The Kingdom of Brooklyn

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  Gilda is radiant, her teeth are white, her lips red. She has never laughed so much, or blushed so rose-red as she is blushing. I help her serve tea and homemade honey cake, special mandelbrot with chocolate marbling, delicate pastries from the bakery. She laughs with the women and they make her blush. I’ve never seen her this relaxed and happy when she is with Sam Marcus. When he’s here, her back is straight, her lips are pursed with nervousness, she keeps her hands folded in her lap. Why is she going to marry this man?

  It’s only after the ladies go home, after Gilda and I are examining the presents, that my mother comes charging up the stairs.

  “You can’t go through with this!” she says in a tone of voice so severe and icy that Gilda’s head is flung back against the couch.

  “I am getting married,” Gilda says. “You can’t stop me. This is my last chance.”

  “Yes, I can stop you! I won’t allow you to ruin yourself and I won’t allow him to move in here and live in this house that we’ve killed ourselves to pay for. He’s a crook, Gilda. He’s after your money! Your little bit of savings. Mama’s jewelry. He wants a free place to live and you as a cook and laundress. He wants to bring his daughter here to live!”

  “What? You’re crazy! His daughter lives with his dead wife’s sister.”

  “But not for long! They want to get rid of her. She’s a filthy pig. This is a girl who eats sardines with her fingers!”

  Gilda is shivering. She sits on her couch and I sit next to her. I’m afraid to take her hand under my mother’s gaze.

  “Who told you that?”

  “I went to visit Mrs. Exter yesterday. I caught her off guard. She admitted these things: Sam isn’t rich; in fact, he’s nearly bankrupt. The chicken farm is on its last legs. They need new equipment, new coops, they need to tear down the little house Sam’s been living in and build a place for egg-candling. His wife’s illness used up all his money, so he’s got nothing, Gilda! He sees you as an easy mark! Free room and board, someone to iron his shirts, make his meals, someone who lives around the corner from Exter, so they can drive to the farm together. Look—can’t you see how convenient it is for him to have his business partner around the corner? They all cooked this up, Gilda, the Exters and Sam, behind your back. You’re such an innocent fool! I forced the truth out of Mrs. Exter. She couldn’t deny it. She says she thought it would be good for you, to get a husband at this late date!”

  “It will be,” Gilda says softly, all the color gone from her face. Her lips move like red worms, separate from her other features. “What else have I got to hope for? You’re not the only woman in the world who deserves to have a husband.”

  “You’d like to have mine, I know!” my mother says.

  This is not to be spoken aloud. I look toward the window for another lightning ball. This thought should never have been turned into words.

  “I should have had him,” Gilda says softly. “Harry Cohen brought him to the party to be my date, but you got to him first.”

  “That’s ridiculous! He wasn’t interested in you! He was sitting in the sunporch all alone, smoking his pipe when I came home that night.”

  “Yes, you came home from a date, all worked up and smelling of perfume. In that fur cape Papa made for you. Looking like a movie star.”

  “He wasn’t interested in you, Gilda! You were a shy, timid little nothing!”

  “I didn’t have a chance!” Gilda cries. “You were so busy shimmying around him, you took his eyes out.”

  “Stop!” I cry. I take Gilda’s hand and kiss each finger. Her fingers are freezing cold. “Mommy, stop!“

  “Just look at the facts, Gilda,” my mother carries on. She’s like a truck that can’t stop. She’s barreling along as if she weighs a thousand pounds. “This Sam doesn’t want you—he wants what you have. Don’t make the mistake of thinking he’s in love with you.”

  “If we were moving away to his place, you wouldn’t be saying this, Ruth,” Gilda says to her. “You just want me out of your life.”

  Will my mother admit it? I know it’s true, we all know it’s true. That’s all she ever talks about—privacy; she wants every room of this house for herself.

  “If you go through with this,” my mother says, “just don’t come running to me when Sam ruins your life.”

  How can I stop Gilda’s tears after my mother leaves? How can I soothe her quivering sobs, comfort her after such forbidden revelations?

  “She’ll kill me someday,” Gilda whispers. “God forgive her, she wants to kill me.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” I say helplessly. “You’re her sister.” (But as I say it, I think of my sister, and know how easily I could do without her.)

  “But what if she’s right about Sam? Could she be right?” She shudders. “I don’t know, I just don’t know! She might be right. Your mother looks for the worst in people and finds it. Oh God, what if she’s right?”

  “She can’t be,” I say, and we sit there, both of us looking at the red lace nightgown; there in the white tissue paper it looks like a puddle of blood.

  On Friday night when Sam is to arrive (this is the night they will set the wedding date), my mother and I have our ears tilted upward to the ceiling. My father knows nothing of my mother’s violent visit upstairs after the engagement shower. We hear Beloved howling softly from the back porch, where he now lives in a little dog house. He can’t come in ever now, where there is a new rug and new rattan furniture. Blossom is playing on the floor with a toy elephant. There is the sound of the doorbell upstairs, Sam’s step on the staircase. Gilda’s voice. My mother’s eyes glow. She has so little color in her face these days that it’s strange, very strange to see her lit up this way.

  We hear an argument start at once, from right upon the staircase. My mother looks at my face and glances away. We hear Sam’s loud voice and Gilda’s gentle voice. Then Gilda cries out with some terrible cry. My father’s chin shoots up from the low angle where it rests as he reads the paper.

  “What’s wrong upstairs?” he says and looks at my mother.

  “She and Sam have to work something out,” she answers with satisfaction.

  “Did you interfere?” he asks. “What did you do, Ruth?”

  “All I did was warn her. Now Nature is just taking its course,” she says.

  From upstairs we hear Sam’s coarse voice saying “It’s a lie! You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “Should I believe it?” Gilda’s voice is so hopeful, so sad, so desperate.

  Sam talks; we hear the buzz of his sawing voice.

  Then Gilda cries out, “But there is no room for another person here! You know there’s no room for her. Not if I keep the beauty parlor. I was thinking maybe I would give it up once we get married.”

  “Give it up?” he says. “A good business like you have built up here?”

  It goes on a while longer, with Gilda begging and Sam denying, with Gilda weeping, and Sam getting louder and meaner. And finally we hear one clear, unmistakable word: “The bitch.” I know who he means. It isn’t, it cannot be, Gilda.

  In the morning after my father has gone to work, Gilda runs down the stairs and knocks at the door between her upstairs and our downstairs. She comes in without waiting for an invitation. She says to my mother: “You won. I thought you’d like to know. Sam is gone for good.” Then she turns around and runs up the stairs, shaking with sobs.

  When one story happens on top of the next one, there isn’t enough space or time to arrange all the details before they rearrange themselves. While I am thinking that Gilda will not get married, while I am glad to be rid of Sam, while I am sorry we will no longer get to eat halvah at Mrs. Exter’s, while I pray for a bicycle, I am given a bicycle. It arrives like the Star of Bethlehem appeared in the sky: just like that. One day I come home from school and there it is in the sunporch, its kickstand down, a blue Schwinn with a button horn on its side, with my name in gold letters, ISSA, on the front fender.

  Why does it come wh
en I have almost made myself stop longing for it? Who wants to please me so much that they put my name on it in gold? And now that it’s here, will I be allowed to ride all over the world, or will they forbid me to use it, just as they got me Beloved and now forbid him to be in the house with me.

  By now I know everything has conditions, everything has limits, the best-seeming things can turn out to be the worst things.

  I don’t know what to say about this bike. As I examine it, the bird in my chest begins to thump and skip—I’d forgotten he was there. Where is everyone? No one is in the sunporch—they don’t even know I’ve discovered the bike. It has big tires, it has silver handlebars, it has a little glassy headlight. Will they let me ride at night?

  Could it be here by accident? Could it be for someone else? No, it has my name on it! Is it my birthday? No. Is it because some terrible thing is going to happen—and this is to pay me back for it? The things I think! Instead of simple happiness! Instead of simple singing and hand-clapping. My club friends would sing and hand-clap; they don’t go into all these questions, not one of them, Linda, Myra, Myrna, or Ruthie. They take what happens and they go on. I would love to be like them, but I can’t. They know I’m not, but they come over anyway. They like the things my father brings home—a gum machine from the subway, a stereopticon with old pictures to slip into a slot, bouquets of comic books (my father has given some out to them without my permission, without letting me look through them first! He has found my friends on the front stoop playing jacks with me, and he has given them my comic books!). I have to smile generously when he does that, but I hate them and I hate him.

  I have a bike. I have a bike. I test my feelings. Is a bike now as good as skates would have been before?

  No, no, no. Not as good. But so what. It’s here, this is now. Who shall I ask about why the bike is here? No one, absolutely no one is in the house. I hear no one moving or talking anywhere, either upstairs or down. Where are they? Now I begin to feel alarmed.

  Did the Russians take them away, as they did Katrinka’s parents in Katrinka, The Story of a Russian Girl? And in trade did they leave me this bike?

  I rush upstairs but Gilda is not there. Maybe no one in my family is left but my grandmother, whom I have not seen in three years. I know where she is. I could go to Sherman’s Rest Home and visit her. I might have to. She might be the only one left in my entire family. But could she help me to grow up? Could she give me advice? She can’t even talk! She doesn’t think! She has no teeth in her mouth. She is a living ghost.

  I come back and lean my head against the cold flank of my bicycle. Blue, it’s the color of my dream bicycle. Where are they?

  I go next door where our neighbor, Mrs. Berk, lives and I ask her if she knows what happened to my family. She says the police came and Gilda had to go somewhere with them. Gilda was crying. My mother called my father, who came home, and they both went with her.

  The police? My stomach heaves. Who has The Screamer?

  “I have her,” our neighbor says. “Come in and wait with me.”

  “How long do we have to wait?”

  “I don’t know. If you have to sleep over, you can.”

  I go into Mrs. Berk’s house and there—playing on the floor—is my sister with her familiar flat face, her brown eyes, her smooth dark hair. An amazing feeling comes over me. I am happy to see her. I even want to hug my sister. I may even love my sister. She may be all I have left in life.

  CHAPTER 25

  Actually, now that it’s a crime for the beauty parlor to be operated, now that it has to be closed down and emptied out, there would be room for Sam Marcus’s filthy-pig daughter. But without Gilda having her business, Sam doesn’t want to marry her. The whole thing is over. But who told? Why did someone tell, someone tattle, someone report that Gilda had no license? Why would anyone want the police to come and close her down?

  The police station—not Russia—was where they all were the day I got my bike; they had gone with Gilda to the police station while an officer took Gilda’s fingerprints. Gilda thought she was going to jail, forever. But she only had to pay a big fine. Jail! I can’t even imagine it.

  Today I am out in the alley—leaning on my new bike—as the movers carry away Gilda’s green metal hair dryer, the red plastic hair-cutting chair, the shampoo attachment that fits over the sink with a deep cut-out for a customer’s neck. They take away her manicure table, her trays of nail polishes and cuticle pushers and nippers and files. The big mirror goes, the metal cabinet where all the chemicals for permanents are stored, the curlers and thinning shears and waving clips—they take Gilda’s life away, bobbie pin by bobbie pin.

  Who these moving men are I do not know. They keep their heads down as they go up and down the stairs, and don’t look at Gilda, who stands in the street sobbing. Mrs. Berk from next door comes over and gives Gilda a hug. My mother stays deep inside the house with my sister; my father is at work.

  Who told? My mother says Sam. Gilda says my mother told. But she told me not to tell my mother she told me that.

  I can’t imagine what Gilda will do now. I just don’t know how she will use her days. As for my bike, I never found out why it came at that moment, on that day. I am afraid to ask, afraid they’ll realize I now have wheels and will be rolling down strange streets and crossing busy roads on it.

  Maybe my father got it in trade for some antique. Maybe they just felt I deserved it after all those years without skates. Who knows? Some questions can never be answered.

  I get on my bike (oh, what simple words to say, but what heavenly feelings pour over me as I settle onto the hard black seat); I ride over to Ruthie’s where she gets on her bike and we ride over to Linda’s, and then we pick up Myrna and Myra at their houses. Five Schwinns, five free, happy girls on a Saturday morning going to ride on the Ocean Parkway bicycle path.

  I see the five of us in my mind’s eye, two and two and one behind (Issa is behind) as we pedal along in unison. Five sets of legs pumping round and round, and five wind-whipped faces looking ahead at what’s to come in our path.

  I know what’s in my head: poor Gilda and the end of manicures and haircuts, poor Gilda and nothing to do now, poor Gilda with only my grandmother to visit. Even now—as we pass Sherman’s Rest Home there on the left—I think that inside those blank, closed doors is the human being that gave birth to Gilda and my mother, who used to sit in springtime on the wooden bench under the lilac tree. I know what’s in my head as we ride along the bicycle path, looking at the scenery (cars and mothers and babies on the benches, and across the lanes of traffic to the bridle path where occasionally horses come pounding along with their riders, their hooves kicking up clods of dirt).

  But I don’t know what’s in Ruthie’s bobbing head, or in Myra’s or Myrna’s or Linda’s, I don’t know what thoughts are riding along with them on the bicycle path, what images flash on the inside of their eyes as the horses and cars and other cyclers flash by on the outside. I wish I knew, but I don’t. Will I ever know anyone’s but my own?

  We each have two dollars for spending money and we stop at Schector’s Luncheonette for lunch. We line up our matching Schwinns and align the kickstands so it looks like our bikes are dancing in step.

  “Let’s leave our horses here to drink,” Linda says, and we all laugh as though no one ever said a funnier joke. We shuffle in the door together, a little happy army: we are friends out for adventure, we are young girls—eleven years old—we tolerate school but we try not to think of it when we are not there. School is where we mark time till we all have boyfriends, which will be soon, soon. We promise each other—we will soon have boyfriends, every one of us.

  “A ham and cheese sandwich,” Myrna tells the man behind the counter.

  “Make it two,” says Linda.

  “Three,” says Myra.

  “Four,” says Ruthie. They look at me. I have never had a ham sandwich in my life. I have never even seen ham. My mother cooks bacon, but that’s the closest
we have come to eating filthy pig.

  “Do you have tuna sandwiches?”

  “All out of tuna.”

  “Okay, then. Ham and cheese.” I tried, and I have witnesses, that I made an attempt to save my soul. As the man turns his back on us and does something hidden on the cutting board, making magic motions with his elbows, his shoulders, seizing tools from a rack (an enormous cleaver, a saw-toothed knife, gobbets of white cream that he smears on bread), I remember the words of the bearded rabbi of last year’s Religious Instruction class: “Eat pork and you will go blind. Touch your eyes in the morning without washing your hands and you will die young.”

  I only went to instruction for two weeks, and only because the school let us out early on Wednesday afternoons if we signed up for the program. When I told my mother the essence of his lesson, she called the school and said I was not to be dismissed early on Wednesdays. “Let your father get on his knees for that hocus-pocus,” she said to me. “I won’t have your mind poisoned.”

  Now I sit on a soda-fountain stool waiting to poison my eternal soul. Ham sandwiches are served to us along with bags of potato chips and chocolate malteds. My friends dig in, every one of them a Jewish girl without a Jewish worry; without a pause in their chatter, they eat ham. They eat hungrily, automatically, their pink tongues licking crumbs from their pretty lips. Lightning does not flash. The ceiling does not crumble into their plates and spill their malteds into their laps.

  I bite. I taste rubber. Pink, elastic, gummy rubber meat. Oh, meat will be the death of me! It rebounds against my teeth, refusing to be chewed, subdued, conquered. God help me, I think, this is the closest I come to prayer, and then the irrevocable happens. I grind the ham into submission with my little pointy teeth—and I swallow.

  Jesus, The Forbidden Savior, Father, Lord, King of Kings, flows speedily into my bloodstream; I feel his essence bubbling up like seltzer. I am a new person. I am no longer a true member of my family. I am separated forever. I am free.