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suddenly she pulls my Jewish star hard. I feel a pinch on my neck till the chain snaps, and she throws my star on top of my mashed potatoes.
    I don’t know what to think. My father’s face is ugly and I don’t like him. I don’t like her either. What will happen to me if I hate them both? I wish Gilda were here; I wish I could run somewhere. I burst into tears and my father lifts me in his arms, puts some money on the table, and carries me out of the restaurant.
    He jerks along the sidewalk very fast. Over his shoulder I can see my mother coming after us. But not too fast. She is watching us carefully, she looks almost cheerful. In the hotel he puts me to bed. When she comes in, they say nothing to each other. Even after they get into their beds, they say nothing. For the first time I realize that silence can be louder than noise.

CHAPTER 5
    My mother and I are walking along the street near the ocean wall. The breeze is blowing the palm fronds, the sky is bluer than my bluebell eyes, there are troop ships on the horizon. Pelicans perch on the jetty rocks; their hanging beak-pouches are round and taut like my mother’s stomach. No one is holding my hand. We are going to get wafer cookies at the store. When the wafers are fresh, they are perfect: crunchy outside and sweet and white inside. I eat one cookie in two bites, never more, never less. I can eat as many as I want; I am always hungry for these cookies. Even when I can’t eat one more bite of hard-boiled egg, I could eat ten cookies. We have not had any meat since the restaurant. I begin to hope I will be free of meat, especially of liver, for the rest of my life. I even hope we will never have a kitchen again. That is my most urgent hope.
    Three men come running out of a hotel; they run into my mother and knock her down. She falls right on her stomach; she rolls on it, this way and that, as if she is a seesaw balanced on a ball, head down, feet up. Head up, feet down. I see this happen as if I am on a swing, going up and down myself, because I feel dizzy. They aren’t ordinary men, they are soldiers. I can tell from their sharply creased brown pants.
    They help my mother stand up, they look down at her belly. She looks down. She bends her knees and looks between her legs, at her white shorts. There is nothing to see.
    The men help her to the beach wall. She sits there. That’s all she does: sit there—but I am more frightened now than I have ever been, more afraid of having seen her flailing on the sidewalk than I ever was of the furnace catching fire or the monster in the pipes in Brooklyn exploding into my room. More afraid of this than of my stomach aches, than of having to eat my own vomit.
    What will this seesaw rocking do to the baby inside her? Will the baby be hurt? Will the baby need iodine? Will my mother have to drink it to get it to the baby? Who is this baby, anyway, and why does it have to come? There is hardly room for the three of us.
    I don’t know what we will do next. Do I get my cookies? Do we walk home? Do we call my father? All I see is my mother rocking on her round stomach like a seesaw.

    â€œBuy me a newspaper,” my mother says as soon as my father walks in the door. The soldiers have walked her back to the hotel, holding her between them (and one holding my hand), and my father has been called home from his recording store. The wife of the owner of the hotel has given my mother an aspirin. The soldiers have left. The owner’s wife has left.
    My mother is lying on the flowered bed, looking quite regular, as if she has forgotten that she was knocked down to the ground.
    â€œGet the paper. I want to see the casualty list today.”
    â€œYou don’t need to read it every day. You don’t need to get upset. You’ve had enough excitement for one day.”
    â€œGet it,” she orders my father, “go down to the drug store and buy it right now.”
    He hesitates, but he has to