Gypsies

  “I’m fond of her,” Emmett said guardedly. “Is that what you want to know?”

  “No, no … I mean, what would you think if I said she was a witch?”

  “I would say you had better reconsider your vocabulary.” Added, “Maybe I want my guitar back.”

  “I don’t mean it that way. I mean, like—magic powers and so forth.”

  “Magic?” Emmett seemed amused. “Your mom was right, kiddo. You should probably avoid this stuff.”

  So Michael went for a walk up the beach, by himself.

  He brought along Emmett’s guitar—his guitar now. He carried the battered Gibson carefully, mindful that the weed had left him a little off balance. He picked his way among the rocks for what seemed like an endless time, but when he looked back the house was still plainly in sight. He perched himself on a flat piece of shale where he could keep an eye on his aunt’s place, so he would know when his mom got back—but where he would not necessarily be seen—and played aimless quiet finger chords. The dope was obviously pretty strong. Parallel-world marijuana. He closed his eyes and stretched out across the face of the rock, letting the afternoon sun roll over him.

  I am what my mother is. Jam what Aunt Laura is.

  Inescapable logic. The “what” remained uncertain.

  There was a tingling sensation in his extremities; his fingers seemed to tremble. Michael pressed his palms against the hot, sandy surface of the stone. Hot shale and beach tar. Hanging on, he thought. Anchoring myself here.

  All an illusion, of course: the solidness of things, the realness of things. What was a world if you could drive a car out of it? And he recognized that this was an old fear, that he used to go to bed with this fear, the fear that he might accidentally dream himself off the planet.

  It had never happened. Not by accident. But maybe he could do it on purpose.

  It was a possibility he had never dared consider. Considering it now—even in the privacy of his own mind—sent shivers through him. The strange tingling in his hands increased; if it were a sound, he thought, it would be a high-pitched whine.

  He whispered, “Do it.”

  Nobody to hear him but the sea and this cloud-rippled sky.

  Emmett’s dope had trampled his inhibitions. Roll with it, he thought. Why not? Why not now, why not here?

  “Do it.”

  He sat up and held his arms out in front of him. He was aware of the sound of the sea washing in against the rocks, a distant gull wheeling and diving. He pressed thumb against thumb, forefinger against forefinger, so that a circle of sea and sky was framed by his hands. Like a private TV screen, he told himself. The tingling revved into a sensation like electricity. Four zillion volts screaming along his spine, now concentrated in this circle of air. It was a heady feeling.

  So what’s on TV?

  He narrowed his eyes.

  Imagine a storm there. A vortex, a whirlpool, and the whirlpool is the sum of all things possible, doors and angles opening out from this locus in a hundred thousand directions. Pick one out of the multitude. Feel it. Follow it.

  He closed his eyes and opened them.

  He looked between his fingers at a green and red world.

  It might have been the same seacoast. But in the landscape he could see through the frame of his hands there was no ocean. Green was the green of algae, of decaying sea wrack, and it occupied a long plain fading to the horizon. Red was the red of oxides and dust, the lifeless shore. He shifted his hands toward the place the town would be and saw a crater that was like the Astrodome turned upside down. Figures moved in the charred rubble around it: wheeled figures, derricklike torsos of shining silver. Machines.

  The machines were singing to themselves.

  Change, Michael thought hastily.

  He paged again through the book of possibilities.

  A better world this time. A world off the cover of an old Popular Science: winged cars, domed buildings, obsidian piers that stabbed across the water. There was a harbor full of boats with blinding white sails. A banner flew from a flagpole yards away, red with black insignia, a leaf and a hammer in silhouette.

  Michael was sweating but mesmerized.

  Change, he told himself.

  An empty shore this time, no boats or people, young seals playing in the tide pools. The seals put their noses up as if they sensed his presence.

  Change.

  Snow swirling down on dark, spiral structures of riveted iron… Change.

  …men in furs building a fire… Change.

  … a sea full of ships as big as cities… Change …

  He stopped when he was exhausted. He fell back against the reassuring blankness of the rock.

  His head was spinning.

  It’s all really out there, he thought. All those places and a million others.

  And it was not just seeing them. He could have gone there. Walked there across the thinnest of barriers.

  He understood that he had a lot to learn. He was shotgunning his attention in a dozen directions, and maybe that wasn’t good. Moreover, he couldn’t toke up every time he wanted to do this—and he knew that he wanted to do it again. But at least he had proved this to himself: anything they could do, he could do.

  He thought, It runs in the family.

  No secrets anymore.

  He turned back to the house in time to see Aunt Laura’s car pull up. His mother climbed out, already scanning for him, anxious as she was so often anxious these days.

  But things had changed.

  Michael stood up, held Emmett’s battered Gibson guitar by the neck, brushed the sand off the seat of his pants, and began the walk back home.

  Chapter Six

  1

  Michael kept quiet over dinner that night. His mom was quiet, too, frowning into the broad Oriental bowl Aunt Laura had set out for her. It was Laura who did most of the talking, between chopping ginger or tending the wok.

  She talked about her work. Laura was a potter, had a kiln in the big shed out back, did clays and porcelains that fetched big prices in the tourist stores out along the highway. She was thinking about maybe a new floral pattern… something simple. Classic. Oh, and the Chinese cabbage was fresh today. (Everything smells so good, Michael’s mom said listlessly.) And wasn’t the weather nice? (The weather was nice.) And so on.

  But every once in a while Laura would look at Michael in a thoughtful way, and he was aware of it and began to feel self-conscious. He understood that his aunt’s secret talent was strong and obvious, once you knew what to look for—a kind of glow or aura^-and Michael wondered whether he had acquired the same look.

  But nobody said anything.

  He woke up next morning anxious to test himself again. He sat impatiently through the breakfast rituals, watched a little morning TV, wore out his calluses on the new guitar. He wanted to get away without attracting attention. The situation was tight, Laura and his mother moving around the house in restless circles; he might have given up, but a couple of hours before lunch his mom announced she’d do the shopping today, it was only fair, and took off in Aunt Laura’s car with a grocery list and a handful of the weird State Bank bills that passed for cash in Turquoise Beach. Michael waved at the Durant and then sauntered around to the rear of the house, planning to cut past the pottery studio and along the open beach again. But when he came around the shed he saw Aunt Laura standing by the cane fence waiting for him, and it was too late then to turn back.

  He liked Aunt Laura. She was only a couple of years younger than his mom, but it seemed like more. She was easy to be around. She was happy most of the time. It was a contrast. He had begun to understand, these few days they had spent here, how unhappy his mom had been since the divorce. Their house in Toronto had been a deep well of silences. How long since she had really smiled? A long time.

  Aunt Laura smiled. She smiled now, standing by the broken-down fence in her Levi’s and tank top. She had on a pair of round-lens sunglasses, the kind Michael thought of as Lennon glasse
s. “Beachcombing?” she said, and the tone of the question was half amused, half serious.

  He was embarrassed. “Sort of.”

  “You know,” she said, “we really ought to talk.”

  “I’d like that,” he said. “Sometime. Sure. But—”

  “Talk about you, Michael,” she said. “About what you can do. About what you were doing out on the beach yesterday.”

  He could only stare.

  She had made an educated guess about her nephew’s long walk yesterday, based on hints, the way he looked, some cryptic comments Emmett had passed on. Judging by the expression on his face, she was on the money.

  The amazing thing, Laura thought, was that it hadn’t happened sooner.

  She regarded her nephew as objectively as she could. Reasonable specimen of the genus adolescent male. Gaunt in his blue sweatshirt and faded jeans, cropped hair, Nike runners speckled with dry sand. He was beginning to build up a tan; a mild case of adolescent acne was on the retreat. His eyes were dark and sometimes furtive in a way that reminded her of Karen. Karen had had this same habit of dodging uneasy truths; although in Michael it was less pronounced.

  She thought, A family trait.

  My nephew, she thought. Karen’s child. The only generation we have produced… unless Tim has been off siring wizards.

  She walked him along the quiet back streets near home. Turquoise Beach was a town of gardeners, and she liked the tropical greenery spilling out of these trellises and yards: bougainvillea, ground ivy, blooming aloes. Mornings like this, the air was full of wild perfume.

  She thought, It would be very hard to leave this place.

  But they had not reached that cusp quite yet.

  She said, “Did your mother ever talk about home? About your grandmother and grandfather, what it was like living there?”

  Obviously Michael had not adjusted to the idea of this interview. He shook his head. “Not much.” Which means, Laura thought, probably never.

  She gathered her thoughts. How to communicate this in a way that would make sense to a fifteen-year-old? Too much old pain here. Hard to make a good Story of it. She said, “There were the three of us, your mother and me and Tim. And your grandmother and grandfather. We moved a lot, but Daddy had this little copperplate sign he used to hang up wherever we lived—The Fauves.’ To me it always sounded like some exotic species of animal. And I guess I used to think of us that way sometimes, as a separate species.”

  Michael’s look was wary but understanding.

  “Mama and Daddy were what you would call plain people. Mon Valley, Ohio River people. I still hear it in the way Karen talks … I hear it in myself sometimes. Daddy worked different places. Mills, mostly, back when the steel industry was good. He was a welder and he could stand in on a lathe. But he drank and got fired a lot. We lived in Duquesne a couple years, then different places around Pittsburgh. The thing about him was, he was hard to be with. He led kind of a sad, sour life. He laid a lot onto us kids.” She drew a breath and saw that Michael was still attentive.

  “I think it was easiest for me. I was pretty. I was the middle kid. Tim was the boy, so he had to live up to a lot of expectations. And Karen—well, your mother was the oldest, and maybe that was the worst. Everything Tim and I did wrong, she took the rap for it.”

  Michael ventured, “It must have been hard …”

  “Being what we are?” But obviously that was what he meant. The crux. Even now, this was hard to talk about: she could never have said these things even to someone like Emmett. “Harder than you know. When we were little we played games. We called it ‘making windows’ or ‘making doors.’ We understood, I guess by some kind of instinct, that it was a thing to keep secret. So we did it at night, in the dark, or out in the ravine back of the old house on Constantinople. And sometimes… sometimes we got caught.”

  She had dropped her voice to a whisper. Michael walked on beside, eyes fixed on the laces of his shoes.

  “Daddy said it was the worst thing a person could ever do. The worst sin. It was a sin so bad it wasn’t even in the Bible, except where it said about suffering a witch to live. It was bad and it would get us in trouble … or it would kill us.”

  “He said that?”

  “In so many words. Often. And sometimes with his fists.”

  Michael returned to his study of the sidewalk.

  Laura said, “We all took it to heart, of course. But for me—certainly for Tim—the temptation was still there. It came naturally to us. We were good at it. And so we still did it sometimes, opened windows and doors, when we were certain we wouldn’t get caught. Did it and then prayed God would forgive us. But Karen took it all very much to heart. All of us believed Daddy, but Karen believed him with this awful, fierce intensity … I think it blinded her. I think in a way she still believes him.”

  They walked along the shaded street to a corner and turned left. They passed a couple more of these tall, old houses, then a blankness of sea grass and rock. The pavement stopped at a black-and-yellow saw-horse with the words caution—road ends printed on it. Beyond that was a grassy headland, a fifty-foot drop to the sea. The water down below churned white against the rocks.

  Laura sat and hugged her knees. Michael crouched against a rock, gazing off across the water.

  She said, “You’re not used to thinking about your mother this way.”

  “I guess not.”

  “It takes some getting used to.”

  He seemed very thoughtful. She let the silence stretch out. This was a place she liked to come and she was content here.

  Michael picked a blade of grass and shredded it between his fingers. He said, “Is that all there is?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I’ve never heard of anybody else who could do this. Have you? I mean, it’s not even like ESP or witchcraft, something you can read about in a library book. So we were all born this way, right? But why? Where does it come from?”

  She shrugged. “We never found out.”

  “You mean,” he said, “you never asked.”

  “There was never anyone we could ask. Not Mama or Daddy, for sure. They didn’t have the talent. You could look at them and know they didn’t. Their parents? I met Grandma Fauve one time. She lived in an old house in Wheeling with three cats and a Doberman chained to the toolshed. She was normal as any old lady. Too, I think I would have known if Mama or Daddy came from a home where there were people like us. There’s a way of not talking about things… and neither of them talked like that.”

  “Then it’s a mystery.”

  “Yes,” Laura said. “It’s a mystery.”

  “Do you think we could ever figure it out?”

  The question touched a nerve. She arched her back and turned her face to the sea wind. The wind came up these bluffs like a river; every August you could see people out here with kites. But the weather had changed. Too cool for that now.

  She turned to her nephew and said, “We may have to.”

  Before they went home, Laura said, “Show me what you can do.”

  Michael was reluctant at first. It was something private, something he had only just discovered. But he thought about what she’d told him—it was more than his mother had ever said—and guessed he owed her this.

  But maybe he couldn’t do it. Maybe he’d lost the 4cnack. Maybe he had to be stoned to be able to do it… maybe he was too nervous.

  He held his arms out in front of him, joined forefingers and thumb as he had yesterday. Nothing happened. Desperately, Michael searched himself for a trace of the electricity he’d been able to conjure down by the shore. He remembered how it had felt, the way it seemed to come, not from him, but through him, sourced up through the ground, a strange voltage of granite and limestone and seabed, magma and tectonics. And, remembering, he began to feel it again, faintly at first, a tingling, and then something more intense. He opened the vortex of possibility between his hands, thinking, Yes.

  He showed her the devastate
d, oceanless world he had discovered yesterday. He showed her the empty world: today the seals were clustered far up the littoral and a gray rain was falling. And he showed her places he had never seen before, worlds that were nothing like Turquoise Beach: desert worlds, an ocean unbroken by land, a sky of high lavender clouds… more. He was dimly aware of her standing just outside the periphery of his vision, peering over his shoulder; her gasps of awe, faintly perceived, made him happy. He thought, She sees it, too. It wasn’t a hallucination, and he wasn’t crazy, and he wasn’t alone. Giddy with it now, he flashed through a half dozen changes, until a sense of fatigue—a kind of interior exhaustion—forced him to stop.

  Michael sagged against a boulder. His head throbbed. He took a deep, satisfying breath and said, “How’s that? Is that okay?”

  Laura looked at him as if from a great distance. Her voice was ragged, faint. She said, “It’s more than I could ever do…”

  2

  Karen’s argument with her sister happened in the evening, but the frustration had been building all that day.

  It was their third week in this house. Part of the strain she felt was no doubt simply the stress of living in close quarters with Laura, who was still nearly a stranger to her. Part of it was the adjustment that inevitably followed any wrenching change.

  But part of it was more than that. Part of it was a dislocation more profound. This world Laura inhabited was, curiously, almost too familiar. Just when Karen began to feel at home, she would stumble over some incongruity that left her head spinning. Yesterday, for instance. She had been lined up at the grocery store when she overheard the checkout girl telling a clerk that John F. Kennedy had died—in retirement, in New England, at the age of seventy-two. A stroke, she said. “Well, I admired that man. Although he was a Catholic.”

  FORMER PRESIDENT JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY DEAD, the headlines in the L.A. Times said. Funeral services were announced for Sunday. Dignitaries to gather in Washington. President Bartlett expresses grief, and so on and so forth.