During Peter’s massages, I always operated his penis like a yo-yo. A yo-yo is a curious creation because it essentially does nothing. It comes up empty, like a bucket sent down a dried-up well. Yet people can do tricks with yo-yos. I’d coil Peter’s penis in my hand and make that same up-down motion. Coil my mouth around it, like a fangless rattlesnake devouring a live mouse. First the head: taut, pink helmet with its single alien eye. Then I took in the veins, the rough-clasped skin full of ridges, tight and bunchy at the same time, that skin down there that looked like the skin of someone who’d been burned badly, crimped the way it would be if you put your hand in flames and then pulled it out.
Since I had sinus trouble, I couldn’t always breathe. I stopped to spit into tissues. I’d tap Peter’s leg when I needed one. Sometimes I’d let him push my head down, even though it hurt my jaw and made me gag. He always felt guilty about doing it but I’d say it was okay, whatever made him come faster. My jaw prickled; then, when the protective numbness lifted, it felt like it was being pressed under a rolling pin.
He wanted me to talk dirty. Or pretend to be other girls besides Nina, which I hated. My favorite thing was to lie on my belly with my head down on a pillow and let him mount me from behind and rub against my butt until he came. This required the least work and energy; I was tired because ever since my mother had stopped coming, he asked for something sexual almost every day. If I didn’t give in, he would go silent and start crying and saying I didn’t love him or that I thought he was ugly or too old.
When he rubbed himself against my butt, he made me keep my face down; he didn’t want to see my face at all. Usually, the bed was elevated so we could watch movies or read. But when he had me lie there, he turned the switch until the creaky hospital bed was all the way down. Then I’d take off my clothes, fall on the bed like a bunch of dropped jacks from a sack. I’d stick my head into the white pillow and breathe the sweaty scent of my own hair. I could feel the springs of the mattress beneath my naked rib cage; they always felt comforting. I’d let my hair fall over my cheeks and my mind go blank like a TV channel with nothing but snow.
It was at least peaceful then. His bones would come upon me like the bones of the whale enclosing Jonah. I would be nestled in this black stomachy sea. I would feel the arrow of his penis against the mushy-bread skin of my buttocks. His face would climb into my hair; his bones would link to mine. Then the soggy feeling. Then the tissues.
I would stand up and look at myself in the mirror. I would always look at myself.
“Admiring yourself again, Nina?” Peter would say.
Until I discovered Nina, I lived unplugged. I was like a food container, or the paper that held a Popsicle, a gum wrapper, cellophane, plastic, aluminum foil, a ziplock baggie. A disposable thing. Someone could eat the contents and the thing that held it would be thrown in the garbage. I was many disposable selves. I floated on the flat, sad shapes of ghostly girls, into a rotting shapeless bog until Nina, their queen and ruler, came to reign over them, over me. She told me I was pretty; I believed it. She told me I had power; I believed it.
Mr. Nasty, Peter’s specter, was born around the same time as Nina. It started with the dirty talk Peter wanted to hear during the massages. Whenever I talked dirty, he asked me to call him “Mister.” Never was I to call him Peter or any of the names I used to address him in letters or any of the series of names with which he signed his daily letters to me: Peter, Daddy, TBG (Teddy-Bear-Grizzly), Victor. “Call me Mister,” he said. “Pretend I’m a stranger. I could be any man. Any race, any height, any age. I could be anyone at all.” Peter instructed me what to say; a typical fantasy sounded like this:
Mister, can I see your big man-thing?
I’m afraid it’s too big for you. Too big for your little girl hole.
(gasp) Mister, it is big! I’m afraid.
You’ve got a little tiny girl hole. I don’t know if it will fit.
I’m afraid, Mister. Can I suck it first?
If you want to.
Can I suck your big huge man-thing?
It might be too big to get your little mouth around it.
I know how to open very wide. For my daddy.
Oh, you like to suck your daddy?
I know how to put it all the way in my tiny baby-girl
throat. It’s so tight.
Just like my little baby-girl
hole. Daddy likes to lay me on my stomach and
then he fucks me so hard. It hurts me but I like it. I like to be hurt when
Daddy fucks me because I’ve been so naughty.
And so it went: I played prostitutes, orphans, belly dancers, pixies, angels, nymphs, geisha girls. Peter played johns, fathers, priests, doctors, sultans, kings, as well as the infamous Mr. Nasty. When playing Mr. Nasty, he pushed my head down really hard and fast during the blow jobs. As Mr. Nasty, he pretended to have rough sex with me as I lay on my stomach and whimpered or pretended to cry.
Occasionally, I’d ask Peter to lick me again, thinking at least it’d be fair that way. He’d never performed oral sex on me, save that one time in the basement. But he kept saying he couldn’t; I was younger then and now I was the age of the tap dancers who had forced him to do that. He said he would try to overcome his fear and when he was ready, he’d let me know.
Peter often “reimbursed” me for the sex, not just through my Story addiction, but also in deals, like agreeing to watch three movies in a row that I picked out from the video store or to take me three times around the scenic road instead of the usual once or to treat me to a thick vanilla milk shake at one of the many diners we frequented. He might have done these things regardless but I took them as more payment. I was afraid that if I did anything at all without bartering for at least some small thing in return, he might think I enjoyed it, and not understand that I paid a huge price to myself. After sex, I got the same feeling as I once had looking at the Garbage Pail Kids. Like something hideous was getting into me. I couldn’t stand the sight of my face anymore. Neither could he, but he denied it. He didn’t want to look at me. He said,
Sweetheart, you’re beautiful, a perfect ten, what man would not want
you, but we’ve pretended that we were father and daughter for so long that at
some point it just stuck; you’re my daughter. That’s why I need to pretend it’s
not you
. But that was a lie. I knew it was because I was thirteen now, too much like a real woman for his tastes.
Whenever we used pretend names, it was easier for me, too. Names meant real characters, and that made our interactions more playful, more like a story. Mr. Nasty was graceful and clean-shaven and his face was always covered with a strange shadow like men had in film noir movies. But Nina was filmed in a different light, always a vivid kind of Technicolor. She didn’t look like any actress or model I’d ever seen. Her eyes were a deep root-beer color, her hair a sleek, luxuriant black. She had a gymnast’s body. Her hair took up most of her; it came down to her butt like the belly dancer I’d seen many years ago with Poppa. She
never
wore any clothes, whereas I was rarely ever naked. Since Richard was so fond of always knocking on the locked door, it was never a good idea for me to take off too many clothes, lest I had to hastily dress.
While I was Nina, I never got bored, because she filled me. Though she was smaller than I was, her presence was like a soda can that was constantly being shaken. She fizzed all through me, animating my blood and eyes. Her heart was so big it flushed my face. Most of Nina consisted of heart; not heart in a sappy-love way, but heart in the way a timber wolf is all heart. Nina was heart and mouth and hand. To conjure her, I would walk from Peter’s bed to the wooden door, twist the little golden lock into place, stand by the door for about twenty seconds, and take three deep breaths.
Deep breath, deep
breath
, Sister Mary used to say when she laid me down on that white bed in her tiny nurse’s office; she’d put her hand on my chest, maybe to feel my heart, and whisper,
Deep breath, deep breath
. And for some reason, that simple thing was so hard, to gather all that thick air and hold it in me like a balloon being blown up; I’d almost cry with the fear that I wouldn’t be able to do it and she’d be disappointed. So I took three deep breaths by the door, for good luck. I stood there and felt Nina ripple through me; I tossed my hair back, and strutted to Peter. Then I sashayed into the bed, slowly took out his penis like a sorceress releasing a genie, like Cleopatra awakening her asp. Cleopatra had died by snakebite, or so the story went—
she
died beautiful, as those who die by poison always do.
O
ne summer day, we climbed up a small slope to get to one of the waterfalls. It had rained a lot the day before, so the falls were filled with white foamy water that tumbled and charged over the smooth brown rocks.
We sat on a rock by the waterfall, listening to it hiss. “We’d better enjoy the time we have now. In high school, you’ll probably find a nice, young boyfriend and I’ll be out of the picture, right? Like that old saying: if you love something, set it free. Eventually, I’ll have to do that with you, sweetheart. You can’t be stuck with an old man for the rest of your life.”
“Well, maybe I’ll have a boyfriend here or there but nothing serious.”
Peter smiled stiffly. “I’m not going to ever be able to support you. You know that, right? Not on my puny check. It’s barely enough to keep me going. I’m totally dependent on Inès. I used to give her a hundred for rent but I can’t even do that anymore. Thank God there’s so much work to do around the house or I wouldn’t be any good to her at all. And she’s so compassionate that even then, she’d never put me out. I’m lucky to have her.”
“Well, when I’m eighteen, we can marry. And I’ll find a good job and support us both. We’ll get away from New Jersey forever.”
Peter smiled crookedly.
“You don’t think I’d make a good wife?”
“No, I was just thinking maybe three would be the charm. It’s always been my lucky number. I’ve been married twice before. The first time I was only twenty-one. She was fifteen. Anyway, I forged her parents’ names on the papers.”
“You could do that for me! Then I don’t have to wait till I’m eighteen.”
“I don’t know. Those were different times. I mean nowadays I’d probably be thrown in jail for something like that.” He grimaced. “Her parents eventually had it annulled. At her request. She met another guy. He was the manager of a movie theater. After they got together, I would find a tree to hide behind and look into their apartment windows with a pair of binoculars. Once, I saw them taking a bath together.”
“Did they see you?”
He shook his head. “Another time I followed them in my car. I was planning to run their car off the highway. Anyway, I tailgated them for a while; they accelerated to try to lose me but I sped after them. I must’ve clocked about a hundred. Went on like that for a while—cat and mouse. All I could think about was the two of them in that bathtub. I hated her for that. But there was another part of her I knew I couldn’t kill. I can’t explain it. She was so pretty, with a face just like a porcelain doll. I just couldn’t go through with it. I still loved her.” He dabbed at his eyes with a tissue. “I guess I’m a romantic at heart.”
He hugged me and we watched the waterfall. Then I asked him if that was the only time he’d come close to killing someone.
“There was one other time. My father used to beat me and my brother in an attic room. Once he knocked me unconscious. Then, after my parents divorced, it was relatives, foster homes, then the boys’ school. I lived with my mother for a short time; she used to punish me by making me stand up all night. I would get so tired I would fall on the floor fast asleep. You know what she punished me for? Laughing in my sleep. She had to work in the morning, so she needed her rest. But it was probably the only time I ever did get to laugh.”
I squeezed his hand, feeling so sorry he’d lived this tragic life. No one had loved him and he’d been totally on his own. He continued, “When I was thirteen and my brother was sixteen, he stole a gun and we went to kill my father in his hotel room while he slept. But he checked out early.”
“And do you think you would have done it?”
He nodded. “My brother would’ve taken the first shot and then I would have shot him next, round after round. I would’ve felt like he deserved it. You know, he didn’t even leave us a penny when he died! Willed everything to his sons from his second marriage.” He shook his head. “But he wasn’t all bad. When I was older, about eleven or twelve, he took me swimming a few times in the lake. That was nice. He also used to give me quarters, piles of them. Anyway, sometimes they passed and sometimes they didn’t. They were counterfeit coins.” Peter threw a rock into the falls.
At the waterfall, I discovered that Peter’s second wife was a dark-skinned Ecuadoran woman, and when they’d traveled through the deeply racist parts of the South, they weren’t allowed to rent a room anywhere. So they’d made love in the car. Peter said he and his second wife had four daughters.They’d used Catholic birth control—the withdrawal method. I asked him if he was in contact with them and he said they didn’t live around here. He’d send Christmas cards every year but they rarely ever sent any back, and this hurt his feelings. He then started talking about all the odd jobs he worked. I could tell by the way his mouth tightened that his kids were a sore subject.
To support his large family, he’d worked as a parking valet, a New York City cabbie, and finally a window washer. He didn’t begin his career as a locksmith until much later, after his second wife had divorced him. But he was used to moving around, changing careers. Even as a kid, he had to earn his own money; when he ran away from the all-boys’ school (six times!) he worked as a shoe-shine boy on street corners, and washed dishes as an adolescent, starting out on a cross-country trip with only a quarter in his pocket. Before he met his second wife he had even worked as a male prostitute for a short span of time in San Francisco, where men paid to give him blow jobs. The best job he’d held was a short-term gig as a dance instructor, and by far the worst stint he’d ever had was the job washing windows. “You had to climb tall buildings held up by just this flimsy belt,” he said, as we held hands by the waterfall. “I was dead tired from taking turns with my wife waking up at night and tending to our first daughter, who had colic. Oh, she used to scream and holler. And back then, things weren’t easy. They didn’t have disposables; you had to hand-wash the diapers. I had four kids, and all those years I was stuck in a job I hated to support them all and make sure
they
got to college. Boy, I hated that job. I’d have to start dressing at five to get there. I’d dread it every second. One thing you learn is
never look down
. I looked down once and the world went zigzag. It was as though an ant farm was being tipped over by some cruel kid and I was a little ant trapped at the bottom.” He sighed and lit a cigarette. “Anyway, when I was about ten, my brother dared me to climb up the side of a stone wall, a wall about the size of the Pathmark water tower and just as steep. I wanted to impress him, so I did it. The problem? I looked down. That was when I froze, right in the middle of the wall. Just froze there like time had stopped. My brother had to talk me through it. ‘Keep going. Don’t look.’ ”