Iodine, she is taking iodine, I know it. My eyes are filling with heavy fluid, tears that won’t come out, salty tears that are flowing backwards, drowning me. Why do these things happen? How does a nice time transform itself into a nightmare so fast? How can people in a family be polite one minute, playing music, and admiring something wonderful, and the next minute there is cursing and screaming?
By afternoon, things look ordinary again. I am reading Forever Amber on the back porch. No one else is around—my father is at his store, The Screamer is still at someone’s birthday party, Gilda is not stirring upstairs. My mother is back at the piano, playing “The Moonlight Sonata.”
When I pass through the living room to my bedroom, I see her head bent over the keys. Her white hair is loose and hanging over her face. She rocks as if in pain on the piano bench and her fingers play the mournful, grieving notes without her seeming to know it. She isn’t aware, she isn’t looking at music. Her body quivers like a silk nightgown drying on the line. She lifts her head but doesn’t see me. Her eyes seem sewn shut, like the alligator’s. And then I see that her face is covered with tears, is slick and shining with them. They drip down, over her fingers, over the keys. On and on she plays.
Every day we get closer to my last day in Brooklyn. When I wake each morning, the day at first seems ordinary, one more day in the endless row of days that stretch into my life, but it isn’t: It’s more like a great truck bearing down on me, or like a boulder let loose on top of the mountain, far up there, but still—crashing its way down, aimed at my heart.
The house is going to be sold. Gilda is making inquiries about renting a room somewhere and then she will try to get a job as a beautician. My father is going to open an antique store in Florida. We might have another house, or we might not. I might make new friends or I might not. They tell me ways to think about it but I won’t. I ignore the whole thing.
In the meantime, my father is packing his antiques, carton by carton, and bringing them home for putting in a trailer we will rent to attach to our car on the day we move; each day my mother takes strangers through our house, hoping they will want to buy it. I keep out of their way, hiding and reading books I still insist on taking out of the library. Gone with the Wind is my favorite now. Scarlett won’t leave Tara; I don’t blame her. It’s the least you can do if you love your home.
Izzy and I plot and plan: he will make his mother move to Florida so he can be near me. If she won’t move, then he’ll come himself, as soon as he’s old enough to drive. And we’ll get married, of course. I’m guaranteed a husband, I will never have to be as lonely as Gilda. We kiss on the cellar steps, sitting very quietly with the light off so no one will discover us. If I look behind us, through the opening of the backless stair, I see the looming outlines of the oil tank and the furnace. Is it possible that I even love these monsters and want to be with them? At least I know them; I don’t know the monsters in Florida.
The question in my mind is this: is this move really one of the things that can’t be stopped? Some things, I know, can never be budged. But is this, does this have to be, one of them?
I don’t know what happened to the alligator purse. The next weekend, when Gilda goes to the opera with Joe Boboli, she carries a white bag with blue and red and yellow wooden beads sewn all over it. She wears a white dress, a white hat with a big floppy brim, and white shoes with navy blue tips.
My father watches from my nine windows while she drives away in a new black Dodge car with Joe Boboli, who is shorter than Gilda and bald. My father sighs. Then he says, “I’m going into the cellar to mend a picture frame. Come down with me.” He invites me, holding out his hand. “You can help me.”
The cellar is looking more and more like a warehouse; the cartons of antiques he has brought home each day are piled like towers of blocks, one upon the other. These are the ones he will take to Florida, the ones with which he will open a new business. There are other piles of boxes, some to be given away, some to be thrown away. Soon all our furniture will have to be sold, even the rattan couch and chairs.
I don’t think about it. I don’t pack my things. I refuse to sort out my possessions. I won’t throw away toys from my childhood, or books, I will never throw away books. There’s no way I can pack my bike. I never did have skates. I hate this and I just won’t do this. When the day comes, they’ll have to drag me to the car. They can take my things or leave them. I don’t care. I refuse to care. How can they do this to me? How can they make me throw away my entire life? When I think of Florida, I think of a big zero. Nothing, it’s nothing. I don’t want it. I won’t have it. I will pull the coconuts off the trees there and kill my parents with them. There is nothing for me to hang onto. I feel like a zombie.
In the basement, my father sands the edges of a broken picture frame. “I’m fixing this painting for Gilda,” my father explains. “You know it’s her birthday coming up.”
Of course I know. The painting is of a country girl wearing an apron and holding a pail, leading a cow through a meadow. “Gilda’s always loved this since she first saw it in my store; now she’s going to have it. She should have it.” My father is now gluing the edges of the wooden frame together. He wants me to tighten the clamp while he presses the angled edges together. The fumes of the cement are strong; I turn my head away.
“Are you sure it’s okay to give this to Gilda? Won’t Mommy get mad?”
“Why should she?”
I’m astonished. Doesn’t my father remember the alligator purse? Doesn’t he ever learn anything? I begin to wonder if he understands what goes on here every day.
“Daddy, why can’t Gilda move to Florida with us?” I ask him. It has been on my mind all along; with my grandmother dead, I can’t see why we don’t invite her.
“Well, she and your mother don’t get along that well. Besides, she lives here, she’s lived here all her life,” he says. “This is her home.”
“This is my home,” I tell him.
“Well. Tell that to your mother.”
I don’t know if he’s serious. Does he think my telling her would make any difference? Just then, we hear her opening the door at the top of the steps. She’s coming down, her feet clumping in their loose slippers. She’s bringing another load of laundry down to the Bendix.
“Tell her now,” he says. “Maybe she’ll change her mind. I’d be very happy if she changed her mind.”
“Change my mind about what?” my mother says sharply.
“Issa wants to tell you something. Tell her, Issa.”
I look at my mother holding the wicker basket full of dirty clothes: my clothes, The Screamer’s clothes, my father’s clothes. Since we have no maid now, she has to do hard things for us, we should be good to her.
“I don’t want to move to Florida, Mommy,” I say. “I want to stay in Brooklyn.” I say it like a five-year-old, although I am now thirteen. Why don’t I stand tall, right up to her? I am now her same height. “And Daddy doesn’t want to move either.”
“Is that so?” she says. She smiles, very slightly, with her mouth tightly closed as if something disgusting is trying to get into it. I realize that if I learn to smile the same way, I won’t ever have to show my small teeth. It’s amazing, how I learn things from her all the time.
“What’s that doing here? Why isn’t it packed in one of the cartons?” She lifts the toe of her floppy slipper toward the painting.
“It’s the present for Gilda’s birthday,” I say as if we all know it already. “I think we should give her a party, too. We could invite Iggy and Izzy and Joe Boboli.”
“An Italian!” my mother sneers. “Mama would turn over in her grave.”
“She’s not marrying him,” my father says.
My mother starts throwing the clothes into the Bendix. “That painting is going to Florida with us—we’re not giving it away. It’s valuable. It’s an oil painting. It’s by a known artist. We can sell it. We need stock for the new store.”
“But G
ilda has always admired it,” my father says. “What can it hurt us to leave her something she loves? We’re taking Issa.”
“You gave away my purse to her. You give her too much money for her clothes. Now you want to give her this. The next thing you’ll want to give her is my child! Don’t you want to leave anything for me?”
Her voice rises up into that beginning of hysteria. Why must she do this? Why doesn’t my father hit her? Why doesn’t he stop her? How come she can get away with so much?
But I see by his face: even he is afraid of her. Like me, he’s afraid she’ll take iodine. He’s afraid we’ll lose her forever. Why else would he let her do this, let her start it and go all the way with it? What else could scare a grown man?
CHAPTER 36
Last things. There is a somberness to everything we do: the last visit to the library (we can’t be having library books mixed up with our own books anymore, and, besides, my father has no time to take me and wait for me while I choose books), the last visit to Dr. Ellen for my teeth to be cleaned (thank heavens), the last visit to Irving’s Delicatessen (Irving gives me a handful of Indian nuts as a going away present).
Gilda still presents me proudly to the storekeepers, but now it’s the last act. “They’re moving away,” she tells everyone. “They’re moving to Florida for the children’s health.” This is news to me. But it’s the new reason: The Screamer has delicate lungs. She needs warm air. The freezing winters are dangerous for her. My sister’s health seems a more decent reason to move than my mother’s need for privacy. My mother seems to believe it: she starts treating The Screamer as if she is a true invalid. Now my sister gets even more attention, more dolls, more coddling.
Money is constantly under discussion. Division of everything. My mother has called a lawyer she used to work for and made an appointment with him. One day she and Gilda, dressed in city clothes, go away for the day and come back with their signed agreement: that Gilda will get only one quarter of the money from the sale of the house: she had to agree that she did not contribute as much as my mother and father did to the mortgage payments over the years. Even if my grandmother’s death left the house to them equally, it is only fair this way. My mother made Gilda see it her way. But my mother assures us Gilda will have enough to live on, especially if she gets a job. Then she can rent a nice apartment, not just a room. And if she gets married—who knows? She could marry a millionaire! She could end up Queen of the May.
On our way to the vault on King’s Highway (more legal matters have to be taken care of, Gilda has to put away this new written agreement) I ask Gilda about Joe Boboli. She shrugs her shoulders: Iggy meant well, but Joe Boboli turned out to be a disappointment: a loud mouth, a man in too much of a hurry for action. The opera wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t for her. “And I could never live with an Italian who has to sprinkle cheese on his spaghetti and meatballs,” Gilda says. “Meat and cheese, it would turn my stomach.”
We pass the suspicious eyes of the stern bank guards in uniform and we are back in the roomful of silver drawers. There’s a fierce chill in here, as if the buried gold in this underground vault is encased in blocks of ice. How well I remember the ritual: Gilda puts her key in the lock of her drawer and the guard puts his key in the adjacent lock and together they turn their keys at the same moment. This unlocks the treasure.
We carry the metal box to the secret room. I feel the awesome power and hush of fortune; what treasures people own are as secret as what happens when men and women make babies together.
“There’s no point my saving these for your wedding,” Gilda says. “Who knows if I’ll be there? Who knows what the future will bring?” and she plucks out of the tissue paper in the box the diamond earrings that belonged to my grandmother. She holds them before my eyes; they swing and sparkle.
“But didn’t they get flushed away in the rest home?” I ask. I am truly astonished to see them again.
“They weren’t the real ones,” Gilda assures me. “How could we trust those colored girls with Mama’s diamond earrings? But Mama wanted her earrings; she was so vain at the end, so vain! Your mother gets it from her, I think. So your father found some fake ones in his store that looked like the real thing. Mama never knew the difference.” She dangles them again in front of me. “For you, Issa.”
“For me?”
“Precious jewels for a precious girl.”
“But what about Blossom? Doesn’t she get half?”
“What good would one earring do her, tell me that! Besides, she never knew your grandmother like you did. No, these are yours, your heirloom from Grandma. Take care of them.”
“Oh yes,” I breathe, taking a pledge that is witnessed by the silver altars around us, “I will.”
“Here, let me screw them on.” The first earring pinches my earlobe as Gilda tightens the screw, then attaches the second one, but I don’t even whimper. “What a beauty you are getting to be. In a few years, you’ll drive the boys wild.”
“Even with my silly little teeth?”
“Your teeth, Issa? What’s wrong with your teeth? They’re perfect! They’re delicate and sharp, they’re white and perfect.”
“But my hair is wild and stupid.”
“Your hair is magnificent,” Gilda says. “Curly and thick and shining. What have you been thinking?”
“That I’m ugly.”
“Oh sweetheart!” Gilda takes my face in her two hands and kisses my hair, my mouth. “You break my heart you are so beautiful.”
“Gilda, I’ll miss you so much. How can I live without you?”
“Don’t,” Gilda says. “I can’t take that now. I won’t be able to walk home on my two feet if you do that.”
My last walk home from King’s Highway, my last passing by this shoe store, this bakery, this drugstore. My last stepping down this curb, over this sewer grate…I decide I am carrying this too far and will be bored in a minute. Even moments this dramatic have their limitations. I swing my head carefully from side to side. My precious diamond earrings, tiny as they are, graze the skin of my neck. They tickle and thrill me.
We come in view of my house. How many more times will I see it like this, standing up like a dollhouse against the blue sky, its chimney straight as a soldier on guard, its lilac tree a factory of springtime perfume? How can I emboss these images on my memory so I am guaranteed to hold them forever?
I imagine we are all taking our last positions. My mother at the sink pouring grease out of a frying pan, my father in the easy chair puffing on his pipe, Gilda on a beach chair in the backyard, letting the sun bake her ragged skin, Beloved curled in a circle in his doghouse, head to tail, raising his eyes as I come into view.
A longing for Beloved tightens my throat like a thirst; I must drink him in right now! I run up the alley, up the three steps to the back porch and prepare to dangle my sparkling jewels for him.
The doghouse is dark inside, there’s no splash of his white patch of fur, or the flip of his tail.
“Mommy,” I call, the gong of alarm beginning to sound in my belly. “Mommy!”
She comes to the screen door but doesn’t look at me. “Where is Spotty?”
“I don’t know, Issa. He got out.”
“He got out? You mean he ran away?”
“Oh, look now,” she says, “I told you what had to happen.”
“What?“
“I told you we would find him a good home.”
“He’s gone?” I fall to my knees and put my forehead to the rough boards as if I will see him under the back porch, through the cracks. Then I leap up and shriek. “MA! MA! What did you do?“
“I don’t like it when you carry on, Issa.”
“What did you DO? Daddy said we could take him with us. He promised!“
“I never promised. They get ticks in the heat that suck your blood. They get fleas. Dogs are a health hazard.”
“Gilda!” I scream at the top of my lungs for Gilda. “Come down. My dog is gone! She gave away my dog
!” I know how to scream and be hysterical, too. I come by it naturally, I do this as well as she does it. “Gilda! Gilda! I’m going to die!”
“Oh shut up, Issa.” My mother slaps my face and I do for the first time feel myself dying. This is dying. I can’t have Beloved in my arms for the rest of time. This is death.
The rest is arguing and sobbing and denying and explaining and shouting and shrieking. The rest is done in the vacuum of my Beloved, in his absence, in a catalog of reasons and words that echo and bounce in my empty heart. My mother is saying the reason we can’t sell the house is because he’s been yapping whenever strangers come to see it; my mother is saying that she found him a perfectly good home with a farmer.
“I don’t believe you,” I scream. “There are no farms here!” and Gilda is smoothing my hair and saying, “She did this to me, too, darling, she did this to me and I lived through it. You’ll live through it, too.”
But I don’t care to live. I might as well die right here, right now. Without Beloved, I don’t even want my earrings. I don’t want to get married someday, I don’t want my life at all. Without Beloved, the future is a black pit. My mother is the cause of all this. My mother, who has done this to me, looks scared by what she has done. But it is done. I know it can’t be undone. This is one of those brick walls.
She says, “After we move everything will be better. We’ll be happier. I promise you. We’ll all be happy in Florida, Issa. Where the sun shines all the time.”
CHAPTER 37
The house is sold to the Borocheks. They are just like us, a mother and father and two children downstairs, and an unmarried aunt and a grandmother upstairs. How amazing—as if, when we move away, ghosts of us will remain and continue living our lives there. I don’t want to meet the children; I don’t want there to be a girl my age who takes my place as one of The Skaters/Bike-Riders/Cookers, who will become Izzy’s partner in playing Old Maid on the stairs. I want to get away as soon as possible.
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