The Kingdom of Brooklyn (7 page)

“I don't know,” my mother calls back. She looks at the ceiling.

“You
do
know,” Gilda says. She hits the door with her fist. I think my mother knows, too. Where could he be? Bingo is
always
under the table in the upstairs kitchen, waiting for scraps of chicken heart.

“Where is he? Tell me!” Gilda shouts, pounding on the door.

“In the cellar,” my mother says.

There is complete silence. Then I hear Gilda turn around to run upstairs, where she has to get the key to the outside cellar door. Then down again, outside, and to the cellar door, where she pokes the key in the lock. I hear all this in my ears. I can get into the cellar by opening a door at the side of our kitchen, but I never do because why would I ever go into a black hole where the furnace is breathing fire?

But once I know Gilda is down there, I slide the bolt on the kitchen door and peek down the steps. I see the shelves above the steps that contain soap powder and bug Flit. I see Gilda's dim form at the bottom of the stairs. She is calling, “Bingo! Bingo!”

“Forget it,” my mother calls from over my shoulder. “Bingo is gone.”

Gilda and I both turn to look at her.
Then why did she say he was in the cellar?
My mother is smiling, but it's not a good smile. “He's gone, Gilda.”

“Where?”

“The pound came and got him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I gave him away. He was a danger to the baby.”

“You gave Bingo
away?
“

I can't believe it either.

“He was gentle as a
lamb
,” Gilda says, but the word
lamb
goes up like a scream. She runs up the few extra steps to where my mother is in the kitchen and butts my mother in the stomach with her head. Gilda is butting my mother as if she has horns in her head. My mother falls down, she has no breath, and the smile has gone off her face.

“Oh God, you bitch,” Gilda says. She runs to our phone, which she is not allowed to use anymore. “Oh God.” She is trying to use the phone book.

“Don't bother,” my mother says when her breath comes back. “They've already put him to sleep.”

This takes some time for Gilda to understand—even I understand it first.

“They should put
you
to sleep,” Gilda cries out finally, tears jerking out of her eyes. Her shoulders shake. She is choking on her tears. “Oh my precious baby Bingo.”

Oh, my mother is bad. She has been very bad lately; I have had to punch her many times. This time a punch isn't enough. I don't know what will be enough. I decide I will go upstairs and live there in the better house. I take Gilda's hand and tug on her. “Let's go back upstairs,” I tell her, patting her and kissing her backside. “I'll come and live with you,” I tell her. “Don't worry, darling Gilda. I'll take care of you.”

Even when the worst things happen, the mind calms down. People still have to go to bed at night and eat cereal in the morning. No matter how hard Gilda butted my mother in her stomach, the two sisters still have my old grandmother to take care of, they still have me walking down there, below the level of their hips, talking up at them, asking things, needing things, demanding what I want. That I can be afraid and then stop being afraid, and that they can hate each other and stop hating each other, is an amazing fact to own. It smooths out the long story ahead, which is bound to be full of terrible times, of fights and yelling and hating.

Best things can go the other way, too—the dropping off of excited, wild feelings down to dull and ordinary. If I get a new ball—which I actually have got: pink, bright, clean, a Spalding—that bounces as high as my head and higher, I am so happy that I think I will always be happy, even if The Screamer screams and even if Bingo is gone forever. I wake up thinking about the new ball; I look for it the instant I wake up and bounce it; I clean it with my toothbrush so it stays pink, I rub it dry on my dress. I kiss it to my lips, feeling that rubbery hard pink curve against my mouth.

Happy! Oh, I am so happy! I will always be happy! Won't I? Won't I?

And then what happens?

One day I wake up and think about something else, not my ball. Even when I do think of the ball, I don't want to leap up and bounce it. It is still clean. It is still rubbery. It still has that same smell. But I don't feel so much love for it. I am not even close to happy, thinking of the ball. When I finally get up and bounce it, I am thinking about something else already, and I forget I am bouncing it.

This is mysterious to me—how the shape of the thing I love, the thought of it, feel of it, smell of it—what used to be everything I needed to feel happy—now is getting away from me, shrinking, getting smaller and littler and tinier until—even though it's right in my hand—I no longer feel any love for it.

I bring it right up to my eyeballs, I blink my eyelashes against it, I feel them scrape the rubber, and I look, look, look at it. It's right there, sticking into my eye.

But I don't care.

Now I want roller skates.

Ruthie has them. Myra has them. Myrna has them. Linda has them. Everyone on the block has roller skates. The little girls who live on my street roar along the sidewalk, pumping away over the cracks, making a sound like ZZZSHEE, ZZZSHEE. One knee and then the next pumping along.

I want, I want…I tell what I want to everyone in my house. All of us happen to be standing outside in the street buying cupcakes from the bakery man. My grandmother. Gilda. My mother. My father. They can't help but hear what I want.

“Too dangerous,” they all say, which is the twin sister to “Be careful.” They tell me I can't be careful enough if something is too dangerous, though I have no idea why. I can be careful. I tell them so. I'll do it carefully, I assure them, whatever that means to them. The little girls are doing it out there, on the sidewalk, ZZZSHEE! ZZZSHEE! over the cracks. They're not getting killed.

“That's enough,” Gilda says. My mother agrees. My father agrees. “Don't ask again.” This time they all miraculously—agree, they all say the same thing.

“Do you want to break your neck?” Even my grandmother chimes in. The chickens she cooks have all had their necks broken by the kosher butcher—do I want to be like a dead chicken?

I
can never be a chicken, dead or alive. They are stupid and wrong. I'm just a child. I just want to roller skate, to fly fast along the sidewalk, to see the hedges go by in a blur. What do they know? They are too old to see any use in it, but I know it must be the secret of happiness. Flying fast, making wild noises. Forgetting whatever it is that goes around and around in my mind, the stuff of stomach aches.

Linda and Myra and Myrna and Ruthie. For years they didn't interest me, being wheeled in their strollers by their mothers, or driving by in their fathers' cars, or sitting on their front stoops eating chocolate pudding or having a glass of milk before bed. They were just other helpless children like me, being guided here and put there and told what to do, but suddenly they are out here on the sidewalk, ZZZSHEE, and they have turned into what I want to be: free. I must meet them, join them, despite my mother's assurances that other children are of no interest, are dumb, bad, stupid, useless.

How odd, that just as I determine I need to be outside, they all determine it's best that I be locked inside. Eating the cupcake the bakery man has given me (free! he does it to be nice, seeing what I have to contend with), I sit on the front stoop listening to their boring arguments. Dangerous traffic. Dangerous germs. Dangerous old men. Dangerous insects. The women circle around me, doing the dance of danger. Best to stay inside, best to color, best to read, best to help Grandma cook, best to…

“How can I help Grandma cook if I can't go upstairs?”

They are silent.

“Then can I go up to the beauty parlor?”

Gilda and my mother look at each other. My mother does a calculation, I've seen that look on her face when she's doing the budget envelopes—so many dollar bills in here for the milk, so many for the butcher, so many for…

“Well, maybe. Once in a while.”

So easily I have forced her to lift the ban. By a clever trick I have changed the iron rule. Look what they will do in order that I not fly down the street on skates!

When we go in the house, the doors between upstairs and downstairs are unlocked. My mother issues the revised orders. Once in a while, at her convenience, when everything I have to do is done, when I have eaten all my food, when The Screamer doesn't need me to rock her, when my mother doesn't have an urge to do rhymes with me, once in a while, I can go upstairs to the beauty parlor.

“Even now?”

She is backed into a corner.

I run, I fly up the stairs, my first time in months, to the new apartment, to see the new sink, the new stove, the new carpet, the new dishes. Gilda has a new dryer, a green monster helmet that fits over the ladies' heads, that dries their hair twice as fast as the old one. It has a clear plastic edge, so the women can see, can move their eyebrows to indicate too hot, not hot enough, just right.

Oh, I have missed this place. I get busy bending hairpins in the crack of the linoleum; I am happy, and I never want to go home, go downstairs, where it's boring, where The Screamer smells of pee and worse things, where no one cares about me!
Where no one cares about me!

Something thumps in my chest as I think that thought.
NO ONE CARES ABOUT ME!

“What's wrong?” Gilda asks me. I am clutching my chest, where a hammer has begun to strike. I look down and see my dress shaking with each hammer-blow.

“Issa! What's wrong?” I don't know myself. Something has got into my chest, like a bird or a dog or a baby, and it's flapping and kicking about. I feel it and see it happening.

The thing wants to get out. It doesn't care if it tears through me. I am amazed, but I want it to get out as fast as it can, I want it to stop hurting me. Maybe I need a pill, like the one my grandmother takes when she has heart pains. I need…I need…
what I need is roller skates!

But I realize I cannot ask for this now. However, it's perfectly clear to me—roller skates would fix me. Just as The Tree Trunk gave my mother headaches, not having roller skates has given me this monster in my chest, pounding against the walls of my body to get out.

The war should stop. Why does it go on this long? How annoying it is that they still say, “Shush, shush,” to me when the radio is on. Cooking grease will help to win the war if we save it in a tin can. Tinfoil we find on the street must be packed and smoothed into a ball. (Chewing gum wrappers are good, cigarette wrappers are the best, if, with the tip of my fingernail, I can get the foil to separate from the white paper without a tear.) I have an enormous tinfoil ball—bigger than a tennis ball. How this is going to kill the Japs, whoever they are, is a total mystery. When I examine my silver ball, I think that perhaps the good soldiers dangle these in front of the bad soldiers; then, while distracting them, they pull out bayonets and stab their bellies. Thinking this, I want to throw my silver ball in the bushes, or bury it.

Gilda takes me with her around the neighborhood to sell war bonds. She gets me away these days by not asking permission; if she finds me outside, she just grabs me, telling my grandmother on the bench to tell my mother we went for a walk,
but only if she asks
. Half the time we will be back before my mother notices. Of course I know this is forbidden; I am never supposed to leave the premises without permission. But it's only Gilda—how dangerous could she be?

Lately my mother goes too far with her rules; I
have
to break them, there is no other way to get what I want. Otherwise I think of the trouble I would have to go through: all that asking and begging (all her arguments and finally her refusal) and then—after she tells me that she owns me—the rest: my sulking and crying, and her yelling at me, or hitting me, or giving me that look, with her eyes getting narrow, and her mouth going tight and mean—and finally, that baffling and disgusting change, her turning to “my sister” Blossom, wherever she is, there in her high chair, or there on the Bathinette (my sister is everywhere, everywhere, she never disappears, even for a second), and my mother's face changing like a red light to a green light, turning on for The Screamer, putting on her high, baby-talk voice, getting cute, tickling and cooing to The Screamer.

She has two faces, whereas most of us have only one. When she returns to cooking, the ugly face comes back, a result of my grandmother's now being assigned upstairs to her own house: down here my mother has to be the main cook. And, oh, how my mother hates onions on her fingers. How she gags at the smell of garlic. How she won't ever, ever, ever cook a chicken because she said to my father that chicken feet, with their scales and claws, with their turned-under toenails, are the most disgusting things she ever saw.

Upstairs, a chicken is treated like a peaceful pet. My grandmother pats a dead chicken as if it were her old, sweet friend. With a silver tweezer, she plucks out the sharp, big feathers. And for the little ones, she sears the chicken over the gas flame,
zzst
,
zzst
—little blue bolts of fire sizzling along its skin. The flames dance. Not ferociously, as when liver flares, but sweet little sparks, dying out over the burners.

Whenever I can get away with it, I sneak upstairs to watch her cook, but I watch with fear in my blood. Any minute, any second, any
half instant from now
, my mother could open the door between our place and theirs and scream for me. “Issa, are you up there?”

If my mother didn't exist at all, I know I could be totally relaxed, watching the chicken being sparked into its clean skin. If only I didn't have to be afraid of her!