The Kingdom of Brooklyn (6 page)

The truth is, I will never get him to love me best, not while she is around. It's too bad, things like this. They are facts of life, like Gilda's skin, Bingo's bad smell.

While the new baby is growing, my father works in a defense plant. He makes wings for airplanes with machines that stamp them out like cookie-cutters make cookies. I know how sharp a cookie-cutter is, I know how hard you have to press on the dough and how careful you have to be while knocking the cookie out. “Be careful,” I warn him. That's what all the women in this house say all the time: “Be careful,” as if being careful is some kind of guarantee that nothing bad will happen.

I have to be careful petting Bingo, I have to be careful not to slip in the bathtub, I have to be careful eating fish because of bones. Little needles of “careful” are always sticking in my ears and my eyes—what if I forget for one second to be careful, what will happen then? If I am always thinking “careful,” I can hardly enjoy playing with the dog, or splashing in the bath water. (I never enjoy eating fish, whose bones can give you an injection in your throat at any moment.)

“Be careful you don't choke on your food,” Gilda tells me, as if swallowing isn't bad enough. What if, while I am swallowing, I choke? How can it be that the food I eat to keep myself alive could also kill me? These are dilemmas that fill my days—dying seems to be at the heart of all my private imaginings. Why did the old baby die and will the new baby die? Will I die? Will my grandmother die? What if everyone dies, my mother and father, my aunt and my grandmother, Bingo and the new baby, and just I am left alone in the house with the furnace? I don't even know how to turn it on and off. I will freeze to death in the winter. Who will find me in my bed, stiff as an ice cube, and when will I be found?

There is no one I can talk to about these matters. Even Gilda, lately, has been harping on food, and on a specific type of food. Crusts. It seems that when my mother goes to the hospital to have the new baby, Gilda wants me to astonish everyone by eating the crusts of my bread. I don't have to do it yet, but only when she goes to the hospital. “Then we can tell her she's crazy—that you do eat your crusts.” I don't see why it's so important that this be done: crust is hard, it cuts my gums. But Gilda adds this information: “Issa, no man will marry you if you leave the crusts of your bread all over your plate.” This stirs up many questions: why wouldn't a man marry me if I did that? Do I want a man to marry me? If I'm married, does it mean I will have to vomit and have headaches and carry around babies, like coconuts, in my stomach? But because it seems important to Gilda, I practice eating crusts. I hold them in my mouth till they get soft, I suck them, I grind them, I wet them, I strain them against my teeth. Crusts are a challenge. Crusts will help us prove to my mother that she is crazy and that Gilda understands me best and can make me do anything.

The day comes that my mother leaves the house, leaking water from her body. I don't even say goodbye to her, worrying about crusts. For ten days I practice eating them.

On the day the baby is to come home, I hold my triumph like a trophy in my mouth: “I ate my crusts.” I am waiting to tell it to my mother, who has been gone all this time without contacting me. They are getting ready for her as if for a queen—my grandmother is shining the windows, Gilda is baking cookies, the bed sheets of the big double bed are tightened and tucked, pulled and pressed to icy smoothness.

They bring in a new baby carriage—my father bumps it up the stairs to the bedroom and my grandmother cleans it with ammonia, shines the very spokes of the wheels. I have heard that the baby who died was a boy; this new one is a girl like me. Why we need two girls in a house is beyond me. I walk down the hall and kick Bingo. He snarls and bites my leg. I love the pain, I could hug him for giving it to me. The wound bleeds, much too serious for iodine. They—Gilda and my father—run with me to see Dr. Cohen down the street, who hurts me even more, with stitches, with an injection. Oh, how the body hurts. How inconvenient it is to have one, how dangerous, how delicious. To live in one is the biggest risk in the world, and the more dangerously you live in it, the more attention you get. I wish Bingo had torn out my eyes! Then I would be the queen, they would shine the spokes of my wheels, they would adore me.

But as it is, no one cares that I have eaten crusts. I say it over and over—as my mother comes creeping in the front door, leaning on my father. I say it to the nurse who comes in carrying the package of the baby. I shout it while they climb the stairs to the bedroom. I tell it again and again all that afternoon—while the nurse is doing something to my mother's breasts, while the baby is wailing in her new carriage, while my grandmother is stirring chicken soup. I come right up to my mother's ear and shout it at her, right in the opening of her ear: “I ate my crusts!”

And she slaps my face.

“Stop that, Issa! You'll wake the baby!”

I do wish they had died. I wish they had all died in whatever ways were possible—choking to death or drowning in the tub or being killed by bombs, any way at all. Then I would have been left alone to freeze to death in my bed. It would have been better than this, any day.

Because the baby is here, everything has to change. For one thing, the house has to be cut in half. My mother argues with Gilda for days before Gilda will agree to the plan to have a carpenter convert the house. My mother wants Gilda and my grandmother to have the top half, and we the bottom half. There will be a staircase with doors that lock, top and bottom, so my grandmother can't get down and I can't get up, at least not without knocking or ringing a bell. There will finally be—right here in Brooklyn—this thing everyone wants so badly: privacy. Doors and locks and keys will be between my mother's scaring me and my reaching Gilda's side. The ladies and the shampoos and haircuts will be upstairs; the stories and busyness will be upstairs; the chicken soup will be upstairs, Bingo will be upstairs—and where will I be? Downstairs, with liver flaring on the grate, with nothing to do, and with…Blossom.

For that is the name they have given my sister—Blossom. The lilac tree that I love, with its sweet purple blossoms, now is spoiled because she has a name like its fragrant parts. My sister (I have to call her “my” sister although I don't want her to be mine) has a red, screaming tongue that vibrates day and night with anger. It flails in her little open mouth like a flipper. Why do they all hold her in their arms and look into her face? Hot steam comes up from her mouth—she's a small, wild furnace.

“I can eat crusts!” I shout, going from one person to another, pulling on their arms, punching their thighs, “Watch me chew!”

Nothing looks the same. The upstairs bedroom where my mother and father slept is now becoming the kitchen-living room of the upstairs apartment. The beauty parlor is staying the beauty parlor, but the bathroom where I had all my stomach aches is to be used only by Gilda and her customers and my grandmother. We, downstairs, will have our own, new bathroom—free of hairs in the sink.

I already feel lost: the dining room has become the living room (and the piano is moved in there), the living room is now where my mother and father sleep, and the sun porch is where “my sister” and I have to sleep, close to the street, close to the cars whooshing by on the icy road, close to the wild outdoors. I have lost the room of my own. The Screamer's being here has cut everything in half. My mother and father are only half mine; Gilda and my grandmother are divided in two, also. Although The Screamer is little she gets
more
than half. Our shared bedroom is full of her things—carriage, Bathinette, little swing, little rocking chair, little rocking horse—my father went somewhere and bought out a household of baby furniture. What belongs to me in my bedroom? Just my blackboard, nothing else. I hate this sun porch room, which has nine big windows in it—not even counting the front door with a stained glass peek-a-boo window. Anyone could look in at us.

Hammering and sawing goes on all day. The Screamer screams and the drills drill, and the radiators clank, and not once does my mother get a headache. I am looking forward to the day she gets one—then she and I can rest in her bed together as we used to in the old days and I can bring her a wet washcloth. I wait and wait, but it never happens. Her head never hurts—instead the pain goes to her breasts. She holds her breasts, which drip, making her rock in pain. The Screamer is not drinking out of them—though Gilda told me that mothers have always fed their babies this way (I can't believe it). I am relieved to hear that my mother refuses to do this, it is a great relief to me. When they drip and tears come to her eyes, my mother covers their drips with my father's handkerchiefs to catch the drops. He watches her cover them with his handkerchiefs. Once he has to help her squeeze the drops out with a rubber pump. When they see me watching, my mother tells me the doctor said they have to do this. She says she has “milk-fever.”

I run away to watch the carpenter and his helper make the new pantry and the new bathroom where before there was nothing—I watch them lay the tiles, two pink and one white, over and over again in the same design. And then they put the doors at the top and bottom of the staircase which before was free and open. Big heavy doors with locks. I start to cry at the sight of them. How will I ever get into the upstairs if I don't have a key? How will I ever find Gilda when I need her?

“Isn't it wonderful?” my mother assures me. They are now building an open back porch where just “our” family will eat in the summertime; Grandma and Gilda are getting a new side entrance for themselves, for “their family,” complete with a stoop, a black steel mailbox, and a gold doorknob. Gilda and I will now have different addresses: mine is 405 and hers is 405 and 1/2.

The first night I sleep in the new room I watch the moon coming in all nine windows. Nine moons. And then I see what I was afraid of: the faces of nine little men hanging onto the nine windowsills, watching me.

In the summertime, my mother puts Blossom out front in her carriage. My job is to sit there and watch her sleep. Bingo sits near me under the bench. Sometimes my grandmother sits next to me. We watch till there is nothing to watch. The Screamer is either asleep, or waking up and getting ready to boil, her tongue curling up like a slice of cooked liver. I think, for the first time, that we are all made of meat. That if we put my sister on the grate over the flame, she would cook and could be eaten.

One afternoon while I am watching my sister, a dog comes over to the carriage and pee-pees on the wheel. He lifts his leg and a stream comes out of a tube on his belly. His tube points up toward his face, while my father's tube hangs down toward his feet. Or so it seems to me. I don't know if my father lifts up his leg—he never lets me watch him make.

Then another dog comes along—he's white and fluffy—and he also makes on the carriage in short squirts. What is this? A parade? I wonder how many more will come. Only two—it seems they are all traveling together in the neighborhood, these four friends. The others arrive and do their pee-pees as if they are playing follow-the-leader. Just then my mother comes out and sees this happening. She screams. She runs in and gets a broom and starts to hit all the dogs. She smashes them on their heads. They run away howling. It's too bad—I liked seeing them pee on the carriage. It was the only entertainment for a long while.

Now my mother snatches up my sister and yells at me as if
I
have peed on her. At dinnertime (we are now eating separately from my grandmother and Gilda) she says to my father, “Bingo is attracting these dangerous animals.”

“I don't think so,” my father says.

“We can't have this,” my mother says. “They could attack the baby. They could kill her.”

My father is busy eating. Working in the defense plant makes him hungrier than ever. He still eats in big chews and great swallows. He tears meat from the bones with his powerful teeth. He scoops potatoes up as if his spoon is a shovel and he is digging a hole to China.

“I wonder what they're eating upstairs,” I say.

“We're our own little family now,” my mother says sharply. “Don't think about them.”

Gilda has to go to the bank. My mother suggests that I go along for the walk. This is a treat for both of us. Gilda hardly ever has me to herself anymore. We get spruced up (“spruced up” is what Gilda says as she sprays perfume on both of us. I am allowed to be in the old bathroom with her for this—my mother is feeling very generous). Gilda puts a lilac bloom in my hair with a bobby pin. She lets me wear a gold locket of hers that she keeps in a blue leather jewel box. Inside the locket is a picture of her father, my grandfather. “If he had lived,” Gilda says, “my whole life would have been different. I wouldn't be beholden to your mother for every bite I eat.”

We walk in the sunshine to King's Highway. The vault in the bank where treasures are kept has rows of silver drawers filled with the gold lockets and rings of the whole Kingdom of Brooklyn. Gilda takes me with her into a secret room (a guard in a uniform is there to watch us) and we look at our precious things: a pair of diamond earrings that once were worn by my grandmother and war bonds and birth certificates.

“Someday these earrings will be yours,” Gilda whispers to me. I shake with a thrill. Then I think of The Screamer. Maybe they will forget her when it's time to give the earrings away. Otherwise, I will kill her. I will have to.

When we get home, Gilda goes around to the side door and then upstairs to her house, while I go in the front door and in the downstairs to mine. While I am having my milk and cookies, I hear her running back down (her shoes pound on the stairs), and she bangs on the locked door that enters to our new living room. “Where is Bingo?” she calls through the closed door to my mother. “He's not upstairs.”