The Kingdom of Brooklyn

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  Coney Island! That’s where we’re going. We’re taking a wild ride to the place of wild rides. Izzy grabs my hand and I feel his index finger move through the circle of my closed hand like a key riding through the opening of a lock.

  “Isn’t this fun?” he asks. He leans close and says, “Isn’t this fun, Issa my kisser?” His hand comes down on the seat between us and nudges my flesh. Whereupon I enter a new extremity of knowledge.

  Kissing, it seems, is the essence of every ride. Bumper cars, merry-go-round, tunnel of love, fun house; with them come speed and thrill and laughter and kissing. We check from time to time and see Iggy waiting for us on a bench at the edge of the boardwalk, smoking cigarettes and staring at the ocean while Izzy and I forget time, forget the world, as we spin, as we bump, as we scream to the springing forth of ghosts and devil-faces in the dark.

  “Did you know people could have this much fun?” Izzy asks me as we look at our images—two fat people with enormous feet—in a pair of fun-house mirrors.

  I shake my head.

  “I didn’t think so,” he says. “What you needed was me.”

  Oh yes. It is a certainty. All the years of crying I want, I want! and what I needed was him. Do I have him? How can a person know when she has someone? And for how long can he be mine if I do?

  Izzy apologizes that he has no father; but what he has is seven uncles, some of them rich. “We can go on any ride we want. Even twice! Even three times! My mother doesn’t care. She gets all the money she needs. And she likes it at Coney Island—sometimes she meets men.”

  One time, as we pass by a doorway in the fun house, we glance across the wild slants of the boardwalk and see that Iggy has company on her bench: a sailor, in fact. A sailor in a sailor suit and a jaunty sailor hat.

  “She likes to kid around with guys,” Izzy says. “They think she’s a hot tomato.”

  “How does a girl get to be a hot tomato?” I ask Izzy. We are in a new part of the fun house, standing up to our ankles in cold, slimy worms. “Ugh,” I add.

  “It’s only spaghetti,” Izzy assures me. “Let me think about hot tomatoes,” he says. He leads me to the next room, where we have to sit down on a softly padded bench that collapses under our weight and sends us careening down a slide, at the bottom of which we land on a bed of balloons. “Only some girls can be hot tomatoes. Most can’t. But you—” Izzy says. He pulls me close to him. “You’d be a star hot tomato.”

  “Me?”

  “Issa the kisser,” he says. And we kiss again, popping balloons as we roll out of the way of the next couple who are screaming and plummeting down the slide together.

  “Your mother is going to kill you,” Iggy says, as we drive home. She thinks it’s a joke, but it isn’t: my mother can kill, and this time she may.

  The truth of what I will face at home is beginning to close in on me; the sky grows darker and darker. It is, in fact, night. How did I—so easily—forget my whole family? My duty to them? My certain punishments? For a girl who tries to be good I am definitely bad, seriously bad. I may even be bad enough to be classed as a hot tomato. How I hope so!

  “Look,” Iggy says, reaching over and giving my thigh a friendly pinch. “What can they do to you? Nothing! They can’t do anything! So you’re late. So what? I’m responsible—I’ll come in and tell them I took you for a ride around the block and we ended up in Canarsie. Or Coney Island, wherever the hell we were.”

  “Leave out ‘wherever the hell,’ ” Izzy advises her. “You’ll see what I mean when you meet Issa’s mother.”

  “Aah. She can’t scare me,” Iggy says. “I eat spinach out of a can.”

  Both Gilda and my mother throw open the front door when we ring the bell. Both look as if their faces have been dipped in white face powder.

  “Which dame is this kid’s mother?” Iggy asks, putting her hand on the top of my head.

  “Issa!” my mother says directly to me, “we thought you were kidnapped.”

  “No such luck,” Iggy says, and she laughs like Betty Hutton, bending over and slapping her knees.

  Gilda’s mouth is open. Iggy says, “Close your mouth, kiddo, or flies’ll get in.”

  Izzy pokes his mother. “Come on, Ma, tell them how we just took Issa around the block, and then you had a flat tire, and they had to tow us to Bensonhurst, where…”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what happened,” Iggy says. “But it’s water under the bridge, here we are, safe and sound. And Issa is fine, we took good care of her, just look at her.” She pinches my cheek to prove to everyone that I’m healthy and alive.

  My mother casts a withering glance upon Iggy’s pink, fuzzy sweater. Then she turns her stare upon Izzy. He has a smirk on his face that thrills my entire body. My mother reaches out and pulls me into the house. She is about to slam the door when Iggy says to Gilda, “Hey, neighbor, I’m new on the block, we ought to have tea sometime.”

  “We ought to?” Gilda says. “You and I? My sister and I were just about to call the police.”

  “Good thing you didn’t,” she says. “Police aren’t that cute. Sailors are cuter.”

  Again, my mother begins to close the door when my father’s car pulls up at the curb. We all watch him park. He gets out with one of his usual cartons under his arm; when he sees a crowd at our front door, he grins. His pipe is angled at the corner of his mouth, he is wearing baggy pants and a big tweed jacket.

  “Hey, this man is better looking than Clark Gable,” Iggy says. “Which of you lucky ladies owns him?”

  My father grins and when no one answers, Iggy says, “If you’re not spoken for, I’ll take you.”

  He can’t help but laugh. My mother reaches out and drags him inside: “Come in, dinner is ready.”

  When they disappear Iggy says to Gilda: “You live in the same house with that dreamboat and he isn’t yours? How do you stand it?”

  Gilda stares at Iggy as if her heart has been torn open.

  “Look, I think you could use a little advice. Why don’t we have lunch at the Chink’s on Avenue P tomorrow?” Iggy says.

  “I don’t know…”

  “Issa and Izzy will be there,” she says. “Right, kids?”

  We nod.

  “Who knows what our fortune cookies will tell us?” Iggy says to Gilda. “See you then.”

  CHAPTER 28

  The Bike-Riders and I have chosen a club song; we sing it at the end of every club meeting and we sing it as we ride our bikes along the bicycle path:

  Did you ever think when the hearse went by

  That you would be-e-e the next to die?

  They lock you up in a coffin dark

  And cover you over with dirt and rock…

  The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,

  They crawl in your stomach and out of your

  mouth…

  After we sing the last line, we dissolve into laughter. No sir, not us, no worms worming their way through our graceful inner parts. We’re young and healthy and soon we will be called upon to exercise our baby-making machinery and the world will be made anew. Worms threaten only the old and emptied out, the ones who have no life ahead of them, like my grandmother. (But Gilda, is she useless? Is she too old to make the world anew?)

  Though my plan is never to think about my grandmother, I can be hit with a thought of her, like a bullet through my temple, when I am most unguarded. The simplest act, like racing inside the house from a game of stoop ball to get to the bathroom before I lose it, can throw up a picture before my eyes of her lying twisted in her wet and bunched-up sheets in the steel bed at the nursing home. Food will do it, too; anything that won’t go down my throat sends up a silent cry from my lips to her ears on Ocean Parkway, where a colored helper shoves cold oatmeal into my grandmother’s slack, unprotesting mouth. But no! I have vowed not to think about her. I make myself stop. These thoughts start up a motor of violence in my body: the wheels of stomach pain begin to churn. Don’t think about it. I don’t want to, but why then
does my mind turn back to my grandmother, like a hairpin seeking a magnet? Why does it secretly worm its way back in, bring up technicolor images of horror, though I haven’t seen my grandmother since that first time, never go to visit her. (My mother won’t let me go, and secretly, in this instance, I thank her. But why do I harbor this dangerous tendency, the hidden intention to make myself feel worse when I already feel bad?)

  Gilda says almost nothing about what happens at the nursing home. She only brings up the subject when she has to discuss a medical decision or some financial matter. But today she is begging my mother to visit in her stead, to bring food to my grandmother, to feed it to her.

  “Please,” she says, a word not easy for her to say to my mother. “I need some time off. I have an appointment. Please will you go there today?” Gilda asks her favor standing on the bottom landing of the steps, not quite in our house, but not quite on her property either. She swings on the doorknob, leaning into our house and then out, like a sail blowing in the wind.

  “Mama doesn’t know the difference,” my mother says. “It’s all the same to her if you skip a day. You could skip a month and she wouldn’t know. She’s in a black hole. Besides, the smell in that place makes me puke.”

  “Everything makes you puke,” Gilda says.

  Oh! Such an ugly word. Something clutches in my bowels when I hear that word. There are words that can make me come alert like a hunting dog (fuck is such a word) and others that can make me shiver. Puke sends a shudder down my back and every hair on my body stands on end.

  My mother knows about words and their power. Not just rhymes, but curses. I am grateful she has never said the word puke about me, not even when I have had fever and been racked with vomiting. Even the times I’ve been heaving and spewing out acid liquid, she has only stepped away from me and screamed for someone to bring a towel, “Hurry, Issa is throwing up!” (Of course it is always Gilda who comes, who holds my forehead, who whispers soothing assurances that soon the racking waves will be over.)

  My mother hoards her ugliest words as I hoard my smiles. She waits to let them out, waits for fights, for the best moment to attack. When she’s in some uncontrollable whirlpool of fury and contempt, when the world seems full of so many “nobodies” that she can’t bear to live in it another minute, she lets certain words out of her mouth like snakes: bitch and punk and lousy bastard and no goddamn good and puke.

  Today Gilda has said puke, but only because she is quoting my mother. My mother knows that Gilda’s appointment is taking off time to have lunch at the Chink’s with Iggy and Izzy. With me. She hasn’t refused me, but she refuses Gilda. She will not feed my grandmother. If Gilda goes out to lunch, my grandmother won’t be fed. Take it or leave it.

  Gilda is sensitive about the word Chink’s. She can’t help it if everyone calls the Chinese restaurant “the Chink’s,” but we don’t have to do it. Jews don’t like to be called Kikes, she says, and the Chinese don’t like to be called Chinks. I never heard a Jew called a Kike; this is news to me. What could it mean?

  As we walk together down East 4th Street toward Avenue P (Gilda looks away as we pass Mrs. Exter’s house and hurries her stride), she confides she is worried about encountering pork in the Chinese restaurant. She has not been out in the world much; she has never eaten Chinese food, though all her ladies love it, and they especially recommend egg roll.

  The Chink’s (see? I can’t help it) is right down the street from my old ballet studio and near the movie theater. The restaurant has a brown bamboo curtain across the front window and a dusty statue of a red wooden dragon nailed over the doorway. Gilda hesitates at the entrance; she squeezes my hand. I think we both feel as if we are about to enter a forbidden world; we can sense the beyond: strange smells, a dark interior, an atmosphere of danger and excitement.

  “Maybe they’re not here yet,” I say, and we look out into the bright sunny world of Avenue P: the passing cars, the delicatessen across the street, the dry goods store.

  “They must be inside,” Gilda says. “There’s the red car.” And, indeed, there it is, Iggy’s “Lizzie,” parked at the curb like a red fire truck, its top down, brazen and open to the sun. I move with Gilda toward the darkness inside, where the air turns cool, dark and foreign, but still: Izzy is inside. My sense of excitement suggests to me that we could be moving slowly toward the sun’s whirling center.

  Ivory chopsticks, hard, twig-like noodles in a white bowl, thick-lipped tea cups with thin-legged storks painted on them. Gilda sits primly beside me, against the wall, while Iggy and Izzy play a switching game with their tea cups:

  “Gimme that one, mine is chipped.”

  “Give it back, you goose. Why should I cut my lip!”

  “Why should I?”

  “We could ask the waiter for another one,” I venture. But mother and son are having too much fun, swinging their arms back and forth, making a racket, till Iggy cuffs Izzy on the head and says, “Shaddup or I’ll take away your Betty Grable pinup and put a picture of me there instead.”

  Izzy pretends to throw up. Then the waiter comes to take our order.

  We all agree on chicken chow mein and boiled rice; tea comes with our lunch. Izzy asks for a side order of spare ribs. I don’t know if I will be able to eat whatever comes; I have trouble with food, especially if I can’t tell what it is, or what’s in it.

  “They don’t serve liver here, do they?” I ask, and Izzy thinks this is hilarious, he laughs till he slides off his seat and disappears under the table. Then he makes a grab for my legs and pretends to sob into my lap.

  “Oh please, please, waiter, make us liver chow mein, it’s a delicacy, we can’t live without it.”

  Gilda sips her tea and makes a face. It has leaves, black as little flies, floating around in it.

  “Up here, young man,” Iggy says, and she pats his seat until he surfaces, just as the egg flower soup is served. I try mine with its little shovel-shaped spoon. It is very much like chicken soup. I am deeply relieved.

  The restaurant is nearly empty, and while Gilda and Iggy talk, Izzy suggests we take a table of our own.

  “Go ahead,” Iggy says. “But don’t make a mess. Have a heart; don’t pour soy sauce all over the tablecloth.”

  Soy sauce. Izzy is at home with everything here. I have never heard of the things he extracts from the tangle of steaming food on his plate: bok choy, bean sprouts, water chestnuts.

  Izzy holds up a small umbrella-shaped object between his chopstick.

  “What’s that?”

  “What’s that? You never saw a mushroom?”

  “No.”

  “God, you are a peasant.”

  “It looks slimy.”

  “Taste it.” He holds out his chopsticks. I don’t recoil, but I hesitate. And here I am at a threshold again (will it never stop happening?)—the challenge to move into new territory, to risk my life! And indeed the thing looks dangerous: flesh-colored and slippery and oddly like…but no, I have never seen one, why do I have this thought.

  “So if you throw up, you throw up.” (He doesn’t say puke; I am deeply relieved by that.)

  I lean forward, close my eyes and open my mouth. Izzy draws his chopsticks with the thing on it in a heart-shaped line along my lips, and then lays it gently down on my tongue like an offering. I close my lips. Before I can taste it, it slides down my throat and disappears.

  Izzy laughs. “Now you’re poisoned. You’ve eaten the forbidden fruit,” he says. “Now you have to leave the Garden of Eden.”

  “You’re a lunatic,” I dare to say to him. He loves that he has shocked me. But, yes, I feel the mushroom inside me, throwing sparks.

  “Tell me more. What else am I?”

  “I never met anyone like you.”

  “Good.” He sits back, satisfied. “I’m one of a kind.” The waiter arrives with the spare ribs.

  “Have one.” Izzy holds the plate out to me.

  “Is this pork?”

  “No, it’s liver in dis
guise.” I lift with my fingers a rib, wine-red and hot, almost sizzling, the edges are dark and look succulent.

  “Bite it, Issa. Do it. You’ll love it.”

  I take a strip of meat gingerly between my front teeth, which are small; they sink in deep.

  “How is it?”

  I am making my evaluation. It’s sweet, it’s crisp. “It’s good,” I say.

  “It is pork, you know.”

  “So I’m ruined.”

  “Not really,” he promises. “There’s much further to go to be ruined.”

  Iggy makes us come back to their table for fortune cookies and tea. I know the two women have been talking the whole time. I have never seen Gilda’s cheeks so red, or her eyes so brilliant.

  “Issa, baby,” Iggy says to me. “We’re going to make a new woman out of your aunt here. We’ve got to get her out in the world more, take her to Coney Island, make her try pizza, drag her to a Dodgers game.”

  Gilda laughs, looking down at her plate.

  On the wall above our table is a small painted lamp, unlit, covered by a milky glass tube. The picture is of a delicate Chinese girl in pink silk robes, holding a parasol. I notice a black ridged switch at the bottom of the lamp; I reach to turn on the light.

  A bolt shoots through me, so sudden, so hot, so shocking, that I gasp, leap up, and begin to dance wildly. My fingertips are quivering.

  “What is it? Did you get a shock?” Gilda cries out.

  “Bad wiring,” Iggy says. “This place is a dump.”

  Gilda puts her arms around me. She is trembling. “She’s okay,” Iggy says. “Relax.”

  “I would kill myself if anything happened to her,” Gilda says. She covers my face with kisses.

  Izzy says “Maybe it’s just a message from God telling her not to eat pork.”

  Gilda throws a look at her plate, which has remnants of meat on it. Izzy is still laughing; he doesn’t know about the ball of lightning that was aimed at my mother as she cooked bacon. He has no humility in him, but now that I, too, have been electrified, I feel I have been given a warning.