The Witch of Little Italy (2 page)

Eleanor balled up the evidence and threw it in the trash under the bathroom sink. The cabinet pulls were crafted out of pale, pink glass, like sea glass.
Sea glass
 … a twinkle of a memory flashed … children giggling and wrapping wire around pieces of sea glass. Strange bits and pieces of memory had been coming back like errant drops of water since the moment she felt she might be pregnant. Eleanor didn’t know what to make of them, or of anything else. Her world, her lonesome restless world, was turning upside down.

She shook her head and walked slowly back into the living room. Switching off the light she looked out the window at the city below. The center downtown Green glistened, heavily lit with Christmas decorations. “Merry Christmas to me…” she said to the glass, fogging it up with her breath and drawing a Christmas tree in the gray mist with her fingertip.

Eleanor sat on the couch to wait for her mother in the dark. She put her hands on top of her head feeling for her familiar knit hat. Eleanor tugged on it, pulling the folded brim over her eyes and then unfolding it again.

Carmen had given her the hat when she was thirteen. The last time she’d been to the Bronx to visit with her mother’s family. The first time she
remembered
spending any time with the Amores at all.

Eleanor couldn’t remember anything solid from before she was ten years old. There existed a sort of misty haze that lit here and there, mostly in the time between sleeping and waking, and mostly in images and faint whispers. They haunted her, those ungraspable, streaming facets of lost time.

Her first “hard” memory took place on the stoop of their brick building in the Bronx. She’d spent a summer there alone with her great aunts, grandmother, and great uncle. Eleanor didn’t remember that summer, she only recalled leaving them standing on the stoop while Carmen scooped her up and deposited her in the back of a checkered cab.

They didn’t visit the Bronx again until Eleanor was thirteen. It was fun, that night. For Eleanor at least. Not so much for Carmen, who drank too much wine and became loose-lipped.

“A nice soft green for you, Eleanor. Like your eyes. So pretty,” she’d said as she gave Eleanor the hat and a rare compliment from her beautiful, self-absorbed mouth.

Eleanor knew enough about pop psychology to understand her attachment to the hat, but it comforted her, so she wore it. If she had to take it off she’d keep it close. Tuck it into a back pocket, or in her bag.

Keys clattered against the door.

Eleanor took a deep breath and tried not to sweat. Carmen could always smell fear on Eleanor and used it against her. She needed to be strong. Stand her ground. For once.

The door opened. The room flooded with light.

“How’d
you
get in here?” asked Carmen.

“The doorman, Mom,” Eleanor sighed. “And Merry Christmas to you, too.”
Off to a great start,
she thought.

“Screw Christmas,” said Carmen, shrugging off a black mink coat and kicking shiny black heels across the floor. “And look at you. You’re a mess. That hat? Really? Did anyone see you come in?”

“Um, the doorman?”
I’m invisible to her
.

Carmen made her way to an ornate cabinet and opened it, revealing a bar. She poured herself a drink in a chubby rocks glass and then looked at herself in the mirror that hung over the bar. She sipped and stared. Eleanor saw her own face next to her mother’s reflection.

Carmen was German Expressionism: bold, angular, exotic, exciting. Eleanor was Impressionist watercolor: softer, rounder, pastel. A washed-out version of her mother. Her nose small—Carmen’s Roman. Her hair an ordinary dark brown—Carmen’s a jet-black mane. And now? Another disappointment to confess.

Eleanor stood. “I’m pregnant,” she told Carmen’s reflection.

There was a slight stiffening to Carmen’s back, and a shift in her eyes … subtle, like a draft … a surrealist portrait, Carmen’s eyes were windows with sheer curtains moving in the breeze revealing the rooms behind. Empty rooms.

Carmen turned and leaned against the bar. Long and lean. Dark and beautiful. “Have you told Cooper?”

“God, no.” said Eleanor.

Carmen took a sip of her drink. “Is he still hitting you?”

Eleanor didn’t answer.

“You shouldn’t let him do that to you, treat you like that. Call the cops, get a restraining order for Christ’s sake,” said Carmen.

“It’s not that easy, Mom.”

“Yes it is.
You
make it harder than it needs to be. Get some self-esteem, Eleanor. It’ll do wonders for your love life.”

“Look, Mom,” said Eleanor pushing through the caustic remarks, “I know this is all
so
out of the blue. And I know you and I don’t get along that well, but I’m in a
really
bad position and I was wondering…” Eleanor paused, a mistake, she knew. A weak spot that her mother could use as leverage later.

Carmen placed her hand to her temples, massaging them. She closed her eyes and asked, “Wondering what? Please enlighten me.”

Eleanor let the words tumble out, “I was wondering if I could come with you when you leave in January. Go back to Europe. I can still go to Florence for my internship this summer.” Carmen opened her eyes when Eleanor mentioned Europe. Eleanor knew that was the key. Carmen had been trying to persuade her to come back to Europe after Yale for years. Eleanor knew she couldn’t live up to Carmen’s expectations, but she also knew Carmen didn’t know that yet. With Carmen’s false hope on Eleanor’s side, she asked the real question. “If you’ll help me.”

“Help you with what?” Carmen asked, genuine confusion furrowing her brow.

“Well,”
Big breath. Go on, you have nothing to lose
 … “I’d need help with the baby.”

The word
baby
fell hard into immediate icy silence.

“How dare you?” asked Carmen through clenched teeth, her eyes on fire.

“Please, Mom?”

“Please? Please what?”

“Please calm down and consider this for a second.”

“What the hell do you want from me? What reaction did you expect? You come here, drop this baby bomb, and then ask me if you can come back with me to Europe?” Carmen’s hands tightly gripped the lip of the bar behind her. “And I’m like,
sure
 … and I almost,
almost
thought you were going to be normal. To react to this thing like a normal young woman would. You know … have an abortion and then get on with it. And I thought, just for a
split second,
that we could actually get along again, you know? But, no. You want me to be your fucking nanny?”

Eleanor clamped her hands over her ears. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do … I don’t know what to do,” she whispered to herself.

Carmen took a deep breath and smoothed back her hair. She faced the mirror again, pulled a little at her thick eyelashes and regained her composure. Eleanor looked up just in time to see Carmen paste a pleasant, motherlike smile on her face. It felt eerie to Eleanor who could still clearly see through the façade, a rendition of Edvard Munch’s
The Scream.

“Eleanor,” she crooned, joining her daughter on the couch, “I know I’m being hard on you, but really, baby—listen to me. Kids are life suckers. They suck up your life and then
forget
all the good things you did for them. All the fun times you had.” She reached forward and took a cigarette out of the pack on the coffee table and lit it with a fancy silver lighter.

“Mom. My memory loss is not my fault.”

Carmen took a long drag from her cigarette, “You know, I read an article on kids and memory loss. Said sometimes they make the whole thing up for attention.” She put her fingers to her mouth to remove some invisible tobacco, a habit she still had from smoking unfiltered cigarettes.

“Are you kidding me?” Eleanor leapt up and paced the room. “
You
are the parent, Mom. You’re supposed to know what happened to me.” In all the years Eleanor and Carmen had quietly struggled with getting back her lost childhood Carmen was never able to answer Eleanor’s questions.
“Did I hit my head?” “Did I fall down a flight of stairs?” “What happened?”
It still aggravated her to no end and a ball of anger bubbled up as she looked at her mother.

Carmen exhaled and squinted through a fog of smoke. “Forget it. Oh, wait, you already did.” Carmen laughed, a sound that resembled diamonds cutting glass. “The thing is, you can’t come with me if you’re going to keep this baby.”

“So where do you propose I go?” asked Eleanor.

“I’m not proposing anything. I don’t support this decision. Case closed.”

Eleanor’s knees went weak. Her forehead began to sweat and itch under the hat.
What am I going to do?
she thought, her mind racing. She couldn’t, wouldn’t tell Cooper. Endangering herself was one thing; her baby was another thing entirely. Carmen was her last, best hope—and now it was gone.

She walked around the room in circles as Carmen smoked and poured herself another drink. Eleanor stopped in front of a photograph propped up on a table in front of her. A photograph she knew well, it was always wherever Carmen was. It was one of two constant things in their vagabond life. The photo and the rocking chair.

The rocking chair—Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love, with, you … Carmen rocked and sang to baby Eleanor. She could feel the love pour out. The sweet satisfaction of chubby hands wrapped in silky hair …

Eleanor shook away the stinging tears. Tears from a memory she couldn’t place. A feeling she’d never known with her mother
. I swear, I’m adopted,
she thought for the millionth time. She picked up the photo. A younger, overly stunning Carmen, standing on the steps of her family’s apartment building on 170th Street, stared back at her. A voice Eleanor had been hearing for weeks now came through stronger than ever.

Come home.

The words echoed through Eleanor’s head.

Come home.

“I know what I’ll do,” she said, her voice ringing loud against the stark silence and startling Carmen. “I’ll go back there.” She picked up the picture and pointed at it for emphasis. “Back to the Bronx,” she said, realizing she’d been thinking about it all along. A dim, lacy notion taking hold.

“You will not,” stated Carmen, chain lighting another cigarette off the first.

“Why?” asked Eleanor, forcefully. “You grew up there. And they liked me. That
one
time you took me there. Well, the time I remember, anyway. They liked me, I could tell.”

“That Anthony boy sure liked you,” said Carmen.

Eleanor blushed. “No, really, Mom. I think I fit in there somehow. Don’t you remember? You gave me this hat…”

Said I was pretty
 …

“Do I remember?” spat Carmen, standing up to look her daughter in the eyes, her hands waving around sloshing bourbon out of the glass. “I remember how crazy Aunt Itsy clawed at her neck. I remember how
hot
it was in there that Christmas. I remember you playing all kissy face with that boy in the hallway. I
remember
what a fucking mistake it was going back there to begin with.”

Eleanor focused on the glass in her mother’s hand. How it wove around. How it spilled itself out to punctuate Carmen’s thoughts.
Even the glass has more backbone than me,
she thought.

“Your mistake, Mom. Not mine.
I
had a good time that night.”

Carmen wasn’t listening. Again. She’d turned her back and was pouring herself a third drink at the bar, “Freaking Yogis in India making me believe I had to make some sort of peace with them. God, what I would give to take back that whole bohemian stage. I was a little old for a midlife crisis.”

Eleanor had been a “late in life” baby, born when Carmen was on the heels of forty. A fact she never really let Eleanor forget. “
You were lucky I even decided to have you
…” she’d say.

“Okay then. It’s settled,” said Eleanor, slapping her knees and going for the door.

“What?” Carmen dropped her cigarette and then stooped to snatch it up, spilling her drink out onto the floor.

Eleanor felt the panicky rise of nervous laughter crowd her chest and flutter at the base of her throat. “I’m going back. I’ll be with your mother if you need me.” She knew the last bit would sting and the words felt bitter and acidy as they came out.

Carmen placed her hand over her daughter’s on the doorknob. Eleanor looked down at the white knuckles contrasted against long nails coated in “Honeymoon Red” nail polish. The nails dug into Eleanor’s hand. There was a moment of complete and utter
still
before Eleanor yanked at the knob, throwing her whole body into Carmen to push her away.

“Don’t go. There’s something wrong there and you know it!” yelled Carmen as she fell against the wall next to the door.

Eleanor threw open the door but stopped to look at her mother crumpled against the wall. Tears formed in the corners of Carmen’s eyes. Just as Carmen could always read fear on Eleanor, she could now read fear all over her mother. The tears met with thick liner and created little congealed black clumps. She didn’t even look like Carmen anymore. Her lips were thin and trembling; her eyes open and full of truth. “Don’t go,” she said. “
Really
. There’s something
wrong
there, they … those women, they can see things. They can
do
things. Things normal people can’t do. Things people ought not to do.”

“The only thing wrong there is that
you
left it behind. I’m not you. You know that better than anyone. And…” Eleanor hesitated.

“And what? Have you heard anything, seen anything strange?” asked Carmen, perking up even as her voice wavered. “It runs in the blood you know. I don’t have it, but these things … they can skip generations I guess. What have you seen, Eleanor? Tell me!”

Come home.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she lied.

Come home.

They’d talked, during quieter days, about Carmen’s childhood. How the building on 170th Street was haunted and how the women there were witches. But Eleanor never believed Carmen … not really. She just assumed it was one more dramatic flair Carmen was adding to her personal bio. But lately, with all the strange things happening in Eleanor’s own mind, she wasn’t so sure.