Gypsies

  Karen blinked. Not in Berkeley? “Well, where is she? Is she coming home?”

  Mama shook her head and handed Karen the letter.

  The letter was very brief. It explained that Laura had dropped her courses and moved in with some friends, that “you might not be hearing from me too often,” that “I want to find a place for myself in my own way.” The return address on the envelope was in Los Angeles.

  Her mother said, “I haven’t mentioned this to Daddy. You know how he is.”

  He would be angry, Karen thought. Her new objectivity allowed her to understand that Daddy was often angry with his children. She had not yet fathomed the reason why.

  Her mother did something astonishing then. She reached into the pocket of her housedress and took out two one-hundred-dollar bills and pushed them across the kitchen table toward Karen.

  Karen looked at the money, bewildered. “Take it,” Mama said. “Household money. It doesn’t matter. Take it and go out there. Find her and try to talk some sense into her.”

  I have finals, Karen thought. I have to study. I can’t take the time.

  But she could not bring herself to say any of this. Instead, faintly awed, she took the money and folded it into the pocket of her Levi’s. It made an uneasy presence there.

  Her mother said, “You always were the sensible one.”

  She booked tickets and a hotel room through a travel agent. The process was frightening—she had never traveled so far in her life. “Is this a vacation?” the travel agent asked. “I don’t know,” Karen said. “I guess so.”

  She rented a car at the Los Angeles airport, J mapped out a route to the hotel and followed it scrupulously, showered, and then drove to the address Laura had written on the envelope.

  She was dismayed when she saw the house. It was a single-story box at the foot of a canyon road. The blank walls had been painted canary yellow; the paint was peeling. A motorcycle was parked in front.

  She knocked on the frame of the screen door. There was a pause, then the door wheezed open. The man inside was tall and very thin. He was wearing a sweatshirt and tight, threadbare jeans. He had a beard.

  “Hey,” he said. He seemed confused. “You look like Laura.”

  “I’m her sister.” Karen’s eyes began to adjust to the dimness. The room was a mess. An open mattress, a water pipe, bundles of clothes… “Can I talk to her?”

  “Laura? Laura’s not here. Hasn’t been here for a couple of days.” Blankly: “You want to come in?”

  Karen shook her head. She took a notebook and a pen from her purse and scribbled the address of the hotel. “Will you give this to her?”

  The man shrugged. “If she shows up.” He hesitated. “It’s Karen, right?”

  Karen paused on her way down the concrete steps. “You know me?”

  “She talked about you.”

  And so there was nothing to do but wait. The waiting made her feel guilty, passive. She ought to be doing something. But what? Hire a detective? It was ludicrous. And she couldn’t afford it. She waited by the phone and tried to bury herself in the texts she’d brought with her. Faulkner and Sir Walter Scott. The books blended in her mind, a weird double exposure, all these strange families haunted by the past. When the phone finally did ring—a day before her return ticket came due—she jumped as if she’d been slapped.

  She yanked up the receiver and said, “Laura?”

  “It’s no good you coming here, you know.” Small, distant voice. “I mean, I appreciate it. But it’s pointless.”

  She gripped the phone with all her strength. “I want to see you.”

  “I appreciate that. I don’t know if it’s possible.” “Today,” Karen said. “I’m leaving in the morning.”

  There was a long silence then, the ticking and whispering of the Bell exchanges.

  “All right,” Laura sighed. “You’re at some hotel?” She repeated the address. “I’ll be over later.” Click and hum.

  Karen was faintly shocked when she saw her sister, though obviously she should have been expecting this: Laura looked like a hippie.

  “Hippie” was a word Karen had heard mostly from the TV news. Scruffy people in protest parades. Drug abusers. At Penn State she had kept herself aloof from that kind of thing. She had a circle of friends, mostly women from her English courses, mostly conservative. She had seen joints circulating at sorority parties, passed from hand to hand like votive candles, but that was as radical as it got. They were all against the war, all politically progressive, never too much involved. They took a secret pride in their levelheadedness.

  I Like me, Karen thought. She was the sensible one.

  She had sensible friends.

  Laura wore ancient denims and a T-shirt that had been dyed a blinding variety of colors. Her hair was braided and she had painted what looked like the signs of the zodiac on her fingernails. Karen felt strangely outmaneuvered by this, this visible declaration of eccentricity. She might be able to talk her sister out of a bad idea, a stupid plan: but a wardrobe was too concrete. That’s why they dress this way, she thought, to bother ordinary people.

  Laura came into the room and sagged limply into a chair. “My guess,” she said, “is that you’re here because Mama sent you. Right? ‘Go find Laura, talk some sense into her.’ ” Laura mimicked the broad Mon Valley cadences of her mother’s speech.

  Karen felt stung. “Mama gave me the money, yes.”

  “So you think she’s right? I’m crazy?”

  “You don’t have to be defensive about it. I don’t know—ere you crazy?”

  “Yes. It’s a common condition.”

  “You want to be talked out of it?”

  “No. Very much no.”

  “You look tired,” Karen said.

  “I am. I’ve been making arrangements.” Added, more guardedly, “Did you read the letter? I’m going away.”

  “Going where?”

  “You’d probably prefer I didn’t say.”

  Karen thought this was probably true.

  “You look pretty wild,” she said desperately.

  “I guess I do.” Laura peered at Karen then, and Karen saw something suddenly gentler in her sister’s face. “I’m sorry about all this mysterioso stuff. Do you want me to explain? If you came for an explanation—”

  An explanation would be better than nothing. “But let’s walk,” Karen said. “I’m sick of this room.”

  They took Cokes out along the beach.

  “I came out to Berkeley,” Laura said, “mostly because of all the stuff I’d been hearing about California. Sounds stupid, right? Well, it was. Stupid and naive. But it was important to me… the idea that somewhere in the world there were people who used the word ‘freak’ and didn’t mean something cruel by it. It was always Tim who talked about us that way. Remember? ‘We’re freaks,’ he would say. ‘We ought to get used to that.’ ”

  Karen said, “Tim always had a cruel streak. He had no cause to say that. Anyway, that was a long time ago.”

  “It was when we were in high school. And the thing is, he was right.”

  Karen turned toward the ocean. “You don’t believe that.”

  “I do believe it. And you believe it.” She touched Karen’s arm. “I’m sorry. I know how you hate this. But we have to talk about it. We’ve spent too long not talking about it. We’re freaks and we’ve been freaks since we were born. That’s why Daddy hates us so much. That’s why he beat us whenever he caught us doing what we can do.”

  Karen’s consternation was immense. She tried to summon the objectivity she had cultivated at school. In her psych, course, all this would have seemed very simple. But words like “Daddy” and “freak” lay in uneasy proximity and she dared not inspect them too closely. “Those old dreams,” she stammered, “those old games—”

  “They weren’t dreams. They aren’t games.” Laura sighed, hesitated, seemed to consider how to proceed. Began again patiently: “When you’re told long enough, and hard enough, and
early enough, that something is bad, and unmentionable, and dirty, then you believe it. You can’t help but believe, I believed it. But I was lucky enough to get beyond all that.”

  (Karen thought, But you never did believe it. You were like Tim. Rebellion was always easy for you.)

  Laura said, “At Berkeley, everybody was doing acid—”

  “LSD?” Karen was horrified.

  “Don’t believe what you read in the papers. I mean, it doesn’t live up to Leary’s rap either. But it taught me a few things. I was able to stand outside myself, really look at myself for the first time.” She became fervent. “The sense of possibilities—I think that’s what we’re really all about, you and me and Tim. We can see what other people can’t.”

  “Possibilities,” Karen said dully: but this was all way beyond her control…

  “Worlds,” Laura said. “Isn’t that what everybody’s looking for? A better world? You know, I used to go down to the Haight with some friends. And there was this same feeling—a better world is possible. You know what the Haight is now? A ghetto full of teenage crank addicts. That whole thing is dying. Dead. Everybody’s gone off—to the desert, to Sonoma, to Oregon. The vision is dead. So I came down here with some people who wanted to set up a community, a more creative way of living together—we used those words. You saw the house? A pit. And Jamie’s gone back to her parents, and Christine is pregnant, and Donald’s in Canada dodging the draft, and Jerry has a very bad needle habit. So the dream dies, right?”

  Karen was appalled. Drugs and needles and communes. It sounded squalid.

  Laura said, “But it doesn’t have to die. I have this ability, this freakish ability to walk sideways off the planet. And I am convinced that there is a better world out there somewhere. Out in that tangle of could-be’s. Not a dream, and not any of those hellish places Tim was always opening up. I mean a good place. A place where people care about each other, where stupidity doesn’t claw us all down.”

  Karen folded her hands in her lap. “I think Mama was right. I think you are crazy.”

  “Oh, Karen, come on. If anyone’s living in a dreamworld, it’s you. You remember that night in the old house on Constantinople? When we went down the ravine, and Timmy opened a door into that old cobble city by the sea? How cold it was, and that man—”

  “We made that up,” Karen said, more loudly than she had meant to. On the beach, a strolling couple glanced toward her.

  She stared at the ground.

  “Well, I remember it,” Laura said softly. “I remember Timmy getting beat for it. Then me. Then you. You worst of all. Because you’re the oldest. Our protector. That’s what they wanted you to be. Karen’s supposed to know better. Karen—”

  “Stop it.”

  “You just can’t admit it, can you?” “No,” Karen snapped.

  “No. Because admitting would mean admitting so much else. That the world is stranger than it looks. That Daddy doesn’t know best. That when Daddy beats you it doesn’t mean he loves you. Maybe the opposite. And maybe that’s the worst thing of all.”

  Karen stood up. There was sand on her dress. She felt prim and ridiculous brushing it off. Her hands trembled.

  Laura said, “Going home?”

  “Don’t make fun of me!”

  “No… oh, Karen, I’m sorry. But you don’t have to go.”

  “I have exams.”

  “You don’t have to have exams.” “What?”

  “Come with me. We could do it together. Cross some borders.”

  She’s serious, Karen thought. My God, she’s serious.

  She clutched the strap of her purse. “I never wanted a better world. I don’t need one. Don’t you understand that? All I want is to be normal.”

  And in the morning she flew back to Pennsylvania and did not see her wild sister again for twenty years.

  She sat in the cafe on Caracol Street with this oppressive memory tugging at her. The Laura facing her now across this table was older—not repentant but certainly less wild. “You were right,” Karen admitted, “about a lot of things.”

  “I think each of us believed the other was running away.”

  “Maybe we were.”

  “Maybe we still are.” Karen frowned. Laura continued, “There are so many questions we never asked. Never let ourselves ask. How come we can do what we do? Are we freaks of nature, genetic misprints? Or something else? And there’s Tim. I haven’t heard from him since he left home back in ’72—have you?”

  “No. Nobody in the family has.” But this was still perilous talk. “I don’t think it matters what we are. The past is the past.”

  Laura shook her head. “It does matter.”

  She put down a bill and change for lunch; they threaded their way out of the restaurant. The sun was shining down Caracol Street from the west. Laura shaded her eyes and said, “It will matter to Michael.”

  Chapter Five

  Emmett was a pretty neat guy, Michael decided.

  Emmett played acoustic guitar for a Latino folk band called Rio Negro and also did some solo stuff in the local Turquoise Beach clubs. His apartment, which was the floor downstairs from Aunt Laura, looked like a music shop. He had all kinds of stringed instruments hanging on pegs or just leaning up against the walls. Emmett showed Michael how to tell the difference between a flamenco guitar, a classical guitar, and a steel guitar; showed him a Dobro, an F-style mandolin, an old long-necked Vega banjo—“the Pete Seeger model.” Michael wandered through the clutter in dumb amazement. He said, “I took a few lessons a year or so ago … I know some chords.”

  Emmett said, “Yeah? Well, hey, there’s an old Gibson over there if you want to try it. Doesn’t look like much but it plays okay.”

  Michael held the guitar reverently.

  Garage-sale material, he thought, but the joints were good and the strings felt new. He finger-picked a G, Em, C. His fingers felt clumsy but the chords rang out.

  Emmett fetched down his own guitar, a twelve-string Martin. “I have handmade guitars, I have foreign guitars. But I keep coming back to this old Martin. Bitch to tune, but I love the sound it makes.” He perched on a window seat with the Venetian blinds and the sea behind him and played complex runs that made Michael feel hopelessly amateur. Emmett smiled through his beard. “You want to play something?”

  Michael said he might be able to chord along to some old folkie stuff. Union Maid or Guantanamera or something on that order. “Chord along, then,” Emmett said, and Michael tried gamely to keep up as Emmett launched into The Bells of Rhymney. His voice was a rough, strong baritone and Michael was amazed at the sincerity he brought to the old Seeger protest tune. “Is there no future, cry the brown bells of Merthyr—?” It made him shiver.

  They played through half a dozen songs until Michael’s fingers were sore. Emmett grinned massively. “Not bad,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his shirt and took out something Michael was able to identify as a joint. He lit it, inhaled, extended his hand.

  Michael maintained his cool. “It might be better if you didn’t tell my mom.”

  “About the smoke?”

  Michael nodded.

  “She disapproves?”

  “She would.”

  Emmett said, “Okay, then… our secret.”

  Michael toked carefully. He had smoked a couple of times in Dan’s basement, weekends. He managed not to cough. But the sweet, pungent smoke went through him like a wind. He felt instantly lightheaded.

  He made a move to hand Emmett back the old Gibson guitar. Emmett said, “Keep it.” Michael goggled.

  “It’s not an heirloom. Long as you play it, hang on to it. If you get tired of it I’ll take it back.”

  He cradled the guitar in his lap. Afternoon sunshine glinted off the varnish. It was a better guitar than Emmett made it out to be. The pain in his fingers had retreated, so Michael hugged the Gibson against his chest and picked out a few bars of an old Paul McCartney song, Yesterday.

  Emmett nodded apprec
iatively. “That’s pretty. You make that up?”

  “What, you never heard it?”

  “Nope. Should I?”

  “The Beatles,” Michael said. “You know? Lennon and McCartney? Sergeant Pepper, Abbey Road?”

  “New one on me,” Emmett said happily. “These guys play at your school?”

  And so Michael was reminded again that he had come a long way in that car trip with Aunt Laura.

  It was so easy to forget. It was not as if they were in a foreign country. Everybody spoke English, everybody drove on the right side of the road. But, he thought, it was a foreign country. The concept was familiar from the science fiction he’d read: a “parallel world.”

  Easy to say. Less easy to deal with. He had played ball with Emmett on the beach; he had watched TV;

  he had behaved—these last few days—as if everything were normal. He understood that his mother wanted that from him, and for now—at least for a while—he was willing to give it. And it worked, this illusion-making: for hours at a time he really would forget what had happened in the car, or before that, back home, with the Gray Man.

  But then his mind would circle back and he would recall that he was a stranger here. And the questions would crowd in. Obviously Laura possessed this ability, to step sideways out of the world, and by implication so did his mother, and you could take that a little further: maybe he did, too.

  So what did that make them? A family of monsters? Wizards? Space aliens?

  The weed had dried out his throat; his voice was husky. He said, “Do you think there’s anything strange about my mom?”

  Emmett seemed nonplussed by the question. “Too soon to tell, sport. What do you think?”

  Michael shook his head: it was irrelevant. “How about Laura?”