San Francisco State University For Today I Am a Boy Book Report

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After reading the book "For Today I Am a Boy", please write a 2 page book review as if it will be published in a teen magazine or parent magazine(ex: Seventeen or Parents). Please also state which magazine do you choose to write for.


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Table of Contents Title Page Table of Contents Copyright Dedication Epigraph Prologue Boy Eighteen Thursdays From Germany with Love The Secret World of Men Margie Hair Pathway to Glory Geography Née Peter Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright © 2014 by Kim Fu All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003. www.hmhco.com The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Fu, Kim. For today I am a boy / Kim Fu. pages cm ISBN 978-0-544-03472-3 (hardback) 1. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 2. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 3. Chinese—Canada—Fiction. 4. Gender identity—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title. PR9199.4.F8F67 2014 813'.6—dc23 2013027720 eISBN 978-0-544-03240-8 v1.0114 Lines from “For Today I Am a Boy” written by Antony Hegarty. Performed by Antony and the Johnsons. Rebis Music, LLC. FOR MY FATHER One day I’ll grow up, I’ll be a beautiful woman. One day I’ll grow up, I’ll be a beautiful girl. But for today, I am a child. For today, I am a boy. —ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS, “For Today I Am a Boy” Prologue ON THE DAY my sister Adele is born, my mother goes to the butcher. It is January 3, 1969. Her belly, hard as packed snow, bobs outside of her unzipped parka as she walks up to the counter. An enormous sow is laid out in the display case. In her mind, Mother replaces the pig’s body with her own: her legs hanging on hooks at the back; her tiny feet encased in rounded, hoof-like leather boots; the shinbone ready to be held in a vise and shaved for charcuterie. Her torso is cut below the breast and lies flat, showing a white cross-section of vertebrae. Her head is intact, eyes clouded yellow and rolled upward. The dried-out edges of her ears let light through. Human ears probably taste similar to pig’s ears, she thinks. A glutinous outer layer with crisp cartilage underneath. She could stew them, char them in a skillet, watch her skin blister and pop. The butcher asks my mother what she wants. “A pound of sausages,” she says. She feels a stab— homesickness, maybe, or dread at the thought of more burned sausages and boiled potatoes. The pain arcs from one side to the other, as though her hipbones are electrodes lighting up the space between. Her legs give out and she lands on her hands and knees. The butcher calls for an ambulance. He hangs up on the dispatcher while he’s still giving instructions and kneels on the floor beside my mother with his rubber apron on. He’s ready. Mother makes it to the hospital in time, though the butcher tells differently. The story goes that a woman gave birth on the concrete floor of the butcher’s shop, a child born in pig’s blood, the cord cut with a cleaver. He never says who the baby was, and is never contradicted. Fort Michel, Ontario, had a population of thirty thousand people—an awkward, middling size, large enough that you waited in line with strangers at the grocery store and didn’t recognize the names in the newspaper obituaries, small enough to count each business: the one butcher, the one Chinese restaurant, the old theater and the new theater, the good bar and the bad bar. Not a small town, by any means, but if every man, woman, and child came out of their homes at the same time, we couldn’t have filled a football stadium. The right size for the story of the butcher-shop baby to live on. My mother’s version omits the butcher. It begins with her in the back of an ambulance watching fluid travel down an IV line. The moment it reaches the hollow of her elbow, her entire body goes slack. The world tilts to the left and slides into itself, leaving only black. Then she’s walking. In the middle of the street outside our house. Snow falls, light but insidious, building up fast on the ground. The wind lifts the split in her open-back hospital gown. She unties it, and the string whips her exposed backside. She starts walking faster. She feels the house is chasing her, accusing her; its shabbiness and empty rooms are an indictment of her character. Three bedrooms crammed onto one floor, growing off the combined kitchen–living room like tumors. Gravel in the front, woods beginning quickly in the back. On the rounded hill that leads into the woods, grass grows in tufts, like hair on a balding man’s temples. No one who ever lived there had been able to afford to re-sod the lawn. The houses stop shortly after ours in a freshly razed commercial strip, holding promise. Concrete bases in open pits can become anything. (In 1969, there was no way to know that so many of them would languish for decades, the posted architectural paintings growing increasingly outdated and green as the reds bleached out.) Mother runs barefoot on the asphalt, past the pits, toward the edge of town. She’s almost out. She sees a figure up ahead, through the snow. A man stands in the road, his feet astride the yellow line. She hesitates —she fears him more than the house. It’s my father. A short man who stands tall in people’s minds; they’re surprised when they see him against a point of reference, surprised that his chin doesn’t reach their shoulders when he comes close. He wears a gray vest over a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. His black hair is gelled back into a ducktail. Mother takes a few steps forward. There is a brutal, magnetic beauty to his features. A chair appears behind him. He sits. He has always been sitting. He holds a baby in his lap as casually as if it were a briefcase. The baby’s arms are flung backward. Mother peers into the pursed, demanding shape of the baby’s mouth. A flash of violence passes through her mind—tearing, heat, gore, broken bones —and then is lost to her forever. Mother is in a hospital bed. Mother has always been in a hospital bed. She looks down. She has pulled herself upright by the guardrails, gripping so hard her knuckles are white. Sleep calls her back. My father sits in a chair beside her, holding their first child, my oldest sister, Adele. Mother wants to ask where the baby came from. Father misreads the question in her eyes. “We’ll try again for a boy,” he says. Soon afterward, as soon as Mother’s broken pelvis has healed, Father begins to whisper in her ear, “A boy, a boy, a boy.” She pushes him away. He slides down her body and repeats it into her navel, as though calling down a long tunnel. “A boy, a boy, a boy!” Mother laughs. He lifts her slip over her head. He mouths the word: the aspirated b and the rounded, open press of the oy. Her eyes roll back. Even in these moments, they don’t speak to each other in Cantonese. Father has fixed their first language in the past. He’s decided to outgrow it the way a child decides to outgrow a beloved toy after being mocked. Nine months later, Helen is born. Father regards Helen with increasing suspicion as the years go by. Eight years, and still no sons. She has inherited his flat features and coarse hair; Adele has our mother’s delicate nose, her fine, weightless hair. He begins to think Helen sealed the spirit door behind her. He begins to think of her as the murderer of his son. Then he remembers he’s trying to shed his old superstitions, as a child remembers he doesn’t like the stupid toy anyway, and he brings Helen gifts: books, a bone-handled letter opener from Toronto’s Chinatown. What could an eight-year-old girl do with that? Helen just likes to hold it. The last time my mother hears Father speak in Cantonese, it’s a name. A boy’s name: Juan Chaun. “Powerful king.” He thought she was sleeping from the way her eyelids twitched like moth wings against the hospital linen. It’s a strange name—too many harsh sounds, too severe for a newborn. She grabs his pant leg as he walks by carrying their firstborn son. “Make it his middle name,” she says. The birth certificate contains no middle name at all: Peter Huang, born at Fort Michel Hospital, April 11, 1979. She signs it anyway. The name exists, if not legally. They crowned their king. During these early, blissful days, all my father knows about me is the nub of penis that extends from my torso. He grabs my mother from behind in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. “Now that you make boys, let’s have a dozen,” he says. My sister Bonnie is their last child. 1 Boy WE CALLED THE wooden bleachers the Big Steps. They overlooked a pit of dust and gravel, generously called the field. I sat on the Big Steps and watched as two boys in my grade rooted around the edge of the field as though searching for a lost ball. They emerged, each holding a long strip of wild grass. Ollie, the smaller of the two, didn’t have all his permanent teeth yet, so he wouldn’t give more than an unnerving, close-mouthed smile. Roger Foher, tall, ugly, and hulking, had ruddy-brown hair and a crooked nose. I skipped down the Big Steps with some of the other boys. Half hidden around the corner, the playground teacher smoked and dropped ashes onto her gray dress, trying to set herself on fire. We formed a circle around Roger and Ollie. Another boy shoved me out of the way to get in close. He cheered with his fists balled. Roger struck first, backhanding the grass in the circular sweep of a swordsman. I could still hear, over the shouting, the grass slicing through the air. It left a red welt on the milky skin of Ollie’s calf. Ollie raised the grass over his head like a lion tamer with a whip. He cracked it on the shoulder of Roger’s T-shirt. The sound—the impact—was muffled by the fabric, and Roger laughed. Ollie stayed grim and silent; the first boy to cry out or bleed lost the game. Roger struck the same spot again, crossing the welt into an X. Ollie’s grass wrapped limply around Roger’s side. Roger turned the X into an asterisk. Ollie got one solid hit, on the fleshy part of Roger’s upper arm. Roger continued to crisscross the same spot on Ollie’s leg. I could smell the teacher’s cigarette, see its muted red dot against the gray sky. The boy beside me stamped his feet, stirring up the dust around us, throwing gravel against the back of my legs. It was Roger’s turn. He paused, expectant, like an animal when it hears movement in the brush. Squinting his eyes, he pointed at Ollie’s leg. The jagged ladder of skin peaked in a spot too bright to be just a mark. Roger raised his arms and spun around. Champion of the world. The other boys were quiet. The strong had beaten the weak; there was nothing exciting about that. The boy who had shoved me went to walk Ollie off the field. Ollie shoved him away. The boys dispersed. I stuck around. Roger noticed me. “You played before?” he said, gesturing with his strand of grass, green and impotent now. I shook my head. “You should try it. It’ll make a man out of you.” Two years earlier, in the first grade, we did all of our assignments in a slim composition book to be collected at the end of the year. I couldn’t imagine consequences that far away. Maybe I’d be dead by then, or living on the moon. One of our assignments was What I Want to Be When I Grow Up. Our teacher had written several suggestions on the board: doctor, astronaut, policeman, scientist, businessman, and Mommy. Mommy was the only one with a capital letter. Working in studious silence, I drew myself as a Mommy. I thought of the mommies in magazine ads and picture books, always bending at the waist over their tied aprons with their breasts on display—serving pancakes, wrapping presents, patting the heads of puppies, vacuuming sparkling-clean floors. I drew myself with a stiff halo of hair, swaddled babies around my feet. A satisfied smile from ear to ear. “I want to be a Mommy.” Two days later, I found my notebook lying open on my bed. That page was ripped out. I asked Bonnie, my younger sister, if she’d done it. The evidence didn’t point to Bonnie: she could hardly have ripped so neatly, right from the staples, making it seem as though the page had never been there to begin with. There was no one else in the family I was willing to confront. The year I became friends with Roger, we were asked again. I said fireman. A picture was optional. I worked furiously on mine. The fireman had an ax in one hand and a woman in the other, and his muscles were as bulbous as snow peas. Flames danced all around. I could imagine only being the woman, my arms around the thick neck of my savior, a high-heeled shoe dangling from my raised foot. I left my notebook open on the coffee table when I went to bed. My father came into the room I shared with Bonnie after we were supposed to be asleep. I watched his shape swoop down like a bird to kiss Bonnie on the forehead. He stopped near my bed and saw the whites of my eyes. He patted me on the foot through the blanket. The door clicked shut. I stayed awake for a long time afterward, wiggling my warmed toes. Ollie and I waited at the base of the Big Steps for Roger. I asked Ollie about his leg and he gave me a withering look, like I had asked something overly intimate. I tried to think of a topic that would interest him. I was used to talking with my sisters. “How did Roger break his nose?” Ollie pointed to the end of the field, where Roger was jogging toward us. “One time, he said it was in a fight with his cousin, who lives across town. Another time, he said he tried to skateboard off his roof. Some girl asked him yesterday and he said he got struck by lightning.” The boy who’d shoved me the day before came to join us. “Hey, Lester,” said Ollie. They nodded to each other. “Hi, Peter,” Lester said. I gave him the same knowing nod and crossed my arms over my chest the way they did. We didn’t speak until Roger arrived. “New game,” he said. No fear crossed Ollie’s and Lester’s faces. “I put three big rocks at the other end of the field,” Roger went on. “Last guy there gets them all thrown at him.” Ollie and Lester nodded. I looked back. Behind us, I could see the yard teacher chastising a girl for chewing gum. There was no reason to bother with us. This was what boys did. “Okay. Go!” Ollie shot off immediately. Lester and Roger were close on his heels, and I followed. We broke right through some kids who were kicking a ball back and forth. Their shouts fell behind us. My lungs seized up. I ran as fast as I could. The distance between me and their backs grew, became unbridgeable. As I watched Ollie crash into the fence with his arms out, and Lester and Roger slow to a stop, I considered turning and running the other way. By the time I reached the end of the field, each of the boys held a stone in his hands. Roger tossed his back and forth between his palms. I doubled over, my hands on my thighs, and stared through my knees. I could hear a jump-rope rhyme coming from somewhere—musical voices, an even meter. “Straighten up,” Roger said. I tried to stand tall, but the moment they drew their arms back, I instinctively crouched and threw my hands over my face. With my eyes closed, I heard the stones hit: Thump. Thump. Thump. They’d all missed. Roger barked, “Peter! Stand still!” They gathered up their stones again. Ollie caught my eye and quickly looked away. He was enjoying this—the victor at last, his fast, mousy frame good for something. I couldn’t help myself. The stones left their hands and I dropped instantly down. The stones flew over my head. “This isn’t working,” Lester said. Roger’s even gaze told me I should have stood still. What happened next was my own fault. “Lie down on your stomach.” Gravel dug into my face, my palms, my knees. The boys stood over me. I stared at Ollie’s white shoelaces, the hole at the toe of his sneaker. The dust stung my eyes. I closed them. The girls were still jumping rope somewhere, under the watchful gaze of the gray dress and the whistle. Singsong patterns. I sank down. All my weight toward the center of the earth. The first stone fell from above, like rain. It struck me high up on my back, just left of my spine. The second landed on the flat of my tailbone. The last one landed on the ground by my ear, loud as thunder. Someone had aimed for my head. “You’re a good man, Peter,” Roger said. One afternoon back when I was in first grade, my sisters and I came home from school and the house reeked of boiling sugar. My mother was making white-fungus soup. She said her mother used to make it. Father lifted the pot from the stove, went outside without his shoes, and dumped it on the lawn. It wasn’t because of the smell. The sweet broth sank into the earth, leaving behind a heap of frilly white. On the first day, it looked like a girl had stripped off her nightgown and abandoned it there. On the second day, like a pile of bleached bones. The next night, she made split-pea soup with ham. The six members of my family crowded around our table meant for four, and my sisters worked dutifully through the sludge. I put a spoonful in my mouth and retched. The soup ran out the sides of my mouth and back into the bowl. My father stood up and came over to me. His head blocked the overhead light, like an eclipse. He took my hands in his. He shaped them into an upturned bowl, as though I were begging. 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. Shauna’s legs trembled and then buckled. She hit the ground on her knees. Her skirt pooled protectively over her thighs. Better to be one of us, better to be standing on this side than kneeling and weeping in the gravel while they leer, that was all my father wanted from me, to be one of them, to be a king. But I belonged in her place, holding something so stunning they’d steal for it, they’d stare into its hot center even as it blinded them. We took a long time walking home, not talking. The streetlights were already on. We passed through the undeveloped area between the school and our houses. The corner store, a garage, a laundromat, a stretch of empty lots. We lingered for a while over a dead rat, steamrolled flat by tire treads. The tail was the most recognizable part. We came to my house first. I stayed on our gravel driveway and watched them walk away. The road rose uphill and then went down, creating the illusion that the boys disappeared into the horizon faster than they should. I pushed open the front door. My father was sitting at the kitchen table. Mother sat on the floor by our shoes. My sisters were nowhere to be seen. They knew. Shauna’s parents must have called. Mother picked me up by my armpits. She could barely lift me; my head hovered above hers, my feet dragged on the ground. She held me at arm’s length like a bag of garbage. She carried me into their bedroom and dropped me hard into a chair. Father came in behind us. He leaned on the wall by the door. Mother opened her mouth and a long stream of invective came out in a language I barely recognized, a language of hard, short sounds, a language of pain. My father put his hand on her shoulder to stop her. She wasn’t supposed to speak to us in Cantonese. Our English would come out wrong, he’d insisted. Like theirs. Deprived of that weapon, she used the only other one she had: she slapped me in the face. For a moment, no one moved, as if the sound of her palm cracking against my cheek needed time to echo. Mother walked out. The door hung open. I met my father’s gaze. He stayed leaning on the wall across from me, his expression inscrutable. Slowly, deliberately, he straightened up. He was smiling. He didn’t speak for a long time, just smiled. I felt his approval like a warm glow. He said, “Bonnie is moving into Helen’s room. You get your own room, son.” My father loved me. 2 Eighteen “I LOVE AN EIGHTEEN NIGHT,” Adele sang over Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night,” dancing with her hands alternating over her head like pistons. For the summer after she turned eighteen, we replaced any two-syllable word in songs on the radio with eighteen. Bon Jovi was livin’ on an eighteen. Janet Jackson told eighteen boys that they don’t mean a thing. Adele skipped through the house singing, “Bam-ba, eighteen! Bam-ba, eighteen!” I was eight years old, the summer before Shauna and Roger and being marooned in my own bedroom. Adele would be leaving soon. Helen had been waiting seventeen years for her own room, and she would lose it within a few months. It wouldn’t surprise her; nothing did. Bonnie and I imitated Adele’s steps in our white socks and plastic slippers. Adele drew circles in the air with her hips while Bonnie snapped just off the beat, marked by jolts of electric guitar. Adele and I leaned in toward each other, mouths moving in unison. “Yeah, I love an eighteen night.” Helen sat at her desk, hunched so far over that her shoulders rose above her neck. She’d signed herself up for an SAT prep course that was run out of the high school, otherwise dormant for the summer. I danced over to her chair and asked if I could help her study. Rather than answer, she handed me one of her vocabulary lists. I couldn’t pronounce the first word. “That’s what I thought,” she said. She went back to her practice set of math problems. We sang straight into her addled brain: B can clean the house in half the time it takes A. If they cleaned it together in three hours, how many hours would it take for A to clean the house all by himself? Eighteen hours. Bonnie slipped and fell onto the gray carpeting. Adele grabbed her chubby hands and pulled her upright. “Well, I love an eighteen night.” She spun Bonnie around. I took weaving jazz steps backward. Helen leaned on her elbows, resting an index finger in each ear. In a class of seventy-two students, forty-one students are taking French, twenty-two are taking German, and nine are taking both French and German. How many students are not enrolled in either course? Eighteen students. As the guitar began to wail on its own, Bonnie and I stopped trying to mimic Adele’s long-limbed grace. We jumped up and down, shook our arms free like monkeys. Adele, her small butt still swaying back and forth, picked up one of Helen’s markers and blacked out two of the digits in the year on the calendar: 1987 became 18. “I need that,” Helen said. Adele tossed the marker in Helen’s general direction. The three of us joined hands and danced in a circle through the end of the song. Helen groped for the marker on the floor. She went back to filling in the bubbles. Sarah is twice as old as John. Six years ago, Sarah was four times as old as John. How old is Sarah? Sarah is eighteen. Helen’s own numbers: the lesser seventeen, the imperfect 150 on her PSATs. When the envelopes came, I knew what they meant. Businesslike, Adele’s typed name visible in the clear plastic windows. Crests with Latin words in tight circles, silhouetted birds. The letters arrived within a few days of one another and were stacked on the hall table with the junk mail no one had thrown away yet. I caught Helen flipping through them. She was irritated that they went unopened, that Adele didn’t care which ones were small and white and cursory and which ones were thick and yellow and welcoming. After Helen left, I wrapped them all up in a grocery-store flyer—Save eighteen cents per pound on roasted ham—and shoved them through the swinging lid of the kitchen trash. I thought of it as a portal. Things went in and were never seen again. They were back on the hall table within a few hours, still wrapped in the flyer. The ghost of eighteen dug them out from the bin. A streak of coffee grinds over a university logo, the hall reeking of eggs and orange peels. The smell caught Adele’s attention. All summer long, Helen volunteered for one thing after another, so she could put the activities on her college applications. Adele took me with her when she visited Helen at the local nursing home. The first floor looked like a hospital—white reflecting on white, a long corridor of doors with numbered boxes and clipboards, a strip of wooden paneling running along each wall. The linoleum smelled freshly bleached. Unlike in a hospital, there was no one around. No one greeted us or asked us what we were doing there. A cart of medical supplies was abandoned at an angle in the hallway. We got into the elevator and went up to the fourth floor, where Helen worked. The silence persisted. On this floor, many of the doors were closed. I stuck my head into an open door as we walked by and saw a man lying face-down in bed with a bathrobe bunched up around his hips. His bare buttocks looked like empty sacks sliding off his spine. Adele shut his door for him. We found Helen in the lounge. She was spoon-feeding a woman fortified pudding, a beige substance that looked like it had come from a caulking gun. The woman tried to say something. “Just eat,” Helen interrupted, shoving the spoon into her mouth. I flopped down into an armchair. The remote control for the shelf television was attached to the armrest by a cord. I turned on the TV. It was muted. Hitting the mute button didn’t do anything. I turned to channel 18. The woman reminded me of a snowman, a human shape drawn broad and round, sinking deep into her wheelchair. The hard egg of her belly was pinned under a seat belt. She shoved the spoon away. “Where are my real shoes?” Her feet were elevated on the footrest of her chair, in soft-looking leather moccasins. The spoon knocked against the woman’s teeth. “Eat,” Helen repeated. The woman turned to Adele. “Do you know where my shoes are?” Adele perked up. “Nope.” Her voice bright, singsong. She got to her knees and pretended to look under the sofa. “Not here.” She opened the fridge. “Not here either.” The woman nodded solemnly. “Try the cabinets.” Adele walked around, loudly opening and closing all the cupboard doors. “Is it in this one? Nope. This one?” The woman tapped her chin. “Maybe someone hid them.” “Maybe,” Adele agreed. “She can’t wear shoes because her feet are too swollen,” Helen said. “Don’t turn her against the nurses and the volunteers by telling her we steal her shoes.” “But you do,” I said. The woman looked at me. She smiled. “Hello, Alfie.” I didn’t know what to do. “Hi,” I said. She gestured for me to come closer. Adele nudged my back, so I got out of the chair and stepped forward. The woman’s lips had sores in different states of healing, dry and wet. “How’s school, Alfie?” Helen held the woman’s chin firmly between her two fingers and turned her head. “You need to eat, Mrs. Harrison. It’s important.” “School is fine,” I said. Mrs. Harrison grabbed the spoon from Helen and wagged it at me. “Would you like some pudding, Alfie?” “No, thank you.” “Alfie’s dead, Mrs. Harrison,” Helen said. “No, he isn’t,” she said. “He’s right here. What are you, blind?” Helen knelt down between me and Mrs. Harrison. “What did Alfie look like?” She seemed confused. Her eyes dimmed as she glanced between us. Adele couldn’t stand it. “Of course this is Alfie,” she exclaimed, putting her hands on my shoulders. “He came just to see you.” Mrs. Harrison looked more foggy-eyed than ever, but she relaxed again. “That’s nice,” she said. She tucked her blanket around herself. Helen stood up. She pulled Adele over by the arm. “What are you doing?” Mrs. Harrison and I continued to smile dumbly at each other. “What harm does it do?” Adele asked. “It makes her happy.” “It’s a lie.” Mrs. Harrison patted the back of my hand. Adele said, “So? Why tell her if she’s just going to forget? Why make her relive Alfie’s death over and over again?” “Because those are her real memories.” Helen wiped her hands on her uniform smock. “You disrespect her dead son by encouraging her to forget him. What he looked like. How he died.” Adele continued to smile gently. “Why not just let her be happy?” Mrs. Harrison picked the pudding container up off the table. She held it out to me. “You need to eat, Alfie,” she mimicked. “It’s important.” Mrs. Harrison and I both glanced sideways at Helen, and we laughed together. Helen plucked the pudding out of her hand. To me and Adele, she said, “I think you should go now.” Helen once told me that her favorite volunteer job had been picking up trash by the highway, because it gave her time to think. Even though she once had to scoop up human feces in between the discarded cans and waist-high dandelions. I asked her how she knew it wasn’t left by a dog, or a coyote, or a bear. “The size and the shape,” she said. Our mother told the four of us to go see a movie, which meant she was sick of us. Helen mouthed SAT words as we walked: abasement, harangue, obdurate. We passed the laundromat, the forever-unsold lot. There were two theaters in town. We went to the one that was closing down, that showed only old movies. The Luther’s marquee announced that for its final week, it was showing Sabrina, from 1954. Neon light blazed in the middle of a sunny afternoon, red and blue flourishes down the Luther’s vertical sign. Adele paid for our tickets. The man in the ticket booth looked at Adele with the eyes of a child who is hungry but no longer expects to be fed. As she took the tickets and change, she rested her fingers in his palm for a long moment. He shuddered from his sneakers to the tips of his long white hair. I looked back at him as we passed under the red curtain. He was old, but he probably smelled like popcorn all the time, buttery and warm. “The ticket guy likes you,” I said. “Maybe you should stay and date him.” “Maybe,” Adele said. Helen snorted. We let the afternoon pass in an air-conditioned haze. The movie was a modern Cinderella story: The unnoticed chauffeur’s daughter falls in love with one of the sons of the main house, played by William Holden. She goes to Paris a girl and comes back a woman, finally attracting his attention. Humphrey Bogart plays Holden’s older brother; he tries to discourage their romance by pretending to be in love with her too. Every frame was like a photograph, champagne and ball gowns in black and white. I watched Adele as much as I watched the screen, the scene changes playing out as light and dark on her face. She had her hands pressed to her mouth in delight. I thought she looked just like Audrey Hepburn—the gamine smile, the swan-necked beauty. As we left the theater, I noticed that the bakery next door had a bank-foreclosure notice in the window. The whole town was shutting down because Adele was leaving. At least the Luther exited with class, running up an electric bill of daytime neon. Time felt loose. We meandered in the opposite direction of home and came to the new bridge. It led to a housing development whose funders had run out of money while it was still concrete foundations in a pit. Helen had begun to speak out loud. “Ensconce, lachrymose, crepuscular.” She looked at me meaningfully. Now that she wanted me to ask her what the words meant, I’d lost interest. Her gaze drifted southward, past the river. Toward her future in the States. Bonnie dropped her arms down over the railing of the bridge. Cars rumbled behind us, a few at a time. They weren’t in a hurry either. “How do they build bridges?” Bonnie asked. She pushed her toe against a large bolt jutting up through the metal. I remembered the hollow frame being lowered on a hook. “Cranes,” I said. “Like the bird?” Bonnie traced a split in the concrete with her foot. “Sort of,” Adele said. “They’re a lot like birds. They dip their beaks, pick up parts of the bridge, and raise them up high.” Bonnie nodded. Giant white cranes with ink-stained wingtips and red crowns built the world, steel crossbeams balanced on their stick legs. She traced the groove in the concrete again. “And what are these lines for?” “I don’t know,” Adele said. Helen had walked ahead a few steps, her back to us. “Those are expansion joints,” she said. The wind carried the words back to Bonnie. “What does that mean?” “So that the bridge doesn’t break when it expands and contracts with the temperature.” Bonnie stared down at her feet in horror. “What?” I asked. “Heat makes it expand, cold makes it contract,” Helen finished. Her hands were in her pockets and she leaned back on her heels. “Why?” I asked. Bonnie climbed up the railing, trying to get her feet off the bridge that might collapse at any moment. Adele went to hold her safe. “Concrete’s like people,” she explained. “When it’s hot, each little bit of concrete tries to get away from every other little bit. Like how it sucks to share a bed with someone in the summer. When it’s cold . . .”—Adele squeezed Bonnie hard until she had to giggle—“they snuggle together close. Like you two, always climbing into my bed in the winter and sticking your cold feet on my back.” “That’s not it at all,” Helen said, still facing away from us. “The kinetic energy increases as you heat something, so the particles vibrate at higher amplitudes, increasing their average distance from one another.” Adele tickled Bonnie, who hooted and arched backward over the railing, almost falling. “That’s what I just said.” Helen turned around. Her chin-length hair tangled in her face from the hot wind. Her shoulders broadened. Expanding. “That is not what you just said.” She gestured at Bonnie and me. “They believe whatever bullshit you say, you know. They’re going to think concrete has feelings.” “Of course not,” Bonnie protested. She slid to the ground, toed the bridge sympathetically. “It just doesn’t like to be cold.” In August, the flies and bees came in from the lakes, swarmed like a fog through town. The four of us sat on the two-meter strip of grass behind the house, the bit of lawn that was ours in front of the sparse trees that belonged to no one. It was the last summer that we would all be together. Bonnie poured orange soda on her hand and held it out, watched in fascination as the flies swarmed the back of her knuckles, tasting it with their feet. The heat forced Helen to study by osmosis. She pressed the cool cover of her SAT prep manual to her forehead. The glossy cardboard soaked up her sweat, and the knowledge flowed into her bloodstream. She pictured the problem in her head: a sheet of paper folded in half and then in half again, the constellation of holes and half-holes. Four holes in seemingly random places, one half-hole like a bite mark along the edge. How many holes will there be when the paper is unfolded? Eighteen holes. Adele, in a white bikini, rested on her stomach on a towel. She dealt in small joys: bringing Alfie to life, letting the ticket-taker at the Luther touch her hand. Wearing a bikini on our lawn where boys could slow down their cars and gawk, too stunned to honk. I drew on her back in black Sharpie. I was drawing angel wings, feather by feather. She let me wear one of her old bikini tops, as long as I wore a boy T-shirt over the top. I felt the warm sunshine through my T-shirt, and I hoped I was getting a tan around the halter straps of the bikini. I held my elbows in tight as I stroked her back with the felt pen. It squished the flat skin over my sternum into ridges that were not completely unlike Adele’s shelf of cleavage. “That tickles.” Adele yawned. The SAT manual blocked Helen’s face completely. It looked like it had replaced her head. “All the toxins in the ink are seeping into your skin,” she said, muffled. My angel wings were elaborate, eighteen pointed ovals, one wing sloping out of each of Adele’s shoulder blades. She shrugged and the wings shifted. When she showered that night, the soap foam would run black. Soon there were boxes at the foot of Adele’s bed marked Home and Away, like opposing teams. While Adele was in the bathroom getting ready to go out—writing 18 in lipstick on the mirror and wiping it off with her arm—I went into Adele and Helen’s bedroom. I started pulling things out of the Away boxes. Helen stayed at her desk and didn’t stop me, which I took as tacit blessing. Helen lived at her desk. She ate handfuls of dry bran cereal and drank coffee that was dark as river silt. Already the seed of the woman she would become was visible, the woman who would crush multivitamins to a powder with the back of a chef’s knife, who would believe eating disorders were things that happened to young girls; grown women could not be too thin. I moved Adele’s winter sweaters into a Home box. I threw some books onto the ground. I flung her sneakers across the room, then followed them with a long volley of balled-up socks and underwear, the panties blooming open midair like juggling scarves. I counted them as I threw: eighteen pairs of socks and eighteen pairs of panties. I pulled out a tangled string of fake pearls and put it on over my head. I paused briefly at a thin photo album. Open to a random page, it showed Adele as a child, her stick legs in a yellow sundress. Almond eyes wide with invitation. It had been worse then: She made grown men sweat, made their thoughts dribble from their temples. Made them question what kind of men they were. When the box was light enough, I dumped the rest out onto Adele’s bed. I rolled on top, right in the center of the mess, a makeup compact digging briefly into my back. I pulled it out from underneath me and snapped it open. In its tiny mirror, there was just a small circle of the center of my face. I fluffed blush onto my cheekbones, trying to sharpen them into Adele’s high angles. Bouncing near me on the mattress was a pot of violet eye shadow that made me think of an eye forced open. I brushed it onto my eyelids. I wet my thumb on my tongue and smeared the shadow into an opaque layer, all the way from the tear ducts to the outside corners. “Don’t mess with her makeup, Peter,” Helen said, as though that were the worst of the things I’d done. She tapped a pen against her lips. She made no effort to stand. “You look insane.” I peered into the compact mirror again. I thought I looked lovely. I popped open Adele’s clear plastic umbrella with a border of roses at the bottom and held it over my head, like I was in a bubble. I heard the bathroom door open. I sat up, crossing one leg over the other above the knee, keeping my back primly straight. Adele stopped in the doorway. She took in the sight of her things strewn across the room and the miniature version of herself. I announced, “Now you can’t leave.” Adele pried my fingers gently from the umbrella. For a moment, she held it so easily it seemed to hover. Then she pulled it shut. The umbrella went back in the box. She scooped clothes off the floor in piles. She shoved the Away box up against the edge of the bed, and, in a few sweeps of her arms, everything tumbled back in again—rumpled, disorganized, but back in the box. I couldn’t believe how quickly my plan had unraveled. She gave me an uninterested, affectionate pinch on the shoulder and left the room. Adele and Helen were once offered a ride home by a stranger. Helen was twelve and Adele was thirteen, the more interesting age. The man was not entirely a stranger, Adele would later argue—a friend of a friend’s father. She still remembered him as handsome, wearing a white jacket with large lapels like a preacher on TV. Unsustainably clean. He gestured to them from the window. She remembered noticing his neatly trimmed fingernails. There was a fine rain. Adele got into the car. Helen refused, so Adele gave her the umbrella. Helen watched the car disappear through a watery blur of pink roses. She thought Adele would never come home, and she couldn’t make herself feel bad about that. When you behave that stupidly, there are consequences: maybe the river would be dredged for bodies two weeks later. Helen and Adele arrived home at the same time. The coughing gray Lincoln Continental stopped at the house next door and Adele stepped out. One leg and then the other, like a movie star. Smiled and waved at the driver as he pulled off. Helen told herself that she was glad Adele wasn’t murdered, that she hadn’t wanted to tell the news cameras that she was the smart one, the one who didn’t get in the car, the one who knew it was better to squish down the sidewalk in waterlogged shoes than risk getting strangled by a pervert. She watched Adele wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. I ran from the bathroom back to Helen’s post. The one thing Helen and I had in common was our lack of friends. Bonnie sometimes disappeared to other little girls’ houses, and Adele had a wide territory through town. She could be anywhere. “Helen, help.” Helen looked up and saw me frantically rubbing my eyes, purple- and pink-stained, as wide as raccoon markings. “It won’t come off. It won’t come off! Dad will be home soon!” Helen watched my agonized dance as I hopped from foot to foot like I had to pee. Her face said I hope you’ve learned something. She ushered me back to the bathroom. She knelt to get into one of the cupboards, and her seventeen-year-old knees cracked. “Here.” She handed me a tub of cold cream. “Put it on top of the makeup, then wipe it away, then wash your face again.” I spread a thick layer over my entire face, leaving holes for my eyes. A Halloween mask. Helen crossed her arms. “Why did you put it on?” I was too busy dunking my head under the tap to answer. Water flooded in and out of my nose. “You want to look like her,” she said. I didn’t deny it. “You’re too young to understand how pathetic she is. How badly she needs people to like her.” I pressed a towel to my face and inspected it in the mirror for blush and shadow. My skin was dried out from the scrubbing. “You look at her and you think that beauty is all that matters.” My face was clean. Colorless and uninteresting as Helen’s. Everyone could see that Adele was the superior creature: the ticket-seller at the Luther, the man who drove her home and left Helen standing smart and unwanted on the curb. The night before Adele was supposed to leave, I was determined not to sleep. I sat up in bed, convinced there was some way I could stop it from happening. I’d hidden her bus ticket in the pantry, but that was only a stopgap. I heard Bonnie shifting in her bed. “Hey, Peter?” “Yeah?” “The cranes aren’t birds, are they.” “No.” We sat in the dark, both of us picturing giant white birds sleeping in construction yards. Their heads were tucked under their wings, beaks harder than steel. Who would give us these visions? Who would take us to black-and-white films, let us draw on her back and wear her clothes? When Adele left, all beauty would pass from the world. The sun seemed explosively bright when I woke up, though our bedside clock said it was only six o’clock. I got dressed without waking Bonnie. Her leg hung off the edge of the bed and twitched as she slept. I stepped silently through the hallway and the living room. Adele’s boxes and suitcases were lined up by the door, the stacks varying in height like siblings in a family portrait. They were the symbols of her leaving. They were the agents of her leaving. I was going to bury them in the ground. I decided to start with the heaviest box I could carry, leaving the easier boxes and the wheeled suitcases for later, when I was tired. I carried it as far as the backyard before I had to flop down. I took a moment to breathe then dragged it into the trees, digging my heels in the dirt. Adele would be able to dig them up later, once she’d been convinced of her mistake. The boxes were sealed with tape. The contents would stay clean. I was doing her a favor. In the copse of spindly birches, some of them dead but still standing, the trees were too far apart to provide much cover. I left the box between them anyway. I went back to get the metal snow shovel from where it hung behind the house. It was heavy. Another body to drag. It took all of my strength to lift the shovel up and drop it, point down, to the ground. It bounced off the hard earth. There was no way I could dig a hole here, let alone one deep enough to contain the Away box. I slid down and rested against the shovel, picturing the boxes and suitcases waiting by the door, their passive victory. As my breathing slowed, I became aware of the sound of moving water—a slow, babbling flow. I left the box and shovel and climbed the slight slope. I caught sight of a narrow tributary below me, a stream that flowed into the larger river that went through town, the one with the bridge that didn’t like to be cold. Maybe the dirt would be softer closer to the stream. More like mud. I couldn’t lift the box this time, so I shoved it up the ridge. Once it was over the hill, I gave it one solid push so that it rolled down to the river’s edge. I threw the shovel after it and stumbled down to them. The box was dusty and streaked with mud, the corners crushed inward, making it more like a ball. I started to scrape at the bank with my shovel. It didn’t really make a hole—the dirt just broke away and crumbled into the river. “Peter!” I looked back. A figure stood on top of the ridge, the eastern sun behind. Even in silhouette, I knew it was Helen from the threat of her stance. She edged down the hill sideways, arms out like a surfer’s. I sat down, defeated, putting my butt squarely in the mud. Helen stopped in front of me. She looked at the shovel. She looked at my tired face, my stained clothes. At the dirty, still-sealed box now with only the Aw of Away legible. She watched the box tensely, as though it were a wound-up jack-in-the-box. She knelt down. Mud and water got into her sandals. With both arms, she thrust the box into the stream. The box sank down with a sucking blomp, then bobbed up again. Only the top was visible, like an iceberg. The box moved leisurely with the current. When it struck the rocks along the bank slightly farther down, not very hard, the tape came loose from the sodden cardboard. The flaps popped open. Helen and I watched as Adele’s possessions flowed away and the box buoyed more and more easily to the surface. Glossy paperback covers jumped like iridescent fish. A coveted leather jacket floated on its inner lining, looking like an eel, sleek and menacing. Everything migrated slowly downstream. I felt numb, more conscious of the wet seat of my pants than anything else. Helen extended her hand to me. I took it and she pulled me up. We walked back to the house. At the back door, Helen took off her sandals and wiped her bare feet on the mat. She lined up her shoes neatly. I kicked my sneakers off and left them where they landed. Adele was standing with her boxes and suitcases by the front door. She paced a small circle. The house still had the anticipatory air that it had when my parents were sleeping, their authority latent. Adele’s face —eyebrows knit in confusion, not accusation—made me realize what we’d done. I started to cry. Adele opened her arms and I rushed for her knees. “I just wanted you to stay,” I mumbled, muffled by the bottom of her nightshirt. Even then, I knew my eight-year-old tears were crocodilian. I knew what I was saying: I don’t care if you’re happy, as long as you’re here. I could feel Adele and Helen meeting eyes over my head. Helen stayed a safe distance away from our embrace, her head held high and her stare blank. Adele’s stuff washed up on the riverbank a day later. Someone phoned the police, thinking there had been a drowning, that all those clothes implied a body. It was in the local paper. Another family would have reported what had actually happened, saved the town from speculation. Ours ignored it. The explanation was too complicated, too private. I had guilty nightmares. In my dreams, policemen stood at the edge of the river, carefully skimming the water with butterfly nets. They moved as gingerly as archaeologists, gathering pieces of a teenage girl’s life. They ignored their radio and the screams of real crimes. Adele went to study at the University of Western Ontario, in another Ontario town that sprawled through strip malls and industrial lands, hardly different from the one she’d started in. Helen left a year later. She went to UCLA on a cocktail of scholarships and bursaries that just covered her first year. On a weekend, she drove by herself to Santa Monica. She bought a sandwich and sat on the Venice Beach boardwalk, laughing reedily at artists hawking sketches, musicians in the costumes of their subcultures thrusting tapes at passersby, the deluded parade of people who thought they’d make it one day. Helen went to California like a gold-rush miner, expecting to find a place where dreamers were ground underfoot by the hard-working, the wise. She would return wearing a suit of gold or she wouldn’t return at all. We drove as a family to drop Adele off at the bus station. The buses picked up from a long strip like an airfield. She wore impractical traveling clothes: high heels and a cinched blazer, both in electric blue. Her hourglass figure shimmied away with the distinct ticktock of her shoes on the asphalt. Bonnie and I held hands as we watched her go. We were the same height, had the same baby plumpness, the same sweaty palms. At a certain point, we couldn’t tell if Adele was walking toward us or away. I have no memory of Helen’s leaving. If it was by plane, train, or bus. If we said goodbye. I have only memories of events that took place before she left and memories of events that took place after. It was as though when she left, she vanished in the night, unnoticed. 3 Thursdays EVERY DAY BUT THURSDAY, Bonnie and I came straight home from school. We did our homework at the kitchen table. Bonnie turned my threes into birds and sideways pairs of breasts. I watched the back of our mother as she shelled shrimp in the sink, her spine rigid and visible through a cotton shift. She inhaled sharply as she cut her finger on a spiky leg. She lifted her finger high enough for me to see the drop of red falling into the bowl of naked shrimp, and then she went on. Their briny gray juices got into her wound, and she went on. We would eat her blood for dinner. The doorbell rang. My mother jumped as though slapped awake. She went to open the door. “Yes?” Bonnie climbed over me to see who it was, and I followed. We strained to see past our mother. The woman at the door was pale and thin and seemed to quiver at the edges, like she was made of water. She had limp red hair. Her freckles were a handful of sand tossed in her face. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Lisa Becker. I live down the block.” My mother stayed mostly behind the door. “Did you just move in?” “No, we’ve lived here for a few years.” “What do you want?” “Well, I, uh . . .” Mrs. Becker seemed to have forgotten why she had come. She glanced around for an explanation. Her gaze landed on the plastic box in her hands. “Oh, right. I heard you had a little boy and girl. I had some toys we don’t need, so I thought I’d give them to you.” She opened the container: a rag doll and some toy cars. “My son is fourteen and my daughter is thirteen. But thank you.” My mother started to close the door. Something in Mrs. Becker’s face stopped her. “How old are your children?” “I don’t have any children.” She moved her head and hands constantly, like a bird, and it made it hard to concentrate on what she was saying. “I had a miscarriage a few years ago and my mother had already bought me the toys. You know—whether it was a boy or girl, we’d be ready.” She closed the container. “I guess they would have been more useful to you back then.” I couldn’t see my mother’s face, but I could feel the distaste radiating off her back. What kind of woman talks about miscarriages at a stranger’s front door? “Thank you for the offer, Mrs. Becker.” If my mother breathed out too hard, Mrs. Becker would blow away like a plastic bag. “No problem, Mrs. Huang.” She started down the front steps. She was wearing white sneakers, the same discount-store brand as my mother. “How did she know our name?” Bonnie asked. “Who cares,” Mother said, going back to the sink. Bonnie was born fourteen months after me, more like a twin than a younger sister. When she was twelve and I was thirteen, she stole a pair of earrings from a friend’s house. She walked into the jewelry store of the nearest mall and tried to sell them. The clerk called the cops. Bonnie told them she had taken it from her own mother’s jewelry box. The cop called our house. I was home. I hated answering the phone, so I stood by the machine and listened to the long, grave message. The moment he hung up my hand shot out and hit the Delete button. Bonnie was delivered home. She didn’t learn any of the things the cops had intended to teach her. She learned to go to pawnshops downtown, wear heels, not look twelve. When Bonnie was five and I was six, we popped out of our shared gray bathwater and went into the kitchen. It was exam season, when Adele claimed to be studying at the library in the afternoons and Helen actually was. Our mother, hiding from us in the bedroom, had left dinner to simmer. Bonnie wet her hands in the beet juices on the cutting board and convinced me to do the same. She reached back and squeezed her own buttocks, leaving a pink imprint of cupping hands. I grabbed the sides of her face. Magenta tribal paint. She pushed back on my shoulders, giggling. Key in the lock. Our father walked in the front door and our mother walked out of her bedroom to greet him. The beet soup started to boil. We were covered in each other’s red fingerprints, smudged meaningless. Our hands were puckered from the bath, and the sunken stains highlighted the creases. “What are you doing?” Mother asked. Bonnie and I looked at each other, puzzled. It had made sense a moment before. My father took off his shoes, leaning his hand against the wall. He announced to no one in particular that a boy and a girl were too old to bathe together at our age. He disappeared into their room. My mother snapped back to life. She dragged us by the arms to the bathroom. Bonnie sat on the closed toilet seat, swinging her legs and examining her rosy blotches, while I sat in the tub and my mother scrubbed me with the back of a sponge. My mother concentrated on each stain, scraping the rough side against my skin until I cried, rubbing and rubbing as though she could erase us both. My mother worked part-time as a telemarketer. She came home later on Thursdays. My father thought it would be good for her to get out of the house and talk to people. People in far-off cities, mostly in America, screamed abuse in varying accents, their voices slightly hollow from the distance. As though cursing her from the bottom of a tin can. On Thursdays, Bonnie and her friends went to a pool hall on the other side of town that didn’t card. They drank coolers in glass bottles, mostly sugar and dye. One night, Bonnie came home running. I watched her through the window over the kitchen sink, running in zigzags down the long driveway as though someone were chasing her. She’s drunk, I thought, or she thinks she is. I went to meet her at the door. She burst in and kissed me just to the side of my mouth. My face felt tight where she left a glazed mark. I licked it and it tasted like candy. “Mom is behind me,” she said. Our mother had gotten onto the same bus. She had sat down near the front immediately and didn’t see Bonnie at the back. Bonnie looked out the bus’s window when Mother got on: they were stopped at the Chinese Association, a brick building covered in tangled graffiti, mostly black, like a ball of steel wool. “The Chinese Assoc,” Bonnie said to me, pronouncing it “a-sock” because that’s what was on the building; the rest of the gold-painted letters had fallen off and never been replaced. Bonnie had slunk off the bus one stop early and bolted home through unfenced yards. She told me this once we had moved to the bathroom, where she could brush her teeth, both of us listening for the door. “The call center is nowhere near there,” I said. Bonnie bared her foamy teeth. “I guess she doesn’t work on Thursdays.” She bent over the sink and spat. “What did you make for dinner? It smells great.” “Pasta,” I said. “What’s in it? In case they ask again.” “Ground beef, cream, chicken stock, peas.” We went out into the kitchen. Mother was already hanging up her coat, having slipped into the house without a sound. “Hi, Mom,” Bonnie said. “Hi. Thank you for making dinner, Bonnie.” “No problem.” “Your father will be late today,” Mother said. “So we can go ahead and eat without him.” I was disappointed. I got a secondhand thrill when my father praised Bonnie for her cooking, slapped her hard on the shoulder. No one had explicitly forbidden me to cook, but my father, just once, had reached out an arm to stop me when I went to help my mother with the dishes. “Women’s work,” he said. We sat at the kitchen table and Mother served Bonnie and me. Bonnie ate like a hearty drunk. I watched my mother wander back behind the counter, slowly constructing her own bowl. Forgetting we were there, a distant look on her face, she took a mahjong tile out of her pocket and brought it to her mouth. I could just hear the sound of her teeth on the plastic, as though testing whether or not it was real. Years later, after my mother died, I went to see the Chinese Association building again. The c in Assoc had fallen off, and the remaining o had been spray-painted over as a joke. I wondered why the letters fell from right to left. Some workman on a ladder, putting in the studs, losing faith as he went. The longer he worked, the looser the letters became: tight A, then s, then another s, then o, then what was the point, what was the point of this language, while people yelled at him from below: You interrupted my dinner, you woke my baby, how did you get my number, this number is supposed to be off your fucking lists, you people are the scum of the earth, how do you sleep at night? The workman had mounted Chinese first and it stuck. In the rare solitude of Thursdays, I cleaned the house. I wore a full-length apron that my father had bought for my mother and that she had never used. It was made of cheap-looking acrylic with machine lace for the trim, the color of a pearl. Naked except for the apron, I pushed the vacuum across the floor, scrubbed the bathroom on my knees. As I made dinner, I watched a cooking show on the portable black-and-white television, another gift in which my mother had no interest. I had lost most of the feeling in my fingertips from constant burning. I dipped my little finger in sauces while they were still in the pan to taste them, making a seductive face at the TV screen, imitating the show’s host: an older Italian woman, fifty and sumptuous as an overstuffed sofa. She hacked lamb shanks with a cleaver while wearing a brief slip dress. She pouted and I pouted. “Half the flavor is in the presentation,” we said in unison. Before anyone came home, I folded and put away the apron, first pausing to hold it to my face. It was starting to get the rubbery smell of my own body. When my parents first came to Fort Michel, Father did the books at an import-export store near the Chinese Association. He entered receipts for rugs and furniture in English and Chinese into a ledger. His desk was inside a metal cage with the safe and the register. Adele told me about the Chinese couple who owned the store. They affected a goofy, stumbling servility for their white customers, grabbing their hands and bowing deeply with every sale. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Then they’d head into the back to write it up, muttering to my father, “Sei-gwai-lo. Idiots.” He managed a McDonald’s off the highway for a while after that. Helen remembered the smell when he came home, the distinct beef-tallow perfume they sprayed onto the french fries. He wore a jacket and tie every day, and our mother spent her nights scrubbing stains out of the wool. He managed a gas station. He managed a sporting-goods store. He liked to be in charge of people. He liked the respect demanded by manager; he would accept any pay but no other title. Father never stayed at one job for long. He always felt he wasn’t climbing fast enough. Eventually he was hired by the Passport Canada office near us, part of a federal visible-minorities program. Nothing could be more antithetical to the way my father saw himself. Under the Languages Spoken sign, they added a slate: Cantonese. The rare Chinese customers always ended up at his window. Father forced them to speak English. He was patient but unrelenting. There were only three offices with doors behind the service windows, and within two years, one of them was my father’s. Being a civil servant fit his white-collar idea of prosperity. Everyone dressed the way he always had—jackets, ties, shined shoes. No burgers. But their pale faces in the fluorescence reminded him how he’d gotten there, by being visible. He comforted himself with pictures of his two eldest daughters, away at university. Adele would be an invisible doctor and Helen would be an invisible lawyer. He’d laid it out for them, and they had expressed no resistance. Bonnie and I had much simpler orders. Be a little girl forever, be a boy. My father called to say he was working late again. My mother said, “Mmm-hmm,” and hung up. We ate my canned-tuna casserole. I thought about roasted lamb with rosemary. Mother read the paper while she ate. Bonnie and I played hangman on the comics page. She wrote out a long string of spaces, her lips dark and ragged at the edges. “A,” I said. “D.” Her six-word phrase turned out to be Made out with old bar guy. When it was my turn, I drew thirteen lines, four words. A question mark at the end. What was it like? The phone rang again and Bonnie ran to answer it. I gave him my number, she mouthed at me over her shoulder. Are you insane? I mouthed back, and she grinned. When she came back, her face was unreadable. She sat down in a slow, brittle way, holding her knees tightly together, like someone under the table was trying to look up her skirt. “Was it him?” I whispered. “Who was it?” my mother asked. Bonnie took so long to answer that my mother put down the paper. She looked tiny holding it, the newspaper almost longer than her body. Bonnie started piercing food with her fork. The largest chunk of tuna on her plate, a piece of pasta, a pea on each tine. “It was Dad’s office,” she said. “He left his wallet.” “Oh,” Mother replied, opening the paper again. “Tell him when he gets home.” Our father came home three hours later. I listened to him and my mother in the bathroom at the same time. The toilet flushed. The sink ran. He didn’t shower. They moved into the bedroom, and the lights went out. Neither of them spoke loudly enough to be heard. I tried to imagine my father’s mistress. The culmination of his immigrant fantasy, blond as Marilyn Monroe, breasts like party balloons, a loudmouthed vixen fattened on abundant grain and milk in the great fields of America. Or maybe, the way sex squeezes irony out of us, she was a Chinese seamstress, almond eyes squinting more and more, her vision vanishing at the point of her needle. Maybe my father wanted to push his tongue against the sounds of the old language; maybe she was silent and docile, scrawny from the voyage, still wearing a stash of incongruous peasant clothes that looked like linen pajamas. My mother before my father had begun his project of westernization, my father the conqueror. Years later, visiting home, I went to see the bar where Bonnie had given her number to old men. It was open at ten in the morning, dank and empty. I saw Mrs. Becker’s husband sleeping on his arms in a booth. The bartender didn’t seem to care. I sat at Mr. Becker’s table and we talked about his wife. I knew she’d died in an accident soon after we met her and that Mr. Becker was the one who had found her. Neither my mother nor the kids at school could elaborate any further—an accident, a tragic accident on our street. “My bus was never late,” he said. “I was home every day at seven forty. On the dot.” He told me that Mrs. Becker liked to eat sour candies crusted with sugar by pressing them to the top of her mouth. She didn’t like pain in general, he said drunkenly, least of all in bed—just that, crystals cutting in and wearing away her soft palate, often doing it until she bled. He could taste it when he kissed her. “Like sucking on pennies,” he said. Another Thursday. I walked home from school, anticipating an empty house. As I rounded the corner, I saw Mrs. Becker standing in her yard and watching the sprinkler spit its twitching lines like it needed supervision. Sprinklers were an odd sight in our neighborhood of scraggly trees and poisoned soil. She spotted me as I tried to run past. “Hello there!” “Hi.” She held out her hand. I shook it. Her white glove was dry and cool. “I’m Mrs. Becker. You live in the house at the end of the road, right?” “Yes.” In full sunlight, she looked even paler. The light shone through her skin to the blue veins along her forehead. “What’s your name?” “Peter.” “It’s nice to meet you, Peter. Can I ask you a question?” “Sure, I guess.” “What does your mother like?” Mrs. Becker clasped her hands together in a position of prayer. “I feel terrible about the other day. I’d like to get her a gift.” I didn’t understand what she felt terrible about; my mother was the one who’d been rude. “Flowers? Does she like flowers? Apricot cake? I make a great apricot cake.” “I don’t know. Maybe.” “I’ll bring by an apricot cake.” The sprinkler hit her feet and ankles each time it went around, wetting her shoes and the hem of her dress. She didn’t seem to notice. “Okay, sure. Thanks, Mrs. Becker.” “Your mother seems like such a nice lady. I want us to be friends. Does she like to go to the movies? Play cards?” Her smile looked unstable. The structure of her face couldn’t sustain the weight. “She likes to play mahjong,” I said. “I’m afraid I don’t know that one.” “I’m sorry, Mrs. Becker, but I have to go.” “Oh! Sure. Is she waiting for you?” She looked in the direction of our house as if expecting to see my mother standing there. “No, but . . .” I searched for something to say. “It’s my turn to clean the house.” “Do you need any help? I have an hour or two. I could come over and help you.” I balked. “No, thank you.” “I’m sorry. That was inappropriate of me. I’m so sorry.” “I’ve gotta go,” I repeated. I ran down the street. Inside our dim house, I gave my eyes a minute to adjust to the light. Standing in the kitchen, I took off my pants, underwear, and shirt and pulled my scrunched socks up to my knees. I took out the apron, put one loop around my head and another around my waist, the pinched sateen catching on my sparse body hair. It felt like a second skin—a better one. I turned on the television, knowing there would be three episodes of Giovetta in a row. A jaunty trumpet played the theme song over close-ups of gourmet dishes, intercut with Giovetta dancing. She only swayed her hips and snapped her fingers, her huge body pushing the borders of our nine-inch TV. I imitated her movements, sliding on my socks. At the end, with the show title under her round face, she bit an empty fork while staring right into the camera. She was pleasure incarnate. I continued to dance to her voice as though it were music, coming thick through the layers of fat over her throat. “Mmm,” she said. “If only you could smell this. Truly incredible.” I shimmied through the house, picking things up off the floor. As I entered the living room, I caught a flash of white in my peripheral vision. I instinctively turned my bare back and buttocks away. Mrs. Becker was standing in our yard, staring through the window as frankly as a ghost. I screeched and ran. I could hear her voice, muffled but penetrating the glass. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I hid in another room for almost two hours, stayed until I had to go back out to the kitchen to get my clothes before everyone else came home. It was dark by then. There was no sign of anyone outside. Mrs. Becker followed Bonnie and a boy home from school. He was one of the boys she went to the bar with on Thursdays, gangly with a splatter pattern of acne across his chin, but—Bonnie explained—he had dark eyes and was good at pool. They went into the woods behind the supermarket. He sat down on a flat rock and she got down on her knees. The hard soil scraped her bare-skinned legs as she bobbed her head up and down. “Have you done this before?” he asked. “Yeah,” she lied. “But never with a guy my own age.” The boy loved this answer, Bonnie told me. He idolized older boys, and putting his cock in Bonnie’s mouth made him one of them. He closed his eyes, opened them, closed them, opened them. “Shit,” he said. “What?” “Someone’s watching us.” Bonnie stood up. A flag of red hair disappeared along the path. Bonnie decided that if Mrs. Becker was going to spy on us, we might as well spy on her too. We watched Mrs. Becker leave her house at four in the afternoon, get in the car, and drive away. Bonnie, who by then had all kinds of skills, jimmied open the Beckers’ living-room window, which faced their backyard and away from the road. The house was laid out the same way as ours—three bedrooms, one floor—which gave us the eerie feeling of being in a parallel universe. Our mother favored spareness and unpainted wood; the Beckers liked animal ornaments and cartoon vegetables on the curtains. Bonnie flipped through the mail on their kitchen counter, took a bar of chocolate from the cupboard, peeked in the fridge. I went straight for the bedrooms. The first bedroom I went into had pastel-blue wallpaper bordered with ducklings and furniture under plastic sheeting. I lifted the plastic off a chair. When I dropped it again, the chair started to rock back and forth. The other furniture turned out to be a crib and a changing table. I passed Bonnie in the bathroom, spraying perfume on her wrist and then smelling it. The bed in the master bedroom had a pink duvet and pink chiffon curtains between the posts. Except for its size, it looked like the bed of a very young girl, not a middle-aged couple. I sat on the bed and sank in deeply, the mattress sloping sharply down toward me. I picked up the photo of them on the nightstand. It had to be fairly recent, as Mrs. Becker looked the same as she did now. She was looking at the photographer, smiling in her unsteady way. Her husband, older than her with tufts of white hair only by his temples, seemed to be tenderly admiring her ear. Bonnie walked in. She went to the armoire and opened a few drawers before finding the one she wanted. She pulled out a pink nightgown and slipped it over her head, on top of her clothes. The neckline cut so deep, it sat lower than Bonnie’s chest, and it had transparent sleeves cuffed in fur. Bonnie posed in the vanity mirror. “Yowza, Mrs. Becker.” She pulled out something that looked like strips of elastic with clasps on the ends. Neither of us knew what it was, so she put it back. Then she rooted around in the nightstand drawer—Bonnie knew where to find the best stuff. “Jackpot!” She waved around a leather-bound notebook. Seeing my face, she added, “When notebooks are kept in the bedroom, they’re always good.” She took a sleeping mask off the nightstand and put it on, snapping the elastic under her hair, blinding herself. She flopped backward onto the bed, still wearing Mrs. Becker’s perfume and lingerie, and threw me the notebook. “Read it to me, Peter.” One page had the corner folded over, so I turned to that. I cleared my voice theatrically. “‘September nineteenth. Dr. Shultz says that I was never pregnant. He says I made the whole thing up. He says the night I spent bleeding in the bathroom was just a nightmare.’” I stopped. I looked at Bonnie, who continued to lie stiffly under her mask. “‘I remember holding the baby in my hand. A complete child. Eyelashes, toenails, knuckles. But the size of a pear. A perfect miniature child. Hard as plastic. It came out of me while I cupped my hand to catch it. A nightmare, he says. That’s not what it would look like, he says.’” I skimmed the rest of the page in silence. “Why did you stop? Keep going.” Bonnie didn’t move. “I don’t think we should be reading this.” “We already broke into her house, Peter. This is no time to develop a conscience.” “‘I told him about the positive test. He said I should have come in to have it confirmed. He thinks I misread the test. He showed me a picture of my insides. He poked the picture with his finger and said there had never been anything there. He poked it and poked it. Each time, he got louder. I could feel him poking me on the inside.’” Bonnie looked like a different person on the bed, her eyes and their sockets hidden, her wrists poking out of pink fur. “‘Darren has agreed to tell people I miscarried. He says we shouldn’t have told so many people about the pregnancy in the first place.’” My voice got higher as I read, started to flutter like Mrs. Becker’s. “‘But it doesn’t matter whether it happened or not. I remember it. I am entitled to my memories. I had a baby and it died.’” My eyes focused on the top edge of the page so that my legs and the floor were a blur. “I don’t want to read any more,” I said. The whole room smelled like Mrs. Becker’s perfume, a generic berry scent. “Okay,” Bonnie replied. She took off the mask and the nightgown. “I think I’m going to try and catch my friends at the bar. Wanna come?” Our eyes met: two animals waking up in a cage for the first time. I wanted to go home and bask in Giovetta’s voice. With the blinds closed. “No, thanks.” We put everything back. Bonnie returned the chocolate. We left through the window. Back then, the afternoons were long and forgiving. A week later, my mother gambled secretly in loud Cantonese. A mahjong Thursday. Bonnie let boys and men buy her drinks, elevating her plainness with jokes. When I got home, I unlocked the front door with one hand and unbuttoned my jeans with the other. “Peter.” My father sat on the living-room couch, his hands on his thighs. The television was off; the radio was off; no book, no magazine, no newspaper. I stayed where I was. He walked past me and opened the cabinet above the stove. He took out the apron. It had none of its shine in his large hands. Instead, it looked like a skinned animal. I knew better than to speak. “Follow me,” he said. We walked out onto our driveway. I still hadn’t buttoned up my pants. The flaps folded open like a book. He held the apron out at arm’s length. With his free hand, he took a lighter out of his pocket. A highpitched cry came from somewhere. My throat. A flick of the flint and our pupils reflected orange. It burned as only acrylic does, pockets of petroleum and air self-starting, self-perpetuating, a noxious and invasive smell. He dropped it on the gravel and it curled in the flames, twisting inward as though alive. We watched it burn out. I wondered if Mrs. Becker was watching, if she had caught the signal, the pyre light, from our yard. How else could my father have known everything, if not from Mrs. Becker? A neighbor, a woman who was merely convenient. Not Marilyn Monroe, not a fresh arrival, just a jittery nobody, the human equivalent of onionskin paper. The ashes were hard and heavy, unmoved by the wind. My father picked a chip, about the size of a small pebble, out of the pile. He pressed it into my hands. “Swallow it,” he said. It was warm, like a dark rock in the sun. Bonnie appeared at the end of the driveway. My eyes were wide with warning—a caught animal signaling to new prey. My father put his hand on my shoulder to stop me from moving. We waited through Bonnie’s long, slow march. She stopped and stood before him expectantly. He put his thumb and index finger on her chin, holding her face still, and leaned in. He inhaled so hard I could see his face flex with the effort. I wondered which smell was the strongest: sweet rum, the smoke of a bar, the sweat of other men on the girl he still owned? It was decided that my mother would quit her job in order to properly control her children. We listened to my father’s calm voice from the hallway. “And,” he said to her, “you haven’t been depositing your entire paycheck. Where’s the money?” My mother’s response was too quiet to hear. We wanted her to call him out, but she didn’t, and we were too afraid. My father stole all our secrets and kept his own. As an adult, I learned that few people had affairs as I imagined them. Passing bodies sometimes collided, random and blameless as atoms, then returned to their original course. People developed second relationships as sexless and mundane as their first. Partners were willingly blind. None of the things I attached to the word mistress existed. But in those days, I hated them all: my father, my mother, Mrs. Becker, and even goofy, unknown Mr. Becker, the adoring fool in the photograph. Where was he? Where was Mr. Becker when my father clutched a fistful of red hair and she pretended it didn’t hurt, pretended to like pain? My mother found an apricot cake on our front steps that Saturday morning. She flipped it upside down over the trash and then handed me the pan. “Go return this,” she said flatly. Mrs. Becker was on her lawn again. She wore khaki shorts and a big hat. “Hello, Peter!” “Hi. Thanks for the cake.” “You’re welcome! Did you eat all of it already?” “We put it on a plate.” “Was it too dry? I was worried it was a little dry.” Even in the shadow of her hat, she had to squint at me; I was still standing at a distance and clutching the cake pan. “I haven’t had any yet.” “Oh. Let me know when you do. It might be too dry. Jam would help. I should have given you some jam to go with it.” “It’s fine, Mrs. Becker.” “Let me get you some jam.” “No, I . . .” “Come inside!” She turned and headed for the door. I had no choice. I followed her into her kitchen and set down the pan. I felt uneasy that I had been there before. “Where’s Mr. Becker?” I asked. “He works on Saturdays.” She dug out a jar of orange-tinted glass with a checked lid and a tied ribbon. “Here you go,” she said, beaming. “Homemade.” “Thanks.” “Can I tell you a secret, Peter?” In the dim kitchen, her hat shadowed her eyes. Her grinning mouth became her whole face. “I’m just so happy. I have to tell someone.” I held the jar close, as though it could protect me. “I’m pregnant,” she said. She tilted her head to the side. “Oh, I hope the baby has dark hair, like you and your sister.” I dropped the jar. I wanted it to shatter, but it only made a dull clank and rolled away. “We’re not family.” That wasn’t what I meant to say. I meant to call her a bitch, a home wrecker, a slut. None of those words came. Her smile remained. I still couldn’t see her eyes. “I didn’t say we were.” I said, nonsensically, “Get out of my house.” Then I turned and ran from hers. Mr. Becker sold insurance in a mall in another town. He took the six-thirty bus home and arrived at precisely seven forty each day. Mrs. Becker had dinner ready at precisely seven forty-five. The bus was never late. One evening, not long after I left the jam on the floor, a van hit a pickup truck and spun out into the oncoming cars. Mr. Becker’s bus sat in traffic for an hour, behind another bus, behind a car, behind a wall of flares. At seven thirty, Mrs. Becker went into the garage with an armful of sheets and towels. She rolled them up and stuffed them under the garage door. She got into the car they didn’t use—their insurance had lapsed —and turned on the engine, leaving the driver’s-side door hanging open. “She wanted me to find her,” Mr. Becker said in the bar that morning, staring into the drink I’d bought him. “I would have come home in time on any other day. You see? It was an accident.” I see her, sometimes, leaning back in her seat, clutching a pear-size baby in her hand, staring into its tiny, sloping eyes, its body hard as plastic, its crown of dark hair no larger than a fingerprint. 4 From Germany with Love ADELE WASN’T TAKING her premed requirements. I listened from around the corner, where Bonnie and I always hid. Father was on the phone in the hallway, talking in his dangerously calm voice, soft as wet concrete. “Transcript,” he said. Then: “Because I’m paying for it,” he said. Adele sent her transcript by mail without comment. I thought this was characteristically ele...
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Running head: FOR TODAY I AM A BOY BOOK REVIEW

For Today I am a Boy Book Review
Institution Affiliation
Date

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FOR TODAY I AM A BOY

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For Today I am a Boy By Kim Fu
This Book review will be published in Seventeen Magazine.
The 2014 debut novel by Kim Fu epigraph is from songwriter and singer Antony Hegarty
lyrics; “One day I’ll grow up, I’ll be a beautiful girl. But for today, I am a child. For today I am a
boy." This works well as a beginning for "For Today I am A Boy" novel, which is a narration of
the story of Peter Huang, the Chinese immigrant son living in a small-town Southern Ontario.
Peter knew early on that he is not supposed to be a boy (Fu, 2014). Though born a boy, he was
longing to be a girl and grow to be a woman. The book analyzes the life of Peter but in wellorganized ...


Anonymous
Awesome! Perfect study aid.

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