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

it? I cannot worry about everything. Daughters, sisters, mothers—they are sacred because they are of your blood, and if a man does something to them, that man is wronging you directly. Through my years of experience and watching the experiences of my friends, I have found that men will wrong your sister, your mother, your daughter, and all to get at you, to try to destroy another man’s honor, because it makes them feel powerful. I know there are two sons in this family your mother takes you to see: beware of the sons—play with them in front of company, but do not go off alone with them. It is just practical advice, from someone who knows.” I didn’t dare tell Poppa I rarely saw either of the boys; that I was with Peter most of the time, both alone and with my mother.
    As we neared the apartment, Poppa pointed to a patch of graffiti on the side of a building and said excitedly, “Look, it is that macho man, Bones, that vandal they can never catch, messing up our city! Well, today, Keesy, good riddance to our old friend Bones, we never have to look at his name again!”
    At our new house, Poppa said we had to take short showers, not the leisurely ones we were used to at the apartment, where we didn’t pay for water. Our furniture was new and encased in plastic wrapping, which Poppa would not remove for fear of ruining it. The plastic was uncomfortable, and as a result no one sat on it, not even Poppa himself. As I saw from watching the mustached moving men, the couch was terribly heavy. It had oak claw feet and was long enough for Poppa to stretch his entire body across. The new TV Poppa bought was huge and had ornate mahogany curls but Poppa would rarely sit in the living room and watch it; he preferred going to his bedroom to watch his tiny TV from the old apartment. We had gotten rid of our rotary-dial phone and got a new touch-tone that lit up when I pressed the buttons, and I couldn’t help but miss the sound the rotary wheel made when I’d turn it. It had sounded like blades on a fresh rink, and would remind me of the times Poppa would take me to Rockefeller Center, where we would watch the ice-skaters.
    One day, I overheard Mommy say on the phone that she had thought we would all be happier living in our cozy one-family, side-gabled colonial house than we were in that cramped, roach-ridden apartment, but we weren’t and she didn’t know why. This was true: it seemed that ever since we got the house Poppa went into three-hour screaming tirades even more often, and having a whole house to roam didn’t stop Mommy from lying in one room with her radio or Gibson record player. There was even more for Poppa to clean, and now a greater responsibility for caring about the way things looked. If even a small amount of water spilled on the bathroom floor, Poppa yelled that the tiles were going to rise up. This was such a great fear of Poppa’s that he insisted we mop after bathing, and then he mopped again himself, the entire time yelling about how expensive it would be if the entire floor needed to be retiled. Poppa had a rule that no one could take baths during the day, when he couldn’t oversee the tiles.
    Around this time, Poppa was having more difficulty at work than usual and his especially foul mood caused him to rage about my mother’s sister Vera more often. She was the one he called “the bitch in Connecticut.” My mother had two sisters: Vera, who was three years older, and my beloved aunt Bonnie, Mommy’s twin, who lived in Ohio.
    One rainy day, while sitting in Peter’s living room after watching Old Yeller , which had made both him and me cry, my mother managed to cheer us up by getting me to do an impression of Poppa’s rant one weekend when he came home from the bar and started on the subject of Aunt Vera. “Watch this, Peter!” Mommy said. “Margaux is better than a stand-up comic!”
    So I stood up. “Okay, okay, but don’t laugh, either of you, or I’ll start laughing too, and