An antiquated wooden television stood beneath a sun-faded print of The Birth of Adam in Judith’s living room. She would bemoan how the television lagged, hitting it with a muddied pink slipper. I grew up living across the hall from Judith, and her distinct smell — cabbages, mothballs, dust — entered my nostrils in childhood and never left.
The painterly image of the Biblical Judith, who decapitated Holofernes, often shows a comely young woman with airbrushed fair skin and ‘come hither’ hooded eyes, grotesque bearded trophy in hand. Her timeless, maiden-esque allure contradicts the mortality inherent in the paintings: her looks defy the fact that she, like Holofernes, would eventually die. My Judith, on the other hand, felt every square inch of aging and impermanence. She’d often wax poetic about Brazil, her homeland, and their superior elderly treatment: “It is different in America. Nobody cares if you’re dead or alive. I want to go to Brazil” — I’d picture her on a cliff, skeletal arms spread wide like Rio’s Christ the Redeemer, housedress and squinting eyes carved into a mammoth stone. “You can go to Brazil, Judith, one day,” I’d lie. She would point to each bruise and spider vein, complaining with a confident soprano, yet the bewilderment of a declining body lurked in each word.
Our South Brooklyn apartment building knew Judith as intrusive and bitter. She was concerningly gaunt, with deep-set, near-black eyes. She could be brutal. She’d comment on appearances or weight gain, always female targets. “She needs to eat less” or “That woman looks like a dog” were some signature phrases—to which I would simply respond, “Oh, Judith!” and exhale nervously. Some may be inclined to analyze Judith’s ‘woman-bashing’ from an internalized misogyny perspective. Maybe she resented younger women in her early 90s, those considered more conventionally attractive. However, to me, she was just Judith—a living mythology of bygone days and the sexlessness of Baba Yaga.
I do not believe Judith’s ‘observations’ stemmed from self-consciousness, as she cared not about adhering to the male gaze. She’d talk candidly about bowel movements in front of my father. She had a haircut often reserved for men and would walk around the neighborhood visibly bra-less. Judith was far from coy and “ladylike”—unexpectedly, she was my first exposure to androgyny. Paradoxically, however, Judith had the standards of the 1950s when viewing others. She would ask me when I was getting married throughout high school, though I was around 4’10 and hadn’t even gotten my period: “Oh, you are sooo beautiful! When will you find a man?” What an image, my pixie-haired, boyish 14-year-old self drowning in white chantilly lace and a tulle veil. Surely, in Judith’s antiquated female gaze, I’d be married off to a middle-aged mustached man in mustard flares and aviator glasses.
Though Judith perceived me as grown-up, her comments highlighted how ‘behind’ I felt. She pierced through my coddled childhood and viewed me as an adult. I was undeniably sheltered: my mother escorted me to school through Junior High. I feared public transit in my ‘tween’ years and was driven around because of it. I wore floral, frilly pink shirts from the children’s section—far into adolescence. I never felt resentment towards Judith because of her comments; instead, I felt the sinking anxiety that comes with a conscious immaturity. It was as if Judith’s finger extended, lengthening past the front door, wrapping around the apartment hallway, and pointing directly to the stuffed animals on my bed, my cat-patterned nightgown. My girlhood was fleeting, and Judith knew it. In her manifestations of my future, however, she skipped the awkward, in-between era that comes before womanhood, the acne creams and ill-fitting dresses. Her dismissal of this uncomfortable waiting period made me feel even more alien and behind.
Judith was a Brazilian woman who married young and was long widowed by the early 2000s when I first knew her. Being invited to Judith’s meant two hours of rampant complaining, expired frozen meals, and her favorite motto, “Don’t ever get old.” I always sensed something occult-like when Judith would announce her age-defying sentiment in broken English. It felt like her version of protection—a shield from the elderly isolation, the mottled ankles, the missing front tooth.
Though I feared Judith in elementary school, her sharp gaze and atrophied cheekbones, the illusion of an ominous, Grimhilde-esque neighbor faded in adolescence. The body comments began as my female-ness made itself physically known. When my breasts started growing, she frequently asked about my “boyfriend” while pointing to an exposed bra strap. She’d then point to her chest, half-smirking and proclaiming that hers were ‘empty bags.’ Everything in Judith’s universe was an old relic: her wiry, balding hair, her antiquated, half-broken stove. Her closet of abandoned Rosemary’s Baby-esque shift dresses, her faux-oriental rug.
As I got older, Judith’s invitations inside, across the hall of our apartment building, increased. She was a masterclass in guilting, remarking that nobody “cared” about an old woman like her (though my father had saved her life twice after bad falls). She’d call me beautiful and retrieve Christmas cards from years before, my toddler face plastered on each one. Her favorite had slight edge rips from years in her cluttered letter cabinet: I grinned in Christmas garb on my grandmother’s porch, unaware of an outhouse behind me. It was not until my father downloaded the photographs that the port-a-potty was realized. My hair was platinum blond, then, my features doughy and unformed. Judith adored the novelty of my porcelain doll-ness. She would often make malicious comments towards her unresponsive family members both in America and back home—the ones whom I had encountered years prior in the fifth-floor hallway, exiting Judith’s apartment after a visit. They had a sort of thousand-yard stare, exhausted from hours at Judith’s. Her family members were strikingly timid, tall, and lanky in comparison to Judith, who barely stood five feet. Their eyes were particularly alien compared to her particularly beady ones: the kind that bulged from one’s head, perhaps from thyroidism or merely cartoonish genetics. Judith’s nephews, nieces, cousins, and extended family members were seemingly not cut from her cloth—not cut from the stained, sloppily embroidered handkerchief that was Judith.
“Maybe they’re just busy, Judith; you know it is a far trip from here to Brazil,” I’d posit. “No, they are selfish people, they don’t care…nobody cares. If I live or die. Oh, don’t ever get old,” she would respond. Overall, I sensed a desperation. Her body was failing, and she was trapped on a foreign planet. Overnight, the world of girdles and landlines changed to skinny jeans and cell phones. She only ever left home for the grocery store, adorned in her oversized fur coat, carrying a shopping cart. Still possessing her many duct-taped antiques, Judith appeared frazzled by her alien, wrinkled body by an overwhelming contemporary world.
At times, I almost telepathically felt her waiting for me across the hall—as if by a supernatural force. “Has Judith been quieter than usual? And why does the hallway smell even more rotten than usual? Oh shit.” I would remark to my mother as a teenager, fearing the worst. After briefly pondering the fate of Saturday nights either spent watching 1970s reruns or potentially spending hours listening to Judith complain, I would always end up ringing the bell, anxiously awaiting the Brazilian accent, the screeching four words that rendered everything alright, if only temporarily—
“Allo? Who izzz there?”
“Judith, it’s Lena. Is everything alright?”
“Who? Who izzz it? My earwax, I cannot hear.”
“Lena, Judith! It’s Lena!”
— and there Judith was, perched on her blue velvet couch like a sentinel, staring out her window at the smog-adorned highway below. Judith was always there, as if no time had passed, as if she froze like an unplugged animatronic the second I exited her door. The doorbell would instantly reboot her, an inherent grimace returning to her face as she mechanically approached the door. Or, more tangibly, I imagined her simply waiting for miraculous teleportation to Brazil, for government-administered frozen meals, for me to ring her bell. She desired her listening doll, situated neatly on her sun-blanched wingback chair.
Perhaps the Biblical Judith, also a lone widow, would feel the same way in the 21st century—swords replaced by AK-47s, the act of beheading reserved for cult killers and Halloween novelty stores. Biblical Judith is said to have lived to 105 or longer; my Judith neared that number. The Biblical Judith stripped herself of mourning attire before approaching Holofernes, something unlike my Judith, whose grief was inextricably embroidered into each fiber of her being. My Judith never committed a similarly valiant act as her historical former, with no accounts of tyrants overthrown, no extraordinary victories. When I picture Biblical Judith, I can never seem to visualize the painterly, alluring young heroine. Instead, I see the wrinkled Judith in a floral Muumuu who complained of excessive earwax. The mythologies of women become intertwined when working with oil paint and the recesses of adolescent memory.
Despite being alive, Judith haunted me—just as the living memory of her Biblical former has haunted history.
In mainstream haunting depictions, cinematic or literary, there is frequently a Judith: an aged, witchy figure who possesses a victim and feeds on their innocence. She may live in a thatched-roof hut or a derelict Victorian—places undeniably isolated. Hauntings may also occur within the confines of a multi-resident structure. Films of the 1960s and 70s, such as Rosemary’s Baby or The Sentinel, focused on the narrative of a lone victim within an apartment—all other neighbors are exposed as co-conspirators in the haunting. Both hauntings envelop the female protagonists. Once bright-eyed and gamine, they are gaunt, distant, and adorned in dark circles by the film’s end. They unwillingly fall into the legacies and rituals of their apartment buildings, knit into a tapestry tucked in the middle of New York City. I, too, resembled Rosemary Woodhouse in those early stages of her cinematic gaslighting, the building enveloping me, Judith’s presence similar to that of Ruth Gordon’s character: adorned in a housedress, captivated by my big-eyed youth. However, Judith never participated in blood rituals. She never cast spells or concocted herbally-ambiguous beverages.
Judith’s role within a substantial, apartment-wide haunting was more tangible and discreet. Her ability to hold power, as a witch would, was, paradoxically, unempowering: it was the power of being old, of drawing guilt from neighbors as if blood from a vein. It was a power that became isolating when the facade wore off, and her unsavory comments surfaced. Any embarrassment or apprehension towards her own ‘uncensored’ speaking had faded when I entered her life. She did not need to cherry-pick her words, as it made no difference in the attention she collectively received from her current “targets” of choice. One would think her power would wear off once the sweet, apron-wearing little old lady image was gone. However, it only heightened one’s guilt: not only feeling ashamed that one was avoiding her but also because they did not particularly like her. Hence, the cycle of visiting, avoidance, guilt, and revisiting would continue, and Judith’s non-paranormal ‘spell’ would be set into motion.
Her life, at least from my childhood perspective, revolved around ‘pestering’ people to the point where it became a sacred constant in her life. Often this consisted of excessive doorbell ringing or asking for “assistance” with a common task (just to lure someone in for hours of complaining, and forget the task altogether). She would arrive at our door as one does to an altar, ringing the doorbell like clockwork as one would light incense. For some, perhaps it may seem more straightforward to pigeonhole her haunting within the supernatural sense, taking the trope of a Hansel and Gretel-esque elderly woman and applying it to her personality, her turns of phrase, and her appearance. It is an action as old as time, subjugating the image of an odd woman through tropes or stereotypes to ‘explain’ her better.
Judith’s apartment felt possessed, haunted, though she was still alive. No, there was not a severed Holofernes head on her bedside table, nor were there the hokey moans of cartoon ghosts. It was a living haunting, a sort of Ikiryō. 生霊, Japanese for “living ghost” is when the spirit exits a living person’s body to haunt places and people. Her spirit lived in the faded curtains, the kitschy cockatoo sculpture. “I want to go to Brazil and never come back,” Judith would continue to repeat, over and over, an array of soiled Q-tips lying on the coffee table. She wanted to die there, but her true soul seemed scattered throughout the cluttered apartment. It seemed as if her limbs, her nerve endings, were connected to #5B. Her lungs were made from the lace tossed over an armchair, and her eyes were the pile of unpeeled onions on the dining table. A woman can become literally domestic after enough time passes, ingrained into the house flesh.
I viewed Judith as her apartment because I grew up visiting it. Or because her only worldly and spiritual possessions resided in the apartment. With few friends or family members in America, 5B was all she had. Her dead husband’s gloves sat on a dresser, and an empty twin bed beside hers became linen storage. It was a void of days-deceased, a void she could not escape. I pictured Judith on the beaches of Brazil, adorned in a bikini, her skin cancer blotches beneath sunscreen.
According to the legend of Ikiryō, disembodied spirits can travel far and wide—would Judith’s soul follow her to Brazil? “I don’t want to live like this anymore,” she told me with a pained grimace, lifting her dress to reveal a substantial stomach bruise. “Oh, I always bruise, like fruit; my skin is so sensitive.” I told her I was sorry, that it looked painful, her mouth flashing a slight smirk, “Thank you, dear. Oh, you’ll hate being old. Hate it.” She was underwear-less during the bruise reveal but cared not about modesty. A part of coming of age is realizing anatomical discrepancies among the sexes. However, at this moment, I was struck by the starkly different experiences between us in womanhood. She was widowed, now. The ribbon-curled, charmingly plain woman in the sepia-toned photographs—often with Brazil landmarks positioned behind her—was gone. Her body was no longer something coveted by greasy catcallers. Her womanhood was more sacred than that, something that prevailed through the decades, a body that seemed to say “I am here; I exist for the sake of it” more than my own. Her real privacy, the genuinely intimate parts of her life, were elsewhere—in the undusted china cabinet, the closet filled with fur coats. I knew she’d never reach Brazil, even with a far-traveling Ikiryō spirit.
Judith’s apartment was where I first saw a real fire, a frightening one (not a birthday candle or stovetop). My father noticed a suspiciously ancient room heater plugged in beside the Singer sewing machine while captive on Judith’s blue velvet couch. He begged her to dispose of it for safety reasons. She refused, saying it worked fine. Judith was stubborn. But so is my father. A post-war mutt of Ashkenazi Jew and German, his existence came from defiance. He was unafraid to defy Judith’s hardheadedness. With a glass of water and a piece of paper from the kitchen, my father was determined to show Judith she was wrong.
He wanted Judith to be wrong. The woman irked him. She would ring our bell around dinnertime to complain and insult, rendering his freshly cooked steak frigid when her monologue finished. We conceived a ‘Judith Routine’. If the doorbell rang after 8:00 P.M., my mother would mute the television, and the three of us would sit silently until she left. Judith was a woman who always felt justified in her actions—her controversial convictions and unsavory bell-ringing etiquette—and my father perceived it as a dangerously high ego, pure selfish spite.
My father took the piece of paper and sparked it on the heater, holding it torch-like as the flames engulfed. As Judith watched on, silent and dumbfounded, the paper became a sacrifice, a parchment Salem Witch. Whenever my father is intense in thought, the color drains from his blue eyes, rendering them near-white: scheming, German. His eyes turned icy, then, before dousing the flaming paper in water, Judith proved undeniably wrong. At this moment, I despised the stubbornness on either end—“Just stop!” I shouted, fearing he would do it again, another piece of paper waiting idly close by. My fear did not lie in the vibrant image of an imposing single flame, but the potential progression of fire.
While startled by the sudden blaze, I imagined the alternative if my father did not put the paper aflame. A fabricated image still haunts me—Judith dropping sewing machine scraps onto the heater, the room bursting into an inferno. Perhaps she’d be wearing her house dress, her slippers, a Brooklyn Miss Havisham. Maybe I’d be Pip, still in the apartment and trapped by the guilt of a bitter, lone elderly woman. However, there were no great expectations for the residents of my 6-story, boringly brick apartment complex. It seemed there was no future here, that I, like Judith, would become couch-bound and glued to soap operas.
My long-held perception of Judith as a nefarious, fairy-tale-like character stemmed from a few months after the fire incident when she broke into my mother’s bedroom. Amid one of Judith’s infamous complaining sessions, she made an unsavory, entirely unwarranted comment about my mother’s appearance, remarking that she needed to “eat less.” In response, my teary-eyed mother swiftly went across the hall into her bedroom. As I went to follow her, Judith pushed me aside, hobbling with a witch-like fervor in search of my mother. “Don’t be mad at me! Oh, please, don’t be, don’t be mad at me!” she said, opening the door without knocking. As opposed to fear that she had hurt my mother, Judith was more concerned about its consequences on her own life. Would she be shunned, unable to have my father as her handyman? Would I no longer sit on her sofa for hours, listening?
I remember how ‘yellow’ Judith looked compared to the jewel-tone hues of my mother’s decor. The sunflowers on her house dress, her varicose legs—she had stepped out of a faded, yellowing 1970s photograph, now hunched in my mother’s bedroom. Her coloring, her sepia-toned aura, felt so right in her own apartment and so wrong in ours. It was comparable to the early stages of an oil painting, when the colors are pre-contextual, muddied, and dark— before the bright white background is made burnt umber, before the shadows are rendered. She was a painting, that’s for sure. She was encased in an askew frame, awaiting the gaze of visitors.
My father heard Judith howling from the other room and discovered her bothering my mother. Judith was quite small, and it was easy for her to sneak in. Instead of berating Judith, he took her by the hand, ushering her out. She had to be handled gently in times of chaos to avoid escalating the situation. All future interactions were limited to awkward pleasantries, my mother attempting to “take the high road” and help an elderly woman. Judith often claimed my mother was lying about ringing her bell to check on her. Judith, in reality, was deaf as a doornail and unable to hear the bell. Frustrated by the unfounded accusations, my mother began to leave notes, proving she had stopped by. Judith claimed these notes were falsified ‘cover-ups’ to make it seem like she cared. “I hear you in your apartment, talking,” she would humorously accuse, “And yet you still ignore me.”
When I was 18, my lifelong dream happened—simultaneously Judith’s worst nightmare. My family was finally moving out of the apartment building, away from the fatalistic, clingy neighbors, far from the moldy bathtubs whose water often ran brown. We would have our own washing machine and a dishwasher. We’d finally live in a house of our own, one with a garden.
My father was the one who broke the news to Judith. She met the situation with tears of anger, exclaiming, “Well, what about me?.” She provided no well-wishes and no congratulations on my father’s first time (ever) living in a house. It was pure, unsurprising, bitter-ness. We would no longer live across the hall for 9 o’clock doorbell ring or 2-hour complaining sessions. Judith was furious.
Viewing another person as only a helpful vessel is arguably wrong, but Judith had surpassed any shame. We were there to listen, there to change lightbulbs. Our individual consciousnesses and our own issues were irrelevant to Judith. To her, we were moving mannequins—a self-absorption that should have angered me. It was my parent’s first time owning something significant, and Judith trampled the excitement with her unkempt floral slippers. However, I always maintained a soft spot for the prickly “biddie” of my childhood. Her existence across the hall was a dependable part of my life, and I found comfort in her consistency—I despised change growing up. I knew she was old and in fear, but to others, Judith’s care did not transcend herself. “She was always nasty, never a nice lady,” a fellow neighbor once told my mother, who had known Judith for decades. How much of Judith’s bitter personality came from age, and how much stemmed from an ingrained, unsavory temperament?
The last time I saw Judith was in 2021 when I was 18 years old, both of us thoroughly masked in her apartment. We stood six feet across from each other in her kitchen, maneuvering like chess pieces on her black and white, checked kitchen floor. Judith was the rook, moving in any direction she pleased. Obviously, in more ways than one, I was the pawn. Adorned in her signature coke-bottle glasses, she needed assistance with her cell phone. “I want to call Brazil,” she told me, “Oh, I need to go to Brazil—nobody cares here. You are so beautiful. You are so pretty. I want to go to Brazil.” She did not address the fact that we were moving, just a general, overarching feeling of rejection, of loneliness. I told her she could call me if she needed anything. In response, Judith brought me a container of expired yogurt to bring home as a sort of peace offering. She was crow-like at this moment, reminiscent of the creatures who also provide odds-and-ends as gifts to thoughtful humans, whether it be a pebble or discarded jewelry. Like crows, many viewed Judith’s presence as foreboding and ominous. Perhaps there was some kindness within her, after all.
I hated the thought of Judith being alone on the 5th floor. The other two apartments on our floor were coincidentally vacant, making her the lone ranger—the occasional social worker or nurse crossing into her territory. The vitality of floor five was slowly dwindling, but Judith was stalwart.
The standoffish blond woman from 5D, with whom we shared a kitchen wall, had also left recently. She always displayed seasonal, kitschy wreaths on her door: a smiling scarecrow holding a “Happy Harvest” sign or a pudgy snowman surrounded by faux-holly branches. It visually defied Judith’s door, an unadorned, chipping monolith she never once decorated. Both she and Judith rarely, if ever, had visitors. The house was our new start.
A few months after we had officially moved away, Judith randomly texted an image to my mother—most likely by accident. It was a selfie taken by a young woman, possibly a relative visiting from Brazil, Judith smirking confidently beside her. Behind them, Judith’s apartment still had its Birth of Adam painting, the parakeet figurine. A coffee cup emoji was plastered in the middle of the photo, and I still do not know why. The image, now most likely lost, still puzzles me—if not sent by accident, was Judith trying to make us jealous? Did she feel we were missing out?
Judith passed away in early 2022 after a brief battle with COVID-19—around half a year after we had moved out. A feel-better card was enveloped and ready to be mailed, but news of her death rendered the card too late. My mother cried, remarking it was the “end of an era.” For me, the concept of Judith being dead was incomprehensible and still is. The impact would have been different if I still lived in the apartment, watching as Judith’s house-flesh slowly faded away. She is in my mind, watching soap operas on her ancient television, the smell of cooking cabbage in the hallway. I believe her Ikiryō never left—life in the form of sloppily-done plasterwork and paint-chipped window sills. After her death, I discovered a three-second-long voicemail from the previous November. It was from Judith, her low, possessed voice electrifying my eardrums with childhood familiarity: “ALLO… ALLO, LENA!” Then, there was static—the voicemail ending once and for all.
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