My cousins said her name was Tizzy Lish. I wasn’t sure if that was really her name or if Bobby and Richard had just made it up, but it seemed like the right name for the old lady. She lived alone in a shabby house a few doors from my aunt and uncle, whom my family visited just about every weekend. Every day at about eleven she would come out her front door all dressed in black except for a funny gray hat that looked like the top of a toadstool, and she would walk two blocks to a dairy store and come back carrying a pint of milk in one hand. The other hand always held a furled umbrella—rain or shine, summer or winter. Her shoes were black and heavy—the kind my mother referred to as “sensible,” but which she would never have dreamed of wearing.

 Going to visit my cousins was always an adventure. Their Hawthorne neighborhood seemed far more exciting than did our home area of Lakewood. There was certainly no luxury or gentility. Just two and three bedroom houses with weedy, scruffy lawn areas in front. Lots of derelict cars took root at the curb or languished on the lawns of some of the homes. 

A favorite place for us to play was a double-sized vacant lot across the street from Tizzy Lish’s house.  At some time, someone must have done lots of planting in this lot because it was more than just knee-high weeds. There were tall trees we could climb and rig rope swings in, and there were stands of pampas grass that made fine hiding places. Dense bushes provided concealed places ideal for hide- and-seek games and for spying on the Lish house, a home only slightly shabbier than its neighbors but which our boyish romanticism had endowed with mystery.

I was nine, and Richard eleven. Bobby, age thirteen, was leader. His arms had the kind of muscles that I dreamed of having. Being youngest, I had to work hard to maintain my cousins’ acceptance and tolerance. They had a younger sister, Elaine, who was eight, but I much preferred male companionship. My one attempt to play with Elaine had been a painful hour in the family garage involving many little plastic cups and saucers and pretending to be a husband. Grass bomb fights in the vacant lots were more to my liking, even though I was more often a victim than a conqueror. Playing boy games with my older cousins let me forget briefly that I was a bookish, skinny kid with thick glasses who at school had to put up with teasing and rejection from his classmates, all of whom were at least a year older, since my parents had started me early.

 During our family visit on Thanksgiving weekend, Richard and Bobby invited me along on a spying adventure. Beside one wall of Tizzy’s house was a pair of wooden doors leading into the ground, slanted so that rain would run off. After breakfast, when we were sure we wouldn’t be seen by casual strollers or gardeners, we stole across the street and hid ourselves in the bushes of the house next door to Tizzy’s. Richard cautioned me to be quiet as I crept behind my cousins across a driveway to the two doors. Bobby carefully pulled one door open on its rusty hinges, wincing at the noise it made. The houses I knew about only had crawl spaces underneath, but the area under Tizzy’s house was a deep cellar with earthen wall divisions. Empty racks that looked like they were made to hold bottles lined some of the walls. I thought of a word I had recently learned and loved the sound of. Dungeon! 

 Once under the house we could hear the creak of floorboards and radio music from above.  My eyes adjusted to the dimness, and I noticed piles of hoes, shovels and rakes in one corner. Across the way were dusty crates, cardboard cartons and a few large trunks. I pictured a chest full of money or jewels. I imagined that the trunks held decomposing corpses or skeletons. I crouched and moved along the dirt wall under the street side of the house, and one of my feet hooked into a loop of metal. There was a shattering of glass as I dislodged an old railroad lantern that had been lying on its side and sent it clattering. Bobby said a bad word starting with “s.” 

 “Run!” Richard commanded.

The three of us scrambled for the opening and escape. We heard the back door of the house slam and when we climbed out into the sunlight, there was Tizzy Lish, bony fists on her narrow hips, looking stern and angry. She asked us what we thought we were doing. I tried to be tough and brave, but I started to snuffle when she said,  “I guess this is a matter for the police.”  Bobby and Richard came up with a lame story about their missing housecat.

“We thought he might have chased something under your house and gotten stuck under there. We weren’t trying to steal anything.”

“Don’t lie to me!” she said. “I know bad boys when I see them. So what are we going to do about it, eh?”  Tizzy walked up to me, grabbed me by the chin, turned my face up and said, “You must be the boy who comes all the time in the dirty blue Plymouth. The cousin.”  I could only nod. After a few more threats about calling the police or our parents, she ordered us to go home. She ended with a threat that made me shiver. “If I ever catch any of you on my property again, I’ll cut your ears off and sew them on backwards!”

Bobby and Richard treated the incident as a big joke and said Tizzy belonged in the loony bin, but I was worried that our misbehavior would get back to my parents and my aunt and uncle. It was a while before my cousins let me forget my clumsiness in kicking the lantern. They even said that on my next visits I should maybe leave them alone and go play house with Elaine. That way I wouldn’t get them in trouble. But I was forgiven.

A week or so later when we walked past Tizzy’s house, we could see a shiny aluminum hasp and lock securing those doors to the cellar area. Elaine said she had seen Grover, the handyman, doing the work. I was even more convinced that there was something under there that the old woman didn’t want us to find.

 Christmas vacation came—my favorite time of year. Uncle Bruce dangled the usual strings of outdoor lights around the rooftop and porch poles of their house. Tizzy Lish  had stuck a bedraggled wreath on her front door. The big day was five days off, falling on a Sunday, and I was pleased that I wouldn’t have to go to Mass twice in one week. Mom and Dad left me to stay overnight with Richard and Bobby while they did whatever parents did in those wartime days once they had temporarily shed themselves of children. The prospect of the sleep-over thrilled me. There would be late night chatter and spooky stories in the bedroom, and during the day, who knew what pranks my cousins would come up with?  They promised to include me in a new campaign they had taken up against Tizzy Lish, but they wouldn’t tell me what it was.

 The next day we were all in the street with softball and bat playing three-flies-and-you’re-up when Tizzy came out in her usual costume for her trip to the dairy. Bobby and Richard pretended not to know that she was advancing toward us on the edge of the street. There were no sidewalks. As she drew abreast of us, my cousins suddenly ran each to one side of her and began jeering and taunting.

 “Crazy Tizzy always dizzy. Go buy your bottle of milk!”

 “Leave me alone, you little hellions.”  She swished right and left with her umbrella.

 “Gonna steal your stupid hat, Tizzy,” jeered Bobby.

 “I’ll cut your ears off and sew....” Showing his bravery, Bobby got too close to the old woman, and the handle of her umbrella struck him full in the face. Blood gushed down his front. He started to wail as Richard and I stood stunned and speechless, watching Bobby’s blood pool on the asphalt.

 Tizzy changed before our eyes. “Oh my dear, I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice filled with concern. “I didn’t mean to hit you.”  She was a different person. Putting one arm around Bobby’s shoulder, she handed me her umbrella so that she could fish a handkerchief from her coat pocket and hold it to Bobby’s nose. She took him into her house, beckoning to us to follow along. She tore off her funny hat and flung it at a corner wastebasket, mumbling something. Getting ice cubes from the freezing compartment of the refrigerator, she applied them first to Bobby’s nose and then to the back of his neck after he lay down on her couch. “There, there,” she said in that odd, comforting voice. “It’ll be all right. I never meant to hurt you. I’m so very sorry.” Richard and I watched and looked at each other in surprise and confusion.

 When the nosebleed stopped, she smiled from one to the other of us and said, “I’ll bet you all could eat a dish of ice cream, couldn’t you?  Wait right here.”  While she served up the ice cream, I looked around her small, bright living room. There were pictures of what must have been her husband and her when they were about my parents’ age. I was surprised to see that Tizzy used to be a pretty woman, like in the movies. A  small, plastic Christmas tree sat on a side table. It was decorated with small birds that clipped onto the branches and brightly colored ribbons tied in bows.

 Tizzy went to the telephone and dialed my aunt’s number without having to look it up. I finished my dish of ice cream and put it down on the table near the Christmas tree. “Hello, Mrs. Moneymaker. This is Mrs. Lish down the street.... I want you to know that your boys and their cousin were playing a silly game we have, and I accidentally struck Bobby with my umbrella and gave him a nosebleed.... He’s all right. A little blood on his tee shirt but I’ll rinse that out.... I just wanted you to know how terrible I feel about hurting the lad....Yes, well, you remember my telling you at the Altar Society meeting about how much I have enjoyed watching your family grow up over the years.... I’ll be sending them home now, and once again, I’m just devastated about the accident!”

 Richard, Bobby and I didn’t talk much as we walked back home. I picked up Bobby’s baseball glove, which I had dropped by the curb when Richard and Bobby had set upon the woman. As Bobby was gathering up the ball and bat, he looked back at Tizzy’s house and mumbled, “Crazy old witch. She’s in for it now.”

 “Know what?” I said with some hesitation. “Know what’s really weird?  Under her Christmas tree I saw these four presents. The stickers said ‘From Santa Claus’ and one was ‘To Elaine,’ one ‘To Richard,’ one ‘To Bobby’ and the last one had my name on it. And they weren’t wrapped in gift wrap but in the L.A. Times funny papers, just like those mystery gifts we got last Christmas.”  I didn’t think Tizzy even knew my name.

 I can’t remember many specifics of that Christmas. Our family drove to Hawthorne for dinner after opening our presents at home, and after a stop at my paternal grandparents’, just as we did every year. Cousins and parents had the usual exchange of gifts. The only ones I recall were the last ones we kids opened—the ones wrapped in the funny papers and tied with the same kind of ribbon that decorated Tizzy’s plastic Christmas tree. The ones claiming to be from Santa Claus. I have no recollection of what Elaine got. Richard unwrapped a balsa wood model fighter plane and sat staring at it for a long time. Bobby got one of those slinky toys that can walk down stairs. My gift was a brand new Hardy Boys book—the only one I had not read.  

 I suppose I fell asleep as usual in the back seat of Betsy, the Plymouth, when we drove back to Lakewood that evening. I remember feeling that a lot had happened in a short period of time. Bobby and Richard never again struck me as being so big, so heroic, so all-knowing. I don’t recall seeing the old lady again. I learned that a milk truck began stopping at her house once a week for a while. Then it stopped coming. During one of our visits that summer, a For Sale sign appeared on Tizzy Lish’s front lawn, and we saw a couple of men begin to load her furniture and boxes of belongings into a moving van. I watched and felt a strange sense of loss