The Kingdom of Brooklyn (17 page)

“You can give the extra copies to a friend,” he says.

“What friend?” I say to him. “I have no friends.”

“You will make a friend if you give away a book.”

“Two books is twice as good as one,” I argue.

“You will end up like your mother,” he says.

What does that mean? But he disappears up the stairs to Gilda's house, informing me that I am to stay downstairs and examine my books.

“What if I want to come up?”

“You stay here,” he says. It is the kind of comment that invites no question. I don't argue. I get busy reading the top book, on diseases of the intestinal tract. The next one on collecting foreign coins. I have a long way to go to get to Nancy Drew. But even as I read, I recall a fairy tale in which a starving beggar asks an old woman (dressed in a red cap and white apron) who lives in the woods if he can have some food; she agrees to bake him a muffin, but each batch of muffins comes out of the oven too big, too fragrant, too delicious looking. She keeps trying to make him a tiny muffin, but the dough rises and the muffins grow big and beautiful. She can't bring herself to give away anything so good; finally, impatient with waiting, the beggar casts a spell on her and turns her into a woodpecker, with a red cap and a white apron, who will have to peck away at the bark of trees into eternity, to get her small bit of sustenance to live.

Still, I won't give away a book, not one.

I am getting older and older and still I have no skates. Now I want a bike. I often dream about a bike shaped like a horse with wings. The horse is called “Schwinn”; he has a beeper horn on his flank. I ride him over the rooftops of the Kingdom of Brooklyn, dipping and darting between chimneys and under elevated tracks. In every dream in which I fly, there is a moment during which something happens to my tongue; it inflates, like a bike tire, it swells in my mouth and emits something like a taste. I don't know what I taste, but I can almost taste it. When I wake, the feeling is still there, the appetite for something I cannot name, the fullness of my tongue, palpable in its nearly tasting something extraordinary.

The Skaters/Bike-Riders and I have our first club meeting in Gilda's living room. Sam Marcus is taking Gilda to the movies, so we have no constraints. The Skaters/Bike-Riders get right to the point: I have to be initiated. This is a ceremony without which no one can ever belong to the club. It's simple: I have to be blindfolded; I have to taste something they serve me on a teaspoon; and I have to let them do something to me that's “scary but not dangerous.”

I will allow anything done to me to belong to their club. I reason that it must follow from belonging to The Bike-Riders that I will somehow then be given a bike. I feel sure they can't kill me—murder is against the law—and, after all, I am in my own house, all I have to do if they try to harm me is run down the stairs and burst into my house, calling for help.

I turn myself over to them. The giving-up of myself as I let them cover my eyes is a form of gaining power itself. In surrender, I become brave and strong. In being blinded, I have new vistas opened to me.

Wild with excitement, I open my mouth. They are preparing something, laughing and giggling, and I await my fate, eyes closed, mouth open. The swollen tongue of my dreams is becoming ready to accept a gift—I am ready to faint and fly, live and die, all at once.

“Swallow it!” they command me, the order I have taken from my mother every day at every meal every day of my life. And always I have resisted: fought her, rejected her, gagged and spit and vomited and cried and begged. Now, not protesting, I let them feed me the spoonful of my joining them, of breaking out of my mother's house. The thing they put in my mouth is so vile, I can't give it a name. It's sharper than a knife, thicker than honey, more tangy than raw onion, more bitter than bitter herbs. But delicious.

“Don't spit it out!” they command me.

“I won't.” I am totally obedient, swallowing the brew. Stars are sparking on my tongue, rivers of fire run down my throat.

Still locked in darkness, I am led to the couch, pressed down, wrapped in a tunnel of cloth, lifted up, tossed downward, flung upward, hurtled and bounced and thudded and dumped. Out on the floor.

They remove the blindfold. I see them folding Gilda's bedspread, in which I have been slung about like a sack of grain.

“What did I swallow?” I need to know if I will die shortly. I want to know how long I will have to enjoy my last happy moments.

“We'll never tell.” But on Gilda's sink I see mustard and horseradish and vinegar and Manischewitz wine.

I stare at the new world of my friends. I toast myself silently. “To freedom. To survival. To friendship.”

I am sometimes Issa and sometimes I. I sometimes don't remember how old I really am or what my duties for the day are: I am just Issa in all of time, deep in the heart of all I know. This is a deeply comfortable place to be, the heart of home, where nothing changes, where I will always understand myself. More and more I like to go there, to float in the sensation of Issa Nowhere, Issa Knowing.

But there is so much to do in the other place, they are always calling me, do this, do that.
Keep out of my way
, I want to tell them.
Let go
. I want to curl up and be in the great moments of my mind, when Beloved first popped his head out of the carton, when I was Mary, Mother of Jesus, when I stood on the beach in my butterfly pinafore and all the soldiers in the world applauded me. I don't only choose happy times: I also want to remember the ball of lightning sizzling behind my mother, the moment Dr. Ellen pulled my tooth out, how my grandmother looked in the bathtub and then later was folded to a flat soul in her wheelchair. I am so busy in there, where my mind swirls and ticks and circulates new scenes and old scenes, sometimes in the straight line of how they happened, and sometimes in new positions that make all the old arrangements seem different.

This moment, blindfolded in the dark with my friends around me, trying to trust them and knowing they could kill me, wanting to take that chance and doing it—this moment will go into the deep other place and be there forever. You know at once when moments like this are happening, but you can't create them. You wish you could make them happen, but they take you by surprise. If you wait long enough,
something
happens. I have to remember that when I am so bored, so tired. Just wait. The earth is turning slowly, but soon it will take you off balance and topple you. Just wait.

The antique store is on Hansen Place, across the street from the Railway Express truck station. My father has his wooden Indian outside on the street—he often stands outside next to it, smoking his pipe; when a customer comes in, he sticks the pipe in a hole in the Indian's mouth and goes into the store with the customer.

I am here for the day with Beloved. Wall-to-wall carpeting is being laid down at home, and I am in the way. So I get to help out in the store.

Everything in the window is dusty—a bronze elephant, a punch bowl with cupids painted on the inside, old pocket watches, chiming clocks, perfume bottles, a fat Buddha, guns from the Civil War, Japanese swords.

Nothing here is interesting to me. Next door, at the candy store, everything is alive, illuminated. Red wax lips, chocolate licorice whips, candy dots on a white strip of paper, orange-and-white chicken-feed corn, Popsicles, candy bars, comic books. Couldn't life have been good to me and given my father the candy store instead?

The cup of coins sits on the counter—it's a big cup and sometimes it's full, sometimes it's half full. If you look inside, you see mostly pennies on top, quarters below: there's no way to tell if it's all filled with pennies or quarters. My father doesn't know. He gambles at every opportunity. He offers the cup: “How much will you give me for it?” Some of his customers, mostly men, love the game—they think they will win money. I think they always do. Now and then someone will actually come back and say, “Remember when I paid you ten for the change? There was twenty-two in there.”

Luckily, my mother has never heard a remark like that. She would be angry for days. I am always angry about it. He won't give me money for comic books. (“I can get you dozens of them free; don't I get you dozens at estate sales?” “But they're never the ones I want.” What does he care? He thinks comic books are comic books.)

Beloved behaves perfectly outside the store. He sits at the Indian's feet in the sun, his leash tied to the Indian's tree-trunk base. He has only one ear now; his scar is made of little star-like stitches. My father has a matching scar of stitches on his shin. And I have a scar on my tongue that no one can see. I can feel it with the bottom of my top teeth. I am less perfect all the time: first my knees were ruined for being a Rockette and now a damaged tongue. By the time I am grown up, I will no doubt be in shreds.

A nun comes into the store. She has a tight white band above her eyes, round glasses, a dark long dress, black shoes, a black cape.

My father is very respectful. I see his honor in his eyes. He definitely won't offer her the cup of coins. She browses at the back of the store while he takes care of another customer. It's Jack, a dealer—a dealer is another man in the same business—and they talk what my father calls “shop talk.” They talk about Otto and how he fences stolen jewelry. They talk about how old gold coins are hard to find. They talk about Persian rugs being too big to handle—you'd need a huge store. Jack points to a painting on the wall of a girl with a basket of flowers and asks to see it. He examines the back more than the front and he offers my father ten dollars. It's a deal, although the price marked on it is twenty-five. Why did my father just give away an extra fifteen dollars? I could have had a Sparkle Plenty doll. I could have had a bike. I could have had…

Just then I see the nun at the back of the store sweep an object off a shelf and hide it under her cape. I think it was a vase.

I tug at my father's sleeve. “Daddy, Daddy!” I whisper the news to him. He stares down the aisle at the nun, who is strolling toward us, holding her cape tight against her chest. Jack, who heard my whisper, is looking, too. My father stands motionless and says nothing. The nun comes past us, smiling sweetly. She leaves, passes the wooden Indian, bends and taps Beloved on the head. She is gone. “Jesus!” says Jack.

“It's okay,” my father says.

“What's missing?” Jack says. “What did she get?”

“It doesn't matter. Don't worry about it. Who knows? She might donate it to charity.”

“Yeah,” Jack says. “Like I'm Jesus Christ. Well, buddy. Easy come, easy go.” Then he lays the painting he just bought on the counter and rips off the frame. Just like that, he rips the wood apart and tears off the backing and then he shouts: “Holy cow! I had a hunch! Look at that!” Hidden behind the backing of the painting are twenty-dollar bills in rows. Jack is counting them. When he gets to number twenty, I feel myself start to cry. I go outside and lay my cheek on Beloved's warm little triangular head.

My father never once found diamonds in a pin cushion, not once. Why aren't we ever the lucky ones?

Late in the afternoon, my father buys me an ice-cream pop next door. He buys pipe tobacco. We stand outside and watch the traffic on Hansen Place; we watch the big green Railway Express trucks pull in and take off from the lot across the street.

My father is tamping new tobacco down into his pipe when a blue car careens around the corner, jumps the curb and crashes into the plate glass of the candy store window.

The big car hangs there, half on the curb, half into the shattered store window, with its motor racing. The man in it is slumped over the steering wheel, but the motor is roaring.

My father hesitates only half a second. Then he rushes to the car, tries the door on the driver's side, runs to the other side and tries that door, runs back and gets the wooden Indian, and carries it with him, Beloved dragging along on his leash, toward the crashed car. I run after him, grabbing and freeing Beloved. My father hurls the Indian into the back car window, smashes the glass, reaches in to unlock the door, pulls the man out of the car, lays him gently on the ground, jumps back in and shuts off the motor.

The man's face is blue. My father lifts him in his arms and opens his shirt button. The candy store man has run out and run in. Police come. The man may be dead or he may not be dead. I don't know him. But I feel as if I don't know my father, either. All these years of watching him read
The Brooklyn Eagle
and seeing him pick peaches off the tree in the backyard, and hearing him sing “Danny Boy” and I don't begin to know the depth of the things inside him. I have enormous respect now, I am in awe of him. He is stronger than I ever realized. And I am his. I may be like him in some amazing way. Why, oh why, didn't I ever think of that?

Gilda is having an engagement shower. The customers crowd up the stairs with white gift boxes while my mother sits motionless in our living room, on our new rattan couch, which rests on our new wall-to-wall flowered carpet.

“Gilda says you're invited,” I tell my mother. “She says to come up. I'm going up soon.”

“No thank you,” my mother says. I know that look on her face, I know trouble when I see it. I don't stay to hear her opinion, but run upstairs to observe the party.

So much giggling and laughter from the women; they sound like young girls, like The Bike-Riders and me at our club meetings, but they are all older than Gilda and she is nearly forty. There is the delicious moment of suspense as Gilda peels back the tissue paper, then her exclamation of delight: a red lace nightgown, satin slippers with roses at their toes, perfume, bath powder with a big feathery powder puff, a box of chocolate-covered cherries.

Gilda is radiant, her teeth are white, her lips red. She has never laughed so much, or blushed so rose-red as she is blushing. I help her serve tea and homemade honey cake, special mandelbrot with chocolate marbling, delicate pastries from the bakery. She laughs with the women and they make her blush. I've never seen her this relaxed and happy when she is with Sam Marcus. When he's here, her back is straight, her lips are pursed with nervousness, she keeps her hands folded in her lap. Why is she going to marry this man?