The Kingdom of Brooklyn (20 page)

The man of my dreams
. This image seems capable of supplanting my desire for bikes, puppies, Captain Midnight decoders. This is a
big
idea, this has a richness I never before imagined possible. I can feel it pushing away even roller skates (the dream of which offered mainly speed and freedom and self-control) and substituting
the man of my dreams
. This idea offers endless fantasies—not only on staircases with decks of cards, but on the decks of ships with moonlight above, on merry-go-rounds, on roller coasters, on subway trains, on rides not unlike the rides in my primer book, sleigh rides and donkey rides and train rides and—(something else happens as I think this—a contraction of my baby-making mechanism occurs, a kind of inner convulsion, shudder, tremor, shock, quiver). I am amazed and totally grateful that I have located this treasure within me; this is the force that drives the world.

Margot, the maid, doesn't come to work one day and my mother says to me, “She feels sick today. She thinks she may be having a baby.”

She thinks?
Doesn't a woman
know
? Doesn't she
do that thing
with a man for that special purpose? I ask this of my mother, the time seems right, nothing appears premeditated, though certain questions have been burning in me for months, for
years
, but now there is an opening, a chance to find out some critical things. I hold my breath in hope; if my mother begins to talk about this, I can ask her what “the missionary position” is—described in our Family Medical Encyclopedia, I can ask her what “the woman lies with knees bent and legs splayed” could mean in real time, real life. The dictionary says to splay is “to dislocate, as a shoulder bone.” Or, “to slope or slant, as the side of a door or window.” Splay also means to spread out, it means awkward, ungainly.

None of this completes the blank space in my mind, fills in the details. Whatever my mother and my father did to make me, I hope against hope that nothing was dislocated, as a shoulder bone.

But my mother can't do this. She says, of Margot, of her possibly having a baby, “Sometimes you know and sometimes you don't.”

I have one more urgent question: I have seen a word written on the wall of the playground in school, a word not in any dictionary, a word that causes girls to shriek and boys to laugh knowingly—FUCK is the word, it's always written in capitals, it has such power, such shame attached to it. What could it mean? Who can I ask? Who would tell me a secret so critical and weighted with meaning? Not my mother surely. Not my father. Surely not Gilda. And to ask Izzy is too dangerous; he is one of the boys who laughs, leers, when the word is in sight. I may never know. That's just the way it is.

But at the next club meeting, at Ruthie's house, I do ask. We are talking about subjects that make our hearts pound anyway, about bras and sanitary napkins and nipples that get hard when we are very cold, and how long it will be before we “do it,” and find out what it's like. And Ruthie says, “Come with me, I'll show you a secret.” And in her empty house we follow her single file to her parents' bedroom where she opens the drawer of the night table—and there, inside, is a little nest of knotted white balloons. They are soggy, weighted slightly, we are invited to poke at them with our index fingers, they are slug-like and elastic, they are terrifying.

“That's the
stuff
,” Ruthie says. “It's scum. If it gets inside us, that's the end. In there is the seed that makes the baby.”

We all shriek and stand on our toes. To be this close to it! To almost have touched it with our bare fingertips!

“Why do they save it?” Linda asks, with my very question.

“Maybe my father thinks he will run out someday,” Ruthie says. She pulls the drawer out further, and—with the authority of one who knows—she shows us the box that contains unused balloons—Trojans, they are called—and she confesses that she counts them whenever her parents are out, to see how often they “do it.”

Such knowledge. It is almost too much for me. I can't see straight for the beating of my heart. The bird has come loose and wild again, it's breaking my ribs. Whenever I get close to some dangerous essence, the bird of fear comes to life.

“Does FUCK mean when they do it?” I blurt out. My club mates nod. See? I have known all along. Some things are known to the heart. No one has to be told the meanings of certain words. They flare their meaning at you, they shock and stun and burn you.

And to think of it! That ordinary parents play with fire. Mothers and fathers obsessed with tuna fish sandwiches and earning money, who talk about buttoning up your coat and being sure to close the front door do these things, together in the dark night of secrecy where no children can come, these parents of ours contain magical fluids and miracle-making machines. My own mother and father are wizards. And I am attached to them by the spider's filament, spinning out toward the sun, knowing by heart the natural magic of existence.

Iggy, Izzy's mother, wears extremely tight pink angora sweaters, tosses hardballs in the street to whichever of her seven brothers is visiting her, drives an old red Ford convertible she calls “Lizzie,” and has never had a headache in her life. Izzy swears to me about this: his mother has never been sick, she never yells at him, she never, once, made him finish anything on his plate. And, just last week, she bought him a pinup of Betty Grable to hang inside his closet door.

Izzy and I are on the front stoop, discussing a subject that sets the hairs on my arms to standing straight up: how a key and lock are like a boy and a girl. He is showing me, in full daylight, how my key is “male” and the front door lock is “female”; he is just now demonstrating the principle by inserting my key into the opening of the front door lock—(“See? In it goes like they were made for each other”)—when his mother comes driving up to the curb in her red car and yells out in her Betty Hutton-hoarse voice, “Hey, kids, wanna hop in and go for a ride?”

Izzy pulls the key out of the lock and places it, steaming, in my hot palm. “Let's go,” he says.

“I don't know,” I say. “I should ask my mother.”

“Why bother?” He winks, something his mother has taught him: he does it without grimacing at all, “She'll never know. We'll be back in a flash.”

And here it is again, the things men do without conscience or worry. How Joe Martini—and then only in kindergarten—escaped from school in the winter wind without jacket or boots or hat, without permission, and was able to convince me, easily, so easily, to do the same. I have always been ripe for convincing; there's no telling what I could be convinced to do, in half a second. All I need is someone's expectation that a kernel of raw courage is within me. All I need is an interested person, waiting to witness my calling it forth. When someone thinks I can do it, when someone is watching, magic happens. I can't even
remember
fear.

A convertible! I hop in the front with Izzy. We zoom away from the curb and I laugh. I laugh, catching wind in my teeth, past the three playgrounds between 3rd, 4th and 5th Streets, past the windows of Dr. Ellen's dental office (behind whose door poor trembling children wait to have drills bore to the core of their beings) and then—but where are we going? Not
just
around the block! Iggy is driving much further, much faster than was agreed upon. She shakes her wild blonde hair and she laughs and Izzy laughs and they jar me, between them in the front seat, with their shaking shoulders.

Oh no, I am a lost soul, swooning under wind and sun, going further and further from home, going so far I almost can't remember how it will be when it's discovered that I didn't ask permission, didn't tell anyone, didn't ask, didn't think, didn't care!

Coney Island! That's where we're going. We're taking a wild ride to the place of wild rides. Izzy grabs my hand and I feel his index finger move through the circle of my closed hand like a key riding through the opening of a lock.

“Isn't this fun?” he asks. He leans close and says, “Isn't this fun, Issa my kisser?” His hand comes down on the seat between us and nudges my flesh. Whereupon I enter a new extremity of knowledge.

Kissing, it seems, is the essence of every ride. Bumper cars, merry-go-round, tunnel of love, fun house; with them come speed and thrill and laughter and kissing. We check from time to time and see Iggy waiting for us on a bench at the edge of the boardwalk, smoking cigarettes and staring at the ocean while Izzy and I forget time, forget the world, as we spin, as we bump, as we scream to the springing forth of ghosts and devil-faces in the dark.

“Did you know people could have this much fun?” Izzy asks me as we look at our images—two fat people with enormous feet—in a pair of fun-house mirrors.

I shake my head.

“I didn't think so,” he says. “What you needed was me.”

Oh yes. It is a certainty. All the years of crying
I want, I want!
and what I needed was him. Do I have him? How can a person know when she has someone? And for how long can he be mine if I do?

Izzy apologizes that he has no father; but what he has is seven uncles, some of them rich. “We can go on any ride we want. Even twice! Even three times! My mother doesn't care. She gets all the money she needs. And she likes it at Coney Island—sometimes she meets men.”

One time, as we pass by a doorway in the fun house, we glance across the wild slants of the boardwalk and see that Iggy has company on her bench: a sailor, in fact. A sailor in a sailor suit and a jaunty sailor hat.

“She likes to kid around with guys,” Izzy says. “They think she's a hot tomato.”

“How does a girl get to be a hot tomato?” I ask Izzy. We are in a new part of the fun house, standing up to our ankles in cold, slimy worms. “Ugh,” I add.

“It's only spaghetti,” Izzy assures me. “Let me think about hot tomatoes,” he says. He leads me to the next room, where we have to sit down on a softly padded bench that collapses under our weight and sends us careening down a slide, at the bottom of which we land on a bed of balloons. “Only some girls can be hot tomatoes. Most can't. But you—” Izzy says. He pulls me close to him. “You'd be a star hot tomato.”

“Me?”

“Issa the kisser,” he says. And we kiss again, popping balloons as we roll out of the way of the next couple who are screaming and plummeting down the slide together.

“Your mother is going to kill you,” Iggy says, as we drive home. She thinks it's a joke, but it isn't: my mother can kill, and this time she may.

The truth of what I will face at home is beginning to close in on me; the sky grows darker and darker. It is, in fact, night. How did I—so easily—forget my whole family? My duty to them? My certain punishments? For a girl who tries to be good I am definitely bad, seriously bad. I may even be bad enough to be classed as a hot tomato. How I hope so!

“Look,” Iggy says, reaching over and giving my thigh a friendly pinch. “What can they do to you? Nothing! They can't do anything! So you're late. So what? I'm responsible—I'll come in and tell them I took you for a ride around the block and we ended up in Canarsie. Or Coney Island, wherever the hell we were.”

“Leave out ‘wherever the hell,' ” Izzy advises her. “You'll see what I mean when you meet Issa's mother.”

“Aah. She can't scare me,” Iggy says. “I eat spinach out of a can.”

Both Gilda and my mother throw open the front door when we ring the bell. Both look as if their faces have been dipped in white face powder.

“Which dame is this kid's mother?” Iggy asks, putting her hand on the top of my head.

“Issa!” my mother says directly to me, “we thought you were kidnapped.”

“No such luck,” Iggy says, and she laughs like Betty Hutton, bending over and slapping her knees.

Gilda's mouth is open. Iggy says, “Close your mouth, kiddo, or flies'll get in.”

Izzy pokes his mother. “Come on, Ma, tell them how we just took Issa around the block, and then you had a flat tire, and they had to tow us to Bensonhurst, where…”

“Yeah, well, that's what happened,” Iggy says. “But it's water under the bridge, here we are, safe and sound. And Issa is fine, we took good care of her, just look at her.” She pinches my cheek to prove to everyone that I'm healthy and alive.

My mother casts a withering glance upon Iggy's pink, fuzzy sweater. Then she turns her stare upon Izzy. He has a smirk on his face that thrills my entire body. My mother reaches out and pulls me into the house. She is about to slam the door when Iggy says to Gilda, “Hey, neighbor, I'm new on the block, we ought to have tea sometime.”

“We ought to?” Gilda says. “You and I? My sister and I were just about to call the police.”

“Good thing you didn't,” she says. “Police aren't that cute. Sailors are cuter.”

Again, my mother begins to close the door when my father's car pulls up at the curb. We all watch him park. He gets out with one of his usual cartons under his arm; when he sees a crowd at our front door, he grins. His pipe is angled at the corner of his mouth, he is wearing baggy pants and a big tweed jacket.

“Hey, this man is better looking than Clark Gable,” Iggy says. “Which of you lucky ladies owns him?”

My father grins and when no one answers, Iggy says, “If you're not spoken for, I'll take you.”

He can't help but laugh. My mother reaches out and drags him inside: “Come in, dinner is ready.”

When they disappear Iggy says to Gilda: “You live in the same house with that dreamboat and he isn't yours? How do you stand it?”

Gilda stares at Iggy as if her heart has been torn open.

“Look, I think you could use a little advice. Why don't we have lunch at the Chink's on Avenue P tomorrow?” Iggy says.

“I don't know…”