Pastor Mike steps to a small podium at the center of the lawn and signals for everyone to gather round. Dee Dee Blancharde stands beside him, her fingers gripping the backrest of Gypsy’s Lightweight Cruiser Deluxe. Gypsy, in her frilly white hat with the pompoms dangling off the sides, manages to look happy and carefree despite the wheelchair, despite the oxygen tank and the tubes running from her nose.
“Come now,” Pastor Mike shouts. “It’s time to begin.”
Neighbors step away from the folding-table buffet to join the circle of reporters, photographers, and churchgoers.
“This is truly a blessed day,” Pastor Mike says, raising his cupped hands skyward. “We have here two people whose long and harrowing journey ought to inspire us all. Dee Dee Blancharde and her daughter, Gypsy Rose, have persevered through every shape and form of adversity. But the daughter, plagued by illness, has been anything but a burden to her loving mother. With a strength that smacks of God’s love, Dee Dee Blancharde has outsmarted and outlasted obstacles of biblical proportions. They were driven from their Louisiana home by Katrina’s wrath, the daughter sick with cancer and muscular dystrophy, the mother exhausted beyond measure, and now, finally, they have found a soft place to land. They have found this place, this house standing here behind me which we at Springfield Methodist could not be more pleased to have built for them, complete with all the modifications necessary for a girl in Gypsy Rose’s condition. Please join me in welcoming them into our community.”
There’s a round of applause as the pastor steps aside and Anne-Marie Burrell of Channel 4’s Mornings with Anne-Marie takes his place. She’s in her early forties, pretty in a regional-television way, though Dee Dee wonders what kind of flaws all that makeup is hiding. Cameramen disperse around her, two on either side and one kneeling in front of the podium.
“Good morning, everyone,” she starts, stretching her flawless smile as wide as it will go.
“Good morning, Anne-Marie,” the small crowd returns.
Dee Dee looks out at the strangers gathered on her lawn, thinks: people will do anything to catch a glimpse of themselves on the idiot box.
“Thank you all for coming,” Anne-Marie continues. “This is, as Pastor Mike said, a blessed day. Like you, I’m here to honor and celebrate the work Pastor Mike and his congregation have done…”
She gestures to the small white house with the long, trellised wheelchair ramp.
“It’s generous and exceptional acts like this one that make a community. As I always say, if we can’t live for each other, then why live at all?”
Dee Dee forces a smile, but she feels embarrassed—not because she’ll be seen as some kind of parasite, but because people don’t understand how hard she’s worked: raising a disabled child alone is just one of her full-time jobs; the other is soliciting help.
“All right, then,” Anne-Marie says. “Without further ado, let’s see the inside.”
The three-man camera crew follows close behind as Dee Dee wheels Gypsy up the ramp. Anne-Marie takes the lead, playing tour guide.
“Notice how the ramp and the floors are made of the same light pine,” she says as they enter the home. “It’s like the inside is a continuation of the outside.”
Dee Dee stares down at the floorboards, eyes wide, hands covering her cheeks.
“Goodness, how they shine,” she says. “You can almost see yourself in them. Isn’t that right, Gypsy?”
She nudges her daughter’s shoulder.
“They’re so fancy,” Gypsy observes, tugging at one of her hat’s pompoms. “I feel like a movie star.”
“The furniture is all top of the line,” Anne-Marie says with a sweeping, Vanna White gesture. “Donated by the Springfield Emporium’s downtown location.”
Dee Dee lets her jaw drop as she takes in the long mahogany dining table, the wraparound sectional facing a large-screen TV.
“Magnificent,” she says, though in truth the space feels cramped, and she is just now noticing the lack of natural light.
“Magnificent,” Gypsy parrots.
Anne-Marie leads them into the kitchen (stainless steel can’t disguise the matchbox size), then back through the dining area and down the hall (barely wide enough for Gypsy’s wheelchair or Dee Dee’s girth—they might have thought about that) leading to the bedrooms and bathroom. The cameramen follow like hungry puppies. It’s clear from the way they dress—baggy jeans, patchy facial hair, T-shirts advertising their friends’ rock bands—that they have no intention of ever standing in front of the camera.
“Feel the mattress,” Anne-Marie instructs Dee Dee as they take their positions on opposite sides of the king-size bed. “It’s memory foam. I have the same model chez moi. Trust me, you’ll sleep better than you ever have before.”
Dee Dee leans forward, presses down with both hands, watches the foam rise up around her fingers.
“Oh, I’ll be hitting the hay early tonight,” she says.
Anne-Marie smiles, gives a little wink as if to say: You’re doing great! Dee Dee looks the room over, thinks: Why’d they put the damn window where all you can see is the neighbor’s rotting fence?
They move to Gypsy’s room, the home’s crown jewel. It has to be the crown jewel, of course, because Gypsy is the real charity case here. Anne-Marie’s audience will want to believe that a canopy bed and pretty wallpaper make up for a lifetime of paralysis and eye surgeries and needles and crumbling teeth and brittle bones from a diet that’s more pills than food.
Poor girl, Dee Dee thinks.
They’ve reached the climax of the tour, and anything less than pure joy will mean that they never see another dime from Springfield Methodist. This time, Dee Dee asks the question herself. She steps in front of her daughter, crouches a little, puts on a wide smile.
“So,” she says, “what do you think?”
Gypsy does not disappoint. She looks up and, through a grin that shows more gum than teeth, says:
“I must be the luckiest girl in the world.”
The cameramen hold her in frame, then turn to Anne-Marie, who is absolutely glowing with compassion.