Gypsy feels a jolt in her spine as Dee Dee drives her wheelchair hard over a crack in the concrete.
“I always knew you to be ungrateful, but this tops it all,” Dee Dee says. “You’ll be lucky if I don’t take the belt to your behind when we get home. If you’re healthy enough to go tramping around, then you’re healthy enough for the damn switch.”
Dee Dee is shouting in plain view and earshot of pedestrians and passing cars. Gypsy keeps her head down, prays that her mother did not park too far away. Luckily, it is after nine p.m. on a weeknight in a sleepy town, with only a handful of restaurants and bars open. Her greatest fear is that Nicholas will choose this moment to appear—that he will witness her being rocketed down a public street by her out-of-control mother. She feels, more clearly than ever, ashamed of the picture she and her mother make. Ashamed of her mother’s obesity. Ashamed of her own ailments and handicaps, most of which—maybe all of which—she doesn’t understand. She wishes she could disappear—simply dissolve, like in Star Trek, and resurface somewhere entirely different. Someplace tropical, maybe. A jungle lined with beaches. Sun shining year round on exotic plants and animals. She would swim and hike and draw and paint, and she wouldn’t care if she never saw another human being in her life.
Meanwhile, Dee Dee is beside herself with the kind of anger that won’t die down until she’s tired herself out.
“I thought you cleared your system of this kind of stupidity down in Naples,” she says. “I just don’t know how to get through to you. I truly don’t. Tonight, I want you to park yourself in front of a mirror and take a good hard look. You ain’t like other people, Gypsy. Not even a little bit. You need looking after, and won’t no one but me do it.”
They turn onto a side street, and Gypsy spots their car parked with one wheel on the curb at the end of the block.
“There are times you’re too weak to lift a spoon,” Dee Dee goes on. “Times you can’t hardly wipe your own ass. I’ve scrubbed vomit from your clothes, washed your sheets in the dead of night when you pissed yourself like a small child. Now who the hell’s gonna sign up for that if they don’t have to?”
She opens the passenger door and steps back while Gypsy, hands gripping the hood, lifts herself from the wheelchair into the car. A few minutes later they are jetting down residential streets, Dee Dee aggressively slamming on the brakes at every stop sign.
“I bet you’re wondering how I tracked you down tonight,” she says. “Well, I went into your computer and took a long look around. Turns out you’ve gotten real sloppy about covering your tracks. Anyway, I set Mr. Godejohn good and straight. Let him know how many laws he’d be breaking if he showed up at that parlor. You won’t be hearing from him again.”
Gypsy suppresses a little whimper.
“And by the way,” Dee Dee says, “don’t go thinking you got a computer no more. It’s boxed up already. This is a new day, little missy. The rules are the same, but the consequences just got real consequential.”
Gypsy is too numb to cry. She feels humiliated not by her mother’s tirade, not by the scene her mother made in front of Aleah, but rather by her earlier misguided belief that she might just get away with it, that she might manage to behave in the world the way other people behaved. She understands now that her future will look no different than her present. This is her life, here in this car.
“You listening to me?” Dee Dee says. “Speak when you’re spoken to.”
“Yes, Mama.”
Yes to all of it, Gypsy thinks. Yes to everything you say. This is me surrendering. Once and for all.
* * *
A half-hour later, Gypsy is lying in bed when Dee Dee, who has dropped her screaming in favor of the silent treatment, brings in a cup of water and the nightly cocktail of meds. She sets them on the side table, then turns and walks out, slamming the door behind her.
This time, without her mother watching, Gypsy sits up straight and swallows every last pill.