Tiger, Tiger (35 page)
“Nothing ever happened. There was never anything,” I said, shocked that I felt so much sorrow. I now had to swallow what I’d suspected for years: that he’d never love me again, that what happened in the basement, what he didn’t even know about but sensed, had made me dead to him.
“You are a robot! Listen to you! You talk without conviction! Are you trained to say that? Are you a puppet? Do you have blood inside your veins? Or are you stuffed full of lies? Like a little parrot that just repeats what it is told without a single brainwave passing through its head? You had better be more convincing than that! If you are lying it is on your conscience, not mine! You are the one who will suffer for it! It will eat you alive, you hear me! It will tear at your guts!”
“How can I say it? How can I say it and you’ll believe me? I’m not guilty! I’m not guilty!” My body grew light. His grip on my shoulders had loosened and I sank to the floor. “I’m innocent! I’m innocent! I’m innocent! I’m innocent!”
He put his arms around me. “Don’t cry, baby, don’t cry.”
“Poppa, I’m innocent, I’m innocent, Poppa. Can’t you see? Can’t you see?”
“I know it. I know you are. I was testing you. I knew you would tell me the right things. These people, these social workers, they do not work for the good of families; they try to destroy families! They want sensationalism! They are like the paparazzi! That woman was a beast. Ugly thing. That face. That hair. Uglier than ugly, my God. She looked like a toad! With that notebook, writing so fast! That look, always staring. How dare she accuse my daughter of wrongdoing? I should call up her agency and complain about the way she treated me. Like a second-class citizen!”
“She treated me the same way. As though I was a criminal.”
He brought me a tissue. “Clean your face. Clean your nose. Look, perhaps now you will finally stop going to that house. Perhaps this is a lesson . . .”
I stood up, infuriated. Poppa had just spent all this time making it clear that there was no possible way for him to accept me for who I was and now he wanted to take from me the only person who could. “No, Poppa, I won’t stop. You can’t make me. You have no reason to stop me now.”
T
hat fall, I started listening to bands like Hole and Veruca Salt, donning dark red lipstick like Courtney Love and Louise Post. I also became obsessed with the blond, hot, brooding, and eternally twenty-seven-year-old rock star Kurt Cobain, who had died the April before of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. Peter had once remarked on how young Kurt was when he died, and I said with a smirk that I admired him for making it as far as twenty-seven in this crappy world. His self-esteem might’ve been even lower than mine—his lyrics were all about feeling worthless and shunned by society. As we drove farther and farther from Peter’s house, my Nirvana albums played constantly, though Peter found some of the songs unsettling. During those twenty-five-mile car rides to Palisades Park with Peter and Paws, singing along to my new idols, I felt as high as I once had talking about the Story.
From the man who ran the Overlook Lodge, a refreshment stand that sold grilled hamburgers, overpriced chips, and biscuits for the many dogs that people brought to the park, Peter and I learned a bit of Palisades Park’s disturbing history. Suicides were not an uncommon occurrence because of the large cliffs that overlooked the Hudson River. The most haunting story was of a small, skinny woman who had jumped off one of the cliffs, expecting an immediate death on impact with the large rocks that lined the river’s hemline. Instead, the woman had gotten caught in the branches of a tree on the way down and had remained stuck for hours, suffering the pain of broken bones until she finally died. It was her small frame that had allowed the tree to catch her in the first place, and her slight weight that had failed to break its branches.
Since it was now fall, we looked for broad-winged hawks as well as the ospreys with their definitive M-shaped wings. In the summer, I had picked wild raspberries amid the flickering tiger swallowtail butterflies; I had carved “Peter and Margaux ’95” into one of the picnic benches with a key. We had found secret streams and collected rocks for Wicca healing spells.
I liked it here. Here, I felt like I was on a ship drifting farther and farther from the real world; I had barely any interaction now with anyone besides Peter and Paws. I’d been doing so well with home-schooling but, because I was sixteen now, old enough to officially drop out, the school board had put an end to it. I studied for and passed my GED that November, but had no idea what to do with the diploma. I missed my teachers, especially Mr. and Mrs. Bernstein, but I told myself I didn’t care. Like a sailor in the middle of the ocean or an astronaut treading the moon, I did my best to leave that isle of horrors far in the distance—Poppa’s house in Union City, those psychiatric wards, the fights with Peter, those terrible schools. Here at Palisades Park I could be free of all that. I rarely saw other adolescents, so I wasn’t reminded of the parties, dates, and dances I was missing.
I knew my new obsession with Kurt Cobain made Peter jealous, so it surprised me when he came out of Barnes & Noble bearing
Hit Parade
, asking me to read him the Nirvana tribute. One day, he even pinned a black-and-white poster of a beaming Kurt to his wall.
“Ta-da!” he exclaimed, pulling back his hand from my eyes. “Re-member that social worker who said there were no boys on my walls? Well, there he is, sweetheart, all yours!”
Peter may have not noticed it, but that poster, so modern, brought out the antiquated look of everything else in the room. Even though it depicted someone who was technically gone from this world, it always made me feel hopeful because I was being reminded that there
were
guys besides Peter who could accept somebody like me, because they themselves were damaged. As for Peter, he didn’t seem to mind its place on his wall. Occasionally, he even stared at it with an unreadable expression, once remarking that it seemed Kurt was like a little boy wowed by circus lights.
Nirvana’s and Hole’s choleric music drew my own feelings of wrath toward Peter right to the surface; the subtitles I’d been too afraid to read for so long I now heard sung over and over. Consequently, we fought more often and more violently than ever before. Once, in a fight in the car at night that began because he said I didn’t want to try intercourse again, I screamed: “You promised, just like I promised you, and I paid up for
your
birthday, right? Even though I was only eight. Guess what that makes you: a
child molester
. Child molester, child molester, child molester!” Peter jammed his fingers in his ears, and when I tried to yank them out he punched me in the face, spattering blood all over the dashboard and my shirt.
Peter pulled into the Pathmark parking lot to get gauze and medical tape. He couldn’t go in right away because he was too upset. I pressed several tissues against my face, unable to believe blood was actually on the dashboard. My nose felt like it had been stuffed with Novocain. I stared at my ruined T-shirt. We have to get rid of this shirt before someone sees it, I thought, and then I heard myself voice the concern. He said that before driving me to Poppa’s house, he would stop to get one of the shirts I kept in his room as a change of clothes.
Resting his head on the steering wheel, he said, “You make me so crazy. Just don’t call me that awful name again, please, I’m begging you, let the past stay past. My daughters can’t forgive me, and you have so much hatred in you now. What about all the good times? That’s what I told my daughter on the phone. I remember sneaking into the back of the church on her wedding day and leaving before she could see me. I loved you, I really did; I wasn’t trying to harm you. Don’t forget that.”
Despite my pledge to stop bringing up the past, I couldn’t. In another shouting match Peter gave me a big black eye, which I hid with repeated applications of makeup. Twice, he had to replace the Granada’s windshield because he had punched it. One day I tried to steer the car into a tree. Another time he took a knife and scratched out the face of the big oval photo of me at eight that had hung on his wall all these years. Afterward he regretted it, so he taped the picture, frame and all, under his mattress, along with that memoir he hadn’t wanted to get rid of and a framed picture of his daughters.
One December night in Peter’s room, I took my basal temperature to make sure I was ovulating, as I’d learned to do from a book about fertility. My body’s temperature was raised, indicating that my uterine lining had sufficiently thickened, my estrogen was high—spiked with the lush brandy of luteinizing hormone—and I was ready to conceive. Never mind that all the dreams I remembered now were nightmares: deserted fun houses and serial killers, train tracks and ocean floors. I dreamed now of strange men raping me in parks, homeless women with pairs of dice for eyes, my body covered head to toe in roaches, dried-out gorges, a sun blacked out by shutters. I wrote in my diary of a dream that I had, of tying a noose to one of the basement’s wooden beams, scrawling “whore” and “slut” across my breasts in red lipstick, then hanging myself for all to see.
Yet tonight I was ready to be a mother and have somebody love me forever, unconditionally. To start in motion the beautiful plan that would complete Mommy and Aunt Bonnie’s dreams, as well as my own. The twin sisters would be reunited; we would all create a loving, harmonious family out there in Ohio. Even Poppa would be happy because he could finally live as he’d always wanted, free of his two burdens. Blood and pain were not going to stand in my way; I was strong. I was a woman. I had just taken two of Peter’s Loraze-pams, smoked a joint that he had gotten from Ricky’s friend who lived down the street, and drunk a Zima while we watched two hours’ worth of Nirvana videos.
Of course, Peter still had his serious doubts. If the plan worked, he would be alone. Alone to rearrange the statues on the stands, which he had started to do compulsively, searching for some kind of perfect order he hadn’t found yet. After the social worker’s visit he’d repainted the walls and the color was now the bubble-gum pink of a new tricycle. To discourage the teenagers trespassing at night to drink and smoke cigarettes in the yard, leaving aluminum cans in the hammock and cigarette butts wedged in the bark of the ailanthus tree, Peter had started to build a drystone wall. But even when the wall seemed high enough he didn’t stop building it. He widened it when he couldn’t make it higher, even when Inès remarked that he was risking serious back injury for no good reason. The wall began to take on the look of something ancient. I imagined that if I left with my mother to live with Aunt Bonnie the wall would grow so long it would enclose the entire yard, replacing the rusty chicken-wire fence and draping itself with the grape ivy that Inès complained made the house look haunted.
That night, he put down the bed with the crank and I lay naked as a stone, my pubic hair properly shaved and my hair in two braids tied at their ends with hard balls so I would look girlish. As he approached me, a terrible look of sadness on his face, his freckled body white and old, I felt every joint and nerve tense like a porcupine curling its warm body inward as it pushed every quill out. The Nirvana album
In Utero
played in the background. I looked at my poster of Kurt. He was smiling, clutching the knees of his ripped jeans. Peter allowed only smiling faces in his room.
“Sweetheart, please relax,” he said, as he began to insert his penis.
“I’m trying.”
“Pretend you’re a boy. Pretend you’re making love to Kurt or that you are him.”
“I can’t. I know what’s going to happen. I’m trying to be brave.
I’m trying so hard.”
“I know you are, sweetheart.”
“Please, even if it hurts. Rape me, like Kurt says. Just do it to my body and don’t think of me at all. Even though it hurts, it’ll feel good.”
“You sound just like Nina. You sound like you’ve gone hard. You haven’t gone hard, right? You’re not just some tough chick.”
“It’s a little hole. It’s my baby-girl hole. It’s so little. I’m only eight years old. Daddy, I want you to. You’ve got a magic wand, Daddy. I want your wand inside me. I want to have your baby.” I was exactly twice the age now as when I first started saying those things.
Peter’s penis, which had gone limp, began to harden.
“Tell me more. Keep talking.”
I closed my eyes so I could not see his long old body, his tired face and ancient skin. “Sweetheart, you’ve got to relax. Whenever I feel you tense up, I go soft. If this keeps up, we should just give it up for tonight.”
“We can’t. I only ovulate once a month.”
“Let’s do something lighthearted tonight. We’ll try again tomorrow. Let’s have fun. We can play Scrabble or gin rummy. Something relaxing. This is hurting my back.”
“No,” I said, feeling the need for the circle that had started when I was eight to finally be complete. This time I was so determined that even the rigidity of my own muscles couldn’t defy me. I was on top as he’d asked, due to his back. I was dry, but we used Vaseline. During the sex, I tried to pretend he was Kurt but it didn’t work, his room was too real to me. I could see the figurines on the stands, the faces in his alabaster angel lamplit, and crickets leaping in his terrarium, food for the anoles. I heard the refrigerator door open outside Peter’s room and someone cough, and I felt ashamed. It did hurt. I tried to focus on the warrior nature of facing down my fear, and I was eager now to move toward, not away from, pain’s hot, red center. Later would come the noble agony of childbirth and a true woman would emerge from the rubble of a girl. Though I didn’t feel aroused I was glad to have his penis inside me because this attempt at creating new life justified my many, many gifts to him over the years. It seemed like I was finally solving the problem of an eight-year-old becoming sexual way before her time by taking charge of what it meant now, and he came inside me, exactly as I’d asked him to do.
Today was December 30 and tomorrow was New Year’s Eve, Poppa’s favorite holiday, and a Sunday. Let Peter and Inès have their trip; I’d have my own. On a pier somewhere, out of time, my real ship was waiting. It had no sails. Others had boarded it before me. The weather was cold, and there was still white snow on the ground, but a rusty spot on my light cotton panties marked my period’s arrival, telling me what I should have guessed, that my body was too corrupted; it couldn’t contain new life. I wasn’t like Little Mama, that cat from the basement. And that basement was death to life. That dark, dingy, cobwebbed basement had taken all my life from me. That place was where I gave myself up, destroyed my own will for him, and now it was gone. My will was dead, so I might as well be dead.