Tiger, Tiger (29 page)
Only occasionally would he massage me with his hand while Nina entertained fantasies about gay men having sex. (We had finally watched a gay porno; sometimes Peter had to look away, but he didn’t resort to fast-forwarding as he always did with lesbian scenes, saying two women together was boring.) Or boys my own age with hands tied with twine and dog collars around their necks who were sometimes forced by the infamous Mr. Nasty to eat Nina out.
Peter couldn’t stand the sight of pubic hair on me. Once, I turned the tables on him. I told him that if he indeed loved me, he would shave his balls, which he did, carefully, with an electric razor. Though he declared his love to me every day in his letters, for some reason I kept feeling like I needed more and more proof.
Peter and I avidly devoured books about older men and young girls like Anne Rice’s
Belinda
, written under the pseudonym Anne Rampling, Marguerite Duras’s
The Lover
, the many V. C. Andrews books, and, of course, Nabokov’s
Lolita
(though Peter complained that Lolita didn’t love Humbert). We also watched the movie version of
Lolita
,
Baby Doll
, and
Pretty Baby
, a 1978 film starring Brooke Shields.
Pretty Baby
was set in early-twentieth-century New Orleans; it was about a photographer who fell in love with a twelve-year-old prostitute, Violet, and married her. “Now
this
is like us,” Peter said after our first viewing. “This is true love.” We watched it religiously, Peter pausing the movie at times to capture characters’ facial expressions; we viewed it so many times we started to memorize lines from it, such as Violet’s singsong declaration of love to her much older paramour: “I love you once / I love you twice / I love you more than beans and rice!” Peter always cried during the next-to-final scene, when Violet’s mother took her away from the house where they were living and the photographer shouted, “You cannot take her!” and then softly, “I can’t live without her.”
Though we watched many movies about young girls, Peter also took my tastes into consideration. Again and again, we viewed the scene in
Risky Business
where Tom Cruise dances in his underwear. I had a huge crush on Ralph Macchio, which Peter said wasn’t surprising since he looked like Ricky. Every time a boy was cute, Peter compared him to Ricky as though he were some kind of prototype. I didn’t want Ricky mentioned; didn’t want to be reminded of my crush on him anymore.
If Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert was right and a nymphet was a charmed, charming, supple girl between the ages of nine and fourteen, I was fast reaching the end of my nymphdom. Since nymphets, for Peter, seemed to bud around seven, it was possible that, for him, they lost their luster even sooner. When Peter was out, I spent a lot of time gazing at the pictures contained within the oval frames on his walls, most of them taken when I was eight. Had I been prettier than other girls my age? I wondered this as I looked through three fat photo albums dedicated to pictures of me at seven and eight. Decently pretty, I supposed, with expressions ranging from drowsy contentment to schoolgirlish pluck (in some pictures I had a habit of lifting and furrowing my chin), to thoughtless, self-assured play. In some, I was full-cheeked and mousy; in others I was fox-faced, with kinetic eyes—girl of fast heartbeat, girl of rose-tipped cheeks and bark-rich hair. My most mundane actions were caught and fossilized: stooping to tie a grimy shoelace, clapping, feeding the parakeets, bending for a pinecone. So many pictures of me with Mister Softee ice-cream cones or Blow Pops. Then another fat album of me at eleven and a good-sized one of me at twelve. Then the Skate Girl album. But there were no albums containing pictures taken of me after the age of twelve. There were a lot of new pictures, but they were unbound, stored in the wooden box I’d made for Peter in shop class.
One picture stood out: a Polaroid of my eight-year-old, swimsuit-clad self clenching the edge of a wrought-iron picnic table in the yard. The nymphlike, bark-haired child stood with her wiry body crooked like a violin bow. The child’s face had a strange expression that none of the other pictures contained: an uncharacteristic smugness, a keen, bawdy confidence. The expression was pure power: an awareness of her Slinky-thin body, its lucid, spanking-new appeal, with arms and legs as lithe as flutes, hair damp and mussed. This child’s haughtiness, her knowingness in that picture . . . from where did it come? How did she learn that expression? Did she come to fourteen-year-old me one night with her dirty knees and rustic face, did that ghost of summers past drift into my bedroom like some succubus, touching her chest to mine like a live wire, waking that drowsy, jaded, and electric creature Nina, who bubbled inside me like a can of shaken seltzer? Like some enchanting and enchanted fairy godmother, Nina gathered into her hands the child’s tanned face, kissed her full on her half-gaped mouth, and whispered:
Margaux, I am your
future
.
Peter decided to paint the walls of his room after I complained that their pale yellow color was depressing. The new color he had chosen was a frosty green that resembled the inside of an avocado. “I don’t want anything too attention-grabbing,” he said. “The attention should be on all the beautiful faces in the room.” By that, he meant me, Karen, Paws, and Jill. Jill. Hateful, adoring, flush-faced Jill, who was more beautiful than me because her eyes were blue and her hair blond. So many times had I stared at that eight-year-old specter who was probably now about my age.
“Peter, I can’t stand it anymore,” I said.
“What is it?” he said, moving the brush in a sleek up-and-down motion. The walls had been covered with primer the day before, and were now ready for a fresh coat of paint.
“School,” I said, using the first thing that came to mind.
“They’re still bothering you?”
“I was walking in line and I got hit really hard in the back. Some kids laughed. I’m not sure who hit me.”
“That’s real brave. Attacking someone whose back is turned.”
“Yeah, I know. This school is no better than Holy Cross. Anyway, I think they’ve seen us together. They know you’re not my father.”
“Well, you’re graduating in a few months. You can say good riddance to that school.” I’d told Peter that Poppa was willing to put me in a Catholic high school in West New York, which might be far enough away for the gossip not to follow.
“Peter,” I said, gathering my nerve. “I don’t want you to put up that picture of Jill once the paint dries. She’s from the past and that picture doesn’t even look like her.”
Peter cleared his throat. “I have several pictures up of you, one of Jill.”
“They’re outdated. You don’t put any current pictures of me on these walls.”
“Are you in a bad mood because of what happened at school? You shouldn’t be taking it out on me.”
“All I want is for you not to put up that one picture. Is that too much to ask? You’re always saying you’ll do anything for me.”
“That’s manipulative. You’re trying to manipulate me.” He kept painting.
“I’m not trying to manipulate you. Her picture bothers me. Every time I’m, you know, doing something for you, I have to look at that picture.”
“Are you trying to guilt me? Is that what you’re up to? Because you feel bad about something totally unrelated to me, some kids, some incident that has nothing to do with me . . .”
“Sometimes I think you’re using me. Sometimes I don’t think you love me.”
“Using you for what?” He turned around; I’d finally gotten his attention. “What am I using you for?”
“Like I’m just a thing. Like I’m not really a person. Like I’m a doll.”
“I can’t believe this! For years, your father has been telling you either directly or indirectly that you’re worth nothing. The kids in school make you feel worthless. I, on the other hand, have always tried to build up your self-esteem. Everything I do is to make you happy!” His eyes were tearing, and when I tried to touch him, he pushed my hand aside. “When I wake up in the morning, when I go to sleep at night, it’s you! The first thought I have when I get up is to get a cup of coffee, smoke a cigarette, and write a letter to Margaux. Look at all these notebooks!” he said, pointing to a crate containing the notebooks of letters. “My room is a shrine to you!”
It was true. Everything that was me was stored in this room. Without Peter to see me, to adore me, how could I exist?
A
s I walked down New York Avenue, an old man kicked a beer bottle. Some pigeons pecked at a piece of yucca, rolling it back and forth like a hockey puck.
“
¿Qué hora es?”
An elderly woman in black was tapping me on the shoulder. Black rubber shoes, black dress.
“
¿Qué hora es?”
“No español.”
I said, dragging myself out of my hypnotic state.
“No
hablo español.”
She nodded and for a brief moment reached to pet my face.
“Qué
linda,”
she said softly, and I realized she was saying that because I was wearing the prom dress.
I had gotten the dress from Yolanda, a woman who lived across the street from Peter. Yolanda had been our sole supporter amid the gossipmongers; she always stopped to talk to us whenever she saw us on the street, and once she said it was terrible that we had to go through so much just because we had a friendship that people considered strange.
The woman in black walked away, leaving me flushed. She had thought me beautiful in my dress. Yolanda had given it to me for a prom or homecoming dance, but I knew I would never attend those. I had worn the dress for my fourteenth-birthday party and now I was wearing it to my wedding. The dress was a white beaded poly-chiffon number with puffed sleeves and a partly see-through bodice. My shoes were also from Yolanda: white boca crepe sandals with pleated satin bows topped by glittery rhinestones.
In my fancy shoes, I had to be careful not to trip on the wide green steps leading to St. Augustine’s doors. I wasn’t used to wearing heels. In fact, I was accustomed only to sneakers, since I never attended parties or dances. Sneakers, the only shoes Peter found sexy. I suddenly worried about my choice of footwear.
But Peter showered me with compliments that day when he met me in the church’s narthex. He was dressed in his wedding-and-funeral suit, the same one he’d worn to meet Poppa. His false teeth were in and he smelled of Brylcreem. We used the holy water from a small font to bless ourselves before entering the church.
Sermons were offered here in both English and Spanish, but there was no sermon going on when we entered that Tuesday afternoon in July. The church was empty, with the exception of a sleeping homeless man in flannel. “I’m glad he’s here,” I whispered to Peter. “He can be the witness.”
We chose a pew in the middle of the nave. Peter picked up a black leather-bound Bible. He started to read the Twenty-third Psalm aloud.
I repeated the words after him: “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures / He leadeath me beside the still waters / He restoreth my soul.”
I saw the Gold Wing, black and silver. I saw the bushes on River Road, bursting with dark red raspberries. I saw Peter’s room, the girl figurines: dancing, tending sheep, feeding animals. I saw the world inside the brightness of Peter’s terrarium and the brick house that contained the characters of the Story. All that was sacred was mine. I owned it. I was in church. I was a bride.
I was also a virgin, like the mother of God; I’d never had intercourse. I was wearing a perfect white dress. Peter had taken a picture of me wearing it in front of a cake with fourteen candles. The lights were off so the kitchen was dark, and in the picture there was only the dimmest outline of the hutch where Inès kept her dishes and bowls. Her tureen, her teakettle, her teacups, her coffeepot, her bowls and plates, all silent as ice. Oh, that picture was strange. My eyes were two spots of black; they looked like the holes left after fires burn into the earth. Normally, I looked fourteen, but in that picture Peter said I looked seventeen or eighteen. “Your body is a grown woman’s in that dress. When did you grow up?”
It wasn’t the body. It was the face that was grown-up. The eyes. Peter refused to take a picture of me unless I was smiling, and it was the barest ashes of a smile. There was an ice-cream cake, shaped like a heart, topped with strawberries. Peter and me. No one else came to our party. Inès’s kitchen that day had been as quiet as the church was now.
We said our vows. Peter put the ring on my finger. We didn’t kiss, though, because I was so afraid someone would see.
In the master bedroom of my parents’ house, there was the queen bed, but it was too big for me. Or maybe not big enough. Every night, I went to sleep on the right side and ended up on the left, all tangled and twisted in the quilt, with small scratches on my arms, belly, and legs from where I dug into my skin while asleep. Even though my mother still slept in the kitchen extension Poppa had had built for her, she kept all her records in the master bedroom. It was there she’d lie in the daytime for hours on end, listening to those records and staring quietly at the circular fluorescent light on the ceiling.
One Saturday night, Poppa walked into the master bedroom, where I was reading V. C. Andrews under the overhead lamp. He didn’t say anything at first, just stared at the record player. He was obviously drunk.
After a while, he turned to me: “Listen, between you and me, I am going to throw them out. Those records make her sick! Only you and I know what this is like, am I right? Well, at least you get to hide at the old man’s house. But I am stuck here, in the inferno, with this sick woman. You look tan. You know something: I have not been to the beach in years. I am turning into a phantom of myself. I am giving you my money, my blood, so you can live. Do you understand? Your life is so carefree. You barely ever see her face. You have not the courage to face suffering. You are so weak; shame on you! You care nothing for your own mother; for shame! My father was paralyzed from diabetes when I was eight years old; I stayed by his side! I helped my mother cook. Shame on you for taking the easy life! If not for you, she would not be like this. It was the pregnancy and the postpartum hormones that caused her to go out of whack. Here’s a piece of advice, take it from someone who knows: do not get pregnant, do not get married. Our blood has been tainted by hers. We are living in the confines of a curse. A curse has four walls and a window in which you can gaze out at the life you could have had.”