The Day I Danced with the Gypsies

FICTION The Day I Danced with the Gypsies Barbara A. Schieve I don't go to school anymore. While Mama's at the cafeteria cashiering, I hang out in the apartment smoking forbidden cigarettes out of the carton Aunt Ruby left in her dresser drawer the morning she took off. I puff away while I sit at the window, looking down at the cars turning into the parking lot of the funeral home next door, wondering when Aunt Ruby is going to come back. Mama says probably never, because Aunt Ruby has always been crazy, doesn't have sense enough to come in out of the rain, and might even be living in a box under the bridge with the homeless people by now. I don't believe Mama. I remember the way Aunt Ruby winked at me right before she slammed the apartment door and staggered down the stairs, banging her suitcases against the wall, her hair wound up in old metal curlers she found in Grandma's trailer after Grandma died. Aunt Ruby, I tell myself, will never leave me for good. Aunt Ruby is Mama's old-maid sister and, even though back in the mountains where we came from people said she didn't always act normal , speaking out when she should have kept her mouth shut, pushing a supermarket cart around collecting bottles from roadside ditches, piling them up in the backyard like she was trying to make a glass mountain, I never believed she had anything really important missing upstairs. Mama is another story. Mama, flouncing around in jeans and spikeheeled shoes, her sunrise-red hair hanging straight down past her behind , like she's ready to burst out singing: "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue." Mama, believing one of the losers she meets at the cafeteria is going to get a steady job and enough money to buy her a house in one of those suburbs where the houses are all alike. It's Mama I worry about! Barbara A. Schieve lives "in a suburb bordering the west side of Cleveland, Ohio, an area popular with different ethnic groups, including transplanted Appalachians . " 58 I open the refrigerator and count the beer cans, wondering if, now that I'm sixteen and might even pass for eighteen, and am already an accomplished cigarette smoker, I should practice beer drinking. But, I decide, Mama isn't so dumb she won't notice missing beer, especially if one of her beer-guzzling boyfriends comes around and the supply runs out. Then I'm really in trouble. She might begin using her brains for something other than figuring out ways to get a house, and realize I'm not spending all my days at school. Instead, I look out of the window and think about how things were before Aunt Ruby left. I used to dance; it was Aunt Ruby who got me started. When I was ten, me, Mama and Aunt Ruby moved up north to this city—to better ourselves, Mama said. She found a job right away. Aunt Ruby, who never had a real job, took care of me. The two of us got in the habit of hanging out in a restaurant that used to be in the store below the apartment, owned by an old Hungarian couple. Mrs. Szabo, the old lady, had a face like a dumpling in the paprikash she made, fat, round, and always wet from looking into steaming pots. Mostly she stayed in the kitchen cooking and didn't seem to mind that Mr. Szabo payed a lot of attention to Aunt Ruby. I guess at her age she was used to his flirting ways. He was waiter, cashier, and when there weren't too many customers, fiddler. He looked like a fiddler, with a few strands of black, shoe-polish hair left on his head, and a mustache that could have been drawn with a marking pen. Aunt Ruby liked him a lot. I guess she had never met a man with old-world manners like Mr. Szabo. He was always kissing the back of her hand and pulling out chairs anytime she had a mind...