The Kingdom of Brooklyn (4 page)

“See? See?” he says joyfully. “Every soldier can send his voice home, captured forever on a record.”

“In case he dies in the war,” my mother says. She hates the war, just like she hates shul, and chatting in the bakery, and Gilda's ladies. But the war is interesting to me—there are the soldiers marching, and the soldiers counting and the soldiers singing:
“Off we go into the wild blue yonder, flying high, into the sun….”
One soldier has given me a Hershey bar on the beach, after asking my mother's permission. Another let me ride on his shoulders and touch the golden wings pinned to the front of his hat.

This is a wonderful place, this beach, this sunny place, without trouble, without liver, without…I have almost forgotten my grandmother and Gilda. I feel a shock of shame.

But my father is showing us the business next door, where a fake palm tree is against the wall, and where the soldiers have pictures taken of themselves to send home to their mothers and wives. He already has a friend there, Eddie, who offers to take a picture of the three of us. So there we are, I in my blue-and-white pinafore, with my brown legs and white soles, and my mother with her frizzy bangs and round tummy, and my father, with his sweet face, his wild curly hair, his wonderful smile. I love the way we are, all of us happy, none of us sick.

“A paradise on earth,” my father tells my mother at night, when the three of us are in our flowered beds. “All we need to do now is kill Hitler.”

There is no upstairs or downstairs here, no backyard or front yard, no Bingo, no ladies who tell stories about their operations or about husbands who won't ask for a raise even after they have worked twenty years selling clothes at Macy's. There is only “Let's Pretend” and “The White Rabbit Bus” on the radio, “Sing this song with your Uncle Don,” and news about the war.

In the daytime, on the beach, I collect baby coconuts, which at night I peel away leaf by leaf, layer by layer, imagining that at the core I will find a tiny crystal doll-baby, or a miniature white rabbit.

Something is beginning to happen between my mother and father; it's a buzzing noise that rises between them like the hiss of the mosquitoes that come near my head at night. Their sounds have changed since Brooklyn. I never used to hear my mother's laughter (the new sound she makes on the beach in the daytime, with soldiers, never with my father), or her soft tears (as she cries at night on her flowered bed when she thinks I am asleep). My father's sounds have changed, too. His round strong funny words have changed to zigzag, loud, sharp responses that make me afraid. This sound is worse after the radio news, or when, at the end of the day, my father brings home the newspaper and my mother snaps back the last page and reads to him a list of dead soldiers' names, soldiers killed on the other side of the ocean. She keeps saying, “Let it not be Marty Goldstone.” I know him, he's my father's cousin, he always gives me chewing gum when I see him. He is in the war. My father says he's like a kid brother to him. Everyone is in the war. My father says he would join up, too. These are the words that always start my mother's tears.

Living in this one room is too friendly. It's true my mother has got her privacy with Daddy and me, away from Gilda and Grandma, but now we're too private in this one room. She says she needs air. She opens the windows but the sound of soldiers marching, hup two three four, makes her cry softly, and the sound of mosquitoes buzzing makes her throw her bathrobe over her face.

I get busy snipping the heads off the ladies in the newspaper. My parents notice the rows of heads on the faded flowered rug and the next day they buy me a toy, a green segmented snake with red eyes and a black diamond on his forehead. I am allowed to keep him in the bathtub and pretend to fish for him with a safety pin on the end of a string tied to a long stick.

When they set me up to fish and then go out of the bathroom, I prefer to put water in the tub, just a little, and watch my snake/fish melt away into green blots, with drops of red, like blood, swirling into the water. He gets pale, little by little, as if he is dying. I know I am ruining him, but it gives me a great deal of satisfaction.

One night my father and I have dinner of fried eggs that my mother makes on a hot plate in the room, while she eats sardines with the spines and tails and fins because my father says she needs the calcium for the baby's bones. She gags, but she swallows it. I wonder how she likes eating something she hates. Sometimes she throws up in the bathroom sink. It's too bad I don't know the number for the Miami Beach Peter Pan Nursery if there is one. I could threaten her with it, or go out to the lobby and pretend to dial their numbers, but I'm really too afraid. I'm always afraid of her.

These days she's not paying much attention to me; we never nap on the same bed anymore, I never squeeze out a washcloth for her here, and on the beach she takes the soldiers' attention away even though they start out talking to me. She steals them from me and then they see only her, with her flared shorts, instead of me in my butterfly pinafore. She's not even that pretty now. When I see her naked, I realize her stomach is getting very big, as if she has swallowed an enormous coconut. It occurs to me that because Gilda isn't here to want me, she doesn't want me, either.

After dinner my father picks up the bag of garbage and I go with him as he carries it to the cans in the back alley.

A man—a soldier—jumps out of a doorway and points a rifle at us. “Halt! Who goes there?” he shouts. My heart stops beating, then begins again, as if a bird were flapping its wings in my chest.

“Just a civilian!” my father cries, dropping the garbage and grabbing me up in his arms. I can feel his heart thumping against the bones of my chest. The thing in his chest feels like a giant bird, bigger than a pelican. “I'm just a civilian, this is my child.”

“Here on vacation?” the soldier asks.

“No, I have a business here.”

“Your business is
over there
,” the soldier says.

“I have a wife and child,” my father answers apologetically. “And another on the way.”

“Isn't that convenient? You look fit enough to heft a rifle. It doesn't take more muscle than that garbage there.”

“I know,” my father says. He sounds sad. He sounds almost sick, as if he might cry. He asks the soldier for permission to pick up the garbage. Then he carries it back to our room.

My mother is on her flowered bed with a small plate balanced on her chest.

“I
have
to join up,” he says to her. “I'm a strong man. They need me.”

“You want the telegram boy to ride up to my door some day?” She throws something with all her strength across the room—a quarter of an orange. “You want me to be a widow?” She flings another piece and this one hits the wall.

“Don't start anything, please! Of course I don't want that!”

“Do you want Issa to grow up without a father?” She
is
starting. I can tell from her voice. “After I jump off the roof, she'll have no mother, either! Maybe you'd like Gilda to raise her.”

“Ruth—they need men over there.”

“I need you more here. Anyway—you're doing your part,” she says. “You make the recordings. That's all some poor women will have left of their men someday.”

“The records aren't making us enough money. The antique business was better; maybe we ought to go back to Brooklyn.”

“I'll never go back,” my mother says. “Never.” She looks to me for confirmation. Her eyes don't really see me. She's deep in her own head. Now that I often do that myself, I know how it feels. You pretend to be paying attention, but you're not. “You never want to go back, do you, Issa? To that freezing snow? To that crowded house?”

I am thinking that it's better here: I have not seen the little man looking in my bedroom window for a long time. Or heard the terrible clanging threat of the furnace monster. I shake my head in agreement. No, I don't want to go back.

We are going out to dinner and I am getting dressed up. This is unusual because restaurants cost too much, and my mother eats only tomato slices, anyway. But we are celebrating something, I don't know what. I am allowed to wear my red plaid dress (although by now it's too short and the waist is too high) and my black strap shoes. While my mother is in the bathroom, I ask my father to fasten my Jewish star around my neck. To see him hold it so gently in his huge hand, that tiny blue star with the gold rim, makes me think he is holding a tiny, tiny animal that he loves.

We walk in the warm dark air to the restaurant. My father wants to order me my own dinner, and my mother won't let him.

“She'll never eat the whole thing.”

“But she's a person, she ought to get her own plate and choose her own food. Just this one time.”

“What are you having?” she asks my father.

“Lamb chops.”

“She can have some of yours.”

He wants his own, I know. He's a very hungry man. When she fries him his sunnyside-up eggs, he stabs them with his fork, in a hurry to get the food into his mouth. He wipes up the yolk with his bread as if he is trying to clean the plate so it won't have to be washed. I like to see him hungry; eating fast makes him happy.

So when the lamb chops come and she takes one off his plate to cut it up for me, in little pieces, I know he's sorry to see it go. She takes a big blob of his mashed potatoes, too. Why doesn't she give me what's on her plate? I'm not sure what it is—we never had it in Brooklyn. They look like fat white worms, with pink lines on them. My father, who likes to taste things off her plate, doesn't touch them.

He holds up his wine glass to celebrate the reason for this dinner out: “To our coming new member,” he says, reaching across the table to bang her glass, but she bangs too hard and he tips the glass and spills some wine on his pants.

“Wash it out or it will stain,” my mother says; then, when he leaves the table, she quickly takes a pat of butter from the bread dish and drops it on top of his mashed potatoes. As it begins to melt, she leans across the table and mashes it in till it disappears.

“Don't breathe a word,” she says. “This is an experiment.” I don't know what she is experimenting with, but I agree to keep her secret. Her eyes are sparkling in a way I never see. She looks alert and cheerful.

When my father comes back with a dark wet spot on his pants, right in front, as if he has made in his pants, he starts eating his food in great shovelfuls. His lamb chop and his green beans and his mashed potatoes.

My mother laughs out loud. He looks up and smiles because she is laughing. She looks so pretty; we almost never see her teeth. She throws back her head and laughs.

“What is it?” he says, still smiling. He is almost laughing himself.

“You can't even tell,” she says.

“Tell what?”

“You can't tell what's in your mashed potatoes!”

“What?” he says. He looks down. His potatoes are gone. He puts his fork down. “What do you mean?” “Tell him, Issa.”

They both look at me.

“Mommy put butter in your potatoes.”

He stares at her.

“And you didn't even know the difference!” she says. She leans forward and stares at him. “All that nonsense,” she adds. “You can just forget about it.”

I know what this is about now. Being Jewish. Milk and meat can't go together. Milk is like butter, like ice cream, like cream cheese. There is some kind of rule he has that causes her trouble, or did, when she was cooking at home. She always had to keep his potatoes separate from mine, in which she put butter.

I touch my Jewish star and realize at once that's a mistake. She didn't even know I was wearing it and now she's looking at it, getting ready to start something. She never liked Gilda to take me to see Mrs. Esposito and she wouldn't let me wear the star after I got it, saying that jewelry was for special occasions, not for playing in the sandbox.

I never tried to wear it on the beach where I had to play in the sand every single day. But now I'm worried.

“
You
can forget about that nonsense, too!” she says to me. She reaches behind my neck and tries to open the clasp with one hand, but she can't.

“Do it,” she says to my father. “I don't want her wearing that nonsense.”

“It's hers,” he says. “It belongs to Issa.”

“What does she know? She's a baby. I don't want her head filled with that dovening baloney, all those old guys in beards doing a hocus-pocus act, don't do this, don't do that, eat this, eat that.”

He is getting angry that she's doing this. I wonder why she is, especially at a restaurant on a special night when we are all dressed up and looking beautiful.

She tells me to eat, not to waste this expensive food.

Now
? She shoves a forkful between my lips. Again, I have little squares of meat in my mouth that won't go down. My father hasn't finished his lamb chop, but he's certainly done eating.

“Leave her alone, Ruth,” he says. “Don't get worked up. It's not good for you.”

I think he's wrong, she likes it. It's not good for
us
; we hate it.

Then suddenly she pulls my Jewish star hard. I feel a pinch on my neck till the chain snaps, and she throws my star on top of my mashed potatoes.

I don't know what to think. My father's face is ugly and I don't like him. I don't like her either. What will happen to me if I hate them both? I wish Gilda were here; I wish I could run somewhere. I burst into tears and my father lifts me in his arms, puts some money on the table, and carries me out of the restaurant.

He jerks along the sidewalk very fast. Over his shoulder I can see my mother coming after us. But not too fast. She is watching us carefully, she looks almost cheerful. In the hotel he puts me to bed. When she comes in, they say nothing to each other. Even after they get into their beds, they say nothing. For the first time I realize that silence can be louder than noise.