Gypsies in the Place of Pain

(Originally published by Emrys Journal in 1995)

When the gypsies came and camped in the hospital waiting room, anything seemed possible.  Our little world of 9-South widened that week, and something of the strange and magical was let in. After they left, carrying their healed daughter away in their arms, I stood in the empty waiting room and breathed their air. It smelled different from ordinary hospital air–spicy and sweaty, smoky and free.  I miss the gypsies.

    The gypsies had come, as the old stories warn us they will, suddenly. One minute, the hospital halls were filled with ordinary parents and our ordinary sick or wounded children.  The next, they were filled with slim, dark-eyed, dangerous men in tight black pants and loose white shirts and lush, dark-eyed, dangerous women in full skirts of many colors.  The gypsies spoke fast and loud in a language no one else knew, and its strange cadences silenced our usual hum of Spanish and English as we all stopped to listen.  In one afternoon, the gypsy women took over and transformed the parents' lounge, spreading bright blankets on the floor and over the vinyl couches and drawing out packages of food from their deep bags and bundles. The gypsy men leaned against the walls of the lounge, smoking dark cigarettes and eating from plates of food carried to them by the women.

    Up and down the hall, ordinary parents drew their children, those who could walk or wheel about the corridors, in close.  The old stories say that gypsies steal children; but when the gypsies had gone, no children from 9-South were missing, and no changelings had appeared.  Of course, our children were poor candidates for stealing— some would have died by nightfall without their IV's, their respirators, their transfusions.  Our children were quite safe from gypsies.  In fact, before she left, the gypsy grandmother made charms for many of the children, to protect them.  My son Ted still has his, even yet, taped to his latest dressing—a small triangle of different-colored threads woven together with pieces of straw.

    I wasn't exactly surprised when the gypsies arrived on our floor, but I was still amazed.  Delighted, actually, to see that gypsies really do exist, just as we've been told—a tribe, a people entirely foreign, but here among us.  Not legends, but flesh.  I wasn't surprised because my son's surgeon had pulled me into the 9-South supply closet to tell me they were here, early on the day they came.  He'd done a classic "Psst," crooked-finger invitation as I walked by the closet on my way to eat a terrible cafeteria breakfast.  It was pretty laughable, the great and handsome surgeon, huddled in the closet, sitting on a giant institutional-size box of Pampers, waving me in.

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