Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragoso

block, of course, I didn’t need to know much about leaning, but later I would when we had to maneuver the bike around complex turns. This made me the driver too, and I would feel a great sense of pride when Peter would tell me I was the perfect passenger.
    My hair was getting long, and by the start of August it was three inches past my shoulders, which meant Poppa hadn’t paid much attention to it in a while; for years, he had insisted that it never fall even slightly past my shoulders. Whenever he noticed it getting longer, he would immediately take me to the hairdresser’s for a pert bob, which he said was stylish for little girls, though this was a lie: most of my classmates sported hair that nearly reached the middle of their backs. It was a marker of a girl’s social status for her hair to be styled differently every school day; while school was in session, my plain, unruly hair had often been mocked by girls who possessed French or Dutch braids and twists, pristine half and full ponytails, or fancy double buns. One day, I complained about this problem to Peter—mentioning how I dreaded another approaching school year when my ugly hair would be the laughingstock yet again—and he promised that he would find a comb that would undo my knots without the least bit of pain.
    The first time Peter showed me the magical purple comb he’d bought at the flea market for a quarter, I was fascinated by it. It was unlike any comb I had ever seen, with two inward-curving sets of teeth. He said he would start at the ends of my hair and work his way to the top. So I sat on his lap in the kitchen and, gently, he began to work out the tangles. My hair was so badly matted it took over an hour of sitting still to untangle. But it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, because while I sat, we talked about “Danger Tiger.” We also took breaks to eat chocolate-chip and oatmeal-raisin cookies.
    Mommy watched Peter untangle my hair, and kept saying how amazed she was that he had gotten me to sit so still. When he was done, he put in two yellow plastic barrettes, one on each side.
    “Go, honey, look in the mirror,” he said, and I raced into the front room to look at myself in the full-length mirror that stood opposite the front door.
    The large wooden mirror had carved birds. Peter had sprayed it with deep gold paint that made it look even more old-fashioned. I stood in front of the glass, touching my glossy hair. Peter came up behind me and put both hands on my shoulders.
    “I’m going to start braiding it, like Karen’s,” he said. “It should be long enough.”
    “Peter, do you like me better with long hair or short?”
    “It doesn’t matter, sweetheart. But I guess I’ve always liked long hair on little girls.”
    We stared at each other in the mirror for what must have been a good minute; Peter was on his knees, so his face lined up perfectly with mine.
    A few days later, at the dinner table, I saw Poppa squinting at me in a funny way.
    “Your hair is getting long,” he said, stiffly. “I didn’t notice that.”
    I shifted uneasily in my seat. “It was a little bit long in Puerto Rico.”
    “My sister took care of it, unlike your mother. But I see someone is combing it out now. Let me see the back.”
    I reluctantly turned my head. He nodded and turned to my mother. “Have you been combing her hair?” He sipped his beer and cut his stuffed pepper in half.
    My mother swallowed her food and then said, “Well, there’s a new kind of comb out, you know.”
    “A new comb?” He raised his eyebrows. “Some kind of a breakthrough?” “Well, at the flea market, they sell all sorts of . . .”
    “You are buying things at some dirty flea market?”
    “No, not exactly,” she said, tightly holding her 7-Up, but not lifting it to drink. I had stopped eating.
    “I give you enough money to buy quality things. I do not give you money to spend on used junk. I do not give you money to buy a comb that has been in some strange