The Kingdom of Brooklyn

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  I bury my face in the little honey cake, breathing in the scent of sweetness and warmth.

  “Where are your earrings, Mama?” Gilda asks. My grandmother’s ears have become stretched out, long flaps of hanging skin. She is all teeth and ears. Gilda looks around at the other women. “Did any of you see what happened to her earrings?” As if any of them can talk, explain, solve problems.

  Gilda finds someone in the hall; she grills the nurse, a colored woman with a big white smile and a hearty laugh.

  “Oh them, they got flushed down the toilet by accident,” she tells Gilda.

  “But they were my mother’s diamond earrings!” Gilda cries.

  Are they my diamond earrings? The ones I once saw in the vault? Who flushed them away? How dare they take what was to be mine?

  I start to eat the honey cake. I eat it with my fingers, in big handfuls, crumbs of dark honey-colored cake smash into my nose and glue themselves to my lips.

  “Issa, what are you doing? Aren’t you going to give that to Grandma?”

  But this isn’t my grandmother, this grinning witch, this smelly pile of rags, this empty pitcher with enormous ears, this silent, foreign, absent, blank-eyed soul.

  I kick Gilda. I kick the wheelchair. I will kick down the walls of this ghost-house, I will pull down the roof and throw the bricks into the ocean. I will bring my real grandmother home with me, where we can sit outside on the bench and smell the lilacs. Where we can cook chicken soup together and smell the onions, layer by layer. Where things can be the way they used to be.

  CHAPTER 19

  I will be a great ballerina. I will do backbends and pliés and grand jetés; I will hold onto the barre (and, when practicing at home, to the sunroom doorknob) and will execute perfect pirouettes, arabesques and splits.

  Madame Genet’s senior class performs for us in the studio: how I love the calf muscles of the sixteen-year-old girls. How strong and smooth their thighs are, how they leap with perfect ease across the shiny wooden floor. Their gauze tutus shimmer and vibrate, flying up in delicate pulsations to reveal the secret white space of the cave between their legs. I will be this powerful one day, this strong, this graceful, this womanly.

  It is better, of course, to have long, straight hair that shimmers across your shoulders when you do a backbend, straight hair to twist high into a tight, dark little bun. But, if I have to, I will wear a wig when I am older. I will pull out my wild golden curls, hair by hair.

  My mother leaves me alone here; I am dropped off while she takes The Screamer to the playground to push her on the swings. I have one complete hour to dream about becoming a beautiful sixteen-year-old with thighs like iron, with calves hidden by veils of lace.

  When the older girls dance ballet, we’re not supposed to think they are gasping for air and sweating, but they are. I know it because when I dance, I am. Illusion—the discovery that it is possible thrills me. Why should the audience suspect perspiration and sense the wild beating of each heart? No, all they want to see is the dance, all they want to hear is the music. I find it a grand conceit that we can conceal so much, pretend to be colorful butterflies when we are really sweating horses with thudding blood, that we can pretend to be dreamy floating angels when we are actually counting beats and remembering the sequence of steps.

  How much of what I see in the world is illusion? Is everything not what it seems?

  I begin to examine everything with this standard in mind. The ladies who come to Gilda have been through hours of sitting and cutting and curling and baking in order to look nice (not beautiful like ballerinas, but simply nice, simply neat). And, my mother, even to play “Danny Boy” has had to learn her scales, her chords and her notes. She always tells me how hard she used to practice when she was a girl, but why is it that the learning part of her life seems to be over. She never practices new songs now. Nor does she read books now. The headaches, she says, prevent it.

  Couldn’t she take an extra aspirin and keep reading, keep playing, and not be angry so much of the time? If I were practicing ballet every day, for hours, I would be too tired and satisfied to be unhappy. If she were busier, maybe smiles she would not hoard. (That rhyme she wrote to me sticks like a burr in my throat. If smiles she won’t hoard, I’m pretty sure she’ll get a reward! Where is my reward? I’m smiling, I’m smiling. I smile into her face whenever I can, and she doesn’t seem to remember. Where is my reward?)

  On the way home from ballet lessons I stop at intervals to do the eight hand positions to myself, then the five foot positions, humming “The Merry Widow Waltz.”

  As we walk up East 4th Street my mother stops the stroller and looks at me. She says, “Issa, you have such powers of concentration.”

  Is that good or bad? I can never tell what she’s thinking when she analyzes me.

  “Doesn’t Blossom?” (This is my test. Blossom has no faults at all.)

  “Oh no. She’s just a baby. But she hasn’t got what you have. She’s a free spirit.”

  “And what am I?” My blood is thudding louder than it does when I do ten pirouettes.

  “You’re a determined little thing.”

  I’m a thing. “Is that good?”

  “You might be famous someday. Rich and famous.”

  “Would you like me if I were rich and famous?”

  “I’d adore you, darling.”

  Adore. Darling. Rich and famous.

  I dance home on winged feet. That night I practice pliés till my heart bursts in my chest. I spin till my eyes fly out of my head. I backbend till my spine splinters.

  She will adore me, darling!

  It is a Saturday afternoon in spring. I am now in third grade. I am sitting on the back porch reading a book called Katrinka, The Story of a Russian Child and wondering how I might feel if I woke up some morning to discover my parents and Gilda gone, leaving me in charge of my sister. Outside snow would be rising to the windowsills. There would be hardly any food in the house. A freezing blizzard would be swirling about the windows.

  My fantasies are thicker than the snowflakes. I would leave my sister in her crib and start out to get help. I would leave enough wood burning in the stove to keep her warm for two days. (Then, when it was gone, if I weren’t back—no fault of mine—she would freeze to death.) Before I left I would pack Zwieback biscuits around her body to keep her fed. (I would take with me all the rest of the food in the house: particularly challah and halvah and black olives.) Wolves would be howling from the edge of the forest, and Indians (do they have Indians in Russia? Do they have them in Brooklyn?) would close in upon the house with tomahawks raised. They would either scalp her, abduct her and raise her as an Indian princess, or eat her. (Are Indians cannibals? There is so much I don’t know yet.)

  Suddenly, I hear the slam of my father’s car door out front. I know his car sounds, just as I know his two-tone whistle, his laugh, his voice. Why is he home? He is supposed to be at his store. He is never home this early on a Saturday. What is he doing here?

  The street is quiet, the house is quiet. Gilda is at the rest home visiting my grandmother. My mother and The Screamer are taking their afternoon naps.

  My father is home! I sit in perfect silence, the book balanced on my knees, and I hear him come up the alley. He knows where to find me—it is he who takes me to the library each Friday night to get an armful of books to read over the weekend. He knows where I am on a Saturday afternoon.

  He has a carton under his arm! Aha! A surprise! I smile at him. He has his pipe in his mouth and a sweet expression in his eyes. Oh, how I love my father! How nice it is to see him. And a carton brought home means a surprise. He loves to surprise me, bringing me treasures from his business like costumes for Halloween (one year a clown costume, one year a hairy gorilla), or games that children used to play long ago, or a gum machine from the subway, or a ukulele whose strings have come unstrung.

  But my mind is reluctant to swing away from that delicious vision I was embroidering a minute ago: The Scre
amer alone in the cold, dark, abandoned house, the blizzard roaring outside, bears at the windows (or were they wolves?) and myself, the heroine, setting out into the storm, heroically, chewing chocolate-covered halvah.

  My father carefully sets the carton down on the floorboards at my feet. There is a scuffling sound from within. What could it be? The slide of some object that is loose in the carton? A new doll whose glass eye has just slithered across the cardboard bottom?

  My father’s eye is merry. My heart starts to pound. Skates? Am I finally getting skates? The Skaters are already riding bikes, they are now The Bike-Riders. But I still dream of skates, that sawing, buzzing freedom of skates on cement. Can it be? This visit has to be special, my father is home at midday, curls of caramel-flavored tobacco smoke swirling around our heads, his merry smile—he can’t contain his pleasure.

  The top of the box pops open and a puppy sticks his head through.

  Oh ecstasy! Oh heaven on earth! Oh joy forever! Oh no! My mother’s face at the screen door. Go away! Let me have this first union with my Beloved with no looming axe above me. Let only my father witness my passion. Let me have something I want, at last! At last!

  Beloved to me. Spotty to all others. A pink tongue and little pink nipples, brown and white fur, so soft, so smooth: heaven on earth. I have never known such happiness. The weight of him curled in my lap as I read. The heft of him in my arms as I carry him here and there.

  “He can walk, don’t make a cripple out of him,” Gilda says. But she picks him up too, a look of deep pleasure crossing her face as she feels what he has to give: warmth, adoration, peace, physical surrender. My Baby. My Beloved. My Reason For Living.

  I get melodramatic in a way I have never been. I would give my life for him. I would save him first in a fire. I would sacrifice my whole family in order to save his life.

  There are rules, of course. Not to touch him while I am eating. Never to allow him on the furniture. Never to let him lick my face. (I will break these rules at every opportunity.) My mother will tolerate him, but barely, and only because it’s too late to give him back. (My father accepted him from a man who disappeared into thin air afterward. In trade for a couple of English teacups. My father never even learned his name.)

  I sit out front with him and The Skaters/Bike-Riders stop to admire his delicious little snout, his sweet brown eyes, his thrilling pointy tail. How did this luck land on me? I have something that others want. Issa is enviable! Issa is lucky! Is it possible? That the arrow of luck has finally landed on me?

  CHAPTER 20

  Myra and Myrna and Ruthie and Linda want to start a girls’ club. They invite me to be in it. Before I can agree, I have to gather all the information and give a full report to my mother: why they’re forming the club, what their long-term goals are, who will be in it, what the weekly activities will be, where they will meet, how much the dues will cost—this is worse than doing a book report for school on the causes of the Civil War. I don’t think my friends know what their long-term goals are. I think they just want to have fun.

  I can tell they are inviting me as a kind of afterthought: they are quite complete as they are, forged in friendship from the early days of their skating together, and now they ride on the Ocean Parkway bicycle path every Saturday, two abreast, their shiny Schwinns moving in tandem, a red and a blue in front, two dark blues just behind.

  They don’t know I see them every Saturday as I sit on a bench in front of Sherman’s Rest Home, waiting for Gilda to come out, and holding Beloved close to me on his leash. (I think they might want me in their club because of Beloved, because none of them have a dog, and they love him because he’s so lovable, because they can’t resist him, and because they want something to hug and kiss, like everyone in the world wants.)

  At least he’s mine. I bend way over to kiss the top of his brown and white head. A beagle, a hunting dog whose ears get stiff when he hears the squeak of brakes and thinks he has just heard a mouse make a noise.

  I think about my friends (and enemies) all the time. I think about Joe Martini, who was left back in second grade because he wouldn’t stay in his seat and do drawings of little houses with smoke coming out of their chimneys. I think about Ruby, the girl with a face like a bulldog, who stole my pencil case and threatened to push me in front of a car. She did push me down on the sidewalk, and now I have two scars on my knees. I will never be a Rockette. Gilda told me they have to have perfect legs. I probably can’t be a ballerina, either, though I practice every day. The reason is that I can’t touch my heel to the top of my head in a backbend. I didn’t get the right muscles from my family. Only little miserable teeth. (Do other girls look at their new teeth as they come in, those ragged-toothed teeth, and beg them: “Grow! grow!”?)

  But Myra and Myrna and Ruthie and Linda are the true mysteries. How does one get to be part of them? Can there be a group called Myra and Myrna and Ruthie and Linda and Issa? It sounds wrong, it’s got the wrong poetry. It’s proof that I got not only the wrong muscles, but the wrong name, too. Issa: my name sounds like a secret that others whisper to keep me away; my name is like a hiss, like steam escaping, like the pressure cooker when it’s about to pop, like the furnace before it explodes. I feel like steam, as invisible as a secret, as violent as an explosion. To look at me, I am just a little girl on a bench, but I am all those things. I rattle inside myself with the beings that I am—the lover of Beloved, the daughter of my father, the hater of my sister, and the grandchild who will not go in those doors behind me, into that house where dying is what they have to do. Dying is bad enough, but should it smell like the monkey house?

  Gilda is inside that hall of horrors. She brings the special food she makes for my grandmother, the salted chicken fat on rye bread, the chopped chicken liver, the kreplach soup, the kasha varnishkas. I don’t know why she makes this food; my grandmother can barely chew or swallow—she eats only farina and the cornmeal mush called mamalega. But they don’t allow me to go in. I haven’t seen her since that one time, after which I came home and had nightmares for two months. To think that every day that I am jumping rope, eating ice cream, letting Beloved lick my tears away, dancing pirouettes, my grandmother has been in one place, strapped into a wheelchair! In a room with old witches who don’t know her or love her. To think of it!

  I don’t think of it. Neither does my mother, who won’t visit her. My father has gone there with Gilda, but he doesn’t speak of it, and no one asks him how it was. I imagine he just goes in and smiles reassuringly at my grandmother. That’s all he has to do; that’s why my father was born. For his sweetness.

  How come I didn’t get his sweetness? They are always talking about what I “got” from them. I have curly hair from him and have my good rhyming from my mother. I get the shape of my big toes from my grandfather, who died before I could meet him. As for teeth: I get my small teeth from someone with horrible small teeth, I will never know who. I can’t check my grandmother’s, because of her false teeth, nor my mother now, because of hers. I will probably get my false teeth from both of them. I try not to think about this either. As soon as the thought pops up like a nasty worm, I kick it back in its hole. Why add a reason for another stomach ache on top of all the other reasons?

  Gilda is in that terrible place now, in that prison, that enormous toilet, that torture chamber, with her beef and barley soup, offering it to my grandmother and to all the old abandoned ghosts without teeth. (She will leave it, finally, for the colored helpers.)

  Her cooking isn’t a bad idea; I know she’s upstairs at night peeling and frying, grinding and chopping. After the customers leave and she’s all alone, she’s not so sad, being busy in the kitchen that way. When she’s busy, I don’t feel so bad. And when I go upstairs to say goodnight, it isn’t just the two of us, it’s now three, with Beloved who comes everywhere with me. Three above, like the three below, is more fair. For those few minutes it’s more like a family.

  This is how we make better friends. Everything is
as usual: I am on the bench waiting for Gilda who is in the rest home. Beloved is at my feet eating Milk Bone biscuits, which I drop down to him, one by one, to keep him happy. I am only supposed to wait ten minutes today; Gilda is going to give herself a permanent because she has no customers coming in this afternoon. Tomorrow she is supposed to meet a widower who is the business partner of Mrs. Exter’s husband, who is in the chicken business. This chicken-man is rich and owns a chicken farm in Little River. His wife died of something terrible, and he is very sad. He is having dinner at Mrs. Exter’s and Gilda is invited. She is going to take me along! And why? Because Mrs. Exter, even though she is a four-star mother, is rich enough to have a television set! And there will be a circus shown on the screen!

  All of this is wonderful—to have so full a calendar when usually on the weekends all I do is read books I get from the library on Friday nights.

  Timing is very important in life. You can’t arrange these things. You might call something like this a miracle: The Skaters/Bike-Riders are coming along just as a black cat jumps out of the window of a parked car and just as I let go of Beloved’s leash to reach into my pocket for another Milk Bone biscuit. The cat races across Ocean Parkway and Beloved dashes after it. Cars all across six lanes screech and bang on their brakes. When I can breathe again, I see that the cat is squashed and flattened into a bloody, furry pile. Myrna throws her bike down and runs after Beloved without even looking both ways. She, too, is almost squashed, but she scoops him up and kisses him freely all over his snout, while I cry out his public name, “Spotty, Spotty, come back here!”

  Myrna runs back to the sidewalk with her rescued armful and claims her place in his life by letting him lick her lips. I have to thank her. I have to hug her. She has to give him to me. The Skaters have to hug her and hug each other. Then Linda hugs me. We are better friends than I am with the others. One reason I feel so warm toward her is that I once stole money from her. She has enriched my life by excitement and guilt.