I was 12 that year, and my friends and I dressed up in our costumes and went trick-or-treating up and down the elevators… Every neighborhood has a witch, an old person every kid avoids, out of fear of something we couldn’t exactly grasp at 12. They were so foreign to my Yankees-loving, Keds-wearing self – their thick Yiddish accents, their mouths and ears seemingly oversized for their faces, the women smelling like talcum, the men of spittle and phlegm. But the scariest of them all was Mrs. Pincus, apartment 12B.