The Kingdom of Brooklyn

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  I get giddy. I throw potato chips in the air and catch them in my open mouth. I toss my pickle spear into Linda’s mouth and she tosses hers into mine. Ruthie and Myra buy red wax fangs and try to terrorize each other, thrusting their faces forward and growling. We push off our spinning stools and stand at the comic book rack, reading Captain Marvel comic books for free.

  My mind is blissfully blank. I laugh and giggle and feel like a regular girl all the rest of the afternoon, as we ride our bikes and buy Popsicles from the Good Humor man and pedal back home.

  Only when we pass Sherman’s Rest Home on Ocean Parkway, now on the right-hand side, do I feel the clicks of adjustment as the puzzle of my life regains its shape. I am Issa, Issa has this Jewish face, this fate, this fortune, this future. Issa is going home to take on the form fortune has made her wear, to re-enter the life she is destined to enact.

  A new boy has moved on the block, into the house on the corner where the Espositos lived. After Tommy and Joe Esposito both died, Mrs. Esposito moved back to Italy. I think for a second or two about how sad it must have been for Mrs. Esposito to leave her vegetable garden and her grape vines and her goats, but I stop myself. I hardly know anything about Mrs. Esposito except that she gave me a Jewish star when I was little; I don’t have to think about how sad her life is. I am trying never to think of how sad my grandmother’s life is. I definitely can’t even begin to think of how sad Gilda’s life is now that she has no beauty parlor, no boyfriend, no dog, no mother with her, and not even me. Because I am growing up. I have a bike, I have friends, I have hope. How can I think about everyone’s sadness every minute of the day?

  The boy is tall and blond. He has a crew cut. He is strolling up the street, looking my way. I get busy playing stoop ball, a ferocious game between me and myself, my goal being to hit only fly balls, to have every pink arrow of my ball hit the point of the step and arc back to me as high and graceful as a rainbow. No low, sloppy, rolling bounces, no chugging clunks in the dead space of the step.

  Wham! Wham! I am hitting the point of the brick, catching those fly balls. I have something to prove, and I’m proving it.

  Just at that moment my mother comes to the front door and calls me in for a hot dog.

  “I’m busy,” I tell her.

  “You can play later,” she says.

  “This is not playing!”

  “Your hot dog will get cold.”

  Whap! Another fly.

  “Good throw,” the boy says behind me. My mother’s head snaps up as she stares at him, though I don’t look behind me. I just throw another fly ball and catch it.

  “You could be on the Dodgers,” he says.

  This is no ordinary compliment. In Brooklyn this remark, to a girl, is a declaration of love!

  “Want to play?” I ask him. I still haven’t looked at his face.

  “Sure.”

  I toss him the ball and stand to the side as he gracefully throws an overhand toss, hits the point, catches the rebound.

  “Nice ball,” he says.

  “It’s a little dead.”

  “Not really.”

  “I might get a new one.” All the will inside me wants my mother to go inside and disappear! I am consumed by shame that she has appeared at this one instant of my life to which I want no witnesses, particularly not her. I can’t put off this moment, do it later, do it when I am alone with him. It’s here, it arrived at this instant whether or not she’s watching. I can’t simply go inside and be nailed to the hot dog chair, can’t face that long ground sausage of chewing and despair, not while outside in the bright air is this blond boy, this hope of freedom, better than skates, better than a Schwinn.

  But he sees the difficulty. “I gotta go; they’re eating over there, too.” He motions toward his house. “So I’ll see you later, okay?”

  But when, when, when? I want to have him sign an agreement, in blood.

  “Later?” I say. I could die at the sound of begging in my voice.

  “Sure.” He tosses the ball to me. I toss it back, like a reflex. He has to toss it back. We are caught up briefly in a duet of harmony. “I’ll come back after supper.”

  The hot dog has a certain transcendent quality—sweating beads of boiled water and fat, making soggy the soft bun, sending up fumes of spice and ground innards of cow. Strings of gray sauerkraut, pungent and sour, can’t take away the sweet taste of my inner smile; the yellow smear of mustard is like the sun laid out in a line that I will follow to the ends of the earth.

  I bite and I burst the skin and taste the hot juices. I tear into this hot dog like a madwoman, and I chew. I relish! I swallow!

  CHAPTER 26

  Not only does the blond crew-cut boy come back, his name is Izzy, short for Isadore, and together we are Issa and Izzy, we are a pair, we are in love, we sit on Gilda’s stairs and play Old Maid, we become co-conspirators in all things. We talk about our teachers, about adults, about parents: how false, how bossy, how wrong they are. Not his parents; he has only one, her name is Iggy (short for Etta) and she’s nothing like a parent. She’s his pal. And not my parents, because I can’t talk about mine while I’m sitting in limbo in my own house, between the upstairs mother I desire and the downstairs mother I belong to.

  Forget parents. Be here, in the semi-dark of late afternoon on the enclosed staircase. Playing the game of Old Maid. She is what I don’t want to be, what Gilda is, whose fate is the worst imaginable, whose demeanor is prissy and sour, who wears a black bonnet tied under the chin, whose forbidding spectacles sit on her beak-like nose, who carries a sharp black umbrella. Everyone else in the deck is paired; Mother Hubbard, and Mary Quite Contrary, the Pied Piper, Aladdin, Jack the Giant Killer, two of each of them makes them jaunty and cheerful, confident and triumphant. Strength in numbers. Safety in numbers. But alone, unpaired, a woman is lost and weak and destined to be sharp as a porcupine. She emanates needles of keep away, keep away.

  On Izzy’s golden head lie needles of another kind, tingling and tantalizing.

  “Do you mind if I touch your crew cut?” I ask Izzy, because the needles of his hair call to my hand, call to be tested. He bends toward me over the cards upon the stair and I reach for quills and find a silken sheaf of wheat. The tips of his hairs prickle my palm; they are feather-soft and luscious.

  “Issa,” he says to me, and his voice is deep, his eyes are watching mine. “What can I touch of yours?”

  We are just a boy and a girl playing cards on the stairs, but instantly I know that no moment in my future will ever equal this one, nothing any man will ever say to me in all the years to come can hold the power of what this first boy’s words offer me. I shiver in his implication, dizzy with imagination. Even Joe Martini, stopping at my desk in kindergarten, even Joe, the Joseph to my Mary, inviting me to live in his house, doesn’t come near to Izzy’s low-voiced, unequivocal desire.

  What of mine can he touch?

  My mouth is an “O” of openness; I am open, waiting for the word to come to describe what he can touch, have, of me, of mine.

  And at that moment my mother throws open the door to the stairway.

  She knows, from the dark, from the heat, from our silence, where we have been wandering. If Gilda had found us so, she would have retreated, let us be, gloried in my discovery, but my mother’s reaction is to turn on the stairway lamp, to plant her feet on the landing and ask how we could possibly see our cards in such dimness.

  We blink, Izzy and I, in the sudden brightness, and he’s instantly on his feet, up and going, late for supper, pleading his mother’s rage (though she never rages, she’s his pal) to get himself past my mother and out Gilda’s side/front door.

  And then I am lost: unpaired like the Old Maid, undefended like the Old Maid, sullen and beak-nosed and bitter like the Old Maid. If at this moment I held the Old Maid’s sharp umbrella, I would pierce my mother in the heart with it—for stopping me, for preventing me, for interfering with my moving into the realm of desire. And then—later
—I would gladly mourn her, with my black bonnet tied under my chin. Gladly I would mourn my mother.

  A Disney film of bees and butterflies is shown at our Girl Scout meeting. At our leader’s house, we sit in our green uniforms and little yellow ties, our knees bent under us on the rug, our innocent chins tipped up toward the screen, where we see diaphanous butterfly wings instead of red blood, and hear the words “Now that you’re growing up…” instead of “Watch for blood.” We have all been watching for blood for months—Ruthie, Myra, Myrna, Linda, and I. Some girls, we know, “get it” as early as nine or ten. We are almost twelve, and so far, nothing. I have a hunch that when I “get it” I will receive womanly power in my thighs. Only then will I be able to become the ballerina that I was too weak to become before. I recall the older girls performing for my ballet class—those girls in the diaphanous butterfly netting of their tutus, flitting and sailing as though on wings, but deep in the core of their bodies: the machinery of blood. Inside their white-stockinged legs were deeply pulsing vessels filled with blood. And not a stain on netting or panties or pink toeshoes. The energy kept inside, where it burned and pulsed and fed those muscles with leaping power.

  When our leader says that some day we girls will marry and want to have babies, that some day we’ll be glad we have all this baby-making machinery right inside us in an efficient little package, I think of Izzy’s eyes on the staircase, his voice saying “What can I touch of yours?” If I say those words to myself, in a little stair-step picture, starting at the bottom step:

  yours?”

  of

  touch

  I

  can

  “What

  …I am en pointe at the top, I am at the height of my beauty and strength, I am strained to exploding.

  We Girl Scouts are advised to revel in the fact that we are magically constructed, that in each of us there is a miraculous chemical and biological factory which, at the right time, when each of us has married the man of our dreams, will build for us a perfect baby, itself a container of life (within life, within life) and like rows upon rows of mirrors, each baby will string out babies unto eternity, and each of us is an essential segment of the string.

  I imagine myself as a spider, hanging in air between two web-like threads, hanging far above a chasm, unable to go backward, afraid to go forward. Unless…unless…Izzy is there to take my hand.

  The man of my dreams. This image seems capable of supplanting my desire for bikes, puppies, Captain Midnight decoders. This is a big idea, this has a richness I never before imagined possible. I can feel it pushing away even roller skates (the dream of which offered mainly speed and freedom and self-control) and substituting the man of my dreams. This idea offers endless fantasies—not only on staircases with decks of cards, but on the decks of ships with moonlight above, on merry-go-rounds, on roller coasters, on subway trains, on rides not unlike the rides in my primer book, sleigh rides and donkey rides and train rides and—(something else happens as I think this—a contraction of my baby-making mechanism occurs, a kind of inner convulsion, shudder, tremor, shock, quiver). I am amazed and totally grateful that I have located this treasure within me; this is the force that drives the world.

  Margot, the maid, doesn’t come to work one day and my mother says to me, “She feels sick today. She thinks she may be having a baby.”

  She thinks? Doesn’t a woman know? Doesn’t she do that thing with a man for that special purpose? I ask this of my mother, the time seems right, nothing appears premeditated, though certain questions have been burning in me for months, for years, but now there is an opening, a chance to find out some critical things. I hold my breath in hope; if my mother begins to talk about this, I can ask her what “the missionary position” is—described in our Family Medical Encyclopedia, I can ask her what “the woman lies with knees bent and legs splayed” could mean in real time, real life. The dictionary says to splay is “to dislocate, as a shoulder bone.” Or, “to slope or slant, as the side of a door or window.” Splay also means to spread out, it means awkward, ungainly.

  None of this completes the blank space in my mind, fills in the details. Whatever my mother and my father did to make me, I hope against hope that nothing was dislocated, as a shoulder bone.

  But my mother can’t do this. She says, of Margot, of her possibly having a baby, “Sometimes you know and sometimes you don’t.”

  I have one more urgent question: I have seen a word written on the wall of the playground in school, a word not in any dictionary, a word that causes girls to shriek and boys to laugh knowingly—FUCK is the word, it’s always written in capitals, it has such power, such shame attached to it. What could it mean? Who can I ask? Who would tell me a secret so critical and weighted with meaning? Not my mother surely. Not my father. Surely not Gilda. And to ask Izzy is too dangerous; he is one of the boys who laughs, leers, when the word is in sight. I may never know. That’s just the way it is.

  But at the next club meeting, at Ruthie’s house, I do ask. We are talking about subjects that make our hearts pound anyway, about bras and sanitary napkins and nipples that get hard when we are very cold, and how long it will be before we “do it,” and find out what it’s like. And Ruthie says, “Come with me, I’ll show you a secret.” And in her empty house we follow her single file to her parents’ bedroom where she opens the drawer of the night table—and there, inside, is a little nest of knotted white balloons. They are soggy, weighted slightly, we are invited to poke at them with our index fingers, they are slug-like and elastic, they are terrifying.

  “That’s the stuff,” Ruthie says. “It’s scum. If it gets inside us, that’s the end. In there is the seed that makes the baby.”

  We all shriek and stand on our toes. To be this close to it! To almost have touched it with our bare fingertips!

  “Why do they save it?” Linda asks, with my very question.

  “Maybe my father thinks he will run out someday,” Ruthie says. She pulls the drawer out further, and—with the authority of one who knows—she shows us the box that contains unused balloons—Trojans, they are called—and she confesses that she counts them whenever her parents are out, to see how often they “do it.”

  Such knowledge. It is almost too much for me. I can’t see straight for the beating of my heart. The bird has come loose and wild again, it’s breaking my ribs. Whenever I get close to some dangerous essence, the bird of fear comes to life.

  “Does FUCK mean when they do it?” I blurt out. My club mates nod. See? I have known all along. Some things are known to the heart. No one has to be told the meanings of certain words. They flare their meaning at you, they shock and stun and burn you.

  And to think of it! That ordinary parents play with fire. Mothers and fathers obsessed with tuna fish sandwiches and earning money, who talk about buttoning up your coat and being sure to close the front door do these things, together in the dark night of secrecy where no children can come, these parents of ours contain magical fluids and miracle-making machines. My own mother and father are wizards. And I am attached to them by the spider’s filament, spinning out toward the sun, knowing by heart the natural magic of existence.

  CHAPTER 27

  Iggy, Izzy’s mother, wears extremely tight pink angora sweaters, tosses hardballs in the street to whichever of her seven brothers is visiting her, drives an old red Ford convertible she calls “Lizzie,” and has never had a headache in her life. Izzy swears to me about this: his mother has never been sick, she never yells at him, she never, once, made him finish anything on his plate. And, just last week, she bought him a pinup of Betty Grable to hang inside his closet door.

  Izzy and I are on the front stoop, discussing a subject that sets the hairs on my arms to standing straight up: how a key and lock are like a boy and a girl. He is showing me, in full daylight, how my key is “male” and the front door lock is “female”; he is just now demonstrating the principle by inserting my key into the opening of the front door lock—(“See?
In it goes like they were made for each other”)—when his mother comes driving up to the curb in her red car and yells out in her Betty Hutton-hoarse voice, “Hey, kids, wanna hop in and go for a ride?”

  Izzy pulls the key out of the lock and places it, steaming, in my hot palm. “Let’s go,” he says.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I should ask my mother.”

  “Why bother?” He winks, something his mother has taught him: he does it without grimacing at all, “She’ll never know. We’ll be back in a flash.”

  And here it is again, the things men do without conscience or worry. How Joe Martini—and then only in kindergarten—escaped from school in the winter wind without jacket or boots or hat, without permission, and was able to convince me, easily, so easily, to do the same. I have always been ripe for convincing; there’s no telling what I could be convinced to do, in half a second. All I need is someone’s expectation that a kernel of raw courage is within me. All I need is an interested person, waiting to witness my calling it forth. When someone thinks I can do it, when someone is watching, magic happens. I can’t even remember fear.

  A convertible! I hop in the front with Izzy. We zoom away from the curb and I laugh. I laugh, catching wind in my teeth, past the three playgrounds between 3rd, 4th and 5th Streets, past the windows of Dr. Ellen’s dental office (behind whose door poor trembling children wait to have drills bore to the core of their beings) and then—but where are we going? Not just around the block! Iggy is driving much further, much faster than was agreed upon. She shakes her wild blonde hair and she laughs and Izzy laughs and they jar me, between them in the front seat, with their shaking shoulders.

  Oh no, I am a lost soul, swooning under wind and sun, going further and further from home, going so far I almost can’t remember how it will be when it’s discovered that I didn’t ask permission, didn’t tell anyone, didn’t ask, didn’t think, didn’t care!