For Today I Am a Boy (16 page)

 

At the height of our affair, Margie sent me to the twenty-four-hour grocery store at three in the morning to buy more lotion. She wouldn't let me clean the kiss-shaped lipstick stains from my face. I had a vivid half-moon bite mark visible above the collar of my T-shirt.

I stumbled through the narrow aisle drunk on pleasure and lack of sleep. As I rounded a corner, I saw Bonnie, dressed in a silver sheath dress and heels, her eyelids painted. She was peering into the frozen-foods case with her arms full of chips and instant-noodle packages.

“Hi,” I called.

She blinked at me, equally dazed. “Hi.” Her hair had grown into something like a pixie cut; I realized how much time must have passed since I'd seen her.

“Just came from a bar?”

“Stayed until closing time, when the lights went on. Everyone looked awful.” Bonnie stared at my neck. She raised her hand as if to touch the spot where Margie had bitten me. Only one tooth had broken the skin. Margie had pressed a cold cloth to my neck, lifting it at intervals to check to see if the bleeding had stopped, while we watched TV, my head curled into her shoulder. “How have you been? I haven't heard from you since the party.”

I could only smile.

Bonnie put her hand down. “You look happy,” she said. She didn't mean
healthy.

 

Mother called me on a Monday night, a rare evening that I was home. She might have called a dozen times before; I would have missed them all. As soon as I answered, without saying hello, she said, “Does Bonnie really not have a phone?”

I barely thought of Bonnie. “I don't know.”

After a pause, Mother said, “I want to see her. I'm coming tomorrow.”

 

Mother left home at six in the morning and drove the five hours to Montreal, alone. Bonnie eluded her completely. I got the restaurant to give me a two-hour, unpaid lunch. When I realized Father wasn't with her, I took her to a dim sum place inside a mall in Chinatown.

The entrance was at the top of a tall, curving staircase with a plastic chandelier that threw pink and green splinters of light. A small crowd waited for tables dusted with sparkles. My mother was wearing a blouse that had once belonged to Bonnie and a skirt that had been Helen's.

Mother went to the hostess behind the podium to get a number. A flash of pleasure passed over her face as she spoke the few words in Cantonese, then again when our number was called. “
Sei-sup-yut.
Forty-one.”

We were seated far from the main path of the carts. We watched the food from a distance and had little to say to each other. After a long silence, my mother said, “Is Bonnie a whore?”

“What?”

“A prostitute. Does she sell herself to men?”

“No,” I said.

“What does she do here, then? How does she make a living?”

“I don't know. I haven't seen her much.” I started playing idly with my teacup, spinning it on its bottom rim. My mother took the teacup out of my hand and put it back on the table. I could hear the women pushing the carts shouting the names of their dishes, could smell the breading and garlic, feel the wet heat, but they never seemed to come any closer.

Mother tried again. “So! Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Yes.” We both seemed surprised by my response.

“Is she Chinese?”

“No.”

Her gaze fixed on the ponytail tossed over my shoulder. “Your father will be pleased,” she said. All around us, the cart-pushers continued to call out, trailing the sounds and smells of what my mother had lost. This was supposed to mean something to her, the idea of a girlfriend. The conversation between them after Adele and Helen were born, the need to try again for a son—my father must have told her about this day, when I would have a girlfriend, and then I would have a wife, then a son, and we would be a real family, an endless line.

She stared at my ponytail, at another of her strange, disappointing children. She remembered holding newborn Adele, searching her blank heart for the joy she'd been promised. She imagined me offering her a male grandchild, a baby clothed in her married name, another greedy mouth. She didn't care. Mother, a pilgrim who walked a thousand miles only to find the sacred grove was just a clump of trees.

 

Bonnie called from someone else's phone, someone who was doing something in the background that made her giggle and gasp. She said, “I finally caught you. You're never home. Want to have breakfast with me tomorrow?” I told her that I had to work. “The next day?” I had work then too. “What, do you work seven days a week?” Yes. “Days and nights?”

“Mondays I only work days. Tuesdays I only work nights.”

“Jesus. Why do you do that to yourself?”

“I need the money.”

“For what?”

My rent was paid after only a few days of work. I ate most of my meals at the restaurants. I had no debt. I had endless energy, even—or especially—once I started seeing Margie. I kept thinking that this was only the prelude, that my body was a starter home. I would need money when I decided to start my real life. “The future,” I said.

A man's distant voice. Bonnie let out a satisfied groan, like a splinter had been pulled out of her thumb. “Whatever,” she said, returning to our conversation. “Then let's have breakfast on Tuesday, when you only work nights.”

When I didn't reply right away, she added, “I miss you.” She yelped. “Stop that!” she called, her mouth farther from the receiver, her hand perhaps covering it. “You still there?”

 

The diner advertised its $1.99 breakfast special in paint on the window, orange letters with green outlines and a sharp-edged explosion around it.
Wow!
it said. The flat-roofed building also housed a tire store and an entrance to the Métro station. A bell over the door rang as I walked in.

Bonnie sat at a four-top with Margie and her son, Dave. Between them, cups of oily coffee and a crusty ketchup bottle and a saltshaker with a dead bug inside; the only other customer ate alone at the counter. A saxophone version of “The Girl from Ipanema” played at low volume. The free chair scraped loudly across the floor as I pulled it out and sat down next to Dave.

“Hi, Peter,” Bonnie said. “I thought it'd be fun if we all had breakfast together. Hope you don't mind.” She wore a child's sweatshirt with the neckline cut out so that the sweatshirt slid over her narrow shoulders. Her eyes blazed, tense in their sockets.

I nodded. I tried to catch Margie's eye. She stared stonily into the distance. I had never seen her in full daylight, without makeup. The colors of her skin and eyes and hair were dulled, and her expensive clothes—a cream-colored satin blouse with a bow tied at the neck, more tailored slacks—seemed sad and out of place. I wanted her to sit in my lap and let me reach under her clothes, to feel the body I coveted, envied, knew better than my own.

“We were just talking about Dave's birthday party last year. Margie took him and a bunch of friends on a cruise. For Dave's
twenty-fifth
birthday.”
Older than you,
Bonnie meant, her voice cheery.

“It was awesome,” Dave said.

“What did you do for your birthday, Bonnie? I'm sorry I missed it. When you were in California. With Helen.”
Helen who judged you,
I meant,
as you're judging me.

“Nothing special,” Bonnie hedged, keeping the conversation on her track. She put her hand on Dave's arm. “Tell Peter about Akhil.”

“Oh, yeah. This is hilarious. Margie fucked a maintenance guy on the cruise and got him fired. It was, like, in the boiler room or something. Whatever that's called on a ship. And they got caught by—what are they called? One of the sailor dudes? The important ones? Sorry, I'm not very good at telling stories. But it was fucking hilarious.”

Bonnie gave a fake, sparkling laugh. Excited, like it was all a game, she squeezed Dave's arm again. “Tell him about the rainbow.”

“Oh, yeah. We used to joke that Margie was aiming for a rainbow. 'Cause she always fucked a guy of a new color, yeah? Like Akhil was the Indian band of the rainbow. Bonus points if they don't speak English.”

Bonnie kept flicking her eyes sideways to Margie—who cradled her coffee cup vacantly, as though there were nothing strange in a son talking about his mother this way, in front of his mother's new lover—and then back to me. I'm sure Bonnie's imagined scenes were dead-on. The humiliation, the racial stereotypes so old or specific I had never encountered them before. Bonnie thought she was saving me. But Margie had saved me. This was the only way I could do it. This was the closest I could get.

“How far into the rainbow are you?” Bonnie asked Margie. Dave laughed earnestly, like he couldn't feel the shift in the air.

“Just a joke,” Margie said, her words slow and stiff.

“Peter must be slowing you down.” Pretending to choke on her mirth, pretending it was that funny! “You've been stuck on yellow for so long.”

Margie looked at me. I could tell she was startled by my expression. I was trying to tell her that I loved her, that I worshipped her, that nothing Bonnie said could change that. Margie leaned away from me, away from my radiant love, like I was a slobbering, mangy dog with shit-mottled hair ready to jump up on her clean slacks. “Just a joke,” she repeated.

 

I went to Margie's house after work, as always. She usually led me straight to her bedroom or its connecting bath, and I never thought about the rest of her house. That night, we walked through her dark front hall to the living room. She turned on a couple of gloomy, shaded lamps. “Drink?”

“No, thanks.”

We sat on the couch. Old-fashioned, stuffed green leather, with button studs in the back. It squeaked. I smelled like fish. I wanted Margie to make me pretty in the bath, for her to stand in front of me in the mirror, wanted to squint my head onto her body.

Margie kissed me. We kissed longer than we ever had. I opened my eyes. I could see her scowling, her eyes shut aggressively tight as she mashed her mouth against mine. She shoved me backward. “Do something!”

“What?”

She leaped up from the couch and went to the window. Thick, diamond-patterned glass, the same as in the sideboard that ran along the wall. She pushed aside a heavy curtain. Her house was at the top of two flights of concrete steps, strip lawns on either side. Chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine, a busy but uninteresting street, ran below. The only things she would be able to see were car lights heading up the mountain, their white heads and red tails, and the tops of trees. She watched the traffic for so long that it made me nervous.

“What do you want me to do, Margie? Tell me. I'll do anything.”

It was hard to see her where she stood, some distance from the lamps. A flash rain had just started, one that would last for only an hour. “I'm getting bored with you.”

All over the city, people were crowding under awnings and inside bars and restaurants, waiting out the storm. She must have been watching the rain flood the gutterless streets, race sideways with the wind. “I knew you guys were, you know, shy and effeminate. I didn't know you don't even fuck.”

“They do,” I said. Admitting that I wasn't one of them, what she wanted me to be. Her yellow man. “Just not me.”

“I want to be fucked.”

“So go get fucked,” I said. “By someone else. And then come back to me.”

“I don't do that. I'm an old-fashioned, one-man kind of girl.”

I thought this was a joke and I laughed. I caught the glint of her eyes in the dark. She wasn't joking. “I'm sorry. Let's go to bed. Please.” She turned back to the window. “We'll play our games. I'll be your little darling. You can dress me up. Bathe me. Beat me. Order me around.” I watched her solid back and realized that I was doing this wrong. I wasn't offering her anything; I was begging for what I wanted.

The rain continued to fall in unbroken sheets, loud on her balconies. She came back. Sat beside me. Her white blouse radiant in the lamplight. “Stay the night,” she whispered.

I mistook the look in her eyes for tenderness.

 

I woke up choking, out of a dream in which someone was trying to crush my windpipe from above. The feeling was the same: that too-much shock, the need to escape. Tightness closing in. Only not in my throat.

I felt her weight pinning me down. Margie's weight. Margie on top of me, her shirt gaping open, her hands on my abdomen. Her pubic bone cutting into mine.

The thing was inside her.

I shoved her off me, thrashing to get free. I fell sideways from the bed. I ran in a half-standing lurch and heard her call something after me. I heard the word
enjoy.

Her house—all its diamond-patterned glass and Old World, mocking strangeness—blurred past. I got to the front steps. I leaned over the railing, naked, looking down the dizzying height at the wet grass, murderous traffic, morning commuters, buzzing flies, no storm, no rain, everything so terribly normal. I threw up.

I straightened up. I bent all the way back, chin to the sky. Margie watched me from the window. She looked the way the bile tasted in my mouth.

 

Later, I could barely remember walking down Côte-Sainte-Catherine in my kitchen clothes from the day before. Asphalt with no shade. I did remember going back into Margie's house, forced by my nudity: Her voice coaxed, the words meaningless, when I refused to go farther than the front hall. I remembered being handed my bag, wincing when our hands touched. I remembered the newness of a room I'd seen only in the dark. Dusty wind chimes hung far from the door, so they never made a sound. Pictures of Dave as a child.

 

Bonnie's bedroom shared a false wall with the room next door. The only natural light came through the narrow glass at the top of the partition; she had no real windows. Two of her roommates, neither of them Dave, were having a fight on the other side of the wall.