The Kingdom of Brooklyn (15 page)

But Myra and Myrna and Ruthie and Linda are the true mysteries. How does one get to be part of them? Can there be a group called Myra and Myrna and Ruthie and Linda and Issa? It sounds wrong, it's got the wrong poetry. It's proof that I got not only the wrong muscles, but the wrong name, too. Issa: my name sounds like a secret that others whisper to keep me away; my name is like a hiss, like steam escaping, like the pressure cooker when it's about to pop, like the furnace before it explodes. I
feel
like steam, as invisible as a secret, as violent as an explosion. To look at me, I am just a little girl on a bench, but I am all those things. I rattle inside myself with the beings that I am—the lover of Beloved, the daughter of my father, the hater of my sister, and the grandchild who will not go in those doors behind me, into that house where dying is what they have to do. Dying is bad enough, but should it smell like the monkey house?

Gilda is inside that hall of horrors. She brings the special food she makes for my grandmother, the salted chicken fat on rye bread, the chopped chicken liver, the kreplach soup, the kasha varnishkas. I don't know why she makes this food; my grandmother can barely chew or swallow—she eats only farina and the cornmeal mush called
mamalega
. But they don't allow me to go in. I haven't seen her since that one time, after which I came home and had nightmares for two months. To think that every day that I am jumping rope, eating ice cream, letting Beloved lick my tears away, dancing
pirouettes
, my grandmother has been in one place, strapped into a wheelchair! In a room with old witches who don't know her or love her. To think of it!

I don't think of it. Neither does my mother, who won't visit her. My father has gone there with Gilda, but he doesn't speak of it, and no one asks him how it was. I imagine he just goes in and smiles reassuringly at my grandmother. That's all he has to do; that's why my father was born. For his sweetness.

How come I didn't get his sweetness? They are always talking about what I “got” from them. I have curly hair from him and have my good rhyming from my mother. I get the shape of my big toes from my grandfather, who died before I could meet him. As for teeth: I get my small teeth from someone with horrible small teeth, I will never know who. I can't check my grandmother's, because of her false teeth, nor my mother now, because of hers. I will probably get
my
false teeth from both of them. I try not to think about this either. As soon as the thought pops up like a nasty worm, I kick it back in its hole. Why add a reason for another stomach ache on top of all the other reasons?

Gilda is in that terrible place now, in that prison, that enormous toilet, that torture chamber, with her beef and barley soup, offering it to my grandmother and to all the old abandoned ghosts without teeth. (She will leave it, finally, for the colored helpers.)

Her cooking isn't a bad idea; I know she's upstairs at night peeling and frying, grinding and chopping. After the customers leave and she's all alone, she's not so sad, being busy in the kitchen that way. When she's busy, I don't feel so bad. And when I go upstairs to say goodnight, it isn't just the two of us, it's now three, with Beloved who comes everywhere with me. Three above, like the three below, is more fair. For those few minutes it's more like a family.

This is how we make better friends. Everything is as usual: I am on the bench waiting for Gilda who is in the rest home. Beloved is at my feet eating Milk Bone biscuits, which I drop down to him, one by one, to keep him happy. I am only supposed to wait ten minutes today; Gilda is going to give herself a permanent because she has no customers coming in this afternoon. Tomorrow she is supposed to meet a widower who is the business partner of Mrs. Exter's husband, who is in the chicken business. This chicken-man is rich and owns a chicken farm in Little River. His wife died of something terrible, and he is very sad. He is having dinner at Mrs. Exter's and Gilda is invited. She is going to take me along! And why? Because Mrs. Exter, even though she is a four-star mother, is rich enough to have a television set! And there will be a circus shown on the screen!

All of this is wonderful—to have so full a calendar when usually on the weekends all I do is read books I get from the library on Friday nights.

Timing is very important in life. You can't arrange these things. You might call something like this a miracle: The Skaters/Bike-Riders are coming along just as a black cat jumps out of the window of a parked car and just as I let go of Beloved's leash to reach into my pocket for another Milk Bone biscuit. The cat races across Ocean Parkway and Beloved dashes after it. Cars all across six lanes screech and bang on their brakes. When I can breathe again, I see that the cat is squashed and flattened into a bloody, furry pile. Myrna throws her bike down and runs after Beloved without even looking both ways. She, too, is almost squashed, but she scoops him up and kisses him freely all over his snout, while I cry out his public name, “Spotty, Spotty, come back here!”

Myrna runs back to the sidewalk with her rescued armful and claims her place in his life by letting him lick her lips. I have to thank her. I have to hug her. She has to give him to me. The Skaters have to hug her and hug each other. Then Linda hugs me. We are better friends than I am with the others. One reason I feel so warm toward her is that I once stole money from her. She has enriched my life by excitement and guilt.

“Oh, the cat is dead,” she says, and we all burst into tears. We cry and jump up and down and hug one another. Gilda, coming out of the rest home, finds us sobbing and laughing and hugging. The poor cat is so easily dead; we should bring my grandmother's wheelchair out here and push it across six lanes of traffic. Then Gilda could laugh and cry with us.

But she has that white look on her face; the air in the home powders her skin with grief. She is very grateful to The Bike-Riders for what they have done for me. We all are extremely happy, standing there, and Gilda invites them to use her living room for club meetings whenever they want to. She lives alone, she says—she would love to hear the sound of young happy voices in her living room. (But she won't stay around—she'll make herself scarce, she promises.) It's settled then, that fast. I am absolutely in the club and my house is where the first meeting will be.

Who would ever think that a fatal accident for a black cat could end up like a party?

Food at other people's houses looks amazing to me. Mrs. Exter has laid out a feast that makes me hungry in a deeper way than just wanting to eat everything. I want to put my head down on the table and wrap my arms around all the dishes and bowls and platters. It's the excess of wonderful things that is thrilling—it's there for me and anyone who wants it, it's free, and nowhere is there anything slimy or gristly or grainy or gluey.

I mostly eat chocolate-covered halvah. It comes in little squares covered in dark chocolate with two wavy lines on the top; no one watches me, I eat ten. Mrs. Exter is watching Sam Marcus and Sam Marcus is watching Gilda and Gilda is staring at her plate.

“Gilda has a wonderful business that she runs all by herself,” Mrs. Exter says loudly.

“I have news for you,” Sam. Marcus says. “It isn't often these days that a woman can run her own business. Especially a business in the home. But a license must be expensive. These days you have to work half a year just to pay off the license.”

“I don't have a license,” Gilda says.

“So you like to take chances, eh?” says Sam Marcus. “What if someone reports you?”

“Only my friends are my customers,” says Gilda. “I don't worry. I couldn't be in business if I had to pay for a license.”

“Friends can turn into enemies,” Sam says. “You should trust no one.”

“The truth is Gilda trusts everyone and everyone trusts her,” says Mrs. Exter and claps her hands together. “A beautician with fingers like an angel. And you don't find a better cook, either.”

“I'm not as good a cook as you,” Gilda murmurs. Her face is down so that no one can see it, although at home, as I watched her get ready, she hid her skin under layers of Acnomel. She's wearing a starched pink blouse with a white collar and a black skirt; she has on her jade ring. Sam Marcus is bald and short. He is wearing two rings on two next-door fingers, both heavy gold, one ring is a lion with glittering ruby eyes, and one is a single diamond stone.

“Sam is lonely since his wife died,” says Mrs. Exter. “The poor thing, how she suffered.”

“It's true, she suffered,” he says. He digs into his pot roast and kasha. He puts his mouth down low to the plate and shovels the kasha kernels in with a spoon.

Something is very odd here; the conversation drops like blobs out of a meat grinder.

“Why can't we turn on the television?” I say.

“A good idea,” says Mrs. Exter. She jumps up and goes to the machine. The circus comes on, far away and very small. Behind glass it's not the same as when my father took me to the circus in person. I have a pungent memory of sawdust and elephants with wild intelligent eyes and the smell of their leathery skin.

I tell everyone at the table—a confession brought on by the food and the endless supply of halvah—that I wish I could have had a souvenir turtle when I went to the circus, but that my father wouldn't buy me one. I don't know why I betray him in this way—the need to make him seem less good than he is comes over me like a chill. It's a trick I'm doing, but I don't know my purpose. I say it especially for the benefit of Sam Marcus. “My father wouldn't buy me a turtle because he said they cost too much.” (The truth is that the turtles come in little boxes with gold safety pins; people who bought them pinned the turtles by their tails to their lapels. My father assured me I wouldn't want to buy a painted turtle whose shell would soon go soft and rotten. Nor would I want to pin a living creature to my collar—that it was too cruel.) But I tell Sam again. “My father said they cost too much.”

“Well,” he said. “If I had a little girl as pretty as you, I would never tell her
that
.”

There grownups go again—lying.
A little girl as pretty as you
. He knows I have small teeth and wild curly hair. If he has eyes, he knows that. Just as I know he is bald and not kind and untruthful. At least I don't say to him, “You're more handsome than my father. I wish you
were
my father.” I have
some
limits. No one is more handsome than my father—Gilda and I both know that. But there is something I'm telling him, I feel as if I'm doing a circus trick. I just don't understand what it is.

I get a turtle. That's what it was. That's what I wanted. I realize this a few days later when Sam Marcus rings Gilda's bell with flowers and candy for Gilda and a turtle for me. The turtle has a palm tree painted on its tiny back, and it comes in a glass bowl with a rock in it. I have to add water and sprinkle in some flakes of food.

I am extremely excited by my successful technique of achieving this gift—as much as by the gift itself.

Every Friday night Sam Marcus comes up the steps with a present for Gilda and a present for me. I make it my business to be upstairs even if it means skipping my trip to the library with my father. Gilda wants me there. She doesn't want to be alone with him. We have signals to indicate when she wants me to sit between them on the couch, or when she wants me to serve the cookies. If she tilts her foot back on its heel, it means rush up to him with a tray of honey cake or sponge cake slices. If she crosses her ankles, it means come and sit very close to her, if possible between the two of them. The rule is that I must never, never leave her upstairs with him unless my mother actually gets hysterical.

My mother has become very interested in the proceedings; she asks me a hundred questions. What does Sam talk about with her, what present did he bring her, how many children does he have, does he own a house in Little River, how new is his car. I tell her what I can because that's the price of my being allowed to stay upstairs so long and so late. But I can't stay past nine—I have to go to sleep and there's no arguing about my bedtime. Usually Gilda makes Sam leave by nine, so it works out perfectly. My mother is beginning to imagine that Gilda will marry Sam Marcus and move to Little River. Then she and my father will have the whole house to themselves.

My father's jaw trembles when Sam Marcus walks up the steps to Gilda's house; my father reads the paper and grinds his jaws together every Friday night. I don't think he would want to take me to the library even if I begged him to. What is he so worried about?

Gilda and he used to meet every night at the garbage cans in the alley; it was almost as if they had an agreement, both of them, to carry out the garbage at exactly six-thirty. And if I were outside, in summer playing ball, or in winter walking Beloved up and down just in front of the house, I would listen to them talk to each other, in low soft voices, as if they were carrying on a conversation left in mid-sentence the night before. They talked of household things: the storm windows, the price of heating oil, my grandmother's misery. But their voices sounded like singing to me, so very much in tune, blending in a comforting harmony.

Now my father has me take out the garbage when I go out to walk Beloved. He won't go out. He won't talk to Gilda. My mother doesn't notice; she never notices things like that, the things people do because they feel a certain way.

I am upstairs when the kiss happens. I am
between
them when it happens. Gilda is holding a bouquet of roses Sam has carried up the stairs. He wants her to wear one of them in her hair; he sends me into the beauty parlor to get a silver clip. I throw Gilda a glance of apology—I have to leave the room, but I do it as fast as possible. He takes it from me and tries to fasten it in her hair but he doesn't know how to work the clip. I do it.