The Kingdom of Brooklyn (21 page)

“Issa and Izzy will be there,” she says. “Right, kids?”

We nod.

“Who knows what our fortune cookies will tell us?” Iggy says to Gilda. “See you then.”

The Bike-Riders and I have chosen a club song; we sing it at the end of every club meeting and we sing it as we ride our bikes along the bicycle path:

After we sing the last line, we dissolve into laughter. No sir, not us, no worms worming their way through our graceful inner parts. We're young and healthy and soon we will be called upon to exercise our baby-making machinery and the world will be made anew. Worms threaten only the old and emptied out, the ones who have no life ahead of them, like my grandmother. (But Gilda, is she useless? Is she too old to make the world anew?)

Though my plan is never to think about my grandmother, I can be hit with a thought of her, like a bullet through my temple, when I am most unguarded. The simplest act, like racing inside the house from a game of stoop ball to get to the bathroom before I lose it, can throw up a picture before my eyes of her lying twisted in her wet and bunched-up sheets in the steel bed at the nursing home. Food will do it, too; anything that won't go down my throat sends up a silent cry from my lips to her ears on Ocean Parkway, where a colored helper shoves cold oatmeal into my grandmother's slack, unprotesting mouth. But no! I have vowed not to think about her. I make myself stop. These thoughts start up a motor of violence in my body: the wheels of stomach pain begin to churn.
Don't think about it
. I don't want to, but why then does my mind turn back to my grandmother, like a hairpin seeking a magnet? Why does it secretly worm its way back in, bring up technicolor images of horror, though I haven't seen my grandmother since that first time, never go to visit her. (My mother won't let me go, and secretly, in this instance, I thank her. But why do I harbor this dangerous tendency, the hidden intention to make myself feel worse when I already feel bad?)

Gilda says almost nothing about what happens at the nursing home. She only brings up the subject when she has to discuss a medical decision or some financial matter. But today she is begging my mother to visit in her stead, to bring food to my grandmother, to feed it to her.

“Please,” she says, a word not easy for her to say to my mother. “I need some time off. I have an appointment. Please will
you
go there today?” Gilda asks her favor standing on the bottom landing of the steps, not quite in our house, but not quite on her property either. She swings on the doorknob, leaning into our house and then out, like a sail blowing in the wind.

“Mama doesn't know the difference,” my mother says. “It's all the same to her if you skip a day. You could skip a
month
and she wouldn't know. She's in a black hole. Besides, the smell in that place makes me puke.”

“Everything makes you puke,” Gilda says.

Oh! Such an ugly word. Something clutches in my bowels when I hear that word. There are words that can make me come alert like a hunting dog (
fuck
is such a word) and others that can make me shiver.
Puke
sends a shudder down my back and every hair on my body stands on end.

My mother knows about words and their power. Not just rhymes, but curses. I am grateful she has never said the word
puke
about me, not even when I have had fever and been racked with vomiting. Even the times I've been heaving and spewing out acid liquid, she has only stepped away from me and screamed for someone to bring a towel, “Hurry, Issa is throwing up!” (Of course it is always Gilda who comes, who holds my forehead, who whispers soothing assurances that soon the racking waves will be over.)

My mother hoards her ugliest words as I hoard my smiles. She waits to let them out, waits for fights, for the best moment to attack. When she's in some uncontrollable whirlpool of fury and contempt, when the world seems full of so many “nobodies” that she can't bear to live in it another minute, she lets certain words out of her mouth like snakes:
bitch
and
punk
and
lousy bastard
and
no goddamn good
and
puke
.

Today Gilda has said
puke
, but only because she is quoting my mother. My mother knows that Gilda's appointment is taking off time to have lunch at the Chink's with Iggy and Izzy. With me. She hasn't refused me, but she refuses Gilda. She will not feed my grandmother. If Gilda goes out to lunch, my grandmother won't be fed. Take it or leave it.

Gilda is sensitive about the word Chink's. She can't help it if everyone calls the Chinese restaurant “the Chink's,” but we don't have to do it. Jews don't like to be called Kikes, she says, and the Chinese don't like to be called Chinks. I never heard a Jew called a Kike; this is news to me. What could it mean?

As we walk together down East 4th Street toward Avenue P (Gilda looks away as we pass Mrs. Exter's house and hurries her stride), she confides she is worried about encountering pork in the Chinese restaurant. She has not been out in the world much; she has never eaten Chinese food, though all her ladies love it, and they especially recommend egg roll.

The Chink's (see? I can't help it) is right down the street from my old ballet studio and near the movie theater. The restaurant has a brown bamboo curtain across the front window and a dusty statue of a red wooden dragon nailed over the doorway. Gilda hesitates at the entrance; she squeezes my hand. I think we both feel as if we are about to enter a forbidden world; we can sense the beyond: strange smells, a dark interior, an atmosphere of danger and excitement.

“Maybe they're not here yet,” I say, and we look out into the bright sunny world of Avenue P: the passing cars, the delicatessen across the street, the dry goods store.

“They must be inside,” Gilda says. “There's the red car.” And, indeed, there it is, Iggy's “Lizzie,” parked at the curb like a red fire truck, its top down, brazen and open to the sun. I move with Gilda toward the darkness inside, where the air turns cool, dark and foreign, but still: Izzy is inside. My sense of excitement suggests to me that we could be moving slowly toward the sun's whirling center.

Ivory chopsticks, hard, twig-like noodles in a white bowl, thick-lipped tea cups with thin-legged storks painted on them. Gilda sits primly beside me, against the wall, while Iggy and Izzy play a switching game with their tea cups:

“Gimme that one, mine is chipped.”

“Give it back, you goose. Why should I cut my lip!”

“Why should I?”

“We could ask the waiter for another one,” I venture. But mother and son are having too much fun, swinging their arms back and forth, making a racket, till Iggy cuffs Izzy on the head and says, “Shaddup or I'll take away your Betty Grable pinup and put a picture of me there instead.”

Izzy pretends to throw up. Then the waiter comes to take our order.

We all agree on chicken chow mein and boiled rice; tea comes with our lunch. Izzy asks for a side order of spare ribs. I don't know if I will be able to eat whatever comes; I have trouble with food, especially if I can't tell what it is, or what's in it.

“They don't serve liver here, do they?” I ask, and Izzy thinks this is hilarious, he laughs till he slides off his seat and disappears under the table. Then he makes a grab for my legs and pretends to sob into my lap.

“Oh please, please, waiter, make us liver chow mein, it's a delicacy, we can't live without it.”

Gilda sips her tea and makes a face. It has leaves, black as little flies, floating around in it.

“Up here, young man,” Iggy says, and she pats his seat until he surfaces, just as the egg flower soup is served. I try mine with its little shovel-shaped spoon. It is very much like chicken soup. I am deeply relieved.

The restaurant is nearly empty, and while Gilda and Iggy talk, Izzy suggests we take a table of our own.

“Go ahead,” Iggy says. “But don't make a mess. Have a heart; don't pour soy sauce all over the tablecloth.”

Soy sauce
. Izzy is at home with everything here. I have never heard of the things he extracts from the tangle of steaming food on his plate:
bok choy, bean sprouts, water chestnuts
.

Izzy holds up a small umbrella-shaped object between his chopstick.

“What's that?”

“What's
that
? You never saw a
mushroom
?”

“No.”

“God, you are a peasant.”

“It looks slimy.”

“Taste it.” He holds out his chopsticks. I don't recoil, but I hesitate. And here I am at a threshold again (will it never stop happening?)—the challenge to move into new territory, to risk my life! And indeed the thing looks dangerous: flesh-colored and slippery and oddly like…but no, I have never seen one, why do I have this thought.

“So if you throw up, you throw up.” (He doesn't say
puke
; I am deeply relieved by that.)

I lean forward, close my eyes and open my mouth. Izzy draws his chopsticks with the thing on it in a heart-shaped line along my lips, and then lays it gently down on my tongue like an offering. I close my lips. Before I can taste it, it slides down my throat and disappears.

Izzy laughs. “Now you're poisoned. You've eaten the forbidden fruit,” he says. “Now you have to leave the Garden of Eden.”

“You're a lunatic,” I dare to say to him. He loves that he has shocked me. But, yes, I feel the mushroom inside me, throwing sparks.

“Tell me more. What else am I?”

“I never met anyone like you.”

“Good.” He sits back, satisfied. “I'm one of a kind.” The waiter arrives with the spare ribs.

“Have one.” Izzy holds the plate out to me.

“Is this pork?”

“No, it's liver in disguise.” I lift with my fingers a rib, wine-red and hot, almost sizzling, the edges are dark and look succulent.

“Bite it, Issa. Do it. You'll love it.”

I take a strip of meat gingerly between my front teeth, which are small; they sink in deep.

“How is it?”

I am making my evaluation. It's sweet, it's crisp. “It's good,” I say.

“It
is
pork, you know.”

“So I'm ruined.”

“Not really,” he promises. “There's much further to go to be ruined.”

Iggy makes us come back to their table for fortune cookies and tea. I know the two women have been talking the whole time. I have never seen Gilda's cheeks so red, or her eyes so brilliant.

“Issa, baby,” Iggy says to me. “We're going to make a new woman out of your aunt here. We've got to get her out in the world more, take her to Coney Island, make her try pizza, drag her to a Dodgers game.”

Gilda laughs, looking down at her plate.

On the wall above our table is a small painted lamp, unlit, covered by a milky glass tube. The picture is of a delicate Chinese girl in pink silk robes, holding a parasol. I notice a black ridged switch at the bottom of the lamp; I reach to turn on the light.

A bolt shoots through me, so sudden, so hot, so shocking, that I gasp, leap up, and begin to dance wildly. My fingertips are quivering.

“What is it? Did you get a shock?” Gilda cries out.

“Bad wiring,” Iggy says. “This place is a dump.”

Gilda puts her arms around me. She is trembling. “She's okay,” Iggy says. “Relax.”

“I would kill myself if anything happened to her,” Gilda says. She covers my face with kisses.

Izzy says “Maybe it's just a message from God telling her not to eat pork.”

Gilda throws a look at her plate, which has remnants of meat on it. Izzy is still laughing; he doesn't know about the ball of lightning that was aimed at my mother as she cooked bacon. He has no humility in him, but now that I, too, have been electrified, I feel I have been given a warning.

Polio lives, a wide green bug with blinking red eyes. It hides beneath the iron grates of the drinking fountains at the park, in the silver sprinklers of wading pools, on the rims of cups in restaurants, on the headrests at the movie theater. If you inhale deeply, it can ride into your lungs on a single breath, splash up from the toilet at school, enter your nose if you lean down to smell a rose. No form of “be careful” has ever been like this, no warning to watch out for cars, for wild dogs, for bad boys, for bullies, has ever had this edge of hysteria to it.

No. No. No
. Not only is “no” the twenty-four-hour song in
my
ears, but The Skaters hear it, the Girl Scouts hear it, the listeners to radio hear it. “
No
” is affixed to the sky above us like sky-writing. No wind blurs or blows it away.

Esther Tempkin, a fellow Girl Scout whose father is a doctor, distributes special cotton masks at our Girl Scout meeting and warns us to wear them if we have to go on the subway, the trolley or into crowded waiting rooms at the dentist's or doctor's office. Her father has seen “terrible cases” she warns us—at the first sign of a sore throat or a stiff neck, we must rush to the doctor. She waggles her tongue in her mouth and rolls her eyes in her head to show what it will be like if we don't take care. She's a beautiful girl: red-haired and luscious-looking, though not a tramp at all (The Bike-Riders and I have discussed this). She has “developed” but wears loose blouses and big sweaters. She has been the first in our troop to see blood—we regard her as a successful warrior queen. She has seen blood and she has survived.

After her demonstration about how we are to wear the cotton masks, she invites us all to her house Tuesday night to watch “The Milton Berle Show.”