For Today I Am a Boy Read online

  He looked at my sisters and my mother. I followed his gaze. Adele, Helen, and Bonnie: the same black eyes, so dark that the iris blended into the pupil. My father put my soup bowl in my hands. “Drink.”

  My own saliva pooled clear on top of the dense slime.

  “Drink, or eat nothing tomorrow,” he said. No anger in his voice.

  Trying to make the soup skip my tongue, I inhaled it like air, straight into the back of my mouth. It left a slug’s trail down my throat. Fleshy, pink chunks remained at the bottom of my bowl. My father sat down again.

  He turned to my mother, lifting his spoonful of ham. “It’s good.”

  We followed Roger farther and farther from the playground. We had to sprint back to class when the bell rang, while Roger just sauntered in tardy. I wasn’t in his class. He claimed to have flipped off his teacher when she called him out for being late.

  Ollie had to explain the gesture to me. Lester, Ollie, Roger, and I sat in the grass ditch for the field’s rain runoff, below the sightline of the playground. A long drought had dried out the ground. The grass the boys used to whip each other was starting to yellow and sprout. “It’s like swearing.”

  “But why?”

  “Because it looks like a dick, I think.”

  Lester and I stuck up our middle fingers to examine them.

  “Not really,” I said.

  Lester said, “It’s more like, ‘Stick this finger up your bum!’”

  “That does sound rude,” I agreed.

  “But why is that an insult?” Ollie said. “Isn’t that worse for the person who says it, since he has his finger up someone’s ass?”

  “Well, it doesn’t look like a dick,” Lester said, defending his theory.

  “Sure it does. Your other two fingers are the balls, see?” Ollie held out his fist with the finger sticking up.

  “Don’t point that at me.”

  Roger hadn’t spoken in a while. He lay on his back staring up at the sky, the wheels turning in his head. He batted the empty juice bottle from his lunch against his stomach. His mind was somewhere beyond us. It was like being caged with a sleeping lion.

  “New game,” he said.

  Ollie didn’t react. “Come on, man. Lunch is almost over.”

  Roger stood up. “New. Game,” he repeated. He used the juice bottle to grind a hole in the dirt the size of the bottle’s base so the bottle stood upright on its own. “Stand three steps back and try to piss in the bottle. Whoever can’t do it has to drink from the bottle.”

  I felt a wave of panic. I never peed standing up. When I had to, I thought of my body as a machine, a robot that did my bidding. A combination of arms and legs and heart and lungs. It had nothing to do with me. My real body was somewhere else, waiting for me. It looked like my sisters’ bodies.

  Lester and Ollie were still sitting down. “Come on,” Roger ordered. “You guys chicken?”

  Ollie pushed himself up. Roger had said the magic word. “Not chicken,” Ollie said. He went over to the bottle and counted his steps backward. “One, two, three.” He unbuttoned his corduroys. Boys were ugly and foreign, like another species. Like baboons. I was not one of them. The evidence was right there, all the time, tucked into my tight underwear, but I still didn’t believe it. I didn’t have one of those things, that little-boy tab of flesh.

  The bottle tipped in the dirt as it got struck. Ollie managed to get some inside, filling up about a finger’s worth of yellow. Roger went next. Lester nudged me. “Let me go last,” he said.

  I shook my head. “No. I want to go last.” Maybe the bell would ring first. Would that be enough? Would Roger let us go? Probably not. His games trumped class. There’d be no leaving until it was over.

  Roger couldn’t do it. His stream arched downward before it reached the bottle. He kept trying until it petered out entirely. Ollie hooted. “Ha! You have to drink it!”

  Roger zipped up his pants. His dead stare was frightening. Ollie kept pressing. “That’s what you said! Whoever can’t do it has to drink it!” He shoved Lester. “Come on. It’s your turn. Then Peter. Then Roger has to drink it!”

  The bell rang. The distance made it sound low and benign. “Bell,” Roger said.

  “Screw the bell,” Ollie said. “We’ll finish it.”

  “Bell,” Roger repeated.

  “You have to drink it! That’s what you said. Those are the rules! Don’t be such a chicken!”

  Roger punched Ollie in the ear. Ollie toppled into the ditch next to me and Lester. “Fuck you!” he shouted.

  Roger stood over us, casting a shadow into the grassy pit. I had a sudden vision of him pouring dirt over the ditch and burying us there. He probably had the same idea. “The bell means it’s over,” he said. “I make the rules, not you.”

  Bonnie and I, five and six years old, sat on the floor outside of Adele and Helen’s bedroom. I pressed my ear to the door. Whitney Houston came out muffled, more beat than melody. Bonnie tried to shove me out of the way. We both tumbled through their door. “Hi!” Bonnie said, flat on her back. “Can we do the hair thing?”

  “I have to study,” Helen said. The corkboard above her desk threatened to crush her, overloaded with medals and awards.

  Adele was reading a magazine, lying on top of her made bed. “Sure. Close the door.”

  Even inside their room, the radio was barely audible. Bonnie sat cross-legged on the floor. Adele sat behind her and ran a comb through her hair. I sat behind Adele and combed her hair, handling it like bone china.

  Helen shut her history textbook and sat down behind me, grabbing a brush from the basket on the table between their beds. She always tugged a little too hard, leaving my scalp raw.

  We all looked alike then. The same eyes in our unmolded faces, the same blue-black hair, even though Adele’s fell straight and limp and Helen’s frizzed in a thick heap like an animal pelt. Bonnie and I had matching haircuts from our mother, two button mushrooms. Sitting in a line, connected by hairbrushes and raking fingers, the perfumed air of the room settling over all of us, nothing that split me apart.

  A knock at the door.

  We rolled to the side, out of position. I grabbed all the brushes and combs and stuffed them back into the basket. Adele threw some paper and pencils at me and Bonnie. Bonnie started writing out numbers. Helen sat down at her desk and tossed a textbook to Adele as she turned off the radio.

  “Come in,” Adele said.

  The door swung open. Half of my father was visible. An arm, a shoulder, a waning moon of face.

  “Ba-ba.” Adele had memories I couldn’t imagine. “Father,” she corrected. “We were just studying.”

  Father nodded. “This door stays open.” None of us were looking directly at our father, our necks curved forward like sickles. “Send Peter when you’re finished.”

  He disappeared into the shadows of the hallway. I stopped holding my breath. “I don’t think Father likes you spending so much time with us,” Adele said.

  “Why?” I asked. I wanted to hear it said out loud, in real words. I wanted to understand it, not just sense it in my gut.

  “He wants to spend time with you,” Adele said. Her smile was so kind, it bordered on pity.

  “Why?” I asked again. I focused on Adele’s gentle, reluctant face and avoided Helen’s shrewd eyes, her eyebrows that sloped to a point.

  “Because he wants you to be like him,” Helen said.

  Adele added, “Big and strong like him.”

  “But I want to be like you,” I said, grabbing Adele’s knee. “I want to have hair like you. I want to be pretty like you.” Her sad, saintly expression frightened me.

  “You can’t.” Helen had turned in her chair. Adele glared at her. “What?” Helen said. “He can’t. You can’t, Peter. You can be handsome, like Father or Bruce Lee.” She pointed at a poster of theirs, one that Father disapproved of: dot-pixelated like a comic book, a shirtless Bruce Lee posed in fighting stance, his body warped wide with muscle. I stared
at the poster in horror. I started to cry.

  “You’re a boy.” Helen said it like she thought it would be comforting.

  “I am not! I am not!”

  Bonnie was always delighted when someone older than her cried. She started poking me in the side. “A boy! A boy! A boy!”

  Adele knelt down. “Peter, there’s nothing wrong with being a boy. There’re a lot of great things about being a boy. Sometimes I wish I were one.”

  I started to wail, a bland, continuous cry, not pausing to take a breath. I felt out of control. A boy! A boy! A boy!

  Helen turned a page in her textbook. “Father’s going to hear him and we’re all going to catch shit.”

  Adele nodded. She pulled me into the closet and shut the door behind us. The seam of the hinge let in the only light, and my heaving breaths seemed louder in the tight space. I felt Adele’s thin arms close around me.

  Bonnie pounded on the door, angry at being excluded. The sound was distant and unimportant. Adele whispered close to my ear, “You can be pretty. You can be pretty.”

  Roger wasn’t at school on his birthday. He’d been talking for weeks about the party he was going to have. There’d be horses, he said, and arcade machines, and BB guns. He mimed popping off a shotgun on his shoulder, then watching an invisible bird tumbling from a tree.

  As we left school that day, Roger was standing by the front door. Ollie and Lester walked together. I chased behind. They stopped abruptly and I crashed into their backs.

  “Hi, losers,” Roger said. The scar on his nose was more noticeable than usual, throbbing over the spot where the bridge curved away from straight.

  “Happy birthday,” Lester said. Ollie smiled without opening his mouth.

  We waited for the front of the school to empty. Kids rushed past us. I saw Bonnie heading for the bus home. She looked just like me from behind: a helmet of black hair, a pair of Helen’s old overalls. I watched a version of myself stay with the crowd, get on the bus, go home. Home to my sisters.

  “Where were you today?” Ollie asked.

  “Pa took me to a baseball game,” Roger said. He looked us up and down, searching for something.

  “What baseball game?” Ollie challenged.

  “Blue Jays. Out in Toronto.”

  “Then how come you’re back already?” Lester asked.

  I’d believed in Roger’s birthday party.

  “Yeah,” Ollie said. “When did this game end, so you could be back by three o’clock?”

  “Morning game,” Roger said, vaguely. “You losers bring me presents?”

  I said, “I got you something. It’s at home. I was going to bring it to your party.”

  Roger sucked on his teeth, drawing his cheeks in. He addressed Lester and Ollie. “What about you two?”

  Lester shrugged. Ollie brought something out of his bag: a gift wrapped in brown paper and kitchen string. Roger grabbed it out of his hands and tore a hole in the paper.

  I saw the glint of metal. I couldn’t read the expression on Roger’s face as he stared at the half-opened present. “You’re a dick,” he said.

  “What?” Ollie said, the words coming out the side of his shut mouth.

  Roger ripped the paper off entirely. “This is your old lunchbox. I seen it.”

  Ollie’s face twitched. Maybe a smile.

  Roger kicked at the scraps of brown paper. They drifted up and down daintily, as though mocking him. “Fuck you guys.” He squinted, his cheeks squishing upward. Astonished, I wondered if he was going to cry. His eyes opened. His hands closed slowly around the collar of Ollie’s shirt. As Ollie’s breath caught, I could see him remembering how big Roger was.

  Lester pushed them apart. “Cut it out. Someone’s coming.”

  A small figure skipped toward us. As she came closer, I recognized her—a girl from my class, Shauna. Her desk was in front of mine, and I found it soothing to look at her. Her blond hair was always parted neatly in the center, clipped in barrettes that stayed in place all day. The glassy blue eyes of a doll. She looked like the child of the Mommy I’d wanted to be, the one receiving the plate of pancakes, the one in white socks and patent-leather Mary Janes that never left muddy footprints behind.

  She seemed oblivious to us as she tried to go past and into the building. She wore a yellow skirt that bounced as she walked, short over her shapeless legs. Roger let go of Ollie, who started to cough. He reached out and grabbed Shauna by the arm. “Where are you going?”

  “I forgot my pencil case.” Roger’s fingers sank into her chubby arm. “Let go. You’re hurting me.” The last part came out as a whine.

  “Roger,” Lester said. “Come on, man. Let’s go to the corner store. We’ll buy you a Coke or something.”

  “Shut up,” Roger said, deadpan. He stayed focused on Shauna. “It’s my birthday today. Did you know that?”

  “What?” Shauna tried to struggle free. “Let me go!”

  “Wish me a happy birthday first.”

  “Fine. Happy birthday. Let go!”

  The possibility of letting go, of ending it there, rose and died in Roger’s eyes. “Come with us,” he said.

  After I had calmed down enough to leave the closet, Helen reminded me that our father wanted to see me. I headed out of my sisters’ bedroom and went down the short hallway like I was on a death march. My mother, who was nothing like the mommies in the magazines, was washing down the kitchen table. My mother, more like a wind than a person: visible only in her aftermath, the cleanliness and destruction she left behind, forgettable until a tornado blew off the roof. She motioned me silently toward their bedroom door.

  I went into their room. My father stood by the window in the dark. The house was shaped so that the light from the kitchen window came through their bedroom window. My father’s white shirt glowed, revealing the muscles of his back. For the first time, I thought about what his body might look like. Did he have square pectorals like Bruce Lee, divided abs, all those sharp, frightening angles?

  “Come with me,” he said. He walked toward their connected bathroom, and I crept after him. My eyes were starting to adjust. He pushed a stool against the sink. I hopped on the stool without being told. We stood side by side in the dark, facing the mirror.

  I heard the light switch snap. In the flood of light, my father’s face was momentarily washed out, drained of its tawny color, his burnished tan. My own face was softened, blurred at the edges where I couldn’t focus my eyes. In the mirror, a white man and a girl.

  Then—pupils contracted—just us again.

  “Today’s special, for father and son. You learn to shave,” my father said. He winced at the sound of his own voice, mouthed the words a second time. Nobody heard his accent more acutely than he did. “I’m going to teach you how to shave.”

  I ran my hand over my smooth chin, a wordless reminder that I was six years old. “Do what I do,” he said. He mixed the shaving cream in a cracked wooden bowl. I looked around their bathroom. There was a curious lack of feminine things, the oils and creams and powders of the bathroom I shared with my sisters. No evidence of my mother.

  Father lathered up his face and neck and I did the same. He handed me a disposable plastic razor. It was easier to look at his reflection in the mirror than at him, like seeing the sun through a pinhole projector. I followed his example, clearing away the foam from my hairless face in strips. “Did your mother ever tell you your Chinese name?” he asked.

  I didn’t want to get my mother in trouble, but I was more afraid of lying. I nodded. I couldn’t remember the actual syllables she had whispered. I remembered they rhymed. “Powerful king,” I said. We rinsed off our razors in a second bowl of water.

  “Adele’s Chinese name is her middle name. It will make her life hard when she’s a doctor.” He paused. I didn’t know Adele wanted to be a doctor. “Maybe she will change it.”

  He ran the blade over his Adam’s apple. “We waited a long time for you. In a family, the man is the king. Without you
, I die—no king.”

  I slid the razor over my flat throat. It caught on the skin. “Hah.” A line of blood appeared.

  My father glanced over, unalarmed. He ripped off a piece of toilet paper. He held the back of my neck and pressed hard with his other hand to stop the bleeding; it felt like being strangled. “It’s okay. Just part of being a man.” I stared up at his face, my head hanging back like a dancer’s in a dip, this strange embrace. “Women bleed much more.”

  The space under the Big Steps was closed off on one side. There was only one way in or out. Cracks of light came through the bleachers, throwing the shadows of a prison window.

  Roger dragged Shauna there by the arm. Our feet crunched on the gravel. We herded her toward the back of the hollow, blocking the entrance with our bodies. The momentum felt unstoppable. Lester’s elbow dug into my side as he tried to get closer, just as it had at Ollie and Roger’s grass fight. His expression was the same: manic, nauseated.

  Shauna had lost a barrette somewhere along the way. Her mother would ask about that, I thought. Her socks were stained by the pale dust under the gravel. She cried. Not like I cried, not the way I heaved and sobbed into Adele’s chest in a closet. Soundless tears, as though crying were impolite.

  “Lift up your skirt,” Roger said.

  She blinked. I could smell Ollie’s sour breath. It came out in short, excited bursts. She raised the hem of her skirt by the corners, not quickly, not slowly. With a knowing I hadn’t expected. Like she’d done this before.

  Roger’s eyes fixed to the spot. “Peter, pull down her underwear.”

  I looked into Shauna’s eyes. My hands on her small hipbones. I tried to tell her that I was sorry. That we were both victims. I wanted her to see who I really was. The one who took a stone in the back. The one who combed his sisters’ hair. In her eyes, I could see only the reflections of four attackers, four boys in that dead, marble blue, like you could see the sky right through her.

  There. Shauna’s ankles bound together. A bald, pink wound.