The Kingdom of Brooklyn (29 page)

I still watch the windows for a sign. No one is there for me. I watch and I watch. A long time later, when my house has burned to the ground, the firemen go in and find my mother. They carry her out and lay her body on the grass. Iggy lets go of my hand (has she been there all the time?) and walks to retrieve something that has fallen from my mother's burned arm. I see it as Iggy carries it back to me; my mother's charred bracelet. The lions' faces have melted into molten black lumps.

Just then one of the firemen notices my finger is swollen stuck in the Coca-Cola bottle. He goes to one of the six huge red fire engines churning in the street and gets a glass cutting saw which he uses to free me. Then he presses his sooty face against mine and kisses my cheek.

“You poor baby,” he says. “You poor, lost baby.”

I sleep in Izzy's bed that night. My sister sleeps with me while Izzy sleeps with his mother. Gilda and my father are somewhere, in the hospital, I think, although my father can walk, I saw him stand up, he isn't dead. He isn't even burned badly. But he couldn't talk to me. He could only look at the house, too, as if he couldn't believe it was gone. No one can believe a change like this. It happens too fast and there's nothing to hold on to, to get used to. One minute you have your life, the way it's always been, the way you're sure it always will be, and the next minute there's nothing there, you're leaning on the railing of a bridge and it gives way, and you fall straight down with nothing to hold onto, with no one to catch you.

They think my mother may have set the painting on fire while standing too close to the oil tank or the furnace—but she can't tell us, can she? Or maybe the newspapers or the rags down there might have—all by themselves—set an oil leak on fire, or the can of glue might have spilled and the fumes ignited, or the oil vapors took a spark. But how will we ever know? Maybe my mother just went down there at the wrong moment. Maybe she never even got to the painting. But now only Gilda and my father are left; the way I always wanted it to be. I think my mother's white hair had to have burned like a ball of lightning.

I want! I want! What I want is my mother
.

Oh, how I miss her. My days are like a cut-out book, with two white spaces on every page: my mother and Beloved, cut out and missing, only their ghostly outlines remaining to decorate the scene.

I live at Iggy's and play with cut-outs all day. Or with a jigsaw puzzle. Or with my sister's new doll house, moving the wrong furniture into the wrong rooms, putting the toilet and bathtub into the living room, putting the baby crib into the kitchen, putting the stove into the bedroom. Everything in the dollhouse is very small and my fingers are like giant-fingers. I knock furniture over, I jangle tiny vases to the floor, I overturn a grandfather's clock, a fireplace.

Izzy wants to play old Maid with me, or stoop ball, or even hopscotch; he tries to get me interested in anything, but I don't want to play with him.

“Leave her alone,” Iggy says. “She'll get better soon.”

My father has burns on his arms and the back of his neck, but they're healing. He sleeps on Iggy's couch and goes to work as soon as he can.

I heard all about the funeral for my mother, but I didn't go. I refused to go. I know about funerals and what they do there, what they did to my grandmother. I know about dirt and holes in the ground and old men who jabber prayers. I don't need to know any more about that.

What do I need? I need the person who knows about my life from the instant it started, even before I was born. I need the person who knows how to make me rhyme, how to make me use the dimples in my knees (I have them! I have them, too!), how to make me know how important I am, and how proud she will be when I get famous.

I never knew I wouldn't want to try if she weren't here with me. How could I have known I would feel this way? Why didn't she warn me?

We have a new apartment on Ocean Parkway now, overlooking the bicycle path and the bridle path. My father and Gilda sleep in separate bedrooms but soon they are going to marry and buy another house in Brooklyn. Gilda will be my legal stepmother. Now that I am almost truly hers we don't talk to each other very much. But that is because I am too busy. I am starting high school, soon I will be in college, and then married to someone, not likely Izzy, but I'm really all done with my childhood and mothers and fathers and aunts and grandmothers. They were important when I lived at 405 Avenue O in the Kingdom of Brooklyn when we were all subjects who kept watch over the house and the three playgrounds and Prospect Park and Coney Island, but those places can take care of themselves now

From the window of my bedroom I can see the mirrored ball on the pedestal in Dr. Ruby Tempkin's front yard. The doctor and his wife don't live in that house anymore, they moved to Florida after Esther died, but they left the ball in the yard. The mirror has gone gray and flat looking, even on sunny days; it reminds me of the mercury that rolls out of a broken thermometer.

I sometimes think my mother is with Beloved and my grandmother, because why wouldn't they seek one another out in the land of the dead? Still, they might do better on little islands of their own, one with a piano, one with a doghouse, and one with a bubbling pot of chicken soup.

My sister doesn't scream at all lately; we share a big bed in our bedroom that overlooks Ocean Parkway. Sometimes she sobs very softly at night and I hug her. She isn't grown up enough to think about all the things that have happened.

I tell her someday we will forget the day of the fire, I am almost certain of it. All we need is time, like a fat pillow, to fill up the space between then and later on. I explain that I can hardly remember my grandmother's face, even the way she looked at me when they put her in the ambulance, which is proof we'll get better eventually—that's the way it works when you're alive. I promise my sister that I will always take care of her and that we will both live in wonderful houses someday.

Every night I read to her a few pages of
Katrinka, The Story of a Russian Child
. When Katrinka found her parents gone, she set out on a journey with her little brother. I tell my sister that when a house falls down, one way or another, and it can't take care of you, you might as well take a deep breath, pack a few provisions, and set out for the next one.

 

 

MERRILL JOAN GERBER is a prize-winning novelist and short story writer.

Among her novels are
THE KINGDOM OF BROOKLYN
, winner of the Ribalow Award from
Hadassah Magazine
for “the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme,”
ANNA IN THE AFTERLIFE
, chosen by the
Los Angeles Times
as a “Best Novel of 2002” and
KING OF THE WORLD
, which won the Pushcart Editors' Book Award. She has written five volumes of short stories. Her stories and essays have appeared in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, The Sewanee Review, The Virginia Review, Commentary, Salmagundi, The American Scholar, The Southwest Review
and elsewhere.

Her story, “I Don't Believe This,” won an O. Henry Prize. “This is a Voice From Your Past” was included in
The Best American Mystery Stories
.

Her non-fiction books include a travel memoir,
BOTTICELLI BLUE SKIES: An American in Florence, a book of personal essays, GUT FEELINGS: A Writer's Truths and Minute Inventions
and
OLD MOTHER, LITTLE CAT: a Writer's Reflections on her Kitten, her Aged Mother…and Life
.

Gerber earned her BA in English from the University of Florida, her MA in English from Brandeis University and was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship to Stanford University. She presently teaches fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

She can be reached by e-mail at:
[email protected]
See her web page at
www.its.caltech.edu/~mjgerber

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Copyright © 1992 by Merrill Joan Gerber

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