Free The Better to Hold You by Alisa Sheckley Page B

Hunter felt too much like self-inflicted torture.
    So I took a cab to 125th Street and waited for a train on the high, rickety platform, along with a loud young mother with two small children, a middle-aged man carrying a biology textbook, and a suburban matron in her early sixties—folks who couldn’t be bothered to go all the way downtown to Grand Central.
    “My daughter said this station was safe,” confided the white suburban matron in her Burberry raincoat, “but I don’t know.” She patted her lemony hair with one hand. “It seems very run-down, don’t you think?” To our left, the mother screamed at her children: “You go near that edge and I’ll kill you!”
    “Bill Clinton thinks it’s safe,” I said. “He has an office around here.”
    “He can afford to.”
    I laughed. “I’m going to see my mother in Pleasantvale. That’s scarier than anything you’re likely to meet around here.”
    The woman smiled, revealing coral lipstick on one tooth. “I’m sure she’ll be very happy to see you. I’m on my way to see my younger daughter’s children.” She pulled a stack of photos out of her wallet. “Look, that’s the three-year-old in the Easter dress I bought her last year; she’s got lovely dimples just like my daughter had. And that’s the five-year-old; she takes after the father’s side—they all have that hard-to-manage Italian hair.”
    The train arrived, saving me. I moved far back, away from the chatty lady in the expensive raincoat. There was no way to explain to her that my mother would not be happy to see me. My mother was not like other mothers: Cats and dogs were her dimpled favorite grandchildren, and I was the unfortunate inheritor of my father’s bad genes.
    Of course, if I’d said my mother’s name, the lady would probably have gone into verbal overdrive. As Piper LeFever, my mother made six films between 1974 and 1979, the year I was born. She’d appeared in Beware the Cat! (as the youngest of three sexy witches terrorizing a small village in medieval En gland) and The Harpy (as a morsel for a big vulture), and had made quite an impression on one reviewer in Lucrezia Cyborgia (as a dangerously beautiful alien in a skintight space suit). Her first starring role had been in Blood of Egypt (as a mousy librarian who is really a powerful priestess of the ancient Sect of Anubis), which was followed by Satan’s Bride and El Castillo de los Monstros, her last movie. El Castillo de los Monstros was my father’s big break. Only twenty-five at the time, he replaced Domingo Santos as director after my mother drove the man to a nervous breakdown. My father, who is Spanish, knew how to handle temperamental women. He made my mother pregnant and finished the picture right on schedule.
    I’m not exactly sure why my parents left the West Coast, or even whose idea it was to buy a splendid Spanish-style house in Pleasantvale, thirty minutes from Manhattan. I guess it must have been one of those rare decisions they came to jointly, without arguing. In any case, it was a strange sort of place to grow up in, a great fanciful villa modeled on El Greco’s house in southern Spain, smack-dab in the middle of a resolutely working-class neighborhood. The house, which was built in the 1920s, had come first, and the neighborhood had grown up around it like the forest of thorns around Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
    At first there was enough room for two warring spouses, a suit of armor in the formal dining hall, two wolfhounds, and a wandering tribe of cats, not to mention a Roman fountain in the central courtyard. But then Dad’s career as a director died completely with the ill-fated mid-eighties television series I Married a Werewolf and the arrangement soon became unbearable. The fact that the show was about a henpecked husband married to a temperamental lycanthrope may also have had something to do with it. Reviewers called it a misogynistic Bewitched.
    Already the proud owner of six cats, two