The Kingdom of Brooklyn (19 page)

But I don't know what's in Ruthie's bobbing head, or in Myra's or Myrna's or Linda's, I don't know what thoughts are riding along with them on the bicycle path, what images flash on the inside of their eyes as the horses and cars and other cyclers flash by on the outside. I wish I knew, but I don't. Will I ever know anyone's but my own?

We each have two dollars for spending money and we stop at Schector's Luncheonette for lunch. We line up our matching Schwinns and align the kickstands so it looks like our bikes are dancing in step.

“Let's leave our horses here to drink,” Linda says, and we all laugh as though no one ever said a funnier joke. We shuffle in the door together, a little happy army: we are friends out for adventure, we are young girls—eleven years old—we tolerate school but we try not to think of it when we are not there. School is where we mark time till we all have boyfriends, which will be soon, soon. We promise each other—we will soon have boyfriends, every one of us.

“A ham and cheese sandwich,” Myrna tells the man behind the counter.

“Make it two,” says Linda.

“Three,” says Myra.

“Four,” says Ruthie. They look at me. I have never had a ham sandwich in my life. I have never even
seen
ham. My mother cooks bacon, but that's the closest we have come to eating filthy pig.

“Do you have tuna sandwiches?”

“All out of tuna.”

“Okay, then. Ham and cheese.” I tried, and I have witnesses, that I made an attempt to save my soul. As the man turns his back on us and does something hidden on the cutting board, making magic motions with his elbows, his shoulders, seizing tools from a rack (an enormous cleaver, a saw-toothed knife, gobbets of white cream that he smears on bread), I remember the words of the bearded rabbi of last year's Religious Instruction class: “Eat pork and you will go blind. Touch your eyes in the morning without washing your hands and you will die young.”

I only went to instruction for two weeks, and only because the school let us out early on Wednesday afternoons if we signed up for the program. When I told my mother the essence of his lesson, she called the school and said I was not to be dismissed early on Wednesdays. “Let your father get on his knees for that hocus-pocus,” she said to me. “I won't have your mind poisoned.”

Now I sit on a soda-fountain stool waiting to poison my eternal soul. Ham sandwiches are served to us along with bags of potato chips and chocolate malteds. My friends dig in, every one of them a Jewish girl without a Jewish worry; without a pause in their chatter, they eat ham. They eat hungrily, automatically, their pink tongues licking crumbs from their pretty lips. Lightning does not flash. The ceiling does not crumble into their plates and spill their malteds into their laps.

I bite. I taste rubber. Pink, elastic, gummy rubber meat. Oh, meat will be the death of me! It rebounds against my teeth, refusing to be chewed, subdued, conquered.
God help me
, I think, this is the closest I come to prayer, and then the irrevocable happens. I grind the ham into submission with my little pointy teeth—and I swallow.

Jesus, The Forbidden Savior, Father, Lord, King of Kings, flows speedily into my bloodstream; I feel his essence bubbling up like seltzer. I am a new person. I am no longer a true member of my family. I am separated forever. I am free.

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!

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.