Tiger, Tiger (15 page)
He turned off the car and folded his hands on his lap.
“Well, you can dislike him if you want,” Mommy said. “Fine. Don’t invite him out again.”
“I never will. Do you want to talk about history? The worst men in history were those who insisted upon sobriety. Some of the greatest leaders were fond of drinking—Churchill, Roosevelt—while the worst tyrants through the ages abstained. Hitler, for instance . . .”
“Not this again.”
“Hitler,” he spoke louder. “Hitler did not drink. He lived very
cleanly
. Check your history book.”
“I can’t believe you’re comparing Peter to Hitler.”
“Again, you miss the point.” He laughed. “I do not trust that man. I do not. You watch your daughter when you go over there. He and his family are bad influences. If it were up to me, I would not permit you to go there with her anymore. That simple. But
you do
what
you
want.
I
wash my hands of this matter. All I will say is I wash my hands.”
G
ood grief” was what Peter said when something surprised him. He didn’t sigh; instead, he’d say the word “sigh.” He painted the walls of the kitchen lavender. He started building me a wooden dollhouse. There was an afternoon (it must have been in the summer) when Peter asked Karen and me to strip to just our panties. After we did, he took several snapshots of us hugging and posing with our arms draped across each other’s shoulders. Mommy must have gone to the Terrace Market for a Creamsicle or Dixie Cup or to Pathmark for a carton of King 100s. Or was Mommy actually there on the lawn chair while Peter, with all his talk of naturalness and nudist colonies and the way God made us, talked her into letting him take those pictures? Mommy might have been unsure at first, but this was
Peter
—I ran around the house in my underwear in front of Poppa all the time, and Peter might as well have been my dad. I couldn’t remember if he tried to get us to take the underwear off. Hard as I still try, I can’t remember much of anything concerning my time spent with Peter for the seven or so months following the dinner at Benihana.
The summer of 1988 I was only nine but already little breasts had started to form on my chest. I got pubic hair and was so repulsed by it that I took my father’s razor and shaved with VO5 henna shampoo. I checked my face in the mirror compulsively, not to be vain, but because I had developed a fear that one day I would look and see nothing there at all.
I knew it was all my mother’s fault.
We were in our bedroom a couple of weeks after I had been told I couldn’t see Peter anymore and I was going ballistic yet again, tearing the sheet off the bed, throwing the pillows on the floor, knocking my stuffed animals off the mahogany bureau. Every time I asked her why I couldn’t see Peter, she told me a lie about how she had once seen him slap Karen.
“No, that’s not true! I heard you and Poppa talking! I heard it! You said it was over a kiss! It was over a kiss! Don’t lie to me!” I came to her, my fist raised, and she backed up. “Tell me the truth!”
“Peter kissed you at the pool.” Mommy started to cry. “He kissed you on the mouth.”
“So? So what?”
“Peter kissed you! On the mouth!”
“So, I’m asking! So! So! So! So!”
“And some of the lifeguards saw . . .”
“What?” I felt ashamed that everyone now knew about my and Peter’s secret world.
“It was right out there, in public, they saw it. One of the lifeguards asked me about it. Who Peter was. He said, ‘Is he her father?’ I said no, he’s not related to us by blood. He was looking at me like I did something wrong. Like I wasn’t a good mother. I tried to explain that Peter was a good friend of the family. He shook his head and said that this was serious. He said that he didn’t want to confront Peter because, technically, he didn’t do anything illegal. He said he would keep an eye on him, though. He said it was up to
me
to do something about what had already happened. When he said that, I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew I had to do
something
.”
“You didn’t have to tell Poppa!”
“I had to,” Mommy said, not looking at me. “He’s your father. It would have gotten around anyway. Someone in the bar probably would have told him. Then he would have really been angry. Dr. Gurney said that what Peter did, kissing a little girl on the mouth, was outrageous. He said that Peter was a sick man. That your father and I should call the police. But your father said that wasn’t necessary. So Peter got lucky.”
“Poppa kissed me on the lips once! He came home from work and said hi and kissed me on the lips!”
“That’s different! He’s your father!”
“Peter’s more of a father than him! Why are you doing this to me, why? Why are you punishing me? You’re trying to kill me! You want to see me die!”
She shielded her eyes with her palm and spoke in a trembling way. “The psychiatrist said. Your father said. I have to listen to them. I have to do what’s right. A man should not be kissing a little girl on the mouth at a public pool. Your father said he was worried that we would be the talk of the town and that people would look at him like he was at fault when all along he’d known Peter was a bad man, ever since that trip to Benihana. Please, let’s stop with this! Let’s just forget about him; we won’t talk about him or what happened ever again. Let’s never say that man’s name again!”
“You call him
that man
, just like Poppa! You call him
that man
!”
“Don’t speak to me anymore about this. I can’t talk about this or I’ll get sick. I don’t want to go back to that hospital! Please, we can’t talk about this anymore! It’s done with, that’s all that matters!”
The entire pantry was filled with boxes of cereal, packages of toilet paper and paper towel rolls, and canned vegetables. There was also a lot of junk food. I rarely ate dinner, and no amount of threatening or cajoling made any difference. Poppa started to make my favorite dishes more often: spaghetti with clam sauce, fried chicken, empanadas with chickpeas. These I would eat, only to throw it all up later. I didn’t force myself to throw up; it just happened. I literally couldn’t keep anything down except the cereal and junk food I ate throughout the day. At school, I ate only once a week, when the cafeteria featured my favorite food: chicken nuggets. During the rest of the week, I would buy packages of chocolate or powdered doughnuts. Then I would have to take my tray to a lone table with kids snickering at me. They thought I was a complete weirdo because I would constantly space out: during bake sales, recess, standing in line, in the library, at practices for Christmas shows. I couldn’t follow directions at those practices and, therefore, had to be placed in the very last row of the stage, where the crowd wouldn’t notice me. I couldn’t help zoning out. I had done it for the last year or so, but had managed to keep the problem hidden before because I was able to snap back into reality whenever I needed to.
Now I just couldn’t listen whenever people talked to me, even if it was a teacher or the principal. Kids would poke me and call me “moron” and “retard.” There would be times when I would be in the bathroom stall on the toilet seat or washing my hands in front of the mirror, and I would be jolted back to where I was, unsure of how long I’d been gone. Our teacher, Sister Lenore, would occasionally send a girl in to bring me back to class. Every night, I’d fall to my knees and pray to be better, to be a normal girl who could concentrate and pass math and geography tests without cheating, who would have friends to sit with at lunch. Who would not be pushed to my knees in line when no one was looking. Who would not be chased down in the recess yard, wrestled to the ground, and hit by three boys and the tomboy who hung out with them. Who would not be chanted at, trapped inside a ring of my classmates: “Circle, circle, dot, dot, now I’ve got my Margaux shot.”
I knew that I didn’t deserve to be alive. That was why they hated me. It would never get better. I couldn’t control where my mind went; I couldn’t help that sometimes my surroundings disappeared and reappeared. God wasn’t helping. Jesus didn’t care.
It had been about seven or eight months since we had stopped seeing Peter and I had lost so much weight that my parents began to worry. When my mother brought me to the pediatrician, she said I had lost fifteen pounds but not to fear; it was probably a sudden growth spurt. My poor eating habits were just a phase. The bad test scores at school were likely due to my eyesight; she said I squinted a lot and probably needed glasses. The pediatrician pointed out that I was going through puberty rather early, and that this transition into womanhood was always stressful. She was used to my mother making a commotion out of my every illness, injury, or oddity. “Another thing,” my mother said at the end, when the pediatrician was trying to rush her out. “She does this jumping thing. She never used to do that.” While walking with my mother or during school lines, I would punctuate my regular tread with a sudden, spasmodic hop, or “skip,” as Peter would have called it. It happened against my will, like a hiccup. It was more proof to me that there was something wrong with my brain. The pediatrician didn’t see it as a problem, though. She told my mother to keep an eye on it and then went on to the next patient.
I’d been feeding the Thirty-second Street pigeons for a few months now with boxes of stale cereal from my mother’s chronic overbuying: Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms, Cheerios. They’d grown to trust me. One by one, they landed on me. They landed on my shoulders, my legs; one even sat on my head. I’d feel their rubber feet graze against my scabbed-up knees, feel their beaks against the scratches on my arms, feel their throats in my hair as they sat upon my shoulders. They loved me. My pigeons loved me. They ate out of my palms and off my legs.
I wrote stories about the birds and decided I would put them all in a book entitled
The Trials and Tribulations of Pigeons
—an impressive title, I thought. Someday I was sure I’d publish the book.
Occasionally, though, I couldn’t help but see the birds as one great gray machine. If one was frightened, they all flew away. If one decided to land, pretty soon they all came, pecking even when there was no food.
One gray day in November, I had an uneasy thought. The pigeons, for all their seeming love and affection for me, would not care if I were dead. There would be others coming with food. The more I followed this thought, the more disconnected I felt. I started to toss the cereal in heaps, not feeling anything toward my birds. All they did was the same thing over and over again. Suddenly, my hands jerked forward and I grabbed the closest bird. The pigeons took off all at once; all those beating wings together made a blast. The bird in my hand flapped his wings like crazy to get away.
“Let go of that thing! Let go of that filthy thing immediately!” my mother said.
I didn’t let go.
“Margaux, you’ll catch a disease! Let go of that filthy, disgusting bird right now! Let go or I will tell your father!”
I didn’t let go, even though she kept screaming at me. The worst of it was hearing my name, Margaux. More than anything she could say to me, I hated the sound of my name on her lips.
Finally, I realized what I was doing and how afraid the bird was. I released my fingers, and I saw in the air a single slice of gray that kept growing smaller and smaller.
On our living room walls, Poppa had reproductions of Picasso’s
Petite
Fleurs
and Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
. His Matisse reproductions especially scared me: my father had told me
La Danseuse Créole
and
Nu Bleu I
were supposed to be women but I thought of the former as a Martian and the latter as simply slabs of blue paint tossed together haphazardly. Eventually, I could see the female image in the green-headed, feathered being in
La Danseuse Créole
, but I spent quite a few years squinting at
Nu Bleu
I
, hoping to glimpse the lovely woman that my father and Matisse had seen so effortlessly. Finally, that year, I kept looking at it closely, and after a while, I did see the upraised left thigh and the right thigh lying flat, like a smashed tube of lipstick, as well as her emaciated torso, her feet detached from her body, and her hand placed at the back of her head in a pose of despair. After I first saw her, I desperately wanted to go back to seeing random blue shapes but found that I couldn’t. On the center wall, to the right of that picture, was a huge oil painting of a nude woman. She was spread out on a maroon Renaissance-style bed and held a single white wheel-shaped flower. Her breasts were visible but her leg was arched to cover her vagina. I wanted to see her vagina to check if, like mine, it had hair growing around it. One of the things Peter had said about my vagina was that it was so beautiful and
hairless
. I couldn’t stop worrying about this hair and shaving it all off with my father’s razor.
Often, I’d sit on the plastic-covered couch, dressed only in an undershirt and panties, looking at the houses across the street. One day, I noticed a man on the front porch of one of those houses, staring at me. So I started to do things I thought would entertain him. I’d stretch one leg high in the air or toss my short brown hair (now grown into a chin-length bob). Or I’d pull up my shirt a little and gaze at my belly button.
I did this every time I saw the man watching. Mommy was always upstairs, calling friends or 1-800 hotlines.
I felt like the nude woman in Poppa’s painting: beautiful, so dark-eyed and haunting. I no longer felt ashamed. My too skinny body felt like a runway model’s supple form. It was the only time I felt like I was worth anything, like someone could see me as something other than a freak.
One day, I waved to him. He waved back, and I didn’t know why, but his boldness made me furious. I hadn’t wanted him to wave back or react in any way.
I ran upstairs and barged into the bedroom Mommy and I shared. She was on the phone. I heard my name and figured she was again trying to get advice concerning me.
“Mommy, there’s a man across the street; he’s looking at me in my panties!”
