The Kingdom of Brooklyn (16 page)

Gilda is wearing bright red lipstick that matches the rose. Her dress is navy blue with lace at the edge of the hem. We three are sitting on the couch; it feels as if it is moving. We're perfectly still, but we're careening into space.

Them Sam Marcus leans over and pulls Gilda's shoulder forward and kisses her fast on the cheek; then he kisses
me
! We all three are caught in a hug, I am being crushed between them. I push Sam off me and look at Gilda. She looks very worried behind her smile.

“Well,” she says.

“Well,” he says. “You have some Manischewitz wine?”

I know just where it is. I hand the bottle to him. He hands it back. “Pour us, sweetheart. We'll have a toast to an understanding.”

“They have an understanding,” I announce the minute I come downstairs to go to bed. For punctuation, we hear Sam Marcus's car start on the street.

“When is the wedding?” my mother asks. She is sitting across the room from my father; he has been reading the paper, I don't know what she has been doing.

“Not for a year,” I say, proud to have this information. “They will be keeping company.”

“You'll have your own room, Issa. Blossom will have
her
own room. Your father and I will redo the whole house! The sunporch can be a sunporch again! We'll get rattan furniture—I know a decorator who specializes in rattan.”

“Gilda's not moving out,” I tell my mother. “When they get married, Sam will move in upstairs. Then he'll be near Mr. Exter and they can drive to Little River together.

“What about his house in Little River?” my mother asks me, furiously, as if something has happened that's all my fault.

“He doesn't have a house there. He lives in a little building on the chicken farm.”

“I thought he was rich!”

“He wants Gilda to invest money in building modern chicken coops,” I tell her.

“He wants her money!” she shouts at my father. “They're going to live
here!
” she shouts at my father.

My father's teeth are pressing down on his pipe. He is nearly biting his pipe in two.

“Answer me!” my mother screams at him.

“They're only keeping company. Nothing may come of it.”

“I won't have it,” my mother hisses. “He will not move into my house!”

“It's not your house!” my father says. “We all live here. It belongs to Gilda as much as to anyone.”

“She has never paid her way!” my mother says to him. “I was the one who worked to pay the mortgage after my father died. I was the one who didn't go to Hunter but had to go to secretarial school! I couldn't even
think
of college where I would have met educated men!” She stares at my father and I see again how false her teeth are, how they hang there in a kind of skeleton smile when she is as far from smiling as she has ever been.

My father bows his head.

She doesn't know what she's just done to him, but I know what she said. I could kill her. She's doing one of her lists: “I rode into the city every day to be a secretary and she stayed home and baked cookies. She stayed home and gave little haircuts. Now she thinks she owns half the house! With her pathetic little income! From polishing nails and curling hair! How dare she offer my house to some stranger! I
need
this house! The
whole
house. I deserve it! I've been waiting years for it. Finally Mama is out of here, and now Gilda thinks she can just invite strangers to live here. I won't have it! I'll stop her—any way I can.”

There is nothing to say when she starts her lists. Usually they're about what I won't eat, or how I aggravate her, or why she needs a decorator, or how she can't live another day without a maid. This is much worse. I thought she would greet my good news with a celebration. I thought she would rush upstairs and invite Gilda down and play some music on the piano. I thought we would all have hot chocolate and marshmallows.

Just when I am sure of something, I find how wrong I can be.

“I don't want him in the house anymore,” my mother announces.

My father and I both think she means Sam Marcus. “It's her place,” my father says in a dull voice. “She can have who she wants up there.”

“Not him. The dog,” she says. “I want him living outside.”

“No!” I rush away from the table and from what we are eating—boiled corned beef and cabbage—and I wrap my arms around Beloved's neck.

My mother and I glare at each other. Beloved has become the new reason for my mother's unhappiness. She suspects I am spitting out food I don't like and feeding it to him under the table (I am). She suspects, from a bad smell in the living room, that he peed under the piano (he did). She believes I love him more than I love her (yes!) and better than I love my sister (definitely! definitely!).

I bend down and kiss him all over his furry face.

“You know you are
never
to touch him while you're eating!”

“I'm through eating!”

“You are not through. Sit down and finish your meat.”

It always comes down to meat: meat red and stitched through with fat. The cabbage is limp and sour. Boiled carrots also taste wrong. They're much better raw. How come my mother can't cook good things after all these years of cooking?

I try to understand my mother. I do try; I thought we had reached a kind of peace, now that I am allowed to go upstairs and listen in to developments in Gilda's newly forming life, now that I am allowed to walk Beloved around the block without my mother's permission each time, now that she lets me read in the backyard for hours without demanding I rock The Screamer or play with her. (The Screamer is now walking by herself, she plays with toys, she doesn't scream as much as she used to.)

“My dog
has
to live in the house. He sleeps with me,” I tell her. How can I say more than that? That I
live
to sleep with Beloved, that I can't
wait
for nighttime so he can jump on top of my blanket and curl deep into the curl of my body. That the fear that has lived in me since I was a baby lessens only when he is breathing beside me in the dark. That his wet black nose is my guide through the startling dreams that erupt from the cave of my sleep.

“It's not healthy,” she says. “I read that you can get asthma from dog hairs. He might have ticks that will suck your blood.”

“I brush and comb his fur all the time.” I look to my father for help, but he's frowning; he's been so silent lately. Where is his laugh? Where is his sweetness?

“It's too cold outside in the winter,” I say, finally. “He'd freeze to death.”

“We can get a doghouse,” she says. “Your father can build one for him.”

“No, I can't,” my father says. That's
all
he says. He gets up from the dinner table and whistles to Beloved, who is lying at my feet. His tail starts beating against the floor.

“Come on, boy,” he says. He snaps his fingers and Beloved leaps to follow him.

“Take the leash!” I cry. My father has been trying to train my dog to walk around the block without a leash. He thinks Beloved needs freedom; everyone needs freedom.

“But he might run away! He might get hit by a car! He might get lost! He might run after a cat! He might…” I am not my mother's child for nothing; I can make lists as fast as she can.

But my father's coat is on, the door slams, he's gone. I am left to wait among the cooking pots. This kitchen is the scene of my entire life—will I always live here in this kitchen, cowed by broiling meat and the requirement to eat it? I want to fly away from home; I dream of flying: in dreams I point my hands into a spire above my head and I take off. My praying hands steer me between skyscrapers and over the tops of tall trees. I sweep like a bird but I'm sly as a snake, dipping, curving, the wind like laughter in my mouth.

“God damn it, you will chew and swallow every bit of your dinner.”

Mommy, Mommy, what is devouring you? I can never be a good enough eater, dancer, rhymer, daughter. I can never fill you with joy and happiness. You are getting a maid, you are getting a decorator, you are getting rattan furniture. But your hair is going white. Your eyes are burning. You are sinking down and you can't catch hold of anything.

Suddenly I hear it through the walls and windows: snarling, shouting, the vicious wilderness sounds of an animal fight.

“Beloved!” I throw open the front door and there in front of my house is pandemonium. My father is kicking at a clump of quivering animal haunches. I see the yellow flash of bared fangs. Panic is in my father's shout: “Get away! Get out of here!” His eyes swing to find me. “Issa, get a broom, hurry!” I hurry, I smash into my mother who is coming toward the door and I take her breath away. Good, she can't yell—I run outside with the broom so my father can beat at the attacking dog (it is Bully, the boxer who lives on East 4th Street: he snaps his razor teeth and hangs on while Beloved yips and yelps with pain). My father howls and smashes down with the broom; the boxer runs away, his cut-off tail beating like a stump in the air.

Blood. My father's shin streaming blood. Beloved's ear torn off, streaming blood. My own tongue, bitten by my own teeth, bleeding. My screams. My mother's screams. We limp and drag our shredded selves into the safety of the house.

So this is the price of freedom. So this is what happens when the leash is left hanging on the door. So this is what's out there in the world.

The maid is called Margot; she's from Holland. She wears a pillbox hat with a veil and speaks English oddly so that everything she says sounds interesting. She is here to scrub the tub and dust the furniture and beats the rugs; she is here to wash clothes and hang them on the line; she will also care for The Screamer while my mother is out with the decorator, looking at rattan.

I don't know what to do with myself when only she and I and The Screamer are in the house. I don't know what to say. I don't know why someone who hasn't made the dirt here should have to clean it up for any reason. Because I am embarrassed to watch her on her knees, scrubbing, I would like to go upstairs and stay with Gilda, but my mother wants me to be sure Margot doesn't steal anything. I have to follow her around, watching her, wondering what anyone would want to steal from our house. We have old lamps, old chairs, old radios, old plates, old pots. No wonder my mother wants new furniture; now that I am looking for things someone might steal, I see we have nothing at all.

My father doesn't even leave quarters around on his night table; he takes all his loose change to the store and keeps it in a cup there. He plays a game in his store: a sign leaning against the cup says “What will you pay me for this change?” Sometimes someone will offer him five dollars, or ten dollars, or even twenty. Sometimes only one dollar. And he always sells the contents of the cup. He never knows if he wins or loses.

When I'm in the store with him, I hate that game because he doesn't let me have even a nickel for a candy bar from the candy store next door. He knows I have terrible teeth, pitted with cavities, and he is against my having candy. Yet, he will easily give away twenty quarters free if it turns out that someone offers less money for the cup than it contains in change.

He's not perfect, my father. Not quite perfect. Still, he's having a good time in his antique shop. He sometimes buys a clock for ten dollars and sells it for a hundred. That's why my mother is looking at rattan with a decorator.

It could happen any time. His arrival with a carton. It's the great hope of my life. Nothing could rival the arrival of Beloved; this is certain, and I have accepted it. No life can contain two days like that one day. It's just as well.

But there are close approximations. Book deliveries are almost as exciting. This is how it happens: with his key he opens the front door of the house (this is in my sunporch bedroom) and disappears outside for another minute, returning to his car. Then he arrives with a heavy carton in his arms, pushes open the unlocked door with his foot and makes a great show of exhaustion as he sets the box down on the floor beside my bed.

He wipes his brow as I grin at him.

“Whose were they?” I always ask him. Sometimes he knows but mostly he makes it up: “These books belonged to a pirate who was shipwrecked for twenty years on an island; then he was rescued and the first thing he wanted to do was give them away because he was sick of reading them over and over!” (This was the carton that contained
Little Women
,
Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes
,
Grimms' Fairy Tales
, and a tattered copy of
Heidi
.) Once my father said, “A famous brain surgeon read these in his spare time.” (Then he unveiled a huge comic book collection: Archie and Jughead and Superman and Dagwood and Nancy and Sluggo.)

I always piled them beside my bed; the best ones would go on the bottom: Nancy Drew mysteries and books about collies. The others I would arrange judiciously textbooks on chemistry and histories of ancient wars would go on top; these I would dispatch very quickly although my rule was I had to consider them, I had to get a distinct sense of what they were about. But I didn't have to read every word.

Today, my mother is still out with the decorator, Margot is on Avenue P with The Screamer buying bread at the bakery, and Gilda is upstairs cooking paprika-chicken for my grandmother, who is now barely able to hold her head up. (They don't strap her in a wheelchair anymore; she has to be tied to the rails of her bed.)

There is the fanfare of his key in the lock, the return to his car, the carton of books preceding my father in the door, but he doesn't want to hang around long today, he has to get back to business. I unpack the books and see two identical Nancy Drew mysteries, two Albert Payson Terhune novels, two Bobbsey Twins books.

“Two of each!” I cry in delight.