Robert Wilson - Gypsies

Daddy didn’t have it. Mama didn’t have it. She thought, Then we are flukes. Mutants. Monsters.

But the power was an inherited power… Michael had demonstrated that.

She leafed through the other photos quickly. The image of Tim caught her eye, Tim growing up in these old pictures like the frames of a silent movie. He looked less intimidating than she remembered. She remembered how Tim used to bully his sisters, even though he was the youngest—something in his voice, his bearing; or just his stubborn willingness to do what they wouldn’t, to break not just one rule but every rule. But in the photographs he was just a child. His round face looked not threatening but threatened: a frightened child.

There were fewer pictures of Tim as a teenager, but in these she could detect at least something of his brooding sullenness. He wore a leather jacket that not even Willis’s threats had been able to pry off him. Laura smiled and thought, A fuck jacket. He regarded the camera with his chin lifted and his lips set in a grim line. His eyes were narrow, fixed.

Laura looked at her lost brother and thought, How much do you know?

The power was immensely strong in him. He had gone on experimenting even after Willis began to beat him—but privately, warily. Laura remembered how Tim would go off back into the hills or down some lonely road somewhere. She suspected that he practiced his awesome talent there, but she never asked. She was not as prim as her older sister, but Laura had always been a little bit afraid of her power, of the things she might see or conjure. Karen believed what Willis told her; Laura did not, but was cautious; Tim—

Tim, she thought, hated all of us.

She closed away the photographs and hid the shoe box once more.

She opened the Bible. It was a very old family Bible with lined pages in the back marked birthsand marriagesand deaths. The Bible had belonged to Grandma Lucille and the pages were filled with her writing, looping fountain-pen letters, and then Mama’s looser ballpoint script.

Laura bent over the brittle pages with their curious odor of dust and papyrus. Births from the turn of the century. She found Mama here next to Duke and Charlie. She found her cousin Mary Ellen, Duke’s girl by a woman named Barbara before Duke ran off. There were mysterious branches of the family, people she had never met, names she couldn’t recall.

She looked for her own name, for Karen’s and Tim’s.

But the names weren’t there.

Karen’s marriage was recorded— To Gavin White, Toronto, Canada, 1970 —but not her birth. None of them appeared in the birth register.

Laura felt suddenly light-headed, breathless. Felt fragile —as if she might float out the window and into the sky. We were not born, she thought, so how can we exist? She thought of the fairy tales she used to read out of her big illustrated Golden Book. We are changelings, she thought. The goblins left us. She remembered those goblins from the pictures. Gnarled and huge-headed, with sharp noses and sinister bright eyes. The goblins left us, she thought, and now the goblins want us back.

She shuddered and pulled the robe tighter around herself. She closed the Bible and put it back in the bottom drawer with the shoe box of photographs on top. She was about to close the drawer when she spotted something at the back, a cluster of faintly familiar shapes, dust-shrouded and gray.

She pulled the drawer open as far as its runners would allow and reached inside.

Three things. She brought them up into the circle of the light.

A paperweight, clouded and opaque.

A tiny, pathetically simple baby doll.

And a cheap pink plastic hand mirror.

I remember, she thought excitedly. I remember!

She thumbed a layer of dust from the surface of the mirror and regarded herself. The old glass was bent and pitted. How she had loved this old thing. The fairest in the land. Who had said that? Another fairytale memory, she thought, a Golden Book memory. She repeated it to herself, aloud but faintly: the fairest in the land.

Ahh… but I’m not.

Her own eyes regarded her sadly from the shrouded depths of the mirror.

Truth was, she had grown old in that quiet California town. She had grown old almost without noticing: mysteriously, effortlessly. I was beautiful once, she thought. I was beautiful and I was young and damn if I wasn’t going to change the world, or anyway find a better one. She had been caught up in that hot, brief burst of Berkeley idealism—all the things people meant when they talked longingly about the sixties. And it had burned like a fire in her and she would follow it out beyond the walls of the world and it would never, ever fail her.

But now I’m old, she thought, and I have spent twenty years watching the waves roll in and out. Twenty years of rose-hip tea and poetry and winter fog; twenty years of Emmett’s facile, occasional love.

Twenty years of stoned equilibrium, she thought, and all this coming home won’t make me young again.

The mirror made her feel very sad.

But these things, these toys, were meaningful. She could not quite recall their provenance, but they had the feel of magic about them. She would show them to Karen in the morning.

In the meantime she tucked them back out of sight in the drawer, switched off the light, and went to bed. In the darkness she could hear the snow beating against the window, a sifting sound like sand in an hourglass—twenty years, she thought, twenty years, my God! —and she watched the faint moonlight until it began to blur and she put her hand to her face and realized with some astonishment that she was crying.

That long night had not quite ended when Michael awoke, alone and desolate in the big upstairs bed.

He took his watch from the night table and held it up to the thin wash of streetlight that penetrated these old dusty windows.

Four a.m.—and he felt as wholly, mercilessly awake as if it were noon.

He sighed, stood up, pulled on his underwear and his Levi’s. He stood a moment at the window.

No more snow tonight. Stars beyond the fading margins of cloud, old streetlights down the back alleys and shuttered windows of this barren coal town. His breath made steamy islands on the glass. His vision of a better world had evaporated entirely. He could not even remember how it had felt. No magic in this place, Michael thought, only these cold empty streets. He shivered.

He wanted to go home.

The trouble with coming awake at 4 a.m.,he thought, was that it left you feeling like a little kid. Vulnerable. Like you could cry at any minute.

These were things he had not allowed himself to think: that he was tired of being chased, tired of being afraid, tired of sleeping in strange beds in houses where he did not belong.

But these were thoughts a ten-year-old might have, and Michael reminded himself sternly that he was not ten years old … he only felt that way sometimes.

“Shit,” he said out loud.

He padded barefoot down the stairs past the other bedrooms, down to the ground floor. He switched on the kitchen light and poured himself a glass of milk. The tile floor was cold.

Impulsively, he pulled his wallet out of the right-hand pocket of his jeans.

He opened the card case.

It was still there… the number he had pilfered from his mother’s address book, his father’s phone number in Toronto. Hasty blue pen scrawl on old green memo paper.

There was a telephone in the kitchen—an old black dial phone on the counter next to the cookbooks.

Michael looked at it and thought, But what’s the point? Call long-distance, wake him up at 4 a.m.—or his girlfriend, for Christ’s sake—and get him on the line and say what? Hi, Dad. I just spent a few weeks in California. Well, sort of California. Got to see Kennedy’s funeral on TV. You should have been there.