The Kingdom of Brooklyn

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  “Not in this house,” he says.

  Gilda is on his side. I hear them talking out by the garbage cans after lunch on Sunday, where they have met by accident, each depositing his bag of garbage.

  “My sister was born a goy,” Gilda says to him. “There’s nothing you can do about her. The same as she was born having tantrums. It’s in her nature.”

  “But she can’t force Christmas on me,” my father says. “I can put up with everything else. But this, this is bile in my throat.” His eyes seek Gilda’s. Their faces, in profile, have the same expression, as if they are two parts of the same person.

  Bundled up in my winter coat and leggings and kerchief and gloves, I am playing Russian Seven against the brick wall in the alley. One, you just throw the ball and catch it. Two, you let it bounce once. Three, you clap your hands twice and spin around before you catch it. Four, you throw it under your leg and catch it on the fly. I can’t get past Four, I’m not even sure I know what Five is.

  “Tell her she can only have Chanukah,” Gilda whispers to him. She pats his arm, and lets her hand rest there.

  Now we get a houseful of menorahs. My grandmother digs one out from a closet that she bought for five cents in a grocery store when she first came to America at the age of fifteen. It is tin and has eight sharp rings that hold the candles. It’s so light that it tips over as soon as she stands it up, even though there is a lion embossed on the front of it. My father brings home a big brass antique menorah, shaped like an archway, heavy, on a pedestal, on a round base. Gilda has her old one but also buys a new one at the Avenue N synagogue, gold plated with two fierce lions with great manes on it. She also buys me a book, The Adventures of K’Ton Ton, about a little Jewish boy. Suddenly everyone is handing me books about Jewish children and Jewish holidays with juicy names like sukkoth and tu bish vat and Rosh Hashonah; saliva bubbles in my mouth when I say those words. My mother spits when she repeats them, angrily, “I will not have her mind filled with Rosh Hashonahs!” she cries, “…with yiskors or whiskers or whatever that nonsense is, I will not have my child repenting for her sins. What kind of sins does a child have to repent for?”

  I both agree with her and I don’t. I have many sins, but I don’t want to repent for them.

  The Chanukah candles come in many colors. I prefer blue and yellow, I like white. The green looks grim. The red reminds me of Christmas colors, and I’m not allowed to like red in this season. But presents! I would love presents, a pile of them under a tree, all for me! Maybe even the sacred roller skates, which appear in my dreams every night. Silver, with sliding adjustable panels, with clamps that tighten with a skate key, with leather straps. Oh, what beautiful complications are woven into a pair of ordinary skates.

  I would love to have a puppy, too. Maybe a Captain Midnight decoder. If they asked me, I have many ideas. But how likely is it I’ll get a pile of Christmas presents? And not even on my birthday, but on Jesus’s birthday?

  In school, we are rehearsing a Christmas play to be put on in the auditorium for the seventh and eighth grade. Miss Fenley says that because I have a good memory, I have to be Mary, Mother of Jesus. Mary has to give a long speech. I repeat it to myself many times, at home in bed, in the bathtub, during endless dinnertimes. I discover that keeping my mind on something far away and fascinating lessens my fear of the man looking in the window, lessens the degree of my shivering with cold after my bath, lessens my disgust at having to eat lima beans, whose grainy thick insides make me gag. This way I keep my mind on some far-off place and become someone else:

  Oh Goodness, we have nowhere to stay on this cold winter’s night. There is no room at the inn. Whatever shall we do? I fear our long-awaited child may be born soon. Joseph, my good husband, do you think they would let us stay in the manger, on a bed of straw?

  Joe Martini is Joseph my husband, which embarrasses and thrills me. They put a beard on his face with a rubber band to hold it on in back. I hope I really can marry Joe someday and have our long-awaited baby with him. They have no donkey for me to ride, but someone brings a wooden hobby horse to school, and I have to rock on it. I think it’s a mistake. No pregnant woman would ride a bouncing horse.

  Joe Martini has a plan. Instead of eating in the hot lunch room every day (which I am now allowed to do), we will one day go instead to his house for lunch. He lives only a half-block from school. He will bring a note from his mother inviting me, in case Miss Fenley tries to stop us, but his plan is not to give it to her. We will just walk down the hall, as if to the hot lunch room, but instead we will walk out the door and run down the street to his house. He says his mother will be glad to have me.

  “What about my boots and my hat and my coat?”

  “Who wants to bother with them?” he says, giving me a new idea that never crossed my mind. Putting on my coat on a cold day has always struck me as a law of nature. I admire this boy; he is my teacher more than Miss Fenley is.

  His house smells different from mine. Food is cooking, but it smells rich and spicy, not fatty and slimy. His mother is different, too—her breasts are soft and big where my mother’s are hard and skinny. She hugs me, too, though I am a stranger. I can’t help but love her.

  “That’s Jesus,” Joe says. And sure enough, there he is, floating over us in a pink gown, in a painting that goes from the floor to the ceiling of the hallway. His eyes are astonishing; they see right into your deepest mind. He has a girl’s face, but he has a beard, too—it reminds me of the beard Miss Fenley attaches to Joe with a rubber band. Joe has a sweet face like Jesus. How come we don’t have a god I could appreciate? Our god is mixed up with white shawls and not eating and unshaven men and sour smells.

  Joe has told me that when they die in his family they are all going to hold hands and fly up together to heaven, where they will all live together on soft white clouds. I don’t know much about death, but I know it isn’t soft wherever Bingo is, and wherever the dead soldiers are, and especially in the place my grandmother fears when she clutches her chest.

  This is good here. Mrs. Martini feeds us spaghetti and meatballs and, oh, they are delicious! They slide right down my throat, even if Joe says, “Watch me suck down this worm!” We get milk and wine, if we want it, although we don’t. We each have an empty wine glass, ruby colored, which the light shines through, casting pink lines on our plates.

  This house reminds me of Mrs. Esposito’s because of lace doilies on the backs of all the chairs and the dark flowery smell of the carpet.

  I wonder, if I had been allowed to know other children, would I also have been able to come into their houses? This is very nice, looking around in someone else’s kitchen, seeing their dishes and glasses, eating their food. There is no grandmother here, or aunt, or beauty parlor upstairs, and there may be no cellar, either, for all I know. But people live here and have fun, even so.

  Mrs. Martini wears an enormous gold cross on a chain; as she moves about energetically, it swerves across her chest, back and forth like a pendulum. She doesn’t even glance at our plates; doesn’t she care if we chew and swallow? Doesn’t she worry that we may be late? There’s an easy carelessness here that astonishes me.

  Joe takes me upstairs to his room, and that’s where he tells me he has ten grownup brothers and sisters! They’re all married; he says he was his mother’s little angel, who flew into her life just when she was lonely.

  You flew into mine just when I was lonely, I want to tell Joe, but you can’t say something like that. Then it is over—we each get a hug from Mrs. Martini, and we pass under the kindly eyes of Jesus, and without coats we run back to school in the freezing wind. The icy blasts take my breath away.

  In the afternoon, we practice Christmas carols, but I don’t know what to do when we come to the words, “Christ the Lord.” My father, who is kind in nearly every other way, has become vicious about this problem. “You will not sing those words,” he told me, “and you know which ones I mean.”

  I don’t see why I can’t.
Will I be cursed? I sing them. I sing them all, Christ the King, Christ the Lord, Holy Infant, he’ll never know.

  But that night I get chills, and then I get a 104° fever. Dr. Cohen comes in the morning and says I’m very sick. Two days later he says I have pneumonia. Now I can’t be in the Christmas play. Now I can’t be the mother of Jesus. I can’t ride my donkey/rocking horse. And I can’t be Joe’s wife. All because I’m Jewish.

  CHAPTER 14

  Sundays always start out well enough. For breakfast, my father buys rolls and bagels and lox and cream cheese at Irving’s delicatessen on Avenue P. He buys The Brooklyn Eagle, which is fat and soon covers the floor all around my father’s easy chair. He buys me Greek black olives which, though I can’t say why, I love although my mother makes an awful face when she tastes one. They’re quite disgusting for many reasons; they have slippery, oily skins, they’re soft and wrinkled. They are not only salty and black, but they have a hard pit in each one. There’s the usual problem of pits; you can choke on one if you swallow it; you can break a tooth if you chew hard on it, or it can just take you by surprise if you forget it’s in there, and shock you by being a rock in your mouth when you expect ordinary chewable feelings.

  But, disgusting as they are, I love Greek olives; my father calls them something like misslinnas. They make my tongue curl. I have to drink three glasses of water afterward. But that’s how I am. I love them.

  My mother can’t understand me. When I love something she hates, she looks at me as if I’m not hers. I look right back at her because although I may be hers, I am not her. My father does not expect me to be him, Gilda does not expect me to be her, but my mother wants an exact copy of herself. My mother has decided The Screamer is exactly that—a copy of her. The Screamer likes what my mother likes and hates what my mother hates. I have seen my mother chew meat for her and put it with her fingers from her mouth into The Screamer’s. Liver she chews especially long and hard for her, whereas I always had to chew and gag on my own. The Screamer is the one who naps with my mother now, when her headaches are bad (and they are very bad. They are worse than they ever were). No one thinks to invite me to nap anymore; does she think I don’t get tired? Does she forget what wonderful times we used to have, napping together, each one of us with a wet washcloth on her forehead?

  Today is Sunday, a day when Gilda has no noisy customers running up and down the stairs, a day when the papers are spread in a colorful circle at my father’s feet, a day I have a greasy container of olives all to myself. Sundays always start out this way—peaceful and full of promise.

  My mother says she can’t read the papers because of her headaches, but I notice she can read music without any trouble. She plays the piano on Sunday. Sometimes she plays too loud, and she plays too long; I have learned ways to close my ears to her music. When she’s finished, my father always says something nice, like “Very nice,” and then he looks at me, and I say it also. “That’s nice, Mommy.” She plays her Chopin, and she plays Stephen Foster songs, her boogie-woogie, and she always plays “Oh, Danny Boy,” to which my father howls along like a dog. She likes to tell the story of how, when she was seven years old, her father bought her a piano because he knew she had musical talent. “But Gilda had none,” she says. “She wanted a violin, but he wouldn’t buy her one. He knew she had no talent.”

  My father never lets this pass: “But if he never bought her a violin, how could he know?” My mother throws him a look that says he is not only not like her, but also stupid. I know that look—we all know that look. I suddenly understand that my mother has always hated Gilda just as I hate The Screamer; I feel a sudden rush of likeness to my mother. We are the same, I am her, but in ways she just doesn’t recognize; we are both good haters—maybe the best.

  On this Sunday, in springtime, we have the windows open, and warm, lilac-laden air is coming in on a hot breeze. We begin to discuss what we will do today. Even though we appear so content, reading the papers and hearing music, even though no one has to go to work or to school, we all know a moment will come when we get unhappy. The day, full of endless hours, lies ahead. How many more times can my mother play “Oh, Danny Boy” and how much longer can my father read the paper? Soon we will have to move on.

  Somewhere out there in the world we have relatives, and I am told that on Sunday people visit relatives, but we don’t. My mother won’t have it. She said relatives are the most stupid people of all, and most of them belong to my father, and his are the worst. I remember a few of them, Aunt Clara and Uncle Charlie, Aunt Tillie and Uncle Harry, but that was from a time I was very small. I don’t remember much, and what I do remember is not interesting to me. Uncle Harry had sharp whiskers and Aunt Tillie could not talk without sniffling and snorting. Uncle Charlie smelled of whiskey and Aunt Clara snapped the box of chocolate truffles out of my hands when I wanted a second one.

  So what shall we do? We are at that moment. My mother asks it from the piano bench, her back toward us.

  “The zoo? Issa would love the zoo,” my father says.

  “Too smelly. The monkey house makes me want to throw up.”

  “Prospect Park? We could rent a paddle boat?”

  “Too many hoodlums there on Sundays.”

  “What about the museum?”

  “Blossom will get restless.”

  “We could eat out at the automat.”

  “Who knows how long those sandwiches sit in those windows?”

  “Issa likes it there.”

  “Well, she would. She’s a child.”

  “I like it there,” my father says.

  There is silence. I know this whole play so well. Now my mother will turn back to the keys and play something fast and loud: a military march or the “Minute Waltz.” My father will pick up another section of The Brooklyn Eagle. That’s the end of that. We won’t go anywhere today.

  Then, what happens is what always happens. The day turns dark. There is the feeling of the end of freedom coming. Tomorrow is school, tomorrow my father goes back to work at the defense plant, where (because they couldn’t prove he was a saboteur) they have given him a much simpler job. Tomorrow Gilda’s customers run up the steps like cackling hens (says my mother) and tomorrow the long week starts without a hint of respite.

  I want, I want…There ought to be fun for me. There ought to be roller skates. If I sit on my bed and look out any of the nine windows, I will see The Skaters going by, Linda and Myra and Myrna and Ruthie. Now they know I am in their class, they know my face by now, I tell them the time every day, but still I have no skates. If I had them, I could fly with them like the wind, I could play their noisy games, their rolling games, their racing games, their falling-down games. Whose fault is it that I have no skates?

  My mother won’t let me, that’s all. If she would, the others would stop saying be careful be careful. My father does what my mother makes him do. Gilda, also, is led by her. She is terrible. I hope something terrible happens to her. Because of her we can’t go to the zoo or rowing on the lake or walking in the museum. Because of her everything in my life is the way it is.

  Good, we are getting a thunderstorm. Good, because it will shake the house with thunder. Good, because the rain will pour on the roof and streak the windows with mess and dirt. Good, because it will drown all the ants and soak all the birds and batter all the flowers, and make all the plants and trees bend down and shiver. Good, because my mother is down in the basement washing The Screamer’s diapers and now she won’t be able to hang them on the line and they won’t get dry and they’ll smell bad and The Screamer will have to wear her wet ones and get diaper rash and all that is good, because no one will take me to the zoo or get me skates.

  Sundays are poison. I would go upstairs and bake with my grandmother, but she is clutching her chest today and moaning. I would go upstairs and roll bandages with Gilda, but she is checking her record book of war bonds and has to concentrate.

  No one wants me, so I turn into thunder. With the thunder I
roar and bang and clap and shake the very walls of the house. It is so dark outside that nighttime would seem bright with its moon and stars.

  If only I could get sick they would pay attention to me, but I am healthy, I am strong as an ox, I am gaining weight from eating peanut butter sandwiches and tomato soup with Joe Martini. I could try to break my arm again, but even that didn’t keep me sick enough for long.

  What could happen that would change the dark furious feeling inside me? If I wait, something will have to happen. There is no way this feeling can go on without something to stop it. It is too ugly and terrible.

  The clothes are washing in the basement in the Bendix. My mother is making bacon sandwiches for lunch; the smell of bacon grease gives my father a headache. He won’t touch it, he won’t even sit at the table when she serves bacon, but she makes it because she has to do things to stir him up. I know she likes to get him angry; it makes things happen, it makes the deadly dull Sunday come to life. I am just like her, so I know how she does things.

  What I do is reach under The Screamer’s knitted blanket and pinch her thigh. She can’t talk, so she can’t tell. I love to make her cry. I know it’s bad and I love to do it. That’s the way I am. Why I am bad I don’t know, but I am.

  The lightning is exploding through the windows. I used to be scared, like Bingo, of lightning and thunder, but I believe Gilda’s telling me that it won’t hurt me, so I let it happen now without screaming or hiding.

  This is what I see; I am opening the refrigerator to check if my chewing gum is still stuck in the inside bottom corner. My mother is at the sink, in front of the open window, rinsing the bacon fat out of the frying pan. The bacon strips are lined up like curly snakes on a brown paper bag. The Screamer, still screaming from my pinch, is in her carriage near the stove. My father is not here: he has gone down to the basement to bring the wet clothes upstairs where we will lay them all over the backs of chairs.