As a Boy I Dreamed Often of a Tiger

Rippling, immense, long back rubbing with liquid force against the doorway, it steps from the bathroom and turns down the hallway, padding—slowly and without sound—toward the room I share with my little brother.

My three-year-old daughter isn’t sure, but my five-year-old son thinks Tigger is half-tiger. He cites as evidence Tigger’s whiskers, stripes, and tail, as well as the fact that Tigger’s almost-scary. Pooh, Piglet, Owl: no one else in the Hundred Acre Wood is even close to scary. “But Tigger is almost-scary. That’s why he’s half-tiger, Dad.”

Shoulders filling the doorway, the tiger lifts its great head and gathers its weight—haunches flexing, yellow eyes going dark and thin.

Movie night, the four of us snuggled up on the couch, munching walnuts and popcorn, and Kaa, the python, is no problem. King Louie and his jazzy orangutans, too, pass with more delight than worry. But Shere Khan, the tiger, the impossible wings of his shoulder bones shifting through the grass—Shere Khan has us all pulling the blanket over our heads.

A single great in-suck of tiger-breath, hot wind pulling across me for the force of it, and I wake into the same night-black room I have just been dreaming of—and I scream, scream, scream.

Despite its fuzzy softness, its bright stripes, funny whiskers, and cartoon smile, most nights the tiger pillow-pet the kids caught at the Christmas parade last year ends up kicked under the bottom bunk.

The house I grew up in—with its uneven ceilings, L-shaped rooms, and closets that worked like hallways—was stitched together from the scraps of abandoned homesteaders’ shacks. Nothing was where it was supposed to be, least of all my parents’ room, which was on the other side of the bathroom, the bathroom the only way in or out. After tuck-in, I lay awake for hours and in my mind’s eye traced backwards the tiger’s dark path, from my room through the hallway and the bathroom and into my parents’ room. And I knew—could feel it in the hollows of my groin and gut and up into the slick, aching places behind my heart—that was where the tiger came from: nowhere but there: the tiger rising and remuscling, each night, in my parents’ room.

While my son catalogues and categorizes, lists the planets from biggest to smallest, his cousins from youngest to oldest, my daughter daydreams, wanders off by herself and invents intricate worlds of sticks and grass and fallen blossoms. She regales us with tales of her sister, Sha-sha, who is sometimes younger and sometimes older, who doesn’t always do what she is supposed to do and is often—too often, I wonder?—sick or hurt or otherwise distressed. Like all good storytellers, my daughter shamelessly cannibalizes her world—her child discoveries, our daily comings and goings and conversations, whatever narrative scraps she gleans from books and kids’ shows—all of these she refashions and breathes into life in her breathless tellings.

The dreams started before my father died. I say this and wonder if it’s true, wonder why all these years I have believed it to be true. Is it because I can’t imagine myself screaming so as a ten-year-old, an eleven-year-old, a young man? Do I have a memory of my father coming to me in the night, following the dream-tiger’s route, stepping into the very space the tiger occupied? I don’t know, but I can anyway see it: my father in a tight white T-shirt and underwear, my big, black-haired father shushing me, comforting me, hard hands laying me down. Was the dream-tiger, I wonder, my child’s way of reckoning the cancer even then gnawing at my strong father’s bones?

Walking home, we see a light on in the upstairs hallway. Packing up her menagerie of screens, the harried babysitter tells us our daughter wouldn’t go...