The trailer is already rented for one month and is to be returned in Florida. My father loads it nightly, with his vases and lamps and statues and dishes and paintings and punch bowls. It’s a big high thing, and it blocks my view of Avenue O, of the houses across the street. At night my father has to sleep in bed with me in order to watch the trailer; he spends half the night sitting up to look out one or another of the nine windows, to be sure no one is robbing him. I have the choice of staying in my narrow bed with him, or sleeping with The Screamer, or sharing the big bed with my mother. But I will not sleep with my mother; I will not let my skin touch her skin. I do not look at her or talk to her.
I still haven’t packed. I won’t do it and I have told them so. They’ll have to do it for me if they want it done. I don’t care if I have no clothes or books or games. I am dead, so why do I need them?
I go to school, I let my teachers say goodbye to me and wish me luck. They are all sure I will be a great success in my future. Apparently they can’t tell I’m dead.
At the eighth grade graduation ceremony at the Avalon Theater, I win the Medal for Excellence in Composition; I hear the applause rise like a flock of seagulls flapping over my head. What do I care? I will never write another word in my life.
The Skaters/Bike-Riders/Cookers chip in to get me a going-away present, a mother-of-pearl pencil on a gold chain that snaps back into a pin I can wear on my chest. They hug and kiss me and tell me they can’t live without me. It’s fine, they think that’s true, but things you can’t live without really kill you if they’re gone. I know it for a fact.
Everything moves along—the furniture is sold, Gilda finds a room to live in in the house of one of her old customers; the day after we leave she will supervise the moving out of the old furniture and the moving in of the Borochek’s. The cellar is emptying out; there is nothing left down there but piles of old newspapers and empty cartons, and the oil painting of the milkmaid girl in the meadow with the cow. The mended frame has been drying down there all this time—and, although my mother thinks we will pack the painting in the trailer and take it to Florida, I know a secret. My father has shared this secret with me: we are giving the painting to Gilda at her birthday party. The birthday party is to be the night before we leave. He tells me he is sure my mother will have a change of heart; she will want to give her sister something fine and generous on the night before we move away. I don’t think he knows much about sisters. I have a feeling of dread in me when I think about this last party for Gilda. We will light the candles, eat the cake, and then in the morning drive away to Florida. I see it in my mind like a dream. We drive away and disappear. And that is the end of that.
The birthday cake is from Ebinger’s, layer cake with chocolate buttercream icing. The guests are Iggy and Izzy and the five of us. My mother is wearing a gray silk dress and black high heels; she is wearing her gold lion bracelet and a gold choker around her neck. I don’t remember exactly seeing Izzy or Iggy; they are in the fuzzy edges of the room, they don’t really belong here tonight because this is not the end of the world for them. Gilda is clear as crystal: in her white dress and her white hat and wearing dark glasses, she stands in the living room with her hand to her face. It is her birthday, she is being celebrated. We have candles already stuck in the cake, not lit yet, too many to count. We have paper cups and paper plates and wooden spoons (everything real is packed in the trailer). The Screamer has made Gilda a boat out of newspaper and she wants to put it on the cake in the middle of the candles. She doesn’t understand what will happen if the flames touch the paper.
I am the one who is to bring the painting upstairs to give to Gilda. When my father gives me the sign, I will run down to the cellar and get it. I watch him for the sign. He is watching Gilda every second. His face is as white as Gilda’s dress. Gilda leans against the table and says to everyone Thank you for this party. Because she leans so limply against the table, it’s as if she has no spine in her body, or no body in her dress. I decide she looks like a ghost in her white dress, it’s brilliantly white, it glows so that the edges of her entire form seem blurred.
I don’t know what I’m doing, really. There are bottles of Coca-Cola on the table and I stick my finger into an open bottle and can’t pull it out. My mother gave Beloved to a farmer but there are no farms around here. Could Beloved be running free in the hills right now, barking at squirrels and quivering in the joy of freedom? Could he be loping along beside a milkmaid who is holding a pail and leading a cow through the meadow?
My father gives me the sign, which is a nod and a wink. He says, “Gilda, we have a present for you for your birthday,” and she says, “Oh really?” but her voice is muted. “Issa will bring up your surprise from downstairs,” he says. He laughs and adds, “It’s an elephant.” I don’t know why he says that false thing: It’s an elephant. I have to correct him, “It’s a cow,” I say.
My mother’s face comes into my view now, her mouth drops open when I say it’s a cow, her neck seems to swell so that the choker tightens and veins stand out on her forehead.
“It better not be the cow,” she says. She is looking directly at my father, who has an odd crooked smile on his face. “It isn’t the cow, is it?” she demands of him.
“It’s the cow,” he says.
“I forbid you to give that to her,” my mother says. “I told you how I feel about that.”
“The cow is for Gilda. She needs that cow. It belongs to her. I thought you’d see the sense of that.”
“I’d sooner burn it than let her have it,” my mother says, and with a sweep of her gold-braceleted arm, with the ruby glow of the lions’ eyes making an arc across the table, she grabs the book of matches with which we are to light Gilda’s birthday candles and she clatters in her high heels to the cellar steps. “I mean it,” she calls back to us, “I’d sooner see it go up in flames.”
We hear her making her way down the hollow, backless cellar steps. No one moves. Iggy’s pink sweater glows brightly, Izzy says something about the buttercream icing beginning to melt, and Gilda and my father’s eyes are locked together. Their gaze is like a steel band binding them together.
We wait. There is no sound from below, not even a shuffle or a bump.
“Should I cut the cake then?” Izzy offers. “And forget the candles?”
“We can light them with matches I have in my pocket,” my father says. He fumbles first in one pocket of his jacket and then in the other. He hunts in the side pocket of his trousers. He finally discovers the matches in the last-chance pocket and holds them up like a prize for all of us to see. Then he tears a single match out of the book, strikes it on the cover and leans forward over the table to light Gilda’s birthday candles.
Just as he lights the first one, a thunderous roar blasts up from below and the floor blows out from under us. The table with the cake on it falls through the hole into the cellar where there is a sea of fire burning and we hear my mother’s screams.
Flames leap up and ignite my eyelashes; my father rushes to the cellar stairs but bellows, “They’re gone! The stairs are gone!” Gilda begins to slide into the hole as more of the floor gives way, but Izzy takes hold of her by the waist and pulls her out the side door. Iggy grabs The Screamer and me from behind, and kicks us toward the front door using her knees to knock us along because we can’t move by ourselves. The Screamer screams the whole time. How amazingly she screams, as if she has prepared for this from the day she was born.
While we stand outside, the fire bursts out of my nine windows at the same moment, in unison, like the flaming legs of Rockettes. My father comes hurtling out the front door, his clothes on fire. He burns in all directions until a man, leaping out of a car, knocks him to the ground and rolls him over and over like a rolling pin.
Neighbors are shouting, cars are stopping, and soon there are sirens. I don’t blink. The heat is boiling my eyeballs. I watch my house burn down till someone pulls me back, wraps me in a blanket. I throw it off; it’s
summer, no one needs a blanket in June. I won’t turn my head away from the light. I hold my elbow back, like knives; I will stab anyone who tries to deflect my attention from the spectacle. I have never seen anything like this in my life. In each burning window I see my mother, leaping, dancing, calling out to me. She disappears from one and appears in another. Her arms reach to hold me. She calls my name, “Issa, Issa”—or is it the sound of the water shooting from the hoses of the firemen? She dances away, deep into the house, upstairs, downstairs, she has it all to herself at last, she flies from room to room, she gazes at me from every window, flinging up the shades, letting in the night.
Sparks are shooting upward, great fountains of fire. The rising embers mix themselves with stars; they quiver and twinkle, flash and blink out. Walls of water are drowning the fire. Soon all the firelight begins to dim inside the skeleton of my house. I watch: from red to orange to a dusky glow…and then darkness reaches in. One by one the windows go dark.
I still watch the windows for a sign. No one is there for me. I watch and I watch. A long time later, when my house has burned to the ground, the firemen go in and find my mother. They carry her out and lay her body on the grass. Iggy lets go of my hand (has she been there all the time?) and walks to retrieve something that has fallen from my mother’s burned arm. I see it as Iggy carries it back to me; my mother’s charred bracelet. The lions’ faces have melted into molten black lumps.
Just then one of the firemen notices my finger is swollen stuck in the Coca-Cola bottle. He goes to one of the six huge red fire engines churning in the street and gets a glass cutting saw which he uses to free me. Then he presses his sooty face against mine and kisses my cheek.
“You poor baby,” he says. “You poor, lost baby.”
I sleep in Izzy’s bed that night. My sister sleeps with me while Izzy sleeps with his mother. Gilda and my father are somewhere, in the hospital, I think, although my father can walk, I saw him stand up, he isn’t dead. He isn’t even burned badly. But he couldn’t talk to me. He could only look at the house, too, as if he couldn’t believe it was gone. No one can believe a change like this. It happens too fast and there’s nothing to hold on to, to get used to. One minute you have your life, the way it’s always been, the way you’re sure it always will be, and the next minute there’s nothing there, you’re leaning on the railing of a bridge and it gives way, and you fall straight down with nothing to hold onto, with no one to catch you.
They think my mother may have set the painting on fire while standing too close to the oil tank or the furnace—but she can’t tell us, can she? Or maybe the newspapers or the rags down there might have—all by themselves—set an oil leak on fire, or the can of glue might have spilled and the fumes ignited, or the oil vapors took a spark. But how will we ever know? Maybe my mother just went down there at the wrong moment. Maybe she never even got to the painting. But now only Gilda and my father are left; the way I always wanted it to be. I think my mother’s white hair had to have burned like a ball of lightning.
I want! I want! What I want is my mother.
CHAPTER 38
Oh, how I miss her. My days are like a cut-out book, with two white spaces on every page: my mother and Beloved, cut out and missing, only their ghostly outlines remaining to decorate the scene.
I live at Iggy’s and play with cut-outs all day. Or with a jigsaw puzzle. Or with my sister’s new doll house, moving the wrong furniture into the wrong rooms, putting the toilet and bathtub into the living room, putting the baby crib into the kitchen, putting the stove into the bedroom. Everything in the dollhouse is very small and my fingers are like giant-fingers. I knock furniture over, I jangle tiny vases to the floor, I overturn a grandfather’s clock, a fireplace.
Izzy wants to play old Maid with me, or stoop ball, or even hopscotch; he tries to get me interested in anything, but I don’t want to play with him.
“Leave her alone,” Iggy says. “She’ll get better soon.”
My father has burns on his arms and the back of his neck, but they’re healing. He sleeps on Iggy’s couch and goes to work as soon as he can.
I heard all about the funeral for my mother, but I didn’t go. I refused to go. I know about funerals and what they do there, what they did to my grandmother. I know about dirt and holes in the ground and old men who jabber prayers. I don’t need to know any more about that.
What do I need? I need the person who knows about my life from the instant it started, even before I was born. I need the person who knows how to make me rhyme, how to make me use the dimples in my knees (I have them! I have them, too!), how to make me know how important I am, and how proud she will be when I get famous.
I never knew I wouldn’t want to try if she weren’t here with me. How could I have known I would feel this way? Why didn’t she warn me?
We have a new apartment on Ocean Parkway now, overlooking the bicycle path and the bridle path. My father and Gilda sleep in separate bedrooms but soon they are going to marry and buy another house in Brooklyn. Gilda will be my legal stepmother. Now that I am almost truly hers we don’t talk to each other very much. But that is because I am too busy. I am starting high school, soon I will be in college, and then married to someone, not likely Izzy, but I’m really all done with my childhood and mothers and fathers and aunts and grandmothers. They were important when I lived at 405 Avenue O in the Kingdom of Brooklyn when we were all subjects who kept watch over the house and the three playgrounds and Prospect Park and Coney Island, but those places can take care of themselves now
From the window of my bedroom I can see the mirrored ball on the pedestal in Dr. Ruby Tempkin’s front yard. The doctor and his wife don’t live in that house anymore, they moved to Florida after Esther died, but they left the ball in the yard. The mirror has gone gray and flat looking, even on sunny days; it reminds me of the mercury that rolls out of a broken thermometer.
I sometimes think my mother is with Beloved and my grandmother, because why wouldn’t they seek one another out in the land of the dead? Still, they might do better on little islands of their own, one with a piano, one with a doghouse, and one with a bubbling pot of chicken soup.
My sister doesn’t scream at all lately; we share a big bed in our bedroom that overlooks Ocean Parkway. Sometimes she sobs very softly at night and I hug her. She isn’t grown up enough to think about all the things that have happened.
I tell her someday we will forget the day of the fire, I am almost certain of it. All we need is time, like a fat pillow, to fill up the space between then and later on. I explain that I can hardly remember my grandmother’s face, even the way she looked at me when they put her in the ambulance, which is proof we’ll get better eventually—that’s the way it works when you’re alive. I promise my sister that I will always take care of her and that we will both live in wonderful houses someday.
Every night I read to her a few pages of Katrinka, The Story of a Russian Child. When Katrinka found her parents gone, she set out on a journey with her little brother. I tell my sister that when a house falls down, one way or another, and it can’t take care of you, you might as well take a deep breath, pack a few provisions, and set out for the next one.
MERRILL JOAN GERBER is a prize-winning novelist and short story writer.
Among her novels are THE KINGDOM OF BROOKLYN, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine for “the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme,” ANNA IN THE AFTERLIFE, chosen by the Los Angeles Times as a “Best Novel of 2002” and KING OF THE WORLD, which won the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award. She has written five volumes of short stories. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, The Sewanee Review, The Virginia Review, Commentary, Salmagundi, The American Scholar, The Southwest Review and elsewhere.
Her story, “I Don’t Believe This,” won an O. Henry Prize. “This is a Voice From Your Past” was included in The Best American Mystery Stories.
Her non-fiction books inclu
de a travel memoir, BOTTICELLI BLUE SKIES: An American in Florence, a book of personal essays, GUT FEELINGS: A Writer's Truths and Minute Inventions and OLD MOTHER, LITTLE CAT: a Writer's Reflections on her Kitten, her Aged Mother…and Life.
Gerber earned her BA in English from the University of Florida, her MA in English from Brandeis University and was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship to Stanford University. She presently teaches fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.
She can be reached by e-mail at: [email protected]
See her web page at www.its.caltech.edu/~mjgerber
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