Read Online The Kingdom of Brooklyn by Merrill Joan Gerber - Free Book Online Page A

it. I am not even close to happy, thinking of the ball. When I finally get up and bounce it, I am thinking about something else already, and I forget I am bouncing it.
    This is mysterious to me—how the shape of the thing I love, the thought of it, feel of it, smell of it—what used to be everything I needed to feel happy—now is getting away from me, shrinking, getting smaller and littler and tinier until—even though it’s right in my hand—I no longer feel any love for it.
    I bring it right up to my eyeballs, I blink my eyelashes against it, I feel them scrape the rubber, and I look, look, look at it. It’s right there, sticking into my eye.
    But I don’t care.
    Now I want roller skates.
    Ruthie has them. Myra has them. Myrna has them. Linda has them. Everyone on the block has roller skates. The little girls who live on my street roar along the sidewalk, pumping away over the cracks, making a sound like ZZZSHEE, ZZZSHEE. One knee and then the next pumping along.
    I want, I want…I tell what I want to everyone in my house. All of us happen to be standing outside in the street buying cupcakes from the bakery man. My grandmother. Gilda. My mother. My father. They can’t help but hear what I want.
    â€œToo dangerous,” they all say, which is the twin sister to “Be careful.” They tell me I can’t be careful enough if something is too dangerous, though I have no idea why. I can be careful. I tell them so. I’ll do it carefully, I assure them, whatever that means to them. The little girls are doing it out there, on the sidewalk, ZZZSHEE! ZZZSHEE! over the cracks. They’re not getting killed.
    â€œThat’s enough,” Gilda says. My mother agrees. My father agrees. “Don’t ask again.” This time they all miraculously—agree, they all say the same thing.
    â€œDo you want to break your neck?” Even my grandmother chimes in. The chickens she cooks have all had their necks broken by the kosher butcher—do I want to be like a dead chicken?
    I can never be a chicken, dead or alive. They are stupid and wrong. I’m just a child. I just want to roller skate, to fly fast along the sidewalk, to see the hedges go by in a blur. What do they know? They are too old to see any use in it, but I know it must be the secret of happiness. Flying fast, making wild noises. Forgetting whatever it is that goes around and around in my mind, the stuff of stomach aches.
    Linda and Myra and Myrna and Ruthie. For years they didn’t interest me, being wheeled in their strollers by their mothers, or driving by in their fathers’ cars, or sitting on their front stoops eating chocolate pudding or having a glass of milk before bed. They were just other helpless children like me, being guided here and put there and told what to do, but suddenly they are out here on the sidewalk, ZZZSHEE, and they have turned into what I want to be: free. I must meet them, join them, despite my mother’s assurances that other children are of no interest, are dumb, bad, stupid, useless.
    How odd, that just as I determine I need to be outside, they all determine it’s best that I be locked inside. Eating the cupcake the bakery man has given me (free! he does it to be nice, seeing what I have to contend with), I sit on the front stoop listening to their boring arguments. Dangerous traffic. Dangerous germs. Dangerous old men. Dangerous insects. The women circle around me, doing the dance of danger. Best to stay inside, best to color, best to read, best to help Grandma cook, best to…
    â€œHow can I help Grandma cook if I can’t go upstairs?”
    They are silent.
    â€œThen can I go up to the beauty parlor?”
    Gilda and my mother look at each other. My mother does a calculation, I’ve seen that look on her face when she’s doing the budget envelopes—so many dollar bills in here for the milk, so many for the butcher, so many