The Kingdom of Brooklyn (3 page)

One day she gives me a teeny blue six-pointed star, rimmed in gold. She fastens it around my neck, bending so close I can smell her hair. I feel something important has happened to me, although I don't know why. Kneeling in front of me, she holds out the chain of her gold cross and I hold out my blue star. We let them touch. Then we smile and she kisses me. I am proud to be Jewish, it seems to be a good thing. Gilda is proud of me, too. She hugs me. Anything that happens away from the house is good. Anything that happens in the house gives me terrible stomach pains.

A war is going on across the sea, men are killing one another although their bullets can't get to me.

“They are fighting across the ocean and the ocean is this big,” my father says, “as big as the world.” He is stretched out on the floor of the living room and I am sitting on his chest with my shoes tucked under each of his armpits and my palms pressing over his beating heart. My mother is playing the piano, something she laughs at called boogie-woogie. Her bottom, which is heart-shaped, jiggles on the piano bench as she rocks from side to side, playing. When she thumps on the low keys, my father bumps me up on his chest and I ride along, laughing. My grandmother passes through the room and stops because we are all laughing. She laughs, too—her teeth are big and white and even. I've seen them both in and out of her mouth. She's very nice, but not too interesting.

Gilda comes downstairs and my mother starts to play “White Christmas.” Gilda leans into the curve of the piano and sings along—she has a voice like the thinnest end of an icicle, very sharp and cold and high. It drips with music, but it could crack, break. My father admires her voice. His eyes are bright, watching her. The war, luckily, has made us all sing and laugh. We have had to draw the black curtains closed and pin them together so the airplanes can't bomb our house. Even though we are safe, I don't feel safe. The bombs could hit; the planes could come across the sea (they fly fast), they could see the light through the curtains, the bombs could hit right in the center of the piano. Bingo seems to understand this because the louder the music gets, the flatter his ears get, till finally he runs off to the kitchen with his tail bent under. His tail and his ears are flat. I know never to pet him when he's that way.

When it's time to go to bed, my father gets the frying pan hot for me. It looks like cooking, but it isn't. The pan is empty of food, which looks wrong but makes me very happy. He carries me upstairs sitting on his shoulders, his neck between my legs. His one hand holds my ankle and one the frying pan.

He knows I hate my cold pajamas, so he says, “Let's not tell anyone you're going to sleep in your clothes. We'll just cover you way up to your nose! No one will ever know. And in the morning you'll be dressed already!”

He zips the hot pan over my sheets, he zips me under the blanket, he rubs noses with me.

The next thing is the prayer my mother taught me because she likes the rhymes in it:
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep
…but there is something wrong with this, according to my father.

“We don't have a Lord, not that one,” he says. “Don't say that anymore,” he tells me. “Even if she wants you to.”

It's hard to remember what I shouldn't say in front of certain people because other people don't want me to. It's like not letting Gilda talk about my mother. I have to watch my lips, my ears. Soon I will have to not see what I see.

I don't want to stop feeling good. My father kisses me goodnight and goes downstairs. The instant he leaves my room, the face appears at the window. It's always there, I'm used to it, it's the little man who hangs onto the window sill with his fingertips and stares in at me. He doesn't try to come in, but he watches me and makes my heart flip. If I am brave enough, I can turn my back on him, but sometimes I have to scream out, into the hall, down the stairs, scream for a drink of water.

Sometimes my mother comes up, or my father. Sometimes my grandmother, but she's very slow. Best, of course, is Gilda, who knows it isn't water I want, but herself, in my bed, next to me, till I go to sleep. In the morning, the man at the window is always gone.

Although my father does not wear a six-pointed star, he is also Jewish. One night he stands in the corner of his bedroom facing the wall, wearing a white shawl around his shoulders, a small round black hat on his head, and he bends forward and back, forward and back, mumbling over a book he holds in both hands. I have come in to get a puzzle I left on the bed earlier in the day, when my mother and I were both lying there like twins with washcloths on our foreheads.

His rounded shoulders alarm me, since he looks weak, not strong as he always is. I am glad my mother doesn't see him in this posture, because it would make her more powerful to know he could be reduced in this way to a small man.

What is he doing? It is not a song he is singing, but it rises and falls like music. It is not a lesson he is learning because, though he holds the book, his eyes are closed. I know he would not want to be disturbed; this is very serious, very private. I back out the door, and ask no one, not even Gilda, what he is doing.

The shul is another place to be Jewish. In the fall of the year, Gilda closes the doors of her beauty shop and she and my father walk to the Avenue N shul. He wears the same white shawl and carries the black book; Gilda is dressed in a dark blue dress, a blue coat and a black hat. We pass by all the familiar houses on 4th Street—some of Gilda's customers live here; also some old ladies my grandmother knows, who come and sit with her on the bench in front of our house.

My mother cannot be with us on this walk to shul; she has been arguing with my father, and her headache is so bad she is nearly blind. The argument made my grandmother run to the couch, clutching her chest. Now the two sick women are resting, one with her little bottle of pills, one with her washcloth.

I crunch my shoes in the dry maple leaves blown in piles against the garden hedges and watch Gilda's heels click in tune to the rhythm of my father's big walking feet. How nice to smell the leaves and be out of the house. How lucky I feel for no special reason.

Because he is Jewish, my father has to pray all day today. He can't eat. He can't shave. He can't laugh. He goes downstairs in the shul, and Gilda takes me upstairs, where the women are. When I get tired, she lets me walk around outside. I can look into a basement window and see the men below, all of them round-shouldered, hunched forward and rocking in their white shawls the way my father rocked in the corner. They are all humming, but not exactly a song. They are singing words, but not the same words. They all look a little weak, not strong the way men are. They all look like my father, but not the father I am used to.

Gilda's black hat has a veil that covers her face. She looks quite beautiful, with the little black squares covering her eyes and her nose. When she breathes, the veil quivers. Outside we meet some of her ladies, but they don't chatter and tell stories the way they do in the beauty parlor, they look very serious, almost on the verge of tears. Not one of them looks as if she has ever had her hair fried or her nails painted; in fact, they all wear dark gloves, like Gilda. Something is going on and it's very important. I am honored to be part of it.

Gilda takes me home and I take a nap with my mother. Much later, my father comes home. He speaks to me and his breath smells bad. His face is gray with growing beard. I hope he will not rub his cheek against mine and scratch me. My grandmother is busy in the kitchen. She prepares food very calmly, not like my mother. She moves slowly, she won't care if I eat it or not, she isn't going to kill me if I don't swallow something. Something is flat about her—as if, if I pushed my finger against her pale skin, it would stay pushed in. Her skin is like flour dough. She is my white, soft, old grandmother.

I like the cold food she is preparing, nothing meaty, nothing greasy, nothing slimy about what she is putting on the table. Smoked white fish, and bagels and lox and cream cheese—nothing that will get stuck in my throat. I love challah, fluffy bread that tears apart and tastes sweet and wonderful. I especially love food that no one watches me eat.

For once, on this special night, no one is watching me chew and swallow. My mother eats sullenly—not what's on the table, but her own meal: tomatoes and a chocolate malted. Gilda and my father are in very good spirits. “To the new year,” my father says and lifts his glass. “To the new year and health and happiness,” Gilda says, and lifts hers. She offers me a sip of her wine, sweet grape wine. It burns my throat but goes down easily. I like it! I ask for more. My father gives me a sip of his. My mother flies up from her chair and goes into the living room to play the piano.

Boogie-woogie comes out.

“Please, not that music, not now, Ruthie,” my father calls to her.

She plays louder.

Gilda and my father look at each other.

“You should take her on a vacation,” my grandmother says. “She's no good this way.”

Because we leave Brooklyn and ride the train for days and nights, we are going to get that thing my mother needs so badly—privacy—and we will get it in Miami Beach. We will get coconuts and hot air. We will get soldiers in our hotel. The war is closer here, because we are right on the edge of the ocean; no one tells me, but I know, that just on the other side of the water is where the fighting and bombing go on.

For once there are just the three of us: Mommy, Daddy and Issa. We live in one room with three flowered couch-beds. Why does Mommy still have to throw up? There are no customers, no hairs in the sink, no hair frying, no liver cooking. Why is Issa still getting stomach aches? There is no more talk of kindergarten—that is still nearly a whole year away. Why has Daddy left his white shawl at home? Why are we in this hot place where I never get cold and there is no furnace?

Gilda isn't here, Bingo isn't here, Grandma isn't here. That means there's nowhere to run if Mommy gets wild. The good facts are that there's no iodine here, no telephone (except the one in the lobby), and no Peter Pan Nursery.

This is not a vacation. This is serious business. We may be able to stay here forever. Another person is coming, too. My brother or my sister. All this is revealed to me on the day I am given a matching spoon and fork set in a little box. The utensils have pearly handles; one has a shiny bowl, one has shiny, sharp prongs.

Out on the street we can hear the soldiers marching,
Hup
, two, three, four,
hup
, two, three, four. I count one when they say
hup
, but it's close to what I know. Their legs open and close like scissors, they have guns over their shoulders, but they are not going to shoot them here, only across the sea.

My father goes out every day to find a business. Grandma and Gilda don't know about this, it is a big secret. My mother puts her finger across her red lips and smiles. A
secret
. If Daddy finds the business, we can stay here forever where it's warm. We will never have to hear the radiator pipes bang again. She and I stay on the flowered beds all day, my mother resting or eating sliced cold tomatoes, and I playing with Margaret/Peggy, or cutting heads of ladies out of the newspaper (when I cut out ladies' heads, I pretend I am Gilda, and also cut their hair. I cut some of them bald so they have no hair at all).

When my mother and I walk on the beach, we discover it is covered with soldiers. They spread out like a brown rug all over the sand. They stand in line or lean against palm trees or sit in circles till the mess hall opens and they can go in to eat. (I ask myself why they call food “mess.” I have many ideas that seem like good answers.) My mother's cheeks get red when the soldiers stop and talk to me. Her hair is long at the sides and her bangs are frizzed at the front. Just before we left Brooklyn, Gilda convinced her to sit down in the beauty parlor chair and “get some curls around that puss of yours.”

My mother agreed, which surprised me. But she said, “Just as long as you don't take my eyes out or stab me in the back with your scissors.” Gilda dipped the sausages in hot water herself, she did her magic quietly, and my mother didn't chat like one of the regular ladies. After she finished my mother's bangs, my mother said, “That's enough. I don't need curls all over, I don't want you making me into some kind of movie star.”

“You're no movie star,” Gilda said, “believe me.”

What happens on the beach is that the soldiers don't talk to my mother at first, they always talk to me. Then, after they learn my name, they begin to talk with her. They forget me and they make her smile, even laugh. She blushes when she laughs. She casts her eyes down to the sand. Her shorts flare out over her hips like a tiny skirt. She has dimples in her knees.

Day after day I play in the sand at the edge of the water till only the bottoms of my feet are white while the rest of me has turned brown. I have a new pinafore in the shape of a blue-and-white butterfly. My mother takes dozens of pictures of me because I am so beautiful. She hasn't had one headache in Miami Beach; I am afraid to tell her this, in case it will remind them to come back.

Where my father finds a business, or how, I never know. But we go there the next day and we see him in a store, which is now his. He sells—not bread, not cough drops, not fish—but the voices of soldiers. In his store they can write letters without a pen, or sing a song to send directly home to their mothers or wives.

There's not much in this store, it's tiny, all there is is a little booth with a curtain around it (like at the doctor's office) and a machine that turns a record around and spins out black thread. He lets me stand next to the recording machine, lets me collect the springy strands of warm black plastic. He sings to show me how it works:
“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me haaaaapy, when skies are gray, you'll never know dear, how much I love you, please don't take my sunshine away.”
Then he plays the record for me on the record player and there it is, my father's wavery familiar, golden voice, telling me how much he loves me.