Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragoso Page A

one of the wooden ceiling beams. He began to pace.
    “They tell you it’s dirty; then they make you undress in front of them. When I was in a boys’ school in upstate New York, the nuns used to whip us in the showers. In the showers, they would line us up and beat us! Yeah, like they didn’t get some kind of a thrill out of looking at our naked bodies. You know why those nuns were so cruel? Sexual repression. Sexual repression and rage. This is what comes from all the repression in society. Do you know what I believe? I’ve even read literature on this. I believe that if children were to grow up with sexuality, as though it was normal and natural, which it is . . . If they were allowed to get joy and pleasure out of their God-given parts, this world would be a much better place.”
    “I agree,” I said. I couldn’t follow all the big words he said, but I got the gist. Like me, he hated rules and couldn’t stand how adults were always trying to leave kids out of everything important. Yet something about this talk also made me uneasy.
    Peter went on, “Mothers in certain parts of Africa massage their infants’ genitalia before bedtime to help them sleep. There are tribes in the world that marry girls off at eight or nine. In certain tribes, you would be of marriageable age.” He paused. “I love you. I want you to feel joy and I want you to be able to give me joy. There’s nothing wrong with that. Can I show you? What I showed you before? My penis? You didn’t really look at it. I think you were afraid. But I want you to know that our sexual organs are not ugly, they’re not dirty, and they’re not bad. They’re beautiful and you don’t have to be ashamed. So can I show you?”
    I climbed into the cart with Fiver and said, “Look, Peter! I’m a rabbit!”
    I started to drink from the water bottle, tasting the sweet metal and the sweet, warm water. I picked up the sad, curled pod, offered it again to Fiver, and when again he refused it, I ate it myself. It was so good, so crisp and green. I liked the feeling that the Pathmark shopping cart gave me, with its moist, strong-smelling newspaper beneath my hands and knees, its rectangular shape, the way the metal was crisscrossed, and the fact that it was on wheels. Peter came and picked me up gently, placed me on my feet; but I instantly sank again, to my hands and knees, to crawl on the ground like a baby, to feel the cold, hard floor beneath my hands.
    “I’m a baby now, not a rabbit. No, wait, I’m a baby rabbit! Chase me!”
    “Margaux,” he said, looking disappointed. “You are eight years old and you know better.” I hated it when adults told me I should know better, or that I already knew better. Peter had never told me that before, and I couldn’t help but worry again that he was changing.
    “Okay! Okay!”
    He helped me up. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound like your father.”
    “Well, you are starting to sound like him.”
    “I’m sorry. That’s the last thing I want. Anyway, it’s true you’re getting older. Not that you should stop playing childish games; I mean, you are a child, and I hope we can play children’s games forever. But we can also do more mature things with each other, things that will give us both great pleasure. You made a promise earlier: you said you would do anything, and I would like you to try to do something very special and nice. Something that people in love, like we are, do together.”
    I stood there, as still as possible, and watched him take down his pants. He wasn’t wearing any underwear. This time, I looked right at his penis, just to please him. The whole contraption looked like a bunless hot dog with two partly deflated balloons attached. The hair around his penis and testicles seemed stiff, like one of those steel combs used to groom dogs. I preferred my private area to his; it didn’t have hair and looked like a woman’s compact, the kind with the rouge and a little silver mirror. But I