Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories (12 page)

Eventually Aunt Zippy recovered, only to find she had lost her powers, as witches do when they fall in love. After she spent a miserable year of doing nothing but crossword puzzles, one of her powers came back, that of clairvoyance. She wanted to return to work right away and help women like her who had suffered disappointments in love.

She moved out of Manhattan to one of her properties, a tenement on Jerome Avenue high on top of a hill in the Bronx. Once again, Aunt Zippy took the top floor with its many windows, because a witch must be able to see the nighttime sky, the moon and the stars. A few phone calls was all it took, and soon she was back in business, women clients only.

Gradually, Aunt Zippy regained the ability to do simple spells, but she knew that never again could she change herself into a tiny fairy the size of a thumb or fly through the night riding one of the hounds of hell.

Two huge, battered stone lions stood guard at the door to Aunt Zippy’s building. We ascended six flights of stairs to stand in front of a heavy steel door. The door was flung open before my mother had a chance to knock.

There was Aunt Zippy. She was wearing a tall, black pointy hat and a long, filmy red negligee. Beneath the flimsy fabric of her negligee I could make out the top of her low-cut black brassiere. Aunt Zippy had amazing cleavage.

“Darlings,” she cried out. As she stood on tiptoe to embrace my mother, who was only five foot two, I saw that Aunt Zippy’s eyes were yellow, smoldering like the eyes of the tigers in the zoo. She kissed me on both cheeks, then took my head in her hands.

“You resemble your mother,” she said, “but you have a beauty of your own. You have the face of a poet.” Did she know about the secret notebook I kept under my mattress already half-filled with poems?

A black dog the size of a collie—but without a collie’s pointed muzzle—stood behind her. I didn’t like dogs and drew back.

“He’s not a dog,” Aunt Zippy said, “he’s a cat, Morris, my longtime companion. He will never harm you.” She led us down a long hallway, lined with photos of her posing with many different women. There was a picture of Aunt Zippy seated with Greta Garbo on a park bench. Another picture showed Aunt Zippy drinking cocktails with Mae West at a long bar. There was also a photo of Aunt Zippy shaking hands with Golda Meir.

We entered a light, airy room with a high ceiling. Curtains of crystal beads hung in front of the high windows, sending shining reflections of sparkling light on the white walls. A modern white sofa stood in the center of the room, flanked by matching armchairs. The only testament to Aunt Zippy’s profession was a gleaming skull on top of the pine coffee table in front of the sofa. The contemporary decor surprised me.

“Just because I’m a witch,” Aunt Zippy said, “is no reason for me to succumb to conventional thinking about my vocation. I’ve already lived a hundred and ten years. Maybe I’ll live a hundred more. Why should I spend my time in some dismal dump filled with bats? As they say, it isn’t over until the fat lady sings.”

My mother giggled. “Right,” she said, smiling.

Aunt Zippy snapped her fingers and three glasses filled with ruby liquid materialized on the coffee table. She picked up one of the glasses and handed it to me.

“Enjoy this wine,” she said. “Your mother and I will be back shortly. My mother nodded at me encouragingly as she and Aunt Zippy each picked up a glass. They vanished through a door decorated with black roses that had appeared in a corner of the room.

Morris didn’t follow them. He spread out under the coffee table and regarded me lugubriously. I had never tasted wine before. I took a sniff. It smelled like raspberries and Vicks cough syrup. When I tasted it I found it had a much stronger zing. I closed my eyes and listened to Morris purr softly below me. He seemed to be humming the first few bars of “Earth Angel,” my favorite song.

Jerome Rothman and I danced to “Earth Angel” at the Sweet Sixteen party where we met. That was the first time I felt a boy’s bone grow hard and press against me through my clothes. He nuzzled my neck and stuck his tongue in my ear, another first. It was warm and wet, and I liked it.

“Sorry to disturb you,” Aunt Zippy said. “We need you to do something—pull a hair out of Morris’s tail? It won’t hurt him; he’s used to it. We need a hair from a black cat’s tail. Only a virgin can pull the hair out and you are the only virgin here, so it’s up to you.”

Already, I could refuse Aunt Zippy nothing. Morris swung his tail up on the couch next to me. I gingerly took a single long strand between my thumb and index finger and yanked. It slid out easily. I handed it to Aunt Zippy. “Thanks,” she said, and vanished again.

When my aunt and my mother came back into the room, my mother was wearing a small purple velvet pouch on a ribbon around her neck. I watched her tuck it beneath the collar of her blue polka-dot dress. “Oh, I need to go to the toilet,” she said. She turned and went back behind the rose door.

Aunt Zippy sat down beside me. She put her feet up on Morris as if he were a footstool. “First, I want to give you my phone number. Call me anytime,” she said. She handed me a white card with a number in gothic lettering. “Second, I want to tell you something. Your true love will have blue green eyes.” I was puzzled. Jerome Rothman’s eyes were a flat brown like a Hershey’s bar.

“But, but—” I started to object.

“No buts about it,” Aunt Zippy cut in. “Now, promise me you’ll remember what I told you.”

“I promise,” I said.

* * *

My father didn’t say anything to me about me telling my mother. For the next few days no one said much of anything around our house.

Wednesday afternoon Jerome Rothman sat down next to me on the bus ride home from our high school.

“How’s about we go to our spot today?” he asked. “I have a surprise for you. I know you’ll like it.”

I was feeling sad and maybe the surprise would cheer me up. He was unusually chivalrous walking through the swamp. He carried my book bag, something he never did before. When we got there, he even took off his Levi jacket and spread it out for me to sit on. Then he pulled something out of the back pocket of his pants, a red rubbery thing that he stuck on the middle finger of his hand. It had a lot of little spines all over it, like a caterpillar. The top was cut off and the tip of Jerome’s finger poked through.

“This is a French tickler,” he said. “I put it on my thing and then I put my thing inside you. You’ll love it.” He wiggled the tickler finger at me. It looked disgusting.

“If you let me do it, it’ll mean we’re going steady.” I noticed for the first time how small and squinty his eyes were, like the eyes of a pig. So far I had let him put a finger in me, only a finger. “I won’t come inside you,” he went on. “I promise.”

I heard Aunt Zippy’s voice talking in my head. “
Liar, liar, pants on fire
,” she said. I knew she was right.

“No, Jerome,” I told him. “No, I won’t do it, no way.”

His face got all tight and angry. “What have you been doing all this time, stringing me along?” He almost spit at me. “You little bitch, you will do it.”

He jumped on top of me, pushing my body down with an arm against my chest. “Bitch,” he repeated and slapped me across the face. He slapped me again. I felt myself growing smaller and smaller, thinner and thinner, as I changed into one of those gray sand lizards that lived in the swamp. I slipped out from under his arm and scurried away through the reeds. He didn’t try to follow me. As I approached Seaview Avenue, I found myself growing larger and larger, changing back into myself. When I got to our house, I stood outside to catch my breath. I was so lucky I had escaped.

A few days later I was sitting at the kitchen table doing my homework. I looked out the window and saw the red seltzer truck pull up and double-park. Mr. Fleishman, the seltzer man, was here for his weekly visit. My mother was in her sewing room in the basement. She let him in through the side door. When they came up into the kitchen, it was not fat Mr. Fleishman with his potbelly walking behind her, carrying the wooden box of seltzer and sodas on his shoulder. It was a slim, wiry man who looked like an older James Dean. He even had his hair slicked back in the same style. He put the box down on the floor and straightened up.

“I’m Fleishman’s nephew Spike,” he told us. “My uncle had to have a hernia operation so I’m filling in. Your usual? Three seltzers, three cream sodas?”

My mother nodded, and he put the bottles on the kitchen counter. Then he grinned at me. “You must have got your pretty face from your beautiful mother,” he said.

“Stop with the fresh remarks,” my mother told him.

“Just being truthful,” he answered. “Say, did you grow up in Brooklyn?” he went on. “You sure don’t have the accent.”

To my surprise, she gave him a big smile. “I was raised in Manhattan,” my mother said. “East Ninth Street and Avenue A.”

“What a coincidence,” he replied. “I grew up two blocks away.” Within five minutes, I was exiled to the basement to finish my homework, and they were drinking coffee and eating my mother’s raisin marble cake at the kitchen table. Before he left to complete his rounds, he gave us two complimentary bottles of cherry soda.

The next day when I came home from school, the seltzer truck was outside and Spike and my mother were in the backyard. They were on their hands and knees in the little garden she had planted, their heads close together over the tomato plants. He was gone by the time my father got home.

The next night, my mother didn’t make any dinner preparations because Spike arrived at five-thirty to take us out. We played two rounds of miniature golf on Ditmas Avenue. Seymour won both times. Then Spike took us to a fancy Chinese restaurant on Flatbush Avenue, all red and gold inside. The fortune in my fortune cookie said
Go with the flow
.

On the way back, Spike stopped at Carvel Custard and brought me and Seymour hot fudge sundaes. My mother said she couldn’t eat another thing. We were sitting in the cab of the truck outside our house finishing our ice cream when my father came up the block. He was staggering from side to side like he was drunk. When he saw us, he ran up to the truck and yelled through the open window. “Get out of there; get out of there right now.”

“Drive away,” my mother told Spike, but he didn’t start the engine. Instead, he got out and walked around the cab of the truck to face my father.

“She doesn’t want to get out,” he said calmly. “Why should she?”

“I’ll knock your dirty block off,” my father yelled at him, balling his big hands into fists. He was six inches taller than Spike at least and maybe thirty pounds heavier.

He swung a wide right at Spike’s head and missed.

“You asked for it,” Spike said. He crouched low, dancing from side to side on the balls of his feet. Then, with a lightning one-two punch, he socked my father in the chin.

My father fell back on the sidewalk all curled up like a baby. Spike climbed back in the truck, and we drove off. He turned up Seaview Avenue.

“Why don’t you and the kids spend the night at my place, Ruthie?” he asked my mother.

We drove a few more blocks before she answered. “No,” she said. “It’s not right. I should try to work things out with him. He’s my husband.”

Spike sighed. When he let us out at our house, they kissed. Then Spike kissed my brother and me and drove away. My father was sitting in the kitchen with the lights out, his head in his hands. My mother told us to go upstairs and go to sleep.

Sometime in the night I heard the sound of bedsprings squeaking in my parents’ bedroom. It was a sound I hadn’t heard for a long time. I wondered if my mother was the one on top, riding him, but I didn’t want to get up to see if maybe they had left the door open and I could get a peek.

* * *

Summer vacation, and my mother and father had fully reconciled. The bedsprings squeaked almost every night.

Mr. Fleishman was back on the seltzer truck. When I asked him about Spike, he said Spike was traveling. I hardly ever thought of Jerome Rothman because I didn’t have to see him every day at school. By the end of the term, he was going steady with Vivian Smolar. Rumor had it she bleached the hair between her legs the same platinum color she dyed the hair on her head. I was sure she let him use the French tickler.

On my brother’s eleventh birthday, my mother asked me to go with him to the pet store. She had so much sewing to do for her customers she couldn’t take him. She was buying him his first big snake for his birthday. He could keep it in an aquarium under his bed. She gave me twenty dollars to spend.

The Jungle Pet Store on Rockaway Parkway had a cage of monkeys in one window and a cage of brightly colored tropical birds in the other. Our arrival occasioned so much cawing and squawking I almost expected a bare-chested Tarzan to be standing behind the counter. Instead, it was a tall, skinny guy in a white T-shirt, with short red hair and freckles. One step closer and I could see his eyes were blue green like the ocean at Coney Island. A big smile opened up inside me. We stood there looking at each other until Seymour pulled at my arm.

“My snake, my snake,” he said. Seymour addressed the proprietor. “I want to see the snakes, sir.”

“We have the best snakes in Brooklyn,” the guy said. “Come this way.” As he moved out from behind the counter, I noticed the big bulge between his legs under his tight jeans. He saw me looking, and I felt my face turning red. “And you don’t have to call me sir,” he added. “My name is Larry.”

He led us past a pen of puppies and a wall of tropical fish to a long, low tank at the back of the room.

“Wow,” said Seymour, looking down at the squirming, undulating mass. “What are the different kinds?”

“Those light green ones are your common variety garter snake,” Larry told him, “but we also have Montana black horn noses, domesticated South American anacondas, and one rare purple ribbon snake from Peru.”

“I’ll take the purple one; he’s the most special,” Seymour said.

“Good choice,” Larry told him. He leaned over and deftly grabbed the purple snake, putting one hand behind its head and the other in the middle of its back. He lifted the wiggling creature and carried it back to the counter, depositing it in a big plastic bag with little holes in it and knotting it at the top.