The Kingdom of Brooklyn

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  CHAPTER 29

  Polio lives, a wide green bug with blinking red eyes. It hides beneath the iron grates of the drinking fountains at the park, in the silver sprinklers of wading pools, on the rims of cups in restaurants, on the headrests at the movie theater. If you inhale deeply, it can ride into your lungs on a single breath, splash up from the toilet at school, enter your nose if you lean down to smell a rose. No form of “be careful” has ever been like this, no warning to watch out for cars, for wild dogs, for bad boys, for bullies, has ever had this edge of hysteria to it.

  No. No. No. Not only is “no” the twenty-four-hour song in my ears, but The Skaters hear it, the Girl Scouts hear it, the listeners to radio hear it. “No” is affixed to the sky above us like sky-writing. No wind blurs or blows it away.

  Esther Tempkin, a fellow Girl Scout whose father is a doctor, distributes special cotton masks at our Girl Scout meeting and warns us to wear them if we have to go on the subway, the trolley or into crowded waiting rooms at the dentist’s or doctor’s office. Her father has seen “terrible cases” she warns us—at the first sign of a sore throat or a stiff neck, we must rush to the doctor. She waggles her tongue in her mouth and rolls her eyes in her head to show what it will be like if we don’t take care. She’s a beautiful girl: red-haired and luscious-looking, though not a tramp at all (The Bike-Riders and I have discussed this). She has “developed” but wears loose blouses and big sweaters. She has been the first in our troop to see blood—we regard her as a successful warrior queen. She has seen blood and she has survived.

  After her demonstration about how we are to wear the cotton masks, she invites us all to her house Tuesday night to watch “The Milton Berle Show.”

  “Isn’t that going into a crowd?” a Scout asks.

  “People you are with regularly are not a threat,” Esther says, quoting her father. “It’s strangers! Watch out for strangers!”

  Television, though we have all seen it, still seems a miracle. Milton Berle is a legend—a man who wears a dress and lipstick. Esther Tempkin has told us that at her house they have placed a magnifier over the screen to make the picture bigger. I know what that means: Dr. Tempkin is rich—all doctors are rich.

  My mother says she could have married a doctor. She tells this to my father when they are arguing about whether or not I can go to Esther’s house. My father thinks I should not go: the doctor has his office in the downstairs of the house—and is not a doctor’s office the most dangerous place to go? But my mother says a doctor knows what precautions to take. She wants me to see what a doctor’s house is like. She wants me to keep these matters in mind when it’s time for me to marry.

  She also reminds my father she could have married a lawyer. Before she met my father, when she worked as a legal secretary in Manhattan, she met “all kinds of important men who wanted to marry me.” I don’t know what she expects him to do when she says these things to him. What can he do? He isn’t a doctor. He isn’t a lawyer. Perhaps she is saying these things for my benefit: if she had married a doctor, then I would have a television. If she had married a doctor, then I would be the one giving out cotton masks and have special information to protect my friends from the red-eyed glare of the polio bug.

  We are sitting on the new rattan furniture when my mother makes her “could have married a doctor” speech. I now think of the talks with my father as speeches because the two of them don’t exchange words; she lectures, he listens.

  The Screamer has other matters to attend to. She’s much bigger now, The Screamer/my sister, with her straight, neat hair, always with her head down over some jigsaw puzzle or follow-the-dot book, or coloring book, or cut-out book. She’s of no interest to me, I ignore her, or I blame her if I can, or I mess up her dolls-of-foreign-lands collection—I do whatever I can to make it hard for her. I would be happier without her, but she’s here forever. I am trying to learn not to spend all my time trying to understand why what’s here forever is here, or what’s gone forever is gone—just as I don’t think, if I can help it, about my grandmother. There are just certain rules that are permanent. You can’t cry or whine to change them, you can’t kick or hit, you can’t beg or plead, you can’t sulk or vomit. The things that won’t change sit there like a brick wall: they don’t hear you, they don’t move, they don’t go away, they don’t change.

  But my mother and father do change. Could they also go away? From each other? From me?

  My mother has a new hairdo; though Gilda knows every style and how to make it, my mother announced that she was going to a beauty shop on Avenue P to have it done: an upsweep, with many hairpins to hold the hair, swirled into a roll, against her scalp. Without hair around her face, loose and white, she looks narrow and thin; her skin looks tight, as if hairpins are also holding it stretched. Her mouth stretches over her big, unreal teeth. She has new clothes now, too—I don’t remember much about her old clothes, but the new ones are silky and fancy, pale gray with weeping willows imprinted on them, or white, with the silhouettes of black panthers standing out. She wears high heels and nylons these days because the decorator who came to do the house wore high heels and told my mother her legs would look good in them.

  I have to be careful with the rattan furniture; if I am nervous, and pull at the splinters that stick out, I can bring the whole couch down to the floor. I am warned. My mother warns me every day. So instead of picking at the splinters, I pick at the dry skin of my lips. If I peel off one layer of my delicate flesh, very slowly, my lips turn red. They look as if they have lipstick on them. The main problem is drinking orange juice. Then my lips burn as if I am dipping them into liquid fire.

  “I want Issa to see what a doctor’s house has in it,” my mother says. “I want her to see what kind of furniture they have, what kind of dishes they have, what kind of silverware they have. She has a right to know what’s out there in the world.”

  My father, smoking his pipe, picks at rattan splinters at the edge of his chair. His curly dark hair has gone a little flat, and his thick, strong fingers are flat out on his thighs. My father seems flattened. It’s strange, but there seems to be less of him, although he hasn’t gotten thinner or smaller.

  He works as hard as ever; longer hours, more days. The antique store is open on Saturdays, now. And he goes on calls to buy new antiques every night. The women at our house no longer worry at the window that—because he is late—someone has tried to rob him or murder him. There are no women anymore to stand at the window and watch for his car to pull up at the curb. My sister is busy with her puzzles and dolls, my mother is busy with her furniture catalogs and clothing magazines, Gilda is alone upstairs, and my grandmother is not at any window anywhere. Even I myself no longer worry about my father now. Some things can’t be influenced, no matter what I do.

  “So, let her go to see Milton Berle, let her go to see a doctor’s house,” my father says. He picks up the newspaper. My mother picks up her fashion magazine. My sister moves her bride doll and her bridegroom doll into position on the living room floor for yet another of their wedding ceremonies.

  Some of the Girl Scouts in my troop know by heart the opening song of “The Milton Berle Show” sung by the men who come out on stage in mechanics’ uniforms:

  We are the men of Texaco

  We work from Maine to Mexico,

  There’s nothing like this Tex-a-co of ours…

  Our show tonight is powerful,

  We’ll wow you with an hourful

  Of showers from a showerful of stars…

  We’re the merry Tex-a-co men—

  Tonight we may be show-men—

  Tomorrow we’ll be servicing your cars!

  I settle back against the soft cushions of the couch. So: this is a doctor’s house. It isn’t so fancy. The medical examining rooms are downstairs, and Dr. Tempkin and his family live upstairs. He has a side door in the alley just like Gilda’s, with a side-stoop, and a separate doorbell. It’s true that in the center of his front garden—wher
e, at our house, we have only a lilac tree—the doctor has a mirrored ball resting on a tall marble pillar. That’s fancy. But after all, his patients need to know how to find his house. That mirrored ball must shine very brightly in the sunshine. The sickest person in the world, rushing along Ocean Parkway in pain, would see the rainbow beams fired off that mirrored ball.

  I try to observe the doctor’s house the way my mother would look at it. Our Girl Scout troop members are sprawled on the furniture in a way that would not please my mother—but Mrs. Tempkin seems not to mind. Esther is a beautiful hostess, wearing a flower-barrette in her brilliant red hair, wearing a flowered apron, helping her mother pass around trays of brownies and special paper cups full of malted milkshakes. In the dimness of the kitchen lurks the famous doctor; he is short, bald, with glasses. His name is Dr. Ruby Tempkin. He has the name of a jewel.

  I am grateful for the luxury of the paper cups: they are for safety from the polio germ.

  Mrs. Gargano, one of our leaders, tells us not to be shocked if Milton Berle comes out on stage wearing a dress. “Men do that for a joke, you know,” she says, and we all laugh nervously. My father would never wear a dress, not for a joke, not for any reason. I think of all the fathers of my friends that I know: they would not wear dresses, either. (But I am eager to wear boys’ clothes. I already do, when I put on my dungarees. They have the zipper on the side, because no girl would wear pants with a fly, but from a distance they do look like boys’ pants. They look tough. They look handsome.)

  And suddenly, there he is, the famous Milton Berle, with a dress, lipstick, a curly wig, a cigar—what an imbecile. Everyone is laughing. I don’t think it’s funny, really—I think it’s stupid. I look around at the lit up faces of my friends, my clubmates and my Girl Scout buddies. We are all watching a little round screen through a sheet of magnifying glass; we are all watching the figure of a man dressed like a woman, with his hairy legs showing, dancing around.

  There’s a sense of comfort in being in a big friendly crowd of people I know, a sense of safety and good cheer, but it also feels flat and unreal to me; something inside me withdraws, backs up like a turtle pulling deep into his shell, I can almost feel my skin telescoping like a turtle’s neck. I go back to a place in my mind that is deeply familiar and most comfortable: to thoughts of the pile of books beside my bed I wish I were reading, to thoughts about my mother’s new hairdo and what it means, to thoughts about Izzy and how I can’t wait to see him again, and to thoughts about my grandmother, knotted in the trap of her wet sheets, helpless…

  But laughter from the world recalls me, I force my turtle-head out of its shell. Reluctantly, I come back to the doctor’s living room, I come back to Milton Berle telling a joke and pursing his lips, I come back to my milkshake, my brownie, to the vision of the little clump of blue flowers on the barrette in Esther’s red hair.

  As we are leaving, I see Mrs. Tempkin pursing her lips against Esther’s forehead, a gesture I think is strange. She’s not going anywhere, this is her home, why kiss her goodbye?

  The rest of us circle about in a commotion of leaving, saying thank you, waving to one another, accepting an extra brownie to take home. As we go out into the night, I see the mirrored ball reflecting the moon, big and brilliant as the sun. And from behind it, or under it, or over it—it’s hard to tell which—the mirror throws off dull bits of starlight, like chips of broken glass.

  My mother wants me to look at what they have here, and so I do. It’s true, we have no starry night in slivered glass at our house, we have nothing of this kind at all.

  Two days later our troop leader calls to say that Esther is in an iron lung, a cocoon that breathes for her. That the fever and stiff neck struck her the night we saw Milton Berle, that her legs were paralyzed within a few hours. That she can’t breathe by herself and can’t move. That if we still have the brownie that was given to us to take home, we must flush it away.

  My mother’s voice when she sets down the phone is pure quivering panic. Not sympathy. Just fury and panic.

  Without asking permission, without telling her where I’m going, I dash out front with my bicycle and ride down East 4th Street to the playground. The vast concrete city is deserted because children are forbidden to come here. I have the entire place to myself. I walk my bike from place to place, examining the silver spout of the drinking fountain, the seesaws (where strangers play), the monkey bars (where strangers climb), and even the spigots of the wading pool, though no spray is coming from them: the pool is dry.

  I am looking for the enemy: the wide green bug with blinking red eyes.

  An old woman in a black cape, carrying shopping bags from the shops on Avenue P comes walking through the playground very slowly. She doesn’t know me, I am sure, but she walks right toward me. Her ankles are thick, her shoes are heavy and black, laced tight. She has a black babushka tied under her chin. She comes right toward me as if she were supposed to meet me here, and she says to me, “I have something for you.” She takes an object tied on a string from around her neck and she comes right up to me and places the circle over my head like a necklace. The thing tied to the string smells like mothballs. My eyes burn as the fumes rise up.

  “Wear it,” she says. “Don’t take it off till the winter. And go home from this place.”

  I ride home as fast as I can. I am shaking and my teeth are chattering. When I get in the door, my mother is holding the phone away from her body. She looks wild, almost insane.

  “Esther is dead,” she says to me. “And with a doctor right there.”

  CHAPTER 30

  On my bed are two cushions Gilda has embroidered for me with famous sayings:

  Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.

  Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low,

  An excellent thing in woman.

  When Izzy and Iggy come to pick us up for a Dodgers game, they step into my front porch bedroom and Iggy lets out a howl.

  “Who in holy heaven gave these to you?”

  “Gilda made them.”

  “Hey, Gilda, come in here—do you want to ruin this kid?” she yells at Gilda, who is standing outside, waiting for us.

  Gilda comes up the front steps and ventures into the house, but hesitantly. She never comes in without an invitation, but my mother and The Screamer aren’t home—they have gone to buy my sister tap dance shoes. My father is at the store. My dog, forever banished from the house now that it’s so elegantly furnished, howls his endless siren of neglect from the back porch.

  Iggy tosses the pillows over so only their blank backs show. “You have to give up this baloney,” she says to Gilda. “If anything, you should be teaching Issa to be as clever as she can be! As loud as she has to be to make herself heard! Forget about being a lady in lace collars, sweet patootie. That’s rule number one in our making you into a new woman.”

  This is not the first I have heard of this—their making Gilda into a new woman—and lately I have seen signs of it. Gilda has begun doing her fingernails with red polish instead of colorless. She has begun to wear various bright-colored silk flowers bobbie-pinned into her hair. She has abandoned all her solid laced-up beauty-parlor work shoes and is now wearing pointy-toed embossed leather pumps. Her clothes have changed, too: cotton house dresses and gray cardigans have made way for two-piece suits with peplum jackets and slits in the narrow skirts. Even today, Gilda is wearing to match her suit a large wavy-brimmed hat that covers half her face. Her lips are glowing red and shapely and the curve of her chin is graceful. Her skin is shadowed, blurred in its details, its scars almost unnoticeable.

  Iggy says, “Next we’ll remake Issa!”

  “Issa is great the way she is,” Izzy says. He looks me over and I’m ready for it. I’m wearing my dungarees and penny loafers and a red plaid man’s shirt. If I keep my mouth shut and thus force my small teeth into the background, I look pretty impressive.

  Iggy drives fast, with the top down, toward Ebbets Field. She makes one
stop, at the rest home, so Gilda can drop off a jar of gefilte fish for someone to feed to my grandmother. Gilda teeters in on her delicate high heels, wearing her glamorous hat, and indicates by a wave she will be only a few seconds.

  Iggy begins to sing: “Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd, buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks, I don’t care if I never get back…”

  Izzy is doing something to me in the back seat; he’s pretending to teach me how to crack my knuckles, but instead he’s just folding my fingers back and forth, rolling them in a gentle, tender rhythm that relays itself in waves up my arm and in arrows of heat to the deep center of my body.

  I don’t care if we never get to the ball game. I don’t know why the world loves baseball so much; especially men. (Iggy loves it like a man.) Teams playing against one another are like countries at war: they have to hate the others because they have to love themselves, and that’s reason enough for them to want to wipe the others out, to kill. They do whatever they have to do to get the right feeling.

  Gilda is taking a long, long time. Iggy gets tired of singing.

  “Wait here, kids,” she tells us. “I’ll go get that slow poke out of there.”

  But she doesn’t come out, either. It’s getting hot with the top down, Izzy wants to go into the rest home to get them.

  “Come on,” he says. “Or we’ll be late for the game.”

  “You don’t want to go in there.” A buzzing has started in my head and is growing louder, as if a swarm of bees is crawling in through my ears. “I can’t go in.” I have the oddest thought in my head: that if I wear my favorite clothes into that building, my dungarees and my man’s shirt, and my best penny loafers, they will be ruined forever. I have such fear of what is inside those walls: I will see what is to become of me.