“Well, maybe. Once in a while.”
So easily I have forced her to lift the ban. By a clever trick I have changed the iron rule. Look what they will do in order that I not fly down the street on skates!
When we go in the house, the doors between upstairs and downstairs are unlocked. My mother issues the revised orders. Once in a while, at her convenience, when everything I have to do is done, when I have eaten all my food, when The Screamer doesn’t need me to rock her, when my mother doesn’t have an urge to do rhymes with me, once in a while, I can go upstairs to the beauty parlor.
“Even now?”
She is backed into a corner.
I run, I fly up the stairs, my first time in months, to the new apartment, to see the new sink, the new stove, the new carpet, the new dishes. Gilda has a new dryer, a green monster helmet that fits over the ladies’ heads, that dries their hair twice as fast as the old one. It has a clear plastic edge, so the women can see, can move their eyebrows to indicate too hot, not hot enough, just right.
Oh, I have missed this place. I get busy bending hairpins in the crack of the linoleum; I am happy, and I never want to go home, go downstairs, where it’s boring, where The Screamer smells of pee and worse things, where no one cares about me! Where no one cares about me!
Something thumps in my chest as I think that thought. NO ONE CARES ABOUT ME!
“What’s wrong?” Gilda asks me. I am clutching my chest, where a hammer has begun to strike. I look down and see my dress shaking with each hammer-blow.
“Issa! What’s wrong?” I don’t know myself. Something has got into my chest, like a bird or a dog or a baby, and it’s flapping and kicking about. I feel it and see it happening.
The thing wants to get out. It doesn’t care if it tears through me. I am amazed, but I want it to get out as fast as it can, I want it to stop hurting me. Maybe I need a pill, like the one my grandmother takes when she has heart pains. I need…I need…what I need is roller skates!
But I realize I cannot ask for this now. However, it’s perfectly clear to me—roller skates would fix me. Just as The Tree Trunk gave my mother headaches, not having roller skates has given me this monster in my chest, pounding against the walls of my body to get out.
CHAPTER 9
The war should stop. Why does it go on this long? How annoying it is that they still say, “Shush, shush,” to me when the radio is on. Cooking grease will help to win the war if we save it in a tin can. Tinfoil we find on the street must be packed and smoothed into a ball. (Chewing gum wrappers are good, cigarette wrappers are the best, if, with the tip of my fingernail, I can get the foil to separate from the white paper without a tear.) I have an enormous tinfoil ball—bigger than a tennis ball. How this is going to kill the Japs, whoever they are, is a total mystery. When I examine my silver ball, I think that perhaps the good soldiers dangle these in front of the bad soldiers; then, while distracting them, they pull out bayonets and stab their bellies. Thinking this, I want to throw my silver ball in the bushes, or bury it.
Gilda takes me with her around the neighborhood to sell war bonds. She gets me away these days by not asking permission; if she finds me outside, she just grabs me, telling my grandmother on the bench to tell my mother we went for a walk, but only if she asks. Half the time we will be back before my mother notices. Of course I know this is forbidden; I am never supposed to leave the premises without permission. But it’s only Gilda—how dangerous could she be?
Lately my mother goes too far with her rules; I have to break them, there is no other way to get what I want. Otherwise I think of the trouble I would have to go through: all that asking and begging (all her arguments and finally her refusal) and then—after she tells me that she owns me—the rest: my sulking and crying, and her yelling at me, or hitting me, or giving me that look, with her eyes getting narrow, and her mouth going tight and mean—and finally, that baffling and disgusting change, her turning to “my sister” Blossom, wherever she is, there in her high chair, or there on the Bathinette (my sister is everywhere, everywhere, she never disappears, even for a second), and my mother’s face changing like a red light to a green light, turning on for The Screamer, putting on her high, baby-talk voice, getting cute, tickling and cooing to The Screamer.
She has two faces, whereas most of us have only one. When she returns to cooking, the ugly face comes back, a result of my grandmother’s now being assigned upstairs to her own house: down here my mother has to be the main cook. And, oh, how my mother hates onions on her fingers. How she gags at the smell of garlic. How she won’t ever, ever, ever cook a chicken because she said to my father that chicken feet, with their scales and claws, with their turned-under toenails, are the most disgusting things she ever saw.
Upstairs, a chicken is treated like a peaceful pet. My grandmother pats a dead chicken as if it were her old, sweet friend. With a silver tweezer, she plucks out the sharp, big feathers. And for the little ones, she sears the chicken over the gas flame, zzst, zzst—little blue bolts of fire sizzling along its skin. The flames dance. Not ferociously, as when liver flares, but sweet little sparks, dying out over the burners.
Whenever I can get away with it, I sneak upstairs to watch her cook, but I watch with fear in my blood. Any minute, any second, any half instant from now, my mother could open the door between our place and theirs and scream for me. “Issa, are you up there?”
If my mother didn’t exist at all, I know I could be totally relaxed, watching the chicken being sparked into its clean skin. If only I didn’t have to be afraid of her!
On this day, my grandmother finds the lucky treasure: inside the chicken’s tummy is a cluster of yellow eggs, veined with red. She holds them up like a prize. I hug her thighs to congratulate her; we don’t talk much to one another, but we look at one another’s faces and smile. She is going to plunge these eggs into the chicken soup. As soon as they boil hard, as soon as they become sweet and soft (nothing like the slimy eggs my mother tries to force down my throat), she will give me one. My grandmother sneaks me the first one that cooks up to the top, rising to boil in the foam like a little sun. Oh, it’s wonderful, like meat in its solidness but also like cake in its crumbly softness. If all meat were like this, I could eat till my mother turned blue waiting for me to refuse; I never would.
“Issa, are you up there, goddamn it!”
Now my heart convulses into its wild dance: the pause (it stops beating) and the deep falling thump, and then the animal sleeping in my chest comes to life and starts its struggle.
“Go down, go, go, Issa!” my grandmother says. She is also afraid, we are soldiers in the army against my mother. This is war, this is the real war. Down I go, holding my chest together so it doesn’t burst with my fear, going downstairs, slowly, to face that look on my mother’s face, as if I have opened the washing machine door while the water is skidding around inside, as if I have opened the furnace door and let the fire roar out to engulf the house. Some awful cellar thing is what her face reminds me of.
“You can’t get enough of those two, can you?” she hisses into my ear. She jerks my arm. She drags me into her kitchen where some mess is boiling and steaming, where the pressure cooker is popping its hat and could explode and kill us, where The Screamer in her high chair is sticking applesauce into her nose.
My father walks in the door with his arm in a bloody bandage. He fills the doorway with his pained face. All the women in the house used to run to him, surround him, when he came in, but now there are too few down here to matter. He says he has ruined an airplane wing today. His bosses are very angry in the defense plant, the war could be lost because of this. They want to know: why did he do it? He doesn’t know why, he didn’t know the machine would do what it did, tear into the metal, break off the wing tip. If he had gone to college and become an engineer, then they could ask him why it broke.
Already my heart, which was pounding from her yelling, is pounding now even more from the blood on his shirt, from the blood seepi
ng through the gauze.
“Why weren’t you more careful?” my mother demands, even after he said all that he said.
He looks at her with Bingo’s sad eyes. Those must have been his eyes as they put him to sleep in the pound. How can you do this to me? (I think—every day, every night—about how Bingo must have felt. I think about what Bingo was thinking when they gave him his shot.)
“The foreman called me a saboteur,” my father says. I have never heard either word, foreman or saboteur, they’re not in my mother’s rhyming lists (though she hasn’t rhymed with me in a long, long time). “He says I could be arrested for sabotage.”
He sounds scared. My father, who is never scared, is scared. His being scared scares me. Who around here is strong enough to take care of me?
Oh, I need Gilda! I need the chicken eggs! I need the smell of the soup upstairs, bubbling with celery and onions and carrots. I can’t stay here with the pressure cooker about to blow out the roof.
I escape. Up, up, up, I go—she’s too busy with the bloody bandage to chase me, too busy with The Screamer, with the cauldron of stew on the flames. How fortunate the doors are not locked between upstairs and downstairs, kept open now so I don’t ask for roller skates.
Up I go, here I am, look, I want to live with you, stay with you, sleep with you. I grab the silver dishtowel rack on the side of the sink, and I swing on it.
My grandmother warns me, “Don’t do that!” But it’s too late, the rack breaks off, I fall down, I feel my hand go under me, and I hear the bone crack.
Oh great emergency! Oh joy! But must it hurt so much to get to this place? This is what I would love to have happen every single day if it weren’t so painful. My mother never yells at me when my body breaks into pieces. She gets the sweetest I have ever seen her; she actually sometimes cuddles me in her arms, embraces me. And my father! He adores me—as now, bloodied and bandaged as he is, he lifts me up in his arms and runs with me through the street to Dr. Cohen’s. They believe the doctor can perform miracles—he can actually keep me from dying.
You can’t feel good or loved around here unless you’re starting to die or in pain. This is a strange arrangement, but it’s the truth.
CHAPTER 10
How does Gilda become a bride? One night she appears downstairs like a ghost, like a dream, like a bride doll. Her white dress is so white a light seems to shine from inside it. Her veil is white gauze held on by a white headband crowning her hair. A red cross burns in its center. Gilda’s lips are red and shiny with lipstick.
We all stare. My father puts down his newspaper and tilts his head to take it in. The Screamer, in her chair eating a butter cookie, sticks her wet finger through the cookie’s round hole and admires Gilda. Lines grow across my mother’s brow, as they do when she begins to get a headache.
Gilda laughs; she spins around once, her skirt blowing up to show her calves and delicate ankles, and then she runs back to the staircase and disappears up to her own house.
We hardly know if she’s really been here or not. All that’s left is the scent of Lilies of the Valley, her perfume.
A box in the beauty parlor fills up with jewelry. Gilda says it’s fake, but I don’t know what she means. It’s as real as my fingers that jangle and untangle the chains—as real as my cheek that I hold the cold, round stones against. Rubies and diamonds glitter on the table with the nail polish bottles and shampoo tubes and all the clips and curlers and bobby pins. Women arriving to get beautiful drop off these strings and rings and things of gold. I’m told the jewels will build air strips in New Guinea. The natives there will do anything for a shiny necklace. I don’t blame them. I would do anything to have one myself.
One night Gilda has a Kits for Russia party. The next night she has a Bandages for Our Boys party. Her customers come to our house at night and go upstairs to sit at Gilda’s kitchen table. We hear their comings and goings. Laughter, footsteps on the stairs, the doorbell ringing and ringing. My heart yearns to fly up there to celebrate whatever they are celebrating. Gilda has told me they roll gauze into neat bandages for the soldiers on the front and make kits for Russia because “they have nothing in Russia.” It seems the Russians desperately need sugar for their tea and soap for their baths and thread because their clothes are in tatters.
My mother keeps casting her eyes at the ceiling; all that noise from upstairs, all that chatter and wild laughter. She doesn’t like it. At night I’m not allowed to go up and watch because soon it will be my bedtime. My father says to her during one of these parties, “Why don’t you go up and roll bandages?” She says to him, “Why don’t you?”
Something is changing in Gilda. She’s braver and noisier; she’s busier and bossier. She gets on the phone and tells people how to get busy to win the war. “I can’t carry a gun, but I can shoot my mouth off” is what she tells one of her customers.
A great event takes place in our neighborhood. Gilda marches in a parade carrying a magnificent American flag on a long pole. She leads an army of brides like herself down Avenue P, all of them in white with red crosses, their skirts and hair flying in the wind, their gauze headdresses shivering like butterflies’ wings. The Avenue N shul is sponsoring a war bond rally on Avenue P. I am on my father’s shoulders, high above the crowd. My grandmother stands down below, spinning her head from side to side, in order to see better. My mother has stayed home with The Screamer, which is always perfect for me.
At every corner are bridge tables where women are selling war bonds. I’d like to be as important as those women. They take money and write down names. My father—counting out five- and one-dollar bills—buys two twenty-five-dollar war bonds although my mother warned him not to do anything that would put us in the poorhouse. I worry that he might be doing something bad. But it doesn’t look bad. He’s very happy to do it. He’s proud. Besides, he pays only eighteen dollars and some change for each war bond. This, he tells me, is a bargain because in a few years they will be worth more than he paid. And, in the meantime, they will be winning the war.
Gilda and the women march to drums and flutes. The women march like beautiful soldiers in a ballet, without heavy boots and guns. They march but really they dance and their dresses blow in the wind. I tangle my fingers in the curls of my father’s head and love being this high, this far-seeing.
When the parade is over (it goes for two blocks), Gilda comes up to us, her cheeks flushed, smiling happily. She talks to my father, not once letting the smile slip away, and holds onto my leg, but I have the feeling it’s my father she’s really touching although I know it’s me. They are both laughing—their faces are lit by laughter. I feel my father’s shoulders shake under my behind. Something about the red lipstick has transformed Gilda into another woman. That, and the gauze headdress. And the red cross. And the flag. It’s as if she turned into another person overnight.
I know I will have to keep this knowledge a secret, at least till I see if the changes stay changed. I also wonder if someday I can change into a laughing, red-lipped woman from the shy small person that I am.
CHAPTER 11
No matter how far away in time a bad thing is, it will happen. The Screamer will walk, my grandmother will die, the furnace will explode—it is just a matter of holding it off and trying to forget about it in the meantime. I have forgotten about school as long as I can. Now the day has come. I know I will doubtless be torn to bits. No one will be able to protect me.
My school is fourteen blocks away. If Avenue P is only one block away, how far is fourteen blocks? My mother and I count streets as we batter our heads into the wind. I can hardly believe we are in this moment, that it has really happened; they didn’t forget me or skip over me. They sent the letter that said I must come. The very event I have dreaded all my life, the horror that will trap me with worthless children who will attack me and murder me, has finally moved up, day by day, till it arrived. In the same way that my father had to give up the happy sunshine of Florida and come home to have his arm sli
ced up at the defense plant, I have had to give up my childhood and surrender to this moment.
Now I am being dragged, jerked and tugged by my mother in order that we not be late, I in my new Stride-Rite oxfords, in my cotton stockings held up by garters, in my plaid skirt and sweater, in my undershirt and woollies, carrying my plaid briefcase in which there is a new pencil case, in which there are new crayons and new pencils sharpened to needle points.
My heart has gone crazy. I could tear away from my mother’s hand and run away forever. I could dash in front of a car and let it squash me as Bingo was squashed somewhere, probably right after they killed him with an injection. My mind is knocking about, my heart is thumping, my feet are flopping every which way and my stomach is spinning as my mother hurries along, pulling and pushing me.
Why does it have to happen? Why does everyone have to go to school? Who makes these rules and why can’t they be ignored or broken? Why would anyone take a good little girl out of her house, where she has her dolls and her books and her special hidden chocolate cupcake, where she has her bed to sleep in, and her tub to bathe in, and her backyard to sit in, why would they pull her out and make her sit all day in a huge stone square building with bars on the windows and sharp pointy fence posts all around it?
The only reason is that she must not be a good girl. She must be bad. Every boy and girl being dragged to school this morning, and I see them now; coming from every direction, must be bad! And that is why they will murder me.
Doesn’t my mother know this? Why has she been so careful with me all these years but now is willing to turn me over to this? I go over the bad things I have done. Oh! They are so numerous, they are so tremendous in number, that I can’t begin to count them, or even think of them in some carefully ordered way. The meals I have not eaten! The milk spilled, the plates broken, the mud tracked in, the dresses torn, the paper wasted, the lights left on, the lies told, the mittens lost, the promises broken. And those are just the things they know about. There are those things no one knows about—the secret thoughts, the mean thoughts, the looking at my body from underneath with a mirror, the trying to break The Screamer’s finger off, the wishing Gilda was my mother.
The Kingdom of Brooklyn Page 6
