For Today I Am a Boy (8 page)

“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

A
DELE 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 elegant—a written, impersonal confession that conveyed no regret. She had transferred into the arts department and was majoring in German language and literature. Her grades were high. My father waved the transcript around the kitchen, snapping the wad of paper as it wrinkled around his thumb. “Why?” He turned to Bonnie and me, silent at the breakfast table. “Why?”

Mother busied herself peeling a pear. “A boy.”

And she was right. Adele sent us a picture. London, Ontario, where she went to school, was only a couple of hours away. She could easily have brought him home, just as easily as our parents could have gone to get her. They could have dragged her from her dorm room by her ankles, cut her hair, kept her in her room until she came around. I'm sure they talked about it. Instead, there was another flat, factual phone call. Was she going to go to med school? No. Then there would be no more money.

Bonnie and I managed to look at the picture before it was thrown away. His name was August and he was disappointingly unhandsome: he had blond, wilted hair and the overbite of a donkey. Large-bodied with sharp Nordic features. Yet he seduced my sister away from medicine and then away from the continent; she returned with him to Germany without finishing her degree.

Adele sent postcards addressed to Bonnie and me. We had to be quick and fish them out of the mail before our parents got to them. I couldn't understand why she had gone to this place full of dead buildings and gray waters. Even the postcard pictures were taken on overcast days, as though the sun never shone there.

At first, Bonnie and I stayed up late dissecting the postcards, constructing a life for Adele. The morning she left premed biology and just couldn't take it anymore—London, Ontario, like Fort Michel with a Costco and a Walmart. Maybe she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the Ontario Thames. We pictured her wasted and lovely with despair. Milky water closed over her head. Then blond, robust, life-loving August reached in and pulled her out. He laid her on the riverbank. He nursed her back to health. Through a fevered haze, she heard him speaking in German, telling her these small Canadian towns were killing her, she must go to Berlin to heal her soul.

Bonnie and I acted out this scene. She played August and I played Adele, throwing myself backward onto the bed with my hand over my eyes. I read aloud from the postcards in my best imitation of Adele's voice, and Bonnie spoke in Germanic nonsense, hacking her
k
's and
v
's. Sometimes we had Adele save August's life: He got lost, was unprepared for the harsh Canadian winter, the long roads to nowhere. He passed out in a snow-filled ditch, aching for the dense, crowded Old World, where the snow was kicked up by millions of feet, where you were never so alone. And then Adele appeared in a white fur-lined parka, his angel of mercy.

 

I woke from a recurring nightmare: I had grown an extra head. It craned its neck to look back at me. It had scraggly hair on its chin and neck. Extra arms popped out of my armpits; hideous growths and tumors appeared on my back and inner thighs, weeping pus. The thing between my legs grew. It
grew.
The second head crowed with laughter, its voice deepening away from Adele's musical lilt with each laugh.

I sat up in bed and looked outside for the sound that had woken me. Bonnie was climbing out her window. She wore a denim miniskirt, and her thighs looked moon-white as she landed in a crouch in the front yard, testing the silence. Earlier that night, she hadn't been in the mood to go through the postcards again. “She's our sister, not a saint,” she'd said, irritated. “Who says it's some big love story? Maybe he was just her ticket out. Maybe he just liked her tits.”

I stared at Bonnie—her new breasts strapped into place, lacy bra straps showing through a diaphanous shirt, the abrupt, fleshy curve of her back—and was struck with envy so hot I could have killed her. She'd broken a promise, done something alone that we were supposed to do together.

 

I wrote dutifully to Adele, filling the blankness for all of us: news from Helen at school in Los Angeles, Bonnie's latest boyfriend. Eventually her postcards were replaced by letters addressed only to me. They grew longer and more intimate as Adele started to forget. She missed these in-between years, my nightmare years. When I read her letters, full of grown-up confidences, I felt the way Bonnie suddenly looked—Adele's glamorous, sparkling equal. Like the young boy she'd left behind was a different person.

One afternoon, I borrowed
Sabrina—
the Audrey Hepburn film Adele had taken us to see during her last summer at home
—
from the Fort Michel library. I renewed it twice and then never returned it. I told the librarian that I'd lost it and paid the fine. I was devastated by the jaunty advertising copy on the box, about Hepburn's
most hilarious
role. I remembered it as a serious drama, not a slapstick where William Holden's character is tricked into sitting on the champagne glasses in his pockets. I chose to watch only a few parts over and over again. Hepburn pacing in an organza Givenchy gown and pearl teardrop earrings. Hepburn in black slacks and a black shirt that plunges down her back. Soon I could remember Adele's features only in black-and-white. Sabrina goes to Europe to become even more sophisticated, even more perfect. She goes for love.

 

Adele and August moved into a house in Berlin that was occupied, though not owned, by a large group of friends. It had once been a single-family manor with two stairwells in the front hall that led to what might be called wings. A spray-painted mural dominated the hall, an abstract image of blue and orange cubes. Ordinary graffiti of names and tags was scribbled on top. Adele thought this was sad; August called it “living art.”

These friends promised to find Adele work, but nothing materialized. They needed the jobs for themselves. They came and went in extreme numbers. Each morning when Adele woke up, there were more people than there'd been the night before—they must have been hiding in some unknown cavern of the house. With nothing to do, Adele became the den mother. She cleaned the red, foul-smelling mold that grew over the rice cooker. She washed people's clothes in the sink and hung them to dry all over the house. To walk around, one had to push aside the damp shirts and sheets suspended from every lamp, doorway, and surface, like parting overgrown plants in a jungle. She rolled their unconscious bodies into positions in which they were less likely to choke on tongues or vomit. She made food that could be reheated easily for large groups at strange hours: meatless stews and soups, beans cooked until gray and earthy as mulch.

A very young girl lived in the house. She had renamed herself Cherry and was the house pet. She spent most of her time sprawled on the furniture or the floor, reading magazines or sleeping. Adele had to clean around her. Adele thought Cherry looked like a baby, with her plump arms and legs and her flabby, shapeless breasts. She had bright red cheeks and a stoned-looking smile; she took whatever drugs were handed to her with the lazy entitlement of a queen.

August started sleeping with Cherry. Everyone but Adele showered rarely and briefly, and hot water in the house was scarce. (
They call me the jealous American,
she wrote.
The jealous American who takes long, wasteful showers.
) As a result, August smelled like Cherry when he returned to the bed he shared with Adele: sample perfumes from magazines covering the chalky, sour scent of teenage sweat.
He plays it off as the nature of the house. As though the house is to blame. A free exchange of bodies and love and ideas.

And as Adele scrubbed a stain from one of Cherry's childish, printed dresses, she thought that that would not be so bad, if it were true. If everyone fucked everyone and they all slept in a heap like rats. She thought of a man with a narrow, sullen face she had seen pacing the hallways of the east wing; it would be all right if she could have him, as easy as she pleased, offer herself up as an exotic feast, a platter of mangoes and pineapple and near-poisonous fish.

But it wasn't true. It was just August and Cherry and August and Adele, a triangle with nothing profound or freeing about it.

 

August offered to marry Adele to simplify her immigration. She agreed. It was a matter of paperwork and translation in a
Standesamt.
Two women from the house witnessed with stoic disinterest.

After, they all went to an illegal nightclub in an abandoned building. Christmas lights were wound around the pipes and airshaft. A large hole in one wall near the ceiling showed a fragment of sky and let in a wintry draft. There was broken glass on the floor from an unknown source. The crowd did not smile as they danced, as though their pleasure ran too deep for such showy expression.

August and Adele danced together under a scattering blue laser. He gave her dramatic, over-the-top kisses, dipping her backward by the waist or lifting her into the air. They drank beer mixed with lemonade. In spite of herself, she felt bubbly and light, like something had happened worth celebrating. August yelled to a group of strangers, in German, “Hey, guys! We got married today!”

The men cheered, raised their glasses. One said something Adele couldn't catch over the music. “What did he say?” she asked August.

August and the man laughed meanly. “He said that you are very beautiful,” August said, winking at his new friend.

(
It wasn't the wedding I was happy about. Ironically, being married to August meant I could finally leave him,
she wrote, much later. I don't think that's how she felt at the time. She married the man she loved. She and Cherry had new titles—wife and mistress—and while Cherry's was more exciting, hers had its own sweetness. Her body was now his home.)

 

August chastised Cherry for getting fat. After August and Adele had come home married, Cherry had continued to spend her days lolling on the sofas, only now she ate. She ate tiny oranges, almonds, chocolates, olives, slices of cheese—a steady stream of small indulgences rather than meals. She wouldn't eat Adele's mushy curries and soups. When she got up to find more treats, Cherry would graze through the house like a large, unhurried animal.

August's criticism came charged. He found her more erotic than ever. A stream of abuse accompanied their lovemaking and could be heard throughout the house. He called her a fat, ugly sow as he squeezed her expanding breasts with glee.

Willowy, gamine Adele, the dark and classic beauty, to be seen and not touched—she sensed that something else was happening, that the raging, barefoot, feminine fire in the next room was bigger than chocolates and almonds. She was the first to say it out loud, although it was obvious by then. Cherry wore leggings and August's shirts over her bulk. Adele said, “I think you're pregnant.”

(I asked Adele endless questions about Cherry's pregnancy. I wanted the most intimate details. Adele's responses were scientific and tinged with disgust; I focused on the ones that surprised me. That her hair abruptly went curly. That she sweated so much she darkened the upholstery. That her pasty skin became mottled and brown over the cheekbones and elbows.)