“The worst?” The worst, as I understand it, is dead, but who could be dead? His worst would be his mother, my worst would be my dog. “Who?“
“Your grandmother!”
“My grandmother?“
“Dead,” he says. “I saw her myself, in her coffin.”
“You saw her?“
“This morning. In the funeral home.”
I can’t take this into my mind. Scenes of the day flash by and I find nothing out of the ordinary: my hours in school, coming home, Gilda upstairs, my mother downstairs, milk and cookies, my practicing the complicated performance of making Stuffed Norwegian Prune Salad, the oil burner man coming to fill the tank in the basement.
My mind circles these events—is this a “find the mistake in the picture” puzzle?—and comes to rest on the snake of the oilman’s black rubber hose, as if it must contain the clue to Izzy’s bombshell.
I see it, both in recent memory and in conjunction with all the years I have witnessed the ritual: the unwinding of the thick black snake from the coils rolled in the oil truck, the dragging of the great tube up the front walkway, the turn around the stoop as it’s tugged and twisted into an unnatural right angle, the scraping-jerk of it up the long alley and into the opening of the low cellar window.
“You have to believe me. She’s really dead,” Izzy is pleading. “I saw her myself.”
But I can’t talk to him now, not while I’m following the progress of the hose as it’s pushed into the slit of the cellar window; not while I’m feeling the uneasy thrill of witnessing this bizarre, allowable penetration into my house, the entry of this awesome object through the cellar window (also the place through which I imagine bad men must enter if they are to get to me, the way all nine men looking in all my nine windows will someday attack me).
The oil man is always ragged and smeared with black, his face is black, his hands are black, he’s dirty, and smells of rancid oil, he’s never the same man but always looks the same, and he pushes that huge black cylinder into the secret opening of my house and pumps the dangerous, flammable oil into the waiting mouth of the oil tank.
“She looked like a ghost,” Izzy says.
The enormous oil tank rests like a submarine beside the green monster of the oil burner which, each morning, belches steam up from its pipes and rattles the bones of the house.
“There was white powder on her face,” Izzy says, talking so close to my ear that he blows my hair deep into its opening and I shake with a chill. I fend him off for the moment while I consider how long it takes for the oil to be pumped in! How impressed I am by the simultaneous emptying of one vessel and the filling of another. And always, as accompaniment, I hear the steady whirring noise, the low thrumming vibration traveling from the truck at the curb along the length of the house, into the window, down to the cellar floor, into the hole in the oil tank.
Sometimes I watch from the alley, sometimes I go down into the cellar to see the needle of the gauge rise from Empty to Full, moving like the single hand of a clock that travels from the start of the universe to the end of time.
The black hose pulses and shivers; if I touch it, the rubber is hot and moves like a stream of black lava under my hand. The man with the black face stands holding the hose at his pelvis, staring down into the cellar window to see the gauge on the tank, and watching me, if I am down there.
I was down there today, putting soap powder into the Bendix for my mother, while the black thing unloaded its stuff, jerked and convulsed and leaked a few drops of thick oil under the tank.
“I actually touched her face,” Izzy insists. “It was ice cold.”
“Nothing bad happened here today!” I blow the words at him. He blinks his eyes at the blast. “No one died today. Only the oil man came.”
“Your mother didn’t want anyone to tell you,” Izzy says to me. “I heard my mother talking on the phone to Gilda about it. Your mother wants you to win some kind of cooking contest at school and she didn’t want this to upset you. She warned Gilda not to tell you, or else. She said it wasn’t important enough.”
“But prunes!” I say. “How important are prunes?”
“I told them you have to know. I told them at the funeral home this morning. I told them you should be at the funeral tomorrow, but they’re going to send you to school like today and go without you. That’s why I came over here tonight.”
I consider Izzy now, under the blanket. Is he a liar? Is he an enemy? If he is not my enemy, then my family is the enemy.
“They would never not tell me!” I scream out suddenly. “She’s MY GRANDMOTHER!”
My scream wakes The Screamer, who also screams, which is her automatic response to everything.
And then we hear the steps of my father approaching the bedroom, the steps of a giant who shakes the walls with the force of his heavy steps. He flicks on the switch and blasts our eyes open in a flare of orange light.
“What’s going on here?” he roars as he takes in the scene before him: Issa, his daughter, in bed, under a blanket, with a man.
They try to explain it away: my mother and father babbling, outdoing each other in their desperation to make it seem fair, myself screaming back, Izzy defending himself and close to tears. Gilda running downstairs to see what’s wrong. Izzy’s mother is called to come and take him away, he is castigated and shouted down, “You had no goddamn business telling her, you little bastard,”—(my mother is not hoarding her bad words)—their miserable excuses are prying out my eyes, coming at me like arrows, “We wanted to protect you, no need to disturb you, Grandma was old and wanted to die, she wouldn’t have wanted to ruin your winning the cooking contest.” Prunes, they’re talking about prunes, and they don’t know in the slightest how happy I am, that Grandma can’t shame me any more by a look from her eyes, that she is free of her tangled sheets and her twisted limbs, free of her pain and free of her brain that knew everything but could not get her any peace.
When I look into her coffin the next day at the funeral parlor (I have screamed that I must see her or I will kill everyone), I assure myself that she is gone, that the life has been vacuumed out of her, that wherever she is, she’s not in her ruined costume of a body. Then I run into the bathroom and kiss my own arms, from the wrists to the elbows, up and down, big wet kisses begging my body to keep me in it, that I have a long way to go, that I can’t go anywhere without it.
And while I am kissing myself, I go into the toilet cubicle to pee, and I see my first blood. Oh good, it is a sign, I will get my life as promised, I have all those things to do ahead of me, a boyfriend and marriage and menus and table settings—a thousand years before I come to this moment in my own coffin that my grandmother is having in hers.
I come out, trying not to smile. Toilet paper is stuffed in my underpants, and I let them take me to the funeral, to the deadly digging of dirt and burial, to the boring drone of the Hebrew prayers said by an old and bearded creature of a synagogue, I let them comfort me and kiss my brow and smooth the hair out of my eyes, I let them think whatever they think about how my chances for the contest are ruined, but I am really so happy, I am free of my grandmother’s heartbreaking glance forever, and I have blood in my pants, and Izzy is not my enemy, he is home with his mother who is taking care of The Screamer, and he is waiting for me.
CHAPTER 33
No sooner does one major event fade out behind me than another looms ahead. I mark my growing up by the dangerous adventures I have survived: the necessity of going to kindergarten, the irreversible arrival of The Screamer, the division of my house into two houses, the sinister ambush-plans of the polio bug, and, most recently, the putting underground of my grandmother. But now there is something unexpected and enormous raising its teeth at me: my mother wants to sell the house and take us away to Florida! (Gilda doesn’t know yet and I am forbidden to tell her. We are to pretend that nothing is in the air; we are waiting for Florida newspapers to arrive that will tell us what houses cost in Miami Beach.)
I don
’t know what to make of this new development. No one asks my opinion. In some important way my life feels exactly like the song we sing in Scouts:
The bear went over the mountain
The bear went over the mountain
The bear went over the mountain
And what do you think he saw?
He saw another mountain
He saw another mountain
He saw another mountain
And what do you think he did?
He climbed the other mountain
He climbed the other mountain
He climbed the other mountain
And what do you think he saw?
He saw another mountain
He saw another mountain
He saw another mountain
And what do you think he did?
He climbed…
Up and down is all I do. As soon as I get calm from one hair-raising close call, the next one starts. Is this the way it’s supposed to be? What if I want to sit somewhere on the mountain and read a book and stare at the sky and drink from the stream and never climb up to the next top, never climb down to the next bottom, and, most of all, never look over to what’s coming next?
I need some time. Everything takes time to do, reading a book, or steaming a pot of prunes, or getting expert at playing jacks, and I can’t always be climbing up and climbing down and looking ahead and looking behind.
Izzy is on this mountain. The Skaters/Bikers/Cookers are also on this mountain and we are all sewing our own brassieres at club meetings and this will take time. My Kingdom of Brooklyn is on this mountain—as are my treasured provinces of Prospect Park and Coney Island and Ocean Parkway and. Ebbets Field (though I never saw it, and no one has invited me to a ball game again).
And there are wonders on this mountain I haven’t even seen yet…like the train one can take into the great New York City where everything is fancy and huge and crowded and amazing. Two of the Girl Scouts are already allowed to go there—one to a real ballet school where she takes lessons, and one to see a plastic surgeon who, as soon as her nose stops growing, is going to do an operation on it to make it beautiful. (Could he do me, I wonder, tug on my teeth to make them longer, and remove my curls and replace them with straight hairs that fall in one shining wave like a curtain, toppling this way and that as I turn my head from side to side?)
There’s not much else I want fixed: I have my regular body that I live in that’s looking pretty good these days and is even learning to resist the birds that thump inside my chest and the butterflies that churn in my stomach. My body seems definitely more in harmony with me since we—my baby-making machinery and I—have been blessed with blood.
So I don’t want to move to Florida! What’s Florida got to do with me? Besides, we already have rattan furniture. We already have a Persian rug. Now we also have a Toast-Tite sandwich maker that takes slices of white bread (buttered on the outside!) and presses them between two iron disks on long handles, and makes magic sandwiches over the stove flame. Toasty on the outside, melted and steaming on the inside. We put apples and butter and cinnamon and sugar inside the bread, and we make little apple pies. Food is not as bad as it used to be.
And even today, this very day, we are getting a new Frigidaire with an electric motor on top of it. The old refrigerator, the one I used to keep my used chewing gum in, the one that has its motor in the basement, no longer pleases my mother. “It has had its day,” she announces.
“But if you talk about moving,” my father says, baffled, “why buy a new one? Why now?”
“One thing has nothing to do with another,” she answers. And to me she says, “Go down and do the buttons for defrosting. When the delivery man comes, we must have it empty and dry so he can take it away.”
The cellar—I never get over my fear of it. The rawness of the cement walls on the way down is just the first hint of the falling away of pretense. I descend on wooden steps that have no backs (if I looked behind my heels, I could see into the room with the oil burner), past the crude splintery shelves that hold the flit gun and other poisons, down and down to the two rooms under the house. There is the room with green storage benches lining it (in which my mother once played Ping-Pong with friends before she married my father), there is the painting of the harlequin figure on black velvet that my grandfather once bought for my mother. (Did my mother ever have friends? I can’t imagine it, just as I wonder if she ever read any books. I’ve never seen it happen. And did my grandfather ever really live here, in this house, where I have been forever but have never seen him? The same grandfather who knew my mother had musical talent, but that Gilda didn’t?)
A bare bulb lights this green room, and at the far end of it is the dreaded hole in the wall: just a hole to the place under the sun porch which is my bedroom, just a hole into a deeper, darker hole, where there is only dirt. Nothing else: dirt, no walls or floors, just the same kind of dirt I saw piled on the hill beside my grandmother’s grave.
I never go that way. The other way is the room with the furnace, the oil tank, the Bendix, the washtub, and the refrigerator motor. I hold my breath in that room, believing that if I don’t breathe, time can’t move forward and nothing can change. The Bendix, with its foam-whirling window, can’t open and flood the room, and thus drown me; the oil tank can’t send spouts of oil through its round entry hold and cover me with thick, black sludge; and the furnace can’t open its fiery mouth and suck me into its hellish maw. I never breathe when I have to do my job with the refrigerator motor.
And this is what I have to do: I have to face the metal motor that vibrates the table it rests on, the floor I stand on and my very teeth. There are gears and pulleys and rubber belts on this machine, and they whirr and turn until I do the necessary thing I have to do with the two round rubber-tipped buttons. And this job I have to do is the taking of them, these buttons, between the tips of my thumbs and forefingers, and—at the same exact moment—I have to pull them out of the holes they are pressed into.
All of this has to be done while I am not breathing. If I do it correctly, the motor will stop, the whirring will cease, the vibration will quiet to silence. And then I have to runupthestairsasfastasIcango.
The last time! This is the very last time. The new refrigerator will have its motor right on top of itself, right in the bright, busy, noisy, friendly kitchen. I will never have to come down into the cellar again! I give it my farewell glance—the low cobwebbed ceiling, the high window through which the oil burner man sticks his hose into the tank, the ugly tank itself, which even now has a thick black puddle of oil oozing out of its underparts, and the mystery of the furnace, with its cargo of power and flame.
I dash, I skid, I take the steps two at a time (backless and threatening as they are), my cheeks are bursting with my held breath till I pop into the kitchen like a red balloon, blasting out the bad air, sucking in the good.
“I did it!” I cry.
“You can’t be serious about this,” Gilda is saying to my mother. She has just come downstairs to admire the new Frigidaire, expressly at my mother’s invitation, expressly for the amazing eating of ice cream not just bought five minutes ago from the ice cream man but ice cream simply taken out of a freezer, which will keep it frozen as long as we want it there.
I am proud, I can’t help but feel our good luck, our advantage in life, our superiority. We are the winners. But to win over Gilda, is that good? To feel good while she feels bad—she has no freezer—isn’t that bad? Still, I am bursting with delight over the knowledge that ice cream can now be mine, at any time, winter or summer.
This ice cream is my mother’s favorite: chocolate. Gilda’s favorite, as I have witnessed and been told many times, is vanilla, which just shows—in my mother’s view—how lacking Gilda is, how insensitive to what’s really good, how dumb.
“We are serious,” my mother says, licking the back of the teaspoon. She still wears her hair in the upsweep; she can do it herself without using a mirror, by
holding hairpins in her mouth, their ends sticking out like fangs of wire, and then jabbing them, one by one, into her roll of twisted hair.
“But how can you do this to me?” Gilda asks. “Issa is my life.”
Now I stop eating ice cream long enough to wonder what they could be talking about. Mostly I don’t listen to adults talk anymore; my own thoughts are far more compelling; wherever they jump or land, I go with them to see what I think. I always amaze myself—by the distances I travel with a daydream, by the graphic scenes I imagine by following a floating thought here and there through a maze of what-if-this? and what-if-that? adventures. But Gilda has just said my name, said it like a cry!
“We wouldn’t move right away,” my mother says. “Not till the summer, probably.” She rests her elbow on the kitchen table and her wrist is bent, her hand dangles limply, her gold lion bracelet gleams in the light. The lions have gold faces, gold manes, but their eyes glow with rubies and their nostrils are diamonds. When my father buys out an estate of antique jewelry, she takes her pick before she lets him sell any of it.
“But even so!” Gilda says. “Where would I go, what would I do?”
“You’ll get part of the money from the sale of the house. We’ll go to a lawyer and work out a fair arrangement.”
“I don’t want an arrangement. I want to live here! This is my home!”
My mother now addresses me, to give me the history of this house, which I’ve already heard a million times. “Think of it, Issa,” she says. “When my father bought this house he paid $9,999 for it! With a four percent mortgage. Of course, when he died so young, I had to work to pay the bills and support Mama and Gilda till I married your father. Then he supported all of us!” She pauses and gives Gilda a look. “Of course, Gilda did what she could, giving a few haircuts, but how much could she really contribute?”
So? I am listening, but what does this mean to me? She’s telling me this as if I haven’t lived my entire life in this house, knowing everything about everything.
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