The Kingdom of Brooklyn Read Online Free PDF Page B

my chest. The thing in his chest feels like a giant bird, bigger than a pelican. “I’m just a civilian, this is my child.”
    â€œHere on vacation?” the soldier asks.
    â€œNo, I have a business here.”
    â€œYour business is over there ,” the soldier says.
    â€œI have a wife and child,” my father answers apologetically. “And another on the way.”
    â€œIsn’t that convenient? You look fit enough to heft a rifle. It doesn’t take more muscle than that garbage there.”
    â€œI know,” my father says. He sounds sad. He sounds almost sick, as if he might cry. He asks the soldier for permission to pick up the garbage. Then he carries it back to our room.
    My mother is on her flowered bed with a small plate balanced on her chest.
    â€œI have to join up,” he says to her. “I’m a strong man. They need me.”
    â€œYou want the telegram boy to ride up to my door some day?” She throws something with all her strength across the room—a quarter of an orange. “You want me to be a widow?” She flings another piece and this one hits the wall.
    â€œDon’t start anything, please! Of course I don’t want that!”
    â€œDo you want Issa to grow up without a father?” She is starting. I can tell from her voice. “After I jump off the roof, she’ll have no mother, either! Maybe you’d like Gilda to raise her.”
    â€œRuth—they need men over there.”
    â€œI need you more here. Anyway—you’re doing your part,” she says. “You make the recordings. That’s all some poor women will have left of their men someday.”
    â€œThe records aren’t making us enough money. The antique business was better; maybe we ought to go back to Brooklyn.”
    â€œI’ll never go back,” my mother says. “Never.” She looks to me for confirmation. Her eyes don’t really see me. She’s deep in her own head. Now that I often do that myself, I know how it feels. You pretend to be paying attention, but you’re not. “You never want to go back, do you, Issa? To that freezing snow? To that crowded house?”
    I am thinking that it’s better here: I have not seen the little man looking in my bedroom window for a long time. Or heard the terrible clanging threat of the furnace monster. I shake my head in agreement. No, I don’t want to go back.

    We are going out to dinner and I am getting dressed up. This is unusual because restaurants cost too much, and my mother eats only tomato slices, anyway. But we are celebrating something, I don’t know what. I am allowed to wear my red plaid dress (although by now it’s too short and the waist is too high) and my black strap shoes. While my mother is in the bathroom, I ask my father to fasten my Jewish star around my neck. To see him hold it so gently in his huge hand, that tiny blue star with the gold rim, makes me think he is holding a tiny, tiny animal that he loves.
    We walk in the warm dark air to the restaurant. My father wants to order me my own dinner, and my mother won’t let him.
    â€œShe’ll never eat the whole thing.”
    â€œBut she’s a person, she ought to get her own plate and choose her own food. Just this one time.”
    â€œWhat are you having?” she asks my father.
    â€œLamb chops.”
    â€œShe can have some of yours.”
    He wants his own, I know. He’s a very hungry man. When she fries him his sunnyside-up eggs, he stabs them with his fork, in a hurry to get the food into his mouth. He wipes up the yolk with his bread as if he is trying to clean the plate so it won’t have to be washed. I like to see him hungry; eating fast makes him happy.
    So when the lamb chops come and she takes one off his plate to cut it up for me, in little pieces, I know he’s sorry to see it go. She takes a big blob of his mashed potatoes, too. Why doesn’t she give