Picture

Picture

By G Money

She was the black dot in a sea of white. I was surprised she even appeared. Rumor had it she was a witch, and we all knew witches didn’t show up in photographs. I wondered why she didn’t wear white like the rest. After all, it was a wedding.
I set the picture down and continued to look through the stack. I had spent the last three nights looking through pictures, old and new. Some I remembered, like the one with me standing on the corner in my Catholic school outfit on my first day of school. My hair was crew cut short then, and was until I turned 16. I always had that tomboy look, and wasn’t afraid to show it. I could fight any boy in my class, and they all knew it. I could beat them at their own game, and they respected me for it. The girls’ didn’t care much for me though, but I didn’t care for them either. What’s the point of being a kid if you’re not going to enjoy it? That was my excuse for acting the way I did. I wanted to enjoy my childhood, my freedom. No point in rushing anything.
No more pictures of the woman in black rumored to be my father’s mother, just the wedding picture. I picked it up again, curious. I held it close to my face and peered at the figure in black. It was hard to make out her shape. Everyone else was discernible. There was no facial expression while everyone else had a smile. I was beginning to wonder if it were true, though I knew it couldn’t be in the real sense. This was the 1990s, not the 1690s. Well, I thought as I placed the picture on the top of the stack in the box, I’ll find out tomorrow. My curiosity would be quenched.
There were mixed feelings about my little endeavor that trickled down through the family chain as they found out one by one. My mom’s sister and her family had never met the woman either and only knew her from the same horror stories that I had been told. My brothers’ couldn’t understand why I wanted to meet her, especially Joe. He was the oldest and had been the subject of many of her cruelties. She brought him a birthday present once, wrapped in an ornament box. When he opened it, he screamed. Inside was a small replica of his head with exed out eyes and stitches for a mouth. A note was in the box as well that said “Happy 6th Birthday.” I thought such a gift would cause a curse that would ruin his life, and wondered if he had found a counter-curse since he was so successful in the adult world. When I asked him, he said determination and brains were the best counter-curses.
“I don’t have a problem with it as long as I’m not there,” dad said as the five of us sat in the family room, watching the evening news.
I could tell he wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea. He had been content to have no contact with her since he left home and went to college and then medical school. This sudden interest disrupted the last twenty years he had spent trying to get over her control, prompting his genetic passive-aggressive response.
I asked him about it once during the Holidays a few years back. All extensions of my best friend’s family always got together and seemed to have such a wonderful time. I wondered why our whole family never got together like that. If it was just the five of us, and my mother’s sister’s family, we resembled my best friend’s family gatherings.
“She hates your mother,” he said. “She hates the fact that I married her.”
“Why?”
“Your mother doesn’t drink.”
“Oh,” I said, not really understanding. I couldn’t understand why she despised my mother. Or why she had been against my father going to college. Such an idea seemed foreign to me. I was constantly being told the value of an education, and its increasing importance in an even more increasingly complicated, technologically sophisticated world. I didn’t understand how a child could grow up to be the exact opposite of its parents.
“Be careful around her,” mom said the next morning. “She’s tricky.”
“I’ll be fine. I’m going to approach it from a purely journalistic standpoint.” Another way to practice my interviewing skills, I thought to myself as I finished my coffee. And some hard evidence to back up the stories I've been told. Dad and I had been up late a one night, talking. An old woman who had been a patient of his for some time had died a couple days before and the son had come to sort through her affairs. Her husband had been deceased for four years. He had been struck by the sincerity in the son, and willingness to make arrangements and take care of the house, and couldn’t imagine doing such a thing for his mother.
“I’d be content to just toss the body in the back of a garbage truck.”
“Dad. Yuck. That’s no way to treat your mother.”
“She would deserve it. And not just for pouring boiling water on me in kitchen.”
I felt my eyes grow wide. “It spilled right?”
“Nope.” His eyes grew hard and distant for a moment. “She put a sauce pan on the stove, filled it with water and waited for it to boil. I had gone into the kitchen to get the table for dinner. She picked the sauce pan up off the stove, the burner still on, dumped the water on me, filled it with water and placed it back on the stove.”
“Didn’t the doctors inquire how you spilled a sauce pan full of boiling water all over yourself? I mean, they would’ve seen right through that.”
“Nope. Child abuse wasn’t reported or even discussed back then as it is now.”
“Wow,” I said quietly. My mind struggled to get around the story, trying to grapple with the idea that a mother could be so blatantly cruel to her son, not feel any remorse and get away with it.
He was in a normal mood the morning of my little endeavor and seemed in good spirits. The Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune was spread out over the table. He looked up from it as I stood to leave.
"Maybe she'll show you her broomstick and take you for a ride," Dad said as he chuckled. His sense of humor was still intact.
"Yeah, and maybe I'll get to see her big black pot!" I laughed as I said it, remember our little joke. "Hey, if she doesn't show up in the pictures, then we'll know for sure!" The two of us laughed so hard I felt tears roll down my cheeks.
**********
Traffic was light for a Sunday afternoon. The Bears were done for the season and the Bulls were on the verge of not having one, so no one was in a hurry to go downtown. I always got this grown-up feeling every time I would go downtown with my parents. We used to spend every Fourth of July in the same hotel, and walk to the same spot along the lakefront to watch the fireworks. It was the best spot. The fireworks exploded in front of the Chicago skyline, creating a breathless, beautifully spectacular scene over and over. I used to wonder what it would be like to come down on my own, without someone looking out for me, making sure I was okay. I thought having a license would give me that chance, but I had to “gain experience” before I could go down on my own.
Cold air swept through the car as I rolled down my window and threw two quarters into the basket and waited for the green light. Panic took possession of me as the light was hesitant in turning. I said a silent prayer as I looked around for an attendant. The light turned green, and I pulled out.
**********
She looked like any normal 75-year-old. Her hair was gray, skin wrinkled like a half-eaten raisin. I had expected her to be short and a little hunched over. Her clothes would be those outdated pants with a blouse that didn’t match. She would have on those nurse-like shoes, only tan or brown. Instead, she had on black slacks and a black blouse with a flowered silk scarf around her neck. It looked funny against her pale skin. She wore black shoes with heels that made her six inches taller, immediately making me feel inferior. I wondered if she had a book on me filled with my inferiority complex and other faults, and if she had looked up height difference or something to make it clear who was in charge. I tried to hide my discomfort, slapping a smile on my face as she invited me in. She returned the smile, not showing her teeth. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise, remembering the description given in Ronald Dahl’s book The Witches. I swept my journalistic eye over the house as she took me on a tour, looking for anything slightly peculiar or out of place. I scribbled my observations down in my reporter’s notebook as we went along.
Her house was simple. Big kitchen with eating area to the right of the doorway, and a family room complete with a TV and VCR to the left. A flight of stairs straight-ahead lead to a guestroom on the right and an unused study with an IBM Compatible on the left. There were no pictures, but dozens of plants and flowers lined the windowsills. The curtains were drawn in such a way as to be able to see out, but no one could see in. I wondered what she was so afraid of people finding out by just looking through the window. There were no swastikas hanging or goat heads tacked up on the wall. There were no satanic symbols or human skulls. Just plants. And they all looked healthy, too healthy.
“Why are you taking so many notes,” she asked as we sat down at the table.
“It’s for a paper for school,” I said hurriedly. “We have to include imagery and other elements.”
“In a paper?”
“Well, it’s more like a narrative kind of paper. We’re graded on description.”
“In an English class?”
“It’s practice for a much larger piece we have to write by the end of the year.”
“Ah.”
“Before we begin, is there anything that you don’t want me to ask you about,” I said, changing the subject and setting a more journalist frame of mind.
“That depends on what the questions are,” she said as she chuckled slightly. I tried hard not to roll my eyeballs, realizing that I would have to be careful in how I phrased my questions and the amount of prodding that might need to be done. I remembered an interview I had done six months ago for a project. The gentleman didn’t give any parameters for questions on his government work, the Gulf War, Russia or the development of nuclear arms. He was retired and had already been asked questions on those topics before. Questions about his family were another matter. He threw me out at gunpoint, no explanation given. Three days later I came across his last name in the Obits. His wife and two sons had been killed in an accident. He was the only survivor.
Flipping back through my notebook, trying to find the page with the questions I had written down earlier, I felt something walk across my feet and rub up against my legs. I bent down and looked under the table at a black cat with a lazy eye. It hissed at me, but I just stared at it. The lazy eye tried to hold my stare, but eventually the head turned away and took the body with it. I felt my skin prickle as I watched it walk away.
“Don’t mind Fester,” she said, seeing him pop out from under the table. “He’s not the affectionate kind of cat.”
I looked at her fully for the first time, and felt my blood run cold when her eyes met mine. They were hard to see through her thick lensed glasses, which only seemed to magnify the dark pits in the center. I felt a burning and quickly turned back to my notebook, scanning the list of questions.
“What was it like being a child during the Depression?”
“I lived with my grandparents and times were tough.”
“I bet,” a raspy Southern voice said from the corner. My Aunt Jude, who was the wife of my father’s younger brother, sat at the kitchen counter, sipping from her coffee cup. I hadn’t noticed her upon my arrival, and I found her presence rather intrusive and insulting. Apparently I wasn’t trustworthy enough to either of them: guilt by association. I wondered if her presence was another ploy to elevate my uneasiness. Interviews were meant to be one on one, not one against two, or at least that was my understanding of them.
“We didn’t have a lot of money,” the witch continued. “I’m not saying we was poor or anything, just that we had enough to get by on, and there wasn’t anything extra. There didn’t need to be anything extra, and we were happy with what we had. We didn’t live in a world of greed like people do today.”
Her words slashed through my dignity, and I bit my lip to keep from speaking, picturing my father waking up at two in the morning, the hospital calling with lives at stake, and his constant reading of the Wall Street Journal and Forbes and Fortune 500. Since when did investing in your own future or that of your family become a crime?
“How did you meet your husband?” The question managed to squeeze itself past the questions I wanted to assault her with. My journalistic sense was struggling with psychological barriers that could be permanently destroyed.
She chuckled slightly, that kind that comes from deep in the throat and sounds more like a cackle. “At a bar I still go to regularly. Course, I was with another man at the time, Dale was his name. Rich, my husband to be, came over and started chatting with me and we left the bar later.”
“How old were you when you got married?”
“Twenty, twenty-one maybe. We got married on September 26.”
A knot formed and squeezed my chest as my memory discovered the significance of the date. That was the day my father was born, allowing another being into her control who was the first to feel suffocated by it and fight tooth and nail against it.
**********
“And the truth shall set you free” was the phrase that ran through my head as the two bantered back and forth again, reminiscing. It was almost sickening. Aunt Jude responded to everything she said in that suck-up kind of way. I half listened, trying to figure out what consequence would befall Aunt Jude if she thought for herself for once. Would the witch draw an arc from the sky to Aunt Jude and cause her to spontaneously combust? I looked at Aunt Jude, wondering if a lump of coal would be left, or if that would evaporate too. She never looked back at me. Her eyes seemed to dance in every direction but mine, even when I was polite and looked at her while she spoke. Her finger tapped nervously on the counter top while her eyes swam in their sockets. I tried hard not to stare, but the only other option was those pit less eyes of the witch. They stared right back at me, and I could feel them bore into my head. I imagined a straw attached to each, sucking out my insides in order to use them in some satanic ritual she was saving. I remembered researching about such things once and was surprised to find that there was no such thing. Satanism existed in various forms and under different names, but not in the evil sense most think about. It was against all forms of the religion to cause harm to another. To every rule, however, there is an exception.
“Why do you despise your eldest son?” The question managed to bypass the journalistic filters that had been running at full throttle.
The room filled with a heavy silence. Her eyes turned and focused on me. I could feel the strong sucking of those straws and fought the urge to run.
“How dare you accuse me,” she hissed. “I do not despise any of my children. They are my flesh and blood.”
I felt a chill run down my spine as the words “flesh and blood” passed through my ears and registered in my brain. It sent a trigger of fear that reverberated through my bones, squeezing my heart until all the blood ran out, then proceeded down until it shot out my toes. I looked down to see if there was a hole in my shoe.
“Then how come you never visit?”
“I am old and cannot make the long drive,” she said matter-of-factly.
I fought with myself to continue to pound at the psychological barrier. I remembered the story my mother told my about Joe’s first baseball game. She had called the witch and asked her to attend because Joe wanted her to see him play. She said she could not come. My mother told Joe exactly that and he became upset, but my mother managed to calm him down and explain thing to him the best she could. But then, as they were getting into the car to leave for the game, the witch pulls into the driveway. My shocked mother greets her and says that she thought she wasn’t coming. The witch laughed in the face of my mother and demanded to know why she would lie to her son. Of course she was coming.
“They lived in Park Forest for eight years. Did you know that?” I could feel the adrenaline pumping as all journalistic sense was drowned.
“How dare you,” she said, the dark pits suddenly alight with flame. “I thought you would have more respect than your father.”
“Did you think I’d be easier to control?”
The pits suddenly became bright as her eyes widened. I stared straight at those lighted fireplaces, believing my will was stronger.
“Control means nothing to me. It is impossible. Any fool would know that.” Her voice was flat, but the pits continued to grow lighter.
I turned to Aunt Jane. "Aunt Jane, why did you come here today?"
"Because she asked me to," Aunt Jane answered matter-of-factly. Her eyes continued to roam around in their sockets.
"Do you always come when she asks you?"
"Yes."
"Do you ever just stop by without being asked?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Her eyes focused on an object somewhere to the right as she thought for a moment. The idea of showing up without being asked was a foreign concept to her, an idea she had never considered.
"I don’t know," she said finally, looking at the witch. Her brain was beginning to function independently for the first time, and I felt a sense of joy swell in my chest.
“Shut your mouth you bitch. You think you know everything you little tramp. You don’t have a brain in that empty head of yours and you’re too stupid to know it.” Her voice strained to recapture the venom that had been acidic when I first arrived. I felt a smile creep across my cheeks. “You and your whole godforsaken family are that way.”
“Then you don’t have a brain either and are too stupid to realize it. We are, after all, flesh and blood.”
The pits burned fiercely, but nothing came out of the mouth. We just stared at each other. She had no come back for her own words.
“I pray to God that I never see you again. Thank you for your time,” I said as I picked up my notebook off the table and left. I put the key in the ignition and saw Aunt Jude come out of the house. She smiled at me as I backed out, got into her car and followed me down the road. We split at the stoplight, and she mouthed "thank you" as she turned right. I waved, and watched her car get lost in the traffic, gradually finding its way to the outside lane, heading to a destination unknown.