The Witch of Little Italy

by Suzanne Palmieri

  “Does she still own it?” asked Fee.

  “No, greedy,” said Bunny. “But there’s a private beach on the side. Do you want to see? I remember it looked like a mermaid cove.”

  “Mama said not to go near the water, Bunny,” said Mimi, but Bunny was already running toward a small beach on the side of Mama’s old house.

  When we rounded the corner, I knew exactly what Bunny was saying about mermaids. There was a bit of beach, yes, but mostly rocks. Huge rocks creating a smaller pool of ocean. Natural walls and small openings made it seem as if the lost city of Atlantis was found, and Bunny—perched high atop a rock mountain—was its queen.

  “Get down!” Mimi yelled from the beach. But beautiful Bunny just stared out at the ocean. I started to get scared. “She swore a solemn vow,” I whispered.

  George began to cry. “You swore a solemn vow, Bunny!” he yelled and his voice ricocheted off the rocks.

  Bunny heard him. She shook her head and tapped at her ears as if someone or something was trying to convince her to dive in. To become a mermaid herself.

  But, she quietly climbed down to join us and we walked slowly back into town. I slipped my hand inside of hers. “I’m glad you didn’t become a mermaid, Bunny.”

  Bunny stopped to pick me up and held me tight, “You are lovely, Itsy!” she said swinging me around.

  “Who wants ice cream?” she asked.

  George cried, “Me! Me!” And we raced through Mama’s town with the wind at our backs and our feet knowing the way.

  We waited for Mama, happy and sticky, eating dripping ice cream cones on the bench.

  “Are you all ready for the journey back? Everyone fed? Anyone need to use the washroom?”

  She rushed us onto a waiting train.

  “Did you get what you came for, Mama?” asked Bunny.

  “Yes I did, thank you,” smiled Mama.

  “What did you need?” asked George.

  “I needed to be reminded.”

  “Reminded of what?” George persisted.

  “I needed to be reminded of something so all the crooked angles in my mind could go straight again.”

  “What did she remind you about?”

  “She reminded me about the sun and moon and sky. You see, Papa is the sun in my sky. And you are all my twinkling stars. The stars, they never go out. They twinkle brightly all the time. In the day, the ocean catches them and they dance under the surface. But the sun? It moves around—the clouds block its light. It’s gone during the night. And the world gets so cold without its shine. I shiver. The shiver is the reason why I came back home.”

  “If Papa is your sun, and we are your stars, who is your moon, Mama?” asked George.

  Mama didn’t answer, she simply placed her hands on the window of the train car and looked back toward Fairview.

  * * *

  I think about that trip often. I wonder about Mama’s history. As much as we lost touch with the Amores, we never even had a grasp of the Green clan. And it rises, like the tide within us. Mama’s magic ways. The strange and wonderful things we are capable of that we never even questioned. We all took to them naturally and believed in them like we took to, and believed in the wide, blue sky.

  But Elly? She bubbles with a mighty dose of Mama. Even if she can’t feel it or doesn’t yet know what it means. And if I don’t protect her, all that potential will be gone. Because as the days go by, her fate looms large. It casts shadows on everything I do.

  20

  Elly

  They were quiet on their way back. The water and memories making both Elly and Anthony contemplative. Elly looked down at the water and then into the sky. She thought of Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:

  What is it then between us?

  What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

  Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not.

  “Oh, Itsy,” Elly whispered. “You are so curious to me…”

  “As you are to me,” said Anthony jolting her out of her reverie.

  “Oh yeah? What’s so curious about me?” asked Elly.

  Anthony turned around, placing his back against the railing. “What do you remember, now? How much?”

  “I told you.”

  “Nope. You didn’t.”

  “I showed you the paintings. And you know how much I remember about you.”

  “Fair enough—but can’t you tell me?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Tell me about your childhood. Before I met you. I want to know everything. I wish I could cut and paste myself right there with you, but I don’t even know where to start.” He pushed back a stray wave from her face and traced the side of her cheekbone with his finger.

  “It was wonderful, and then it wasn’t. But I can’t really remember the bad parts. I can feel them, but I can’t access them. It’s like there’s this curtain draped all around but I can see the actors’ feet on the stage, you know?”

  “Well then, tell me about the good. Tell me the wonderful parts.”

  “Well, it wasn’t anything I’d like to replicate for this little bambina.” Elly turned around to lean her back against the rails as well and cradled her belly with both hands. “But it was extraordinary, for sure.”

  “Tell me, Elly. Take me back there with you.”

  Elly turned to look at him, this man she was destined for, this man who she’d just pledged herself to for life. If there was anyone she could share this with, it was him. “She taught me how to dance,” began Elly, “in this cottage she rented. A real English cottage. Roses climbed up the walls and everything. It was like a storybook. She played her favorite albums on a record player. Joni Mitchell. Mostly big band mixed in with a lot of sixties stuff. Her favorite was Procol Harem. She said she liked the tempo. Very dramatic and all that.”

  Anthony smiled, “Yep, sounds like Carmen. Tell me more.”

  “We’d go into town to some pub where they played jazz, and she’d sit around with the locals, mesmerizing them. She’d smoke and then they’d ask her to sing. She was famous there. I remember being so proud. I fell asleep in the booths and she’d pick me up and walk me all the way home. We’d snuggle in her bed and talk together for hours.”

  “Wow, I never figured Carmen to be the mothering type.”

  “See, that’s just it. She wasn’t. Not in my memories after. All the stuff I’ve remembered my whole life draws this cold, bitter picture. But in these new memories? In these she’s amazing.” Elly grew quiet.

  “What is it?” asked Anthony.

  “These new memories make me wonder if I could ever be as good to this baby as she was to me, initially speaking that is.”

  “That’s some crazy powerful stuff,” said Anthony.

  “I know. But it’s like she threw her whole self into the role of motherhood. She got it all right. It was the role of a lifetime. The best performance of her career. Right down to the cottage and the kitchen and the meals … until the drugs.”

  “Whoa! You aren’t going to tell me Carmen cooked!”

  “Yes! Wonderful meals. She had this big book. Compiled recipes from The New York Times. We had roasted chicken and homemade sweet potato gnocchi. She even made these amazing, elaborate breakfasts. I can still smell the brioche.”

  “Unbelievable,” said Anthony.

  “Tell me about it, I can’t remember her cooking one meal later on. Not one.” Elly sighed. “But you want to know the most extraordinary thing?”

  “Yes,” he said pulling her to him, holding her as the ferry docked.

  “All of that doesn’t mean a damn thing. The best part of these memories is the absolute certainty that she loved me. I felt grounded in it. Like nothing bad could ever happen. She was everything to me.” Elly pulled away, wiping the tears that stung her cheeks. “I feel her—not Carmen, that little girl. The one that was me. I feel her rising like a tide. She’s coming back. She’s slamming me with
the fury of a thousand storms. She’s so pissed off at me, Anthony. She’d like to wring my neck!”

  “Why do you say that, babe? She’s still you and you’re still her. It’s just a matter of jiving all the memories together. Finding the place where they meet, you know.”

  “Yes, that’s it exactly. I have to find the exact moment when I pushed that little girl deep inside a trunk and locked her up. I have to find out how and why it happened so that I can add it all up. I already know the when.”

  “When? When you were here?”

  “Yes. This is what I’ve been able to figure out. Not so much remember—because I don’t remember it. But I’ve pieced it together. I was about to leave. Itsy found me. She clearly tells me something, something I can’t remember, and something she obviously won’t disclose. And then I’m out on the front stoop of the building surrounded by strangers.”

  “You know, I’ve wondered about that since the night when we were teenagers and you told me about all this forgetting business. What was that like? Having to go away from this place with no memory at all?”

  “That’s the thing. I didn’t feel anything because there was nothing to feel. Carmen said she picked up a ‘blank slate’ that day. She calls it a tabula rasa for flash … but a blank slate is a blank slate. I started adding on layers of myself as they were given to me. The problem was, Carmen didn’t have much to give me at all. As soon as she realized I wasn’t fooling around, she never tried to retell me the story of my childhood. She just got mad, and stayed mad.”

  “But that seems weird. If the memories are as wonderful as you think they are, why wouldn’t she tell you?”

  “That’s just it, everything hinges on the details I still can’t remember. There has to be something, something big that I’m not remembering yet. And maybe when I put all this together some of it will make sense.”

  “Well, for the record I don’t care if you remember or not. I’m happy with things just as they are.”

  Elly looked at him again. He seemed nervous. “Are you worried I’ll remember myself right out of being in love with you?”

  Anthony shrugged his shoulders.

  “Well, that’s not how it works,” she said leaning forward and moving her lips against his cheek. “The more I let that little girl surface, the more she lets me love you. You see—she loved you first.” Elly’s mouth made its way to cover his.

  He put his hands into her hair and opened his mouth to hers in the kind of kiss that Elly thought only lived inside of movies and romance novels.

  As they got off the ferry Anthony pulled her aside once more.

  “Do you ever think about him?”

  “About who?”

  “About Cooper?”

  Just the name itself made Elly want to throw up. “Not if I can help it.”

  “So you didn’t love him?” He searched Elly’s eyes in desperation.

  “No, I never loved him.”

  “But you made love to him?”

  Elly could see Anthony was struggling. That he didn’t want to pry but needed this information for his pride. For his sanity, even.

  “Anthony. I’m going to say this once, but I don’t want to talk about it again, okay?” Anthony nodded.

  “The person I was, even a few months ago, was not a person I want to remember being. I was so damaged that I didn’t know the difference between what I wanted and what Carmen—or anyone else for that matter—wanted for me. Carmen and I were at a show my freshman year at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Cooper’s father recognized her from a production he’d seen in France. He approached her during intermission. Cooper was with him. I won’t lie. He was amazing looking and he was also rich. When we left that night, Cooper asked for my phone number and Carmen gave it to him. She encouraged me to date him, so I did. I’d do anything to please her. Anything. She wanted me to be with him, so I did. But you want to know something?”

  “What?” Anthony asked, relieved.

  “The only thing that stopped me from falling completely under his control. The only thing that even warned me it wasn’t a normal kind of relationship, was the time I spent with you. Those few moments we shared when we were just thirteen years old taught me more about myself, about what I wanted, than anything up until that point. It separated me from Carmen.”

  “How?”

  “Because she didn’t like you. And she didn’t like it here. But I did. And that independence gave me a strength I didn’t know I had.”

  “And now you’re back,” he said.

  “Yes, now I’m back. And I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Elly?” asked Anthony as he led her to the taxi stand.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been waiting to hear you say those words for my entire life.”

  Elly laughed. “Well, thank God you’re patient!”

  “One of us has to be,” he said and gave her hand a squeeze as he made a move to hail a taxi.

  Pull him back from the curb … a voice—her voice—hollered through her mind. Instinctively she yanked him back just as a car swerved too close to the curb.

  “Slow down, ya jerk!” he yelled. And then to Elly, “You knew?”

  She nodded her head.

  “So you have their magic?”

  “I suppose. Does it bother you?”

  “Not even a little,” he said.

  “Well, there’s something that’s bothering me,” said Elly.

  “What?”

  “I’ve got some of their magic. It’s amazing really. I can see things, and there’s this glow around people I never noticed before. But the thing is … I’ve been able to get these glimpses, you know? Of the past and future. I can feel things. Almost like my senses are heightened. It’s like I’m painting—only all the time…”

  “That doesn’t sound bad. What’s the problem?”

  “When I try to see the baby I can’t. I can’t see the baby, Anthony. Not even a little bit of her. When I touch my stomach all there is, is black.”

  “Have you told Mimi, or the aunts?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Elly began to shake. “I’m afraid they’ll see the blackness, too.”

  Anthony put his arm around her shoulder and led her to a waiting taxicab.

  21

  Itsy

  Mama took good care of us. Our bodies and souls, too. We were rarely sick. I can only remember being sick once, but that memory stays with me and fills my heart with a longing that only grows stronger as I grow older.

  Mama never tried to force away our fevers. She said “The fever is your body fighting like mad trying to get rid of the illness, love.” Instead, she’d lay us in her bed on white linens and wipe us down with rubbing alcohol infused with rosewater and lavender.

  My turn under Mama’s diligent care came when I was ten. We were getting ready to leave for Far Rockaway. I was in the garden taking clothes off the line when the warm June breeze turned suddenly cold against my clammy skin.

  Papa carried me into their bedroom. I watched their projected shadows against the wall as they argued. My head was so heavy, I couldn’t turn it around. I wanted to say “Don’t fight…” but when my parents argued there was no turning back. They loved so fiercely.

  “You need to go, Margaret!” said Papa. “I’ll call my aunts and they can take care of her.”

  Papa was restless to be rid of us. He looked forward to the calm days when he had the building to himself.

  “I would never leave one of my children, Vincent! It’s as if you don’t know me at all! And those women? Those stregas? I’d sooner leave Itsy with a pack of wild geese!”

  Mama was always uncomfortable mixing Green magic with the Italian witchcraft. Though she struck a fine balance, it was new for her even while we were growing up. And pragmatic Papa never believed in the magic anyway, so he was always correcting her.

  “It’s a flock of geese, Margaret. A pack of wolves and a flock of geese.”

  “See! See h
ow you are? Just assuming I’ve made a mistake? Maybe that’s exactly what I meant to say. Those women are like a gaggle of wolves. A pack of geese. All nervous and ferocious—and silly at the same time!”

  “That’s not fair, Margaret. They love these girls as much as you do. And their ways aren’t so different from yours. It’s not their fault you dominate our children’s minds! They can’t see past you. It’s not good, that fierce loyalty. You need to cut some of these apron strings you hold so tightly to.”

  It wasn’t that Mama didn’t get along with Papa’s family; it was the other way around, actually. No matter how long they were married or how many of his children Mama bore, she was forever referred to as MargaretGreen. One word. They’d come to visit us, run their gloved fingers over the tops of picture frames inspecting for dust, and then they’d say, “Well, hello MargaretGreen, my how pretty you always look!” They were masters at the backhanded compliment.

  Mama didn’t keep us away from them, but she didn’t encourage us to have relationships with them either. So in a way, I suppose Papa was right. And it was true. Most of the women on Papa’s side of the family were midwives, so they understood a bit of herbal healing.

  I wonder whatever happened to them all, all those other Amores. After the funerals we never saw them again. Or maybe we did and I simply don’t remember. There were some lost years, lost in a fog. Like being inside of a fever.

  I must have fallen asleep as they argued, because when I woke up it was evening already. Mama’s dim bedside lamp bathed the room in golden lowlight. She was humming and rubbing me down with her magic water. “I see the moon and the moon sees me…” she sang. I tried to sing with her “and the moon sees someone—”

  “Hush, my Itsy. Let me get the fever down.”

  Tears burned my eyes and my head began to throb. My throat was sore. “We can’t go to the cottage tomorrow because of me, Mama?”

  “Oh Itsy!” Mama climbed on the bed next to me and fit my body into hers like a puzzle piece. My head rested on her chest and she looped her fingers over my forehead and into my hair and back again. “Bunny is old enough to open the cottage now, and she’s excited to do it, too. She’s in a hurry to be a lady and wear her hair up. I’ll stay here until you are well and then we’ll take the train together. Footloose and fancy free. And you want to know the best part?”