But just because I had a dirty mind didn’t mean I was a whore. I was still a virgin. Nina wasn’t me. This thought made me feel better. I mustered the strength to cross the street and walk into the crowded schoolyard.
As usual, I ended up a social failure. I couldn’t bring myself to approach anyone and start a conversation. In English class, when the teacher asked us to split into groups, I chose a table by myself in the back of the room. I was still able to manage good report cards and got the highest score in eighth grade on the CAT, which was a standardized test all Washington School junior high students had to take.
I’d not only stopped fantasizing about having school friends, I’d again failed to respond to friendly overtures. Two girls had given me their phone numbers, but as with Justine, I couldn’t bring myself to call them. I was terrified they were trying to befriend me to get information out of me. Why else would they want to associate with a weirdo? After all, I had a big, juicy secret and I wasn’t going to let them get to it. Not by bullying me and not by being friendly, either.
One Sunday in early December, Peter was out with Inès for a ride and I was in his room, cushioned under a carapace of thick blankets, waiting for him to return. I’d turned the radiator off because roaches craved its heat. I never bothered to kill them anymore: it seemed like altogether too much trouble to chase them down and dispose of their bodies. Sometimes it seemed as though if I stared at the radiator long enough there weren’t roaches, like a trick of the mind had made them disappear. I was practicing this trick, staring at them until they seemed so still they didn’t exist, then blinking my eyes to make them appear again, when I heard a knock.
“Come in,” I said, figuring it was just Richard.
He was shirtless, wearing his usual green beret and army pants. “Just came to steal cigarettes.” He opened the top drawer of Peter’s commode. “Damn it, I can’t find them.” I started to get up to help but he held up his palm to halt me.
“Don’t,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you to get up. You look so comfy under there.”
It took me a couple of seconds to realize he was flirting.
“Yeah?” I said, flirting back.
“I mean, you really look cozy under there. Man, it would be a lucky guy who could get to cuddle up with you right now.”
“You want to climb in here with me? Just for a sec?” I said.
Richard laughed. He looked sort of hypnotized.
I patted the spot beside me. Or rather, Nina did. I felt her power; it was a quickening all through my body. I liked the way he was trapped there, with his hand still in the drawer. Yet there was the other part of me, the non-Nina side, that just wanted to be held and cradled in his warm arms. Something about him understood me.
Finally, I said, “Please, just come.”
“I can’t,” Richard said. “I’m sorry.” Then, hastily, “Keep warm,” and he left without cigarettes.
Strange people were all around us, but Peter and I tried not to stare; after all, we didn’t appreciate being stared at. An old man a few houses up from Peter’s spent all day looking out his open window with a nasty expression on his face. He always wore a stained white undershirt and the skin on his forehead was bunched up like the rolling-pin fur of a pug. Peter had nicknamed him “The Eagle Eye” and we made fun of him in private: Peter wrinkled his eyebrows, stretched his neck as though peering out a window, and said: “Whooo’s out the-ere? Whooo can it beee?” But eventually I didn’t want to talk about that man anymore, even to mock him, because I was sure his disgust was directed toward me.
Then there was “The Blesser.” He spent all day making the rounds at various bodegas and at Pathmark, placing his hands on different items as though blessing them. Peter and I had once watched as he drifted through Fernandez Grocery, placing his hands upon the cans of Campbell’s soup and Alpo dog food, the Santo Niño Virgin Mary candles (which, technically, we whispered to each other, should already be holy), the Fabuloso floor cleaner, the cans of Similac. Bodega owners were always tolerant of the Blesser. Who knows: maybe they were secretly grateful to him for his good wishes. Or maybe it was the fact that he wasn’t badly dressed or unwashed: he was actually quite dapper, in tweed pants, carrying a small green umbrella with a wooden bird head for a handle.
After a while, it dawned on me that Peter and I were to other people what the neighborhood eccentrics were to us. People stared and turned away. I noticed whispering. When I finally brought the subject up he said that Inès had advised him recently that we shouldn’t hang around Pathmark too much or walk together on Bergenline, because people were starting to talk. Miguel and Ricky told all their friends that I was their foster sister but they, too, must have heard the gossip.
“Sweetheart, Pathmark is where Inès’s co-workers shop; that’s where everyone around here goes. And I know for a fact that supermarkets are breeding grounds for gossip. All the bored housewives. Nothing better to do but wag their tongues,” Peter said, as he watered the philodendron plant in his room. “I think Inès is right. We have to cut down on our public appearances.”
“What is Inès saying about us? Do you think she knows?” In my mind, she had to have guessed the truth by now.
He shook his head. “I tell her how abusive your father is. She’s even said, ‘If her home life is that terrible, thank God at least she can come here.’ She understands that I’m like a father to you. It’s no different to her than taking in Miguel and Ricky’s friends. She just doesn’t like it if we raise our voices too loud. That’s the one thing that bothers her. Other than that, what can she say?”
“Do you think she feels like she has to put up with me? Like I’m a problem?”
“Well, she said something about you being quieter when you come up the steps. And toning it down a little. Sometimes you get excited and tend to giggle really loud. And she said something about your clothes. I can’t remember: did you wear a red shirt recently that said ‘Sexy’? She didn’t think that was appropriate.”
“She hates me.”
“All she wants is for you to tone it down, Margaux.”
“Why don’t you tell her to tone Richard down?”
“I’m the one dependent on her, not the other way around. I don’t know what I’d do if she ever told me to leave.”
Peter adjusted the philodendron’s grow light and then went to water the plants in his terrarium. “You know, it might just be talking now, but it could get a lot worse. I didn’t want to tell you this, but about a few weeks ago, someone approached me. It was very disturbing; he called me a bad name . . .”
“What was it?” I asked, sitting up in bed and pulling my knees to my chest.
“Child molester,” he said, shutting the lid to the terrarium.
We were in Peter’s room, watching Paws gnaw a rawhide bone. Suddenly, Peter said, “Why did you just say that?”
“What?”
“Just now you said, ‘I wish that bone was your face.’ Out of nowhere.”
“I don’t remember.” This wasn’t entirely true. I did remember a little bit, but it also just popped out. I thought of that day with Miguel on the steps, the irritation I felt; no, more like rage, actually.
“You don’t?”
“Not really.”
He sighed. “Then it must be somebody else. A demonic entity. This has happened to me, too.”
“When?”
“A long time ago, I hurt my daughters.”
I drew my knees up, hugging them. From the bed, through the window, I could see the ailanthus tree covered with frost. I loathed winter; I could never keep warm enough. Neither could the roaches, apparently. They crowded the radiator, more of them than I’d ever seen before.
“Wait, what do you mean you hurt them?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Peter then explained about how demons strike when there is an open door, an invitation. Usually, they come when a person is vulnerable, like when drunk or doing drugs. If I had a demon jumping inside me at random, did that mean I could hurt somebody?
But, as I would learn later, my fears were groundless. My “demon” bothered only Peter, no one else.
At home in bed, I wondered what Peter had done to his daughters that was so awful he couldn’t even talk about it. He must have meant he hit them, maybe even beat them. But he’d told me once that he’d never struck his children even though his wife had demanded it, so to trick her, he’d taken the child in question into his room and pummeled the bed with a slab of wood. I’d thought that was admirable, refusing to be violent. He was with me, but I provoked him. Poppa said I was a difficult person, too. Yet Peter still considered me his savior. I wasn’t sure what he meant exactly—what was I saving him from? The Devil? Years and years of studying religion had taught me that the Devil was behind every evil action we did. Since Peter’s childhood was so horrendous, did that mean the Devil had even more sway over him than other people? But now I felt I was battling, too.
“You were born on Easter day,” Peter often repeated. “The day of rebirth, new hope. You’re my rebirth, my hope, and all I have in this world. You’re God’s special gift to me.”
One January day, this mysterious demon threw an icy snowball right into Peter’s face, almost hitting him in the eye. We were at “The Place,” a small fenced-in meadow by Union Hill High School, letting Paw run through the snow and having ourselves a silly snowball fight. Peter’s snowball, soft as cookie dough, had just struck my shoulder, and in response I grabbed a chunk of ice mixed with snow and pitched it like a fastball. It smacked his left cheek, leaving a red hoof-sized mark.
“Margaux!” he said, rubbing his cheek. “That really hurt! You could have blinded me!”
“I’m so sorry. My mind just went black for a second. You know. It happens sometimes.”
Still rubbing his cheek, Peter asked, “Do you even remember throwing it?”
“No, it’s like the other time.”
We didn’t say anything for a few minutes, just watched Paws bite the snow. Union Hill’s eaves held up long, clear icicles, some of which had frozen strangely and were covered with tumorlike bumps, many of which seemed as sharp as sickles. Whenever I glanced at pointed objects, I would quickly have to look away or horrible thoughts bloated my mind: I would think of poking out my eye in the mirror and seeing the white jelly of my cornea burst, or I would think of stabbing myself in the breasts or vagina. I told Peter that I thought the Devil was putting thoughts in my head, sick images I would never have thought of on my own.
Peter had started reading self-help books, which he would quote to my mother whenever she said she felt like she’d failed as a parent because of her mental illness. “No fault, no blame,” he would say to her. He picked her up a copy of
The Power of Positive Thinking
and taught her to pound pillows and yell in order to release her suppressed anger. Peter and I lit white candles and prayed for her to get well; we even performed a crystal healing spell from one of Inès’s Wicca books. None of this worked: she was hospitalized again that February—her third time this year. Peter had ridden in the cab with us those last few times. In the emergency room, she confided to him things about her childhood she had never talked about before. When she and Aunt Bonnie were both nine, she said, a man had lured them into a barn, and, after raping my aunt, he put his fingers inside my mother until she bled. My mother’s parents didn’t call the police, because they hadn’t wanted to go to court; they thought it best to just put it behind them. Mommy would faint in school or start screaming out of nowhere, so my grandparents took her to a psychiatrist, who started prescribing her Mellaril, an antipsychotic, which made her feel like she was sleepwalking. She didn’t play anymore, but she caused no trouble either; she was, as she said to Peter, “a perfect angel” compared to Aunt Bonnie, who refused to take the pills; my grandmother disciplined Bonnie by sticking her in ice-cold showers. Her screams would reverberate throughout the house. “That was the way people raised kids back then,” Mommy told Peter.
“You’re telling me,” Peter said.
Lately, I’d begun to grind my teeth down during my sleep to such an extent that I’d wake up with terrible jaw pain. Red scratches had started to appear on my arms and legs. My periods sometimes lasted for ten days at a time and I often spotted in between.
That winter, I began to feel like the scales were tipping. Peter owed me more happiness than he gave, and so he should stop going out with Inès, who hated me and wanted me dead. When he came back on Sunday, he had plenty to say regarding her bad-mouthing me. Why was this even necessary? I sincerely doubted Inès had demanded he take her out; Inès wasn’t pushy about anything. It was he who was always pushing people beyond their limits to new ones. Did he even care that I went into long crying jags every Sunday because I couldn’t stand the loneliness? Somehow I needed to convey to him just how much suffering he caused by putting Inès first. That woman did nothing for him, no sex at all. She supplied nothing so she deserved nothing.
I started to pretend I was the notorious demon, using a guttural voice to tell Peter, “You sicken me,” or “You love your dog more than me,” or “You used to be fun, but now you just act like an old man.” These outbursts resulted in Peter’s sobs and me blaming it all on the evil spirits. I then knew there never had been an actual demon possessing me, but this realization didn’t stop me from dreaming about malevolent entities or fearing that I was in danger of losing my soul.
M
arch heralded spring, which made Peter happy: when the wind died down he could take the Gold Wing out of the basement, where it had been corralled since the first snowfall. But March also reminded Peter of my birthday, which was a month away, and my birthdays always depressed him. This year would be the big fourteen. To Peter every one of my birthdays was another baby step toward the Armageddon of our relationship. As it was, he was always complaining about my age. He said that ever since I’d turned twelve and gotten my period, my vagina had gotten a scent. It wasn’t a bad smell, he said, and would probably be exciting to most men, but because he had been molested by the tap dancers, he couldn’t tolerate the scent of a woman’s vagina, and so he wasn’t able to go down on me. I didn’t dare remind him that, unlike him, I put up with things I didn’t like: such as the pain or boredom I went through every time I pleasured him, or thinking up hateful fantasies about prostitutes, street urchins, and the like. We had a new one in which he played a sultan and I was a slave girl who’d do the dance of a thousand veils. I really hated being slave girls. I had to get down on my knees and call him “Master.” I had to pretend I worshipped his penis when, in reality, I thought genitals were the least appealing parts of boys and men. How could anyone adore something that looked like an anteater’s snout with a hairy, baggy, vein-covered sack beneath it?