Free The Kingdom of Brooklyn by Merrill Joan Gerber Page A

bandage. He fills the doorway with his pained face. All the women in the house used to run to him, surround him, when he came in, but now there are too few down here to matter. He says he has ruined an airplane wing today. His bosses are very angry in the defense plant, the war could be lost because of this. They want to know: why did he do it? He doesn’t know why, he didn’t know the machine would do what it did, tear into the metal, break off the wing tip. If he had gone to college and become an engineer, then they could ask him why it broke.
    Already my heart, which was pounding from her yelling, is pounding now even more from the blood on his shirt, from the blood seeping through the gauze.
    â€œWhy weren’t you more careful?” my mother demands, even after he said all that he said.
    He looks at her with Bingo’s sad eyes. Those must have been his eyes as they put him to sleep in the pound. How can you do this to me? (I think—every day, every night—about how Bingo must have felt. I think about what Bingo was thinking when they gave him his shot.)
    â€œThe foreman called me a saboteur,” my father says. I have never heard either word, foreman or saboteur , they’re not in my mother’s rhyming lists (though she hasn’t rhymed with me in a long, long time). “He says I could be arrested for sabotage.”
    He sounds scared. My father, who is never scared, is scared. His being scared scares me. Who around here is strong enough to take care of me?
    Oh, I need Gilda! I need the chicken eggs! I need the smell of the soup upstairs, bubbling with celery and onions and carrots. I can’t stay here with the pressure cooker about to blow out the roof.
    I escape. Up, up, up, I go—she’s too busy with the bloody bandage to chase me, too busy with The Screamer, with the cauldron of stew on the flames. How fortunate the doors are not locked between upstairs and downstairs, kept open now so I don’t ask for roller skates.
    Up I go, here I am, look, I want to live with you , stay with you, sleep with you. I grab the silver dishtowel rack on the side of the sink, and I swing on it.
    My grandmother warns me, “Don’t do that!” But it’s too late, the rack breaks off, I fall down, I feel my hand go under me, and I hear the bone crack.
    Oh great emergency! Oh joy! But must it hurt so much to get to this place? This is what I would love to have happen every single day if it weren’t so painful. My mother never yells at me when my body breaks into pieces. She gets the sweetest I have ever seen her; she actually sometimes cuddles me in her arms, embraces me. And my father! He adores me—as now, bloodied and bandaged as he is, he lifts me up in his arms and runs with me through the street to Dr. Cohen’s. They believe the doctor can perform miracles—he can actually keep me from dying.
    You can’t feel good or loved around here unless you’re starting to die or in pain. This is a strange arrangement, but it’s the truth.

CHAPTER 10
    How does Gilda become a bride? One night she appears downstairs like a ghost, like a dream, like a bride doll. Her white dress is so white a light seems to shine from inside it. Her veil is white gauze held on by a white headband crowning her hair. A red cross burns in its center. Gilda’s lips are red and shiny with lipstick.
    We all stare. My father puts down his newspaper and tilts his head to take it in. The Screamer, in her chair eating a butter cookie, sticks her wet finger through the cookie’s round hole and admires Gilda. Lines grow across my mother’s brow, as they do when she begins to get a headache.
    Gilda laughs; she spins around once, her skirt blowing up to show her calves and delicate ankles, and then she runs back to the staircase and disappears up to her own house.
    We hardly know if she’s really been here or not. All that’s left is the scent of Lilies of the