Tiger, Tiger (32 page)

Peter told me he’d been reading more psychology and self-help books and a memoir about a girl who’d been raped by her father, which particularly moved him. He said maybe it had even cured him of his addiction to young girls. Since he was tormented by the sight of it but couldn’t bring himself to throw it away, he taped it under the mattress.

Perhaps inspired by his readings, Peter began a novel about abused runaways entitled
The Exploited
, which he asked me to write down for him in my neat, precise print. Our only arguments now were about this novel; Peter wanted complete creative control over it. He’d dictate what he wanted written down and I’d frill up the words in a poetic style that he deemed “flowery.” I felt like complaining that his writing was colorless but was afraid he’d give me one of his relentless silent treatments. We played more chess now and occasionally Scrabble. Once, to his amazement, I nabbed his queen with my knight, defeating him. From watching him I’d mastered moving knights—the trickiest characters on the board. He shook my hand but said from now on he’d rather stick to Scrabble and gin rummy because my win was a depressing reminder that his mind wasn’t as sharp as it used to be. The bed was an uneven surface for game boards but we had little choice since I refused to go into the kitchen. “You’re not a leper,”

Peter had said. “Richard mostly stays in the living room now, and Miguel and Ricky don’t bother anyone.” But I couldn’t even stand passing through that kitchen and front room in order to get to the Granada. I said that I would like to build a tunnel that led directly from the bedroom to the car.

If there was anyone in the kitchen and I had to pee, I would do so in a small vase that Peter kept in his room; he would dump the urine into the toilet at night after everyone went to bed. Peter’s room was literally our whole world now, besides the parks and diners and fast-food drive-throughs. It had everything we needed: books, a tape recorder, a TV, our Ouija board, our Scrabble game, our chess set, our deck for poker and gin rummy. In place of sex that winter, we practiced meditation, visualization, and even astral projection. Peter said his spirit had already gone out of his body once and floated by the ceiling as he peered at his motionless form below. He was so determined to leave his body again that he consulted a book written by a guru who claimed to have done it more than a hundred times.

Peter would be the one to venture out into the kitchen to make himself coffee and get me a club soda or a cup of ice cream. Whenever he went out he shut the door immediately so nobody could see me. On my side of the bed I kept Oreos, Goya crackers, saltines, Fig Newtons, pretzels, Twizzlers, and packets of Big Red gum. I had a store of tissues, two changes of clothes including underwear, maxi pads, a string bikini, my roller skates, and my schoolbag containing my textbooks; I would do my homework or study for tests whenever Peter would go into the kitchen to chat with Inès.

The more time we spent in the room, the greater effort Peter made to pretty it up. He put up more permanent Christmas decorations: tinsel wreathes around each oval frame and colored lights around the TV. He even bought three tiny green lizards called anoles to liven up the terrarium. He bought more stands and more porcelain figurines so that it seemed there wasn’t a single spot on the wall left uncovered. Only on my side of the bed was the wall empty, as though he was waiting for me to decorate it.

The inside of Peter’s mustard yellow Granada was matted with dog hair, its upholstery stained with ketchup and sweet-and-sour sauce, and its glove compartment stuffed with packets of salt and sugar and napkins from various fast-food restaurants. The Granada was our second home, and I depended on the routine of our trips to provide me with a sense of daily structure.

Peter liked to play his cassettes, which were an odd mix: Willie Nelson, Neil Young, Fats Domino, Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
, the Eagles, and Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” He said that the Beethoven gave him a feeling he couldn’t exactly describe but the closest he could come was what he called “sublime hopelessness.” Again and again, he’d rewind the tape and play it for me until I began to understand what he was talking about. Lately, giving up hope seemed like an easy and reasonable choice. During moments of pure despair, I was no longer trying to swim fitfully upstream; instead, I allowed myself to float. When trying to climb out of one of my depressions, it was just the opposite: I felt like a tortoise who had gotten a sudden and crazed idea to flee its shell, not realizing that its carapace was not simply an ornament, a topcoat, but tethered to its spine and rib cage, something one must claim ownership of if there was to be any peace at all.

The spring I was fifteen, Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Trevor came for a rare visit from Ohio but they were gone within three days, after Poppa took Uncle Trevor to the bar for a couple of drinks. Mommy said that Poppa had had too much to drink and words were exchanged. I was bitter at Poppa for ruining everything. I loved Aunt Bonnie. She was spunky and funny with a head full of bouncing curls and a faux Southern accent. I imagined Aunt Bonnie was the person Mommy could have been if she hadn’t taken so many of the wrong medications. Whenever my mother had me sign a Christmas or Easter card for her, I always wrote “Mom No. 2.” As a young woman, Aunt Bonnie suffered from alcoholism, but now she counteracted her low moods by doing volunteer work, putting together homemade cookbooks, and attending church events. She’d never had children, and said she was happy except for one thing: at fifty, she wanted to adopt a baby, but it was too expensive and the waiting lists too long.

Aunt Bonnie called Peter a “sweetheart” when she met him during our one lunch together at El Pollo Supremo that summer. She mentioned some boy she’d had a crush on in high school who’d also owned a motorcycle. Even though Peter had finally gotten rid of his, he couldn’t stop referencing it at the lunch as though he were trying to impress her. Aunt Bonnie seemed to talk to him as if he were a ten-year-old, and when I thought about it, anytime I’d seen him with Inès she’d done the same thing.

Lately, Peter wanted to pretend the car’s steering wheel was the old Suzuki’s handlebars, and once he risked trying to roller-skate with me at a rink even though he said one good hard fall might very well land him in a wheelchair. As the rink’s strobe lights blazed and the gem-studded disco ball shone, I noticed the manic look in Peter’s eyes as he skated, even attempting dance moves after he caught me admiring a break-dancing teenage boy. I didn’t know how to tell Peter that he was too old, that he was not only endangering himself but embarrassing me. He tried to hold my hand during the “couples only” skate, and I found myself feigning hunger so that, while Peter got me a pretzel, I could sit miserably alone as other girls whizzed by accompanied by friends or boyfriends their own age.

On non–school days, I used to get up early to type pages of my novel on an electric typewriter Poppa had bought me, but that summer I slept until one, which was when Peter picked me up for our afternoon ride. My skin began to take on a grainy appearance and my nails constantly broke. Worse than anything was the way the world became hostile. It seemed as if the too green blades of grass wanted to leap out and slash me, songs I used to like now scraped my eardrums raw, and my body felt disjointed, mixed up as though my bones were scrambled. I would stare at things like a crack in the wall or the palm of my hand and feel as if I didn’t have enough strength to lift my gaze and set it elsewhere. I needed to escape my life, but I was afraid to kill myself. According to the Catholicism I’d grown up with, and to a degree still tried to live by, suicide was a mortal sin, met with the fires of hell. Yet it didn’t quite make sense to me why somebody who was already suffering would be punished more. I lived in dread of the day when even this terror ceased to matter, when the pain would become so intense that I had no choice but to take action, like Mommy had.

My mother’s second suicide attempt had just occurred in early June. She wandered off, found a wall in Weehawken, and jumped off of it, breaking her ankle. Our frequent visits to the psych ward made things worse for me; for Poppa, too. “I cannot stand to look at crazy people,” he said one night in the kitchen. “To me, it is like visiting one of Dante’s circles. The sounds of the lunch carts, the smell of the food and the unwashed bodies; it is enough to bring up the bile in my stomach. Those faces void of sanity, some sneering like pigs, some screaming like the undead, some staring at you as if you are the source of their agonies. I tell you something, in those crazy wards, there are many sick people, but your mother is one of the sickest. I have never met such an upside-down, screwed-up person in my life. One thing I have figured out about that woman is that she likes everything topsy-turvy; she wants filthy instead of clean, broken rather than fixed, chaos as opposed to order; to this woman, sickness is health. Do you hear me? Don’t you ever think like her, don’t you ever be like her. Maybe she doesn’t mean it, but she makes everyone around her as sick as she is.” He was doing what he always did—blaming Mommy when it was
his
fault she was so ill. His lies turned my stomach; he didn’t even realize my mother would be normal if only she were away from him. He continued, “But, still you are no innocent. You are a curse upon this household. You better listen to what I am about to tell you next. Your carefree days are over. That man has a car: let him bring you there several times a week at least! You show her some support! Some care! Though she did not care for you properly, she tried her best. She carried you for nine months, so it is your duty. I am passing my burden on to you. She wants you! Her blood!”

I was thankful Peter always accompanied me, and every time we visited, he played a game of Ping-Pong with Mommy. He once suggested we play a board game such as Monopoly, Chinese checkers, or backgammon, but pieces were missing from every game. So Ping-Pong was our only option, though my mother couldn’t stand for long periods of time on her ankle, nor could she move quickly. The psychiatric nurse said that she was lucky she hadn’t died or become paralyzed. The nurse also said she was lucky to have such a devoted daughter and caring husband, that if we kept coming regularly, she’d soon be well enough to return home. I often wondered, though, whether our visits did anything for her or whether she was happy at all to see us. She could barely smile and her eyes had a wide, staring look like a baby, except what is cute on a baby is disturbing on an adult. Her laugh was unnaturally slowed down. She shuffled as though her hands and legs were in shackles and her thinning grayish brown curls hung in limp, unwashed clumps. I kissed and petted her, but it didn’t seem to cheer her up. I knew better than to expect it to. I tried not to feel horrified, but here in the psychiatric ward, it wasn’t possible to feel anything else unless you were heartless. Human suffering was everywhere you looked.

“She’s so strong,” a psychiatric nurse said once about me. If only she knew the truth. I came only because Poppa told me that if I didn’t I was a bad daughter. Once the same nurse said I needed to help my mother take a shower, by handing her the washcloths and soap and making sure she shampooed her hair. The nurse said she knew I could handle it. I was so tired of acting like I was stronger and better than I was. And what good did these visits do? My mother wasn’t cured by them but Poppa continued to insist I make appearances because that was the only thing he cared about: appearances. We could both die and his prime concern would probably be burying us with the right makeup. He was burying me right now. And these psychiatrists and nurses were no better than Poppa. They kept up their sick smiles and, instead of looking for a real solution, just kept stuffing her with drugs that never worked.

Over to the elevator she’d accompany me and Peter, staring with what the nurses referred to as “flat affect.” “I’m coming back, don’t worry,” I’d say as I pressed the switch again and again. When the double doors closed, I would bury my face in Peter’s chest while he pressed “G” for Ground. No matter who was in the elevator with us, I’d finally permit myself to sob as Peter held me. We’d then drive to a diner and I’d order a giant vanilla milk shake, which I’d consume within minutes. On some days, my anxiety was such that these milk shakes were the only thing I could stomach.

During the hospital visits, I tried my hardest to block out my mother’s paranoid and delusional talk, but there was one thing she said that haunted me. It was her description of a hallucination she had in her room. She said she had heard drums playing. When an orderly heard her making grunting sounds, he came in to find that she had stripped off all her clothes and was squatting over a pool of urine, thinking she had just given birth to a brand-new baby.

Around this time, I started to develop a plan to get my mother and me away from Union City for good. I’d get pregnant, Poppa would return to Puerto Rico as he was now always threatening, and Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Trevor would feel sorry for us because we had nowhere to go. If pity wasn’t a good enough reason, the fact that Aunt Bonnie desperately wanted a baby would be more than enough incentive to take us in. Apparently, my mother must have wanted a baby herself, or she wouldn’t have had that delusion. Peter didn’t want to have intercourse with me, but somehow I’d have to get him to change his mind. Poppa was always talking about institutionalizing Mommy and giving her shock treatments, which I was sure would turn her into a vegetable, like that guy in
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. I couldn’t let any of this come to pass; I had to take action immediately.

As I’d predicted, Peter worried that if I went to Ohio he’d never see me again. I told him that when I was eighteen I’d come back and marry him, and as he was getting old, this was his last chance to do something meaningful—at least this way when he died I’d have a part of him with me forever. I didn’t feel bad deceiving Peter, not when this was so crucial, and besides, he’d tried to trick me when I was eight by buying me those green beans. My mother and I were in crisis; life would crush us if I didn’t act. Survival first.