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

else here, no one at all. I pull her down to me and give her a big kiss, right on the lips. She’s surprised, but she likes it. She’s proud of me. When we get on the plane, I get to sit on the knees of one soldier after another. The propeller noise is terrible and my mother has to vomit at least three times. But the soldiers bring her wet washcloths and drinks and one strokes her hair the way my father does, very softly and gently, and I am jealous. I know something new now: I will always want to be just like my mother.

CHAPTER 6
    Luckily, the baby dies. Gilda says it’s just as well because it wouldn’t have been any good after all the shaking it got on the plane. “I hope she’s learned her lesson,” Gilda says, as if all this were my mother’s fault. I don’t think it’s fair of Gilda to blame her, but in no time another baby is growing, and another big fuss starts up and this time I do blame my mother. There must be a way to stop things like this from happening; I just don’t know yet what they are.
    Do I like being home again? No. I miss coconuts and soldiers; I miss living where there is no kitchen. And Bingo smells bad out of both ends. He drags his rear part along the runner in the upstairs hall as if he is using it for toilet paper. My mother tells Gilda: “Your dog is disgusting.” I used to love Bingo, but now I don’t like to watch him squat to make because he stares at me even while his duty is coming out. I know that when I’m on the toilet with my stomach aches I can’t look at anyone when the actual thing is happening. Body secrets give me deep, breathless feelings, but no one talks about them. Body secrets are things grownups keep to themselves.
    When I watch my grandmother put her teeth in and out, I want to ask her, how does it feel to have those, why do you have them, will I have them? But I know my grandmother has very few words—she would rather smile or cook than talk. My father has words, but I automatically know he wouldn’t like me to ask: why do you have those balls and that tube in the front of your body? Do they itch that much? Are they so heavy they make a hole in one certain place in all your underpants?
    Gilda could be asked anything, I’m never afraid of her, but I am afraid it’s possible she doesn’t even know that she has heavy black hairs on the insides of her thighs. Maybe she never saw them (and only I did) and maybe I shouldn’t worry her about them. I know she knows about the pits and deep scars on her skin—she couldn’t miss them since she is in front of mirrors all day, behind the ladies who are getting haircuts, and in front of the bathroom mirror while she is giving shampoos. I have watched Gilda put salves and hot packs on her face. Once, on Avenue P, an old woman stopped her and said, “My heart goes out to you, darling, or I would never say this, but it might help. Try urine on your face. Your own urine, on a sanitary napkin, tied around your face at night.” Gilda ran all the way home after that, with me flying along, holding onto the stroller handle.
    My mother doesn’t hide body secrets—she acts instead as if they aren’t hers, but that someone has attacked her with them, has forced her to have a body when she would prefer never to live in one, eat in one, sleep in one. She lays out her suffering for everyone to see—her headache secrets, her vomiting secrets, her bloody-pants secrets. Now her big-stomach secret. She has a message for us: “Look how I have to suffer. Look what the world does to me.
    She has other secrets I’m interested in—how she makes her behind squish from side to side when she plays boogie-woogie while she rocks on the piano bench, how her dimples made the soldiers laugh, how the curve of her hip makes my father cup his hand on it, makes him say something low to her, makes her tilt her head toward him and forget me! They