I Totally Meant to Do That (21 page)

My aunt Jane encountered one, or thinks she did, years ago while tending to her roses in Raleigh. When she stepped into the garage for a trowel, she heard the front door open upstairs, and then footsteps directly above her. She walked to the staircase and called my uncle’s name but he did not answer. Now I will hand her the microphone: “So I grabbed a coat hanger and straightened it out. And I screamed up the stairs ‘I’m coming to get you! I know you’re a gypsy and I’m coming to get you—you better run!’ But by the time I got upstairs whoever it was was gone.”

I half expect her, at the end, to pull out a flashlight, place it under her chin, turn it on, and say, “Sometimes at night, I can still hear them rifling through my underwear drawer.”

Like I said, high drama. I recently asked my mom what she remembered about the arrest from the early ’80s, and like any good bit of gossip, the details had been warbled during their journey through the telephone: “The king of the Gypsies himself strolled into the courtroom—dressed beautifully, in a very elegant suit—and said he’d come from New York to get them off.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“They said he was very glamorous. He’s probably dining at Jean Georges in Manhattan tonight.”

For the next few days, she left me intermittent voice mails saying, “Jane, you better not write about the gypsies! They’ll come get you! The king lives in New York, Jane. He’s gonna get you!” Then, I’d hear her howling with laughter before the phone hit the receiver. For you to get the joke, though, you’ll need more context. Really, she was making fun of her own mother, Nana.

When Mom grew up in the late ’40s and early ’50s in Danville, Virginia, a small town near the North Carolina border, an itinerant community came through every spring in caravans, out of which they sold tonics and told fortunes. They were known to locals as Gypsies. It’s safe to assume these nomads were in fact Romanies, whose presence in that area at that time—and in that way—has been well documented.

In Danville, they squatted on a couple of acres at the end of Broad Street, which belonged to Mr. Dibrell, who owned the Dibrell Brothers Tobacco Company; he didn’t mind. From what my mother can remember, the women wore multiple bracelets, head kerchiefs, long flowing skirts, and jangly earrings. “No one had pierced ears back then,” she says. “If you had pierced ears, you were a gypsy.” If this is true, then the Piercing Pagoda at the mall stole its imagery from the wrong culture.

Eventually, whether or not they were guilty, the nomads developed a
reputation
for stealing—another occurrence common to the time. The police began to monitor their actions. Mr. Dibrell ran them off his land. And Nana, in an effort to deter my mother from playing with their kids, told her that Gypsies steal children and turn them into other Gypsies. In case you’re skimming, I’ll repeat that: My grandmother told my six-year-old mother to stay away from the Gypsies because they would “steal” her.

Baby theft was a common accusation against the Gypsies—as the slander went, kidnapping was a recruiting tactic—but I don’t say that to cut Nana slack. She wasn’t above using scare tactics to exert influence. When she asked me, at the age of six, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered, “a cheerleader.” For whatever reason, she found this reply unsatisfactory, so she responded, “No, no honey: Cheerleaders get diseases.”

This terrified me. I remember watching football games with
my dad and thinking,
Oh, those poor girls; I hope they don’t die
, and also,
Why would anyone choose that profession?

Similarly was my six-year-old mother terrified of the Gypsies. She has a vivid memory of encountering one woman in particular, who was walking with her barefoot child toward Main Street. My mother stopped in her tracks, turned white, flipped on her heels, and fled in abject terror for home. And who can blame her? I would’ve done the same thing at that age if I’d been approached by a man in a van offering candy—which is essentially how my grandmother had framed the situation.

“You
ran
from her?” I asked.

“Yes! It’s horrible,” she replied. “Nana told me they’d take me! What could I do?” Then she laughed over the absurdity of it all and said, “Oh well.”

I’ll tell you this much, though. She’s never pierced her ears.

the one on which the green Herend leaf dish was received and instantly retrieved, my mother insisted that my sisters and I “go through those boxes in the basement and divvy it all up.”

I was confused. Was I being forced to share my future loot? I mean I guess it’s only fair. Otherwise it would be like when parents turn a dead child’s bedroom into a mausoleum—at least let my sisters play with my toys.

But I was wrong. These were different boxes entirely. They were the mother lode of all buried Southern treasure TBE at a point TBD, and I hadn’t known they existed. I knew, of course, that both of my grandmothers had died, but because I was living in New York, I hadn’t witnessed the distribution of their valuables. The boxes to
which my mother referred held my sisters’ and my allocations, the paltry consolation prizes you receive when you trade one box in the ground for another.

We descended the dusty catacomb stairs with a card table and chairs and took inventory: gold-rimmed crystal goblets, silver liqueur glasses, a set of Wedgwood, white and gold Nippon, green-rimmed china, a pink-and-white breakfast set, several different collections of demitasse.

We didn’t recognize most of the items. In one case, there was a clear explanation. The date on the
Richmond Times Dispatch
wrapped around a set of C. H. Field Haviland Limoges china read Tuesday, December 10, 1957. Nana must have packed the plates before they moved from Broad Street to Hawthorne Drive in 1958. But she never unpacked them, not even when she moved again to Greensboro after my grandfather died. For the last fifty years, that china has lived in three basements—and counting—without being used.

In one sense, that makes it more valuable. The Haviland was one of the few complete sets in the inventory. At the same time, however, it carries no memories; its teacups are empty.
Use
is not a dirty word. Another of her sets, for example, is missing salad plates. Therefore, even if I don’t remember ever eating off them, I can at least close my eyes and imagine her dropping one on the kitchen floor.

For this reason, I became more interested in the newspaper around the Haviland than in the plates themselves. I tried to conjure her wrapping them—right around the time that
6 CANADIAN SHIPS CATCH 636 WHALES
, as reported by the
New York Times
, Sunday, October 20, 1957; “Virtually every part of the whale has a commercial use.” While she sacramentally mummified those saucers,
ALBERT
CAMUS WINS NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
, Sputnik “beep-beeped triumphantly in outer space,” and, my favorite,
BRITAIN PRESSES U.S. ON AGREEMENT TO DUMP OIL WASTE ONLY FAR AT SEA
.

It’s possible that Nana intended to use her Haviland again, but simply forgot it. Or perhaps she imagined this day, when someone would roll away the stone to reclaim the contents of the tomb. Instead, time after time we only check on the body and roll the stone right back. My back ached. My nostrils were full of dust. I’m sick of these burials. Raise them up! Resurrect the dead!

But my mother is right: I couldn’t schlep a case of crystal to New York unscathed. And even if I did, I’ve nowhere to put it. Lou and Tucker have glass cabinets for storing, and dining room tables for entertaining. My mother keeps five sets of china in the kitchen—and she uses them all.

Which means that fifty years from now, when I see the butterflies on her Queen Victoria or the Meissen’s delicate orange flowers, I’ll remember how she made us wear hats on Christmas Eve. I’ll think about the way she’d always join a dinner party while still wearing her red-peppers apron. How she’d fill a bowl with ice cream, put it on a saucer with a silver spoon, eat it in bed, go back downstairs to refill it, eat the second serving in bed, go back down, and so on.

What if, when my children find my boxes in a cellar, they think of only the newspaper headlines? Actually, we won’t even have that in common; they’ll be more interested in the fact that news was once printed on paper.

My nephew Franklin appeared at the top of the basement stairwell. He was in that “Why?” phase, asking questions that inexorably lead to other, harder-to-answer questions. And I was in that smart-ass stage, because I’ve never outgrown it, so I couldn’t help but egg him on.

“Can I come downstairs?” he asked.

“No,” Lou replied.

“Why?”

“There’s nothing down here for you,” she said.

“Not for another forty years,” I added.

“Why?” he asked. “What is that stuff?”

“These aren’t toys, sweetie,” she responded.

“Well,” I said, “technically they are.”

“Then why aren’t you playing with them?” he asked.

I looked at Lou, but neither of us had an answer.

That night, while everyone else was asleep, I crept down to the living room and swiped that Herend green-leaf dish. It was still sitting in its wrapping paper by the Christmas tree and I stole it. I put it in my suitcase, and the next day, when the coast was clear, I walked it directly out of the house, into the car, out to the airport, and into my Brooklyn apartment, where it sits now on a chest of drawers.

I use the crap out of it. I put my iPod in it, my passport. Stamps, lip glosses, an old watch, Post-it notes, receipts, anything really, including items far beneath its grooming and heritage. But I think it’s happy. It’s hard to know for sure, it being a dish and all. But I’m pretty sure it is.

What I wish I had, though, is that samovar. It can’t find its way home either, but I guarantee, wherever it is, it’s shiny.

momentous happened during the day. Obvious examples include promotions, major cultural events, and so on, but tiny triumphs also suffice. Bumping into Debbie Harry on her way out of a West Village head shop, trying a new flavor of Doritos, and high-fiving a fellow skateboarder coasting by have all, in the past, been enough. But in New York, the city of happenings, moments compete for consequence, constantly one-up each other.

Increasingly, I find that typically important events feel unworthy. I’ve moved beyond the pleasures of corn chips—even those cool ones with two flavors in one bag, which, let’s all admit, are pretty rad. As night falls, I grow fearful of lying awake, lamenting a wasted day. So instead I go out in search of something to throw the hours at.
That is how I wound up watching two men wrestle at 5:30 a.m. in a dominatrix’s apartment under the Williamsburg Bridge.

And still thought,
Ho-hum
.

It was a “Once in a Lifetime” moment. You know the Talking Heads lyrics:
“And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself … Well, how did I get here?”
Except, I didn’t wake up to the sterilized routines of adulthood—lawn mowing, carpooling, PTA—wondering what happened to my punk-rock youth; I did the reverse. I opened my bloodshot eyes to see a grungy unfurnished apartment, an elevated J train rumbling outside, and a plastic cup of warm vodka in my hand. Wasn’t I supposed to be living in Raleigh, married to a banker, and driving a Volvo wagon? Instead of a handsome husband, I stood next to a hipster dominatrix in cutoff jean shorts. “And you may tell yourself, This is not my ironic T-shirt! And you may tell yourself, This is not my vinyl collection of the Velvet Underground! And you may ask yourself, my God—when did ‘jorts’ become stylish?!”