The Kingdom of Brooklyn Read Online Free PDF

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.
    â€œJust 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