“Then I’ll go myself,” and, in a blink, Izzy is out of the car and up the steps of the rest home. He disappears inside. Now I am really afraid. I’m alone in a red convertible, and although I thought I was on my way to a great adventure, a long ball game, hours of sitting and letting Izzy play games with my fingers, I am now staring at the door of a house of skeletons.
I let out a single sob, a kind of practice cry for whatever is going on, the horror I will soon be shown.
I don’t know if it’s a half-hour or an hour later: I have been sitting at the wheel of the car and pretending to drive. I drive myself to Florida, it so happens, and I am back on the beach gathering coconuts. My mother is not with me, so the soldiers have only me to admire. Only me to give chocolate bars to, only me to applaud. This is a technique I learned in kindergarten: put yourself somewhere else when you don’t want to be where you have to be. It’s not easy, holding onto that wheel and keeping the car going to Florida when in truth you’re bouncing over craters and caverns in the road and the wheel is being wrenched out of your hands. When in truth the front door of the rest home is waiting to suck you inside and throw you to the wild animals. Look over here, it keeps saying, but I won’t. I’m going in another direction. To the sunshine, to the ocean, to the admiration of an army; if, in fact, not to the Dodgers game.
But louder than my thoughts is the siren of an ambulance. It’s pulling up right behind me, a bulbous white truck with signs and symbols on it denoting the battle against death.
“Hey-Issa, Hey-Issa,” is what I hear from the front porch of the rest home, the sound of a snake hissing my name, and there is Izzy, holding open the screen door of the building, and now here comes Iggy and Gilda, out the door while the ambulance men run in with their stretcher.
“It’s your grandmother,” Izzy says, letting go of the screen door and running to the car. He opens the driver’s door and lets me out. “She was bleeding from the mouth.”
No. I won’t hear about it. I won’t think about it. They can’t make me take this in and picture it, feel it, remember it forever with all the other things I have had to bury under the sand, deep under, under sand that’s wet and further buried under sand that’s dry.
“Don’t tell me, Izzy.”
But he doesn’t have to. Because now I see what I have avoided the sight of—for how many years? Now it’s inescapable. She’s coming out, feet first on the stretcher, a limp helpless lump of the human being I used to love, and blood is on her chin, on her gown, on her tangled sheets.
I don’t want to see her face, but my eyes are drawn to it with an enormous force. I pray she won’t be looking, that if she is, she can’t see, that if she sees, she won’t know me.
But she does. She knows me. Her eyes rivet themselves to mine and hold there as she is moved past me.
“Grandma!”
She cranes her neck to watch me as they carry her away, into the back of the ambulance. So she isn’t unaware, she isn’t unconscious, insane, gone out. She isn’t—as I have fooled myself into believing—not there. The only truth is that she cannot move and she cannot talk. But she is there and she has been there every single day and night that I have not been there, she has been strapped into that bed for all the time I’ve been riding my bike, dreaming my dreams, kissing Beloved, playing stoop ball with Izzy, licking ice cream cones, watching Milton Berle. I have only had to wait a half-hour in a hot car in a state of fear and uncertainty, and she has been waiting for the torture to break and for the fear to relent for almost forever!
“Grandma!”
They are closing her into the ambulance and I am leaning against a square post on the porch of the rest home and sobbing. I am punching the wooden post with my fist, I am trying to bite the wooden post with my tiny, worthless, hideous, weak, ugly teeth.
“Take her home, Izzy,” Iggy tells her son, and then they are gone, the ambulance is gone, and Iggy’s red car, with Gilda in it, is following along behind.
We are only a few blocks from home. Izzy pulls me along. I see the sun glinting off the points of the gilded poles separating the bicycle path from the benches on Ocean Parkway. I want to fling myself on one of those golden spears. I want to, I will!
But Izzy keeps both arms around me, to hold me up, to keep me going. “She’s old, Issa,” he whispers. “You’re not old.”
“But I will be,” I say. “And so will you. And you know it.”
CHAPTER 31
The Skaters who became The Bike-Riders have now become The Cookers/Sewers and I am one of them. A contest at P.S. 238 has pitted our homemaking class, led by Miss Thomas, against the class led by Mrs. Slutzkin. There will be two weeks of preparation of cooking and sewing at home and in school, at the end of which the two classes will present their delicacies to our principal, Mr. Hunt, for a taste-test, and our sewing creations to his wife, Mrs. Hunt, for a judgment by her expert eye.
I have been required to write down the Safety Rules of the Kitchen in my Homemaking Notebook, on whose brown cover some other rules are listed. Four boys on the cover (one of them a colored boy) stand behind a fence holding baseball bats and mitts. The words over their heads are, “What’s his race or religion got to do with it…HE CAN PITCH!” Nailed to the fence is an admonition to me telling me what I can do:
1. ACCEPT or reject people on their individual worth.
2. SPEAK UP wherever we are, at home, in business, in our school, labor, church or social groups, against prejudice, for understanding.
3. DON’T LISTEN to, or spread, rumors against a race, or a religion. Remember—that’s being an American!
Rules are overtaking me; we are bombarded with them, must know them, be able to recite them, be ready to be tested on them, and the main way to guarantee this is to have us write them down. Our time in school is primarily spent writing down all the rules:
1. Each girl must have a potholder when handling hot pans and dishes.
2. Water spilt on the floor must be wiped up with newspaper.
3. Stools must be placed under the table or under the sink when not in use.
4. If you injure yourself in any way, tell Miss Thomas immediately.
5. Always be careful when striking matches.
6. Never light the gas without permission.
7. Long hair must be braided or tied back off the shoulders to prevent catching fire and for sanitary reasons.
8. Please do not wear sweaters or long sleeves for your own safety and comfort.
It seems to me that every one of those rules is just a result of common sense. Couldn’t they trust me to figure it out for myself?
Miss Thomas’s essential requirement for planning a meal is the writing down of all the details that have to be remembered and attended to:
1. Count up the number of people being served.
2. Write down each course of the menu in detail.
3. List the exact amount of food to be prepared.
4. Enumerate needs for table setting, including cups, sherbet glasses, water glasses, spoons, forks, knives, saucers, small plates, large plates, table decoration, napkins, tablecloth, doilies, salt, pepper.
I am against all this. The formalities sap my energies. Don’t they know I have a brain and can remember that plates have to be set on the table before food can be served? That if I am cooking Stuffed Norwegian Prune Salad and Puffed Rice Balls, I will need to have prunes and puffed rice ready to use?
Still, recipes are dictated to us hour after hour, and we dutifully bend our heads and take them down. All across the home ec room I see a sea of heads with neat parts in their hair bending over their notebooks. I yawn and write, yawn and write: wash prunes thoroughly, steam prunes until tender, remove the prune stones, fill the hollow prune with peanut butter, or other prunes. Press the prunes into shape and roll them in granulated sugar. Arrange prunes like a flower in plate. Place cream cheese into center prune and serve prunes proudly. Show that you are proud of your prunes.
If this is what I will ha
ve to do when I get married, I am worried whether or not I will be able to bear marriage. Marriage to Izzy, as I imagine it, doesn’t seem to include either prunes or dictation. What would we two do if married? Play Old Maid, crack our knuckles, play stoop ball, eat licorice whips and drink egg creams, touch each other (accidentally and on purpose), go to Coney Island and live in the fun house, travel on the bumper cars, ride the steeplechase, plunge from the parachute jump.
But we can’t do any of this, even before we are married, because I am committed to the Homemaking Contest. I have to stay home and make vegetable chowder, baking powder biscuits, Spanish rice, scalloped fish, peanut brittle and cinnamon toast. I have to be prepared, if asked, to recite from memory all ingredients and methods of preparation. When I’m not cooking, I have to be sewing. Our teacher has taught us to perform the hemstitch on white muslin, overcasting on unbleached muslin, gathering on white cotton, tucking on a ruffle, darning on scrim, darning on cashmere, and darning on stockinet, catch stitching on flannel, overhand stitching on French linen, and slip stitching on silk. In my sewing notebook, called “Plain Sewing,” I have pinned in little squares of material demonstrating each of these stitches, one to a page. If this is plain sewing, I wonder, then, what is fancy sewing?
At our house, my mother never sews, but Gilda is permitted to darn my father’s socks. He goes upstairs once a month (I have to accompany him) and tries on all the socks she has mended for him. There is a ritual to this: my father and I sit on the couch and Gilda sits at her desk (its top is covered by a green paper blotter) under the light of a floor lamp, and she hands him each sock, one by one. He peels off one of the socks he is wearing, usually the one on his left foot, and pulls on the mended sock. If it is lumpy, he strips it off and hands it back to Gilda who slides it onto the smooth round surface of the wooden darning egg she holds by a graceful handle and pounds it with the pocked surface of her silver thimble. Then she hands it back to my father. He puts it back on his foot.
His toes are long and hairy; his big toe is enormous, and the others are fitted against one another as if they are paired for sleeping cuddled together. There are some blue veins on his ankles; without his sock on, his foot has the look of a pale, unprotected primitive animal.
Tonight there is a particularly lumpy bulge at the tip of the big toe where Gilda has darned a large hole. My father tries on the sock and takes it off several times, each time handing it to Gilda to pound it further. He begins to laugh as she taps her thimble fiercely on the darning egg; the wood of the egg is golden brown and smoother than marble. She looks up and laughs at what he must be seeing. She taps again, then hands the egg to my father so he can use his greater strength. She offers him the thimble, but he can’t get it on—not even on his pinky. They are both laughing. She works on it further and then it’s time for him to try the sock on again. When she hands the sock back to him, he looks helpless, so she gets down on her knees at his feet, props his foot on her thigh and slides the navy blue cloth gently on at the toes, then slowly smooths the cloth up over his heel and ankle. She pulls it halfway up his calf so that her hands disappear under his trousers.
“How’s that?” she says, keeping her head bowed. Under the light of the floor lamp, her hair glows auburn, almost aflame.
My father wiggles his toes. “Still a little lumpy in there, I think.” He holds out his foot to her, and she takes his big toe between her fingers. She massages his toe.
“That feels pretty smooth to me,” she says.
“No, it’s still got a ridge there.”
“I never said I could make it perfect,” Gilda says. “Maybe you’ll just have to throw this sock out.”
“That’s what she says,” my father says. “Throw them all out and buy new ones.”
“You could,” Gilda says.
“But then I couldn’t come up here,” my father says. They both look at me. Then he says, “Shouldn’t you be downstairs cooking vanilla cornstarch pudding tonight for your contest?”
“No, candied sweet potatoes,” I correct him.
“You better get busy.”
As I get up to leave, my father rises also. Gilda goes down the hall and gets her coat from the hall closet.
“Do you want me to drive you to the hospital?” he asks. “She couldn’t complain about that.”
“That’s okay, Iggy is picking me up.”
I haven’t asked and they haven’t said anything about my grandmother. She’s just in the hospital, she’s been there for three weeks. They don’t trouble me with news of her because they know I’m so busy cooking and sewing. I am sewing my public project for Mrs. Hunt to judge (it’s an embroidered dishcloth) and a private project for myself (a satin brassiere, which I can’t get right.) I have cut out two circles of pink satin, using my compass to guide me, but a circle is flat, and I don’t know how to get the slight cupping I need for my nipples. That’s all I have: nipples. And barely raised. Nothing else around them has grown and they, themselves, are infinitesimal, nearly invisible. But a flat circle won’t do. (I sew this private part of my project carefully locked in the bathroom.)
All week long I am allowed to stay up late to plan my imaginary menu for the imaginary major dinner party that I am required to invent for my home economics notebook. Tonight they absolutely don’t want me to stay up late: something strange is in the air. No one talks during dinner, except The Screamer, who babbles on about some nonsense, but my mother and father keep their heads down and eat their food without looking up. I wonder if they have had another fight. But I don’t wonder long. I can’t be bothered. I have myself to think about.
Once I get into bed, I carry a flashlight under my blanket so I can work on my project without waking The Screamer, who has fallen asleep while forcing her dolls to talk to one another. They both talk just like her, even the bridegroom.
I can see her neat straight hair on the pillow of the bed that is catty-cornered to mine. My eyes linger on her head for a few seconds, wondering who she is, what her life could possibly be like, how she came to be so closely associated with me when I don’t know her or care about her at all.
I am restless: in my home ec notebook I write down tapioca pudding for dessert, and note beside it that “Tapioca is made from the juice of the cassava tree, which is one of several tropical-American shrubs or herbs of the spurge family.” Is it a shrub or is it a herb? What is the spurge family? (The information is in my notebook, from something Miss Thomas said.)
Never mind the menu. I fish under my bed for my Slam Book, which is a secret book that I passed around in seventh grade to other girls, who write down secrets like their “Best Song,” “Best Actress,” “Best Friend,” and most important, “Remarks and Comments.” I read my last year’s entry, which indicated that my favorite song was “Buttons and Bows,” my favorite actress Esther Williams, my favorite movie Luxury Liner, my best friend: “There is no such thing as a true friend.” (I probably hadn’t met Izzy yet.)
I notice that I must have had my father fill out a page: his best song was “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover,” his best actress was Bette Davis and worst actress Mae West, best actor Gary Cooper and worst actor Eddie Cantor, best movie It Happened One Night, and under comments he wrote, “Other good songs are ‘Offen prepachick brent a fierl’ and ‘I Wish I Was in Dixie.’” Under best friend, he wrote, “Gilda,” and added, “because she makes such good mandelbrot.”
Burn this, I thought. If my mother ever sees it, she will go mad. Lately whenever my father praises Gilda for anything at all, even just for her good mending of his socks, my mother says, “She’s got you completely fooled. She’s evil. She’s a cat with velvet claws.”
I slip the Slam Book far and deep under my bed and switch off my flashlight.
Just as I am falling asleep, I hear a tapping at the window over my head. My heart nearly stops. The man who used to stare in my nine windows hasn’t come for a very long time. I am afraid to look, afraid of what is there now, and whose face h
e wears.
I keep my neck rigid, I don’t move at all. Fear again. Just when a moment arrives that I am almost able to bat fear away, ignore polio, ignore bombs, forget pain, concentrate on tapioca, a whirlwind of it takes me unaware and I feel the spin begin.
The tapping continues, turns into the tattoo of “Shave and a haircut, shampoo,” and I leap up and see Izzy’s face pressing against the glass. He must be standing on the bench in the front garden. He places his finger to his lips and points to the front door. Down beneath him, in the faint glow of moonlight, I see the outline of his bicycle.
Fear disappears. He has come to delight me. To challenge my adherence to rules. He wants me to forget rules. His tapping on the window is my invitation and my dare.
And so I do the forbidden thing: I unlock and unbolt and unchain the front door to my house and to my bedroom. In my nightclothes, with my hair wild from the pillow, I invite Izzy in.
CHAPTER 32
Being in a dark room with a man has its own essence; I am as electric as if a ball of lightning is in the room with us. Izzy and I cover our heads with my blanket, to cushion our whispers and to enhance the thrill of our collusion. (We have an enemy to watch out for; the sister/Screamer can’t be trusted, though I know she tends to sleep heavily, stupidly, like the thick-skinned lump that she is.)
“What? What? Why are you here?” I demand of him. I think it’s some great, wild idea he’s had, sneaking out of his house, riding his bike over the bumps of the sidewalk in the dead of night, feeling his rubber tires knit the old, crooked cracks into a freeway of adventure.
“I have bad news,” he whispers. “The worst.”
The Kingdom of Brooklyn Page 18
