And then my hair stands on end. I can feel it lift up at the back of my neck and rise up toward the sky. There is a tremendous crackling noise, and the room lights up. I turn around, and a ball of flame, big as the sun, has flown in the window and is hanging in the air, just behind my mother’s back. It dances with fire, it’s blinding me with fire, it hangs there in the space behind my mother till she turns around and almost takes it in her open mouth when she screams.
No one can move, we are paralyzed as it crackles and sparks. My father in the basement hears it and howls, “What? I’m coming!” and dashes up the stairs; he sees it just as it vanishes from the air. With a pop, it disappears, leaving a black hole in the air, an inside-out space.
We look at one another. We are all alive, but no one can move. We have been visited by a ball of fire. We have been electrified. We have lived through another Sunday.
CHAPTER 15
My mother is convinced she will die by fire. Terrified since the ball of lightning came in the window, she won’t open the windows. She won’t let anyone take a bath or shower if the sky is cloudy. We can’t even get a glass of water from the sink if there is one dark thunderhead in the sky. Could it be that she is being punished by God for making bacon? Could that possibly be the case? I don’t think about God. How can I think about an invisible person who never shows up, never speaks, never shows the slightest indication that he exists. But maybe, as my father suggested, I should take this event as a warning and not eat bacon any more. Maybe my father is right, that God is everywhere, that he sees everything I do and knows everything I think. I have a sense that, if God does exist, his presence is especially dense in the area where the Jewish shawl and the Jewish prayer book are in sight. My father may know something: a ball of fire has never crackled at his back.
I watch my mother when she isn’t aware of me; I follow her into the bathroom where there are only the two of us. The Screamer can’t walk, so she has to stay wherever they plop her. She’s like a lump of dough. One of these days her mouth will talk and her legs will walk, but not yet, not yet.
I walk, I talk, I see my mother leaning forward, looking at her face in the mirror, examining it as if it is spoiling, like a piece of molding cheese. She has a sad, disgusted look around her mouth, which she never opens to smile. Her pretty round behind comes toward me as she leans over the sink—even when she’s sad her behind is always pretty, the way her skirt clings to it and then swings free down at her knees. When my mother walks, she dances, despite herself.
Very suddenly, I throw my arms around her legs and kiss her behind. She jumps, as if I have bitten her.
“Issa! Don’t do that!”
“Why not? Gilda likes it when I do that to her.”
“You must never kiss people in those places,” she says. “And you must not kiss Gilda all the time. You’re not a baby.”
“I wish I were.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Well, I do.”
My mother wants me out of there. I think she probably has blood on a napkin and wants to take it off and put on a clean one. I have seen her wrap the old one in toilet paper and put it in a paper bag. But that was when I was little and she would do those things in front of me. Now, I suppose, she only does them in front of The Screamer.
I don’t think there is a reason for me to be in this house any more. I would like to live in some other house. With some other mother.
When Gilda wants to take me around the neighborhood to sell more war bonds, I ask her if we can go to a Skater’s house. “Please, can we visit one of the girls from my class?” I beg. “Linda, Ruthie, Myra, or Myrna?”
“I don’t see why not. I know all their mothers, every one of them is patriotic,” she said, hitching over her shoulder the canvas bag that has her record book and her money box in it. “Everyone is patriotic these days.” As we pass Mrs. Exter’s house, Gilda points out to me the four gold stars pasted in her window. “A four-star mother,” she says, “poor thing. Four boys lost in the war. I’m glad I have no sons. I’m glad you aren’t a boy, Issa.” Just then Mrs. Exter comes to her window and waves to us. She doesn’t look too bad. When your children die, you can still smile and wave. What does that mean?
“I love the summer,” Gilda says to me as we walk on. Even after she has told me about four boys dying in the war, she can think of something ordinary like the summer. What does that mean? When grownups have feelings, do the feelings only last a minute or last forever?
“I love the summer, too,” I say, switching from dead boys to summer thoughts. I do the same thing grownups do—go to another subject. But what happens to the bad thought; if I bring it back later, will I get the bad feeling? Can I switch on and off like a lamp?
We walk along the summer streets, under the leafy shade of maple trees that drop little wing-shaped seed holders. I gather them up, snap them open in the middle and glue the wings to my nose. There aren’t many cars on the street in the daytime; the fathers who have cars are all at work, including my father. Summertime is calmer than wintertime. I wear less clothes. I don’t have to run to school. At night fireflies wink and glow against the hedges, and we sit out on the stoop to get cool, licking ice-cream pops we buy from Willy, the ice cream man.
But now that it is summer, I never see Joe Martini. I thought he would find me no matter what; I wonder if he has already forgotten me. He promised me he would walk over to my house as soon as he could, but he must have counted the fourteen blocks and decided I wasn’t worth it. Or maybe his mother didn’t like me and forbids it. Or…could it be…Jesus may have told him with his powerful eyes to stay away from me.
I wish Joe loved me. I wish everyone loved me. I wish anyone loved me.
Suddenly we are at the door of Linda’s house. To my amazement, once the door is opened, there is the real-life Linda, just a little girl playing Monopoly with her father on the rug. There is Linda’s mother, cooking in the kitchen. There is Linda’s little sister, Evvy, pale and thin, because her heart is weak. (I thought only my grandmother, who is old, could have a weak heart, but look at this: a child younger than I am has a weak heart. This too could happen to me!)
“Hi,” Linda says. “Want to play?” Just like that, the invitation I have wanted for so long is laid at my feet. She pats the rug beside her and I rush to the place, folding my legs under me, grateful and weak with gratitude. Gilda goes into the kitchen to talk to Mrs. Levitz, and, because the game is beginning, I am just in time to get my money from the banker, who is Mr. Levitz. He has two missing teeth, and a stubble of beard, but he has a sweet face.
“I hate Miss Fenley, don’t you?” Linda asks. “I can’t wait to see who we have for our teacher in first grade.”
“Me too,” I say.
“We should walk to school together,” Linda says. “You and I only live across the street from each other.”
“Will you be allowed to cross Ocean Parkway?”
“Of course! I’ll be in first grade. Won’t you be allowed?”
“Sure,” I say. I decide I will push my mother in front of a car if she doesn’t let me walk to school without her.
“Your turn,” Linda says, giving me the dice. She has short brown straight hair and bangs that fall into her face. She’s pretty. I try to see into her bedroom. I try to see her whole house from where I’m sitting. I wonder where she keeps her skates.
Mr. Levitz is reading an Archie comic book while Linda and I take our turns. He laughs out loud to himself. I know he drives a truck—he delivers furniture but he doesn’t work every day.
“This is fun,” I say. But Gilda, I notice, has finished her business and is ready to leave. My heart turns over.
“You want to stay?” she asks me.
“Oh please!”
“Your mother will kill me,” she says.
“Well, if she does, I’ll kill her,” I say; the words just fly out of my mouth. Mr. Levitz laughs. But no one seems to think I am bad. Gilda blows me a kiss and leaves withou
t me; she says she will be back to get me in an hour.
So I get to stay and play with a friend. I could explode with amazement as I think about it, Issa playing with a friend!—and I do think about it, all the time I am playing Monopoly, buying houses and getting put in jail and collecting “Go” money. So much money—if only I had my own money I could buy skates.
When I have to go to the bathroom, Linda directs me to her bedroom next to the kitchen; the bathroom is through there. As I pass her dresser, I see six quarters sitting on a mirrored tray, gleaming like silver moons. I take a quarter. I just take it without hesitation and quickly bend to put it in my sock. When I go back to the living room, that wild bird, my heart, is flapping its wings inside me. The quarter is red-hot in my sock. Do they know? Can they know? Why did I do it? Maybe Linda will discover the quarter missing later and tell her mother. They will come to my house. They will shine flashlights in my eyes.
I am so bad. Why does it feel so exciting to be bad? The thudding inside me is spinning my breath out in long strands. Linda’s mother is making potato pancakes, I can smell the onion and the oil, flowing in a delicious cloud from room to room. My heartbeat shakes me! I have discovered that if I pretend to bend down to pick something up, if I let my head hang low, the wild bird in my chest will eventually slow down, beat and pop, then stop flapping. I try it, shaken hard by this excitement; so much has happened in one day it is almost too much to bear.
When Gilda comes for me an hour later, I am better. My confidence in myself expands; I can survive this kind of shattering expedition away from home. The inside of my mind is glowing with new matters to think about. I walk home with Gilda, feeling the quarter in my sock like a chocolate cupcake, hidden and delicious.
Easy as pie, they now call for me. Four friends call for me, at my door, Linda and Myra and Myrna and Ruthie. I hardly believe it, looking out one of my nine windows and seeing the troupe of them coming up to the front door. The doorbell rings like a fanfare of trumpets. I can’t believe that eight legs that can skate, eight eyes that have seen the sidewalk flying by beneath, are now walking to my house, looking for me.
My mother has to have all her teeth pulled. She never smiles, anyway, so I think it won’t be so bad, but it is. She comes home from the dentist on my father’s arm looking like a witch, her lips drawn in on a string of pain. Blood comes out of her mouth all night. When I come into her bedroom, she throws the sheet over her face, and talks from under it, in the dark, like a lamp without a bulb. Her words sound to me like, “Wis is to wis my yay-yay.”
“This is to fix my headaches,” is what my father translates. A certain doctor thinks that it’s my mother’s teeth that are causing all her headaches, causing all her nausea. The doctor should have asked me and I could have told him it isn’t her teeth. It’s me. It’s Gilda. It’s not being able to rhyme her rhymes to applause in a big parade on Avenue P, carrying a flag and wearing a crown. I can feel where my mother’s unhappiness comes from: it’s from my father’s not being rich or fancy, it’s from living in the same house with the beauty parlor and Gilda and my grandmother, it’s from the endless war and the accident at the defense plant, it’s from having to cook and get onion-stink on her fingers and tears in her eyes. It’s from her being beautiful and having no one looking at her. The doctor ought to have asked me. I know.
She comes out from under the sheet, holding ice to her mouth in a washcloth.
“Wo wahwy wah-ing” she says, but I unpeel the words to find that she said, “Don’t worry, darling.” For that darling I would give her all my teeth this minute. I would give her my life.
“Poor Mommy,” I say. Saying it gives me an amazing power, as if I am the mommy and she is the child. I never knew she could be a child; right now she is crumpled on the bed like a little child, she is weak like a little child. I never knew my mother could be this weak. I never knew I could be this strong.
This is another new idea to think about. Look how every day is a surprise.
CHAPTER 16
Teeth take over. The Screamer gets her first one, so what is the commotion about? One tooth. I have a whole mouthful. My mother has none, my sister has one, they are the strangest things; with teeth, if you think about it, a person is like a wild animal, having those white, sharp, pointy prongs that clamp down into meat, that grind it and tear it. So what about smiles? The same prongs that are so sharp, that can hurt, that mince matter, are displayed to show friendliness.
“Smile more,” Gilda reminds me. “If you smiled more in school, you’d have more friends. You’d be elected class president.” How little she knows. I already lost two elections, each time nominated by Joe Martini, in first grade, for president and for vice president; each time I had to go out into the hall and stand there with the other nominees for three minutes by the clock while the class raised their hands for or against me, and then go back inside, head bowed, heart agog, to find out they didn’t want me. Not me: someone else. The hands that didn’t come up for me were like fists that punched my stomach as I came back into the room.
Gilda doesn’t know everything—I was wrong to think she did. I used to think she thought I was perfect. Why then did she discuss my smiling with my mother? Why did my mother write a jingle for me and prop it up in front of my orange juice:
If smiles she won’t hoard,
I’m pretty sure she’ll get a reward!
Why should I smile? How much I smile should be my own business. A smile isn’t something you do; it comes because you feel a certain way, and it isn’t often I feel that way. Besides, I have too much gum showing over my teeth. My teeth are too small. Whose fault is that? I am beginning to see and envy parts on others that are prettier than mine.
The Screamer clicks a spoon against her one ragged tooth and everyone laughs and laughs. One afternoon The Screamer sneezes and my grandmother says, “Gesundheit.” The Screamer laughs at this funny word. Then everyone says “Gesundheit” every time The Screamer sneezes. One day when she isn’t even sneezing at all, someone says “Gesundheit” to her and she makes a sound like a sneeze, a little baby snort through her stuffy nose. How brilliant they think she is. How they carry on, day after day, saying “Gesundheit” and going wild when she makes the snuffly sneezing noise.
When I catch a cold and sneeze for a week, no one says Gesundheit to me. They, are all worn out from saying it to her.
Teeth aren’t the only odd things. Look at ears, those cups glued onto the sides of our heads. And eyes, like marbles, that come in different colors and roll around, roll around. Luckily, in children especially, they are at the very top of the head. If they were lower, we couldn’t see far at all. Children are too short to do almost anything important.
At first my mother goes around with her lips sucked in, to hide her toothless mouth. When she gets her new teeth, big, square, white, even teeth, with their pink plastic tops and bottoms, she gags putting them in, she gags taking them out. Even if she tries to do it quietly, we know when she is putting them in and taking them out.
Though I am just now getting my second set of teeth, my grownup teeth, I have to worry about losing them someday and getting plastic teeth. I also have an unstable heart to think about, like my grandmother’s. I have all these body parts, all over me, and all of them breakable, dangerous.
Suddenly cavities spring up in all my teeth as if my bubblegum had infiltrated every crack and sprouted seeds of rot. Dr. Ellen’s office is opposite the playground, and I sit at the waiting room window, not reading Jack and Jill, but watching free children roller skating on the blacktop; they are doubly lucky, to have roller skates and not have cavities. My stomach churns at the threats from within: the low burr of the drill, the smell of antiseptic, the cries of a child.
They have to hold me down, my mother and father both. They have tricked me, lied to me, bribed me, dragged me into the chair. I have made them promise not to let Dr. Ellen pull my loose tooth. My mother promises. My father promises. Dr. Ellen promises. He says, in a k
indly way, “I just want to wiggle it slightly.” Then he thrusts his hairy fist into my small mouth and pulls the tooth out of its socket with a violent wrench that I feel in the core of my brain. Blood pours out of my mouth.
I scream so loud the mirrors crack. I don’t want to have teeth to rot, and a heart to flop inside my ribs, don’t want to vomit, have babies, make poopies, pee, gag, break my bones, have sore throats. Die! Next to my cry: I want! I want! is my other cry: I don’t want! I don’t want!
It doesn’t matter. I get what there is, and so does everyone else.
There is a party in the street when the war ends. Dancing on the sidewalk, balloons, whistles, hats in the air. My father brings out a tambourine and dances around like a wild monkey, his knees going cockeyed. My mother is wearing a brown silk dress and beautiful, delicately heeled alligator shoes as she lounges against one of the tables. Gilda and my grandmother are setting out honey cakes and sponge cakes and mandelbrot and candied orange peel. There is a special bottle of Manischewitz grape wine.
It suits me. War news on the radio has always been the cause of people shushing me. There’s nothing good about war, except for the war bond parades and Gilda’s collecting jewelry for the natives in New Guinea.
My father drinks two paper cups of wine and begins to sing one of his war songs:
Praise the lord, and bless the ammunition.
Praise the lord, my Blossom’s goin’ pishin,
Praise the lord and hurry with the diapers
Or we’ll…all…get…wet!”
The Kingdom of Brooklyn Page 9
