Gypsy
I am digging through my mother’s lingerie drawer for the lavender and periwinkle slip with the lace along the bottom that I always wear when I’m a gypsy. It is Halloween 1976 and I am ten- years-old. It will be my third year as a gypsy because we shop for our costumes in our parents’ drawers and closets. Or in my brother’s case, in the linen closet. He’s wearing a sheet again. Casper the Friendly Ghost. At least this year the sheet is white. Mom assured him last year that the faded hydrangeas on the only top sheet she was willing to part with would hardly be visible in the dark. So, my brother peeked through two slits like a floating cemetery bouquet, pin-balling off fence posts and skeletal trees with poor peripheral vision as he gathered candy in an orange plastic jack-o-lantern.
Now, unlike with Halloweens past, this year, I am doing my own makeup. My long mousy hair is piled on my head with a hair tie accented by purple plastic balls and wrapped in grandma’s polka-dotted silk scarf. Mom can’t help me because she is in the hospital, so I help myself to the tiny Avon sample tubes of lipstick, testing shades like Coral Kiss on my cheeks and Streamer Pink on my lips, and covering my eyelids with bright blue Maybelline shadow.
My mother and father should be home with my new baby sister soon. That afternoon, I finished the cross-stitch of the praying angel that will be framed above her crib in the closet dad recently wall-papered in a red, white and blue Amish-quilt-inspired pattern. The tiny clusters of x-es read:
Marianne Kathleen Lowe
October 29, 1976
8 lbs 1 oz
Bicentennial Baby
There is a picture of me with neon blue-shadowed eyes and smeared cotton-candy-colored lips, a matching lip-print on the fuzzy soft-spot atop my sister’s tiny peach head. I loved her so much, like I loved my Madame Alexander dolls and Barbies, only maybe a bit more.
When I was a teenager, I appreciated that my little sisters distracted my mother and I got away with a lot. The scent of cigarettes and wine coolers on my breath were not the priority when a toddler was testing electrical sockets or Catholic elementary school uniforms needed ironing.
I went back into mom’s lingerie drawer and found the sexy nightgown she’d been so embarrassed to open one Christmas morning. She stealthily stuffed the flimsy lace and silk underneath a couch cushion before any of her children got a really good look, her cheeks flushing as she glared at my dad and hissed “Bill!” through pursed lips. I wore that pastel pink negligee over a leotard to school for Sports Days during Spirit Week in 11th grade saying I represented “Indoor Sports.” I’d never even gotten to third base, and I can’t imagine what my teachers must have thought, but I know I thought I was so clever. Mom had to have been changing a diaper when I left the house that morning.
When I was in college and Marianne was 10, she wore my old ballet costumes for Halloween. When my sisters came for slumber parties in my dorm, I dressed them in tiny Carolina cheerleading uniforms and brought them to bars along Franklin Street
When I was in my 20’s and living in LA, Marianne begged me to meet and marry MacGyver. I did meet Richard Dean Anderson when we both worked on the Paramount lot, and I got her an autographed photo, but I married Chris Weerts instead. She was 19 at my wedding and in a goth phase, shrouded in dark eyeliner and disengagement. In the photos she looks like she’d rather be anywhere else than surrounded by peach and periwinkle flowers under the Calabasas sun. My parents let Marianne fly home alone to her boyfriend the very next day so they could continue their California trip minus her aridity and anger.
And when our mother died three years later, that Bicentennial baby could barely say goodbye. So much bottled-up resentment and unhealed wounds. By the time I was 40, I’d not heard from my sister in five years. By the time I turned 60, it had been a quarter of a century without contact. It seemed she’d become the gypsy.
But then a weird thing happened. Proof, in a way, that it is always a good idea to be open to the possibility of miracles.
As that house, where once a gypsy held a newborn baby, was being emptied and sold, I was at the Hollywood Bowl one evening and received a text from my brother. “Would you be up for a zoom call tomorrow?” he asked, “Marianne said she’d join.”
And the next morning, there she was, my gypsy sister in a square on my computer, a face both familiar and unknown to me. I didn’t feel anger, just curiosity. How do you make up for lost decades? Slowly I suspect. The conversations have been pragmatic. How do we best support our father through his life transition? The things we wish we’d been given the chance to get from the house.
My baby sister will be 50 next week. And hope she, too, sees my face in a box on the computer as a sort of gift.
We don't talk about the ghost years. Instead, we are like my brother in his flower-sheet, pin-balling through the dark with poor peripheral vision, trying to find our way around old fence posts and unhealed wounds. The neon-blue eyeshadow and the cotton-candy lipstick are a lifetime behind us, but looking at her face in that tiny square, I realize the soft spot is still there.
As shared at Story Salon on October 21, 2026.
Comments