The Kingdom of Brooklyn by Merrill Joan Gerber Page A

coat?”
    â€œWho wants to bother with them?” he says, giving me a new idea that never crossed my mind. Putting on my coat on a cold day has always struck me as a law of nature. I admire this boy; he is my teacher more than Miss Fenley is.
    His house smells different from mine. Food is cooking, but it smells rich and spicy, not fatty and slimy. His mother is different, too—her breasts are soft and big where my mother’s are hard and skinny. She hugs me, too, though I am a stranger. I can’t help but love her.
    â€œThat’s Jesus,” Joe says. And sure enough, there he is, floating over us in a pink gown, in a painting that goes from the floor to the ceiling of the hallway. His eyes are astonishing; they see right into your deepest mind. He has a girl’s face, but he has a beard, too—it reminds me of the beard Miss Fenley attaches to Joe with a rubber band. Joe has a sweet face like Jesus. How come we don’t have a god I could appreciate? Our god is mixed up with white shawls and not eating and unshaven men and sour smells.
    Joe has told me that when they die in his family they are all going to hold hands and fly up together to heaven, where they will all live together on soft white clouds. I don’t know much about death, but I know it isn’t soft wherever Bingo is, and wherever the dead soldiers are, and especially in the place my grandmother fears when she clutches her chest.
    This is good here. Mrs. Martini feeds us spaghetti and meatballs and, oh, they are delicious! They slide right down my throat, even if Joe says, “Watch me suck down this worm!” We get milk and wine, if we want it, although we don’t. We each have an empty wine glass, ruby colored, which the light shines through, casting pink lines on our plates.
    This house reminds me of Mrs. Esposito’s because of lace doilies on the backs of all the chairs and the dark flowery smell of the carpet.
    I wonder, if I had been allowed to know other children, would I also have been able to come into their houses? This is very nice, looking around in someone else’s kitchen, seeing their dishes and glasses, eating their food. There is no grandmother here, or aunt, or beauty parlor upstairs, and there may be no cellar, either, for all I know. But people live here and have fun, even so.
    Mrs. Martini wears an enormous gold cross on a chain; as she moves about energetically, it swerves across her chest, back and forth like a pendulum. She doesn’t even glance at our plates; doesn’t she care if we chew and swallow? Doesn’t she worry that we may be late? There’s an easy carelessness here that astonishes me.
    Joe takes me upstairs to his room, and that’s where he tells me he has ten grownup brothers and sisters! They’re all married; he says he was his mother’s little angel, who flew into her life just when she was lonely.
    You flew into mine just when I was lonely , I want to tell Joe, but you can’t say something like that. Then it is over—we each get a hug from Mrs. Martini, and we pass under the kindly eyes of Jesus, and without coats we run back to school in the freezing wind. The icy blasts take my breath away.
    In the afternoon, we practice Christmas carols, but I don’t know what to do when we come to the words, “Christ the Lord.” My father, who is kind in nearly every other way, has become vicious about this problem. “You will not sing those words,” he told me, “and you know which ones I mean.”
    I don’t see why I can’t. Will I be cursed? I sing them. I sing them all, Christ the King, Christ the Lord, Holy Infant, he’ll never know.
    But that night I get chills, and then I get a 104° fever. Dr. Cohen comes in the morning and says I’m very sick. Two days later he says I have pneumonia. Now I can’t be in the Christmas play. Now I can’t be the mother of Jesus. I can’t ride my donkey/rocking