Now, alone in the attic, I saw the pink wood swing hanging by brown braided ropes, looking shabbier than usual. I sat on it and started to push with my feet, but soon realized I couldn’t get myself high enough.
I went to Blackhead’s tank and saw him huddled in a corner. “Wake up!” I said, banging on the glass. “Wake up!”
When I saw his furry head rise, I lifted the chicken wire that was his ceiling. I pictured seeing the wire above, with all the round holes in it, suddenly lifting, and the hand surging down, and taking my body into it. I was rising, rising with the hand that was holding me just so snugly, and yet I was afraid. Blackhead was afraid. Poor Blackhead! I kissed his fur. I put his body to my face and breathed in his hot rodent smell. Poor, poor baby to be lifted from his nice small warm tank! But it was nicer outside; there was more space. I whispered this into his pink ear, but still the little heart beat too fast inside my hand.
My eyes turned back to the glass tank. Inside was a plastic yellow bowl that contained brown food pellets and a water bottle with a long metal tip. The wood shavings he slept on smelled sweet and dusky.
I set Blackhead on the floor. “Go, Blackhead! Run! Run!” I yelled, clapping my hands. But he wouldn’t run; he just turned about in circles and sniffed at the floor. I knew I should put him back, but instead I headed for the stairs.
Downstairs, everyone erupted from hiding places, yelling, “Surprise!” There was a cake on the kitchen table, with candles. Peter lit one; then he touched that newly lit candle to all the others, until they, too, were burning. I looked to the faces around me, all lit. Flames were in the eyes of Ricky, Miguel, and Inès, in the eyes of my mother.
“Make a wish,” Peter said, and I had to think of what my wish should be.
I blew hard and the flames turned to blackened wicks. All had extinguished but two, which Peter gently blew out for me.
“What was your wish?” he whispered, leaning over so I could whisper in his ear.
Normally, I wouldn’t have told, for fear of destroying the wish’s power, but at this moment, I felt giddy enough to get away with anything. “A tiger’s tail,” I told him.
“Eight is the most beautiful age for a girl,” said Peter, after I opened my presents. “Though it makes me sad to see you growing up.”
I was a little sad about it, too. When I was four or five, people would tell me that I would grow up, but I wouldn’t believe them. I would not believe that my abilities as a child would end—fitting my body under tables, squeezing it under chairs and into tight corners. How I treasured this animal freedom, the joy of being able to tuck my legs and arms under, to slip through a hole in a fence or in the space between a giant tree trunk and a brick wall; this was my glory. Like a mouse living in an opening where the wall has cracked, or the brown recluse who builds her web in a wood beam in the ceiling and can see everything, or the ant that has a whole city of intersecting tunnels in the dirt, it’s the glory of Blackhead . . .
Blackhead! I started to cry, and covered my face with my hands.
“What’s wrong, honey?” Peter knelt on the cracked kitchen linoleum and took both my hands in his.
“I let the guinea pig loose.”
There was no belt around the waist of Peter’s red sweatpants that he could use to hit me with, as Poppa would have done. There was no anger in his eyes, only alarm, which moved like a virus, from one aqua eye to the other, and made his face rigid in a way that I had not seen before. And still, his first impulse was to console me with a “Don’t worry, we’ll get him,” springing to his feet with a masculine power that electrified him all over, from the gray-blond sprinklings of hair on his arms, to his sandy-silver bangs, to his long, determined feet in their light, white sneakers. He quickly raced downstairs to fetch Ricky and Miguel, and when he returned, the three of us followed him upstairs, slouched to our knees, beginning the hunt. We looked under the bottom bunk bed; we cast clothes aside and invaded the closet; we inspected corners and checked under blankets. After we had checked everywhere else, Peter and Miguel hefted the bunk bed, and sure enough, the poor thing had balled up his body in the dustiest, driest, saddest corner. His glossy black, brown, and white fur was covered with dust and cobweb filaments that Peter carefully removed.
“This little fellow will be just fine,” Peter said. “I’m glad we found him when we did.”
“If we didn’t find him,” Ricky piped up, his voice taking on the thin pitch of boyish excitement, “his teeth might have kept growing. He needs to chew on wood to keep his teeth from getting long. Otherwise, they could grow right over his mouth and he won’t be able to eat.” He paused, and then, in a dire tone: “If a few months had passed, we might have found just a skeleton.”
“Well, that didn’t happen,” Peter said hastily, returning the guinea pig to his tank, where he gratefully sucked on his bottle. “And it was kind of fun looking for him, like a game of hide-and-go-seek. The most important thing is that Margaux’s birthday wasn’t spoiled.”
In my peripheral vision, I caught Miguel rolling his eyes. We watched Blackhead for a bit to make sure he was okay, and he was—he drank his water, kicked wood shavings into his usual nest, and went to sleep.
“Now that’s the life,” Peter chuckled, heading back downstairs.
Remesagil Jones Farm Market, the store that Peter took me to one Friday in May, was located on Bergenline Avenue across from the newspaper stand where my mother often bought her lottery tickets. It was one of the largest fruit-and-vegetable stores in Union City, boasting items with exotic names that, peering through his square reading glasses, Peter read off to me: Holland tomatoes, acorn squash, green and wrinkled chayote (which I said reminded me of Play-Doh), nanderines, Swiss chard, escarole, napa, knob celery. I laughed at some of the funny-sounding names, and when Peter started to bag some kale and turnips that were located toward the back of the market, I wandered off to rip the little plastic baggies off three at a time and press the scale to see the red arrows flit up like startled tongues. I loved this store—its fecund colors and dark crisp odors—I loved the giant cantaloupes that were like round bumpy suns but had surfaces that made me think of moons, and I wondered whether some of the swirling flies felt like astronauts when they perched upon them, eyelashlike legs lifting inquisitively.
Peter came up to me and said, “I almost forgot. Fiver is sick.” Fiver was another rabbit; the half-grown son of Porridge and Peaches. “Do you think you could pick out a little something to make him feel better?”
“Oh, he loves carrots,” I said, racing to those, but then I saw something green, shaped like elf slippers. “Actually, I want these!”
Peter refused me at first, saying they were pricey; then he gave in, as usual. I put the green beans in a baggie that he held open. Saying he couldn’t afford anything more, he got into the long checkout line. His face seemed tight, impatient. Generally, he was always smiling. He had said a few times that I brought him total happiness, and that my love was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He had also said that he wanted to marry me when I was eighteen; I knew enough math to know that was only ten years away, and I was very happy about it too, because married people saw each other every day of the week, not just Mondays and Fridays. Married people could have babies, and they could live wherever they wanted. I told Peter I wanted to move to Westport, Connecticut, and live by a lake. When I told my mother I was going to marry Peter when I turned eighteen, she said, “You can marry him in heaven.”
Peter continued to say how he felt sad that he couldn’t make a baby with me now, because I had no working eggs. Sometimes he would say, “How’s your belly?” a code that meant he was imagining me pregnant. Other times he would make a humming sound that meant he was picturing me naked. I didn’t know why, but on occasion, it made me furious when he did this and I felt like hitting him.
I had entered the basement by only two of its three entrances: in the winter, by going down the soft wooden steps, or lately, because the weather had been warmer, through the heavy green doors at the back of the yard. But this time Peter, taking my hand, led me to the small cement slope at the front of the house and brought me to that narrow, oval-shaped wooden door. On the way, I glanced at the somber pink bear, even more covered in ivy than the year before, and the ivy now totally covered the mermaid’s tail. Peter kept saying he was going to trim it before it hid the statues completely, but he hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
“Are you mad? Are you mad?” I asked as we entered the basement. I knew by the way Peter was silent that there was something wrong with him. I felt a little afraid that he might be getting like Poppa, changing from happy to angry all the time, and that I’d never be able to predict or control him again.
Peter surprised me by saying Fiver was in the basement. He was sick all the time and, right now, he had to be kept quarantined from the other rabbits.
“Poor little guy! He’s all by himself !” I said, rushing to the Pathmark shopping cart where Fiver was kept. “He must be sad alone here in the dark.”
“No,” said Peter, quickly. “He’s not. Rabbits enjoy darkness. They live in warrens underground, in the wild, and when they’re kept outside, the hutches need to be placed in shady areas. They like coolness and damp air. So don’t think Fiver is unhappy here; he’s really quite peaceful.”
But he didn’t look peaceful to me at all; he looked depressed. He was hunched in a corner with his head down, but not sleeping. He had a newspaper floor and a bowl of rabbit pellets and a bottle with a long metal tip. I took a bean from my pocket and stuck it through the mesh of Fiver’s cart, but he wouldn’t come over to take it no matter how I coaxed him.
“Is he going to get better? Or will he die?” I said, expecting the truth from Peter.
“Well, I think he’ll improve,” said Peter, though he didn’t seem all that sure. “I’ve been buying the expensive brand of food, and giving him medicine from an eyedropper. As you can see, his home is tidy, his newspaper’s changed every day, and he has plenty of water. I wouldn’t worry about it. Sweetheart,” he said, turning away from Fiver and taking both of my hands, “will you keep your promise to me?”
“What promise?”
“You said you would do anything. You made a promise.”
“I don’t remember.”
“For the beans, remember? I said they were too expensive, just to feed to a rabbit; I said we should get carrots instead, and you already had them in your hands, a bunch of them; you said no, you wanted these, and that you would do anything in the world to have them.
Remember?”
“Maybe. I guess so. I don’t really remember.”
“Well, you definitely said it,” he said, softly.
“Okay.”
We stood in silence for a second and then I began to talk quickly. “Remember the story of Jack and the Beanstalk? Do you think the pods are magic? They’re like magic eggs. Maybe I’ll get pregnant if I eat one.”
Peter looked pleased when I said that, as I knew he would.
“Some kids at school were saying you can get pregnant from swallowing watermelon seeds.”
“That’s silly. Kids have so many misconceptions. Parents shouldn’t lie to children about how babies are made. Kids should know the truth. The body is a natural, beautiful thing. I wish the world wasn’t full of so much shame.” He looked upset, as he did whenever he talked about the way the world was, and then he said, “Remember I told you how babies were made? I showed you my babymaker. My penis.”
I didn’t remember seeing Peter’s before. “I saw Poppa’s once. We took showers when I was younger.”
“And why did he stop?”
“He said I was getting too old.”
Peter shook his head and said something again about the trouble with society. Then I said, “Well, how is a baby made?”
He looked pleased with this question. “Human beings have organs that are magical. They combine with each other in this really beautiful, pleasurable way. Don’t you remember anything I told you?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Imagine that: elementary schools teach children all about how plants reproduce but tell them nothing about the way human babies are conceived,” he said. “Talk about repressing everything. I don’t understand this society. Our body parts are beautiful and natural and we should be free to expose them wherever we go. I, because I’m male, have a penis and testicles; you, because you are a female, have a vagina and clitoris. These aren’t dirty words; it isn’t wrong to say them. It isn’t wrong to speak the truth. I bet you didn’t even know the names for your own reproductive organs until I told you.”
“My mother calls it my private part. And she said once that no one should touch my private part. No one should touch my fanny either. But I don’t think I agree,” I said, hastily. “My parents are repressed.”
“No kidding!” said Peter, looking even more wound up. “Think of a society that is so screwed up that you’ve got these untouchable parts and these are the same parts that happen to create the most pleasure, and everyone is brainwashed into believing that a perfectly natural thing is disgusting and wrong. And to think that these people pull their children’s pants down to spank them and then they tell their children that no one should ever see them with their pants down.”
“I know! I hate being spanked! And I don’t know why I should take my pants down. Can’t I be spanked with my pants on?”
Peter shook his head. “It’s mixed messages, all of it. I’m sure your father feels perfectly justified telling you to take your underwear down, making you lie across his lap to be beaten with his belt; yet if he were to discover that anyone asked you to take down your pants, for the purposes of letting you know how beautiful you are, or to give you pleasure and joy, your father would probably kill that person. I have no doubt that your father would get his gun and shoot me if he found out I’ve seen you naked, yet he’s nothing but a hypocrite and a child abuser. Oh, the big man, beating a defenseless child! With his belt, no less! Do you have any idea how sick that is? I know he’s part of the culture; he was probably treated that way. Just passing it down. Generation to generation. No one stops to think.”