The Awfulness of Peter Petro
I’m sorry, Peter, but I really wanted to write this letter to you, last night, around two in the morning, over my third martini, after not thinking of you for three-fourths of a century. More accurately, I felt like writing about someone totally repugnant, creepy, and grotesquely impelling; then you popped into my head.
I’ve always known that being Peter Petro would be a continuously painful experience. Even at eight years old—you always will be eight to me—you are nothing but grief. The fanaticism in your little gray eyes is intensified as it pierces your thick lenses—how can you wear glasses like that when you’re only eight? For God’s sake, Peter.
And then there are your bangs, plastered limply against your damp, pulsating forehead like seaweed on a rock. In our whole third-grade class there is no one more awfully awful than you. From another planet, I’d say if I knew about other planets—but honestly I don’t. I’m eight and a girl, so I haven’t gotten into the outer-space thing; that obsession is typical of you. What I’m actually into is the awfulness of Peter Petro. Apparently you have made a strong impression on me.
Peter, the incident of the swing, for instance. When I was swinging at recess? Happily? And you stood there and wanted the swing? Wanted it to the point of insanity, screaming for it and stamping your Buster Browns until Mrs. McFall had to come over, lame as she was, and make me give you my turn. After that, you swung and swung. Never mind that there was a whole line waiting, your clear intent was to keep the swing until the very end, till the bitter clanging of the recess bell.
But you can’t ever live down the worst part, because it is etched unchanging on my memory even into old age: There in the gravel under your swing appears a sudden drip of water, and now everyone can see it seeping wider, puddling. Look how fast the news of this event rushes through the schoolyard; hear the hoots from the boys, the scandalized gasps among the girls. Only when Mrs. McFall has hurried the last tittering straggler back into class do you relinquish the wet swing, a swing that no one wants now—oh God forgive you, Peter Petro, for that sorrow in your young life.
It was our mothers who decided we ought to be playmates. Of course, I don’t have many friends either, so I guess it seems inevitable. But compared to you, I live on Earth, a planet I do know and care about. Nevertheless, here we are, thrown together. Here we lie on the floor, head to head, drawing furiously with our Crayolas. At least you are furious; your fury has brought out in myself a certain imperious detachment.
I am working in color on my picture, which—Christmas being three weeks away—shows the Virgin Mary cradling little Jesus within her (periwinkle blue) shawl. The flying (white) things are angels, and here are their (goldenrod) harps. I’ve even done the Three Wise Men with their (burnt sienna) camels—the camels were hard to do, not my best work—and at the upper edge a (yellow) star with a single long ray lighting the Wise Men’s path.
You work in dimension. Perspective. Your first drawing, which was of the Lincoln Tunnel, took a long time, but since then you’ve been going faster and faster—eleven pieces of paper so far. First you draw a square at the center of the page, and from the corners of the square you draw straight lines radiating outward toward the four outer corners of the page. You add a few details, furiously I might add, and shove the picture to face me. “Look,” say you. “Do you know what this is?”
“Yes,” say I. “It’s a tunnel. You already asked me that about every single picture.”
“Yes, but which tunnel?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know! Lincoln.”
“No,” you triumph once again. “It’s the Holland.”
And next time I will guess Holland because it looks exactly—to me—like the last one, and you will say it is the Lincoln, staring at me as if I should know; as if any moron should know; as if discerning between pictures of the Holland Tunnel and the Lincoln is a valid test of my worth as a human being.
Now, actually, Peter, in retrospect I think it was a very good test, and I failed it. But I did not come here to apologize. I will mention, in passing, one other scene from your miserable life: Your mother has come to pick you up. You don’t want to leave. You have had the best time ever, at my apartment, though who could tell? You are distraught. I see your mother’s hands trying to get a grip on your balled fists. I see your Buster Browns hooked tight around a chair leg. I see you stretched out between her straining arms and your L-shaped ankles across our hardwood floor like a powerless yet writhing human catastrophe—oh, may God forgive you for that, Peter Petro, and myself for bearing witness to it. I see your eyes without their glasses. I see you and your mother frantic on hands and knees, searching. And oh, woe, the now-found glasses are broken; shock and surprise, how can this be?
Peter, you are too awful to exist. How can your shoes be that brown, your trousers that short, your socks that mismatched, the striped shirt that wrinkled? ‘He’s a genius,’ grownups say in your defense. Maybe; but your intelligence is like ragged fire, blazing up, smoldering, unfed. I cannot go where you are—I will not.
What, am I writing a letter of first love? No, it’s a love that has been creeping up over a long life, my long life of not seeing people’s hearts, of only noticing from the corner of my eye that they are imprisoned by being themselves. I don’t know whether we choose what vessel will carry our share of the universal soul for a lifetime. If we do choose, apparently I chose to be me, while you (incomprehensibly) chose to be Peter Petro. I’m sure you’ll understand, Peter, my scorn at first sight of you, my dread when first faced with the specter that I might—to others—resemble you, my outright horror in realizing that I might even be you. That you and I might be one.
I saw you in your shame. I looked away, with a shame of my own, but still I saw you. Now you are condemned to live forever in my personal history as your most shameful self. Even if later you managed to survive high school, and New York University, get contact lenses and a hairdo, learn to use a napkin, become a computer millionaire, and father three healthy children, here in my memory you must forever sit on your dripping swing, hands raw from the icy chains, going down with the ship. Here you ever seek your glasses, broken by your own furious disempowerment. I can kneel down and thank God He didn’t have me marry you, the way our mothers dreamed. Yet as I write, I see that I am actually forgiving you, that in fact my reason for writing is to forgive you. Forgive you for what? For being just one speck in the human condition?
Yes, I know, exactly like me. So therefore, in forgiving you, will I myself finally feel forgiven?
Lifetime musician, guitarist, stage performer. I'm 85 and still haven't published any fiction! But I have four novels and dozens of stories lined up and ready.