The Kingdom of Brooklyn (25 page)

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:

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.

“And now,” my mother says, “the house is worth much more, much more than we paid for it!”

This news causes Gilda to bow her head and begin to stir her ice cream in circles, mushing it down till the hill of chocolate melts to a runny brown mess.

My mother begins one of her lists, I see it coming, by her inhaling a deep breath, before she even begins.

“The winters are better in Florida, the weather is better in Florida, the antique business, we hear, is thriving in Florida, there's no reason to stay in this filthy, cold, stinking place.”

Brooklyn? Is she talking about my Brooklyn?

“Except that you live here with me,” Gilda says. “Except that you are my only family. You know the children are like my own.”

“Only I am,” I remind Gilda. “Not so much Blossom.”

She smiles, so very sadly, and she takes my hand.

“Yes,” she admits. “You are like my own child.”

“It's never too late. You could still find someone to marry,” my mother says. “And have your own children.”

“It will never happen,” Gilda says. “You took care of that very nicely, didn't you?”

“I had nothing to do with it,” my mother says. “That Sam was a no-good bum.”

“Maybe he wasn't perfect, but neither am I,” Gilda says. “You know it was my only chance. You ruined it because you didn't want him living here.”

“You can have anyone you want living here,” my mother says, “…if you find someone to buy the house for you.”

“You would really do that,” Gilda says. “Take Issa away from me, just like that. Just disappear with her…”

Now I am really listening. Now I want to fling myself into Gilda's lap and wrap my arms around her neck. Now I want to promise, “I won't ever go, I won't ever leave you!”

“If you run around with that Iggy, you'll find some man or other,” my mother says. “You probably can't help it, that dame has so many men after her, one of them might even settle for you.”

I see it in her eyes, the cargo of bad words amassing there—they're gathering in her mind like an army getting ready to strike. Doesn't my mother know she has got to be careful? Gilda is like an eggshell. Gilda can't listen to this

“Don't say any more,” Gilda begs. “You'll be sorry for it!

“I won't be sorry. What I'm sorry for is all the years I've wasted being your servant. What I'm sorry for is myself, and my children, who never had a natural family life! I'm sorry that my husband and I never had any privacy, not one stinking goddamn minute of privacy. I nearly killed myself, Gilda, working for you and Mama, and for what?” My mother's veins are standing out in her neck and in her forehead. She shakes her fist and rattles the heads of the lions on her bracelet, who have the same fierce expression she has. “So now we want to escape! To get out of this place. To go somewhere warm and beautiful and where you aren't always hanging on to me and my kids!”

“Oh!” Gilda says. The pits in her skin stand out dark and deep. They are like holes out of which her life will pour.

“But, Mommy!” I cry. “I don't want to leave Gilda!”

“Children don't decide these things!” my mother says, hitting her fist on the table. She shakes her head so that her cheeks flap. “You'll go where we say you'll go.”

“But I
love
Gilda!” And this time I move, I leap into Gilda's lap and throw my arms around her, I wash her tears away with kisses, I kiss every place I can reach on the gravelly roughness of her skin.