I looked at Karen’s picture again. She looked old, though she must have been only seven. Maybe it was the red streaky makeup under her eyes. Or maybe it was the stockade, enclosing her head and arms.
I noticed the picture across from hers, of a smiling blond girl. “Oh, that’s Jill,” Peter said. “She and her mother came over a lot last summer after Karen left, and she’d play with Jenny and Renee. She’s pretty, isn’t she?”
I shut the album.
My mother came into the kitchen from the living room and said to Peter, “I gave the American Cancer Society your address; they’re going to send you a pamphlet about that test. I’m going to see if I can get Maria next. I’m not tying up your phone, am I?”
“Sandy, don’t worry,” Peter said. “I’ve told you people rarely use that phone. We might as well not even have a phone. So long as it’s not long distance, it’s fine.”
My mother nodded and left to call Maria. Peter then said, “Margaux, do you want to see my room? I don’t think I’ve ever shown it to you.” That was true. We had always hung out in the kitchen, yard, or living room, so I was curious to see it. Peter’s room was right off the kitchen; it had a wooden sign on the door that read, “Slave Quarters.” “That’s my joke with Inès,” he said. “Because I do so much around the house.”
The first things I noticed were the photos of me when I was eight. There were three large oval-framed pictures on the walls, and at the center of the main wall a larger photo of me and Paws hanging over a collection of potted plants next to a good-sized TV with a VCR and a Nintendo set. I was in my blue-and-white one-piece bathing suit, holding Paws’s collar.
“Isn’t that a nice picture?” Peter said. “And there’s another one of you in that cranberry-and-gray striped shirt with the Peter Pan collar you always used to wear. Remember that shirt? Do you still have it?”
“No, I’ve outgrown it.”
“And that picture,” he said, pointing to the left side of the wall. “That’s you and Karen and Paws clowning around by the Christmas tree.” I looked happy in the picture, but for some reason I couldn’t remember that last Christmas and thinking about it nauseated me. “Who’s that?” I said, pointing to another picture.
Peter chuckled. “Believe it or not, that’s Jill. The girl you just saw in that album; I know it doesn’t look like the other picture. I put your picture on the left side straight across from Jill’s because even though you’re a brunette and she’s blond, you both have that exact same
look
. That special look of love and, dare I say, adoration. That glow, that look, only comes once in a lifetime. You were both eight years old. And you know what? Both of you were looking
at me
. Two girls, the same age, one of an olive complexion and dark eyes and the other a very pale blond with blue eyes, but it’s like you’re two halves of the same person. And you’re both filled with love and wonder; when I wake up in the morning, I see these two angels and they give me the strength to start the day.”
In that picture, Jill didn’t look like a real girl like me or my friends, even Grace. Peter’s Jill was too flawless, too bright. In the photo album, she was just a regular girl with pigtails and chipmunk cheeks, but in this picture her face was slightly turned so it looked much slimmer, her curly hair was platinum blond, and her eyes were the faux blue of Christmas tree bulbs. She even had a dainty mole by her eye, which Peter referred to as her “beauty mark.” I was both angry and awed by the sight of her; her good looks drew my eye back again and again with the urgency of thirst, and whenever I looked at her I felt bad because my picture on the left side was nowhere near as radiant.
“And you see how I chose a dark frame to offset her blond hair and a gold frame to offset you. And when I got the photos blown up, they were originally square-shaped. But I can’t stand squares so I cut the pictures so they would fit into oval frames. It’s an art of mine. You don’t see any square or rectangular lines in nature so why should I have a room that’s full of right angles? I don’t even like to see squares on my ceiling. See what I did with the ceiling?”
I looked up.
“See?” Peter said, grinning. “I took this giant piece of blue fabric—Miguel, Ricky, and Richard helped me: they all held up part of it while I nailed the edges down. Anyway, I rolled it in such a way that it would resemble the waves of the ocean. I had a terrible ceiling before. Every day I would look up at all of these squares that look exactly alike, and the more I stared at those identical squares with their ugly cracks and stains the more depressed I got. But now I look up, and it’s like the ocean is right above my head. You know what I’m thinking? If I get tired of the ocean, I’ll make stars, white stars out of construction paper, Krazy Glue them, and it will be like I have the sky above me. Not like the city sky, but the country sky, like the sky of Bear Mountain State Park. Like I’m camping and the stars are all out.”
“I’ve never been camping. I’ve never seen the stars.” His ceiling did look like an ocean, so much so that I felt like I was actually swimming in it.
“You’ve missed out on so much; it’s your father,” Peter said, shaking his head. “I want to change that. I’d like to take you to Bear Mountain sometime. On the motorcycle, maybe. Wouldn’t it be romantic?”
“Yeah,” I said, staring at the ceiling.
Rubbing my shoulders, he said, “Margaux, tell me. Do you see one thing, even one little thing that doesn’t automatically make you feel relaxed and tranquil? See, I have these anxiety attacks, I wake up in the morning and my heart is pounding and I feel like I can’t breathe. The pictures manage to put me at ease, because they’re all of children and children are innocent and carefree. When I look at children’s smiling faces, I don’t feel so sad anymore.”
A few paintings of old-fashioned girls with plump cheeks and heavily powdered skin, their hair in ringlets, hung on the walls mixed in with the photographs. Peter walked about, showing me everything. On wood stands jutting from the walls stood girl figurines; Peter said some were made out of majolica, a type of porcelain. One blond-ringleted girl in a long white nightgown was holding her hand to her mouth to blow a kiss; another girl, barefoot and dressed in peasant clothes, was tending sheep.
I felt dazed, like I was in a different world. Trying to shake the feeling, I said, “So, do you always make your bed?”
“Well, in the air force, you learn those things and you never get them out of your system. Like your father: he was in the army, right? But he took everything he learned to a crazy extreme.” He paused to light one of his King 100s. “I mean, I understand your father to some degree. It’s important to be neat; not like Richard, who throws his clothes all over the place whenever he stays over, plus, his damn cigarette butts: he just can’t put them in the trash can. The other day he threw them right in the kitchen sink! Your father would never be able to take him, he’d probably shoot him the minute he met him! Now, I have to admit that I like
some
routine in my life. It just makes me feel better. Inès says that every time we go out to dinner, I always order the same thing: pot roast, mashed potatoes with gravy, and green beans . . . Oh, you noticed that? You can’t stop looking at that painting once you start. That’s Norman Rockwell’s
Curiosity Shop
.”
He walked to the painting that was hanging in the back of his room to the right of an aquarium, situated above his bed frame, that contained plants. “See how at first glance all it looks like is a girl buying some dolls from a shopkeeper? But
then
you notice how the dolls don’t have doll faces; they have the face of the shopkeeper.”
“Oh, yeah . . . creepy . . .” The shopkeeper had a wrinkled face and gray hair that looked normal on him, but grotesque on the two baby dolls.
“Yeah, if you’re just glancing at that picture everything looks normal, but then, as you look closer and closer, you start to realize nothing’s the way it should be. It’s funny; I feel like every time I look at it I find something new that’s not quite right.”
S
hortly after my twelfth birthday, Peter started saying that French-kissing would be romantic. In my mind, it was nowhere near as romantic as cuddling, but I knew that once he started nagging, he’d never let up. On the phone recently, Winnie had mentioned that she had done it a few times with a boy on her block, and she’d started pestering me to catch up to her in sexual knowledge. We were the oldest of our friends, our bodies were the most developed, and now I finally had my period, too. I figured that after the kiss I could call her up and tell her what it was like, pretending I’d done it with Ricky. Peter’s pestering had even jolted my memory: we’d done it before when he made it a game. Well, this time I said that if he wanted it done, he would have to pay me fifty cents; I had a mean impulse to somehow convey to him that if it were someone like Ricky it’d be free, but because he was old, he had to pay. I felt good about it then, like it would even out the fact that he’d gotten so many French kisses for free when I was too young to realize my own worth.
Peter paying me would be like a dowry, the fee paid for young brides in places like India; as always, Peter talked about how demented America and most of Europe were for not allowing men to wed young girls and had pointed out my period’s arrival as nature’s way of informing me it was time to marry and have babies. But in this sick culture, I was restricted from following my true instincts.
As Peter and I kissed right behind a white truck that read “Pathmark” in blue and red letters, I kept my eyes open even though one of my magazines warned that that wasn’t romantic. Peter had his eyes closed. The bristles on his face scratched me a little. I looked at this truck, numbered 31186. All the trucks were coded like that. There was a large Dumpster and stacks of shipping crates. Peter’s mouth tasted like ash and coffee and it was dry, like he didn’t have much spit.
I didn’t want to think it, but I knew that I was grossed out. I loved him, but I didn’t like the feeling of his tongue touching mine, and I tried to imagine it was Ricky’s, but I couldn’t. I knew Ricky wouldn’t have stubble. I knew Ricky wouldn’t taste like coffee.
“Fifty cents, please,” I said with a smile when we’d finished.
“I love you, sweetheart. I really love you.” He pulled me close to him, his body sucking in mine.
A month before the school year ended I found out some bad news. Winnie’s mother was transferring her to an expensive all-girls prep school. We all wanted to transfer with her, but only Irene’s family permitted it. I feared that I would return to my lowly social status at Holy Cross.
“If you want to transfer somewhere, go to public school and save me money,” Poppa said, surprising me. For years he hadn’t wanted me mixed in with public school kids, but now he didn’t seem to care. I also talked the matter over with Peter, who thought it was a great idea; the public school was only a couple blocks away from my house, so there would be no more bus to take home from Holy Cross, allowing me to arrive at his house earlier.
Once school had ended and summer began, my mother and I began to head over to Peter’s as early as nine in the morning. She even let me go to New York City on the back of Peter’s motorcycle. I was dazzled by all the Mohawked, tattooed punk rockers in Washington Square Park. I adored the music stores in the East Village that blasted heavy metal and burned incense. Punk rock girls in high lace-up boots working in clothing shops told me I would look pretty if I dyed my hair purple. On the stands outside, people sold huge fancy silver and gold crosses tied to black shoestring necklaces. One day, I bought one for eight dollars and stopped wearing my black choker. Then I cheerfully gave the change from the ten to some runaways who were begging on Bleecker Street.
Old men always challenged Peter to games of chess on the granite-topped chess tables at Washington Square Park, and he was never able to resist them. There was one gray-haired black man whom Peter called the Grandmaster. He had eyes as dark as Inès’s typewriter keys, and spoke in such a low voice that Peter had to cup his ear to hear what he was saying. As the Grandmaster was positioning one of Peter’s King 100s in his mouth, I noticed that he, like Peter, barely had any teeth. It was then I realized that Peter had stopped putting in his false teeth. When I asked him about it, he said they were uncomfortable; he had learned to smile with his mouth closed and it didn’t matter what people thought of him so long as he was comfortable in his own skin. To me, it made no difference whether he had any teeth, just as it hadn’t mattered that there was a hutch in place of the turtle’s tank or a piano where the iguana’s aquarium used to be; just as it hadn’t mattered that Rabbit was no longer fun and “Danger Tiger” was forgotten, along with Tickle Torture Time and the other games we’d played when I was eight. Just as I told myself it didn’t matter that Karen was my sister once, but now I’d never see her again.
What was important was that Mommy and I were going to Peter’s every single day now after school, not just two days a week. We never ate with Poppa anymore; he gave my mother fifteen dollars each day for our meals. Most of the time, he left it on the counter for her to take, but if he was in a bad mood he would throw it on the floor. When Inès came home she would cook things like chicken, rice and beans, or spaghetti for the “gang” upstairs, which was how Peter referred to them, while my mother, Peter, and I would head to the avenue and eat at a fifties-style restaurant called Yummy’s or at El Pollo Supremo. Occasionally, we went down Palisades to Forty-second Street and had dinner at a crowded place called El Unico. It had the cheapest prices you could imagine, and we often got heaps of white or yellow rice, kidney or black beans, yucca, fried bananas, and chicken. Sometimes Poppa complained that we never ate with him anymore, but Mommy would remind him that back when we did, I barely ate, and that if I’d continued that way, I might have died of cardiac arrest, like Karen Carpenter. I assumed Poppa’s complaints were mostly for show; secretly, he was glad we no longer ate with him. Plus, we had done things at the table that he said had made him lose his appetite, like chewing too loudly, or not wiping our faces properly; he used to say it was a wonder he could stomach any food at all, seeing my mother’s blank look or watching me roll my peas or fried potatoes across the plate with my fork. But it was our silence that had bothered Poppa the most.