The Kingdom of Brooklyn (12 page)

“I hate Miss Fenley, don't you?” Linda asks. “I can't wait to see who we have for our teacher in first grade.”

“Me too,” I say.

“We should walk to school together,” Linda says. “You and I only live across the street from each other.”

“Will you be allowed to cross Ocean Parkway?”

“Of course! I'll be in first grade. Won't you be allowed?”

“Sure,” I say. I decide I will push my mother in front of a car if she doesn't let me walk to school without her.

“Your turn,” Linda says, giving me the dice. She has short brown straight hair and bangs that fall into her face. She's pretty. I try to see into her bedroom. I try to see her whole house from where I'm sitting. I wonder where she keeps her skates.

Mr. Levitz is reading an Archie comic book while Linda and I take our turns. He laughs out loud to himself. I know he drives a truck—he delivers furniture but he doesn't work every day.

“This is fun,” I say. But Gilda, I notice, has finished her business and is ready to leave. My heart turns over.

“You want to stay?” she asks me.

“Oh please!”

“Your mother will kill me,” she says.

“Well, if she does, I'll kill
her
,” I say; the words just fly out of my mouth. Mr. Levitz laughs. But no one seems to think I am bad. Gilda blows me a kiss and leaves without me; she says she will be back to get me in an hour.

So I get to stay and play with a friend. I could explode with amazement as I think about it,
Issa playing with a friend!
—and I do think about it, all the time I am playing Monopoly, buying houses and getting put in jail and collecting “Go” money. So much money—if only I had my own money I could buy skates.

When I have to go to the bathroom, Linda directs me to her bedroom next to the kitchen; the bathroom is through there. As I pass her dresser, I see six quarters sitting on a mirrored tray, gleaming like silver moons. I take a quarter. I just take it without hesitation and quickly bend to put it in my sock. When I go back to the living room, that wild bird, my heart, is flapping its wings inside me. The quarter is red-hot in my sock. Do they know? Can they know? Why did I do it? Maybe Linda will discover the quarter missing later and tell her mother. They will come to my house. They will shine flashlights in my eyes.

I am so bad. Why does it feel so exciting to be bad? The thudding inside me is spinning my breath out in long strands. Linda's mother is making potato pancakes, I can smell the onion and the oil, flowing in a delicious cloud from room to room. My heartbeat shakes me! I have discovered that if I pretend to bend down to pick something up, if I let my head hang low, the wild bird in my chest will eventually slow down, beat and pop, then stop flapping. I try it, shaken hard by this excitement; so much has happened in one day it is almost too much to bear.

When Gilda comes for me an hour later, I am better. My confidence in myself expands; I can survive this kind of shattering expedition away from home. The inside of my mind is glowing with new matters to think about. I walk home with Gilda, feeling the quarter in my sock like a chocolate cupcake, hidden and delicious.

Easy as pie, they now call for me. Four friends call for me, at my door, Linda and Myra and Myrna and Ruthie. I hardly believe it, looking out one of my nine windows and seeing the troupe of them coming up to the front door. The doorbell rings like a fanfare of trumpets. I can't believe that eight legs that can skate, eight eyes that have seen the sidewalk flying by beneath, are now walking to my house, looking for me.

My mother has to have all her teeth pulled. She never smiles, anyway, so I think it won't be so bad, but it is. She comes home from the dentist on my father's arm looking like a witch, her lips drawn in on a string of pain. Blood comes out of her mouth all night. When I come into her bedroom, she throws the sheet over her face, and talks from under it, in the dark, like a lamp without a bulb. Her words sound to me like, “Wis is to wis my yay-yay.”

“This is to fix my headaches,” is what my father translates. A certain doctor thinks that it's my mother's teeth that are causing all her headaches, causing all her nausea. The doctor should have asked me and I could have told him it isn't her teeth. It's me. It's Gilda. It's not being able to rhyme her rhymes to applause in a big parade on Avenue P, carrying a flag and wearing a crown. I can feel where my mother's unhappiness comes from: it's from my father's not being rich or fancy, it's from living in the same house with the beauty parlor and Gilda and my grandmother, it's from the endless war and the accident at the defense plant, it's from having to cook and get onion-stink on her fingers and tears in her eyes. It's from her being beautiful and having no one looking at her. The doctor ought to have asked me. I know.

She comes out from under the sheet, holding ice to her mouth in a washcloth.

“Wo wahwy wah-ing” she says, but I unpeel the words to find that she said, “Don't worry, darling.” For that
darling
I would give her all my teeth this minute. I would give her my life.

“Poor Mommy,” I say. Saying it gives me an amazing power, as if I am the mommy and she is the child. I never knew she could be a child; right now she is crumpled on the bed like a little child, she is weak like a little child. I never knew my mother could be this weak. I never knew I could be this strong.

This is another new idea to think about. Look how every day is a surprise.

Teeth take over. The Screamer gets her first one, so what is the commotion about? One tooth. I have a whole mouthful. My mother has none, my sister has one, they are the strangest things; with teeth, if you think about it, a person is like a wild animal, having those white, sharp, pointy prongs that clamp down into meat, that grind it and tear it. So what about smiles? The same prongs that are so sharp, that can hurt, that mince matter, are displayed to show friendliness.

“Smile more,” Gilda reminds me. “If you smiled more in school, you'd have more friends. You'd be elected class president.” How little she knows. I already lost two elections, each time nominated by Joe Martini, in first grade, for president and for vice president; each time I had to go out into the hall and stand there with the other nominees for three minutes by the clock while the class raised their hands for or against me, and then go back inside, head bowed, heart agog, to find out they didn't want me. Not me: someone else. The hands that didn't come up for me were like fists that punched my stomach as I came back into the room.

Gilda doesn't know everything—I was wrong to think she did. I used to think she thought I was perfect. Why then did she discuss my smiling with my mother? Why did my mother write a jingle for me and prop it up in front of my orange juice:

Why should I smile? How much I smile should be my own business. A smile isn't something you
do
; it comes because you feel a certain way, and it isn't often I feel that way. Besides, I have too much gum showing over my teeth. My teeth are too small. Whose fault is that? I am beginning to see and envy parts on others that are prettier than mine.

The Screamer clicks a spoon against her one ragged tooth and everyone laughs and laughs. One afternoon The Screamer sneezes and my grandmother says, “
Gesundheit
.” The Screamer laughs at this funny word. Then everyone says “
Gesundheit
” every time The Screamer sneezes. One day when she isn't even sneezing at all, someone says “
Gesundheit
” to her and she makes a sound like a sneeze, a little baby snort through her stuffy nose. How brilliant they think she is. How they carry on, day after day, saying “Gesundheit” and going wild when she makes the snuffly sneezing noise.

When I catch a cold and sneeze for a week, no one says
Gesundheit
to me. They, are all worn out from saying it to her.

Teeth aren't the only odd things. Look at ears, those cups glued onto the sides of our heads. And eyes, like marbles, that come in different colors and roll around, roll around. Luckily, in children especially, they are at the very top of the head. If they were lower, we couldn't see far at all. Children are too short to do almost anything important.

At first my mother goes around with her lips sucked in, to hide her toothless mouth. When she gets her new teeth, big, square, white, even teeth, with their pink plastic tops and bottoms, she gags putting them in, she gags taking them out. Even if she tries to do it quietly, we know when she is putting them in and taking them out.

Though I am just now getting my second set of teeth, my grownup teeth, I have to worry about losing them someday and getting plastic teeth. I also have an unstable heart to think about, like my grandmother's. I have all these body parts, all over me, and all of them breakable, dangerous.

Suddenly cavities spring up in all my teeth as if my bubblegum had infiltrated every crack and sprouted seeds of rot. Dr. Ellen's office is opposite the playground, and I sit at the waiting room window, not reading Jack and Jill, but watching free children roller skating on the blacktop; they are doubly lucky, to have roller skates and not have cavities. My stomach churns at the threats from within: the low burr of the drill, the smell of antiseptic, the cries of a child.

They have to hold me down, my mother and father both. They have tricked me, lied to me, bribed me, dragged me into the chair. I have made them promise not to let Dr. Ellen pull my loose tooth. My mother promises. My father promises. Dr. Ellen promises. He says, in a kindly way, “I just want to wiggle it slightly.” Then he thrusts his hairy fist into my small mouth and pulls the tooth out of its socket with a violent wrench that I feel in the core of my brain. Blood pours out of my mouth.

I scream so loud the mirrors crack. I don't want to have teeth to rot, and a heart to flop inside my ribs, don't want to vomit, have babies, make poopies, pee, gag, break my bones, have sore throats. Die! Next to my cry:
I want! I want!
is my other cry:
I don't want! I don't want!

It doesn't matter. I get what there is, and so does everyone else.

There is a party in the street when the war ends. Dancing on the sidewalk, balloons, whistles, hats in the air. My father brings out a tambourine and dances around like a wild monkey, his knees going cockeyed. My mother is wearing a brown silk dress and beautiful, delicately heeled alligator shoes as she lounges against one of the tables. Gilda and my grandmother are setting out honey cakes and sponge cakes and mandelbrot and candied orange peel. There is a special bottle of Manischewitz grape wine.

It suits me. War news on the radio has always been the cause of people shushing me. There's nothing good about war, except for the war bond parades and Gilda's collecting jewelry for the natives in New Guinea.

My father drinks two paper cups of wine and begins to sing one of his war songs:

He seems to think it's all right to say “lord” in that silly song, no one gets excited about it at all. I think it's nasty to talk about The Screamer's wet diapers, no matter how much she disgusts me. But everyone, even my mother, even Gilda, seems to think the song is cute.

There is another song my father bursts into:

Why does he have tears in his eyes? Is he happy or is he sad? Does he wish he had flown off into the wild blue yonder? Does he wish he were a gold star on someone's window?

We know one thing: his job at the defense plant is over. My mother wants him to get rich. She says so often, now.

She wants us to buy a house of our own. She wants to move away from Gilda and Grandma. She wants an alligator purse. She wants gold jewelry. She wants a vase of gardenias on every table. She wants a maid to cook and another maid to wash clothes and another one to clean the house.

My father says why can't she learn that the best things in life are free. She turns her back on him. The war in Europe is over, but a new war is starting, right in our house on Avenue O.

No more blackouts, enough sugar for a thousand chocolate cakes, plenty of soap powder for the Bendix and The Screamer's diapers, new leather shoes for everyone, nylon stockings for Gilda and my mother; just when our spirits are lightening, just when my father goes back into the antique business (at an auction my father buys three locked trunks—contents guaranteed unknown—and finds some rare china bowls and a bronze elephant with which to start out in his new business, a store he rents on Hansen Place); just when I get my first ballet slippers and start to take lessons in a basement studio on Avenue P, my grandmother's heart stops.

I come home from school one day and see Dr. Schwartz's black car in front of the wishbone tree. (We don't use Dr. Trutt for my grandmother; she thinks his wife is a floozy and if he can't take care of her, how can he take care of sick people?)

I run into my house and upstairs, where my grandmother is on the couch in the front room, her face twisted like a corkscrew. Gilda is bending over her, Dr. Schwartz is bending over her, even my mother, knotting a handkerchief in her hands, stands far back, but watching. This isn't the usual emergency that a few white pills under her tongue can fix up. This is the real thing. My own heart in my chest does a loop-the-loop, skids, flutters, begins to pound. It could also just…stop. Who is to say mine won't stop even as I watch my grandmother, whose pasty face is the color of pale chicken fat?