The Kingdom of Brooklyn (24 page)

“That feels pretty smooth to me,” she says.

“No, it's still got a ridge there.”

“I never said I could make it perfect,” Gilda says. “Maybe you'll just have to throw this sock out.”

“That's what
she
says,” my father says. “Throw them all out and buy new ones.”

“You could,” Gilda says.

“But then I couldn't come up here,” my father says. They both look at me. Then he says, “Shouldn't you be downstairs cooking vanilla cornstarch pudding tonight for your contest?”

“No, candied sweet potatoes,” I correct him.

“You better get busy.”

As I get up to leave, my father rises also. Gilda goes down the hall and gets her coat from the hall closet.

“Do you want me to drive you to the hospital?” he asks. “She couldn't complain about that.”

“That's okay, Iggy is picking me up.”

I haven't asked and they haven't said anything about my grandmother. She's just in the hospital, she's been there for three weeks. They don't trouble me with news of her because they know I'm so busy cooking and sewing. I am sewing my public project for Mrs. Hunt to judge (it's an embroidered dishcloth) and a private project for myself (a satin brassiere, which I can't get right.) I have cut out two circles of pink satin, using my compass to guide me, but a circle is flat, and I don't know how to get the slight cupping I need for my nipples. That's all I have: nipples. And barely raised. Nothing else around them has grown and they, themselves, are infinitesimal, nearly invisible. But a flat circle won't do. (I sew this private part of my project carefully locked in the bathroom.)

All week long I am allowed to stay up late to plan my imaginary menu for the imaginary major dinner party that I am required to invent for my home economics notebook. Tonight they absolutely don't want me to stay up late: something strange is in the air. No one talks during dinner, except The Screamer, who babbles on about some nonsense, but my mother and father keep their heads down and eat their food without looking up. I wonder if they have had another fight. But I don't wonder long. I can't be bothered. I have myself to think about.

Once I get into bed, I carry a flashlight under my blanket so I can work on my project without waking The Screamer, who has fallen asleep while forcing her dolls to talk to one another. They both talk just like her, even the bridegroom.

I can see her neat straight hair on the pillow of the bed that is catty-cornered to mine. My eyes linger on her head for a few seconds, wondering who she is, what her life could possibly be like, how she came to be so closely associated with me when I don't know her or care about her at all.

I am restless: in my home ec notebook I write down tapioca pudding for dessert, and note beside it that “Tapioca is made from the juice of the cassava tree, which is one of several tropical-American shrubs or herbs of the spurge family.” Is it a shrub or is it a herb? What is the spurge family? (The information is in my notebook, from something Miss Thomas said.)

Never mind the menu. I fish under my bed for my Slam Book, which is a secret book that I passed around in seventh grade to other girls, who write down secrets like their “Best Song,” “Best Actress,” “Best Friend,” and most important, “Remarks and Comments.” I read my last year's entry, which indicated that my favorite song was “Buttons and Bows,” my favorite actress Esther Williams, my favorite movie
Luxury Liner
, my best friend: “There is no such thing as a true friend.” (I probably hadn't met Izzy yet.)

I notice that I must have had my father fill out a page: his best song was “I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover,” his best actress was Bette Davis and worst actress Mae West, best actor Gary Cooper and worst actor Eddie Cantor, best movie
It Happened One Night
, and under comments he wrote, “Other good songs are ‘Offen prepachick brent a fierl' and ‘I Wish I Was in Dixie.'” Under best friend, he wrote, “Gilda,” and added, “because she makes such good mandelbrot.”

Burn this, I thought. If my mother ever sees it, she will go mad. Lately whenever my father praises Gilda for anything at all, even just for her good mending of his socks, my mother says, “She's got you completely fooled. She's evil. She's a cat with velvet claws.”

I slip the Slam Book far and deep under my bed and switch off my flashlight.

Just as I am falling asleep, I hear a tapping at the window over my head. My heart nearly stops. The man who used to stare in my nine windows hasn't come for a very long time. I am afraid to look, afraid of what is there now, and whose face he wears.

I keep my neck rigid, I don't move at all. Fear again. Just when a moment arrives that I am almost able to bat fear away, ignore polio, ignore bombs, forget pain, concentrate on tapioca, a whirlwind of it takes me unaware and I feel the spin begin.

The tapping continues, turns into the tattoo of “Shave and a haircut, shampoo,” and I leap up and see Izzy's face pressing against the glass. He must be standing on the bench in the front garden. He places his finger to his lips and points to the front door. Down beneath him, in the faint glow of moonlight, I see the outline of his bicycle.

Fear disappears. He has come to delight me. To challenge my adherence to rules. He wants me to forget rules. His tapping on the window is my invitation and my dare.

And so I do the forbidden thing: I unlock and unbolt and unchain the front door to my house and to my bedroom. In my nightclothes, with my hair wild from the pillow, I invite Izzy in.

Being in a dark room with a man has its own essence; I am as electric as if a ball of lightning is in the room with us. Izzy and I cover our heads with my blanket, to cushion our whispers and to enhance the thrill of our collusion. (We have an enemy to watch out for; the sister/Screamer can't be trusted, though I know she tends to sleep heavily, stupidly, like the thick-skinned lump that she is.)

“What? What? Why are you here?” I demand of him. I think it's some great, wild idea he's had, sneaking out of his house, riding his bike over the bumps of the sidewalk in the dead of night, feeling his rubber tires knit the old, crooked cracks into a freeway of adventure.

“I have bad news,” he whispers. “The worst.”

“The
worst
?” The worst, as I understand it, is
dead
, but who could be dead? His worst would be his mother, my worst would be my dog. “
Who?
“

“Your grandmother!”

“
My grandmother?
“

“Dead,” he says. “I saw her myself, in her coffin.”

“
You saw her?
“

“This morning. In the funeral home.”

I can't take this into my mind. Scenes of the day flash by and I find nothing out of the ordinary: my hours in school, coming home, Gilda upstairs, my mother downstairs, milk and cookies, my practicing the complicated performance of making Stuffed Norwegian Prune Salad, the oil burner man coming to fill the tank in the basement.

My mind circles these events—is this a “find the mistake in the picture” puzzle?—and comes to rest on the snake of the oilman's black rubber hose, as if it must contain the clue to Izzy's bombshell.

I see it, both in recent memory and in conjunction with all the years I have witnessed the ritual: the unwinding of the thick black snake from the coils rolled in the oil truck, the dragging of the great tube up the front walkway, the turn around the stoop as it's tugged and twisted into an unnatural right angle, the scraping-jerk of it up the long alley and into the opening of the low cellar window.

“You have to believe me. She's really dead,” Izzy is pleading. “I saw her myself.”

But I can't talk to him now, not while I'm following the progress of the hose as it's pushed into the slit of the cellar window; not while I'm feeling the uneasy thrill of witnessing this bizarre, allowable penetration into my house, the entry of this awesome object through the cellar window (also the place through which I imagine bad men must enter if they are to get to me, the way all nine men looking in all my nine windows will someday attack me).

The oil man is always ragged and smeared with black, his face is black, his hands are black, he's dirty, and smells of rancid oil, he's never the same man but always looks the same, and he pushes that huge black cylinder into the secret opening of my house and pumps the dangerous, flammable oil into the waiting mouth of the oil tank.

“She looked like a ghost,” Izzy says.

The enormous oil tank rests like a submarine beside the green monster of the oil burner which, each morning, belches steam up from its pipes and rattles the bones of the house.

“There was white powder on her face,” Izzy says, talking so close to my ear that he blows my hair deep into its opening and I shake with a chill. I fend him off for the moment while I consider how
long
it takes for the oil to be pumped in! How impressed I am by the simultaneous emptying of one vessel and the filling of another. And always, as accompaniment, I hear the steady whirring noise, the low thrumming vibration traveling from the truck at the curb along the length of the house, into the window, down to the cellar floor, into the hole in the oil tank.

Sometimes I watch from the alley, sometimes I go down into the cellar to see the needle of the gauge rise from Empty to Full, moving like the single hand of a clock that travels from the start of the universe to the end of time.

The black hose pulses and shivers; if I touch it, the rubber is hot and moves like a stream of black lava under my hand. The man with the black face stands holding the hose at his pelvis, staring down into the cellar window to see the gauge on the tank, and watching me, if I am down there.

I was down there today, putting soap powder into the Bendix for my mother, while the black thing unloaded its stuff, jerked and convulsed and leaked a few drops of thick oil under the tank.

“I actually touched her face,” Izzy insists. “It was ice cold.”

“
Nothing bad happened here today!
” I blow the words at him. He blinks his eyes at the blast. “No one died today. Only the oil man came.”

“Your mother didn't want anyone to tell you,” Izzy says to me. “I heard my mother talking on the phone to Gilda about it. Your mother wants you to win some kind of cooking contest at school and she didn't want this to upset you. She warned Gilda not to tell you,
or else
. She said it wasn't important enough.”

“But prunes!” I say. “How important are prunes?”

“I told them you
have
to know. I told them at the funeral home this morning. I told them you should be at the funeral tomorrow, but they're going to send you to school like today and go without you. That's why I came over here tonight.”

I consider Izzy now, under the blanket. Is he a liar? Is he an enemy? If he is not my enemy, then my family is the enemy.

“They would
never
not tell me!” I scream out suddenly. “She's MY GRANDMOTHER!”

My scream wakes The Screamer, who also screams, which is her automatic response to everything.

And then we hear the steps of my father approaching the bedroom, the steps of a giant who shakes the walls with the force of his heavy steps. He flicks on the switch and blasts our eyes open in a flare of orange light.

“What's going on here?” he roars as he takes in the scene before him: Issa, his daughter, in bed, under a blanket, with a man.

They try to explain it away: my mother and father babbling, outdoing each other in their desperation to make it seem fair, myself screaming back, Izzy defending himself and close to tears. Gilda running downstairs to see what's wrong. Izzy's mother is called to come and take him away, he is castigated and shouted down, “
You had no goddamn business telling her, you little bastard
,”—(my mother is not hoarding her bad words)—their miserable excuses are prying out my eyes, coming at me like arrows, “
We wanted to protect you, no need to disturb you, Grandma was old and wanted to die, she wouldn't have wanted to ruin your winning the cooking contest
.” Prunes, they're talking about prunes, and they don't know in the slightest how happy I am, that Grandma can't shame me any more by a look from her eyes, that she is free of her tangled sheets and her twisted limbs, free of her pain and free of her brain that knew everything but could not get her any peace.

When I look into her coffin the next day at the funeral parlor (I have screamed that I must see her or I will kill everyone), I assure myself that she is gone, that the life has been vacuumed out of her, that wherever she is, she's not in her ruined costume of a body. Then I run into the bathroom and kiss my own arms, from the wrists to the elbows, up and down, big wet kisses begging my body to keep me in it, that I have a long way to go, that I can't go anywhere without it.

And while I am kissing myself, I go into the toilet cubicle to pee, and I see my first blood. Oh good, it is a sign, I will get my life as promised, I have all those things to do ahead of me, a boyfriend and marriage and menus and table settings—a thousand years before I come to this moment in my own coffin that my grandmother is having in hers.

I come out, trying not to smile. Toilet paper is stuffed in my underpants, and I let them take me to the funeral, to the deadly digging of dirt and burial, to the boring drone of the Hebrew prayers said by an old and bearded creature of a synagogue, I let them comfort me and kiss my brow and smooth the hair out of my eyes, I let them think whatever they think about how my chances for the contest are ruined, but I am really so happy, I am free of my grandmother's heartbreaking glance forever, and I have blood in my pants, and Izzy is not my enemy, he is home with his mother who is taking care of The Screamer, and he is waiting for me.

No sooner does one major event fade out behind me than another looms ahead. I mark my growing up by the dangerous adventures I have survived: the necessity of going to kindergarten, the irreversible arrival of The Screamer, the division of my house into two houses, the sinister ambush-plans of the polio bug, and, most recently, the putting underground of my grandmother. But now there is something unexpected and enormous raising its teeth at me: my mother wants to sell the house and take us away to Florida! (Gilda doesn't know yet and I am forbidden to tell her. We are to pretend that nothing is in the air; we are waiting for Florida newspapers to arrive that will tell us what houses cost in Miami Beach.)