The Kingdom of Brooklyn

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  He seems to think it’s all right to say “lord” in that silly song, no one gets excited about it at all. I think it’s nasty to talk about The Screamer’s wet diapers, no matter how much she disgusts me. But everyone, even my mother, even Gilda, seems to think the song is cute.

  There is another song my father bursts into:

  Off we go, into the wild blue yonder,

  Flying high, into the sun,

  Down we dive…

  (he stops here to drink another cup of wine and adds:)

  Atta boy, give ‘em the gun!

  Why does he have tears in his eyes? Is he happy or is he sad? Does he wish he had flown off into the wild blue yonder? Does he wish he were a gold star on someone’s window?

  We know one thing: his job at the defense plant is over. My mother wants him to get rich. She says so often, now.

  She wants us to buy a house of our own. She wants to move away from Gilda and Grandma. She wants an alligator purse. She wants gold jewelry. She wants a vase of gardenias on every table. She wants a maid to cook and another maid to wash clothes and another one to clean the house.

  My father says why can’t she learn that the best things in life are free. She turns her back on him. The war in Europe is over, but a new war is starting, right in our house on Avenue O.

  CHAPTER 17

  No more blackouts, enough sugar for a thousand chocolate cakes, plenty of soap powder for the Bendix and The Screamer’s diapers, new leather shoes for everyone, nylon stockings for Gilda and my mother; just when our spirits are lightening, just when my father goes back into the antique business (at an auction my father buys three locked trunks—contents guaranteed unknown—and finds some rare china bowls and a bronze elephant with which to start out in his new business, a store he rents on Hansen Place); just when I get my first ballet slippers and start to take lessons in a basement studio on Avenue P, my grandmother’s heart stops.

  I come home from school one day and see Dr. Schwartz’s black car in front of the wishbone tree. (We don’t use Dr. Trutt for my grandmother; she thinks his wife is a floozy and if he can’t take care of her, how can he take care of sick people?)

  I run into my house and upstairs, where my grandmother is on the couch in the front room, her face twisted like a corkscrew. Gilda is bending over her, Dr. Schwartz is bending over her, even my mother, knotting a handkerchief in her hands, stands far back, but watching. This isn’t the usual emergency that a few white pills under her tongue can fix up. This is the real thing. My own heart in my chest does a loop-the-loop, skids, flutters, begins to pound. It could also just…stop. Who is to say mine won’t stop even as I watch my grandmother, whose pasty face is the color of pale chicken fat?

  But no, Gilda turns to assure me it’s not her heart, her heart is strong. Dr. Schwartz thinks there has been an explosion in a blood vessel in her brain. See how her mouth turns down on one side? See how one hand and one leg seem unable to move? He shouts at my grandmother, his voice seems to be thunder flung out of a storm cloud: “DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME? BLINK YOUR EYES IF YOU DO.”

  She stares like my doll with painted china eyes. I feel a sudden and hideous gurgle of diarrhea in my lower parts; my insides are trying to come out to escape what is inside me that is treacherous and can kill me.

  I hate this, hate it, it’s the worst invention in the whole world: fear.

  Now there is the bell. My grandmother’s voice has turned into a bell that rings and rings. I hear it in my sun-room bedroom in the deep of night, that distant, imperious clank of the brass bell she can clutch and shake in her good hand, and I imagine I hear Gilda’s footsteps running in desperate, fearful reply to it. This drama all takes place overhead, on another level, in another world. We downstairs don’t have to worry—my mother has told me so. Gilda is good at this. Gilda will handle it. Gilda was born to be a nurse and a soothing presence. Gilda loves my grandmother and wants to take care of her.

  When I ask if my grandmother is not terrified that she can’t walk or talk, when I ask if she isn’t scared every minute of the night and day, my mother shrugs. She seems to think my grandmother never felt very much to begin with; I see with amazement my mother doesn’t love her.

  Don’t you love your own mother? It is a question I frame, but it’s too incredible to say aloud. I realize that the truth I’ve heard all my life is a lie. Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me! Wrong! Words have the most power. Words can do damage far beyond a slap or a punch or a rock in the side of the forehead. And likewise, but in an opposite way, wonderful words, like Joe Martini’s saying I’m his wife and I can always come and live with him, do the most good, bring more happiness than any present, last forever, and creep out in the warm sweetness from the depths of my mind as I lie in bed and say them to myself, over and over. They are better to burrow into than my feather pillow, sweeter to wrap myself in than my layers of wool blankets.

  I try to imagine my own mother frozen in one position in her bed, without a mouth to talk with, without legs to walk with, not like The Screamer who will soon, is now, getting a mouth and legs that work, but frozen forever, helpless and silent. My heart pauses at the thought—it only starts when I jump, literally jump in bed like a jerked puppet, to start it again. This is how I can also die, by thinking of my mother’s total weakness, her loss of power over me. What would keep me going if she were not behind me, holding me up, pushing me, disapproving of me, liking me only when I am like her, hating me when I am not?

  Nothing would keep me up. I’d fizz out like a popped balloon, I’d whoosh away and fall to shreds like a tattered, ruined balloon.

  This is too hard to think about. I would rather be in my ballet slippers, in Madame Genet’s basement studio next to the Claridge Theater on Avenue P. I would rather be doing my eight hand positions to “The Merry Widow Waltz.”

  Gilda is run ragged. After I get home from school, I hear her overhead racing up and down the hall, from the beauty parlor to the persistent jangle of my grandmother’s bell. Sometimes I go upstairs and try to help: “See what she wants,” and I approach the sickroom in terror to look into my grandmother’s frozen eyes, her crooked face, and I say “What do you want?” but all she can do is shake the bell at me, jab the bell at me, stab at me with the bell, her mouth vicious with the misery of not being able to tell me anything at all.

  “Oh, Grandma,” I say. Her fingers are furled into a curled claw; her white hair is electric with static and the chaos of being loose and wild. I always have to get Gilda: “You go, I can’t understand her,” and Gilda drops her scissors and comb and runs, leaving me there to look at the lady in the chair, who is half done, half cut, half curled.

  “It must be hard for you to see your grandma that way,” the ladies say to me. If I agree, they will say something else about how hard old age is.

  I don’t think it’s hard, I think it’s disgusting and that suffering like my grandmother’s shouldn’t be allowed. Laws should stop this, wars should be fought to stop this. No one, no one I love, and never, never, never me, should ever have to experience this.

  Gilda wants her moved downstairs. Gilda is crying and my father is patting her back after my grandmother has fallen out of bed upstairs, and two neighbor-men have been called to help my father lift her back into her tangled sheets. She is like a load of old laundry nobody wants around. Does she know it? Inside those steel blue eyes, is my grandmother in agony? I used to wash her back in the bathtub, I used to watch her cook chicken soup, she used to give me those golden jewels, the boiled baby egg yolks from the hen’s belly. She came from Poland in the hold of a ship when she was fifteen. She married a tailor, my grandfather, who died before I was born, but he knew my mother had talent for the piano, but was certain Gilda had none for the violin. If he had known me, what would he have seen in me?

  “Let my sister take her!” Gilda is sobbing. “I can’t handle it anymore. She’s downstairs all day, she does nothing but play with Blossom, Issa is at school,
why should she be the prima donna? Why can’t she take Mama for a while? This is going to kill me!”

  My father smooths Gilda’s hair back with such tenderness that I begin to shiver. I think he is going to kiss her and I am afraid of what I will see when he does.

  “Shh, shh,” he says to her, stroking her hair. “Yes, yes, this is too much for you, isn’t it?”

  “Let her have it!” Gilda sobs.

  “It would kill her,” my father says.

  “But it’s all right for it to kill me?” she asks him. “I don’t know how to bear it anymore,” she says. And it occurs to me that she’s stuck the way Mary was stuck when she had no place to spend the night and the baby Jesus was about to be born. People get stuck somehow, at sometime; grownups get stuck, and don’t know what to do. So they cry. Or they beg. Or they give up and let someone else figure it out.

  “We’ll figure it out,” my father says. “I’ll find a solution.”

  “Please!” Gilda begs him and she throws herself into his arms. He hugs her there in front of my grandmother, whose eyes stare out from the puffy queer twists of her skin as if they are desperate to close and shut out what they see.

  And then there’s no more Grandma in the house. Just like that, we’re one less. She isn’t dead, but she’s worse than dead. She’s in Sherman’s Rest Home on Ocean Parkway. They take her there in an ambulance, three black men stagger down the stairs with her, her sheets dragging like animal tails, and they stuff her into the back, and Gilda, sobbing and screaming, climbs in with her, and neighbors are in the street watching, and my mother stands leaning against the doorjamb, leaning with her hip out and her hand resting delicately upon her hip bone, her face without expression, looking like a sculpture. Looking cold as marble.

  CHAPTER 18

  This is a new feeling: feeling for someone else. I think of Gilda alone upstairs. I feel how alone she is, eating alone, sleeping alone, just sitting alone on her couch, while we—downstairs—are four in the living room, four sitting around the radio, four having dinner, four going to bed and knowing the other three are breathing in the nearby shadows of darkness. I ache for Gilda’s aloneness, I want to draw her down to sit with us, to give her noise and light and chatter and the plain comfort of company.

  The others don’t seem to worry about her; if they do, they don’t tell me. I know just when it happens, when her last customer comes down the stairs and hurries past my sunporch windows along Avenue O, hurries home to make supper for whoever lives in her house. It’s close to five o’clock and dark out already. My mother is making something on the stove, I have already set the table with plates and silverware, with napkins and glasses. Soon my father will be home.

  And upstairs, I see in my hidden eye, Gilda alone, Gilda taking out a piece of fried fish and some bread, Gilda sitting down at the dining table and looking out her front window at the houses across the street, their windows warm and bright, and behind their glowing panes, families sitting down together to eat.

  The silence upstairs is like a vacuum, sucking me up. I want to rush up there, fling on all the lights, dance and sing for her.

  I don’t have this feeling for my grandmother—I don’t think of her, wherever she is, alone, without us, paralyzed, unable to move or talk, because I can’t imagine it. I haven’t been to visit her yet, nor has my mother. Only Gilda goes three times a day, and my father has gone once, to carry for Gilda heavy jars of homemade gefilte fish, chicken soup, flanken and potatoes.

  My mother won’t go. “I don’t have the heart for it,” she says. What does that mean? What does she have the heart for? She reads magazines all day and talks about getting a decorator for the house if we’re not going to move away yet. My father has protested that we can’t move yet (if we ever can): not now, not when he’s starting up a new business, not with my grandmother paralyzed, not while Gilda is alone.

  Why does she need a decorator for the house? I could decorate it for her if she asked me—I would make crepe paper streamers and tie balloons on a string across the ceiling. I would hang a Halloween skeleton from the front door. I would glue devils and angels around the moldings, I would put an enormous Christmas tree permanently in the middle of the living room.

  “She wants new furniture,” I tell Gilda. Gilda has had bad luck today. She has burned a customer’s scalp, she has cut her own finger on the manicure nippers. At the rest home, she found my grandmother lying on soiled sheets. I am trying to keep Gilda company. I have run upstairs after supper, run so fast I pretend I don’t hear my mother calling me back. I know she won’t stand and come to yell up the stairs after me; she has The Screamer on her lap and is doing “This Little Piggy” with her.

  Safely upstairs, I sit beside Gilda on the couch and hold her injured finger. I kiss it with my lips. I tell her I am giving her a “raisin,” and it will make her better. Usually she loves this, she adores it when I do this. But tonight she is staring out the black front windows; she has not even lowered the shades. Ice patches have formed along the window frames, blurring the view from the edges. I try to think of things to tell her.

  “Mommy says she has to have a new couch. She says she hates to sit on furniture where strangers’ behinds have been.”

  Gilda looks at me and I know she doesn’t see me. She’s somewhere else, and she says something I find very strange: she says, “My sister thinks she was born without a body, that she has no behind. Then what is it she shakes in everyone’s face? Your poor father, he doesn’t even know what she’s doing to him.” She says it in a trance and she has no idea she has said it aloud, or that I have heard it. I know that, because when her eyes come back to seeing, she sees me, and she hugs me, and she’s gentle, and she offers me a cookie, not homemade, but from the store.

  I don’t talk to Gilda anymore about furniture, though I am thinking about what will happen when we get new furniture; we won’t be able to put our feet up, we won’t be able to play on it.

  Our old furniture is “new”—we get new furniture whenever my father comes upon a second-hand piece he thinks we might like better than the old piece, or he thinks he can sell the old one and can’t so easily sell the new

  I don’t mind it. There are often treasures under the cushions of used furniture: I have found a pipe, a pen, a penny, a penlight. I have found licorice His Nibs candies, and sticks of Black Jack gum, and safety pins. I know my father hunts treasures, also. Sometimes at night he closes the shades and spreads out newspaper on the kitchen table and cuts open pin cushions he has bought at an “estate” sale—he thinks he will find hidden diamonds. He has heard of this happening, and he hopes it will happen to him.

  I love it, love it, when the sawdust spills out onto the paper and carefully, with his big thick fingers, he spreads the crumbs out before our eyes. Who will see it first, that sparkling gem, that glowing fiery stone that will mean we will be rich? We will have new everything—and I will get skates, dolls, tea sets, toeshoes!

  But it’s always only sawdust.

  The Screamer can’t be ignored. She’s here and she belongs here as much as I do. She’s annoying in every way; she screams. She is cranky after her naps and kicks till her breaths stops and her face turns blue. Her crib smells of throw-up and pee; they think she’s wonderful. They play with every part of her, tickle her ears, count her toes, blow on her belly-button, bite her tummy.

  Why is it that my hair looks wild in the morning, a tangle of golden curls that won’t lay down, while her hair wakes up combed and neat, straight lines of fine, dark, neat hair. We both grew inside our mother, but we’re not the same. We’re both my mother’s daughters, but my mother loves her more. She is of no interest. She is in the way. We’d be better off without her.

  I need something strong in my mind. I am so tired of another Sunday. Gilda is going to the rest home. I will go with her. I have to find out someday where we all go when we’re old, don’t I?

  I don’t beg, or ask, or plead, or argue. What I do is make my grandmother a mi
niature honey cake while Gilda is baking special foods for her. They can’t refuse me now—I know how they think in this house. They will have to let me bring my grandmother a present. How sweet an idea, they will say. What a good child!

  But we don’t even have to ask because my mother is out looking at furniture. They have taken The Screamer away and left me home with Gilda and there’s no discussion because Gilda can’t leave me home alone, and she can’t not go to visit my grandmother this middle time of the three times a day she goes to visit her.

  I hold the honey cake like a little dead child as we walk along Avenue O, as we turn on Ocean Parkway and pass the old people sitting on benches, pass the bicycle riders on the bicycle path, pass the little gold, pointy rails that separate the benches from the bicycles. I walk in my good Stride-Rite shoes, the ones that are wide on me even in their narrowest size, the ones the salesman wants me to grow into by eating my potatoes standing up.

  “I don’t want you to be scared,” Gilda says. “I’m used to it by now.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “But you will be,” she tells me. “There’s no way I can prepare you for this.”

  “Is she going to die?” I ask Gilda.

  “Not soon enough,” she says.

  My grandmother is strapped into a wheelchair. Her head flops forward, her white hair has never been combed, I think, since the day they stuffed her into the ambulance. Her face has fallen away and all I see at first is the grin of her huge false teeth. They smile even as tears come out of her eyes when she sees me.

  Her hand shakes at me although she has no brass bell in it. The smell in this room is so bad that I can’t breathe. I hide behind Gilda as she tells my grandmother what she has brought, shows off the little treats for everyone to share, including the other old women who are strapped in their wheelchairs.