FICTION

The Capo’s Niece

Growing Up with Gangsters

Elizabeth Sobieski
Bouncin’ and Behavin’ Blogs
11 min readFeb 5, 2024

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Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash

My mother always said that I was a cold baby. In her usual charming twist of a phrase, she told me, “When I was expectin’ you, I didn’t know I had a refrigerator in my oven.”

I don’t understand how one arrives at cold infancy. Was I born chilly or did I gradually develop into a frosty baby? Was I somehow unkissable, unhuggable? Or was I reasonably kissable and huggable, merely a small someone who wouldn’t smile, wouldn’t share, wouldn’t react, wouldn’t return affection?

I don’t get it. Just last month, I scanned some of the old photos and I am convinced that I identically resembled a standard issue facsimile of a normal baby: fat pink cheeks, a hairless Eisenhowerian head and big Ruskie blues.

Maybe she was a frigid mother and perceived me as a cold baby, conceived me as a cold baby. Except for maybe some autistics, I’ve never heard of a cold baby.

Ma’s no longer around so I can’t find out what she meant. I asked Gram what I was like as a tyke and she said I was a brat but she didn’t mention anything about my emitting sangfroid upon all my antecedents. And I don’t think of myself as a cold adult. I believe people who know me may consider me whimsical, iconoclastic, quirky, even weird, but not cold. At least I hope never cold. Let’s…

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Elizabeth Sobieski
Bouncin’ and Behavin’ Blogs

Elizabeth Sobieski @TheMaskedHatter on Instagram, has written for various publications and is the author of “The Masked Hatter-Pandemic Style", Penser Press.