CHAPTER 5
My mother and I are walking along the street near the ocean wall. The breeze is blowing the palm fronds, the sky is bluer than my bluebell eyes, there are troop ships on the horizon. Pelicans perch on the jetty rocks; their hanging beak-pouches are round and taut like my mother’s stomach. No one is holding my hand. We are going to get wafer cookies at the store. When the wafers are fresh, they are perfect: crunchy outside and sweet and white inside. I eat one cookie in two bites, never more, never less. I can eat as many as I want; I am always hungry for these cookies. Even when I can’t eat one more bite of hard-boiled egg, I could eat ten cookies. We have not had any meat since the restaurant. I begin to hope I will be free of meat, especially of liver, for the rest of my life. I even hope we will never have a kitchen again. That is my most urgent hope.
Three men come running out of a hotel; they run into my mother and knock her down. She falls right on her stomach; she rolls on it, this way and that, as if she is a seesaw balanced on a ball, head down, feet up. Head up, feet down. I see this happen as if I am on a swing, going up and down myself, because I feel dizzy. They aren’t ordinary men, they are soldiers. I can tell from their sharply creased brown pants.
They help my mother stand up, they look down at her belly. She looks down. She bends her knees and looks between her legs, at her white shorts. There is nothing to see.
The men help her to the beach wall. She sits there. That’s all she does: sit there—but I am more frightened now than I have ever been, more afraid of having seen her flailing on the sidewalk than I ever was of the furnace catching fire or the monster in the pipes in Brooklyn exploding into my room. More afraid of this than of my stomach aches, than of having to eat my own vomit.
What will this seesaw rocking do to the baby inside her? Will the baby be hurt? Will the baby need iodine? Will my mother have to drink it to get it to the baby? Who is this baby, anyway, and why does it have to come? There is hardly room for the three of us.
I don’t know what we will do next. Do I get my cookies? Do we walk home? Do we call my father? All I see is my mother rocking on her round stomach like a seesaw.
“Buy me a newspaper,” my mother says as soon as my father walks in the door. The soldiers have walked her back to the hotel, holding her between them (and one holding my hand), and my father has been called home from his recording store. The wife of the owner of the hotel has given my mother an aspirin. The soldiers have left. The owner’s wife has left.
My mother is lying on the flowered bed, looking quite regular, as if she has forgotten that she was knocked down to the ground.
“Get the paper. I want to see the casualty list today.”
“You don’t need to read it every day. You don’t need to get upset. You’ve had enough excitement for one day.”
“Get it,” she orders my father, “go down to the drug store and buy it right now.”
He hesitates, but he has to take her orders. Everyone does. He goes out. He seems glad to leave. While he is gone, I get some eggshells out of the garbage and take them to feed to my dead snake in the bathtub. I stir the mess with the long fishing-stick till my father comes back.
I watch from behind the bathroom door as she snaps open the paper. “I knew it!” my mother screams. “See? It’s Marty Goldstone! There it is. It’s Marty’s name, right there!” My mother screams louder. She throws the newspaper in the air and it flutters down heavily, like a pelican with a pouch full of fish. “Missing in action! Missing in action!” She gags right there, on the bed. She sobs and talks as she gags. I push open the bathroom door in case she needs to use the sink. “This is insane! Who made war? Who needs it? What is it FOR?”
My father knocks on his own head. “Marty, my cute kid cousin,” he says. “That cute kid who used to drink sarsaparilla soda all the time.”
Is my father crying? Does my father have tears in his eyes? Does he? That is scarier than anything I have ever seen.
“Where will this end?” my mother shouts. She screams it at my father, as if he knows but won’t tell her.
He goes and sits on her flowered bed and puts his arm around her. Then he sees me and motions me to jump into his lap. The three of us hug each other hard. We are suffering, it’s true, but it is wonderful to hold onto one another so tight.
Bad things often give you good feelings, but no one is allowed to say this. Bad things force you to be excited, to push yourself out in a new way, to get busy, then get tired, then be happy to rest, too tired to be afraid. There is so much happening, there is no time to turn on the radio, or to get me wafer cookies. My parents don’t even remember that I need them.
I go over my bad list. The soldier who pointed his gun at us. My snake, who fell apart in the bathtub, whose head fell right off and crumbled to mush. The butter in the mashed potatoes. My Jewish star left buried in them. The soldiers knocking my mother down. Marty Goldstone, who disappeared in the war.
Even more bad things had to go on the list after my mother called Gilda in Brooklyn. My grandmother had a bad fall. Mr. Carp, one of the ladies’ husbands, died of a heart attack right in the fish market. And the biggest bad thing: my father has to rush back to Brooklyn right away or be drafted into the army.
Talk, talk, talk. My mother and father talk and I listen, sitting on the floor, peeling the layers off baby coconuts very fast. I have a huge collection of these small green coconuts with yellow-pointed tips. I gather them whenever we go out. We have big ones, too, full-sized, grownup coconuts with hairy heads and little holes for eyes, nose and mouth. My father collects the big ones and takes me out in the alley behind the hotel to crack them. He smashes them down on the ground, over and over. He hammers on them, he pries them open with a screwdriver. His face gets red and he grunts as he tears the shells off. It’s hard to believe these soft little green ones that I love turn into those huge, tough, hairy coconuts that he collects. I suppose it happens if they hang on the tree long enough.
When he finally gets one open, we’re supposed to drink the coconut milk. He pretends it’s delicious, but it tastes thin and warm and hairy to me. The coconut meat is a wonderful white color, but it’s hard to chew. And it has a scaly brown skin. My father says it’s good for you, it makes you strong.
Once, in the alley, a piece of coconut got stuck in my throat and I choked. He got it out of me by turning me upside down and banging me on the back, but we never told my mother. He reminded me, “If we tell her, there’ll be no end to it.”
That seems to be an important difference between them—she never lets things go, she pulls them back when they’ve almost disappeared and make fights out of them. My father lives through things and forgets them. Or, if he remembers them, and if they’re bad, he doesn’t add them on to everything else bad that ever happened. My mother’s way lets her scream and get started anytime she wants to, which I understand. I sometimes want to get started but I have no new reason to; if I held onto everything bad, I could just get going with no new reason. I practice doing this, but my memory is not as good as hers. Maybe I haven’t lived long enough, and therefore I don’t have as many bad things to remember. Going to school seems to be a bad thing, but I haven’t even gone yet! It seems as if I have, as if bad boys have made fun of me and hit me already. I am just waiting to tell them I’m important and they’re nothing. When will I finally be able to do all the things I have practiced to do?
Talk, talk, talk. We have to go back to Brooklyn because my father has got his draft notice. The army is taking older men. They are taking men with wives and children. But he has one way out: if he goes to work in a defense plant, he doesn’t have to go over the ocean to the war.
He wants to go over the ocean.
My mother wants him to work in a defense plant.
What kind of plant could that be? I imagine a plant with big green leaves, with bombs growing out of it. Bombs are on posters all over the city. A man called Uncle Sam, who wears a tall hat with stars on it, is also on the posters. He w
ants my father. My father wants to go and “take care of” whoever shot down Marty Goldstone’s airplane.
Thinking that Marty is dead makes my father Jewish again, even if it’s dangerous with my mother there. He opens his little black book from Brooklyn. He doesn’t have his white shawl at the hotel, but he takes a towel and drapes it over his shoulders. He puts a washcloth over his head and stands in the corner and mumbles.
My mother laughs at him. He ignores her till she comes and tries to pull the towel off his shoulders. Then he snarls at her, like Bingo snarls at me when he’s eating and I try to pinch his back. They bark at each other; they look as if they will kill each other.
I wish I had my snake/fish to jerk around in the tub, to bleed the green blood out of and kill him again. I have no one to be my enemy here, while my mother and father have each other.
We say goodbye to all the coconuts, big and small, except for one baby coconut I am allowed to take back to Brooklyn with me. We say goodbye to the palm trees, the pelicans, the blue sky and ocean waves, the flowered room, the soldiers on the beach. We say goodbye to my father, who has packed up his recording machines and sent them back to Brooklyn. There are no friends to say goodbye to. I never met one child in all of Miami Beach. My mother says I don’t need children anyway; they are bad and will hurt me. And they are all stupid. She says I will see for myself when I get out in the world.
The biggest exciting thing of the bad things is the airplane we have to fly on. Just my mother and I get to fly on this plane, a troop plane going to Brooklyn. My mother has to be on it because the doctor said the train ride would kill the baby. Even the plane ride might. I hope it will, because if children are bad and stupid, why should this one get to live in our house?
My father kisses us over and over. I push him away. He’s blocking my view of the plane, a big black thing, just like in the newspaper. My mother hugs him and whimpers and whines till my father turns us over to a soldier and leaves us under the wing of the plane. The minute he disappears, she gets happy. She laughs and her dimple pops in and out. She has dimples on her cheeks and her knees, and I don’t have one anywhere. If she loves my father so much, why does she cry when he’s there, and laugh when he’s not?
I have to hang on to my mother now; there’s no one else here, no one at all. I pull her down to me and give her a big kiss, right on the lips. She’s surprised, but she likes it. She’s proud of me. When we get on the plane, I get to sit on the knees of one soldier after another. The propeller noise is terrible and my mother has to vomit at least three times. But the soldiers bring her wet washcloths and drinks and one strokes her hair the way my father does, very softly and gently, and I am jealous. I know something new now: I will always want to be just like my mother.
CHAPTER 6
Luckily, the baby dies. Gilda says it’s just as well because it wouldn’t have been any good after all the shaking it got on the plane. “I hope she’s learned her lesson,” Gilda says, as if all this were my mother’s fault. I don’t think it’s fair of Gilda to blame her, but in no time another baby is growing, and another big fuss starts up and this time I do blame my mother. There must be a way to stop things like this from happening; I just don’t know yet what they are.
Do I like being home again? No. I miss coconuts and soldiers; I miss living where there is no kitchen. And Bingo smells bad out of both ends. He drags his rear part along the runner in the upstairs hall as if he is using it for toilet paper. My mother tells Gilda: “Your dog is disgusting.” I used to love Bingo, but now I don’t like to watch him squat to make because he stares at me even while his duty is coming out. I know that when I’m on the toilet with my stomach aches I can’t look at anyone when the actual thing is happening. Body secrets give me deep, breathless feelings, but no one talks about them. Body secrets are things grownups keep to themselves.
When I watch my grandmother put her teeth in and out, I want to ask her, how does it feel to have those, why do you have them, will I have them? But I know my grandmother has very few words—she would rather smile or cook than talk. My father has words, but I automatically know he wouldn’t like me to ask: why do you have those balls and that tube in the front of your body? Do they itch that much? Are they so heavy they make a hole in one certain place in all your underpants?
Gilda could be asked anything, I’m never afraid of her, but I am afraid it’s possible she doesn’t even know that she has heavy black hairs on the insides of her thighs. Maybe she never saw them (and only I did) and maybe I shouldn’t worry her about them. I know she knows about the pits and deep scars on her skin—she couldn’t miss them since she is in front of mirrors all day, behind the ladies who are getting haircuts, and in front of the bathroom mirror while she is giving shampoos. I have watched Gilda put salves and hot packs on her face. Once, on Avenue P, an old woman stopped her and said, “My heart goes out to you, darling, or I would never say this, but it might help. Try urine on your face. Your own urine, on a sanitary napkin, tied around your face at night.” Gilda ran all the way home after that, with me flying along, holding onto the stroller handle.
My mother doesn’t hide body secrets—she acts instead as if they aren’t hers, but that someone has attacked her with them, has forced her to have a body when she would prefer never to live in one, eat in one, sleep in one. She lays out her suffering for everyone to see—her headache secrets, her vomiting secrets, her bloody-pants secrets. Now her big-stomach secret. She has a message for us: “Look how I have to suffer. Look what the world does to me.
She has other secrets I’m interested in—how she makes her behind squish from side to side when she plays boogie-woogie while she rocks on the piano bench, how her dimples made the soldiers laugh, how the curve of her hip makes my father cup his hand on it, makes him say something low to her, makes her tilt her head toward him and forget me! They both forget me when he has his big hand on her hip. I feel the thing between them; his powerful interest and her pleasure in capturing it. I know these things without thinking about them—she doesn’t enjoy his hand on her hip, but she loves how she has his full attention when she lets him do it.
The truth is, I will never get him to love me best, not while she is around. It’s too bad, things like this. They are facts of life, like Gilda’s skin, Bingo’s bad smell.
While the new baby is growing, my father works in a defense plant. He makes wings for airplanes with machines that stamp them out like cookie-cutters make cookies. I know how sharp a cookie-cutter is, I know how hard you have to press on the dough and how careful you have to be while knocking the cookie out. “Be careful,” I warn him. That’s what all the women in this house say all the time: “Be careful,” as if being careful is some kind of guarantee that nothing bad will happen.
I have to be careful petting Bingo, I have to be careful not to slip in the bathtub, I have to be careful eating fish because of bones. Little needles of “careful” are always sticking in my ears and my eyes—what if I forget for one second to be careful, what will happen then? If I am always thinking “careful,” I can hardly enjoy playing with the dog, or splashing in the bath water. (I never enjoy eating fish, whose bones can give you an injection in your throat at any moment.)
“Be careful you don’t choke on your food,” Gilda tells me, as if swallowing isn’t bad enough. What if, while I am swallowing, I choke? How can it be that the food I eat to keep myself alive could also kill me? These are dilemmas that fill my days—dying seems to be at the heart of all my private imaginings. Why did the old baby die and will the new baby die? Will I die? Will my grandmother die? What if everyone dies, my mother and father, my aunt and my grandmother, Bingo and the new baby, and just I am left alone in the house with the furnace? I don’t even know how to turn it on and off. I will freeze to death in the winter. Who will find me in my bed, stiff as an ice cube, and when will I be found?
There is no one I can talk to about these matters. Even Gilda, lately, has been harping on food, and on a specific type of fo
od. Crusts. It seems that when my mother goes to the hospital to have the new baby, Gilda wants me to astonish everyone by eating the crusts of my bread. I don’t have to do it yet, but only when she goes to the hospital. “Then we can tell her she’s crazy—that you do eat your crusts.” I don’t see why it’s so important that this be done: crust is hard, it cuts my gums. But Gilda adds this information: “Issa, no man will marry you if you leave the crusts of your bread all over your plate.” This stirs up many questions: why wouldn’t a man marry me if I did that? Do I want a man to marry me? If I’m married, does it mean I will have to vomit and have headaches and carry around babies, like coconuts, in my stomach? But because it seems important to Gilda, I practice eating crusts. I hold them in my mouth till they get soft, I suck them, I grind them, I wet them, I strain them against my teeth. Crusts are a challenge. Crusts will help us prove to my mother that she is crazy and that Gilda understands me best and can make me do anything.
The day comes that my mother leaves the house, leaking water from her body. I don’t even say goodbye to her, worrying about crusts. For ten days I practice eating them.
On the day the baby is to come home, I hold my triumph like a trophy in my mouth: “I ate my crusts.” I am waiting to tell it to my mother, who has been gone all this time without contacting me. They are getting ready for her as if for a queen—my grandmother is shining the windows, Gilda is baking cookies, the bed sheets of the big double bed are tightened and tucked, pulled and pressed to icy smoothness.
They bring in a new baby carriage—my father bumps it up the stairs to the bedroom and my grandmother cleans it with ammonia, shines the very spokes of the wheels. I have heard that the baby who died was a boy; this new one is a girl like me. Why we need two girls in a house is beyond me. I walk down the hall and kick Bingo. He snarls and bites my leg. I love the pain, I could hug him for giving it to me. The wound bleeds, much too serious for iodine. They—Gilda and my father—run with me to see Dr. Cohen down the street, who hurts me even more, with stitches, with an injection. Oh, how the body hurts. How inconvenient it is to have one, how dangerous, how delicious. To live in one is the biggest risk in the world, and the more dangerously you live in it, the more attention you get. I wish Bingo had torn out my eyes! Then I would be the queen, they would shine the spokes of my wheels, they would adore me.
The Kingdom of Brooklyn Page 4
