In memory, I saw the purple stare and heard the dangerous woman say: Juju eye? You’re a real little freak in the making, aren’t you?
I went to the window. Closed it. Locked it.
When I tore open my closet door, she wasn’t hiding in there. She wasn’t in my mother’s bedroom or closet, either. Or the hall closet. Or the bathroom.
In the living room, I found the front door locked, as I’d left it after Mrs. Lorenzo arrived.
I returned to my bedroom and met the Cyclopean gaze. I plucked the eye off the bed. I retrieved the La Florentine candy tin from my nightstand, opened it, and confirmed that nothing else had been taken from—or added to—my collection. I put the eye in the tin and the tin in the nightstand drawer.
The eye hadn’t been there when I came home and turned down the bedclothes. While Mrs. Lorenzo and I were busy in the kitchen, Eve Adams—Fiona Cassidy, whoever, whatever—had come here to get the creepy thing and position it to gaze at the door.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, I had no difficulty translating the message. The woman must have known that Mr. Yoshioka had come to tell me about the stink like dry-cleaning fluid and about the cut-up Polaroid of the tiger screen. She was warning me not to conspire against her, to stay away from Mr. Yoshioka, to remember that she liked to cut. She was saying, You think the fabric eye is juju, boy, but the only thing that’s juju around here is me.
When my tremors subsided, I returned to the kitchen, where Mrs. Lorenzo had finished preparing the side dishes. She was frying the tightly rolled saltimbocca in a mixture of butter and olive oil, and the air was fragrant with the aromas of prosciutto, veal, sage, and pepper.
She wanted water to drink with dinner. For myself, I poured cherry Kool-Aid from a pitcherful that Mom had mixed that morning.
When I sat at the table, I had no appetite. I started picking at the food, certain that my suddenly sour stomach would throw it right back at me if I dared to eat. But it was a testimony to Mrs. Lorenzo’s cooking that before long I’d finished what she served to me and was asking for seconds.
The special secret dessert proved to be ricotta cream cake sprinkled with icing sugar and shaved chocolate. It wasn’t just special; it was a piece of Heaven.
After dinner, when the dishes were done, we played 500 rummy at the kitchen table. Mrs. Lorenzo wanted to turn on the radio and find some good music, but I pretended that, being an obsessive musician, I couldn’t concentrate on cards with music playing. What actually concerned me was that music might mask the sound of Eve Adams coming back with bad intentions.
I went to bed at 9:30, like I was supposed to, though I couldn’t sleep. Mrs. Lorenzo was watching TV in the living room, but the sound was low. It wasn’t the TV that kept me awake; it was the witch from 6-C, if she was a witch. I got to thinking that maybe I should hope she was just a witch; there were worse things, after all.
At 10:20, I got out of bed and went into the living room to see if Mrs. Lorenzo was all right. During less than an hour of insomnia, I’d thought of several ways Eve Adams might have killed her suddenly, quietly, with that switchblade. I found Mrs. Lorenzo lying on the sofa. She wasn’t watching TV, but she wasn’t dead, either. Sound asleep, she snored softly.
I went back to bed and assured myself that I was a big baby. Whoever the mystery woman might be, she wasn’t a witch any more than she was a vampire or a space alien hatched out of a giant seed pod. She was up to no good in 6-C, and she didn’t want any interference. A nine-year-old kid was easy to intimidate. A shy tailor living in the shadow of some tragedy or other was easy to intimidate. All that she wanted was for us to fear her and stay away from her, and in a couple of months she would be gone.
Nevertheless, at 11:00, I crept along the hallway to the living room again, to see if Mrs. Lorenzo was still sleeping or maybe, this time, slashed and dead. She was neither. Sitting on the sofa, bent forward with her face in her hands, ghostlike in the pale flickery light of the TV, she wept quietly but with such grief that her body shook. Nothing on television had made her cry. She didn’t need a sad movie or the horror of the news to bring her to tears.
No matter how crazy the occupant of 6-C might prove to be, I was embarrassed to have all but forgotten how recently Donata Lorenzo’s world had turned upside down. Although the dream of Fiona Cassidy strangled with a necktie had disconcerted me when later I saw her alive on the stairs, I was nonetheless responsible for whatever woe I brought down on myself; I was reckless when I followed her and inexcusably bold when I entered her apartment and prowled its rooms uninvited. Mrs. Lorenzo, on the other hand, had done nothing to deserve her widowhood; she’d been an innocent whom Fate had struck with great cruelty.
Before she might look up and discover me watching her from the threshold of the hallway, I returned quietly to my room. My shame dampened my fear, and though I doubted that I would sleep that night, I slept.
28
The next morning, because it was Grandma Anita’s birthday, she and Grandpa Teddy picked up Mom and me in their Cadillac Club Coupe, and we went to 10:00 Mass, and after that we stopped for brunch in a big hotel where I went around and around through the revolving doors three times and would have completed a fourth revolution if Mom hadn’t given me the Look, which always brought me immediately to my senses.
I had never been to a brunch before, and this was an all-you-can-eat buffet, which amazed me. I was also astonished by the fresh flowers on every table and the ice sculpture of a swan and the white uniforms and tall white chef’s hats worn by the men who carved the roast beef and the turkey.
The posh surroundings and the spectacle seemed to sharpen my appetite. After finishing my first plate, when I wanted to go back for a second, Mom warned me to take only what I was certain I could finish. “All you can eat doesn’t mean waste as much as you want.”
When I came back with a full plate, they looked dubious. But I finished every bit of it.
Grandpa Teddy said, “Anita, I suspect this grandson of ours is from another planet. He’s really as big as a horse with a crocodile’s mouth, but he’s able to hypnotize us into seeing him as a young boy who might be blown away in a strong wind.”
Later we went to a movie starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. It was pretty funny, though not as funny as the cartoon we saw first.
That whole day was perfect; and it is the nature of the nine-year-old mind to believe that each extreme experience signifies a lasting change in the quality of life henceforth. A bad day raises the expectation of a long chain of grim days through dismal decades, and a day of joy inspires an almost giddy certainty that the years therea
fter will be marked by endless blessings. In fact, time teaches us that the musical score of life oscillates between that of Psycho and that of The Sound of Music, with by far the greatest number of our days lived to the strains of an innocuous and modestly budgeted picture, sometimes a romance, sometimes a light comedy, sometimes a little art film of puzzling purpose and elusive meaning. Yet I’ve known adults who live forever in that odd conviction of nine-year-olds. Because I am an optimist and always have been, the expectation of continued joy comes more easily to me than pessimism, which was especially true during that period of my childhood.
When we came home on the evening of Grandma Anita’s birthday celebration, I gave little or no thought to the woman in Apartment 6-C. Such a day of unalloyed delight must mean that my world had begun to rotate around a warmer sun than before, that the mystery woman and the evil she represented were surely now on a different world from mine, in some far arm of the galaxy, and our orbits would never again intersect. I slept deeply and without dreaming.
On Monday morning, Labor Day, I woke and yawned and stretched and sat up in bed—and saw a Polaroid photo propped against the lamp on my nightstand. It was a picture of me sleeping.
29