Tiger, Tiger (40 page)
I told him I wanted the car. Again, the thought came back about Inès’s not driving being the reason she didn’t inherit the car. I tried to shut it out.
“You know what I did that night, the night the call came?” He ground the cigarette to ash. “I went to the bar. I drank. All the time I was drinking, I thought to myself: maybe this person has taken some pills, gone into the woods, maybe it is cold there. Or he has jumped from something and has a broken leg and is suffering. No one is there to help him. I wished him dead to God. I prayed: let this man be dead. I do not want to see people suffer. That is not my nature. Anyway, I find out he is dead, I am relieved.”
He lit another cigarette. “You know, I always felt that there was something not right about him, something not normal. I couldn’t place my finger on it. Anyway, I found him to be a considerate-enough person, helpful. He even lent me money once. You remember, the jewelry business was slow, I was out of work for a few months. He came to pick you up on a Saturday and I asked him to lend me twenty. So humiliating, to ask one who has nothing. Of course, I bought one of his cars, so I helped him ten times more.” He paused.
“Anyway, he always helped with your mother. But there was something strange about him, something distracted. He did not let go of his tragedy; he did not move on. Anything can happen in life, someone in your family can die, you can lose money, a job, anything can happen: still, you must survive. You cannot kill yourself. That is not the point of life. You must see it through, whatever it is.”
“Even if you were old, let’s say, and someone would have to change your diapers?”
“Whatever the case may be. Life is too precious. My oldest sister, Esmeralda, changed my father’s diapers toward the very end of his life.”
“Wasn’t that humiliating, though? For both of them?”
“That is her duty! I changed your diapers, no? I can only hope you would care for me as I grow older. That is what life is about. Blood cares for blood. I thought about him, that he had helped me, lent me money even, though he was poor, that he had driven your mother to the hospital many times; I appreciated it, but he was not my blood. And he was not your blood. His death is sad, but everything is sad. We move on.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Listen to me, don’t assume our lives mean anything more than the sun when it rises and sets. Don’t assume it will do this forever; we can’t know. I don’t wake up expecting the sun to rise, and when it does, I take it as a gift.” I thought of how he used to write poetry when he was my age and then gave it up. How he didn’t really live life as though it was a gift; he repeated every day that he was a cursed man. But it was like his remark about Peter’s suicide being a brave act; he said it not because he believed it, but because for whatever reason, he wanted me to.
“Despite everything that’s happened to me, I keep going. I grieve but not too long. Life is too short to be always grieving. That is why, around here, they have a name for me, my friends call me the party man.”
I smiled to myself; my back was turned so he couldn’t see me. When I glanced at him, he, too, was smiling. “I am the party man. To Eduardo, Jose, Felix, Ricardo. To friends, bartenders, girls, whenever they see me they wave me over and we have fun. I am a good conversationalist. I know the right jokes. I walk into a place and it becomes alive. I can start a party anytime—in wartime, peacetime, during a recession, a natural disaster, a personal crisis; I may feel sad, but I keep drinking; I watch the horse race with my friends, the baseball game, I have a good time, I keep going. That is why I will never end up like your friend Peter.”
Eleven months after Peter’s death I took a job as head teacher at a Catholic preschool in Jersey City. Every time I made the commute back to the apartment I now shared with Anthony, I was exhausted.
One day, entering Route 7 from “The Circle,” New Jersey’s most treacherous intersection, in the pouring rain, I saw a couple of cars stuck in three feet of water; the owners hadn’t injured themselves, but it was clear their attempts to drive through the flood had left them stranded. I started to slow down, meaning to park, and then on impulse I jammed the gas pedal to the floor. The Mazda couldn’t go far. Surrounded on all sides by deep water, Peter’s car lurched once, then shut down completely, water seeping into the cracks in the doors and floor. Firemen came with a boat to rescue me. I climbed in after saving what I could: my CDs and a few books I kept in the car. Everything else, from the upholstery to the engine, was destroyed, a whole grand flushed, Poppa would later yell. But when, with staunch pride, I told him now that I was working I’d reimburse him every cent of his five-hundred-dollar loan, he held up his hand, saying it wasn’t up to me to pay someone else’s debt.
Ever since Peter’s death, it was like I’d been waking from a deep sleep to the sound of a dog or wolf howling in the wild somewhere. Like I was in the aftermath of some dream that was fading by the second. The air in the window was bluish black and the wind blowing the curtains made them look like eyes opening. It was two or three or some other time of nonentity. I could have been a newly hatched turtle plodding toward the sea’s edge. I could have been an atom splitting or water changing to vapor. God could have been making my eyelashes out of ashes from a fire. I could have been an embryo growing bigger with eyes now forming in my soft skull. I could have died twenty times before, but that doesn’t matter any more.
Coming back from Coney Island, in a sudden rain, Peter parks the Suzuki under a bridge and we French-kiss amid yellow crates, orange traffic cones, garbage flung out of windows. We’re daring under the bridge where no one can see. Daring in Peter’s room with the door locked. Daring on the deserted beach.
There’s the Coney Island sky, pink and red. There we are in the subway going to the city. Look at us, at the top of the Empire State Building, the wind practically scalping us. We’re skating at the rink; it’s risky because one fall might paralyze him. We’re playing Super Mario Brothers 3; he’s asking me to teach him how to make Mario jump. I’m reading him Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
. There we are in church: he’s reciting the Twenty-third Psalm. I am the only girl from my eighth-grade class who’s married. There I am on the back of the motorcycle, my hair coming loose from its ponytail. We’re lying on a grassy meadow in Bear Mountain, waiting for the stars to turn on their lasers. I am finally climbing that big hill by the entrance to the scenic road, gathering the red raspberries that grow at the top. So brave I stand at the top of the hill, with the raspberries in hand to show him I’ve conquered it. In the light, in the clear air, I smash the berries on a few sharp rocks and start down empty-handed, licking my hand dry.
Years after Peter’s death, I’m sifting through all the pictures he took. Loose pictures, pictures in albums, pictures crammed into the wooden box I made in shop class. Me at seven trying a cartwheel, pink-and-white dress falling over my head, patent leather shoes sticking out like the star points of a jack. My panties, clearly visible, are My Little Pony. Eighth-grade graduation, I sit on a patio chair in the yard with a single red rose Peter had given me. His bangs are neat, and his face handsome. I’m fifteen, bending over the wooden dollhouse, holding a tiny felt mouse in a flannel shirt and suspenders.
Now I’m looking at a picture of my great rival, Jill. Unbeknownst to Peter, I had seen Jill as a grown woman during the summer of his last year; she was probably home from college. I was certain it was her. She had the same beauty mark under her eye that I remembered. Her fair hair was gathered into a low ponytail and she was wearing wedge sandals. She was tall, thin, pink-cheeked. Passing by her that day I was sure she had forgotten all about Peter. If he had given her any joy at all, it was as fleeting as a Mister Softee ice cream; her mother had always been present, and so their time together had been as ordinary as her Capri pants and ankle bracelet. No witching hours, no secret anything.
There I am sucking a grape Blow Pop at twenty, the sun on that secret trail so bright that it makes my face look as if it were under candlelight. There are other pictures: laughing into the sun, dipping my fingers into that hidden pond where I had once set a wood turtle free.
So many pictures of me with the rusted watering can, standing barefoot by the green gate in front of Peter’s house, sitting on the motorcycle, my nose deep in a Max Graf rose. On the hammock, my head against his chest; he twirls my hair in one finger, my expression is lazy. In another, my head is against his arm, his face in profile looking at me, my eyes dazed with feeling, his eyes as sharp and clear as daybreak. In one I had never seen before Karen and I are in the bathtub and I’m washing her hair with baby shampoo. Winnie-the-Pooh bath toys are bobbing between us. The cameraman is unseen, of course. He’s somewhere beyond our plane of vision, somewhere in the wasted hills, caught in the oval of a hand mirror. He flashes briefly in the mind of a dying grandmother, somewhere in the dark lake, the laughing woods. He makes up words and the music to go with them, he is a jack-of-all-trades, and handsome. He loves us very much.
Today is October 6, 2010. I’m looking at a completely different set of pictures, which I just picked up from Walgreens. In one of the photos that my husband took of me and my daughter, we’re sitting on a stone embankment surrounding a giant blue lake. I’ve donned square hippie sunglasses with purple psychedelic circles, and my daughter wears a hot-pink Hello Kitty fedora along with several sparkly plastic bangles. As usual, my daughter refuses to smile for the sake of the camera. I take this as a sign of her independence.
Last night, walking by the stairwell, I noticed the electric guitar missing from my seven-inch statuette of Kurt Cobain. Kurt stands on top of the CD rack on the left side of the lucky-8-ball candle I bought years ago in Binghamton. To the right of Kurt is a plastic red-eyed and fanged dark blue monster wearing a white T-shirt that boasts #1
HAIRSTYLIST
.
“Did you take Kurt’s guitar again?” I ask my daughter. “Yes,” she admits. She’s a music lover so the tiny instrument figures in many of her games. On the carpeted stairwell rest two taped-together rolls of brown butcher paper—“logs for my movie set,” she’s explained to me. She often makes her “sets” out of shoeboxes, empty water bottles, and discarded cardboard she finds in the recycling bin. I enjoy using everyday objects to create art with my daughter: green felt can be grass; flat creek stones can come alive with paint and googly eyes. We once made a wintry scene by spreading glue over a drawing on black construction paper and then sprinkling table salt all over it. It’s something I got from an old notebook of craft ideas my mother put together when she had a job as a teacher’s assistant—before her mental illness made it impossible for her to work.
By setting down my memories in this book, I’ve worked to break the old, deeply rooted patterns of suffering and abuse that have dogged my family through the generations. One thing I’ve learned through my writing is that because my grandparents didn’t openly deal with the sexual assaults of my mom and aunt as children, the trauma was passed down unchecked. My mother had no idea how to recognize trouble, or to shield me from it. By insisting on silence and forgetting, my grandparents were probably trying to protect their daughters from more harm, but my own story is proof that they were tragically mistaken.
Secrets are what allowed Peter’s world to flourish. Silence and denial are exactly the forces that all pedophiles rely on so their true motives can remain hidden. Going back over old papers and thinking carefully about my own experiences have exposed the many ways that Peter manipulated me and my family. As I was finishing this book, I read
Conversations with a Pedophile: In the Interest of Our Children
by Dr. Amy Hammel-Zabin, a prison therapist, and I became convinced of what I’d always suspected: that a sexual predator looks for children from troubled homes like mine but that he can also trick average families into thinking he’s ordinary or even an upstanding member of the community. Pedophiles are masters at deception because they also excel at self-deception: they fool themselves into believing what they do isn’t harmful.
Stored in my computer are the official 1989 court documents (which I saw last year for the first time) charging Peter with these four crimes against one of his foster children: sexual abuse, criminal sexual conduct, endangerment of the welfare of a child, and child abuse. The court deemed with certainty that Peter was “likely to respond favorably to probation.” At that time, Peter and I, having been separated, were communicating by phone; a year later, when I was eleven, he would begin a second sexual initiation with me. Since I feel that the current justice system largely fails at both convicting and rehabilitating sex offenders, it is essential, if change is to take place, to see the problem of pedophilia through the eyes of those who have dedicated their lives to studying it. In
Time
, Dr. Fred Berlin, the founder of the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma, confronts this issue pragmatically: “People want to see a monster when they say ‘pedophile.’ But the best public-safety approach on pedophilia is to provide these people with treatment. That will prevent further victimization.” Berlin’s website is a possible resource for anyone who is struggling with sexual feelings toward children:
www.fredberlin.com/treatmentframe.html
. Antidepressants were effective for Peter in his later years, and the subject of Hammel-Zabin’s book was helped immensely by testosterone-inhibiting drugs. It’s true that strict enforcement of current penalties such as prison time for sex offenders is a vital part of the solution. Unfortunately, most pedophiles would be hard-pressed to find treatment options before a conviction has occurred. Often by the time authorities have been brought in, a sexual predator has already abused numerous children and his troubled thought processes have become so ingrained that they’re resistant to treatment. Help needs to be readily available to those who are
thinking
about offending; in this way, the problem can be addressed at its roots.