The Kingdom of Brooklyn (2 page)

Sometimes I am forced to go to bed, but sometimes I am awake when he comes in, in a blast of cold, a cloud of smoke coming out of his mouth. He is alive! The women dance around him, taking his coat, his scarf, his hat. They don't even ask if someone hit him over the head and took his money. They just surround him, and then Gilda makes him hot chocolate, and my mother brings him his pipe, and my grandmother smiles with her big white teeth while she lays his scarf on the radiator. Even though it's late at night, very late, and the whole world is sleeping, my mother—just before we all go upstairs to bed—sometimes plays a few chords on the piano, not sitting down, but with her head bowed over the keys, chords that are deep and thrilling, but are also wonderful and calming. They reverberate through the house, they make the curtains shiver. When she raises her head, we all smile at each other. For this night we are safely here, all of us together.

The piano is the one place my mother can get calm. The piano sits, unafraid of her, square in the living room downstairs. Its legs are also like tree trunks, but these she admires, down on her knees, dusting and polishing them, standing to caress the shiny black lid above them. When my mother plays, I know she is not thinking about anything but music. She has forgotten me by the time her pretty legs move about under the bench. One is tucked back, and one taps here and there on the pedals, those little rounded gold feet I like to rub with my finger. They are cold and smooth to my touch. She doesn't mind if I lie under the piano while she plays. She doesn't care about me at all, or about anything, then.

I love her music because—when she plays it—I am safe from her fury and she is happy.

There comes a day I simply cannot swallow little squares of liver. They have things in them, secret pockmarks, rubber knots that will not be chewed or swallowed. My mother has broiled them on a wire grate. Flames have shot into the air, nearly catching her hair on fire. (Her hair has gone white. Worry has turned her hair white. I have turned her hair white.) On the plate are lima beans, grainy as mashed chalk. And spinach, which has iron in it, that Popeye eats for strength, but it's sandy in my mouth. I cannot ever eat enough to please my mother.

“Eat it,” she says. “Chew and swallow it or I'll kill you.” It's very simple. Either I will die from not eating, or I will die while eating, or—if I don't eat—she will see to it that I die by her own hand. My stomach ache comes back, my old friend that now lives with me. I know this pain. It swirls and swishes like the washing machine in the cellar. I double over with it—it's wonderful, it will get me to the bathroom where I can spit out the liver.

“No you don't,” my mother says. She has left the burner on and blue flames form a star on the top of the stove. “You will not get away with that. Do you know what the butcher charges for liver? Your father works his heart out to pay the butcher.”

I gag. I didn't plan it, but I gag.

“All right,” she says. “I'm calling the Peter Pan Nursery.” We both know what happens there. Even though she knows I know, she tells me again. “When they take bad girls like you away to live there, they give you black stockings to wear. If you don't eat, they make you sit at the table till you do. And if you throw up, they make you eat the vomit from the floor.”

This is the moment when my mother goes to the phone. Black and cold, it sits in the living room. When she picks it up, I become a giant ear. I freeze as she begins to dial. I count. She is proud that I can count and have not yet begun kindergarten. I count: one, two, three, four, five, six! Only six! I am saved! Six is not a phone number. Only seven dials of her forefinger is a phone number. Only seven dials will bring the black van from the Peter Pan Nursery. Only seven swings around the circle of the dial will bring my tongue to floor to lap up liver vomit.

She is warning me, that's all.

I rush to my seat at the table. Gratefully, I shove little cubes of cold liver into my mouth. I set my teeth to grinding. Gag all you want, I tell the snake moving up and down in my throat. I will get this down. I love her! She isn't going to send me there tonight. Tonight I get to slide between my freezing sheets and live till morning.

In the morning we do rhymes sitting on her bed. I want to help Gilda with the ladies, but my mother insists that rhymes are very important, more important than
hair
.

“Star!”

“Far!”

“Cat!”

“Hat!”

“Another!”

“Mother!”

“No—another word that rhymes with hat.”

“Bat! Fat! Rat!”

She kisses me. I glow, there is a hot spot at the point her kiss meets my cheek.

“Tomato!” she cries out.

“Potato!”

Now she hugs me. Hugs and kisses. For this!

“Candy!”

“Sandy!”

“Jacket!”

“Racket!”

We both laugh in triumph.

“Olive.”

“Bolive.”

“Don't be silly,” she says. “We can't afford to be silly about this.”

“Why can't we?”

“Because if you do this right, you are going to be a very important person.”

“Really?” I have her attention now.

“You are already brilliant,” she says. “Just wait and see, Issa. You are going to be someone
important
.”

How to behave when I go to school is what we talk about. I am not going to school for a long, long time. I am still too small, but my mother wants me to be prepared. I didn't know there could be so many situations to cause trouble, but my mother paints them for me in varieties of difficulty so convoluted that my stomach reaches a new level of agitation. If children make fun of me (why would they?) I must remember that I'm important and they are nothing. If a bad boy hits me (why would he?) I must tell the teacher at once. And above all, I must always listen to what the teacher says. Teachers know important things, they aren't like Gilda, who only cuts hair and chatters all day with big-mouth women. (None of Gilda's customers have bigger mouths than anyone else. I check to see.) But after these sessions with my mother, waves, bigger than those I have seen at Coney Island, wrench the flat surface of my belly, and now I can see, as well as feel, the grinding avalanches of pain.

“Butterflies,” Gilda says to me, as—more than ever—I have to hog the toilet, keeping her from bringing her ladies inside for their shampoos. “Everyone gets butterflies when they worry. But your mother is getting you into a state for nothing and she shouldn't be doing this.”

An alarm goes off in my head. This is what I have been warned that Gilda should never do: talk against my mother.

While I clutch my stomach, Gilda tells her lady to wait in the beauty parlor for a few minutes and read a magazine. Then she gets a wire pull from the milk bottle cap and begins forming it into a flower for me. She sits on the tile floor of the bathroom while I hunch over her on the toilet and feel the wild animals (not butterflies) roaring in my stomach. Gilda is so patient with me, I want to stroke her pitted face.

“There. One petal, two petals, three petals.” Gilda leans on the round curve of her hip with her legs out to the side. Everything about her is dainty. Her auburn hair, twisted like a challah, shines in the light. She forms a flower for me out of the silver wire.

“I have to get in there,” my mother says at the door.

“Issa is in here. Her stomach again.”

“Do
you
have to be in there, too? Do the two of you have to have a party in there? Let me get in there to throw up.”

My mother comes in and Gilda goes out fast. My mother heaves and gags over the sink, violently pushing away the shampoo tray on a stand that the ladies fit their necks into. She doesn't really vomit. I watch though I don't want to see it come out, but nothing does. She tries and tries. What makes her want to vomit? She isn't even trying to chew and swallow liver. My mother eats only chocolate malteds and sliced tomatoes.

“Look at this!” she screams to me. I slide off the toilet seat and pull up my pants. I look in the sink where little black hairs from the ladies' shampoos lie curled like worms along the edges of the porcelain.

“I can't take it! I'm through putting up with this!” my mother cries. “I can't take it another minute. I wish to God your father were home. I'd like him to have to stick
his
face in this sink.”

What my mother can't take is not having privacy. She talks about privacy as if it were an object, like a glass statue of an angel, something my father once bought on a call, something hard to find, hard to get, valuable and rare, but to which she is entitled. She enumerates to me the damages done to her daily: how my grandmother comes into the bedroom
while she and my father are still in bed
to gather laundry for the wash. The endless appearance of Gilda's customers up and down the front walk, their chatter in the bedroom Gilda uses for a beauty shop, their hairs, their
disgusting
hairs, in the sink in the bathroom. There is more—how for years
she
has been taking care of Gilda and Grandma and enough is enough. Let Gilda get a job out in the world. Let her get married. Let someone else put a roof over her head. Let her take my grandmother with her and
disappear
.

Later that night she tells all this again to my father. He holds me on his lap on the green chair while she rages around the bedroom. I'm fine when he is holding me, balancing the center of my behind on his thigh. His thick arms around my waist will keep her from hitting me even if she wants to. He doesn't like her to hit me, ever. She doesn't really hurt me when she hits; it's just that the sound of her screams gets deafening when she swings her hand at me and I think the roof will come down and the walls fall in.

When my father tries to defend Gilda, take her side, remind my mother that Gilda isn't beautiful like my mother is, that she doesn't do well out in the world, my mother screams: “So you want her here forever? Then divorce me and marry her!”

This idea gives me a horrific, wonderful thrill. Gilda—now my mother—making wire flowers for me. My father—now Gilda's husband—warming my bed with a hot frying pan. It will be quiet and peaceful with just the three of us. Maybe even my grandmother can stay. I will never have to count the turns of the dial to the Peter Pan Nursery.

The next time I can't swallow, when the three-minute egg, with all its slime and mucous, won't go down my throat, my mother lifts me straight out of my chair. The gate in my throat has simply locked shut, there is nothing I can do to get the white slime to move from my tongue down my throat. It has slipped back out into the spoon.

“I have no choice,” she tells me. “You have forced me to this.” She runs upstairs and I follow in terror. I beg God (he is the same man as “The Lord” in the prayer I have to say at night) behind my closed eyes for a lady to be in the bathroom having a shampoo. But no one is there. Only Bingo is in the hall, his ears laid back, his dark fur moving as he breathes heavily.

She has already taken from the medicine cabinet the bottle of iodine—the torture of my life, the dreaded liquid fire she applies to my cuts to kill the germs, the red-black poison she spreads with its glass tube over my bleeding flesh. The pain from it is much worse than the scrape of the roughest cement on my knees. Glass tubes are terrible instruments; mothers take your temperature with them, mothers run them along open wounds. (If the glass breaks, it can kill you.)

The iodine label has a skull on it to remind me—and anyone else: “Never swallow this.” (Did she think, after what it did to my knees, that I would ever take it into my mouth?)

But now she plans to swallow it herself because the egg was too soft, because I have driven her to it.

“Please, don't!” I tug on her skirt. I wrap my arms around her hips. “Mommy! Please don't!”

Gilda comes running down the hall, her silver scissors held aloft. “What's happening here? Why is Issa crying?”

“Mind your own business! Issa is mine.”

“I couldn't swallow my egg,” I try to explain.

“Ruth, you're out of your mind!” Gilda cries. “You're going to destroy this child.”

“She's none of your business,” my mother screams. Then she flings the iodine bottle into the bathtub, where it shatters. The red poison drips down the porcelain side and forms a row of zig-zag teeth.

“You belong in an insane asylum like Mrs. Disic next door. They need to come and take you away in a strait jacket. “

My mother glows blue like the liver flaring in its grate on the stove.

“Keep your claws off my child and off my husband,” she warns Gilda. Her eyes have something wild in them. I don't even recognize her.

“He won't be your husband much longer if you keep this up,” Gilda hisses. “No man can take this forever.” Gilda's face is white. “You're crazy, Ruth. Look what you're doing to this precious child.”

I am sobbing and pulling toilet paper off the roll in long strands, shredding it and pushing it into my eyes.

“Go down to the kitchen and help Grandma make mandelbrot,” Gilda whispers to me. “Or go play with your doll.”

I wipe my eyes on her apron. I run out of the bathroom to my room and jerk Margaret/Peggy from her cradle. She has a painted-on, blank stupid face. Stupid! They're all so stupid. They all ought to take iodine and leave me alone.

I am Jewish. Being Jewish means I am entitled to wear a blue star around my neck instead of a gold cross. The person who teaches me this is Mrs. Esposito, who lives on a farm on the corner—with chickens in a cage and two goats in the backyard. She grows grapes and tomatoes and big cabbages. Two men live with her, Tommy and Joe; one is her brother and one is her husband, but I can't tell them apart. Gilda takes me there to collect money for the Red Cross and Mrs. Esposito invites us in, gives us sour balls to suck, and puts strangely shaped tomatoes in a bag for me to take home.