“According to Katya,” Isaac said, looking impassively at Christy, “it means there are more bodies nearby.”
They peered at each other. Isaac shook his head. He started to say something, but Christy spoke first.
“It never happened. Eric and I never saw anything. So don’t worry.”
Isaac nodded.
“Isaac Lalli,” he said, in a self-mocking tone, “sole master and resident of the 400 block of St. Irenaeus Square.”
Christy gave him a look of solidarity. She came over to the couch, sat beside him, and leaned against him as she hadn’t for years.
“It’s an amazing yard, beautiful just the way it is,” she said.
SEEING NOTHING BY DIANE AYRES
Bella Vista
I don’t know what shocked me most: the way my foulmouthed neighbor screamed and cursed his hoary mother to the grave-when she already appeared to have gone and returned from it-or the way she screamed back. Especially when she was holding the meat cleaver, standing at the kitchen table whacking the wings and legs off a chicken, always with a cigarette stuck to her lower lip.
I actually heard a mob hit one evening while working in my home office, which I found less disturbing than the sound of that woman-somebody’s grandmother-shrieking the F-word at the top of her two-packs-a-day-for-fifty-year lungs. Hardcore.
The side of our house overlooked the back of their house, where they fought in the kitchen in front of a picture window with blinds they never closed, yellowed by tobacco smoke and splattered grease. When windows were open in this corner of old row homes, voices blasted from below, amplified, between brick and stucco, directly into the window beside my desk as I was trying to work.
My husband and I lived on a side street off a side street, off a side street, which brought to mind a feudal town in Tuscany with passages through a maze too narrow to drive. On a map, our neighborhood, lovely Bella Vista, looks like the border between gentrified Center City and the old-time neighborhoods of South Philly. But at the street level, it felt like a funky residential oasis between noisy, once-hip South Street, where nobody told the kids from Lancaster that Sid Vicious and his haircut were dead, and the inimitable Italian Market, where Rocky Balboa once ran, oozing sweat and punching meat to a really loud and rousing song. And, mostly, Bella Vista life was quiet, except for the Freudian nightmare next door.
I wasn’t one to spy on my neighbors. I only glimpsed them down there, at an extremely sharp diagonal, inadvertently, when I got up to adjust the window, depending on the season and the volume of their noxious spew. When I spotted them, my instinct was to avert my eyes because I found them hideous-like some incarnation of the monster Grendel and his mother, in their lair down below. But I was no Beowulf to slay them, or even to ask them, nicely, to use their indoor voices. I was unnerved by the prospect that they would even spot me up here.
Grendel was a walking case study of vitamin D deprivation, termite-white in a dingy white sleeveless undershirt, sprouting black body hair like a mass of horseflies crawling all over his back and shoulders and up his neck, where they got trapped in his coarse black, greasy hair. He had a matching unibrow, and a Fu Manchu that had taken root in the 1970s and never been weeded. Revolting.
He frightened all of the Bella Vista womenfolk and small children who passed him on the sidewalk as he went to or from his job at our friendly neighborhood corporate chain-store pharmacy, wearing a logo-emblazoned uniform and visor. Though what the visor was for was anybody’s guess. He walked with an elongated stride, as if he were imitating Homo erectus-and badly-swinging his brown bag lunch stiffly, grinning weirdly to no one in particular. There wasn’t a woman who wouldn’t shudder instinctively at his sight, assuming he was a serial killer until proven innocent. Imagine our spine-crawling response when we found out that he was the guy behind the counter who developed our personal family snapshots. For us, the Digital Age couldn’t come too soon.
Grendel’s Mother was almost as strange to behold when she emerged from the back door on shopping day, barely a head taller than the grocery cart she stole from the Superfresh on 11th Street. A sturdy woman, she wore the black widow’s housedress of the Old Country, with her white hair pulled straight back in a bun. The crone drove that rusty piece of junk to and from the market with such road rage that innocent bystanders could only pray she wasn’t packing her meat cleaver. The top-heavy wire basket nearly tipped over at times as she pushed on, having no respect for obstacles she couldn’t see, oblivious to the unpredictable cobblestones, crooked sidewalks, and crumbling curbs, making such an unholy racket I could hear her two blocks away.
It was hard enough trying to concentrate while she was threatening to chop up her son like poultry-I kept thinking, Eeewwww… she’ll have to pluck him.
One day their homicidal promises were so convincing that I actually picked up the phone to call 911.
I’ll stab you in your sleep!
Not if I smother you first-you crazy old bitch. Gimme the money. I know you got it, Ma.
I could hear him rifling through kitchen cupboards, popping the lids off of old tin flour canisters, throwing cereal boxes and canned goods hither and yon.
Where’d ja hide it, damnit?!
Holding the phone, I hesitated, wondering if callers were required to identify themselves. Hmm. I had to think about this. After all, it’s a big deal to call the cops on your neighbors. Did I really want to get involved? Obviously, some families just yelled a lot and said awful things. That’s just how they “communicated.” And I had never actually witnessed any physical abuse.
I decided to defer to the collective wisdom of my Bella Vista elders, whose official word on the street was invariably: I didn’t see nuthin.
But I sure did hear a lot: and it was mostly from colorful characters who charmed the hell out of me. The Happy Guy who strolled down our street every day at lunchtime, for instance, belting out a respectable version of “Volare.” Or the trio of highly seasoned bookies who worked our block and the local convenience store, assuming their positions every day on this or that corner, in rotation. Aging wiseguys with chewy old skin like the Italian dry sausages hanging on strings from the ceiling of Claudio’s in the market. The way they made themselves laugh at their own jokes never failed to crack me up from afar.
When I passed these bookies on the street, they were flirty, but always respectful, and they took to greeting me playfully with a nickname: Hey, Smiley.
Between these guys and the nosey neighbor ladies (of which I soon became one, being home all day), I felt relatively secure. Not to worry, hon, one of the native grandmas reassured me when we first moved in as newlyweds. They only kill each other.
Good to know, I humbly thanked her.
And then she asked me why I wasn’t pregnant yet-a question she continued to ask every time she saw me for the rest of her life, which she lived out mostly sitting in her folding lawn chair in front of her house. I would just play the blushing bride-Smiley-although after several years she eyeballed me suspiciously, and then sympathetically, and finally in complete senility, at which point I could only pat her hand gently and say: Not to worry, hon.
I had to wonder at my own tendency to be blasé about the wiseguy-on-wiseguy crime that made our neighborhood legendary. We got our slices at Lorenzo’s on the corner of 9th and Christian, and ate them just down the street under the two-story mural of the late Mayor Frank Rizzo looking vaguely off. It didn’t disturb my appetite for splashy red tomato pie to know that mob boss Sal Testa almost got his arm blown off in this same spot, eating a bucket of raw clams.