Enchantments Read Online Free PDF

made of smooth, smooth green leather with a little press button. And Mama's eyes light up the way a clearing in the woods lights up when the moon suddenly appears, and she asks, “But what's this?” And I know that she knows and doesn't know, knows and doesn't know, and it will be like that, wonderfully like that the whole while she's holding the case in her white fingers, about to press the hard little button. And then,
toe!
Inside there's a necklace of teardrop emeralds. My father picks it up and stands behind Mama. As he gently fastens it around her neck, it closes the circle of my dreams.

My mother was born in America, and she used to tell us bedtime stories about when she lived among the Plains Indians with her grandfather, Sitting Bull. When she got to the end of a story, Clara never failed to say, “Mama, I don't believe your grandfather was Sitting Bull.” If Papa was there he'd laugh and say, “What are you talking about? Just look at her big, beautiful Sioux nose.” And he'd pinch it and she'd push his hand away, but she'd be laughing too. And she'd add, “Just remember you had to give ten horses to Grandpa Sitting Bull so you could marry me.”
    She came up with story after story with so many details that even though at the beginning we were just pretending to believe so she wouldn'tstop, by the end we found ourselves wondering— what if it's true?
    Of course, as we found out the first time she took us to America to meet her family, it wasn't true. To begin with, they were all light-skinned—though there was some hope for an old aunt with a face so wrinkled it looked like cracked shoe leather and an aquiline nose so large it cast a cone of a shadow across her cheek. The only problem was that her name was Rosalinda.
    To be sure, Mama's family sometimes spoke odd Italian. With complete assurance they would say they were going to the “supermar-chetta” in the “carro.” But they weren't Indians— no, they were Abruzzesi, the older ones having emigrated to America at the turn of the century. Great-aunt Angelica and Great-uncle Giacomo (now called Jack) had gotten married by proxy when he was already in America and she was still back in the Abruzzo. Jack told us that he and his brother (my mother's father, who died young) had built the roads of New York State. Jack had gone on to build not only the roads but houses in White Plains, the suburb of New York City where they lived. Perhaps that was why all the houses looked so much alike. When I went for a walk, I got lost. Luckily they weren't all the same color.
    Theirs was white, with pink doors and shutters— it looked exactly like a dollhouse. I'd thought they might live in a skyscraper. But of all the houses I'd been in it was my favorite. It wasn't too big, like Schifanoia, where I had to walk kilometers to find Mama. And it wasn't too small, like the apartment in Paris, where your only choices were the bedroom or the living room—no surprises, nothing to discover. In Angelica and Jack's house there were a number of possibilities, but not too many. If you shouted, somebody would hear you. The second-floor rooms had dormer windows that looked like bulging eyes. When I sat close to the panes, I felt suspended in midair—at the same level as the branches where squirrels were scurrying and leaping. In the basement there was a room with wood paneling and a bar with tall stools. On the walls there were posters of concerts and ballets because Angelica and Jack's daughter was a ballerina and her husband was a conductor. Next to that room there was a pantry with a freezer that was always full of broccoli and ice cream.
    At the dinner table Jack would look at me with his round, transparent eyes and say, “Bella, eat the broccoli, bella!” And if I didn't eat, Aunt Angelica would raise her eyes to Heaven, her facetwisted with disappointment, and say, “Oh-ah! You don't like my broccoli, oh-ah!” And then she'd get over it and go on chewing like a cow with a