The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

“Did Evie always hate him?”

“I don’t think she ever hated him, Ry.”

“What are you talking about? Why else would—”

“She hated his being here. Totally different, in this case.”

“Okay. Why did she hate him being here?”

My mom looks at me, and I want to weep. I’ve never actually seen the expression I unleash on her every fifteen minutes or so during our Sunday-night outings. But I suspect it looks like that. If that’s true, at least my mother can’t be as fragile as she generally appears.

“Why do you think?” she asks.

“Yeah. Okay. I just meant that that always surprised me about Evie. She seemed so open about everything, and everyone. Always talking about the Clintons, and propositions, and Greenpeace. I’m pretty sure she taught me all those words.”

My mother nods. I’m still surprised she’s let us sit here this long. “I think the riots really spooked her. Remember, she was eighty-four years old. She’d lived here a long, long time. For most of that, this neighborhood was one hundred percent Jews.”

“A lulav in every window,” I say, and my mother laughs.

“An etrog on every plate. Where’d she even get that? I’ve never seen an etrog on anyone’s plate. Have you?”

I laugh, too. And my surprise tilts toward amazement. I am sitting with my mother in front of our childhood home — the one we left for the last time in an ambulance, with my mother in restraints and screaming — and we’re laughing.

“So anyway,” my mother says. “Here’s our coal-skinned new retiree neighbor Mr. Busby, walking around the yard all the time in his half-buttoned, purple satin shirts—”

“That’s right, those shirts!”

“—with his barrel chest stuck out. And there’s little Evie, trapped upstairs tending to Stan — that was her husband — who was pretty much just a pool to pour morphine in by then. So mostly, she just stared out the window.”

“‘You become the neighborhood,’” I say, gliding my hands across the tops of the blades of grass, feeling their chemically treated ends prickle like gelled hair. “Do you remember her saying that?”

My mother pauses a moment, then shakes her head. “No, actually.”

I do. More than once. Though I can’t remember when. And even now, I don’t know what it means.

My mother shakes her head again, but harder, like a dog shedding water. “You know, I really do have no idea how the pranks started. I think he might have brought her up a cold shrimp platter the first weekend he lived here. As a new-neighbor gesture, you know, not realizing. I don’t think he’d ever met a Jew before, either, let alone known anything about keeping Kosher. But not long after that, she got him the gift subscription to Hustler, with the note that said ‘To go with your shirts.’ Then he hid a bunch of those black, rubber June bugs all over that sukka she put up every year around back, on strings so he could make them scuttle across her little folding picnic table. Do you remember any of that?”

I shake my head. “Just the picnic table. And ears of corn? Did she hang ears of corn in there?”

“He put rubber bugs in those, too. After that, it was on. Seemed like one of them came up with a new torture for the other every single week.”

Instead of smiling some more, my mother starts muttering again. At least now I can hear her. “She was so lonely,” she says. “They both were.” Then some things that I don’t catch. The sky purples over our heads, and the breeze brushes past.

“So, this one time…” I finally prod.

She looks surprised, as though she thought she’d still been talking to me. Her braid swings like the tongue of a bell, and her body vibrates. “Sorry. Yes. This one time. I assume she got the clothes from Madolyn, Tell me you remember Madolyn.”

“Good God, how could I forget them,” I say, and my mother says them right with me, holding her hands a good two feet in front of her breasts, and there we are smiling again. Mother and daughter. We glance together across the street toward Madolyn’s duplex. “You don’t think she still lives there?” I ask.

My mother doesn’t respond.

“Whose ex was she again? The Family Affair guy?”

“Not him. The one from the knock-off. With the beard.”

“Oh my God, Mom, do you remember what she told me? When I was just sitting out here with the turtle, minding my seven year-old business? She came across the street in this tiny black dress, and she had to have been as old as Mr. Busby, right? Sixty, at least.”

“Older,” says my mother.

“So it’s just me and the turtle, looking at the sky. And here comes Madolyn and her shadows. And she stands over us. And she puts her hands right on her boobs. And then she says…” I try for a smoker’s rasp, though it doesn’t quite come off. “ Just remember, Girlie. I got these for the husband. But I kept ’em for me.” And then she turned around and went right back home.”

My mother just nods, and takes a long time doing it. Her voice comes out sad. “That would be Madolyn. She was always so nice.”

Nice?