The Kingdom of Brooklyn

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  “Butterflies,” Gilda says to me, as—more than ever—I have to hog the toilet, keeping her from bringing her ladies inside for their shampoos. “Everyone gets butterflies when they worry. But your mother is getting you into a state for nothing and she shouldn’t be doing this.”

  An alarm goes off in my head. This is what I have been warned that Gilda should never do: talk against my mother.

  While I clutch my stomach, Gilda tells her lady to wait in the beauty parlor for a few minutes and read a magazine. Then she gets a wire pull from the milk bottle cap and begins forming it into a flower for me. She sits on the tile floor of the bathroom while I hunch over her on the toilet and feel the wild animals (not butterflies) roaring in my stomach. Gilda is so patient with me, I want to stroke her pitted face.

  “There. One petal, two petals, three petals.” Gilda leans on the round curve of her hip with her legs out to the side. Everything about her is dainty. Her auburn hair, twisted like a challah, shines in the light. She forms a flower for me out of the silver wire.

  “I have to get in there,” my mother says at the door.

  “Issa is in here. Her stomach again.”

  “Do you have to be in there, too? Do the two of you have to have a party in there? Let me get in there to throw up.”

  My mother comes in and Gilda goes out fast. My mother heaves and gags over the sink, violently pushing away the shampoo tray on a stand that the ladies fit their necks into. She doesn’t really vomit. I watch though I don’t want to see it come out, but nothing does. She tries and tries. What makes her want to vomit? She isn’t even trying to chew and swallow liver. My mother eats only chocolate malteds and sliced tomatoes.

  “Look at this!” she screams to me. I slide off the toilet seat and pull up my pants. I look in the sink where little black hairs from the ladies’ shampoos lie curled like worms along the edges of the porcelain.

  “I can’t take it! I’m through putting up with this!” my mother cries. “I can’t take it another minute. I wish to God your father were home. I’d like him to have to stick his face in this sink.”

  What my mother can’t take is not having privacy. She talks about privacy as if it were an object, like a glass statue of an angel, something my father once bought on a call, something hard to find, hard to get, valuable and rare, but to which she is entitled. She enumerates to me the damages done to her daily: how my grandmother comes into the bedroom while she and my father are still in bed to gather laundry for the wash. The endless appearance of Gilda’s customers up and down the front walk, their chatter in the bedroom Gilda uses for a beauty shop, their hairs, their disgusting hairs, in the sink in the bathroom. There is more—how for years she has been taking care of Gilda and Grandma and enough is enough. Let Gilda get a job out in the world. Let her get married. Let someone else put a roof over her head. Let her take my grandmother with her and disappear.

  Later that night she tells all this again to my father. He holds me on his lap on the green chair while she rages around the bedroom. I’m fine when he is holding me, balancing the center of my behind on his thigh. His thick arms around my waist will keep her from hitting me even if she wants to. He doesn’t like her to hit me, ever. She doesn’t really hurt me when she hits; it’s just that the sound of her screams gets deafening when she swings her hand at me and I think the roof will come down and the walls fall in.

  When my father tries to defend Gilda, take her side, remind my mother that Gilda isn’t beautiful like my mother is, that she doesn’t do well out in the world, my mother screams: “So you want her here forever? Then divorce me and marry her!”

  This idea gives me a horrific, wonderful thrill. Gilda—now my mother—making wire flowers for me. My father—now Gilda’s husband—warming my bed with a hot frying pan. It will be quiet and peaceful with just the three of us. Maybe even my grandmother can stay. I will never have to count the turns of the dial to the Peter Pan Nursery.

  The next time I can’t swallow, when the three-minute egg, with all its slime and mucous, won’t go down my throat, my mother lifts me straight out of my chair. The gate in my throat has simply locked shut, there is nothing I can do to get the white slime to move from my tongue down my throat. It has slipped back out into the spoon.

  “I have no choice,” she tells me. “You have forced me to this.” She runs upstairs and I follow in terror. I beg God (he is the same man as “The Lord” in the prayer I have to say at night) behind my closed eyes for a lady to be in the bathroom having a shampoo. But no one is there. Only Bingo is in the hall, his ears laid back, his dark fur moving as he breathes heavily.

  She has already taken from the medicine cabinet the bottle of iodine—the torture of my life, the dreaded liquid fire she applies to my cuts to kill the germs, the red-black poison she spreads with its glass tube over my bleeding flesh. The pain from it is much worse than the scrape of the roughest cement on my knees. Glass tubes are terrible instruments; mothers take your temperature with them, mothers run them along open wounds. (If the glass breaks, it can kill you.)

  The iodine label has a skull on it to remind me—and anyone else: “Never swallow this.” (Did she think, after what it did to my knees, that I would ever take it into my mouth?)

  But now she plans to swallow it herself because the egg was too soft, because I have driven her to it.

  “Please, don’t!” I tug on her skirt. I wrap my arms around her hips. “Mommy! Please don’t!”

  Gilda comes running down the hall, her silver scissors held aloft. “What’s happening here? Why is Issa crying?”

  “Mind your own business! Issa is mine.”

  “I couldn’t swallow my egg,” I try to explain.

  “Ruth, you’re out of your mind!” Gilda cries. “You’re going to destroy this child.”

  “She’s none of your business,” my mother screams. Then she flings the iodine bottle into the bathtub, where it shatters. The red poison drips down the porcelain side and forms a row of zig-zag teeth.

  “You belong in an insane asylum like Mrs. Disic next door. They need to come and take you away in a strait jacket. “

  My mother glows blue like the liver flaring in its grate on the stove.

  “Keep your claws off my child and off my husband,” she warns Gilda. Her eyes have something wild in them. I don’t even recognize her.

  “He won’t be your husband much longer if you keep this up,” Gilda hisses. “No man can take this forever.” Gilda’s face is white. “You’re crazy, Ruth. Look what you’re doing to this precious child.”

  I am sobbing and pulling toilet paper off the roll in long strands, shredding it and pushing it into my eyes.

  “Go down to the kitchen and help Grandma make mandelbrot,” Gilda whispers to me. “Or go play with your doll.”

  I wipe my eyes on her apron. I run out of the bathroom to my room and jerk Margaret/Peggy from her cradle. She has a painted-on, blank stupid face. Stupid! They’re all so stupid. They all ought to take iodine and leave me alone.

  I am Jewish. Being Jewish means I am entitled to wear a blue star around my neck instead of a gold cross. The person who teaches me this is Mrs. Esposito, who lives on a farm on the corner—with chickens in a cage and two goats in the backyard. She grows grapes and tomatoes and big cabbages. Two men live with her, Tommy and Joe; one is her brother and one is her husband, but I can’t tell them apart. Gilda takes me there to collect money for the Red Cross and Mrs. Esposito invites us in, gives us sour balls to suck, and puts strangely shaped tomatoes in a bag for me to take home.

  One day she gives me a teeny blue six-pointed star, rimmed in gold. She fastens it around my neck, bending so close I can smell her hair. I feel something important has happened to me, although I don’t know why. Kneeling in front of me, she holds out the chain of her gold cross and I hold out my blue star. We let them touch. Then we smile and she kisses me. I am proud to be Jewish, it seems to be a good thing. Gilda is proud of me, too. She hugs me. Anything that happens aw
ay from the house is good. Anything that happens in the house gives me terrible stomach pains.

  A war is going on across the sea, men are killing one another although their bullets can’t get to me.

  “They are fighting across the ocean and the ocean is this big,” my father says, “as big as the world.” He is stretched out on the floor of the living room and I am sitting on his chest with my shoes tucked under each of his armpits and my palms pressing over his beating heart. My mother is playing the piano, something she laughs at called boogie-woogie. Her bottom, which is heart-shaped, jiggles on the piano bench as she rocks from side to side, playing. When she thumps on the low keys, my father bumps me up on his chest and I ride along, laughing. My grandmother passes through the room and stops because we are all laughing. She laughs, too—her teeth are big and white and even. I’ve seen them both in and out of her mouth. She’s very nice, but not too interesting.

  Gilda comes downstairs and my mother starts to play “White Christmas.” Gilda leans into the curve of the piano and sings along—she has a voice like the thinnest end of an icicle, very sharp and cold and high. It drips with music, but it could crack, break. My father admires her voice. His eyes are bright, watching her. The war, luckily, has made us all sing and laugh. We have had to draw the black curtains closed and pin them together so the airplanes can’t bomb our house. Even though we are safe, I don’t feel safe. The bombs could hit; the planes could come across the sea (they fly fast), they could see the light through the curtains, the bombs could hit right in the center of the piano. Bingo seems to understand this because the louder the music gets, the flatter his ears get, till finally he runs off to the kitchen with his tail bent under. His tail and his ears are flat. I know never to pet him when he’s that way.

  When it’s time to go to bed, my father gets the frying pan hot for me. It looks like cooking, but it isn’t. The pan is empty of food, which looks wrong but makes me very happy. He carries me upstairs sitting on his shoulders, his neck between my legs. His one hand holds my ankle and one the frying pan.

  He knows I hate my cold pajamas, so he says, “Let’s not tell anyone you’re going to sleep in your clothes. We’ll just cover you way up to your nose! No one will ever know. And in the morning you’ll be dressed already!”

  He zips the hot pan over my sheets, he zips me under the blanket, he rubs noses with me.

  The next thing is the prayer my mother taught me because she likes the rhymes in it: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep…but there is something wrong with this, according to my father.

  “We don’t have a Lord, not that one,” he says. “Don’t say that anymore,” he tells me. “Even if she wants you to.”

  It’s hard to remember what I shouldn’t say in front of certain people because other people don’t want me to. It’s like not letting Gilda talk about my mother. I have to watch my lips, my ears. Soon I will have to not see what I see.

  I don’t want to stop feeling good. My father kisses me goodnight and goes downstairs. The instant he leaves my room, the face appears at the window. It’s always there, I’m used to it, it’s the little man who hangs onto the window sill with his fingertips and stares in at me. He doesn’t try to come in, but he watches me and makes my heart flip. If I am brave enough, I can turn my back on him, but sometimes I have to scream out, into the hall, down the stairs, scream for a drink of water.

  Sometimes my mother comes up, or my father. Sometimes my grandmother, but she’s very slow. Best, of course, is Gilda, who knows it isn’t water I want, but herself, in my bed, next to me, till I go to sleep. In the morning, the man at the window is always gone.

  CHAPTER 3

  Although my father does not wear a six-pointed star, he is also Jewish. One night he stands in the corner of his bedroom facing the wall, wearing a white shawl around his shoulders, a small round black hat on his head, and he bends forward and back, forward and back, mumbling over a book he holds in both hands. I have come in to get a puzzle I left on the bed earlier in the day, when my mother and I were both lying there like twins with washcloths on our foreheads.

  His rounded shoulders alarm me, since he looks weak, not strong as he always is. I am glad my mother doesn’t see him in this posture, because it would make her more powerful to know he could be reduced in this way to a small man.

  What is he doing? It is not a song he is singing, but it rises and falls like music. It is not a lesson he is learning because, though he holds the book, his eyes are closed. I know he would not want to be disturbed; this is very serious, very private. I back out the door, and ask no one, not even Gilda, what he is doing.

  The shul is another place to be Jewish. In the fall of the year, Gilda closes the doors of her beauty shop and she and my father walk to the Avenue N shul. He wears the same white shawl and carries the black book; Gilda is dressed in a dark blue dress, a blue coat and a black hat. We pass by all the familiar houses on 4th Street—some of Gilda’s customers live here; also some old ladies my grandmother knows, who come and sit with her on the bench in front of our house.

  My mother cannot be with us on this walk to shul; she has been arguing with my father, and her headache is so bad she is nearly blind. The argument made my grandmother run to the couch, clutching her chest. Now the two sick women are resting, one with her little bottle of pills, one with her washcloth.

  I crunch my shoes in the dry maple leaves blown in piles against the garden hedges and watch Gilda’s heels click in tune to the rhythm of my father’s big walking feet. How nice to smell the leaves and be out of the house. How lucky I feel for no special reason.

  Because he is Jewish, my father has to pray all day today. He can’t eat. He can’t shave. He can’t laugh. He goes downstairs in the shul, and Gilda takes me upstairs, where the women are. When I get tired, she lets me walk around outside. I can look into a basement window and see the men below, all of them round-shouldered, hunched forward and rocking in their white shawls the way my father rocked in the corner. They are all humming, but not exactly a song. They are singing words, but not the same words. They all look a little weak, not strong the way men are. They all look like my father, but not the father I am used to.

  Gilda’s black hat has a veil that covers her face. She looks quite beautiful, with the little black squares covering her eyes and her nose. When she breathes, the veil quivers. Outside we meet some of her ladies, but they don’t chatter and tell stories the way they do in the beauty parlor, they look very serious, almost on the verge of tears. Not one of them looks as if she has ever had her hair fried or her nails painted; in fact, they all wear dark gloves, like Gilda. Something is going on and it’s very important. I am honored to be part of it.

  Gilda takes me home and I take a nap with my mother. Much later, my father comes home. He speaks to me and his breath smells bad. His face is gray with growing beard. I hope he will not rub his cheek against mine and scratch me. My grandmother is busy in the kitchen. She prepares food very calmly, not like my mother. She moves slowly, she won’t care if I eat it or not, she isn’t going to kill me if I don’t swallow something. Something is flat about her—as if, if I pushed my finger against her pale skin, it would stay pushed in. Her skin is like flour dough. She is my white, soft, old grandmother.

  I like the cold food she is preparing, nothing meaty, nothing greasy, nothing slimy about what she is putting on the table. Smoked white fish, and bagels and lox and cream cheese—nothing that will get stuck in my throat. I love challah, fluffy bread that tears apart and tastes sweet and wonderful. I especially love food that no one watches me eat.

  For once, on this special night, no one is watching me chew and swallow. My mother eats sullenly—not what’s on the table, but her own meal: tomatoes and a chocolate malted. Gilda and my father are in very good spirits. “To the new year,” my father says and lifts his glass. “To the new year and health and happiness,” Gilda says, and lifts hers. She offers me a sip of her wine, sweet grape wine. It bu
rns my throat but goes down easily. I like it! I ask for more. My father gives me a sip of his. My mother flies up from her chair and goes into the living room to play the piano.

  Boogie-woogie comes out.

  “Please, not that music, not now, Ruthie,” my father calls to her.

  She plays louder.

  Gilda and my father look at each other.

  “You should take her on a vacation,” my grandmother says. “She’s no good this way.”

  Because we leave Brooklyn and ride the train for days and nights, we are going to get that thing my mother needs so badly—privacy—and we will get it in Miami Beach. We will get coconuts and hot air. We will get soldiers in our hotel. The war is closer here, because we are right on the edge of the ocean; no one tells me, but I know, that just on the other side of the water is where the fighting and bombing go on.

  For once there are just the three of us: Mommy, Daddy and Issa. We live in one room with three flowered couch-beds. Why does Mommy still have to throw up? There are no customers, no hairs in the sink, no hair frying, no liver cooking. Why is Issa still getting stomach aches? There is no more talk of kindergarten—that is still nearly a whole year away. Why has Daddy left his white shawl at home? Why are we in this hot place where I never get cold and there is no furnace?