The Kingdom of Brooklyn (23 page)

Iggy says, “Next we'll remake Issa!”

“Issa is great the way she is,” Izzy says. He looks me over and I'm ready for it. I'm wearing my dungarees and penny loafers and a red plaid man's shirt. If I keep my mouth shut and thus force my small teeth into the background, I look pretty impressive.

Iggy drives fast, with the top down, toward Ebbets Field. She makes one stop, at the rest home, so Gilda can drop off a jar of gefilte fish for someone to feed to my grandmother. Gilda teeters in on her delicate high heels, wearing her glamorous hat, and indicates by a wave she will be only a few seconds.

Iggy begins to sing: “Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd, buy me some peanuts and
Cracker Jacks
, I don't care if I never get back…”

Izzy is doing something to me in the back seat; he's pretending to teach me how to crack my knuckles, but instead he's just folding my fingers back and forth, rolling them in a gentle, tender rhythm that relays itself in waves up my arm and in arrows of heat to the deep center of my body.

I don't care if we never get to the ball game. I don't know why the world loves baseball so much; especially men. (Iggy loves it like a man.) Teams playing against one another are like countries at war: they have to hate the others because they have to love themselves, and that's reason enough for them to want to wipe the others out, to kill. They do whatever they have to do to get the right feeling.

Gilda is taking a long, long time. Iggy gets tired of singing.

“Wait here, kids,” she tells us. “I'll go get that slow poke out of there.”

But she doesn't come out, either. It's getting hot with the top down, Izzy wants to go into the rest home to get them.

“Come on,” he says. “Or we'll be late for the game.”

“You don't want to go in there.” A buzzing has started in my head and is growing louder, as if a swarm of bees is crawling in through my ears. “I can't go in.” I have the oddest thought in my head: that if I wear my favorite clothes into that building, my dungarees and my man's shirt, and my best penny loafers, they will be ruined forever. I have such fear of what is inside those walls: I will see what is to become of me.

“Then I'll go myself,” and, in a blink, Izzy is out of the car and up the steps of the rest home. He disappears inside. Now I am
really
afraid. I'm alone in a red convertible, and although I thought I was on my way to a great adventure, a long ball game, hours of sitting and letting Izzy play games with my fingers, I am now staring at the door of a house of skeletons.

I let out a single sob, a kind of practice cry for whatever is going on, the horror I will soon be shown.

I don't know if it's a half-hour or an hour later: I have been sitting at the wheel of the car and pretending to drive. I drive myself to Florida, it so happens, and I am back on the beach gathering coconuts. My mother is not with me, so the soldiers have only me to admire. Only me to give chocolate bars to, only me to applaud. This is a technique I learned in kindergarten: put yourself somewhere else when you don't want to be where you have to be. It's not easy, holding onto that wheel and keeping the car going to Florida when in truth you're bouncing over craters and caverns in the road and the wheel is being wrenched out of your hands. When in truth the front door of the rest home is waiting to suck you inside and throw you to the wild animals.
Look over here
, it keeps saying, but I won't. I'm going in another direction. To the sunshine, to the ocean, to the admiration of an army; if, in fact, not to the Dodgers game.

But louder than my thoughts is the siren of an ambulance. It's pulling up right behind me, a bulbous white truck with signs and symbols on it denoting the battle against death.

“Hey-Issa, Hey-Issa,” is what I hear from the front porch of the rest home, the sound of a snake hissing my name, and there is Izzy, holding open the screen door of the building, and now here comes Iggy and Gilda, out the door while the ambulance men run in with their stretcher.

“It's your grandmother,” Izzy says, letting go of the screen door and running to the car. He opens the driver's door and lets me out. “She was bleeding from the mouth.”

No. I won't hear about it. I won't think about it. They can't make me take this in and picture it, feel it, remember it forever with all the other things I have had to bury under the sand, deep under, under sand that's wet and further buried under sand that's dry.

“Don't tell me, Izzy.”

But he doesn't have to. Because now I see what I have avoided the sight of—for how many years? Now it's inescapable. She's coming out, feet first on the stretcher, a limp helpless lump of the human being I used to love, and blood is on her chin, on her gown, on her tangled sheets.

I don't want to see her face, but my eyes are drawn to it with an enormous force. I pray she won't be looking, that if she is, she can't see, that if she sees, she won't know me.

But she does. She knows me. Her eyes rivet themselves to mine and hold there as she is moved past me.

“Grandma!”

She cranes her neck to watch me as they carry her away, into the back of the ambulance. So she isn't unaware, she isn't unconscious, insane, gone out. She isn't—as I have fooled myself into believing—not there. The only truth is that she cannot move and she cannot talk. But she is there and she has been there every single day and night that I have
not
been there, she has been strapped into that bed for all the time I've been riding my bike, dreaming my dreams, kissing Beloved, playing stoop ball with Izzy, licking ice cream cones, watching Milton Berle. I have only had to wait a half-hour in a hot car in a state of fear and uncertainty, and she has been waiting for the torture to break and for the fear to relent for almost forever!

“Grandma!”

They are closing her into the ambulance and I am leaning against a square post on the porch of the rest home and sobbing. I am punching the wooden post with my fist, I am trying to bite the wooden post with my tiny, worthless, hideous, weak, ugly teeth.

“Take her home, Izzy,” Iggy tells her son, and then they are gone, the ambulance is gone, and Iggy's red car, with Gilda in it, is following along behind.

We are only a few blocks from home. Izzy pulls me along. I see the sun glinting off the points of the gilded poles separating the bicycle path from the benches on Ocean Parkway. I want to fling myself on one of those golden spears. I want to, I will!

But Izzy keeps both arms around me, to hold me up, to keep me going. “She's old, Issa,” he whispers. “You're not old.”

“But I will be,” I say. “And so will you. And you know it.”

The Skaters who became The Bike-Riders have now become The Cookers/Sewers and I am one of them. A contest at P.S. 238 has pitted our homemaking class, led by Miss Thomas, against the class led by Mrs. Slutzkin. There will be two weeks of preparation of cooking and sewing at home and in school, at the end of which the two classes will present their delicacies to our principal, Mr. Hunt, for a taste-test, and our sewing creations to his wife, Mrs. Hunt, for a judgment by her expert eye.

I have been required to write down the Safety Rules of the Kitchen in my Homemaking Notebook, on whose brown cover some other rules are listed. Four boys on the cover (one of them a colored boy) stand behind a fence holding baseball bats and mitts. The words over their heads are, “What's his race or religion got to do with it…
HE CAN PITCH!
” Nailed to the fence is an admonition to me telling me what I can do:

1. ACCEPT or reject people on their
individual worth
.

2. SPEAK UP wherever we are, at home, in business, in our school, labor, church or social groups,
against
prejudice,
for
understanding.

3. DON'T LISTEN to, or spread, rumors against a race, or a religion. Remember—
that's being an American!

Rules are overtaking me; we are bombarded with them, must know them, be able to recite them, be ready to be tested on them, and the main way to guarantee this is to have us write them down. Our time in school is primarily spent writing down all the rules:

It seems to me that every one of those rules is just a result of common sense. Couldn't they trust me to figure it out for myself?

Miss Thomas's
essential
requirement for planning a meal is the writing down of all the details that have to be remembered and attended to:

I am against all this. The formalities sap my energies. Don't they know I have a brain and can remember that plates have to be set on the table before food can be served? That if I am cooking Stuffed Norwegian Prune Salad and Puffed Rice Balls, I will need to have prunes and puffed rice ready to use?

Still, recipes are dictated to us hour after hour, and we dutifully bend our heads and take them down. All across the home ec room I see a sea of heads with neat parts in their hair bending over their notebooks. I yawn and write, yawn and write:
wash prunes thoroughly, steam prunes until tender, remove the prune stones, fill the hollow prune with peanut butter, or other prunes. Press the prunes into shape and roll them in granulated sugar. Arrange prunes like a flower in plate. Place cream cheese into center prune and serve prunes proudly. Show that you are proud of your prunes
.

If this is what I will have to do when I get married, I am worried whether or not I will be able to bear marriage. Marriage to Izzy, as I imagine it, doesn't seem to include either prunes or dictation. What would we two do if married? Play Old Maid, crack our knuckles, play stoop ball, eat licorice whips and drink egg creams, touch each other (accidentally and on purpose), go to Coney Island and live in the fun house, travel on the bumper cars, ride the steeplechase, plunge from the parachute jump.

But we can't do any of this, even before we are married, because I am committed to the Homemaking Contest. I have to stay home and make vegetable chowder, baking powder biscuits, Spanish rice, scalloped fish, peanut brittle and cinnamon toast. I have to be prepared, if asked, to recite from memory all ingredients and methods of preparation. When I'm not cooking, I have to be sewing. Our teacher has taught us to perform the hemstitch on white muslin, overcasting on unbleached muslin, gathering on white cotton, tucking on a ruffle, darning on scrim, darning on cashmere, and darning on stockinet, catch stitching on flannel, overhand stitching on French linen, and slip stitching on silk. In my sewing notebook, called “Plain Sewing,” I have pinned in little squares of material demonstrating each of these stitches, one to a page. If this is plain sewing, I wonder, then, what is
fancy
sewing?

At our house, my mother never sews, but Gilda is permitted to darn my father's socks. He goes upstairs once a month (I have to accompany him) and tries on all the socks she has mended for him. There is a ritual to this: my father and I sit on the couch and Gilda sits at her desk (its top is covered by a green paper blotter) under the light of a floor lamp, and she hands him each sock, one by one. He peels off one of the socks he is wearing, usually the one on his left foot, and pulls on the mended sock. If it is lumpy, he strips it off and hands it back to Gilda who slides it onto the smooth round surface of the wooden darning egg she holds by a graceful handle and pounds it with the pocked surface of her silver thimble. Then she hands it back to my father. He puts it back on his foot.

His toes are long and hairy; his big toe is enormous, and the others are fitted against one another as if they are paired for sleeping cuddled together. There are some blue veins on his ankles; without his sock on, his foot has the look of a pale, unprotected primitive animal.

Tonight there is a particularly lumpy bulge at the tip of the big toe where Gilda has darned a large hole. My father tries on the sock and takes it off several times, each time handing it to Gilda to pound it further. He begins to laugh as she taps her thimble fiercely on the darning egg; the wood of the egg is golden brown and smoother than marble. She looks up and laughs at what he must be seeing. She taps again, then hands the egg to my father so he can use his greater strength. She offers him the thimble, but he can't get it on—not even on his pinky. They are both laughing. She works on it further and then it's time for him to try the sock on again. When she hands the sock back to him, he looks helpless, so she gets down on her knees at his feet, props his foot on her thigh and slides the navy blue cloth gently on at the toes, then slowly smooths the cloth up over his heel and ankle. She pulls it halfway up his calf so that her hands disappear under his trousers.

“How's that?” she says, keeping her head bowed. Under the light of the floor lamp, her hair glows auburn, almost aflame.

My father wiggles his toes. “Still a little lumpy in there, I think.” He holds out his foot to her, and she takes his big toe between her fingers. She massages his toe.