The Kingdom of Brooklyn

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  “And now,” my mother says, “the house is worth much more, much more than we paid for it!”

  This news causes Gilda to bow her head and begin to stir her ice cream in circles, mushing it down till the hill of chocolate melts to a runny brown mess.

  My mother begins one of her lists, I see it coming, by her inhaling a deep breath, before she even begins.

  “The winters are better in Florida, the weather is better in Florida, the antique business, we hear, is thriving in Florida, there’s no reason to stay in this filthy, cold, stinking place.”

  Brooklyn? Is she talking about my Brooklyn?

  “Except that you live here with me,” Gilda says. “Except that you are my only family. You know the children are like my own.”

  “Only I am,” I remind Gilda. “Not so much Blossom.”

  She smiles, so very sadly, and she takes my hand.

  “Yes,” she admits. “You are like my own child.”

  “It’s never too late. You could still find someone to marry,” my mother says. “And have your own children.”

  “It will never happen,” Gilda says. “You took care of that very nicely, didn’t you?”

  “I had nothing to do with it,” my mother says. “That Sam was a no-good bum.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t perfect, but neither am I,” Gilda says. “You know it was my only chance. You ruined it because you didn’t want him living here.”

  “You can have anyone you want living here,” my mother says, “…if you find someone to buy the house for you.”

  “You would really do that,” Gilda says. “Take Issa away from me, just like that. Just disappear with her…”

  Now I am really listening. Now I want to fling myself into Gilda’s lap and wrap my arms around her neck. Now I want to promise, “I won’t ever go, I won’t ever leave you!”

  “If you run around with that Iggy, you’ll find some man or other,” my mother says. “You probably can’t help it, that dame has so many men after her, one of them might even settle for you.”

  I see it in her eyes, the cargo of bad words amassing there—they’re gathering in her mind like an army getting ready to strike. Doesn’t my mother know she has got to be careful? Gilda is like an eggshell. Gilda can’t listen to this

  “Don’t say any more,” Gilda begs. “You’ll be sorry for it!

  “I won’t be sorry. What I’m sorry for is all the years I’ve wasted being your servant. What I’m sorry for is myself, and my children, who never had a natural family life! I’m sorry that my husband and I never had any privacy, not one stinking goddamn minute of privacy. I nearly killed myself, Gilda, working for you and Mama, and for what?” My mother’s veins are standing out in her neck and in her forehead. She shakes her fist and rattles the heads of the lions on her bracelet, who have the same fierce expression she has. “So now we want to escape! To get out of this place. To go somewhere warm and beautiful and where you aren’t always hanging on to me and my kids!”

  “Oh!” Gilda says. The pits in her skin stand out dark and deep. They are like holes out of which her life will pour.

  “But, Mommy!” I cry. “I don’t want to leave Gilda!”

  “Children don’t decide these things!” my mother says, hitting her fist on the table. She shakes her head so that her cheeks flap. “You’ll go where we say you’ll go.”

  “But I love Gilda!” And this time I move, I leap into Gilda’s lap and throw my arms around her, I wash her tears away with kisses, I kiss every place I can reach on the gravelly roughness of her skin.

  “Fine, so you love her,” my mother says. “And we won’t be taking your dog with us,” she adds in my direction. “Dogs die of the heat in Florida, so you’ll have to give him away, Issa. We’ll find a good home for him and that’s that. And don’t you dare talk back to me now.”

  CHAPTER 34

  The worst! Losing Beloved is the worst! Losing Gilda is terrible, losing Izzy is unimaginable, losing The Skaters/Bike-Riders/Cookers-Sewers is heartbreaking, but without Beloved I will surely die. Don’t you dare talk back to me now is what she said. So I narrow my eyes and stare at her, stare at her with Chinese eyes, stare at her like a…Chink (oh yes) like a Chink staring at a…a…a Kike. What if I said that out loud? Would it shock her, jar her, astonish her, frighten her? Would she vomit from the shock?

  I want to be so bad, I want to hurt her, I want to prove to her that she can’t do this to me. Children don’t decide these things is what she said. Well, why don’t they? Why not? They have lives. Children count. Children matter. What they want matters as much as what she wants!

  I don’t want Florida. I don’t need coconuts. I need snow. How could she ask me to live without snow, without that possibility of muted beauty, that screen of descending peace that lands on the curbs and cracked sidewalks as softly as falling flower petals? How could she pull me bodily out of my bed in the sunporch, away from my lilac tree, away from my Avenue O that I love, my Avenue P that I shop on, away from this entire world I am attached to by all the memories of all the days I have ever lived? I need Ocean Parkway, the street that has on one side the rest home (empty of my grandmother) and on the other side the mirrored ball on a pedestal in front of Dr. Ruby Tempkin’s house (empty of my dead red-haired friend Esther Tempkin). I need Ocean Parkway to remind me that I am alive, that I am here and others are gone, to remind me that I am destined to go on and complete the work of my days.

  What will Florida remind me of? Nothing much, nothing that matters. The things that matter to me are what turn the blur of my inattention to the sharpest awareness. Beloved, my soulmate, matters. I will chain myself to Beloved. They will never separate me from Beloved.

  That night I sneak him out of his little doghouse on the back porch and into my bed. The Screamer says she will tell. I tell her, without raising my voice, that if she tells I will kill her.

  She gets quiet. Maybe she loves Beloved, too. Maybe she is just convinced I will kill her. It doesn’t matter how I get my way as long as I get it. I have learned this from my mother, who always gets her way. It’s a marvel, isn’t it, how you can hate what someone does, and then do things her way?

  On Saturday, it is agreed that my father may take me to the antique shop; it is allowed that Beloved can go along since my mother can’t stand his whining when I’m not at home to calm him. My reason for going with my father is that I have chosen to do a composition for my English teacher on “the beauty and value of antiques,” and I need to examine certain ones in order to describe them in detail.

  My mother, whose hopes were dashed when I was not in the class that won the home economics contest, now imagines that I will write the best composition and thus win the Excellence in Composition Medal when I graduate eighth grade in June. That’s when the deadline looms: June, when I graduate. June when the house will be sold. June, which is the month of Gilda’s birthday. We must move in June. We must go to Florida where dogs die in the heat and where I will start my new life in high school.

  “Dogs don’t die because it’s too hot for them in Florida, Daddy,” I tell him as we pull away from the curb. “I looked it up in the library. Dogs can live in any climate. They adapt. They can live in the North Pole.”

  “Whoever told you dogs can’t live in Florida?”

  “Mommy.”

  “Oh. Mommy.”

  “She says we can’t take Spotty to Florida.”

  “She said that?”

  “Why do we have to move to Florida?”

  “She’s hell bent,” he says. “She thinks I can make more money there.”

  “Can you?”

  “Who knows?” He glances over at me. “Don’t worry, Issa. You won’t ever have to give away this mutt.” He reaches over and cuffs Beloved on the head. I glance at my father’s foot on the gas pedal, and just there, where his pants ride up, I can see the line of stitches that match the ones on Beloved’s torn and mangled ear.

  “She said I can’t talk back to her about it.�
��

  “I’ll talk to her. I said don’t worry.” Now my father reaches over to ruffle my hair. On a crazy impulse, I whirl sideways and lay my head in his lap. He laughs while I watch the steering wheel turn just above my eyes.

  “What’s it like down there?”

  “Well, let’s see: there’s sky and trees upside down, and lampposts, and traffic lights, and everything’s spinning.”

  I feel the car turn; the universe reverses direction. Now I don’t see lampposts anymore, or traffic lights, or apartment houses.

  “Where are we?” I ask.

  “Guess!” my father says.

  “I can’t. I’m too dizzy.”

  “We’re going into Prospect Park!”

  “Really?” I sit up, and he’s right, we’re not on Ocean Parkway or the big main highway that goes downtown to the antique store. We’re on a curvy road, with hills and trees all around us.

  “How about we take the day off, Issa? Let’s go to the park and rent a paddleboat; we can have a picnic and we can go to the zoo. We’ll play hooky.”

  “Mommy wouldn’t like it. Mommy…”

  “Forget Mommy for now,” he says.

  My father. The man who sat in the dark sunporch smoking a pipe while Gilda gave a party. My father, before he knew I would be his, sitting shyly in a corner in the dark, the bowl of his pipe flaring with each pull of his breath, waiting there for the shooting star of my mother to land in his lap. “He was so kind and decent,” she told me once, when I asked why she married him. “He was so honest.”

  But his kindness and honesty have been the bone in her throat; he is not doing badly in business now, but she knows how weak he is in the area of ruthlessness. (I was with her in the antique store the day a young woman rushed in with her baby and begged my father to give her ten dollars for her gold wedding ring. He held the ring in the palm of his hand, as if weighing it, and then gave the girl twenty dollars. Then he reached for her hand and put the ring back on her finger. “Pay me back when you can,” he said. I remember my mother’s face, drawn to a point with anger. And not only she was angry: I did my own counting of how many things I could have bought in the toy store with that twenty dollars.)

  If we play hooky today and he misses out on business (after all, he is having the beginnings of his “going out of business sale,” for which he has placed a small ad in The Brooklyn Eagle), my mother will have another reason for fury. And what about my composition?

  Besides, what is the “beauty and value of antiques”? I personally hate them. They’re dusty, they’re breakable, they’re old and dirty, they come in ragged cartons wrapped in old newspaper whose ink gets on your fingers. If they’re clocks, they don’t tell time. If they’re music boxes, they don’t play. If they’re pins, their clasps are broken. If they’re necklaces, their chains are torn.

  And if they’re perfect, they are too valuable for me to touch, too expensive for us to take home, too delicate for me to hold. Who cares about antiques!

  Ducks are on the lake, ducking their heads into the water and letting the sun stream in iridescent stripes down their backs. Oh sun! Oh water! My father has rented a paddleboat, two fishing poles, bought a jar of worms. We pedal and the paddles turn. We steer into the narrows of the lake, and pass under the low-hanging boughs of weeping trees. Beloved curls at our feet with his eyes bright, his tail wagging.

  I hear everything: the lap of the water at the sides of the boat, the faint buzz of insects around my head, the shrill song of birds who chase one another from branch to branch of the trees on shore.

  We maneuver into the shade of an umbrella-wide tree and toss our fishing rods into the lake. I can hear the tiny pull and rip of the nylon cord as it cuts gently through the still water as I thrust my rod one way and then another. I feel we are sitting under a magnifying glass, with everything bigger and closer and hotter.

  My father smiles, puffs on his pipe, lets the caramel scent flavor the air.

  Yes, he has told me before: the best things in life are free. The paddleboat and the worms aren’t free, but still. The big things are: the sun, the water, the trees, the birds. Who made these things? Why do they delight me? Why do I forget my tight, hard, mean little worries when I see the flap of a jumping fish? The shimmer of a school of minnows hurrying by, as if they are connected by invisible webs?

  Why don’t we do this every day? It’s so wonderful, so peaceful, so warm, so perfect. I lean down and kiss Beloved on the top of his head. I lean over and kiss my father on his cheek. He reaches into his pocket and hands me a stick of Black Jack chewing gum. Why can’t I marry my father and just we two move to Florida?

  I write my composition instead on “The Beauty of Nature.” My mother has taught me that the first sentence of any piece of writing is the most important. When I had to do a report on Roman culture, she wrote the beginning words for me: “All roads lead to Rome.”

  I begin this one similarly, hoping to please her: “The best things in life are free.”

  My mother leans over my shoulder as I write at the kitchen table. She is angry that we spent the day in Prospect Park. She can’t fix it, though; it’s done. She reads my first sentence and she says, “Get that idea out of your head, Issa. The sooner the better.”

  CHAPTER 35

  My father brings home an alligator purse in a white gift box. Bought at an estate sale, it rests in tissue paper, smelling of sanitized swamp and jungle. I am allowed to touch its scaly surface, run my fingers over the animal’s woody head, touch its tiny sharp teeth protruding under the line of its upper jaw. Its sealed mouth is positioned just over the fastening snap. The alligator’s eyes are stitched closed, its nostrils are sewn through with amber thread where its snout is attached to the body of the purse. The creature looks steamrollered onto its own skin: alligator hide comprises the entire square design of the purse, even as the alligator is overlaid upon the geometric arrangement of its scales. The back side of the purse shows his feet, with four perfect claws; his nails are splayed out as if he is trying to get a grip on a threatening surface and pull himself up to freedom.

  “Look at the hand-stitching all around,” my mother breathes in admiration. “It must be worth a fortune.”

  My father stands back proudly, glad to have been responsible for such a phenomenon.

  “Let me show it to Gilda,” I beg. “Let me call her.”

  By the time Gilda comes down, my mother is already modeling it, strutting back and forth through the living room with the varnished brown animal slung over her shoulder.

  “Poor little fellow,” Gilda says. “Killed for that.”

  “Oh, you make me sick,” my mother says, but not unkindly, because she is so pleased with this present. “It’s the sort of elegant thing one could wear to the opera.” She looks at my father. “But never mind, you would never go to the opera.”

  “But I’m going to the opera,” Gilda confesses with some shyness. “Maybe I could wear it.”

  Our heads pop up. “How come you’re going?” my mother asks. I have the crazy thought that she has hunting-dog ears like Beloved, and they have just stiffened up to an alert position. My father is watching Gilda, too, but his head is tilted down, as if he isn’t really watching.

  “His name is Joe Boboli, I never met him, he’s a friend of Iggy’s. It’s a blind date—she’s arranged it.”

  “But how come the opera?” I ask.

  “Well.” Gilda seems embarrassed. “The fact is, he’s Italian, and he wants to take me to a certain opera that has a character in it named Gilda.”

  My mother, in a sudden flurry of movement, rushes to open the piano bench and pull out a book of music called Favorites of Opera Lovers. She flings her fingers over the pages till she finds what she wants: then she lets the alligator purse slide gently down her arm and lays it on the side of the piano. She begins to play a song.

  “This is an aria from Rigoletto, Gilda is his daughter…” she says over her shoulder to Gilda. “Not that you would know
it. But she dies in the end, of course.”

  My mother plays on and on. We all stand around, getting tired, but no one sits down on the couch.

  After we’re sure she’s not going to stop, my father makes a move: he reaches for the alligator purse, takes it in his big hands and holds it out to Gilda, careful to point its teeth downward. “Look, Gilda, take this if you want to wear it on a special night out, just take it, why don’t you?”

  “Oh no, you didn’t get it for me,” she says. My mother keeps playing, but I see her shoulders get stiff. She holds her head rigid, as if she is having trouble listening to the conversation above the noise she is making.

  “It’s quite a classy item,” my father says. “You might as well take it if you have an opportunity to use it.”

  Gilda takes the purse in her hands and runs her fingers over it. “It is handsome,” she says. “The poor thing. They’ve turned him into a work of art.”

  “Just keep it,” my father insists, pressing his hand over her hand on the alligator’s snout. “It’s yours. I’ll come across another someday.”

  Smash! My mother bangs her fists down on the piano keys and stands up. Her face is like a jigsaw puzzle fallen to pieces.

  “It’s mine! If you brought it home for me, it’s mine! It isn’t hers! It’s mine, I own it, I need it, I deserve it.” She lunges toward Gilda and rips the purse out of her hands. Then she cries out in pain, throwing the purse to the floor and holding up her index finger, which begins to ooze droplets of blood in a thin line. “Oh God damn it! You all hate me, don’t you! You’re all against me! I don’t know why, no matter what I do, it’s never enough. Never mind! Just go to hell, why don’t you, every one of you!”

  My mother stumbles, sobbing, to the bathroom, slams the door and locks herself in. Gilda runs upstairs. My father stares around the room, looks at me, and leaves. I hear his car drive away. I fling myself on the floor of the back porch and take Beloved in my lap. I rock with him against my heart.