Read Online Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragoso - Free Book Online Page B

lying. But I still had a habit of being naughty, which didn’t upset Peter as much as the lying had, and he even tolerated downright nastiness from me—cruel practical jokes such as spilling his coffee down the sink when he was in the bathroom, or the times I mocked his false teeth or ugly ingrown toenails.
    Mommy told Peter that I had many reasons for “acting out” and they were all linked to Poppa in some way. Recently laid off from work, he now started drinking early in the morning and continued to drink all day. He’d taken to spending the night in my room while I slept in the master bedroom with my mother. Whenever I went into my old room to get clothes, Poppa would scream at me to shut the door behind me because any light hurt his head. If he was really hungover he’d hurry me to the point where I came out with the wrong clothes, such as two shirts instead of a pair of pants and a shirt. According to Mommy, Poppa burned through his unemployment checks drinking and gambling, and he said if he wasn’t allowed to do either he’d go into such a fit of despair he wouldn’t even be able to get dressed in the morning.
    I didn’t know if I was acting out the day of my eighth-birthday party when I let the guinea pig loose. Peter had told me to go upstairs and feed Blackhead and put fresh water in his bottle. He also said to play with him for a while because Blackhead was looking a little lonely lately. I was thrilled to be given the responsibility. Peter had never sent me up to the attic alone before. Maybe since we’d made the pact not to lie he trusted me more. I raced up the attic stairs, nearly tripping on Ricky’s skateboard, which clattered down the steps, blue twisty steps that wove and wound all around the wall. Inside the attic, the walls were dark blue. I hadn’t known the room was blue until I saw it without Peter. Now that he wasn’t with me, I noticed how messy it really was. Boy clothes, paper plates, paper cups, and cards were strewn all over the floor. I picked up a card and saw that it was a Garbage Pail Kid card with a picture of a tubby doll-like child lying on a bed of nails. I didn’t know Miguel and Ricky collected those things, and it considerably lowered my opinion of them; I knew that boys liked gross things, but this was too much!
    I sat cross-legged on the floor and began to look at the cards, hating their grossness but feeling unable to resist examining them. Kids at my school had taken to collecting these cards, and some of the girls had started to sing a hand-clapping song that was just as bad:
    Say, say, my enemy, come out and fight with me,
    We’ll bring our B.B. guns; we’ll have us lots of fun.
    I’ll gouge your eyes out and make you bleed to death.
    When I was younger, I used to fight with girls,
    But now I’m older I fight with B.O.Y.S.
    Boys, boys, boys, boys, boys, boys!
    Crisscross applesauce.
    That day, I thought of the nurse’s office at school, which was the most comforting place in the world. I’d been getting a lot of stomachaches lately. Sister Mary, the school nurse, had a very small room in her office with a white ceiling and white walls and stiff white bedsheets and a white fluffy pillow and a small brown cross with Jesus crucified yet looking serene with his arms outspread, his feet nailed safely down, his head bent to expose his crown of thorns. The ritual Sister Mary and I shared was the same each time: she would take my hand, lead me to the white bed, and then tell me to lie very flat and very still and look to the figure of Jesus on the cross for comfort and support.
    On the white bed, ankles together, arms at my sides, I would wait for prickles to shoot up my legs, for the blood to thicken in my feet. Slowly, I would spread my arms out to the very upper corners of the bed: right arm, palm up; left arm, palm up. Legs straight, knees slightly lifted, and feet stilled by the nails that I imagined kept them safely pinioned. Chest cavity, elbow, belly, ankle,