Tiger, Tiger

by Galaxy Craze

  “First thing we’re going to do,” our father said, as he locked the front door, “is go to the shoe shop and buy this boy a new pair of shoes.”

  “Trainers, Dad,” Eden said. “Can I have trainers?”

  “Whatever you want,” he said, as he put his keys in the pocket of his navy coat and walked down the front steps.

  On the street we passed our neighbor Claire walking with her five-year-old twins. I had seen these children since they were small, every weekday the same routine: the brother and sister dressed alike walking with their mother or with their nanny.

  “Well, hello,” Claire said. “I haven’t seen you for ages.”

  “We were in America,” my mother said. “California.”

  “California, how nice,” she said touching her hairband on her head. “Wonderful weather.”

  She looked at my mother intensely as though searching for something beyond her face. “You look nice and tan.”

  I felt myself smiling stiffly at her. The mother was older than our mother, but her children were still young. She had straight brown hair cut to her shoulders; she wore a raincoat, straight trousers that went to her calves, and flat shoes without socks.

  “Well, welcome back,” she said, “I have to get the children to their French tutor.”

  I remembered now, as we watched her hail a taxi, that I had had the impression she didn’t approve of us. That she had seen us leaving the house with suitcases and that she had heard my mother and father fighting on the street at night.

  On the High Street, people walked past in a hurry, carrying shopping bags. A group of schoolchildren crossed the road, dressed in matching uniforms. Two teenagers kissed at the bus stop. The boy had purple hair and wore black boots to his knees. A woman stood outside the newsagent’s, smoking a cigarette.

  We walked in the direction of the park. The air was cool and the sky overcast.

  We waited at the street for the light to change; two red buses went by in a row. At the corner, a mother and her daughter stood waiting to cross. The girl was wearing a red coat with white tights and patent leather shoes; her hair was tied with a ribbon on the side. Her mother held a wrapped present under her arm. The girl and her mother looked back at us, and I smiled at them, a wide, bright smile. I stepped closer to my father, too afraid to take his hand. I looked at the line of us, Dad, Eden, and Mum. Look, I thought moving my head to the side, as though listening to a song, we’re a family.

  * * *

  In the park, Eden said he wanted to go on the swings. “Will you push me, Dad?” Eden yelled from the swing.

  “Can’t you do it yourself?” he said, fixing the scarf around his neck.

  My mother looked over her shoulder at him. They sat next to each other on the bench. “Go on,” she said, under her breath.

  “Oh, all right. Here I come, Eden,” he called through the playground. Eden held the chains of the swing, his feet on the rubber ground beneath him, waiting as our father walked casually toward him.

  I sat on the bench with my mother, with the empty space where my father had been between us. We watched Eden on the swing, his hair blowing forward, then back, his cheeks turning rose-colored from the wind. He laughed at something our father was saying.

  I looked at Eden. Sometimes, when he slept, the soft baby look of his face was still there, but he was changing; the slope of his nose, the roundness in his face, was leaving him. He was one of the older boys in the playground now.

  I remembered that I loved the smell in the park of the grass and leaves and the damp air. Once, Sati and I were lying in the sun by the side of the pond. She had her eyes closed and she said, “Describe London to me.”

  Dear Sati, I thought,

  This is what London feels like: like looking at the city through a very fine gauze. So that it is a city, but everything is softer. In California things shone in the sun; here, everything is misted. That’s why it’s beautiful. I would have never noticed if we had not been away and come back.

  I felt my mother looking at me. “Your bruise is fading,” she pushed my hair off my forehead, looking at my bruise. I was sure she knew there was something I wasn’t telling her.

  I thought of Mum, standing on the dock at the ashram, looking out at Eden and Jabe. “He’s so happy,” she had said aloud, but she had never asked us if we wanted to stay.

  “Look how happy Eden is now,” I said. “You never asked us what we wanted, Mum. You never did and you still don’t. We just got back and now we’re going to Scotland.”

  “Your grandfather isn’t well,” she said.

  “I know, but you never even phoned him while we were in California.”

  I thought of us packing the car, driving through London on a Saturday morning, when the streets were quiet and empty. Passing the towns along the way, stopping for lunch at the Little Chef on the hill. Our mother would enroll us in the village school. Then I thought of the boy, Nicholas, standing alone with his hands in his coat pockets outside the dairy wall.

  The wind blew through the playground, and she held the neck of her coat closed with her hands. Her face looked tired, cracked in the cool weather.

  “I know you’re angry with me,” she said. “I’m sorry, May. You’ll see what it’s like when you’re a mother. I’m trying my best.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not angry, Mum.”

  My mother looked away. A group of young children in school uniforms ran onto the playground, their mothers following behind them, carrying their satchels and talking to one another as they sat on the benches.

  Once, in a park in London, I watched a boy—he was six or seven years old—gather flowers for his mother from inside a wrought-iron railing, while she read a newspaper on the bench. The boy collected the flowers carefully, only picking the best ones. He held them together in his hand, a small bouquet for her.

  He carried the flowers to his mother, holding them out to her. “These are for you, Mum,” the boy had said. She looked at him from over the paper and then glanced around the park, until she saw the place behind the wrought-iron fence where he had picked them.

  “Where did you get these flowers?” She took his wrists so tightly the flowers fell from his hands.

  He looked at her but couldn’t speak.

  “You took them from over there,” she said angrily, her face close to his. “You’re not meant to pick the flowers in the park. They’re for everybody to look at.”

  When she let go of his hands, he stood staring at the place where she had held his wrists. His mother watched him for a moment before taking up the paper beside her. The purple flowers had fallen together, except for a few scattered below the bench.

  I thought of that boy. He would be Eden’s age by now, the softness of his face leaving him. And I knew that in some way, that day when his mother scolded him for picking the flowers, something in him would have changed toward her, as it would through his life, changing the full, complete love a young child feels for his mother.

  We left the park before it was dark and walked home along the High Street. We passed the café whose menu of carry-out food we had looked at in our room in the ashram. The street was busy with people carrying packages from the shops or standing at the bus stops, on their way home from work. We passed the bookstore, the chemist, and the bank. Sale signs were posted in the shop windows and advertisements on the bus.

  On the corner, we could see the lights on through the windows of Tiger, Tiger. I saw people inside, but when we were near I realized the windows were bare and the shop inside empty. A sign posted on the door gave the name of the store that would be taking its place, a clothing chain that already had two other shops on the High Street. What I had thought were people inside was only a reflection of the people waiting at the bus stop across the street.

  “Oh, Mum,” Eden said. “I told Jabe I would send him a present from here.”

  “Who’s Jabe?” our father asked, as he stared into the empty windows of the shop. Inside, in the bare room,
were a ladder and paint can.

  “He’s Eden’s friend on the ashram,” our mother said.

  “Remember, Dad?” Eden looked up at him. “I told you about him this morning.”

  I looked at my father’s reflection in the shop window. We would live apart, and there would be pieces of each other’s lives we would never know. We continued down the High Street; the sky was dark blue and the yellow streetlights shone against it.

  “Maybe we’ll go round to the Indian for dinner if you’re not too tired,” our father said. “On second thought, I’ve got some delicious olive oil that Rafael brought me back from his farm in Italy. Maybe I’ll make pasta. Would you like that?”

  “That sounds good, Simon,” I heard our mother say.

  “Let me just pop into Ian’s and pick up a bottle of wine,” he said.

  Mum, Eden, and I waited outside on the pavement in front of the wineshop. Mum looked into the window, decorated with wooden crates and bottles of wine and champagne. A double-decker bus went by and three girls my age jumped off, laughing and holding hands as they ran up the street.

  Dad came from the shop, the narrow paper bag in his hand. “Got a nice bottle of Chianti,” he said.

  My mother smiled, a smile that seemed too weak to hold on her face. A smile that lived for one heartbeat.

  There was firmness in my father’s voice, quickness in his step. He stopped on the corner, buttoning the top button of his coat, as though he were closing himself against her.

  “Dad?” Eden said. “What are we having for pudding?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said, taking his money clip from his pocket. “Why don’t you two run over to Raj and pick up some ice cream, and your Mum and I will get dinner started.” He leafed through the bills, pulled out a five-pound note, and handed it to Eden.

  “Thanks, Dad.” Eden held the bill between his hands.

  “Loseley’s,” our father said. “It’s the best.”

  Eden put the five-pound note in his pocket as we turned the corner to the market.

  In the shop we walked the aisles to the freezer, looking through the glass at the boxes of ice cream. We found the Loseley’s chocolate and vanilla that said, “made with Devon milk” on the box and took it to the register. An Indian woman stood behind the cash register. She held the five-pound note up to the light, looking at the watermark.

  We carried the ice cream down the street to our house. The lights were on in the kitchen, and we could see inside. We saw our mother and father making dinner. She opened a cupboard door while he filled a pot of water at the sink. Our mother set the table. The bottle of red wine stood on the counter.

  Eden and I stood outside our house in the night, watching them. I imagined us walking along the hallway to the kitchen. We would sit down at the table together: father, mother, daughter, and son. And if someone, anyone—a stranger—walking down our street tonight looked into our windows, they would see a family sitting down to dinner.

  Why was this so hard for us? In Scotland my grandfather would say to her, Why would you give all this up, to live with the gypsies, to live on an ashram? And our mother would look at him, startled, as though she had never thought that she was giving anything up. As though she had only thought she would be gaining more.

  Through the window, I saw my father say something to her. They were not standing far apart, but he reached out to her. He put his hand on her arm, pulling her close to him. When she was near, he wrapped both arms around her and she leaned her face against the side of his neck.

  I remembered a day in the park, skipping behind my mother and father, telling Eden to skip beside me.

  “Skip with me!” I told him, as our parents walked ahead, arguing.

  The tap of our shoes on the pavement, the bounce of trees and grass, pretending to everyone who walked by—to the man sitting on the park bench, to the children playing on the sloping lawn—that we were a happy family.

  Eden walked up the steps, the bag of ice cream in his hand.

  “May?” he said, turning back to look at me. “Are you coming?”

  A man on the street walked his dog. He held the evening newspaper beneath his arm. Two people stood talking at the bus stop. The woman held her coat around her with her hands. The man looked away, his hands in the pockets of his suit jacket.

  Eden stood outside the green door. The lights were on in the houses across the street. I looked at the billowing shapes of curtains, at the people inside moving from room to room. The glow of yellow lights, as though a fire were burning inside.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank my editor Elisabeth Schmitz for refining and focusing the story and the writing.

  My agent Kim Witherspoon for her sound and wise advice.

  Anna Van Lenten for reading drafts and generously offering good advice.

  Sam Brumbaugh for his support and encouragement while I was writing this book.

  Once again I am so happy to be part of the Grove/Atlantic family and want to thank Morgan Entrekin, Deb Seager, Charles Woods, Gretchen Mergenthaler, Michael Hornburg, and Jessica Monahan.

  My family: Jett Craze, Sophy Craze, Polly Smith, Edward Craze, Victoria Craze, Carol Shiff … Thank you. India. Rowan and Tess xoxo.