The Kingdom of Brooklyn (10 page)

Never mind that the smell in the hot lunch room is of vomit and tomato soup. Or that the sandwich is peanut butter on whole wheat bread and we have to eat in the semi-dark. I can get this food down. I can swallow anything as long as I don't have to run fourteen blocks each way and be watched as I eat and drink and even as I go to the bathroom. I could manage crusts here, liver here, soft-boiled egg if I had to. Joe Martini and I sit at a long wooden table and each get our bowl of soup and our half-sandwich. We get our milk. Some children look sad, but I can't imagine why. Would they rather be racing home in a blizzard? Home is fine for some things, like having a cold, or getting an enema, you wouldn't want to be in school for those things, but for eating anywhere else is better than home.

School may not be as bad as I thought. It's terrible for learning things, but it has its advantage for eating food and for sitting with Joe Martini. At school you can forget home if you want to. At school you have a kind of privacy in your mind that no one can enter. Miss Fenley might think I am reading “Ride ride ride” every time someone reads it, but she can't really know what I'm thinking. No one knows what is going through my mind as I stare out the window at the trees blowing in the wind, or even as my eyes follow Miss Fenley's pointer going along the row of alphabet letters. I am learning things, but not the things Miss Fenley is teaching me. I give myself special lessons that light up my mind like flashes of lightning. I walk through a blizzard of my own thoughts and cross my own dangerous streets.

On the radio, Christmas is as big as the war, even bigger. Songs come on—”Silent Night,” “The First Noel,”—that my father switches off and my mother switches back on. A little green plastic Christmas tree appears in the kitchen and then disappears. At school, decorations go all around our classroom. Tinsel (which I never saw before) and stars and elves and Santas and candy canes and camels and donkeys and reindeer and Jesus The Baby and Jesus The Lord and Jesus The Savior and Jesus The Father. Joe Martini knows all about Jesus and can't believe I never heard of him.

“I'm Jewish,” I tell him, hoping that will explain everything, but wondering why even Jews don't know news this big about Jesus.

“Jesus was a Jew,” Joe Martini tells me. “So you should know.” This is definitely something I will have to ask my father about since he is the expert on Jews in our family. But I know he won't want to talk about Jesus. He won't talk about Christmas either, except in fights with my mother. The word
Christmas
is between the two of them like the word
liver
is between my mother and me.

“Issa is in school now,” she informs him, which seems to make it plain why she should have the Christmas tree she wants in our house. Not just the little plastic one, but a big one, a real one, a forest tree with green piney leaves, with mirrored balls on it, with tinsel.
With presents for me under it!
She doesn't want to deprive me, she says. Or Blossom, my sister. “This is a Christmas world,” she tells my father.

“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.

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.