steps, she was accosted by a hollow-cheeked youth whose temple curls dangled from his ears like convolvuli. In his short alpaca jacket and the further affectation of a pair of lemon spats, he looked like some half-caste creature, part yeshiva bocher and part swell.
“You should have in these unsafe streets an escort,” he offered in a sibilant voice, taking her arm.
She abruptly reclaimed the arm and replied, shakily, “I never needed one before.”
“You’re the hokey-pokey girl,” as if assigning her the role she had already assumed, “the one that won’t give the boys a tumble.” He ungloved a hand to dip his middle finger into a tub of parfait on her cart, stirring slowly before licking the finger with a tongue Jocheved half-expected to be forked. Then closing his eyes to smack his sensuous lips, he tugged down the leather bill of his cap and grabbed her arm again, this time with a firmer grasp. She tried to pull away and, for the first time in her memory, Jocheved was afraid. At that point another man in a ratty fur ulster and hat, his face like cracked crockery, appeared from nowhere to grab her other arm. He pressed a piece of damp cheesecloth with a sickly sweet smell to her nose, which caused Jocheved to shake her head violently, snorting to clear her nostrils of its fumes. But the more she struggled to resist the almondine odor, the deeper she was forced to inhale, her brain careering free of its axis. Houses whose listing walls were propped up by warped timbers reeled about her like beggars on crutches, and the sun showed its guttering flame just in time to expire.
1999.
The evening after their return from Las Vegas, Mrs. Karp served a dish of meatloaf whose fetid taste no one could stomach. “Don’t blame me,” she said, still woozy from jet-lag and the phenobarbitol of the night before. “I’m not the cook.” Nettie was the cook, a hard-bitten, church-going woman with swollen ankles, who had once barged into the bathroom where Bernie sat in flagrante with a lingerie ad torn from a newspaper. “I ain’t seen nothin’,” she assured him, and slammed the door, though she tended to avoid him ever after, as Bernie did her. Sometimes she could be heard muttering under her breath about the trials of working for “Jewrish” folk—though there was nothing especially Hebraic about the Karp household unless you included the old-world relic in cold storage, which Nettie, if she knew anything of it, never mentioned. But she was familiar enough with the deep freeze, and had taken out the ground beef for the meatloaf that very morning, still (as Mrs. Karp attested) frozen solid.
Mr. Karp tugged at a drooping earlobe as if to aid his powers of deduction and asked his son, “Bernie, was there any kind of an electrical failure during the storm?” For he and his wife had returned from their weekend trip to find evidence of the tempest’s damage strewn all over town.
Bernie replied that yeah, there had been a kind of an electrical failure, then immediately had second thoughts.
“Eureka!” declared Mr. Karp in full gloat. “The meat in the freezer must have thawed, then spoiled, and froze again. Mystery solved.” He showed horsey teeth, then frowned at the realization that the family trove of turkeys and roasts, now tainted, would have to be jettisoned wholesale. “Tell Nettie to clean out the freezer bin in the morning,” he advised his wife, who told him to tell her himself.
The next morning, having complied with orders, Nettie toiled up the carpeted staircase to report the outcome of her appointed task to the missus, who was reposing in her aerosol-scented bedroom with the curtains drawn. Mrs. Karp, still in her dressing gown at half-past eleven, looked up vacantly from the steamy pages of a novel by Arabesque Latour, as the bull-necked servant informed her, “He gone.”
“Who gone?”
“The man in the ice box.”
Mrs. Karp raised a tweezered brow, let it drop, and resettled herself on her chaise to continue reading. “Good riddance,” she was heard to say to herself.
But Nettie was unappeased. Having apparently mustered all her tolerance to abide the old man in the freezer over the years, she was past consoling now that he was at large and possibly dangerous. Grumbling that it was more than her job was worth to remain in their employ, she plodded down the stairs and out of the Karps’ haunted house forever.