The Kingdom of Brooklyn (14 page)

I hold the honey cake like a little dead child as we walk along Avenue O, as we turn on Ocean Parkway and pass the old people sitting on benches, pass the bicycle riders on the bicycle path, pass the little gold, pointy rails that separate the benches from the bicycles. I walk in my good Stride-Rite shoes, the ones that are wide on me even in their narrowest size, the ones the salesman wants me to grow into by eating my potatoes standing up.

“I don't want you to be scared,” Gilda says. “I'm used to it by now.”

“I'm not scared.”

“But you will be,” she tells me. “There's no way I can prepare you for this.”

“Is she going to die?” I ask Gilda.

“Not soon enough,” she says.

My grandmother is strapped into a wheelchair. Her head flops forward, her white hair has never been combed, I think, since the day they stuffed her into the ambulance. Her face has fallen away and all I see at first is the grin of her huge false teeth. They smile even as tears come out of her eyes when she sees me.

Her hand shakes at me although she has no brass bell in it. The smell in this room is so bad that I can't breathe. I hide behind Gilda as she tells my grandmother what she has brought, shows off the little treats for everyone to share, including the other old women who are strapped in their wheelchairs.

I bury my face in the little honey cake, breathing in the scent of sweetness and warmth.

“Where are your earrings, Mama?” Gilda asks. My grandmother's ears have become stretched out, long flaps of hanging skin. She is all teeth and ears. Gilda looks around at the other women. “Did any of you see what happened to her earrings?” As if any of them can talk, explain, solve problems.

Gilda finds someone in the hall; she grills the nurse, a colored woman with a big white smile and a hearty laugh.

“Oh them, they got flushed down the toilet by accident,” she tells Gilda.

“But they were my mother's diamond earrings!” Gilda cries.

Are they
my
diamond earrings? The ones I once saw in the vault? Who flushed them away? How dare they take what was to be mine?

I start to eat the honey cake. I eat it with my fingers, in big handfuls, crumbs of dark honey-colored cake smash into my nose and glue themselves to my lips.

“Issa, what are you doing? Aren't you going to give that to Grandma?”

But this isn't my grandmother, this grinning witch, this smelly pile of rags, this empty pitcher with enormous ears, this silent, foreign, absent, blank-eyed soul.

I kick Gilda. I kick the wheelchair. I will kick down the walls of this ghost-house, I will pull down the roof and throw the bricks into the ocean. I will bring my real grandmother home with me, where we can sit outside on the bench and smell the lilacs. Where we can cook chicken soup together and smell the onions, layer by layer. Where things can be the way they used to be.

I will be a great ballerina. I will do backbends and
pliés
and grand
jetés
; I will hold onto the
barre
(and, when practicing at home, to the sunroom doorknob) and will execute perfect
pirouettes
,
arabesques
and splits.

Madame Genet's senior class performs for us in the studio: how I love the calf muscles of the sixteen-year-old girls. How strong and smooth their thighs are, how they leap with perfect ease across the shiny wooden floor. Their gauze tutus shimmer and vibrate, flying up in delicate pulsations to reveal the secret white space of the cave between their legs. I will be this powerful one day, this strong, this graceful, this womanly.

It is better, of course, to have long, straight hair that shimmers across your shoulders when you do a backbend, straight hair to twist high into a tight, dark little bun. But, if I have to, I will wear a wig when I am older. I will pull out my wild golden curls, hair by hair.

My mother leaves me alone here; I am dropped off while she takes The Screamer to the playground to push her on the swings. I have one complete hour to dream about becoming a beautiful sixteen-year-old with thighs like iron, with calves hidden by veils of lace.

When the older girls dance ballet, we're not supposed to think they are gasping for air and sweating, but they are. I know it because when I dance, I am. Illusion—the discovery that it is possible thrills me. Why should the audience suspect perspiration and sense the wild beating of each heart? No, all they want to see is the dance, all they want to hear is the music. I find it a grand conceit that we can conceal so much, pretend to be colorful butterflies when we are really sweating horses with thudding blood, that we can pretend to be dreamy floating angels when we are actually counting beats and remembering the sequence of steps.

How much of what I see in the world is illusion? Is
everything
not what it seems?

I begin to examine everything with this standard in mind. The ladies who come to Gilda have been through hours of sitting and cutting and curling and baking in order to look nice (not beautiful like ballerinas, but simply nice, simply neat). And, my mother, even to play “Danny Boy” has had to learn her scales, her chords and her notes. She always tells me how hard she used to practice when she was a girl, but why is it that the learning part of her life seems to be over. She never practices new songs now. Nor does she read books now. The headaches, she says, prevent it.

Couldn't she take an extra aspirin and keep reading, keep playing, and not be angry so much of the time? If I were practicing ballet every day, for hours, I would be too tired and satisfied to be unhappy. If she were busier,
maybe smiles she would not hoard
. (That rhyme she wrote to me sticks like a burr in my throat.
If smiles she won't hoard, I'm pretty sure she'll get a reward!
Where is my reward? I'm smiling, I'm smiling. I smile into her face whenever I can, and she doesn't seem to remember. Where is my
reward?
)

On the way home from ballet lessons I stop at intervals to do the eight hand positions to myself, then the five foot positions, humming “The Merry Widow Waltz.”

As we walk up East 4th Street my mother stops the stroller and looks at me. She says, “Issa, you have such powers of concentration.”

Is that good or bad? I can never tell what she's thinking when she analyzes me.

“Doesn't Blossom?” (This is my test. Blossom has no faults at all.)

“Oh no. She's just a baby. But she hasn't got what you have. She's a free spirit.”

“And what am I?” My blood is thudding louder than it does when I do ten
pirouettes
.

“You're a determined little thing.”

I'm a thing. “Is that good?”

“You might be famous someday. Rich and famous.”

“Would you like me if I were rich and famous?”

“I'd adore you, darling.”

Adore. Darling. Rich and famous
.

I dance home on winged feet. That night I practice
pliés
till my heart bursts in my chest. I spin till my eyes fly out of my head. I backbend till my spine splinters.

She will adore me, darling!

It is a Saturday afternoon in spring. I am now in third grade. I am sitting on the back porch reading a book called
Katrinka, The Story of a Russian Child
and wondering how I might feel if I woke up some morning to discover my parents and Gilda gone, leaving me in charge of my sister. Outside snow would be rising to the windowsills. There would be hardly any food in the house. A freezing blizzard would be swirling about the windows.

My fantasies are thicker than the snowflakes. I would leave my sister in her crib and start out to get help. I would leave enough wood burning in the stove to keep her warm for two days. (Then, when it was gone, if I weren't back—no fault of mine—she would freeze to death.) Before I left I would pack Zwieback biscuits around her body to keep her fed. (I would take with me all the rest of the food in the house: particularly challah and halvah and black olives.) Wolves would be howling from the edge of the forest, and Indians (do they have Indians in Russia? Do they have them in Brooklyn?) would close in upon the house with tomahawks raised. They would either scalp her, abduct her and raise her as an Indian princess, or eat her. (Are Indians cannibals? There is so much I don't know yet.)

Suddenly, I hear the slam of my father's car door out front. I know his car sounds, just as I know his two-tone whistle, his laugh, his voice. Why is he home? He is supposed to be at his store. He is never home this early on a Saturday. What is he doing here?

The street is quiet, the house is quiet. Gilda is at the rest home visiting my grandmother. My mother and The Screamer are taking their afternoon naps.

My father is home! I sit in perfect silence, the book balanced on my knees, and I hear him come up the alley. He knows where to find me—it is he who takes me to the library each Friday night to get an armful of books to read over the weekend. He knows where I am on a Saturday afternoon.

He has a carton under his arm! Aha! A surprise! I smile at him. He has his pipe in his mouth and a sweet expression in his eyes. Oh, how I love my father! How nice it is to see him. And a carton brought home means a surprise. He loves to surprise me, bringing me treasures from his business like costumes for Halloween (one year a clown costume, one year a hairy gorilla), or games that children used to play long ago, or a gum machine from the subway, or a ukulele whose strings have come unstrung.

But my mind is reluctant to swing away from that delicious vision I was embroidering a minute ago: The Screamer alone in the cold, dark, abandoned house, the blizzard roaring outside, bears at the windows (or were they wolves?) and myself, the heroine, setting out into the storm, heroically, chewing chocolate-covered halvah.

My father carefully sets the carton down on the floorboards at my feet. There is a scuffling sound from within. What could it be? The slide of some object that is loose in the carton? A new doll whose glass eye has just slithered across the cardboard bottom?

My father's eye is merry. My heart starts to pound. Skates? Am I finally getting skates? The Skaters are already riding bikes, they are now The Bike-Riders. But I still dream of skates, that sawing, buzzing freedom of skates on cement. Can it be? This visit has to be special, my father is home at midday, curls of caramel-flavored tobacco smoke swirling around our heads, his merry smile—he can't contain his pleasure.

The top of the box pops open and a puppy sticks his head through.

Oh ecstasy! Oh heaven on earth! Oh joy forever! Oh no! My mother's face at the screen door. Go away! Let me have this first union with my Beloved with no looming axe above me. Let only my father witness my passion. Let me have something I want, at last! At last!

Beloved to me. Spotty to all others. A pink tongue and little pink nipples, brown and white fur, so soft, so smooth: heaven on earth. I have never known such happiness. The weight of him curled in my lap as I read. The heft of him in my arms as I carry him here and there.

“He can walk, don't make a cripple out of him,” Gilda says. But she picks him up too, a look of deep pleasure crossing her face as she feels what he has to give: warmth, adoration, peace, physical surrender. My Baby. My Beloved. My Reason For Living.

I get melodramatic in a way I have never been. I would give my life for him. I would save him first in a fire. I would sacrifice
my whole family
in order to save his life.

There are rules, of course. Not to touch him while I am eating. Never to allow him on the furniture. Never to let him lick my face. (I will break these rules at every opportunity.) My mother will tolerate him, but barely, and only because it's too late to give him back. (My father accepted him from a man who disappeared into thin air afterward. In trade for a couple of English teacups. My father never even learned his name.)

I sit out front with him and The Skaters/Bike-Riders stop to admire his delicious little snout, his sweet brown eyes, his thrilling pointy tail. How did this luck land on me? I have something that others want. Issa is enviable! Issa is lucky! Is it possible? That the arrow of luck has finally landed on
me
?

Myra and Myrna and Ruthie and Linda want to start a girls' club. They invite me to be in it. Before I can agree, I have to gather all the information and give a full report to my mother: why they're forming the club, what their long-term goals are, who will be in it, what the weekly activities will be, where they will meet, how much the dues will cost—this is worse than doing a book report for school on the causes of the Civil War. I don't think my friends know what their long-term goals are. I think they just want to have fun.

I can tell they are inviting me as a kind of afterthought: they are quite complete as they are, forged in friendship from the early days of their skating together, and now they ride on the Ocean Parkway bicycle path every Saturday, two abreast, their shiny Schwinns moving in tandem, a red and a blue in front, two dark blues just behind.

They don't know I see them every Saturday as I sit on a bench in front of Sherman's Rest Home, waiting for Gilda to come out, and holding Beloved close to me on his leash. (I think they might want me in their club
because
of Beloved, because none of them have a dog, and they love him because he's so lovable, because they can't resist him, and because they want something to hug and kiss, like everyone in the world wants.)

At least he's mine. I bend way over to kiss the top of his brown and white head. A beagle, a hunting dog whose ears get stiff when he hears the squeak of brakes and thinks he has just heard a mouse make a noise.

I think about my friends (and enemies) all the time. I think about Joe Martini, who was left back in second grade because he wouldn't stay in his seat and do drawings of little houses with smoke coming out of their chimneys. I think about Ruby, the girl with a face like a bulldog, who stole my pencil case and threatened to push me in front of a car. She did push me down on the sidewalk, and now I have two scars on my knees. I will never be a Rockette. Gilda told me they have to have perfect legs. I probably can't be a ballerina, either, though I practice every day. The reason is that I can't touch my heel to the top of my head in a backbend. I didn't get the right muscles from my family. Only little miserable teeth. (Do other girls look at their new teeth as they come in, those ragged-toothed teeth, and beg them: “Grow! grow!”?)