The Kingdom of Brooklyn by Merrill Joan Gerber Page A

hairs in the sink.
    I already feel lost: the dining room has become the living room (and the piano is moved in there), the living room is now where my mother and father sleep, and the sun porch is where “my sister” and I have to sleep, close to the street, close to the cars whooshing by on the icy road, close to the wild outdoors. I have lost the room of my own. The Screamer’s being here has cut everything in half. My mother and father are only half mine; Gilda and my grandmother are divided in two, also. Although The Screamer is little she gets more than half. Our shared bedroom is full of her things—carriage, Bathinette, little swing, little rocking chair, little rocking horse—my father went somewhere and bought out a household of baby furniture. What belongs to me in my bedroom? Just my blackboard, nothing else. I hate this sun porch room, which has nine big windows in it—not even counting the front door with a stained glass peek-a-boo window. Anyone could look in at us.
    Hammering and sawing goes on all day. The Screamer screams and the drills drill, and the radiators clank, and not once does my mother get a headache. I am looking forward to the day she gets one—then she and I can rest in her bed together as we used to in the old days and I can bring her a wet washcloth. I wait and wait, but it never happens. Her head never hurts—instead the pain goes to her breasts. She holds her breasts, which drip, making her rock in pain. The Screamer is not drinking out of them—though Gilda told me that mothers have always fed their babies this way (I can’t believe it). I am relieved to hear that my mother refuses to do this, it is a great relief to me. When they drip and tears come to her eyes, my mother covers their drips with my father’s handkerchiefs to catch the drops. He watches her cover them with his handkerchiefs. Once he has to help her squeeze the drops out with a rubber pump. When they see me watching, my mother tells me the doctor said they have to do this. She says she has “milk-fever.”
    I run away to watch the carpenter and his helper make the new pantry and the new bathroom where before there was nothing—I watch them lay the tiles, two pink and one white, over and over again in the same design. And then they put the doors at the top and bottom of the staircase which before was free and open. Big heavy doors with locks. I start to cry at the sight of them. How will I ever get into the upstairs if I don’t have a key? How will I ever find Gilda when I need her?

    â€œIsn’t it wonderful?” my mother assures me. They are now building an open back porch where just “our” family will eat in the summertime; Grandma and Gilda are getting a new side entrance for themselves, for “their family,” complete with a stoop, a black steel mailbox, and a gold doorknob. Gilda and I will now have different addresses: mine is 405 and hers is 405 and 1/2.
    The first night I sleep in the new room I watch the moon coming in all nine windows. Nine moons. And then I see what I was afraid of: the faces of nine little men hanging onto the nine windowsills, watching me.

    In the summertime, my mother puts Blossom out front in her carriage. My job is to sit there and watch her sleep. Bingo sits near me under the bench. Sometimes my grandmother sits next to me. We watch till there is nothing to watch. The Screamer is either asleep, or waking up and getting ready to boil, her tongue curling up like a slice of cooked liver. I think, for the first time, that we are all made of meat. That if we put my sister on the grate over the flame, she would cook and could be eaten.
    One afternoon while I am watching my sister, a dog comes over to the carriage and pee-pees on the wheel. He lifts his leg and a stream comes out of a tube on his belly. His tube points up toward his face, while my father’s tube hangs down toward his feet. Or so it seems to me. I