The Kingdom of Brooklyn (28 page)

“Even with my silly little teeth?”

“Your teeth, Issa? What's wrong with your teeth? They're perfect! They're delicate and sharp, they're white and perfect.”

“But my hair is wild and stupid.”

“Your hair is magnificent,” Gilda says. “Curly and thick and shining. What have you been thinking?”

“That I'm ugly.”

“Oh sweetheart!” Gilda takes my face in her two hands and kisses my hair, my mouth. “You break my heart you are so beautiful.”

“Gilda, I'll miss you so much. How can I live without you?”

“Don't,” Gilda says. “I can't take that now. I won't be able to walk home on my two feet if you do that.”

My last walk home from King's Highway, my last passing by this shoe store, this bakery, this drugstore. My last stepping down this curb, over this sewer grate…I decide I am carrying this too far and will be bored in a minute. Even moments this dramatic have their limitations. I swing my head carefully from side to side. My precious diamond earrings, tiny as they are, graze the skin of my neck. They tickle and thrill me.

We come in view of my house. How many more times will I see it like this, standing up like a dollhouse against the blue sky, its chimney straight as a soldier on guard, its lilac tree a factory of springtime perfume? How can I emboss these images on my memory so I am guaranteed to hold them forever?

I imagine we are all taking our last positions. My mother at the sink pouring grease out of a frying pan, my father in the easy chair puffing on his pipe, Gilda on a beach chair in the backyard, letting the sun bake her ragged skin, Beloved curled in a circle in his doghouse, head to tail, raising his eyes as I come into view.

A longing for Beloved tightens my throat like a thirst; I must drink him in right now! I run up the alley, up the three steps to the back porch and prepare to dangle my sparkling jewels for him.

The doghouse is dark inside, there's no splash of his white patch of fur, or the flip of his tail.

“Mommy,” I call, the gong of alarm beginning to sound in my belly. “Mommy!”

She comes to the screen door but doesn't look at me. “Where is Spotty?”

“I don't know, Issa. He got out.”

“He got out? You mean he ran away?”

“Oh, look now,” she says, “I told you what had to happen.”

“
What?
“

“I told you we would find him a good home.”

“He's gone?” I fall to my knees and put my forehead to the rough boards as if I will see him under the back porch, through the cracks. Then I leap up and shriek. “MA! MA!
What did you do?
“

“I don't like it when you carry on, Issa.”

“
What did you DO? Daddy said we could take him with us. He promised!
“

“I never promised. They get ticks in the heat that suck your blood. They get fleas. Dogs are a health hazard.”

“Gilda!” I scream at the top of my lungs for Gilda. “Come down. My dog is gone! She gave away my dog!” I know how to scream and be hysterical, too. I come by it naturally, I do this as well as she does it. “Gilda! Gilda! I'm going to die!”

“Oh shut up, Issa.” My mother slaps my face and I do for the first time feel myself dying. This is dying. I can't have Beloved in my arms for the rest of time. This is death.

The rest is arguing and sobbing and denying and explaining and shouting and shrieking. The rest is done in the vacuum of my Beloved, in his absence, in a catalog of reasons and words that echo and bounce in my empty heart. My mother is saying the reason we can't sell the house is because he's been yapping whenever strangers come to see it; my mother is saying that she found him a perfectly good home with a farmer.

“I don't believe you,” I scream. “There are no farms here!” and Gilda is smoothing my hair and saying, “She did this to me, too, darling, she did this to me and I lived through it. You'll live through it, too.”

But I don't care to live. I might as well die right here, right now. Without Beloved, I don't even want my earrings. I don't want to get married someday, I don't want my life at all. Without Beloved, the future is a black pit. My mother is the cause of all this. My mother, who has done this to me, looks scared by what she has done. But it is done. I know it can't be undone. This is one of those brick walls.

She says, “After we move everything will be better. We'll be happier. I promise you. We'll all be happy in Florida, Issa. Where the sun shines all the time.”

The house is sold to the Borocheks. They are just like us, a mother and father and two children downstairs, and an unmarried aunt and a grandmother upstairs. How amazing—as if, when we move away, ghosts of us will remain and continue living our lives there. I don't want to meet the children; I don't want there to be a girl my age who takes my place as one of The Skaters/Bike-Riders/Cookers, who will become Izzy's partner in playing Old Maid on the stairs. I want to get away as soon as possible.

The trailer is already rented for one month and is to be returned in Florida. My father loads it nightly, with his vases and lamps and statues and dishes and paintings and punch bowls. It's a big high thing, and it blocks my view of Avenue O, of the houses across the street. At night my father has to sleep in bed with me in order to watch the trailer; he spends half the night sitting up to look out one or another of the nine windows, to be sure no one is robbing him. I have the choice of staying in my narrow bed with him, or sleeping with The Screamer, or sharing the big bed with my mother. But I will not sleep with my mother; I will not let my skin touch her skin. I do not look at her or talk to her.

I still haven't packed. I won't do it and I have told them so. They'll have to do it for me if they want it done. I don't care if I have no clothes or books or games. I am dead, so why do I need them?

I go to school, I let my teachers say goodbye to me and wish me luck. They are all sure I will be a great success in my future. Apparently they can't tell I'm dead.

At the eighth grade graduation ceremony at the Avalon Theater, I win the Medal for Excellence in Composition; I hear the applause rise like a flock of seagulls flapping over my head. What do I care? I will never write another word in my life.

The Skaters/Bike-Riders/Cookers chip in to get me a going-away present, a mother-of-pearl pencil on a gold chain that snaps back into a pin I can wear on my chest. They hug and kiss me and tell me they can't live without me. It's fine, they think that's true, but things you can't live without really kill you if they're gone. I know it for a fact.

Everything moves along—the furniture is sold, Gilda finds a room to live in in the house of one of her old customers; the day after we leave she will supervise the moving out of the old furniture and the moving in of the Borochek's. The cellar is emptying out; there is nothing left down there but piles of old newspapers and empty cartons, and the oil painting of the milkmaid girl in the meadow with the cow. The mended frame has been drying down there all this time—and, although my mother thinks we will pack the painting in the trailer and take it to Florida, I know a secret. My father has shared this secret with me: we are giving the painting to Gilda at her birthday party. The birthday party is to be the night before we leave. He tells me he is sure my mother will have a change of heart; she will want to give her sister something fine and generous on the night before we move away. I don't think he knows much about sisters. I have a feeling of dread in me when I think about this last party for Gilda. We will light the candles, eat the cake, and then in the morning drive away to Florida. I see it in my mind like a dream. We drive away and disappear. And that is the end of that.

The birthday cake is from Ebinger's, layer cake with chocolate buttercream icing. The guests are Iggy and Izzy and the five of us. My mother is wearing a gray silk dress and black high heels; she is wearing her gold lion bracelet and a gold choker around her neck. I don't remember exactly seeing Izzy or Iggy; they are in the fuzzy edges of the room, they don't really belong here tonight because this is not the end of the world for them. Gilda is clear as crystal: in her white dress and her white hat and wearing dark glasses, she stands in the living room with her hand to her face. It is her birthday, she is being celebrated. We have candles already stuck in the cake, not lit yet, too many to count. We have paper cups and paper plates and wooden spoons (everything real is packed in the trailer). The Screamer has made Gilda a boat out of newspaper and she wants to put it on the cake in the middle of the candles. She doesn't understand what will happen if the flames touch the paper.

I am the one who is to bring the painting upstairs to give to Gilda. When my father gives me the sign, I will run down to the cellar and get it. I watch him for the sign. He is watching Gilda every second. His face is as white as Gilda's dress. Gilda leans against the table and says to everyone
Thank you for this party
. Because she leans so limply against the table, it's as if she has no spine in her body, or no body in her dress. I decide she looks like a ghost in her white dress, it's brilliantly white, it glows so that the edges of her entire form seem blurred.

I don't know what I'm doing, really. There are bottles of Coca-Cola on the table and I stick my finger into an open bottle and can't pull it out.
My mother gave Beloved to a farmer but there are no farms around here
. Could Beloved be running free in the hills right now, barking at squirrels and quivering in the joy of freedom? Could he be loping along beside a milkmaid who is holding a pail and leading a cow through the meadow?

My father gives me the sign, which is a nod and a wink. He says, “Gilda, we have a present for you for your birthday,” and she says, “Oh really?” but her voice is muted. “Issa will bring up your surprise from downstairs,” he says. He laughs and adds, “It's an elephant.” I don't know why he says that false thing:
It's an elephant
. I have to correct him, “It's a cow,” I say.

My mother's face comes into my view now, her mouth drops open when I say it's a cow, her neck seems to swell so that the choker tightens and veins stand out on her forehead.

“It better not be the cow,” she says. She is looking directly at my father, who has an odd crooked smile on his face. “It isn't the cow, is it?” she demands of him.

“It's the cow,” he says.

“I forbid you to give that to her,” my mother says. “I told you how I feel about that.”

“The cow is for Gilda. She needs that cow. It belongs to her. I thought you'd see the sense of that.”

“I'd sooner burn it than let her have it,” my mother says, and with a sweep of her gold-braceleted arm, with the ruby glow of the lions' eyes making an arc across the table, she grabs the book of matches with which we are to light Gilda's birthday candles and she clatters in her high heels to the cellar steps. “I mean it,” she calls back to us, “I'd sooner see it go up in flames.”

We hear her making her way down the hollow, backless cellar steps. No one moves. Iggy's pink sweater glows brightly, Izzy says something about the buttercream icing beginning to melt, and Gilda and my father's eyes are locked together. Their gaze is like a steel band binding them together.

We wait. There is no sound from below, not even a shuffle or a bump.

“Should I cut the cake then?” Izzy offers. “And forget the candles?”

“We can light them with matches I have in my pocket,” my father says. He fumbles first in one pocket of his jacket and then in the other. He hunts in the side pocket of his trousers. He finally discovers the matches in the last-chance pocket and holds them up like a prize for all of us to see. Then he tears a single match out of the book, strikes it on the cover and leans forward over the table to light Gilda's birthday candles.

Just as he lights the first one, a thunderous roar blasts up from below and the floor blows out from under us. The table with the cake on it falls through the hole into the cellar where there is a sea of fire burning and we hear my mother's screams.

Flames leap up and ignite my eyelashes; my father rushes to the cellar stairs but bellows, “They're gone! The stairs are gone!” Gilda begins to slide into the hole as more of the floor gives way, but Izzy takes hold of her by the waist and pulls her out the side door. Iggy grabs The Screamer and me from behind, and kicks us toward the front door using her knees to knock us along because we can't move by ourselves. The Screamer screams the whole time. How amazingly she screams, as if she has prepared for this from the day she was born.

While we stand outside, the fire bursts out of my nine windows at the same moment, in unison, like the flaming legs of Rockettes. My father comes hurtling out the front door, his clothes on fire. He burns in all directions until a man, leaping out of a car, knocks him to the ground and rolls him over and over like a rolling pin.

Neighbors are shouting, cars are stopping, and soon there are sirens. I don't blink. The heat is boiling my eyeballs. I watch my house burn down till someone pulls me back, wraps me in a blanket. I throw it off; it's summer, no one needs a blanket in June. I won't turn my head away from the light. I hold my elbow back, like knives; I will stab anyone who tries to deflect my attention from the spectacle. I have never seen anything like this in my life. In each burning window I see my mother, leaping, dancing, calling out to me. She disappears from one and appears in another. Her arms reach to hold me. She calls my name, “Issa, Issa”—or is it the sound of the water shooting from the hoses of the firemen? She dances away, deep into the house, upstairs, downstairs, she has it all to herself at last, she flies from room to room, she gazes at me from every window, flinging up the shades, letting in the night.

Sparks are shooting upward, great fountains of fire. The rising embers mix themselves with stars; they quiver and twinkle, flash and blink out. Walls of water are drowning the fire. Soon all the firelight begins to dim inside the skeleton of my house. I watch: from red to orange to a dusky glow…and then darkness reaches in. One by one the windows go dark.