Tiger, Tiger (16 page)
She hastily ended the call. “He’s looking in here, in this house?” She shook her head. “This is why you have to be dressed; you’re too old now to be parading around half naked. Your father says and I say. I’m going to give this pervert a piece of my mind!”
My mother ran downstairs and stood on the porch and yelled across the street at the man, “You! You have got some nerve looking in here at my nine-year-old daughter! Do it again and I’ll call the police!”
She slammed the door. “We don’t have to tell your father about this unless it continues. We’ve got two sturdy locks on this door so I’m not worried. I don’t want him taking it out on you, cutting your hair again, or anything like that. He worries enough about you as it is.”
It was true. Poppa, drunk the night before, had taken me aside in the kitchen and asked me if I knew what rape was. I said yes. I had learned the word in school, when some girls had given me a note saying that they had hired a man to rape me. Poppa said that now that I was developing, I was a target. He said to be careful. Under the kitchen’s fluorescent lights, he lifted my chin, looked me in the eyes, and said, “You know something, if a savage ever catches you, and gives you a choice between being raped or him killing you, you should choose death. That way, you still have your honor. You die fighting, like a real woman. You understand? You tell that son of a bitch to cut your throat first. You tell him you would rather be shot! You spit in his face! You call him a bastard and damn him to hell! You hear me? You understand? You never let yourself be ruined!” He was nearly yelling, and I was frightened, so I just told him what he wanted to hear. I couldn’t tell him it was already too late; I was already somehow ruined. All I could do was hold my head underwater in the bathtub for as long as possible, trying to drown myself and in that way keep the family honor that meant so much to Poppa.
In the dark, though, I was not a girl at all and there was nothing wrong with me. At three in the morning, I would tiptoe down the stairs to practice my landings like a true cat. I did them in front of the big TV. Either I’d woken up in the middle of the night or I had never gotten to sleep in the first place. So I practiced. Under my breath, I roared, growled. Then I pounced onto the smooth linoleum again and again. Sometimes I got up on the second step of the staircase and leaped from there, trying as best as I could for a graceful landing on all four of my tiger paws.
W
inter came, and Poppa kept the heat low, so we usually wore our coats in the house. He got stricter about the amount of time we spent in the shower, and he also started picking up the phone and listening when my mother made calls, opening Aunt Bonnie’s letters from Ohio and reading them, and popping into my room at unexpected times. I still slept in the master bedroom at night; after my mother started sleeping in the kitchen extension Poppa had recently built for her, my father chose not to reclaim the master bedroom for himself, seeming content with the small room next door that used to be my room. Unfortunately, we still had the same problems caused by the fact that he needed to go into the master bedroom to get his clothes and I still needed to go into his room to get mine.
I usually watched TV only when Poppa was at work or at the bar. All other times, after I finished my homework, I read, huddled up under the quilt because the room was always freezing. I read a lot of adult romance, fantasy, and horror novels because I was bored by most young adult novels. I couldn’t buy that the narrator of Judy Blume’s
Deenie
was so naïve she didn’t even realize she had a “special place” between her legs until she turned twelve. That year, I read
Watership
Down
twice as well as Stephen King’s
Firestarter
and
Carrie
. One day, I even decided to read my entire pink leather children’s Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Since I slept only a few hours a night, often waking up from nightmares and being unable to fall back asleep, I managed this feat within a few days. Poppa, too, would sometimes be up at these hours, and if he caught me reading under the tiny lamp when I was supposed to be sleeping, he became furious, saying it made him nervous when people were up when they weren’t supposed to be. I knew he wasn’t talking only about me. My mother often couldn’t sleep either, and she’d listen to her radio half the night.
Mommy and I complained to each other that Poppa’s rules weren’t fair, such as the rule that no one but he was allowed to be up at odd hours. What does he think we’re going to do, she once joked to a friend, slit his throat in the middle of the night? No one could use the bathroom in the morning until after he’d left for work, because he needed to get ready.
Poppa also became much more critical of my appearance. When I was younger, he had always said I was the kind of great beauty that had inspired the Spanish poets, but now he complained that my looks were going, in part due to my paleness and thinness, and in part due to my awful complexion. For Christmas, Poppa had bought me subscriptions to
Teen
,
YM
, and
Vogue
because he said looking at the models would teach me about posture, how to care for my hair, how to apply makeup, and most important, how to fight acne. I was approaching the age of ten and my face had really started to break out. Poppa made a big commotion about it, even going so far as to ban chocolate from the house, convinced that the chocolate doughnuts I always ate were the cause of it. Nearly every night, he asked me to stand under the fluorescent kitchen light while he looked at my skin through his jeweler’s loupe. Whatever new evils he happened to find, he insisted on taking care of with a needle that he’d sterilized on the kitchen flame and cotton balls soaked in rubbing alcohol. He often praised me for being brave during these procedures, for standing perfectly still and not uttering a single cry. The strange thing was that the nights when Poppa worked on my skin were our only times of intimacy and, though I would never look forward to the sting of the needle and the stench of rubbing alcohol, I grew not to mind it so much because at least he wasn’t screaming at me or my mother. I liked that he would touch my face with grace and care, and that sometimes, after the ordeal was over, he would touch my nose with the tip of his finger.
One night, I awoke to the sounds of shouting. I crept out of my room, hugging my body for warmth as I navigated the dark hallway to the balusters on the stairs and looked through them. The tiny night-light in the stairwell was on and it cast an unearthly glow over the faces of my parents, who were arguing by the foot of the stairs. Mommy was trying to get past Poppa; he was blocking her. Each time she tried to go past him, he laughed and raised his hand as though he was going to strike her. She was in a long flowered nightgown and he in a white undershirt and boxer shorts.
“Let me go by! You let me go!”
“Who else are you calling? I have a three-hundred-dollar phone bill, tell me who else!” Poppa shouted. “You tell me, goddamn it!
Besides that bitch, who never invited us over for a Christmas dinner, that prostitute, that bitch who sat at the table with her legs spread out once at a dinner, that filthy bitch, she was coming on to me . . .”
“You shut your mouth!” Mommy said. “You’re going to wake up Margaux with that nasty talk!”
Poppa was so drunk that he was slurring his words, which I had never heard him do. “She has probably heard everything already, thanks to you. Thanks to you letting her go to that dirty house, with wild boys and that sicko, that disgusting pervert, that man you loved so much! Are you calling him? It won’t appear on the phone bill, because it is local. But I will find out if you call him! If you call him or she calls him, I will know! I have my ways . . .”
“I think it was a misunderstanding. It was blown out of proportion. Margaux is being punished for nothing.”
“So you call him, then? You’ve heard his side of it? Do you know nothing about how men think? Do you know nothing about what thoughts men think?” He was speaking in a low, sneering way. “Did your father teach you nothing? Did he never take you aside and tell you things that girls must know about the world? Your father let you and your sisters run wild in the woods all day by the house. Your mother spent all day on a sofa, practicing her French verbs. This is how you grew up. This is how. Your father did not care for you. You speak of the man as a god, but did he tell you and your sisters anything? Any practical advice? Your father was a—”
“Stop talking about my father!” Mommy put her hands in her ears. “I won’t listen to that talk! I won’t listen to your nasty talk! You have a dirty mind and you are a sick man! You’re the one running up the phone bill, with all your calls to Cuba, your girlfriend! I
do
wish I had been told something! I wish my parents had taken me aside! My parents were innocent. Unlike you! My father should have warned me about men like you, who run around with a million girlfriends. You took my whole inheritance from me, fifty thousand from my poor, dead father, who you have some nerve to bad-mouth now!”
“I used that for the down payment on this house! If not for me, you would be in an institution—the state would have your father’s money. In a way, I did that man a favor by taking you on!”
“Look, I know you married me for my money; I overheard you once.You stole my whole life with your lies! Now look at me! Look at me!”
“Yes, look in the mirror!” Poppa bellowed with laughter. “Look in the mirror and you will see what I have to look at every day! A fat cow that no one wants to see! No wonder I have my girlfriends! I will not deny it! I have my girlfriends! So what are you going to do about it! Tell me your plan . . .” My mother was sobbing. “Tell me how the world is so perfect. Tell me how that man just wanted a playmate, a little nymph for his garden. I am not a fool. People may treat me like one, people may act as though I don’t matter, as though I am just here to pay bills and cook and clean and sweat like a field-worker! Tell me if they were ever alone together. Tell me if they were ever alone.”
“They were never alone!” Mommy shouted. “And if they had been, I am sure his intentions would have been better than yours with all your women! He’s not a drunk like you. He loves his girlfriend. He’s faithful. He has a good heart. He had a good heart and that’s why you can’t stand him! Because you are rotten!”
“You had better be careful what you say about me. You had better be careful.”
“It’s
you
who’d better be careful, you bastard.” I’d never before seen a look on her face like the expression she made that day. “Margaux, come down the stairs! I want you to know what your father is really like! About how many brothers and sisters you may have that you don’t even know about! Call the police! Right now! Call nine-one-one!”
I panicked and went to the head of the stairs. Poppa looked up and saw me standing there. He looked at me one last time, raised his hand into a claw, and began to dig into my mother’s forehead with his nails. I started running down the stairs, screaming, “Don’t do it! Don’t hurt her, Poppa!” I slipped halfway down and collapsed into them. My mother was screaming. And when my father took his hand away, his fingers were covered in blood.
She screamed at Poppa: “You fight like a woman! With your nails! Your nails!”
Poppa looked dazed. After a minute or so, he went over to the phone jack and removed the plug from the wall. “I want you to calm down, both of you,” he said. “I have had a little too much to drink tonight. I have had a little too much and words have been said. Words have no meaning at a time like this. I am under stress at work, I may get laid off, I am hanging on by a thread, and this is a bad time. Your mother has been getting sick for a while. I want you to both calm down and collect yourselves. If the police come, you,” he said, pointing to my mother, “will be institutionalized, and you,” he said, pointing at me, “will be in a home. Everybody in this world fights. There are wars every day, so do not look at me as though I am a bad man! Do not look at me as though you cannot stand me! I have cared for you, both of you! If not for me, you would both be out on the street!”
“Do you ever miss him?” I asked Mommy.
It was a Saturday night and Poppa was at the bar. Mommy and I were playing checkers at the oak kitchen table. She had a large gauze bandage on her forehead where Poppa had scratched her. Poppa had told us both to say that Mommy was trying to rescue our escaped parakeet from the jaws of a stray cat. Even though the story was ridiculous, no one questioned it—not the nuns at my school when Mommy dropped me off, not the owner of La Popular bodega, not acquaintances of Mommy who worked at J&J, Jelly Bean, Carvel, or Sugarman’s drugstore not even the postman, who always chatted with Mommy.
“Do. You. Ev-er. Miss. Him,” I asked again.
“Oh?” She blinked and tugged at the bandage. “This thing is itchy; it’s driving me nuts. Miss who?”
“You know. Peter. Double jump.” I took two of her red checkers.
“Well, I didn’t see that coming.”
“I tricked you.”
Mommy sighed and said, “I miss going there, to Peter’s. I miss the yard; it was such a nice yard. The little girl, Karen, she was a nice girl. I miss Paws the retriever, what was he, part retriever and part . . . ?” “Collie. King me.”
“Who taught you to play like that?”
“Peter did. He taught me chess, too.”
“He taught you chess? When: sometime I wasn’t watching?”
“Yeah, sometime you weren’t watching.”
Mommy was getting sick again. We knew it. She knew it.
“I don’t want to go to that hospital,” she said. “I won’t go there.”
They stood in the living room in front of the giant TV; Poppa was trying to coax her into her coat.
“I have already called the cab. He will be here any minute. Cassandra,” he said, and I was shocked to hear him say her name, “listen. We have been under pressure, all of us, including the child. Sometimes I feel like someone has cursed us recently, has wished trouble upon our house. Right now, I feel like the world is against me. My brain lately feels like a pressure cooker . . . Do you get me? There are certain moments in my life when I have felt like I am not equipped to deal with pressure; right now is one of those moments. I feel like any minute, I will explode. Do you understand me? I need to clear my head. You, too, need to clear your head. This is the right thing.”