Tiger, Tiger (11 page)
I began to walk, and he took my hand again.
“Good,” he said.
While we waited for a hairdresser, neither Poppa nor I flipped through the magazines that were scattered on the small end table. Poppa clutched my hand, his leg jittering. I was afraid to talk to him at first, but then I said, softly, “Poppa, not much, please?”
“I will tell them to take off a little. You have split ends. It needs to be done.”
“Just a little? You promise?”
“I promise nothing. These women are experienced; they know exactly what to do. I am a man; I know very little about hair. I will tell them to use their judgment.”
“Poppa, you said you would tell them a little! Now you’re saying something different!”
“You better not start up,” he said, squeezing my hand. “You better not humiliate me.”
I was silent, until he released the pressure from my hand. “Okay, but can I tell you something? School is coming soon; the other girls all have long hair. I’m the only one in school with short hair; they make fun of me. If you have them take off too much, I am really going to, it’s going to, I mean, I am . . .” I cleared my throat and concentrated on not crying. “I am going to suffer, Poppa. It’s hard looking different from everybody else. I want to look like all the other girls. I have to look like them, or they’ll laugh at me. They’ll call me a freak and ugly.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Do you hear me, Poppa?”
He still didn’t say anything.
“I am going to suffer, Poppa.”
“I will tell them just a little bit. If this makes you happy, I will tell them just a trim, okay?” He squeezed my hand, this time in a friendly way, and I was relieved.
A hairdresser with long white nails and a fluffy perm dressed me in the wide smock and led me into the shampooing room, where I lay back in the reclining leather seat, allowing my hair to fall into the basin filled with warm water. After the shampooing, I was led to the large swivel chair in front of the big, clean mirrors. I saw hairspray bottles, fancy combs, and brushes and hair dryers. Vidal Sassoon, Aqua Net. Poppa talked to the woman in Spanish.
“How much did you tell her, Poppa?”
“I told her to get rid of the split ends. Do not move while she does this. You might get cut. It might help to close your eyes. Sometimes there is a slip. I do not want you to move suddenly and get blinded.”
I didn’t close my eyes. But when the little hairs from the bangs began to fall into them, Poppa simply covered my eyes with his hand.
I felt the whisker tickle of the short brisk hairs on my cheeks. I felt her turn my head to the left and then to the right and hold my chin still. I felt the tips of her long nails and soft fingers. I felt the wide black smock, its stiff fabric, the way its cuff encircled my throat too tightly.
“Sit still! Do you want her to cut you? You are doing well. Sit still.”
“Okay, all done.”
The first thing I saw were my bangs. Then I noticed that the hair came only to my ears. I screamed.
“Shh. Stop. Behave yourself.” He put his hand on my mouth and my teeth touched his fingers. “You look good. I am proud. You can wear this kind of haircut. It is called a pixie cut. This is the trend. You have a model’s face. You can get away with this. Many Hollywood girls have these cuts. The runways of Paris are filled with short-haired girls.”
“You lied to me,” I said, as the hairdresser put the hand mirror in back of my head so I could see, whisking the hair up with her hand, and forcing a too-bright smile.
“Come, let’s get ice cream now. Perhaps we can take a walk to Woolworth’s; you can pick out a nice toy, some coloring books.”
“You lied to me! You told her to take off more than you said!”
“You are embarrassing me. We will discuss this when we are alone. Let’s go.”
Outside, the summer heat came blasting against my neck. My back still itched from where hair had fallen into my shirt. “I look like a boy! Look at me; look how I look!”
“This is all the fault of that stupid woman. I told her to cut only a little. These people like to do things their own way. I gave her a bad tip for that.”
“You gave her three dollars!”
“Normally, I tip five. This is why I like to get my hair cut by an experienced barber, personally. These young girls never listen.”
“You talked in Spanish so I couldn’t hear! I’m not stupid!” I was screaming. “You want them to make fun of me! You want me ugly like a boy! You want to ruin my life! I hate you! I hate you!”
“You hate me. Fine. This is inevitable. Perhaps you should cut down on going to that house. It is inevitable that you would rebel under the influence of savages!”
“No! You better not! You better not!”
“You hate me. This is the way it turns out. You hate me; well, okay, you know what, if you are going to hate me, I am going to hate you as well! I can hate, too! Let’s go!”
“I don’t care if you hate me! I don’t care what you think!”
“You are an animal. You are a wild beast. You are not even human. No wonder they mock you! Let’s go. It is not your hair; it is you! I feared that being raised by that sick woman, you would turn out bad, and I was right. You are a bad seed. Let’s go. You take my hand!”
“No!”
“You take my hand right now!”
When Peter first saw my haircut, his eyes welled with tears and I could see he was saddened by my new appearance.
Later, when my mother was out shopping at Pathmark and Karen played on the living room floor with some Tinker Toys Peter had gotten for her from a flea market, he said, “I can’t believe your father did this! This is child abuse!”
Karen looked up. “My hair is still long,” she said.
Peter ignored her. “He has no right to cut your hair short! He doesn’t own you! Nobody has the right to control your body!”
K
aren started first grade and I began third. I found that the cursive-writing practice books that bored everyone else were my heart’s delight, and I even earned a penmanship pin that I would wear proudly. That October, with Peter’s encouragement, I composed my first handwritten story on lined notebook paper. “The cat and the dog are the best of friends. They live together in a big house, with lots of furniture. Then one day the dog makes a big mess and wrecks the whole place. He scratches and bites everything up. But that night, Kitty sweeps and sweeps and dusts and mops. Until all the dirty dirt is washed away and they are happy again. The End.”
I continued to write, but now for an audience. Carefully, Peter bound those loose-leaf papers in an album marked
Margaux’s Stories
and kept them in the black trunk with the broken latch along with the two thick photo albums called
Margaux: Images
; and yet another album, entitled
Margaux’s Art
, which was filled with my drawings. I wasn’t a very good visual artist, but Peter seemed to think everything I drew was a masterpiece. There was this one drawing I had made him for Father’s Day, of a tiger and an eagle (Peter’s favorite animal) inside a large heart; underneath the heart were their children: tiger cubs with wings. One Friday, Peter took this drawing out of the album, put it in a dark gold frame, and hung it on the wall of his room, where it would remain for the next fourteen years.
Recently, I had begun having trouble sleeping at night. When I woke early, I took advantage of the time: descending the stairs quietly, turning on the soft kitchen stove light and working for hours on a paper ladybug play set. Since Poppa had to get up so early now for work, he wasn’t creeping around the house anymore at odd hours, but one night on his way to the bathroom, he stopped in the middle of the kitchen and glared at me; I looked back at him. I expected him to yell, but for some reason, he didn’t; he just stared at me like he wished I were dead, then darted back up the stairs.
In the backyard, Peter and I would sometimes lie in a white hammock under the giant ailanthus tree. Its trunk was so thick that it could have fit me, Mommy, and Karen inside it. I had never seen such a thick tree. Porridge and Peaches would be nestled inside their wooden hutch, their noses twitching against the chicken wire, after we had fed them baby carrots and brown rabbit pellets. On the opposite side of the yard, Inès had planted sunflowers; Peter said that she liked them best. Peter’s favorite flower was the rose; the large white ones were called bourbon roses, and the smaller ones at the front of the house were ballerina roses. He also grew pink blessings; he said pink was his favorite color, and that maybe they would bring what their names promised.
I’d teased him about this, saying pink was a girl’s color, but he didn’t seem to mind; he said no one teased girls for liking blue, so why should he be ashamed for liking pink?
Whenever we were in the backyard, Karen would sometimes jump into the hammock with us and we would swing back and forth until we thought the thing would break. Every once in a while, we’d get rowdy, tickling or trying to push each other out. But most of the time, it was just Peter and I rocking back and forth, breathing in the flowers and the cool black dirt. Paws would dig a hole and lie beside us. I asked Peter why Paws dug a hole before he lay down, and Peter said it was because the dirt beneath the top layer of soil was cooler.
Ever since my haircut, I had barely even talked to Poppa, and often, when he wasn’t looking, I would spit the food he cooked into paper napkins and then dispose of it later. Poppa didn’t seem at all sorry about what he had done; his reaction to my ignoring him was to ignore me right back and to occasionally yell about me in the third person, calling me a beast and a demon child. If he’d known I was going to grow up just to turn on him, he wouldn’t have wasted his time and money and life on me. One time when he was yelling at the dinner table, I got so angry that I slammed my plate down and the chicken and yellow rice and green olives scattered across the table. He grabbed me by the arm and my mother screamed, “Don’t hurt her, get away from her!” He let go of my arm and struck her across the chest, nearly knocking her down. Then he looked at me backing away from him, and said, “You coward, go run away from me, coward!” He raised his fist and came at me. I backed up until the wall touched my back, and he started laughing. “You think I am going to hit you? I am not going to touch you. You are a coward. I am not going to hit you! Go, hide against the wall, cry like a baby!” Then he went upstairs to get dressed for the bar.
I didn’t care about him anymore. I would go on ignoring him. I didn’t even care if he saw me up at three, four in the morning: cutting, gluing, punching holes with a ballpoint pen. I didn’t care if he gave me his mean look from the stairs at 3:00 a.m.; I could look mean too, and whenever I would give him a dirty look, he’d just quietly go back upstairs.
It took me two weeks to draw all the ladybugs, color them in, and then make paper clothes for them—jackets, pants, dresses, and sweaters. I’d punched out little holes for the arms and legs, and colored in fine details, like the buttons of a sweater or the polka dots on a dress. The ladybugs were all named; they were all part of my story. There was only one girl ladybug; her name was Mime, and I found it difficult to make her hair; I had to cut a small piece of paper into long straight pieces, and glue it on her head. I also included little paper carriages for babies, tiny paper roller skates with swirled specks of thread purloined from my mother’s sewing kit to decorate the wheels, and a TV set made out of a Sun-Maid raisin box.
Then I presented the whole cast of ladybugs to Peter, who said, “Wow.”
On the kitchen table, after spreading everything out, I started to show him how to dress the ladybugs carefully, without ripping them. “This is so nice. But, sweetheart, wouldn’t you rather leave this at home and play with it when you’re alone? It’s too nice to waste on me. I’m an adult; I can’t really enjoy it.”
“You don’t want them?”
“No, it’s not that, it’s just that I . . . Well, I thought you would really enjoy playing with them. More than I can at my age.”
“They’re for you! I made them for you!”
“Oh, okay, sweetheart. Of course I want them.”
“If you don’t want them, I’ll throw them out.”
“No, I’ll play with them,” Peter said. “While you’re gone and I’m missing you, I’ll play with them.”
“Are you sure you’ll play?”
“Yes, if you show me exactly how to take care of them and tell me all their names. I’ll play with them with Karen.”
“No! Karen will ruin everything; she won’t be careful!”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right. Karen won’t mean to, but she’ll ruin them.”
Peter stored the ladybug play set inside the big black trunk with the broken latch, where he kept all his other “me” stuff. They might have lasted forever, inside the trunk, and yellowed with age, like the framed tiger-and-eagle picture, if Karen hadn’t gotten into the trunk one night and ripped up all the ladybugs and their accessories. When Peter told me, there were tears in his eyes.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. Karen did it while Inès and I were sleeping.”
“Did you punish her?”
“Yes, I spanked her. I don’t like to spank children, and usually I don’t believe in it, but this was a horrible thing that Karen did. You spent so much time on those ladybugs. So I spanked her, and then made her stay in her room all day. All she did was cry, but I wouldn’t let her out.”
My mother now allowed me and Peter to drive all the way to Hudson Park on the motorcycle. In the woods surrounding a big lake, Peter would make sure no one was looking, and then ask for a fish kiss. A fish kiss was made by puckering your lips like one of those kissing fish at the pet shop. The fish kisses were not as gross as other kinds of kissing, since our lips barely touched. By now, I’d gotten used to most forms of kissing; the only kiss I didn’t like was the Bazooka Joe. The Bazooka Joe was rare: we never did this in public, because it took too long. Peter would buy some Bazooka Joe gum, we’d read the short comic strip, and then I’d take the hard square of gum and chew it into mush. I’d pass the gum to Peter and he would pass it back to me. Our tongues couldn’t help but touch, and to me, it felt like a fish flapping against my mouth. Every time this new kind of kissing happened, I would feel for a second that it was gross; then the emotion would die off as suddenly as it had appeared. Whenever I lost an emotion like this, I couldn’t feel much of anything for the rest of the day, sometimes for the next few days. Lately, Poppa had been saying I was cold and heartless, just like “the bitch in Connecticut,” and I wondered if he might be right.
