Gypsy

 

 Bridget McGowan

            Cheryl Leigh entered her street as if in a trance, undisturbed by the noise and racing of the other children; she retraced her steps, running her fingers along Mrs. Kaiser’s white picket fence and across the top of Frasier’s hedge. For her, the doors of life shut when the bus door opened at the corner of Park and Summit Avenues.

            “Hi, Cher. How was school?” her mother asked when the girl entered the house.

            “Okay,” Cheryl answered.

            She turned on the cartoons and sat on the sofa, pulling an afghan over her legs even though it was September and warm outside.

           “When is dinner?” Cheryl asked as her mother put the finishing touches on a paper Mache gypsy she was making in the middle of the living room rug.

            “What do you mean, when’s dinner? What am I around here, the hired help?”

           The girl looked at her mother as an adult would who was trying though exasperated, to be patient with a slow child.

            “Mom –” she whined.

            “Mom –” her mother imitated. “Get me this, go here, take me there, make me dinner.”

            “Never mind.”

            “Oh, a thousand humble pardons I beg of you, oh precious daughter,” her mother said, bowing on the floor and crawling toward the sofa.

            “Mom, cut it out,” Cheryl said.

           “What? Am I embarrassing you? Who’s here to see what a horrible witch your mother is being?”

            “I’m trying to watch television.”

            “Oh. Bugs Bunny is more important than mom.”

            Cheryl sighed.

            “Mr. Fredericks, my teacher, is going to call tonight.”

            “Why?” her mother asked, sitting up. Cheryl shrugged.

            “That’s all he told me to tell you.”

            “Well, I haven’t had a man call me in ages,” Mrs. Schofter said, pretending sensuous delight.

            She sat on the floor thinking about the prospect for a while, then looked at her little girl for a few minutes.

            “Hey, Cherie, I have to show you what I bought today.”

            “What?” Cheryl asked without taking her eyes off the TV.

            “Now you just wait.”

            Mrs. Schofter dashed up the stairs excitedly while her daughter stared at the cartoons.

            “Hey, Cherie, you want to come into the casaba with me?” Mrs. Schofter asked, striking a pose at the bottom of the stairs.

            Cheryl saw her mother standing in a red wig, wearing a black sequined gown that was slit up one side to the thigh, and a strap across the opposite shoulder as its only means of support. Cheryl crinkled her nose as though a skunk had died nearby.

            “Are you going to wear that?”

            “Of course I’m going to wear it.”

            “Out?”

            “No, to scrub the kitchen floor. Yes, out. Why?”

            Cheryl shrugged and returned her attention to Yogi Bear.

            “What’s the matter with it?” Mrs. Schafer asked, straightening.

            “I don’t know. Do you think it looks – you know, kind of – silly?”

            “Oh, you’re an old stick-in-the-mud!”

            Mrs. Schofter danced around the living room as though with the paper Mache gypsy, trying to make the most of the highlights of the dress.

           “You know what your trouble is, Cheryl? You have no sense of style. If you had your way, everyone would wear uniforms the way they do in that school of yours.”

            She stopped dancing and looked at the girl.

          “By the way, since when do they have men teachers in elementary school? I thought seventh graders were supposed to have nuns.”

            Cheryl got off the sofa, turned off the television and went to her room.

            “Cher?”

            “I have to do my homework.”

           “You’re too conscientious,” her mother said, pouting. “You’re a square. How do you expect to get a boyfriend?”

            “I don’t want one,” Cheryl called down from her room before she closed the door.

            The phone rang. Cheryl was adept enough not to be heard as she picked up the extension in her mother’s room.

            “Mrs. Schafter, this is Mr. Fredericks, Cheryl Leigh’s teacher.”

          “It’s Schofter. Schofter with an O, not an A. Blame it on my husband. I didn’t make up the name.”

            “I see. Mrs. Schofter –”

            “You can call me Lenora. I mean now that name really is mine.”

            “Okay, Lenora. There seems to be a small problem with Cheryl Leigh.”

            “What problem? She couldn’t be talking in class. She’s quiet as a mouse. And she always does her homework right after school, even though I think she should be out with her friends then. In fact, I think you give out too much homework.”

            “Mrs. Schofter –”

“So, what’s the problem?”
            “You.”

          “What do you mean, me? I’m not a problem, I’m a human being. And I am Cheryl’s mother. Little girls love their mothers.”

            “Mrs. Schofter, I understand you’re divorced?”

           “That’s none of your God-damned business. You said Cheryl was having problems. So let’s keep it to Cheryl’s problems and keep your nose out of my business.”

            Mrs. Schofter, I think that is part of Cheryl Leigh’s problem. Your personality is quite different from hers, and I think she has problems communicating with you.”

          “What? Communicating with me? We communicate fine. And you listen here, Fredericks, or whatever your name is, you are a teacher. Your job is to teach school lessons to Cheryl. I’m her mother, and I’ll raise her any way I see fit.”

           “Mrs. Schofter, she is not two beings, one for school and one for home. She is one whole person. She reacts in school according to the way she’s expected to act at home, and I don’t think her home life is very healthy.”

            “Look, I don’t think it’s healthy to have seventh grade girls taught by a man. So don’t you give me any trouble or I’ll do my best to get you thrown out of that school.”

            “You don’t scare me, Mrs. Schofter.”

            “Don’t play that game with me. You mind your business, and I’ll mind mine.”

            If he said any more, she didn’t hear it. She slammed down the phone so hard it almost cracked.

            “I’ll take her out of that school if they don’t shape up. Cher, come down here.”

            The girl obeyed.

           “I presume you heard the conversation?” Cheryl nodded. “Didn’t let him push me around, did I?”

            “Mom, why did you do it?” the girl cried. “You didn’t even listen to him.”

            “Of course I listened to him. He’s trying to lay all the blame on me. I suppose next he would’ve said the divorce was my fault. Vietnam, Korea, World War II and anything else he could think of would have been my fault, too. Who knows, maybe I’m responsible for creation, too!”

            “Mom,” Cheryl said, “he didn’t say that. You weren’t even listening.” She wiped tears from her face.

            “Okay, kid if you have problems, how come I don’t know about them? What are they? Come on, out with it.”

            “You wouldn’t listen.”

            “I’m all ears. What?”

            “Well, you do – crazy things.”

            “Oh, I’m crazy. I suppose that teacher of yours that you have such a crush on put that idea into your head.”

            “You’re not listening,” Cheryl said, turning toward the stairs.

            “What? If I do these crazy things, would you mind telling me what they are?”

            “Like that wig,” Cheryl said, looking at the costume her mother was wearing.

            “You don’t like it? Okay, I won’t wear it.”

          She pulled off the red hair and her bleach blonde hair with an inch of black roots showing tumbled out around her ears and forehead.

            “And that dress.”

           “This dress?” Lenora said, modeling again. “It’s the latest. I saw it on a model in one of those fashion magazines.”

            “But you’re too old to wear something like that.”

            “Baby, when you’re old they put you in a box and nail it shut. I’m not old.” She folded her arms. “What do you want me to wear, a potato sack or a burlap bag?”

            “Mother –”

            “I embarrass you. Is that it? I am not the model mother that the nuns tell you about. Well, listen, kid, I never said I was the Virgin Mary!”

            “Mom!”

            “Look. You have your personality. I have mine. I don’t want to be like you and I don’t want you to be like me. Now if we understand that, we should get along just fine. Okay?”

            “Yeah,” Cheryl said, resigning from a hopeless cause.

            She was on her way upstairs when her mother stopped her with a proposition.

            “You know what you need? A change of scenery.”

           Cheryl stopped expectantly, waiting for the next line, “You should stay with your father for a few months.”

            Instead, her mother said, “Why don’t we just take off for the woods tomorrow?”

        She would have said, “You’re kidding,” but knew her mother wasn’t. Instead, Cheryl’s jaw dropped in horror.

            “Mother, you wouldn’t!”

            “You need to get away from those blandy people at school. See the world. Just you and me. We’ll be gypsies living off the land.”

            “I have to go to school.”

            “You’ll never learn anything in that place. Geez, most kids would jump at the chance to take off. I have to have a stick-in-the-mud.”

            “But we can’t!”

            “Stop trying to be practical. That’s my department. And we’re going.”

           

            At six a.m. the next day Cheryl discovered that she hadn’t been having a nightmare; her mother had the car packed with tent, sleeping bags, backpacks and ice chest full of food.

            “Come on, are you ready?” her mother asked as Cheryl came down for breakfast. “Here, I made you a sandwich.”

            Cheryl checked it over: ham and cheese with pickles on a Kaiser roll wasn’t the sort of breakfast she’d hoped for.

            “What about school?”

            “You won’t miss much. Let’s go.”

            Cheryl didn’t see anything as they went even though she stared out the window the whole way. Her mother chattered for a while, and Cheryl had the general impression that they were going to New England. She didn’t hear anything else. For all she knew or cared, she was dead.

            They stopped at a campground, and slept in the car when it rained. By the end of the first week of gypsy life, Cheryl had a cold, but Lenora showed no signs of giving up her nomadic freedom.

            “You’ve got to learn to rough it and enjoy it,” Lenora said.

            “We’re going to get into trouble when we get home,” Cheryl said.

            “Who says we’re going home? If we like it, we might just stay away until the car breaks down.”

            “And who’s going to pay for gas?”

          “Credit cards. I’ve got  enough of them. When they won’t accept one, we’ll use another. Your dad will take care of the bills.”

          “Dad, the universal bill payer,” Cheryl thought . She didn’t pursue the matter, and only spoke when absolutely necessary.

          She should have felt closer to her mother; Cheryl felt isolated from everyone and everything. Here in the fresh air in the open wilderness she felt grimy. Her hair and clothes smelled of smoke from cooking over a fire.

 

         They passed through northern New York, Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, stopping occasionally to look over historical monuments. Cheryl took little interest in anything, no matter how educational.

           “I don’t understand you,” Lenora said as they motored toward Maine. “I have tried and you don’t want to camp. We’ll stay in motels, then. What kind of gypsy are you?”

            “I don’t want to be a gypsy.”

            “Don’t you want to see the world?”

            “No.”

            “What do you want?”

            “I want to go back to school.”

            “You know something, kid? You’re weird.”

 

            After another week, Cheryl asked, “When can we go home?”

         “That’s what’s wrong with you, kid. All you want to do is sit home and watch the boob tube. Didn’t you used to have fun when  your dad and I took you camping?”

            “Yeah,” Cheryl said slowly, “when Daddy was here.”

            She hadn’t meant to say that; it hit her mother like a bomb.

          “That’s it, isn’t it? You wish you were with your father. Your mother’s too crazy for you. Isn’t that it?”

            “No. I didn’t mean it.”

            “Oh, yes, you did. You wouldn’t have said it if you didn’t mean it.”

            “Mom couldn’t we just go home?”

            “Oh no. Not until we get this settled.”

            “I don’t want to take sides. You always make me take sides.”

            “You’ve got to be for one of us or the other.”

            “Why? Why can’t I be for both of you?”

            “Because, silly, Daddy and I are against each other.”

            “That’s your problem,” Cheryl said, walking away. “I didn’t have a fight with either of you.”

            “Well, you’re about to have one with me.”

            “Good,” Cheryl said, turning around, an angry look on her face. “Then I’ll go live with Daddy. Maybe then I’ll be able to go back to school, and I won’t have to live in the woods like some stupid gypsy. I never wanted to come out here in the first place!”

            Her mother couldn’t have looked more pained. She stared through tears at her little girl and saw, instead, her husband’s thirteen-year-old daughter looking at her with so much hate she almost didn’t recognize the girl.

            “So, that’s it?”

            “What do you want?”

            “ I want to know. Is that how you feel? You really don’t want to live here any more? You want to go live with your dad?”

            She wouldn’t back out. She felt nothing but pity for her mother. Cheryl knew she’d be happier with her father. But she felt sure her mother was a mental case, that she needed looking after.  She couldn’t do that.

            It wasn’t Cheryl’s business to be a nurse to her own mother. She’d end up worse if she stayed with her.

            “Is that what you want?” her mother asked again.

            “You heard what I said,” Cheryl answered.

           

            When they arrived home, Mr. Schofter waited with his lawyer and the police.

            “Dad!” Cheryl said, and ran to him. She looked happy.

            “I have a court order, and I’ll take her by force if need be,” he told Lenora as she approached. “She’s missed two weeks of school, and no one knew what happened to either of you.”

            “Your vice squad won’t be necessary,” Lenora said. “She hates me and wants to go with you. As soon as I get all of her things packed, you can take her wherever you want. I won’t make any demands on either of you anymore.”

            She looked blankly at Cheryl, who was tempted to back down and hug Lenora.

            Within the hour Cheryl’s things were packed in her father’s car. Lenora watched from the front porch. Cheryl said something to her father and raced up to the porch. She stopped awkwardly on the top step as though she were no longer allowed to walk on her mother’s porch.

            “Goodbye?” Lenora suggested, extending her hand.

            “Goodbye, Mom,” Cheryl said, then stepped onto the porch and kissed her mother on the cheek.

            Before Lenora could recover Cheryl and her father were in the car and waving as they drove down the road.