The Kingdom of Brooklyn Read Online Free PDF Page A

me.”
    What happens on the beach is that the soldiers don’t talk to my mother at first, they always talk to me. Then, after they learn my name, they begin to talk with her. They forget me and they make her smile, even laugh. She blushes when she laughs. She casts her eyes down to the sand. Her shorts flare out over her hips like a tiny skirt. She has dimples in her knees.
    Day after day I play in the sand at the edge of the water till only the bottoms of my feet are white while the rest of me has turned brown. I have a new pinafore in the shape of a blue-and-white butterfly. My mother takes dozens of pictures of me because I am so beautiful. She hasn’t had one headache in Miami Beach; I am afraid to tell her this, in case it will remind them to come back.

    Where my father finds a business, or how, I never know. But we go there the next day and we see him in a store, which is now his. He sells—not bread, not cough drops, not fish—but the voices of soldiers. In his store they can write letters without a pen, or sing a song to send directly home to their mothers or wives.
    There’s not much in this store, it’s tiny, all there is is a little booth with a curtain around it (like at the doctor’s office) and a machine that turns a record around and spins out black thread. He lets me stand next to the recording machine, lets me collect the springy strands of warm black plastic. He sings to show me how it works: “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me haaaaapy, when skies are gray, you’ll never know dear, how much I love you, please don’t take my sunshine away.” Then he plays the record for me on the record player and there it is, my father’s wavery familiar, golden voice, telling me how much he loves me.
    â€œSee? See?” he says joyfully. “Every soldier can send his voice home, captured forever on a record.”
    â€œIn 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.
    â€œA 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.”

CHAPTER 4
    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