Gypsy Heart

Before Starting On Lithium:

What Claire feared most was being trapped by boredom and routine. She watched her mother drudging through the cooking, laundry, and cleaning, no social life that Claire could see. She was determined that her own life would be interesting, even though she knew that there is a fine line between "interesting" and "scary".

She drove alone to New York City, an eight-hour drive, at ninety miles an hour, just to buy a record she couldn't find in her own town. She spent a weekend in Montreal with a Portuguese guy she barely knew. Going out with a man was not really a sexual thing for her. It was just another adventure. Take, for example, the gypsy.

One day, a preteen boy who spoke with a faint accent knocked on her door. He had seen Claire's car out front. A hit-and-run driver had put a dent in the fender and Claire had never gotten the dent hammered out. The boy offered to fix the dent for $150.

Claire had been living with the dent just fine. She said no.

But the boy was persistent. "I'm only twelve," he said, "but I can fix dents. And my whole family lives right around the corner, so you'd be able to find me real easy if something was wrong with my work. But it won't be."

Claire shook her head no.

"We're a clan of gypsies," he added. Intrigued, Claire stopped shaking her head. But she still said no to the car repair.

Three days later, the boy came back. With him was a man just about Claire's age, tall, slender, and well-tanned. His eyes were dark, deep-set, and accented by thick, jet black, eyebrows. His smile was a killer.

"This is my cousin, Dino Rubino," the boy said. "He's 23. Will you let him fix your car?" Claire felt her knees buckle and her mouth gape open. Dino was a living doll. But he was a gypsy; he would move to another city in a month.

Dino said, "I'll fix the dent for $75." Claire still hesitated.

"$50. And I'll take you out to dinner."

Claire said yes. Maybe he would do a bad job on her fender, but it would be worth it to get a date with this dreamboat.

Dino did an excellent job on her fender. Claire gave him the $50. Then he came inside and played her guitar. But first he took off two of the strings and tuned the guitar rather strangely. The music he played had a haunting sound that Claire liked. And he kept his promise to take Claire out.

****************

Claire was in her favorite heaven, flirting with harmless danger.

"I didn't know there were gypsies any more," she told Dino while they waited for their orders. "At least not in this country. Where did you come from?"

"Everywhere. We stay in a city and do all the odd jobs around there. Then we move on. We can do a lot of stuff besides fixing cars—pave driveways, fix appliances, put on roofing and siding." He left her for a few minutes and asked the owner to let him clean out the stove and oven. He got the job. As he drove Claire home, he told stories of teenaged gypsy trysts in the woods.

Dino's clan originated in Serbia and Rumania.

By the time Claire was 24, she had seen and done everything she could in her hometown. But, just about the time her life started to become boring, she attended a convention in Chicago. There she met a man who seemed to like her. Claire used this as an excuse to pack all the belongings she could into her VW bug and move to Chicago.

Living in Chicago did make her life interesting again. The loud guy in the apartment next door dealt drugs all hours of the night. The men who visited the prostitute downstairs kept parking in Claire's space. When she left a note on their car politely asking them not to, they slashed her tires. And the roaches were so bold that they walked across her and her boyfriend's laps as they sat on the sofa.

Finally, things became too interesting for Claire. She found herself in a psychiatrist's office accepting a prescription for lithium.

After taking lithium for ten years:

Claire didn’t mind sweeping her kitchen floor. It was not a big job; the kitchen’s area was only thirty square feet. She swept crumbs of food, big and small, into a little pile, then picked them up with the dust pan and threw them away. The speckled white floor always surprised her: it looked clean, but there were all those crumbs in the dust pan.

It was winter and Claire had not driven her car for two weeks. Almost every place she went was within walking distance of her apartment: the supermarket, the drugstore, even the library. And she hardly had a social life. She decided that she had better go out and start the car, to keep the engine block from cracking.

As she put on her coat, Claire imagined that she, the fifty-year-old Claire (Claire2), was having a conversation with Claire1, herself at 24:

Claire1: Look at you! That lithium has got you so doped up you have no life at all.

Claire2: Yes, I do. I have a good, fulfilling job, working from home as a writer.

Claire1: And an unbelievably boring routine. You go to church every Sunday morning, shopping every Saturday, to the library—

Claire2: Don't knock it til you've tried it. Look at you, getting into trouble all the time. You bring on most of your depressions yourself, you know.

Claire1: I never asked to be depressed. Of course, I have to have excitement in my life once in a while. And excitement makes me manic. And you do get depressed after you’ve been manic—

Claire2: Do you really think it's worth it? A little excitement, and then all that pain afterward? I could see the point of your adventures if you were doing something worthwhile. But you're not. You're just killing time until you can find a job.

Claire1: I do envy how calm you are, to be honest. But the sameness of your life is absolutely revolting.

Claire2: It's all in the word you use. Try saying "security" instead of "sameness". Sometimes I miss the change and variety I used to have in my life. But there are plenty of ways to get change and variety without living in a roach-infested ghetto in a city where you don’t know anybody. You can have change and variety right along with comfort and safety. And I've still got all those memories.

****************

Claire invited Matt in, and he saw her guitar.

"OK if I play it?" he asked.

"Sure," Claire said. "I never play it any more."

"God! Who tuned your guitar?" Matt said.

"A Serbian-Rumanian gypsy," Claire said. She smiled.

When I was young it was more important—to pay more pain for to laugh much louder—yeah—when I was young. —The Animals

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