Tiger, Tiger

Tiger, Tiger

1

“CAN I PLAY WITH YOU?”

Nineteen eighty- five. It was spring, and cherry blossoms fell when the wind blew hard. The gay feathers and asters were in bloom, and I smelled the sweet, dizzy scent of honeysuckle fumes, which rode on the shoulders of the wind, along with that
dazzle of newly shorn pink and white cherry blossoms, and the white wisps of dandelion seed heads. It was the season of yellow jackets, those sluggish wasps that were always hanging around trashcans and soda bottles. A yellow jacket stung me on the tip of my nose when I was three, and my nose swelled to twice its size; ever since, my mother had fiercely hated them.

“Get out of here!” she yelled, waving her hand at the yellow jackets that had come, unannounced, to our picnic on the lawn at Liberty State Park with my parents’ friends Maria and Pedro, and their son, Jeff.

Poppa collected a bit of Pepsi on the tip of his plastic straw and set the straw atop our green- and- red beach blanket. The wasps all rushed to the straw and Poppa grinned.

“You see, I solve problems with common sense. They like sugar, and as long as that soda is there, they will all stay by that straw. Right, Keesy?”

Poppa began to call me Kissy (with his Spanish pronunciation he said “Keesy”) as a toddler, after he taught me to kiss his cheek goodnight and, for a while, I went around kissing everything: all my dolls and stuff ed animals, even my own reflection in the mirror. Only when Poppa was pleased with me did he call me Keesy and, occasionally, Baby Bow. Whenever he was angry he didn’t call me anything; he spoke of me in the third person. Poppa rarely used my first name, Margaux (pronounced Margo), though he had named me himself, after a 1976 vintage
French wine he once drank: Château Margaux. He never called my mother Cassie, and he never kissed or hugged her. I didn’t think anyone else was different until I saw other parents kiss, like Jeff ’s, and to be honest, I thought they were the odd ones.

Maria was my mother’s best friend and my occasional babysitter. Jeff was seven, a year older than I. At Jeff ’s house, if he agreed to play Stories, I’d agree to play G.I. Joes and Transformers. War got tiresome for me, and Jeff hated to play Ladybug and Lost Dog, because those stories didn’t include toys; these deals made our friendship possible.

Mommy and Maria were talking about the usual things mothers talk about: the benefits of vitamin C, the child snatched from Orchard
Beach, the boy recently killed on a roller coaster. “Such a shame,” Mommy would say, and “God works in mysterious ways.” Mommy kept a small spiral notebook, in which she recorded, among other things, every single disaster she heard about on the radio or TV. 

Excerpted from TIGER, TIGER: A Memoir by Margaux Fragoso. Published in March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2011 by Margaux Fragoso. All rights reserved.