For Today I Am a Boy by Kim Fu

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.”
    â€œPasta,” I said.
    â€œWhat’s in it? In case they ask again.”
    â€œGround 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.
    â€œHi. Thank you for making dinner, Bonnie.”
    â€œNo problem.”
    â€œYour 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.
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    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.
    Â 
    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