Burn Marks

1

Wake-up Call

My mother and I were trapped in her bedroom, the tiny upstairs room of our old house on Houston. Down below the dogs barked and snapped as they hunted us. Gabriella had fled the fascists of her native Italy but they tracked her all the way to South Chicago. The dog’s barking grew to an ear-splitting roar, drowning my mother’s screams.

I sat up. It was three in the morning and someone was leaning on the doorbell. I was sweaty and trembling from the dream’s insistent realism.

The urgent ringing recalled all the times in my childhood the phone or doorbell had roused my father to some police emergency. My mother and I would wait up for his return. She refused to admit her fear, although it stared at me through her fierce dark eyes, but would make sweet children’s coffee for me in the kitchen-a tablespoon of coffee mixed with milk and chocolate-and tell me wild Italian folktales that made my heart race.

I pulled on a sweatshirt and shorts and fumbled with the locks to my door. The ringing echoed through the stairwell behind me as I stumbled down the three flights to the front entryway.

My aunt Elena stood on the other side of the glass door, her finger pressed determinedly to the bell. A faded quilt made an ungainly cloak around her shoulders. She had propped a vinyl duffel bag against the wall; a violet nightgown trailed from its top. I don’t believe in prescience or ESP, but I couldn’t help feeling that my dream-a familiar childhood nightmare-had been caused by some murky vibrations emanating from Elena to my bedroom.

My father’s younger sister, Elena had always been the family Problem. “She drinks a little, you know,” my grandmother Warshawski would tell people in a worried whisper after Elena had passed out at Thanksgiving dinner. More than once an embarrassed patrolman roused my dad at two in the morning to tell him Elena had been busted for soliciting on Clark Street. On those nights there were no fairy tales in the kitchen. My mother would send me to my own bed with a tiny shake of the head, saying, “It’s her nature, cara, we mustn’t judge her.”

When my grandmother died seven years ago, my father’s surviving brother, Peter, gave his share of the Norwood Park bungalow to Elena on condition that she never ask him for anything else. She blithely signed the papers, but lost the bungalow four years later-without talking to me or Peter she had put it up as collateral in a wild development venture. When the fly-by-night company evaporated, she was the only partner the courts could find-they confiscated the house and sold it to meet the limited partnership’s bills.

Three thousand remained after paying the debts. With that and her social security, Elena had been living in an SRO at Cermak and Indiana, playing a little twenty-one and still turning the occasional trick on the day the pension checks arrived. Despite years of drinking that had carved narrow furrows in her chin and forehead, she had remarkably good legs.

She caught sight of me through the glass and took her finger from the bell. When I opened the door she put her arms around me and gave me an enthusiastic kiss.

“Victoria, sweetie, you look terrific!”

The sour yeasty smell of stale beer poured over me. “Elena-what the hell are you doing here?”

The generous mouth pouted. “Baby, I need a place to stay. I’m desperate. The cops were going to take me to a shelter but of course I remembered you and they brought me here instead. A very nice young man with an absolutely gorgeous smile. I told him all about your daddy but he was just a boy, of course he’d never met him.”

I ground my teeth together. “What happened to your hotel? They kick you out for screwing the old-age pensioners?”

“Vicki, baby-Victoria,” she amended hastily. “Don’t talk dirty-it doesn’t sound right coming from a sweet girl like you.”

“Elena, cut the crap.” As she started a second reproach I corrected myself hastily. “I mean stop talking nonsense and tell me why you’re out on the streets at three in the morning.”

She pouted some more. “I’m trying to tell you, baby, but you keep interrupting. There was a fire. Our lovely little home was burned to the ground. Burned to an absolute crisp.”

Tears welled in her faded blue eyes and coursed through deep furrows to her neck. “I hadn’t gone to sleep yet and I just had time to stuff my thing into a suitcase and get down the fire escape. Some people couldn’t even do that much. Poor Marty Holman had to leave his false teeth behind,” The tears stopped as abruptly as they began, to be replaced by a high-pitched giggle. “You should have seen him, Vicki, my God, you should have seen what the old geezer looked like with his cheeks all sunk in and his eyes popping out and him shouting in this mumbly kind of way, ‘My teeth, I’ve lost my teeth.’”

“It must have been hilarious,” I said dryly. “You cannot live with me, Elena. It would drive me to homicide within forty-eight hours. Maybe less.”

Her lower lip started to tremble again and she said in a terrible parody of baby talk, “Don’t be mean to me, Vicki, don’t be mean to poor old Elena, who got burned out of her house in the middle of the nights. You’re my own goddamn flesh and blood, my favorite brother’s little girl. You can’t toss poor old Elena out on the street like some worn-out mattress.”

A door slammed sharply behind us. The banker who had just moved into the first-floor-north apartment erupted into the stairwell, his hands on his hips, his jaw sticking out pugnaciously. He was wearing navy-striped cotton pajamas; despite the bleary sleep in his face, his hair was perfectly combed.

“What the hell is going on out here? You may not have to work for a living-God knows what you do all day long up there-but I do. If you have to conduct your business in the middle of the night, show some consideration for your neighbors and don’t do it out in the hall. If you don’t shut up and get the hell out of here, I’m calling the cops.”

I stared at him coldly. “I run a crack house upstairs. This is my supplier. You could be arrested for complicity if you’re found hanging around out here when the police arrive.”

Elena giggled, but said, “Don’t be rude to him, Victoria- you never know when you may want a boy with fabulous eyes like that to do something for you.” She added to the banker, “Don’t worry, sweetie, I’m just coming in. We’ll let you get your beauty sleep.”

Behind the closed door to one-south a dog began to bark. I ground my teeth some more and hustled Elena inside, snatching her duffel bag from her when she began wobbling under its weight.

The banker watched us through narrowed eyes. When Elena lurched against him he made a face of pure horror and retreated hastily to his apartment, fumbling with the lock. I tried moving Elena upstairs, but she wanted to stop and talk about the banker, demanding to know why I hadn’t asked him to carry her bag.

“It would have been a perfect way for you two to get acquainted, make things up a little.”

I was close to screaming with frustration when the door to one-south opened. Mr. Contreras came out, a staggering sight in a crimson dressing gown. The golden retriever I share with him straining against her collar, but when she saw me her low-throated growls changed to whimpers of excitement.

“Oh, it’s you, doll,” the old man said with relief. “The princess here woke me up and then I heard all the noise and thought, Oh my God, the worst is happening, someone’s breaking in in the middle of the night. You oughta be more considerate, doll-it’s hard for people who have to work to get up in the middle of the night like this.”

“Yes, it is,” I agreed brightly. “And contrary to public opinion, I am one of those working people. And believe me, I had no more desire to get out of bed at three A.M. than you did.”

Elena put on her warmest smile and stuck out her hand to Mr. Contreras like Princess Diana greeting a soldier. “Elena Warshawski,” she said. “Charmed to meet you. This little girl is my niece, and she’s the prettiest, sweetest niece anybody could hope for.”

Mr. Contreras shook her hand, blinking at her like an owl with a flashlight in its face. “Pleased to meet you,” he said automatically if unenthusiastically. “Look, doll, you oughta get this lady-your aunt, you say?-you oughta get her up to bed. She ain’t doing too great.”

The sour yeast smell had swept over him too. “Yep, that’s just what I’ll do. Come on, Elena, Let’s get upstairs. Beddy-bye time.”

Mr. Contreras headed back to his apartment. The dog was annoyed-if we were all having a party she wanted to join in.

“That wasn’t very polite of him,” Elena sniffed as Mr. Contreras’s door closed behind us. “Didn’t even tell me his own name when I went out of my way to introduce myself.”

She grumbled all the way up the stairs. I didn’t say anything, just kept a hand in the small of her back to propel her in the right direction, urging her on when she tried to stop for a breather at the second-floor landing.

Back in my apartment she wanted to ooh and aah over all my possessions. I ignored her and moved the coffee table so I could pull the bed out of the couch. I made it up and showed her where the bathroom was.

“Now listen, Elena. You are not staying here more that one night. Don’t even think I’m going to waffle on this because I won’t.”

“Sure, baby, sure. What happened to your ma’s piano? You sell it or something to buy this sweet little grand?”

“No,” I said shortly. My mother’s piano had been destroyed in the fire that gutted my own apartment three years earlier. “And don’t think you can make me forget what I’m saying by raving over the piano. I’m going back to bed. You can sleep or not as you please, but in the morning you’re going someplace else.”

“Oh, don’t look so ugly, Vicki. Victoria, I mean. It’ll ruin your complexion if you frown like that. And where else am I supposed to turn in the middle of the night if not to my own flesh and blood?”

“Knock it off,” I said wearily. “I’m too tired for it.”

I shut the hall door without saying good night. I didn’t bother to warn her not to rummage around for my liquor-if she wanted it badly enough, she’d find it, then apologize to me a hundred times the next day for breaking her promise not to drink it.

I lay in bed unable to sleep, feeling the pressure of Elena’s presence from the next room. I could hear her scrabbling around for a while, then the hum of the TV turned conscientiously to low volume. I cursed my uncle Peter for moving to Kansas City and wished I’d had the foresight to hightail it to Quebec or Seattle or some other place equally remote from Chicago, Around five, as the birds began their predawn twittering, I finally dropped into an uneasy sleep.