They had a gay time too, going out to ballrooms and drinking till one in the morning. His mother was a little concerned that Margaret was too much fun, but he knew that she only had eyes for him. Everything made them happy: their little tiny house on Colonial Street, their first rickety car.
“And God rest your Grandmother’s soul,” he said. “She gave me so many good times, that woman.”
“Grandmother — our grandmother — was the monkey-girl?” my brother exclaimed.
“Our grandmother was so not part monkey,” I asserted. “She barely got off the couch. Remember once the remote control fell off the arm of the couch and she just left the television on all night?”
“Monkeys get old too, you know. And look at the two of you,” Grandfather said. “Obviously part monkey. Do you think it’s normal to tear around the house all day like lunatics? You can’t sit down in class either. I heard it from one of your teachers. Terrible, really.”
Then my brother started acting like a monkey, jumping from the couch to the chesterfield. And Mother came in and sent us to bed.
“Oh, leave them alone,” Grandfather told her. “They can’t help it. Throw them some bananas, or let them sleep out in the trees. It’s cruel to keep those little animals inside. Send them back to the wild!” he cried as we climbed into bed and prepared ourselves for the jungles of our dreams.
THE STORY OF LITTLE O (A Portrait of the Marquis de Sade as a Young Girl)
She had always been little for her age. That’s why her grandfather Joe had started calling her Little O.
Joe would sit in the big armchair and Little O would climb up on top of him. It was the best place in the house to watch television from and they very much liked to share the spot. They sang along to the commercials. She loved when Joe sang while she was on his tummy. His belly would roll around and rumble and it made her feel as though she were on a life raft and the sea was stirring underneath her.
She liked when he would fill up the measuring cup of warm water and dump it on her head in the bathtub — like he was making a big pot of soup and she was the little dumpling inside of it.
When she would fall down and scrape her knee, Joe would blow on it. He used to give her a glass of milk anytime that she had a nightmare about there being a serial killer under the bed.
Joe was proud of her because she was so cute. He would put her in the grocery cart and all the people would stop him to say how beautiful she was. He loved it when people made a fuss over the baby. He would say she was his daughter. And wasn’t she?
Sometimes Little O imagined herself growing inside an egg. It must have been a very big egg, like an ostrich egg. And Joe had come along with a little spoon and tapped the egg and she had come out of it.
When she was very little, Little O thought that everybody had a Joe the way that she had a Joe. He would answer all of her important questions. There was this deep dark hole in Joe’s mind where all the answers to every question were. It was like when the shopkeeper goes to get something from the back, you have no idea how big it is. You can only imagine how enormous it must be to have every shoe size in the world back there.
What does a skeleton eat for dinner, Joe? What does a baby bat do if it is afraid of the dark, Joe? Are there mashed potatoes on the moon, Joe?
These were all things that Joe knew.
They had a stack of telephone books in the corner of the living room. She used a new one every year to sit on and eat breakfast. Each was filled with pressed flowers that they had picked up in the park that year.
Before long there were ten telephone books in the corner and Little O still lived with Joe in the ugly little apartment on the sixth floor of a building with no elevator. Joe had gotten more and more overweight. It was too hard for him to go up and down the stairs all by himself, so Little O would have to do all the errands.
She bought him nine child-sized hamburgers on Mondays, when they were forty-nine cents at the corner restaurant. They were each wrapped in silver aluminum paper like tiny gifts. He was always so happy to get those hamburgers that it would make Little O want to cry.
Little O would sit next to him on her knees on the couch and run the comb across his head. He very much liked the feeling of it across his scalp.
He knew he had saved her. He had fed her with a tiny spoon, out of tiny jars, even though she wasn’t his. He had changed all of her diapers. And so now she owed him things and had to take care of him forever. He did not have to worry about ever being alone again.
Little O never had any sense of decorum. She brought the garbage down wearing a pair of rubber boots and a really short nightgown. You could see her behind when she bent over. She didn’t care and she didn’t know why she should.
The mothers in the neighbourhood would have told Joe about how Little O was dressing inappropriately, but they didn’t want to talk to him. He had been gruff and argumentative years ago in the grocery store. They could only imagine how crazy he had gotten after spending a year cooped up in that apartment.
What else could you expect from a little girl who had been abandoned by her parents and raised by her welfare-case grandfather? they thought. They hoped she would stay away from their sons when she got older.
She brought in Joe’s welfare stub, which he had to sign every week, to the social worker. The social worker asked Little O if she was happy living with her grandfather, if she wouldn’t prefer to live with some other girls her age. The social worker did not say what would happen to Joe, so Little O said that she and Joe were fine. The social worker said that she was sure there was a big apartment in heaven waiting for Little O one day. And that she was such a good girl.
When she was eleven, Little O sat on Etienne Metivier’s couch, wearing a tie that belonged to his father around her neck. It made her feel fancy even though she was wearing a tank top with a number on it and jean shorts. She crossed her legs politely. He went and served her tea from a very elegant cup that his mother kept locked away so that no one except special guests could use it.
“Do you want to maybe go to the swimming pool later, sir?”
“That sounds like a good idea, sir.”
“Very well then, sir.”
It excited him that they were calling each other sir. He had no idea why. That’s why boys liked Little O. She knew things that they would like before they did.
She went over to Scott LeDuc’s house. He said that he had a whole basket filled with kittens under the kitchen table. She knew that he was watching her pet the kittens. He thought there was something so beautiful about the way she did it. When she whispered words to the kittens, it seemed strangely indecent.
“That’s a sweet little pussy. That’s just a lovely little glass of milk. Oh look at your little wee blinking, twinkly little eyes. Oh what tiny little raspberries for paws. Oh God loves you so much. Aren’t you the prettiest thing that God ever did invent in his whole life? I want to keep you in my inside coat pocket for days and days and days. Until you are a little old lady cat. And listen to your mews! I am going to take you to have your mews recorded for a symphony orchestra. And we will tour Europe and drink milk out of teacups and take naps together and eat crème brûlée.”
And then she scrambled out from under the kitchen table, shook hands with him and was on her way. He didn’t even know what hit him. He sat right down on his ass on the kitchen tiles, no longer able to even look at the kittens. It was troubling to feel so much.
Little O noticed that boys noticed her. Although she didn’t know why they did. She didn’t have trouble attracting their attention the way some of the other girls did. When she would sense that a boy had fallen in love with her, there would be a peculiar feeling, a magical sort of lonely feeling. When you realized that someone was in love with you, you got to see yourself from the outside, just for a minute. You could finally have proof that you existed. You could look at yourself as though you were a fabled creature, like a unicorn.