Blue Boy Page 6

  On Wednesday night, while my father is hard at work in his office, my mom grabs the keys and her purse and takes me to the mall in the minivan.

  “Beta, vhat has been bothering you?” she asks. I am still healing from the Sarah and Melissa incident—literally—but I don’t want to tell my mother what has happened. More embarrassing than making a fool out of yourself in front of your schoolmates is making a fool out of yourself in front of your parents.

  “What do you mean?” I say. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Beta, I know you better than anyvone. I know something is vrong.”

  As we drive the rest of the way to the mall, I think about my mother’s comment. I know you better than anyone. It’s probably true; she is my mother, after all. And yet I don’t feel that this should be the case. There are so many people my age at school, and I spend so much of my time there, and yet I have not found anyone who truly knows me. And, really, my mother doesn’t know me, either. She certainly has no clue that the reason why I hop out of the car with a bouncy step is because I am looking for a more edifying level of smut.

  When we get to the mall, I spend a few weary minutes in my mother’s company, sighing my boredom as loudly as possible while she sifts through piles of pastel-colored blouses and skirts that are pleated like lampshades. She moves to one of those circular steel clothes racks, the kind with a hollowed-out center that I sometimes like to hide in while my mother shops. My frame is so tiny that I can pretend they are miniature houses, a rainbow of fabric forming their walls.

  My mother picks clothes depending on what they cost, not necessarily on what they look like. It’s a trick in her mind. She tells herself that if something is on sale, she is saving money—even if she ends up buying ten of the same thing. Like many women, shoes are her favorite purchase, and she will come into the house after a day of shopping with literally ten pairs contained in two white plastic bags, the corners of the shoeboxes pressing against the sides like chicks trying to burst out of their eggs. Today, she has decided she needs a new blouse—or four—to go with the pink pumps she bought last week. As she swishes through the blouses, I envision an entire stack of them on her bed, my mother having snipped off all of their tags and folded them into neat squares that she can put in her closet.

  Her arms now full, she looks up, contemplating where a dressing room might be. This is my opportunity to desert her.

  “Beta, I am going to go try these—”

  “Can I go to the bookstore?”

  “Of course, beta.” My mother never objects to my frequent book buying; she figures that I am educating myself and that I could always be wasting my money on rubbish like candy and Hot Wheels toy cars. “Vhat book are you buying?”

  “Um, a magazine. A poetry magazine…”

  “Poetry! My little Zafir,” she says, referring to an Urdu poet whom she quotes when sewing extra fabric onto her sari petticoats to accommodate her older, plumper flesh. “Here’s ten dollars,” she says, handing me a bill. “Just don’t go to the Gap.”

  My mom has always had a crude vengeance against the Gap—mainly because she loves shopping there and sees it as her greatest weakness. Every time we pass the store in the mall, she gets a glassy look in her eyes. She practically presses her nose to the store’s window and breathes a snowflake of condensation onto the glass, like she’s a bicultural Little Match Girl. Usually she’ll slip me a ten-dollar bill and tell me to go buy something, and by the time she finds me dawdling dangerously near a stack of hot pink Mattel boxes in a toy store, her purse is noticeably larger, a new scarf or mitten set or even a sweater stuffed into it in hasty concealment. Even though she starts wearing the said accoutrements—little threads hanging from where she’s ripped off the Gap labels—she continues to use the Gap as her proverbial scapegoat: “Every night, the Doyles’ daughter—vroom on her car, like she owns the neighborhood, vearing her Gap nonsense.”

  Tonight in the mall, her fear about the Gap seems like the only worry on her mind. She’s totally in the dark as to why I’m leaving her. “Okay, I’ll meet you back here in twenty minutes,” I say, turning on my right heel and dashing out of the store, an ineffectual admonition of “Don’t run!” coming out of my mom’s mouth as I round the curve.

  The mall is always full of people: the skater posse that hangs out in the food court and drinks Coke after Coke and sometimes pours in a capful of their careless parents’ Captain Morgan to spice it up; the myriad cliques of Rave-hairsprayed rich chicks giggling over boys who may or may not be at the mall; single mothers carrying their babies along with their canvas tote bags; janitors mopping a patch of floor where a milkshake or an enormous Cinnabon splattered against the checkered marble floor; thirtysomething schoolteachers who turn their gazes to the floor in the hopes of avoiding eye contact with their students. Although there are all these social groups, and as much as they might have in common with each other, as much as they talk about each other and watch each other, they do not coexist boisterously on weeknights. No, on weeknights, the mall is like one big therapist’s couch, and the people who frequent it during these evenings are searching for a form of comfort they lack at home. Like tits, for example.

  I espy the bookstore across a panorama of gurgling fountains, kiosks selling fanny packs, earrings, and poorly made watches, and a gaggle of black girls playing Skip-It, a game in which they scuttle a plastic ball attached to a plastic string around one foot like a pedestrian form of hula hoop. I walk through this bazaar and am just about to enter the bookstore when I realize something. The store has structured itself so as to deter any smut searchers. The magazines are all at its entrance, arranged like an arsenal on one wall-hugging rack. (No pun intended.) The grandiose presentation, and the proximity to the mall thoroughfare, transform the entrance of this meager chain bookstore into a proscenium and me into the spotlit star of a peep show.

  I lean against a pillar, pretending that I’m waiting for someone. Every now and then, I sneak a glance at the rack, trying to locate the Penthouse stash. And then I spot it—in the farthest corner, level with the head of the cashier, who stands on a pedestal. One reach of my tiny hand to savor the delectable treats above, and I can see his hand grabbing mine and chopping it off. Or worse, he would tell my mother. He would drag me to the mall security office and tell the police I’m a pervert (or, as I once heard my father calls a sex offender he saw on the news, “a prevert”), then send an intercom announcement all over the mall, the calumny echoing off the marble floors and into every crevice of every dressing room, where my mother, blouse tangled up like a turban around her torso, hears the words, “PAGING MISSUS SHAW…SHAW-WHAT?…SHAW. WE HAVE YER PERVERT SON…WHASSYER NAME AGAIN, SON? KEE-WHAT? KEITH. KEITH SHAW.”

  Were Krishna’s amorous pursuits so depraved? How can I expect to be a paragon of godly behavior when I’m curving around a pillar in the mall to find a bounty of bosoms? Part of me wants to run away from this mall and all the way to our temple, where I can kneel on the floor and curl myself back into a ball, begging God’s forgiveness. But another part of me wants to live bravely and learn as much as I can about the body and its pleasures. What to do? I can either slither in there and risk total derision and desolation but have an idea of what happens in flagrante delicto, or I can wait out here, lead a perfectly happy existence and be a kid, putting off sexual complications until later.

  I think the choice is clear: Tits tits tits.

  I wait until the cashier has left his post and then make my way through mallgoers and a few potted plants to enter the store again. From what I can see, there are only a few people in the store. As I pick up a copy of Disney Adventures magazine and pretend to scan its cartoon contents, I realize that the people in here—the guy in the gray blazer reading Robert Fulghum at the front table display, the curly-haired woman cracking the spine of an unbought Danielle Steel paperback, the high schooler flipping through a Superman comic in his puffy Starter jacket—have an air of secrecy, privacy, stealth. Reading, it would
seem, is a forbidden act in this town.

  I sneak a glance back at the cashier’s post and see it is still vacant. I put the Disney Adventures down and slide over to the cozy corner of the rack, where the pouting lips, blond hair, and barely clad bust of a minx ooze under the Penthouse title. I am just about to reach up and snatch one of the copies away when I hear two deep voices approaching. I turn away and grab up the Disney Adventures again.

  Two gruff-looking guys walk up to the rack. One of them has a coffee-colored goatee around his mouth and a backward Reds cap on his head; the other has a shaved head and is wearing a plain blue mesh jersey with a long-sleeve white T-shirt under it. The goatee guy reaches up and takes the very copy of Penthouse that I wanted. He looks briefly at the front cover, a short but tough grunt escaping him, then tips the cover so that his friend can see it. The friend grunts his assent. A seasoned pro, the goatee guy flips straight to the center, and both men blow air through their nostrils in acknowledgment of the content.

  The irony that these guys are looking at a glossy titfest while I’m nose-deep in Mickey Mouse is not lost on me.

  From where I stand, I can see bent refractions of tit, but I am not afforded anything more than my usual viewings with Cody. The goateed guy flips through the pages, each time tipping the magazine friendward as if to say it’s his handiwork.

  “How ’bout that?” Goatee says, and I glimpse four tits rippled on a two-page spread.

  “I’m there, I’m there,” says the other, sliding one hand up and over his bald head.

  They communicate this way for minutes on end, always with these tough-guy expressions, “How ’bout that?” and “I’m there, I’m there,” and all I want to scream is “No, you’re not there! You’re here, and you’re stealing my tits!” I am seething so much at the way they have inserted themselves between me and the magazine that I almost forget my original goal: I am not here to see tits. I am here to see sex. And they seem to be looking only at the former. Blasphemy.

  Then I glimpse it: the wax-like chest of a man, two brunettes licking it with bubblegum tongues, and at the base of this shiny flesh, a well-cropped square of pubic hair and the solid cylinder of his penis. I see this for just a moment before the page flips again, and there is the man again, standing behind one of the women, gripping her waist from behind, the other woman licking his ear as if salivating sex into it.

  “I’m there, I’m there.”

  A collage of bodies wafts into my mind. I cannot dismiss the strength of the man’s body, the way his head is thrown back, mouth slack-jawed as he pushes himself against the woman in front of him. He seems to be pushing himself against her with every last bit of his strength, and as I look at the two men staring at the magazine, there is a longing in their eyes to do the same thing. Their breathing has become tough, and the grunts come now without their bidding. The more the rumble of their arousal couples with the sexy sheen of the magazine, the harder I become down below and in my mind. The sex—the sheer, mad, throbbing sex of this mundane mall bookstore—fills my head and becomes something huge. My head throbs, and I begin to see spots. Oh, no. I have to put out one hand to steady myself.

  I drop my magazine.

  I kneel down quickly and pick it back up. I look at the men as I rise. They have smirks on their faces, their posture uncomfortable due to their boners and the sight of a clumsy Indian child next to them. They chuckle and stuff the Penthouse back into the top of the rack, then swagger out of the store laughing. Their backs now turned to me, I look at them unabashedly, trying to capture every detail of their ragged appearance. My face is throbbing, and I turn back to the rack and look at the issue, which is still crinkling from the hasty way in which Goatee returned it to its smutty place on high. Without thinking twice, I swing up, almost rock climbing, grab the issue, and head for the cash register.

  In the back of the store, the cashier is arguing with the lady who had the Danielle Steel book.

  “M’am, I’m sorry, but you can’t just come in here and read a book like it’s your own. Look what you’ve done to it! You’re going to have to buy it.”

  “I forgot my wallet at home,” the lady says unconvincingly, trying to bypass the cashier and make her exit. But he persists, blocking her way and presenting to her the newly enjoyed, green-and-gold paperback.

  The more they argue, the more frantic I become. I am standing at the cash register with a dirty magazine that looks like someone just had sex with it instead of a person. I look around me to make sure no one is looking, and the usual white noise of the weeknight mall greets me. I look back again at the quarreling couple and decide that I have no choice. I reach across the desk, grab one of the store’s brown paper bags, and rush out, stuffing my bounty into it and never looking back.

  Then the fates come into play.

  In front of the pillar where I was lingering before, I run into Mrs. Nevins.

  “Well, hi, Key-ran,” she is in the middle of saying, when she notices the enormous block lettering on the magazine I am shoving into the bag. She blushes, her brows furrowing, and she stutters out something that is half pity, half censure: “Oh, no, Key-ran…”

  “I—it’s not what you think, Mrs.—” I start, and then the unthinkable, yet inevitable, occurs. Behind me, I hear the ardent waddle-step of my mother’s Keds against the marble floor and the crunching of her many shopping bags as they slap against her leg.

  “Kiran, beta,” she says as I manage to slip the magazine fully in the bag and clutch it to my stomach. “Who is this?” she asks, concerned, afraid that Mrs. Nevins might be some wacko who’s come up to kidnap me.

  “I’m Sheila Nevins,” she says, extending her hand and continuing to frown. “Mrs. Sharma, I’m sorry to be rude, but I hope you know what your son is holding.”

  “Rude? Vhy vould that be a rude thing to say? Kiran is a smart child. I am proud of him. He buys magazines like that all the time.”

  “Excuse me?” Mrs. Nevins says, her eyes widening in shock. She is still wearing what she wore at school today: a green sweatshirt with an appliqué red apple stitched onto its front, a white turtleneck, and very blue jeans. “Mrs. Sharma, apologies again, but you don’t take issue with the sort of garbage that your son is carrying?”

  “Garbage! Vell, excuse me, but aren’t you a teacher? I can’t believe you vould object to poetry!”

  “Poetry! Is that what you call it? Unbelievable! Good night, Mrs. Sharma. And good night, Key-ran. God help you.”

  She storms away, giving one disgusted look back. I recognize in her posture the same unease that Mrs. Moehlman exuded as I confessed to her about the splinter.

  My mother reacts with a cough-like huff. “Vhat a buffoon,” she says. “Maybe ve should have you svitch classrooms. Let’s go, beta.”

  She slides two bags into my arms and heads for the exit. I follow, nonplussed, a mixture of skin, horror, and guilt weighing me down.

  My guilt is very strong, but my lust overrides my guilt.

  When my mother and I get home, I push away the encounter with Mrs. Nevins as I have learned to push away all of my other school-related humiliations. I focus on the task at hand. As my mother gets a quick talk from my father in his study (“Vhy do you need ten blouses at once? For each of your incarnations?”), I run upstairs with my magazine, go into my room, shut the door, and lock it. It is exhilarating to have a new thrill, a new pursuit. Yes, the makeup and dolls have yielded fun and fulfilling experiences, but the carnal delight of what I hold in my hands, the limbs that are wedged into the binding of this slippery magazine, carry more promise than anything I have undertaken before—as the pressure in my groin attests.

  I unwrap the magazine from the brown paper bag and flip to its center again. The dueling tits greet me once more, but it is the man’s body that I can’t shake out of my head. I turn the page to see it again. This man’s penis does not seem consistent with the rest of his body. It seems like it belongs to someone or something else; it has a life of its own. I am at
attention like this man; like his, my dick seems to be stretching into some other space. I grip my dick, and the heartbeat I can feel through it seems separate from my own, like the time I held a chinchilla in science class and felt the rough beat of her tiny heart against her rib cage. Until now, I have thought of my privates as a part of my body, as simply an extension of myself. But the throbbing I feel, coupled with the way in which this man swaggers around, despite being frozen in pictures—the way he holds his dick up to the full, sticky, Fire Engine lips of one of the women, the way he pushes it into her, the way he places one hand on his hip as he stands over the other woman, who lies sprawled on a table, and lets it work its magic—makes me realize that my desires are a bubble around me, my body encased in another throbbing heart. Somehow, in the pages of this dirty magazine, I have discovered that we do not hold our sexuality but that our sexuality holds us.

  Over the next week, every time I pull out the magazine, which grows dog-eared, the ink on the cover smudged with my fingerprints—as if I am making as big of an impression on the magazine as it is making on me—the women’s bodies change. I can see not just their sexiness but the beauty of them. There is less of a desire to fondle the tits, to call them “tits” at all. As Cody continues to unload numerous epithets for the pendulous balls of flesh, I simply look at them as a lovely appetizer before turning the page and marveling at the ripe, searching penis of the latest charlatan that has swaggered onto the scene, and the ways in which he satisfies his girls.

  The man’s body, the ripples of his chest, remind me of something. The weight of these women’s breasts—that’s what they are, breasts! Not tits—remind me of something: their limbs glow. I stash the magazine, dash from my room, make sure both of my parents are downstairs—the sounds of a midday tea being made, my mother taking out the cups, my father grunting as he places the kettle on the stove—and go into the master bedroom.