Gypsies

  “Is it really very far?” “We can drive there.” “What’s it like?”

  “Like here. Very much like here. But nicer.” “All right,” Karen said sadly. “Yes.”

  2

  They checked out and loaded up the luggage in Aunt Laura’s car—a car Michael could not identify, probably foreign. It was small and boxy and the name Durant was written on the gas cap. The trunk swallowed all their luggage effortlessly.

  They were on the road an hour before the change began.

  It was a long drive. They followed the San Diego Freeway south past shimmy instant suburbs and forests of desiccated palm trees, past oil wastelands and cracked concrete underpasses scrawled with Hispanic graffiti. Laura didn’t talk much, seemed to be concentrating on the driving. It was coming on for dusk, rush-hour traffic, blinders pulled down to keep out the setting sun. Michael felt the tension rising in the enclosed space of the car.

  He understood that something important was happening. They were going to Aunt Laura’s place to visit, to stay a while, that had been established… but more than that. His mother’s anxiety was obvious. She sat beside Aunt Laura with her spine rigid and her head held almost primly forward. And he could see the concentration gathering in Laura herself, a tensing of muscles.

  They left the freeway on an off ramp and turned west toward the ocean, through a range of scrubby brown hills. There was more housing going up along these dry ravines. Billboards for Model Homes. Who would live here? Michael wondered. Why? What was there to draw all these people?

  And then they came within sight of the ocean, a gray flatness, shabby roadside stalls and businesses, salt air and the rancid smell of diesel oil.

  The change began as the sun was setting.

  Michael thought at first it was a trick of the light. The sunset seemed to suffuse the car through the windows on the right. It was momentarily blinding, the way a lance of sun off hot, still water is blinding. But not only that. He felt a surge of something inside him, a disorientation, as if he had been blindfolded and spun a dozen times around. For a fraction of a second Michael thought he was falling, that the car was plummeting through empty space. He blinked twice and held his breath. Then the tires bit pavement again, the suspension bottomed and then steadied. The brightness faded.

  But the memory lingered. This was a familiar feeling. When had he felt it before? Just a little while ago, he thought … in Toronto. With the Gray Man.

  Like this, Michael thought: a stepping outside and beyond, through the secret doors of the world; and he looked outside with sudden startlement: Where are we now?

  But the world—this road—looked the same. Or nearly the same. It might be imagination, but it seemed as if some of the shabbiness had gone. The storefronts were a little cleaner, a little brighter. The air (he was almost certain) felt fresher, the sunset brighter but less gaudy.

  He caught Laura’s eye in the rearview mirror.

  She looked at him and nodded solemnly, as if to say, Yes, I did that. Yes, it’s real.

  He cleared his throat and said, “Where are we going?”

  “My place,” Laura said calmly. “I told you.” A sign announced the distance in miles to a town called Turquoise Beach. “That’s it… that’s where I live.”

  3

  Karen had never been good at dealing with the unexpected. She was cautious, therefore, in evaluating this place Laura had brought her to. Turquoise Beach.

  A name not on any map she had ever seen, though she supposed you could go to a gas station—here—and buy a map that would have Turquoise Beach marked on it. And other strange places.

  They arrived after dark, but the town, what she could see of it, was an innocuous old seaside town, Victorian buildings and newer stucco storefronts. There was something quaintly bohemian about the beaded curtains fronting doorways and the stained glass shining from upper-story apartments. They drove down a crowded beachfront main street, cafes and patio restaurants open to the warm night. A tiny storefront window proclaimed all kind of shells. The one next door offered antiques, hurricane lamps, drift glass—sale! And the people on the street were almost as quaint. They were dressed in what Karen thought of as gypsy fashion: faded Levi’s, quilted shirts in bright colors. There was a woman with feathers braided into her long dark hair.

  Beyond this hub was a network of shadowed streets and quiet houses, a similar mix of Victorian brickwork and airy wood-frame buildings. Laura, humming to herself, turned west toward the ocean and parked at last in a patch of gravel adjoining a three-story slatwood house. “We’re the top two floors,” she said, climbing out.

  Karen stood in the coolish night air feeling suddenly alone in this new world, reminding herself that it really was that, a new world. Did Gavin exist in this place? If she phoned their old number in Toronto, would he answer?

  Did Canada exist, or had the borders been redrawn?

  Strange. It made her shiver. She listened to the faint rushing of waves against the shore, prosaic and real. And the stars, she thought: the stars were still the same.

  Laura came abreast of her holding two suitcases. Karen said quickly, “Here, let me have one.” But a bearded man bustled out of the front door of the house and took the case out of her hand. “You must be Karen,” he said.

  Laura said, “This is Emmett. Emmett lives downstairs. Emmett is helpful.” Emmett smiled somewhat shyly.

  He’s courting her, Karen thought. But wasn’t someone always? Laura had always attracted men. Laura had a knack with men.

  Whereas Karen had married the first man who showed any interest in her… who had left her to live with his girlfriend by the lake. “Hello, Emmett,” she said.

  Michael came around the car with his own suitcase weighing him down. Emmett wisely didn’t offer to take it; instead he said, “Let me show you the stairs. Mike—right?”

  Michael followed him into the house.

  “He’s nice,” Karen said.

  “So? You approve?”

  “My first impression is good.”

  Laura smiled. “Emmett and I are pretty much loners. But we’ve been circling a little bit. There are—” She made a seesaw gesture with her hand. “Possibilities.”

  Karen said hopefully, “You have coffee?”

  “Costa Rican. Fresh-ground.”

  “I want a big cup of coffee. And a shower.” And a bed, she thought privately. Something soft. With clean sheets.

  “Can do. Told you it was nice here.”

  And Karen understood that they had begun to be sisters again. After all these years. In this strange place.

  4

  They sat around Aunt Laura’s old kitchen table for an hour before bed, the two women talking about nothing in particular, sipping coffee from porcelain mugs. Michael watched with a growing impatience. He felt excluded: not from the conversation so much as from what was left unsaid. Between them, he thought, they know. They understand.

  When he couldn’t take it anymore, he stood up. It had been a long day and his head was buzzing. But he felt the urge to say something, to make them acknowledge the thing that had happened. This was taboo: but the world was different now; he felt the words come welling up.

  “You ought to explain,” he said. And into the sudden silence: “I mean, I’m not blind. I don’t know where we are, but I know you can’t get here from the hotel. Not down the regular roads.” Roads, he thought, angles, doorways. “I felt it,” he said. “You should explain.”

  His mother looked away, folded her hands in her lap, regarded her folded hands wordlessly. Michael felt a sudden remorse. But his Aunt Laura wasn’t angry or surprised. She looked at him steadily from her place by the window.

  “Soon,” she said quietly. “I promise. All right?”

  The gratitude he felt took him by surprise: it was that intense. “AH right,” he said.

  Because, the thing was, she meant it. He could tell.

  “But bed now,” Laura said. “I think that’s a good idea for all of us. Can
you find your room?” Upstairs and to the right.

  Tired as he was, Michael lay awake for a time in his new bed in the dark, listening to the night sounds of his aunt’s house and the quiet pulsing of the surf. The house was quiet. For a long time, there were no voices from the kitchen.

  Chapter Four

  1

  A stranger to this world, Karen decided her wisest course would be to understand the immediate neighborhood.

  She found an old Texaco road map in one of Laura’s cluttered kitchen drawers. On the map, the town of Turquoise Beach was a black dot nestled in a curve of coastline between Pueblo de Los Angeles and San Diego. Pueblo de Los Angeles sounded strange, but everything else—she was not very familiar with California—seemed roughly in its place. Across the border from San Diego was a Mexican city called Ciudad Zaragoza. Was that right? San Francisco was familiar and reassuring, but what about the large towns marked Alvarado, Sutter, Porziuncola? She couldn’t find Hollywood: should it have been on the map? Still… the familiar outweighed the strange.

  I’ll get used to it, she thought. In time, I’ll know where I am. As a gesture toward the future, Karen taught herself the layout of her sister’s apartment. Two bedrooms up and a futon in the spare room downstairs, a large central living room with polished wooden floors and broad windows overlooking the sea. Paperback books on homemade shelves and gauzy curtains that moved in a daily breeze from the west. On the living-room wall Laura had hung a poster print of the Edward Hopper painting of a lonely Pittsburgh diner.

  The beach was undemanding, so Karen followed it north for a mile or so one morning. Beaches were not susceptible to change. Rock and water and sand would not surprise her. The littoral was a complex terrain of black stone and tide pools, which discouraged casual sunning but was good for beachcombing. Karen felt an instinctive liking for the people she saw that overcast day, picking their way along the water-line with somber expressions and knitted sweaters. From a promontory overgrown with sea grass she was able to sit and look back at the town, its quiet grid of roads, to identify Laura’s tall house among all the others. Home, she thought tentatively. But the word was only hypothetical. She tasted it with her tongue and wondered whether it would ever make sense again.

  The wind came in from the sea, and she shivered and began the long walk back.

  The next day Laura drove her into town for lunch. Michael said he’d be okay at the house with Emmett. They were tossing an old softball down by the water; Emmett grinned and nodded. Emmett was a musician (Laura said), but trustworthy; yes, he would make sure Michael was fed.

  By day, the town of Turquoise Beach seemed even more cheerfully low-rent. Laura explained that it was pretty much a bohemian town. The oldest houses, she said, dated from the twenties. There had been a successful cannery operation in Turquoise Beach from 1923 through the Depression, and the cannery barons had built these brick Victorian-style houses on the hills overlooking the sea. When the cannery closed for good, in the fifties, Turquoise Beach had almost closed with it. But it struggled on as a very marginal resort town, too far from the city to attract much tourist trade, a weathering anachronism, increasingly home to literary hermits and similar eccentrics.

  By the mid-sixties it had become a booming seaside Bohemia. Aldous Huxley had lived out his last years in a big red-brick house on Cabrillo; the poet Gary Snyder was supposed to have spent some winters here. In the seventies a lot of arts-and-crafts businesses had moved in, and so Turquoise Beach—in its small way—had prospered. Today many of the residents were perfectly straight, middle-class types employed at the new aerospace plant up the highway. But the atmosphere persisted.

  Laura parked along the main street, which was called Caracol Street, and Karen followed her sister into a cafe restaurant with folding chairs and tiny tables that spilled out onto the sidewalk. It was past one and the lunch crowd had faded. Twice, Laura nodded and smiled at people passing in the street. But for the most part they were alone—it was a place where they could talk.

  Laura said, “You like it so far?”

  Karen wondered what to say. She decided it was not a decision she could make. Not yet. She said, “I want to know more about it.”

  “The town? The world? What?”

  “I guess—the world.”

  “Tough question. Where to begin?”

  “Anywhere,” Karen said. “Anything.” But what did she want to know, really? “Is there a Canada?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there a Soviet Union?”

  “Yes… but the borders are a little different.”

  “Have there been wars?”

  “Yes.”

  “The same wars?” “Not quite.”

  “Are there atomic bombs?”

  “Very few. Is that the kind of thing you want to know?” Laura put down her napkin and looked thoughtful. “Geopolitics. Well, let’s see. The Yalta Conference came out a little differently. The Beirut Accords banned the proliferation of nuclear weapons in 1958, and the ban is enforced, and with a vengeance. Poland is a member of the EEC. Turkey is a Moslem nation, but Iran isn’t. Uh—”

  Karen shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. What you’re saying is that it’s a more peaceful world?”

  “I think that’s the most basic thing. Yes, it’s more peaceful. And no, I don’t know why, exactly. There’s no process, nothing obvious that stops wars from happening. They do happen. World War II happened… although the Holocaust was a much more limited event, and Japan was wise enough to stay out of it entirely. Still, the European war was bloody, Americans died in trenches. All the awfulness, barring Hiroshima. But some peace came out of it. Nobody looking for enemies, nobody wanting enemies. No McCarthy era. America was prosperous and maybe complacent in those years, but not hysterical.”

  Karen said—it came out sounding more skeptical than she intended—“No more bad guys?”

  “Plenty. There’s racism, there’s religious intolerance, there’s conformity. There are famines. But the scale of it is different. Just slightly shifted. I would call it a gentler world. No CIA, no military advisers in Third World countries, and the crime rate is pretty low —although everybody complains about it.” She smiled. “And the weather is nice.”

  Karen tried to think of all the things that had frightened her in her daily life. “Pain,” she said. “Disease. Death.”

  “We’re not in paradise. But you can get into a hospital without taking out a second mortgage.”

  “Drugs.” The great parental nightmare.

  “There are drugs,” her sister said. “But I’ve never heard of a real heroin problem outside the worst urban neighborhoods. Not as much alcoholism either. Not too much demand for cocaine or amphetamines. Life’s, you know, a little slower. But you can buy small amounts of marijuana. Legally.”

  Karen said, “A great place to run away to.”

  “Hey, if that’s what you’re doing, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes you have to run away.”

  You should know, Karen thought, and was instantly ashamed of herself. She said, “It is nice. Well, obviously.” Added, “You’re happy here?”

  Her sister did not immediately answer. Karen understood that she had asked one of the basic questions, one of the dangerous ones. Abruptly Laura became her little sister again, and Karen thought old, unanswerable thoughts: I should have protected her… I should have…

  “I’m as happy,” Laura said carefully, “as I can imagine myself being. And I wouldn’t go back. Not to stay. This is home now.” Home. That word again.

  Karen said, “Then I was wrong … all those years ago.”

  Laura put her hand across the table, bracelets jangling. “That’s not what I meant.”

  But the awareness of that old argument hung in the air between them. Karen turned to face the street, hoping to shake this sudden melancholy, or something worse than melancholy. But the street, Caracol Street in this odd town in this peculiar world, seemed abruptly foreign. A shrill and passing thou
ght: You shouldn’t have come here. It was bad to come here. Daddy’s voice echoing in her head.

  She thought of Laura twenty years ago, in the hotel in Santa Monica.

  2

  It was 1969, a bewildering year. Karen was working on an English degree at Penn State, commuting home odd weekends. Tim was restive in high school; Laura was in her second semester at UC Berkeley and —Karen’s mother said—in serious trouble.

  Karen had come home for the Easter break. Home that year was the house in Polger Valley, an old steel town in the Mon Valley, its ancient mills revived by the war in Vietnam. Daddy had taken work at the foundry; Karen’s mother was working part-time at the hairdresser. Karen had mostly paid her own tuition at Penn, with only a little help from her parents. Laura’s college had taken a respectable bite out of the savings, though, and Tim’s education remained in doubt—he was bright but refused to take a job. The draft was a threat, but Tim claimed he would find a way to fail the physical, or maybe run off to Canada… and maybe he would; but it was Karen’s idea that he said these things mostly to make Daddy angry. Then Tim could storm out of the house and commiserate with his longhaired friends. Tim, who wore an American flag stitched upside down to the back of his denim jacket, was a lightning rod for conflict.

  Daddy was sulking the weekend Karen came home; Tim was absent. The scenario was familiar.

  Her mother took her aside after dinner. Lately, Karen had acquired some perspective toward her parents. They were adults, and she was an adult; she should be able to talk to them in an adult way.

  At least that was the theory. In practice it was more difficult. But she tried to be objective.

  “We had a letter from Laura,” her mother said.

  Her voice was restrained. She didn’t want Daddy hearing this. Daddy was in the room he called the den, a tiny room off the downstairs hallway, watching TV. Karen and her mother sat in the kitchen. The kitchen, Karen thought, was the most reassuring room in the house, and therefore the best room for bad news. Karen focused this moment in her mind: dishes stacked on the drainboard, her mother in a flower-print housedress, the envelope clutched in one hand. “Laura’s not in Berkeley anymore.”