Tiger, Tiger (9 page)
Peter paused; I knew his question didn’t require an answer. He lit a cigarette—which I thought was a little strange, since he rarely smoked in the basement—took a few puffs on it, and then ground it into one of the wooden ceiling beams. He began to pace.
“They tell you it’s dirty; then they make you undress in front of them. When I was in a boys’ school in upstate New York, the nuns used to whip us in the showers. In the showers, they would line us up and beat us! Yeah, like they didn’t get some kind of a thrill out of looking at our naked bodies. You know why those nuns were so cruel? Sexual repression. Sexual repression and rage. This is what comes from all the repression in society. Do you know what I believe? I’ve even read literature on this. I believe that if children were to grow up with sexuality, as though it was normal and natural, which it is . . . If they were allowed to get joy and pleasure out of their God-given parts, this world would be a much better place.”
“I agree,” I said. I couldn’t follow all the big words he said, but I got the gist. Like me, he hated rules and couldn’t stand how adults were always trying to leave kids out of everything important. Yet something about this talk also made me uneasy.
Peter went on, “Mothers in certain parts of Africa massage their infants’ genitalia before bedtime to help them sleep. There are tribes in the world that marry girls off at eight or nine. In certain tribes, you would be of marriageable age.” He paused. “I love you. I want you to feel joy and I want you to be able to give me joy. There’s nothing wrong with that. Can I show you? What I showed you before? My penis? You didn’t really look at it. I think you were afraid. But I want you to know that our sexual organs are not ugly, they’re not dirty, and they’re not bad. They’re beautiful and you don’t have to be ashamed. So can I show you?”
I climbed into the cart with Fiver and said, “Look, Peter! I’m a rabbit!”
I started to drink from the water bottle, tasting the sweet metal and the sweet, warm water. I picked up the sad, curled pod, offered it again to Fiver, and when again he refused it, I ate it myself. It was so good, so crisp and green. I liked the feeling that the Pathmark shopping cart gave me, with its moist, strong-smelling newspaper beneath my hands and knees, its rectangular shape, the way the metal was crisscrossed, and the fact that it was on wheels. Peter came and picked me up gently, placed me on my feet; but I instantly sank again, to my hands and knees, to crawl on the ground like a baby, to feel the cold, hard floor beneath my hands.
“I’m a baby now, not a rabbit. No, wait, I’m a baby rabbit! Chase me!”
“Margaux,” he said, looking disappointed. “You are eight years old and you know better.” I hated it when adults told me I should know better, or that I already knew better. Peter had never told me that before, and I couldn’t help but worry again that he was changing.
“Okay! Okay!”
He helped me up. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound like your father.”
“Well, you are starting to sound like him.”
“I’m sorry. That’s the last thing I want. Anyway, it’s true you’re getting older. Not that you should stop playing childish games; I mean, you are a child, and I hope we can play children’s games forever. But we can also do more mature things with each other, things that will give us both great pleasure. You made a promise earlier: you said you would do anything, and I would like you to try to do something very special and nice. Something that people in love, like we are, do together.”
I stood there, as still as possible, and watched him take down his pants. He wasn’t wearing any underwear. This time, I looked right at his penis, just to please him. The whole contraption looked like a bunless hot dog with two partly deflated balloons attached. The hair around his penis and testicles seemed stiff, like one of those steel combs used to groom dogs. I preferred my private area to his; it didn’t have hair and looked like a woman’s compact, the kind with the rouge and a little silver mirror. But I didn’t want to tell him that; I was afraid he might get offended, so when he asked what I thought of it, I said, “It’s nice. It kind of reminds me of a . . .” I tried to think of a metaphor he would like. “Of an ice cream cone. Since you’ve got freckles, it’d be the sprinkled kind, I guess.”
“An ice cream cone with sprinkles. I’ve never been told that. Would you like to try to lick it, like you would an ice cream?”
“I’d rather have real ice cream, Peter.”
“We can get one later. We can get anything you want. But right now, you can pretend this is ice cream.”
I shook my head. “The problem, Peter, is that that thing . . .”
“My penis.”
“Okay, penis.”
“Don’t be afraid to use the correct word.”
“Okay, your penis, isn’t that where you pee from?”
“Yes. Well, there’s a little hole, see, and that’s where I pee.”
“I’m going to be licking pee. That’s really gross.”
“Well, why don’t you just kiss it, then? Just kiss it right on the tip.
It’ll feel really good.”
“No, I don’t want to.”
“Why?”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
I knew that what I was going to say next would make Peter angry, but I was mad now myself. “It’s disgusting, Peter! Just stop it! Just stop telling me what to do!”
“You made a promise. You promised me anything. Now you’re going back on your word.”
“This is unfair!”
“How so?”
“It just is!”
“How is it unfair? You made a promise and I’m asking you to keep your promise, and we swore we’d never lie to each other.”
“I didn’t know what you were going to ask for. You didn’t tell me!”
“Well, then you shouldn’t have said ‘anything.’ ‘Anything’ means anything.”
“I can’t do it!” I was on the verge of tears. “I can’t! You’re going to make me throw up if I do it. If you make me kiss pee, Peter, I am going to throw up!”
“There’s no pee! It’s clean. Society has brainwashed you with its rules.”
“I can’t stand rules!”
“No, you’re like everybody else,” he said, pulling up his pants, backing away as he spoke. “Don’t worry, I won’t make you do anything. The bad man isn’t going to hurt you! I’m not going to force you to do anything! I’m not like that! What kind of person do you think I am?”
He opened the basement door and started to stride out.
“No, wait, Peter, wait!” I grabbed on to his T-shirt. “Let go of me!”
“I can try, maybe, now that I’m used to the idea, maybe I can try.”
“Let go! Don’t talk about it anymore!”
“But I’m not like them, Peter. I’m my own person.”
He snorted.
“I really am, Peter! I am!”
He turned to me, there in front of the house, in the savage sunshine, and whispered in a choked-up way, “You think my body is disgusting. You don’t like me because I’m an old man. You think I’m ugly.”
Fiver died two weeks later. The day after, I was standing in line in the big blue playroom where we lined up before the first bell at school, in my blue jumper, ankle socks, and Buster Brown shoes. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I felt my knees sinking so I straightened my legs, feeling my blood prickling and tingles shooting through my feet. To keep busy, I played with the hood string of my light spring jacket, which my mother had insisted I wear though the late-May weather was too warm. I wound the string around my finger, let it go, watched it snap back at me, then repeated the process. When one leg started to hurt, I pushed everything over to the other side. Sister Mary was nearby in her white habit; I hadn’t realized I’d been sobbing until she put her arms around me.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart? What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t stop crying enough to speak, and besides, I liked the sound of her saying “What’s wrong?” I wanted her to keep saying it, and to hold my sadness close. She pulled my hand along gently, and I knew where we were going. Within my sorrow sparked a small delight, for I knew I would not have to go to class.
Inside the white room in her office, Sister Mary kept asking me what was wrong, but my mind drew a strange blank. I couldn’t even remember that Fiver had died until she asked me to lie down on the bed and began to stroke my face.
“Do you feel dizzy?”
“Yes.”
“Sick to your stomach?”
“Everything. I feel like everything is wrong.”
“Are you having a problem? Or are you just sick?”
“My rabbit died yesterday.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Just keep in mind that the rabbit is in heaven. He’s happier now than when he was alive. Because heaven is a beautiful place. With lovely gardens and streams and the most colorful birds you can imagine.”
“What about things to eat?”
“Carrots and lettuce and grass and whatever rabbits eat; it’s all there.” She took my hand.
“I think I’m dying, too.”
She held my hand tighter. “Don’t say such things. It’s not true.
You’re just grieving. We all grieve and then we get better.”
“I drank from the same water bottle as he did, Sister. I think it’s catching. I also ate something bad. It was something that wasn’t mine; that I didn’t pay for. We were at the store, my mother and I, the fruit market . . . and, and I stole a green bean. I ate it when no one was looking. That’s why I’m sick today.”
“Well, I’m glad you told me that. I’m going to allow you to see Father John today and confess your sin. After confessing, you’re going to feel much better. That’s why we have confession, to wash the bad things off our souls so we can one day return to God. Stealing is a venial sin. I’m sure he won’t give you that many Our Fathers, just a few. And maybe some Hail Marys as well. And you’ll be as good as if it never happened.”
“Sister, you don’t think God would punish me by killing my rabbit? You don’t think it’s a penance?”
She stroked my hair. “No. This is your guilt speaking. I’m going to tell you a little secret. When I was a small girl around your age, I stole something from a five-and-dime store. I didn’t confess right away, and I felt guilty just like you. My stomach hurt and I had a lot of headaches. You see, sometimes we don’t always do the right thing because we are, by nature, sinners. We can’t help that we’re not perfect.”
“I know I’m not perfect, Sister, but I feel like I’m the worst girl in the world.”
“No, dear, it’s not true. No. No, Margaux, no.”
A
fter I returned from a three-week trip to Puerto Rico with Poppa that June (Mommy had to go the hospital, so she missed it), I discovered my days as the only little girl in Peter’s household were over. Karen came to be my sister with her faded pink dress and her naked baby doll with its dirty face. She came with chipped front teeth and dirty fingernails. She came with a red Popsicle beard and a hippy sashay that I would never be able to imitate. She came with one white ankle sock pulled up and one crunched around her ankle and her hair in unraveling pigtails. We stood facing each other, each feeling superior to, and wary of, the other, in Peter’s backyard by the cement birdbath. Karen carried a rusty green watering can: it was the same one I always used to water the tomato plants.
“Go on, give each other a hug,” Peter said. “That’s the best way to get to know each other. I can’t think of a nicer way.”
We did embrace, stiffly, and that was when Peter said, “Just like sisters. You two are going to get along fine.”
I couldn’t help but be shocked by the way Karen behaved. She spat on the ground. She cursed, using words that I had never even heard of, though I was eight and she was only six. Peter said that Karen had had a rough time and I should be patient with her—Karen’s mother was a drug addict—and this was her fourth foster home. He called it synchronicity that Karen had arrived just when he was beginning to become depressed about me leaving for Puerto Rico. “I had no idea when you were coming home,” he told me when we were alone together. “I wasn’t even sure if we would ever see each other again. Karen really helped keep my mind off of it.” When he saw the look on my face, he quickly said, “But of course no one can replace you, sweetheart.”
I didn’t understand Peter’s need for Karen, but I knew that he would force me to love her. I had already disappointed Peter once, and I wasn’t going to chance falling out of his favor again. Maybe Karen, despite her wild ways, or perhaps because of them, could be a lovable sort of girl. Peter seemed to adore Karen, and my mother took an immediate liking to her, often calling her a “sweet girl” regardless of her being from “a bad home.” My mother was relieved to be out of the hospital; also, she was pleased when Poppa finally found another job as a jeweler, and began to work overtime to make up for the financial blows we’d suffered while he was unemployed. I could tell she was glad to be back in the routine of going to Peter’s every Monday and Friday; she complained that the hospital had been boring, and that while she was there her medication was altered, which caused her to get severely depressed and even paranoid for a while. This kind of thing happened nearly every time she went. There were always new drugs coming out, and hospitals received free trial samples, which psychiatrists automatically considered the latest miracle breakthroughs. When the new drugs inevitably didn’t work, my mother would end up back on Zoloft and Thorazine. Peter was outraged. “These people use you like a guinea pig,” he said, “like you don’t have any rights.” My mother shrugged at that and said that the system was the system.
I could tell my mother thought Karen was the best thing in the world for me. “The teachers have mentioned how withdrawn Margaux’s become at school lately,” Mommy remarked soon after meeting Karen. “Maybe playing with another little girl will get her out of her shell.”
Inès, too, loved Karen, as she had never loved me. She even took a week off work in July, and I remember seeing them together in the yard, bowed over the flower patch, under the white birdbath, showing Karen how to dig with the small metal shovel and tuck a petunia in like an infant. Sometimes she would end up dislodging earthworms or even a white grub, which caused me to scream though I’d never been afraid of insects before. Now I didn’t much like gardening. Karen, however, wasn’t afraid of earthworms or the occasional grub; she simply covered them back up with soil.
