Robert Wilson - Gypsies

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 endsprinted 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 devastated, 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…”

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.”