Mrs. Yongé

(continued)

By Margaret Karmazin

"You desire more candy?" she asked, reaching for the tray.

"No, thank you," I said. I just wanted to get out of there and scooted to the edge of my seat.

There was a long pause and then Mrs. Yongé said, "I want to show you something."

My heart jumped to my throat. Was this when she would suddenly open her mouth in a snarl to exhibit long vampire teeth? Instead she pushed her kimono sleeve up and stuck her thin arm in my face.

"See the design?" she asked.

I jerked my head back but could not help staring at the strange tattoo, if that's what it was, on the top of her wrist. As soon as my eyes fastened upon it, the lines in it began to move in a swirly pattern like those twirling spirals that hypnotize the characters in cartoons. I am not making this up. It began to cause a weird pulling sensation inside my head and I seemed to be trapped, unable to stop watching it. Part of my mind struggled against it but the whole of it, as it turned out, surrendered. After that I don't know what happened. The next thing I remember was standing by the open door where Mrs. Yongé was again holding out the tray of candy, still smiling that idiotic smile.

"Have another candy, Su-san," she said happily.

I was suddenly aware of a pain on the top of my thigh and bent my head to look down at it, but she stopped me by laying her small hand on my arm. "If you like, I will give you this candy to take with you back to your house. I will put it in a sack."

My head felt so funny. "Uh, no. No, thank you. I don't want any candy. I'd better go home now. My mother probably needs me or something."

She smiled. "Yes, your mother may want you, Su-san. Good-bye." I swear there was a tear in her eye.

I bolted. I would have immediately started running like hell but felt groggy and disoriented. She was still in the doorway looking at me so I tried to walk normally but as soon as I rounded the corner, plopped down on the curb to examine my leg. What I saw stabbed fear into my heart, which immediately began to race. As if a bee had stung me, the skin was raised in a red welt, a perfect circle of swollen outraged flesh. The only difference was that a bee sting felt hot to the touch and this was cold. In the center of the welt, there was a miniscule hole just like in a bug bite. But I knew, if by nothing else than the gripping sensation in my gut, that this was no bite by any bug.

I was terrified. There was no place to turn. My mother would take one look and laugh and suggest getting out the baking soda. She would never believe or even want to hear about the swirling tattoo on Mrs. Yongé's arm nor would she believe me if I told her what it did to me.

This was one of those moments when you grow up a chunk -- that's what I would call it later when I had the maturity to reflect on such things. I think you grow up in sudden chunks. I decided then and there that since I had no one in this matter to rely on, I would rely on myself. Neither my mother nor anyone else would force me to go into that woman's house ever again. I stood up then and, with a subdued but stronger self, walked home.

I needn't have worried. The next day my mother announced at supper that Mrs. Yongé had suddenly moved out of the neighborhood. "It's strange," she added. "So unexpected." My father placidly chewed his meatloaf but I spilled some of my milk.

"Get the dishrag and clean that up," said my mother. In the kitchen I heard her say, "Evidently, she was renting the house. I thought she'd bought it. Now they say some realty company owns it. She didn't say a word to anyone. Yesterday she was here and today she was not. She'd only moved in a month or so ago."

"Typical fly-by-night," said my father. "That jet black hair, those funny kimonos."

"Don't judge a book by its cover," said my mother without much sincerity. I thought her a huge judge of book covers.

Being cursed with an active imagination, I immediately pictured Mrs. Yongé having returned to her vampire family in their castle somewhere in Europe. Or perhaps she was an alien from another planet! After her mission was completed, they'd come to get her. Then I was hit with real terror. Since she'd gone almost immediately after the swirling tattoo incident, then I must have had something to do with that mission! It was me she'd been after all along!

Both of my parents noticed my face blanche. "Susan, did you hear something about it? Do you know why she left? You seemed to know her better than we did. Didn't you stop by there sometimes?"

I was almost hyperventilating. "I feel sick," I said, and indeed I did. I must have passed out for the next thing I knew I was upstairs in my bed and heard my mother speaking in hushed tones to the doctor's wife on the telephone.

The doctor, a man who liked his liquor as much as he did children, examined the spot on my leg with happy blurry eyes and pronounced it a spider bite. He gave me a shot of penicillin, which they did for everything in those days, snapped his bag shut and left in a bustle of goodwill. It was 1959 and what children claimed in a delirium of fever was not taken seriously. I recovered in a couple of days and never mentioned the bite or Mrs. Yongé again.

An odd thing. After I came out of that fever, I was different. My dark moods vanished, I became an even-keeled person. And my mother was kinder to me.