The Kingdom of Brooklyn by Merrill Joan Gerber Read Free Book Online

almost disappeared and make fights out of them. My father lives through things and forgets them. Or, if he remembers them, and if they’re bad, he doesn’t add them on to everything else bad that ever happened. My mother’s way lets her scream and get started anytime she wants to, which I understand. I sometimes want to get started but I have no new reason to; if I held onto everything bad, I could just get going with no new reason. I practice doing this, but my memory is not as good as hers. Maybe I haven’t lived long enough, and therefore I don’t have as many bad things to remember. Going to school seems to be a bad thing, but I haven’t even gone yet! It seems as if I have, as if bad boys have made fun of me and hit me already. I am just waiting to tell them I’m important and they’re nothing. When will I finally be able to do all the things I have practiced to do?
    Talk, talk, talk. We have to go back to Brooklyn because my father has got his draft notice. The army is taking older men. They are taking men with wives and children. But he has one way out: if he goes to work in a defense plant, he doesn’t have to go over the ocean to the war.
    He wants to go over the ocean.
    My mother wants him to work in a defense plant.
    What kind of plant could that be? I imagine a plant with big green leaves, with bombs growing out of it. Bombs are on posters all over the city. A man called Uncle Sam, who wears a tall hat with stars on it, is also on the posters. He wants my father. My father wants to go and “take care of” whoever shot down Marty Goldstone’s airplane.
    Thinking that Marty is dead makes my father Jewish again, even if it’s dangerous with my mother there. He opens his little black book from Brooklyn. He doesn’t have his white shawl at the hotel, but he takes a towel and drapes it over his shoulders. He puts a washcloth over his head and stands in the corner and mumbles.
    My mother laughs at him. He ignores her till she comes and tries to pull the towel off his shoulders. Then he snarls at her, like Bingo snarls at me when he’s eating and I try to pinch his back. They bark at each other; they look as if they will kill each other.
    I wish I had my snake/fish to jerk around in the tub, to bleed the green blood out of and kill him again. I have no one to be my enemy here, while my mother and father have each other.

    We say goodbye to all the coconuts, big and small, except for one baby coconut I am allowed to take back to Brooklyn with me. We say goodbye to the palm trees, the pelicans, the blue sky and ocean waves, the flowered room, the soldiers on the beach. We say goodbye to my father, who has packed up his recording machines and sent them back to Brooklyn. There are no friends to say goodbye to. I never met one child in all of Miami Beach. My mother says I don’t need children anyway; they are bad and will hurt me. And they are all stupid. She says I will see for myself when I get out in the world.
    The biggest exciting thing of the bad things is the airplane we have to fly on. Just my mother and I get to fly on this plane, a troop plane going to Brooklyn. My mother has to be on it because the doctor said the train ride would kill the baby. Even the plane ride might. I hope it will, because if children are bad and stupid, why should this one get to live in our house?
    My father kisses us over and over. I push him away. He’s blocking my view of the plane, a big black thing, just like in the newspaper. My mother hugs him and whimpers and whines till my father turns us over to a soldier and leaves us under the wing of the plane. The minute he disappears, she gets happy. She laughs and her dimple pops in and out. She has dimples on her cheeks and her knees, and I don’t have one anywhere. If she loves my father so much, why does she cry when he’s there, and laugh when he’s not?
    I have to hang on to my mother now; there’s no one