The Kingdom of Brooklyn

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  “Oh, the cat is dead,” she says, and we all burst into tears. We cry and jump up and down and hug one another. Gilda, coming out of the rest home, finds us sobbing and laughing and hugging. The poor cat is so easily dead; we should bring my grandmother’s wheelchair out here and push it across six lanes of traffic. Then Gilda could laugh and cry with us.

  But she has that white look on her face; the air in the home powders her skin with grief. She is very grateful to The Bike-Riders for what they have done for me. We all are extremely happy, standing there, and Gilda invites them to use her living room for club meetings whenever they want to. She lives alone, she says—she would love to hear the sound of young happy voices in her living room. (But she won’t stay around—she’ll make herself scarce, she promises.) It’s settled then, that fast. I am absolutely in the club and my house is where the first meeting will be.

  Who would ever think that a fatal accident for a black cat could end up like a party?

  CHAPTER 21

  Food at other people’s houses looks amazing to me. Mrs. Exter has laid out a feast that makes me hungry in a deeper way than just wanting to eat everything. I want to put my head down on the table and wrap my arms around all the dishes and bowls and platters. It’s the excess of wonderful things that is thrilling—it’s there for me and anyone who wants it, it’s free, and nowhere is there anything slimy or gristly or grainy or gluey.

  I mostly eat chocolate-covered halvah. It comes in little squares covered in dark chocolate with two wavy lines on the top; no one watches me, I eat ten. Mrs. Exter is watching Sam Marcus and Sam Marcus is watching Gilda and Gilda is staring at her plate.

  “Gilda has a wonderful business that she runs all by herself,” Mrs. Exter says loudly.

  “I have news for you,” Sam. Marcus says. “It isn’t often these days that a woman can run her own business. Especially a business in the home. But a license must be expensive. These days you have to work half a year just to pay off the license.”

  “I don’t have a license,” Gilda says.

  “So you like to take chances, eh?” says Sam Marcus. “What if someone reports you?”

  “Only my friends are my customers,” says Gilda. “I don’t worry. I couldn’t be in business if I had to pay for a license.”

  “Friends can turn into enemies,” Sam says. “You should trust no one.”

  “The truth is Gilda trusts everyone and everyone trusts her,” says Mrs. Exter and claps her hands together. “A beautician with fingers like an angel. And you don’t find a better cook, either.”

  “I’m not as good a cook as you,” Gilda murmurs. Her face is down so that no one can see it, although at home, as I watched her get ready, she hid her skin under layers of Acnomel. She’s wearing a starched pink blouse with a white collar and a black skirt; she has on her jade ring. Sam Marcus is bald and short. He is wearing two rings on two next-door fingers, both heavy gold, one ring is a lion with glittering ruby eyes, and one is a single diamond stone.

  “Sam is lonely since his wife died,” says Mrs. Exter. “The poor thing, how she suffered.”

  “It’s true, she suffered,” he says. He digs into his pot roast and kasha. He puts his mouth down low to the plate and shovels the kasha kernels in with a spoon.

  Something is very odd here; the conversation drops like blobs out of a meat grinder.

  “Why can’t we turn on the television?” I say.

  “A good idea,” says Mrs. Exter. She jumps up and goes to the machine. The circus comes on, far away and very small. Behind glass it’s not the same as when my father took me to the circus in person. I have a pungent memory of sawdust and elephants with wild intelligent eyes and the smell of their leathery skin.

  I tell everyone at the table—a confession brought on by the food and the endless supply of halvah—that I wish I could have had a souvenir turtle when I went to the circus, but that my father wouldn’t buy me one. I don’t know why I betray him in this way—the need to make him seem less good than he is comes over me like a chill. It’s a trick I’m doing, but I don’t know my purpose. I say it especially for the benefit of Sam Marcus. “My father wouldn’t buy me a turtle because he said they cost too much.” (The truth is that the turtles come in little boxes with gold safety pins; people who bought them pinned the turtles by their tails to their lapels. My father assured me I wouldn’t want to buy a painted turtle whose shell would soon go soft and rotten. Nor would I want to pin a living creature to my collar—that it was too cruel.) But I tell Sam again. “My father said they cost too much.”

  “Well,” he said. “If I had a little girl as pretty as you, I would never tell her that.”

  There grownups go again—lying. A little girl as pretty as you. He knows I have small teeth and wild curly hair. If he has eyes, he knows that. Just as I know he is bald and not kind and untruthful. At least I don’t say to him, “You’re more handsome than my father. I wish you were my father.” I have some limits. No one is more handsome than my father—Gilda and I both know that. But there is something I’m telling him, I feel as if I’m doing a circus trick. I just don’t understand what it is.

  I get a turtle. That’s what it was. That’s what I wanted. I realize this a few days later when Sam Marcus rings Gilda’s bell with flowers and candy for Gilda and a turtle for me. The turtle has a palm tree painted on its tiny back, and it comes in a glass bowl with a rock in it. I have to add water and sprinkle in some flakes of food.

  I am extremely excited by my successful technique of achieving this gift—as much as by the gift itself.

  Every Friday night Sam Marcus comes up the steps with a present for Gilda and a present for me. I make it my business to be upstairs even if it means skipping my trip to the library with my father. Gilda wants me there. She doesn’t want to be alone with him. We have signals to indicate when she wants me to sit between them on the couch, or when she wants me to serve the cookies. If she tilts her foot back on its heel, it means rush up to him with a tray of honey cake or sponge cake slices. If she crosses her ankles, it means come and sit very close to her, if possible between the two of them. The rule is that I must never, never leave her upstairs with him unless my mother actually gets hysterical.

  My mother has become very interested in the proceedings; she asks me a hundred questions. What does Sam talk about with her, what present did he bring her, how many children does he have, does he own a house in Little River, how new is his car. I tell her what I can because that’s the price of my being allowed to stay upstairs so long and so late. But I can’t stay past nine—I have to go to sleep and there’s no arguing about my bedtime. Usually Gilda makes Sam leave by nine, so it works out perfectly. My mother is beginning to imagine that Gilda will marry Sam Marcus and move to Little River. Then she and my father will have the whole house to themselves.

  My father’s jaw trembles when Sam Marcus walks up the steps to Gilda’s house; my father reads the paper and grinds his jaws together every Friday night. I don’t think he would want to take me to the library even if I begged him to. What is he so worried about?

  Gilda and he used to meet every night at the garbage cans in the alley; it was almost as if they had an agreement, both of them, to carry out the garbage at exactly six-thirty. And if I were outside, in summer playing ball, or in winter walking Beloved up and down just in front of the house, I would listen to them talk to each other, in low soft voices, as if they were carrying on a conversation left in mid-sentence the night before. They talked of household things: the storm windows, the price of heating oil, my grandmother’s misery. But their voices sounded like singing to me, so very much in tune, blending in a comforting harmony.

  Now my father has me take out the garbage when I go out to walk Beloved. He won’t go out. He won’t talk to Gilda. My mother doesn’t notice; she never notices things like that, the things people do because they feel a certain way.

  I am upstairs when the kiss happens. I am between them when it happens. Gilda is holding a
bouquet of roses Sam has carried up the stairs. He wants her to wear one of them in her hair; he sends me into the beauty parlor to get a silver clip. I throw Gilda a glance of apology—I have to leave the room, but I do it as fast as possible. He takes it from me and tries to fasten it in her hair but he doesn’t know how to work the clip. I do it.

  Gilda is wearing bright red lipstick that matches the rose. Her dress is navy blue with lace at the edge of the hem. We three are sitting on the couch; it feels as if it is moving. We’re perfectly still, but we’re careening into space.

  Them Sam Marcus leans over and pulls Gilda’s shoulder forward and kisses her fast on the cheek; then he kisses me! We all three are caught in a hug, I am being crushed between them. I push Sam off me and look at Gilda. She looks very worried behind her smile.

  “Well,” she says.

  “Well,” he says. “You have some Manischewitz wine?”

  I know just where it is. I hand the bottle to him. He hands it back. “Pour us, sweetheart. We’ll have a toast to an understanding.”

  “They have an understanding,” I announce the minute I come downstairs to go to bed. For punctuation, we hear Sam Marcus’s car start on the street.

  “When is the wedding?” my mother asks. She is sitting across the room from my father; he has been reading the paper, I don’t know what she has been doing.

  “Not for a year,” I say, proud to have this information. “They will be keeping company.”

  “You’ll have your own room, Issa. Blossom will have her own room. Your father and I will redo the whole house! The sunporch can be a sunporch again! We’ll get rattan furniture—I know a decorator who specializes in rattan.”

  “Gilda’s not moving out,” I tell my mother. “When they get married, Sam will move in upstairs. Then he’ll be near Mr. Exter and they can drive to Little River together.

  “What about his house in Little River?” my mother asks me, furiously, as if something has happened that’s all my fault.

  “He doesn’t have a house there. He lives in a little building on the chicken farm.”

  “I thought he was rich!”

  “He wants Gilda to invest money in building modern chicken coops,” I tell her.

  “He wants her money!” she shouts at my father. “They’re going to live here!” she shouts at my father.

  My father’s teeth are pressing down on his pipe. He is nearly biting his pipe in two.

  “Answer me!” my mother screams at him.

  “They’re only keeping company. Nothing may come of it.”

  “I won’t have it,” my mother hisses. “He will not move into my house!”

  “It’s not your house!” my father says. “We all live here. It belongs to Gilda as much as to anyone.”

  “She has never paid her way!” my mother says to him. “I was the one who worked to pay the mortgage after my father died. I was the one who didn’t go to Hunter but had to go to secretarial school! I couldn’t even think of college where I would have met educated men!” She stares at my father and I see again how false her teeth are, how they hang there in a kind of skeleton smile when she is as far from smiling as she has ever been.

  My father bows his head.

  She doesn’t know what she’s just done to him, but I know what she said. I could kill her. She’s doing one of her lists: “I rode into the city every day to be a secretary and she stayed home and baked cookies. She stayed home and gave little haircuts. Now she thinks she owns half the house! With her pathetic little income! From polishing nails and curling hair! How dare she offer my house to some stranger! I need this house! The whole house. I deserve it! I’ve been waiting years for it. Finally Mama is out of here, and now Gilda thinks she can just invite strangers to live here. I won’t have it! I’ll stop her—any way I can.”

  There is nothing to say when she starts her lists. Usually they’re about what I won’t eat, or how I aggravate her, or why she needs a decorator, or how she can’t live another day without a maid. This is much worse. I thought she would greet my good news with a celebration. I thought she would rush upstairs and invite Gilda down and play some music on the piano. I thought we would all have hot chocolate and marshmallows.

  Just when I am sure of something, I find how wrong I can be.

  CHAPTER 22

  “I don’t want him in the house anymore,” my mother announces.

  My father and I both think she means Sam Marcus. “It’s her place,” my father says in a dull voice. “She can have who she wants up there.”

  “Not him. The dog,” she says. “I want him living outside.”

  “No!” I rush away from the table and from what we are eating—boiled corned beef and cabbage—and I wrap my arms around Beloved’s neck.

  My mother and I glare at each other. Beloved has become the new reason for my mother’s unhappiness. She suspects I am spitting out food I don’t like and feeding it to him under the table (I am). She suspects, from a bad smell in the living room, that he peed under the piano (he did). She believes I love him more than I love her (yes!) and better than I love my sister (definitely! definitely!).

  I bend down and kiss him all over his furry face.

  “You know you are never to touch him while you’re eating!”

  “I’m through eating!”

  “You are not through. Sit down and finish your meat.”

  It always comes down to meat: meat red and stitched through with fat. The cabbage is limp and sour. Boiled carrots also taste wrong. They’re much better raw. How come my mother can’t cook good things after all these years of cooking?

  I try to understand my mother. I do try; I thought we had reached a kind of peace, now that I am allowed to go upstairs and listen in to developments in Gilda’s newly forming life, now that I am allowed to walk Beloved around the block without my mother’s permission each time, now that she lets me read in the backyard for hours without demanding I rock The Screamer or play with her. (The Screamer is now walking by herself, she plays with toys, she doesn’t scream as much as she used to.)

  “My dog has to live in the house. He sleeps with me,” I tell her. How can I say more than that? That I live to sleep with Beloved, that I can’t wait for nighttime so he can jump on top of my blanket and curl deep into the curl of my body. That the fear that has lived in me since I was a baby lessens only when he is breathing beside me in the dark. That his wet black nose is my guide through the startling dreams that erupt from the cave of my sleep.

  “It’s not healthy,” she says. “I read that you can get asthma from dog hairs. He might have ticks that will suck your blood.”

  “I brush and comb his fur all the time.” I look to my father for help, but he’s frowning; he’s been so silent lately. Where is his laugh? Where is his sweetness?

  “It’s too cold outside in the winter,” I say, finally. “He’d freeze to death.”

  “We can get a doghouse,” she says. “Your father can build one for him.”

  “No, I can’t,” my father says. That’s all he says. He gets up from the dinner table and whistles to Beloved, who is lying at my feet. His tail starts beating against the floor.

  “Come on, boy,” he says. He snaps his fingers and Beloved leaps to follow him.

  “Take the leash!” I cry. My father has been trying to train my dog to walk around the block without a leash. He thinks Beloved needs freedom; everyone needs freedom.

  “But he might run away! He might get hit by a car! He might get lost! He might run after a cat! He might…” I am not my mother’s child for nothing; I can make lists as fast as she can.

  But my father’s coat is on, the door slams, he’s gone. I am left to wait among the cooking pots. This kitchen is the scene of my entire life—will I always live here in this kitchen, cowed by broiling meat and the requirement to eat it? I want to fly away from home; I dream of flying: in dreams I point my hands into a spire above my head and I take off. My praying hands steer me between skyscrapers and over the tops of
tall trees. I sweep like a bird but I’m sly as a snake, dipping, curving, the wind like laughter in my mouth.

  “God damn it, you will chew and swallow every bit of your dinner.”

  Mommy, Mommy, what is devouring you? I can never be a good enough eater, dancer, rhymer, daughter. I can never fill you with joy and happiness. You are getting a maid, you are getting a decorator, you are getting rattan furniture. But your hair is going white. Your eyes are burning. You are sinking down and you can’t catch hold of anything.

  Suddenly I hear it through the walls and windows: snarling, shouting, the vicious wilderness sounds of an animal fight.

  “Beloved!” I throw open the front door and there in front of my house is pandemonium. My father is kicking at a clump of quivering animal haunches. I see the yellow flash of bared fangs. Panic is in my father’s shout: “Get away! Get out of here!” His eyes swing to find me. “Issa, get a broom, hurry!” I hurry, I smash into my mother who is coming toward the door and I take her breath away. Good, she can’t yell—I run outside with the broom so my father can beat at the attacking dog (it is Bully, the boxer who lives on East 4th Street: he snaps his razor teeth and hangs on while Beloved yips and yelps with pain). My father howls and smashes down with the broom; the boxer runs away, his cut-off tail beating like a stump in the air.

  Blood. My father’s shin streaming blood. Beloved’s ear torn off, streaming blood. My own tongue, bitten by my own teeth, bleeding. My screams. My mother’s screams. We limp and drag our shredded selves into the safety of the house.

  So this is the price of freedom. So this is what happens when the leash is left hanging on the door. So this is what’s out there in the world.