Lola's Luck:
My Life Among
the California Gypsies
SHE HAD INTRODUCED HERSELF to me as Ruth, “Sister Ruth, expert advisor on love, business, marriage.” Ruth’s Seattle family addressed her as Dei (pronounced “day”) and referred to her as Phuria or Phuri Dei, the Old Mother-Lady, a glamorous term conveying spiritual power, a productive life and the glory of numerous kinsmen.
I usually referred to her simply as The Old Lady. So, on occasion, did her family. Gypsies tend to acquire a number of names according to need, circumstance and personal preference.
Sometimes I heard her people refer to her as Lola. It took me a while to realize who they meant.
For several years, she remained Ruth, or The Old Lady, to me and my family. Not until I began traveling to California and met hundreds of her near and distant relatives would I make the switch to calling her Lola.
She hated hearing herself called The Old Lady. Although her people, the Machvaia Roma are quick to acknowledge old age as reward and blessing, the capstone to a well-spent life, Ruth was also well aware of the derogatory connotations of old age in America. She was probably in her late sixties, but whatever age she was, she certainly possessed a youthful joie de vivre.
“Men still like me,” she acknowledged frankly, and her flamboyant manner of dressing made me suspect she felt more siren than serene. One time, overhearing my reference to her as The Old Lady, she became pettish, reminding me that the date and place of her birth were uncertain. “We don’t know how old,” she cautioned, twisting on her toes in a girlish pirouette.
I had never met anyone like Lola. In my memory she looms fierce and feminine, an irrepressible beguiling Circe. Lola’s buoyant enthusiasm and prevailing sense of fun and pleasure offset any lack of finesse she might possess. Within the year of our first meeting, she won my heart, becoming the pivot and inspiration for my studies.
She was a Machvanka of Serbian Gypsy background, a bright, short, plumpish parrot, propelled to energy and movement by an abiding taste for the good things of life. She knew how to seize the moment and, just a few hours after we met, Lola announced with abrupt decision that we were bound to be best friends. It was hard not to believe her. But her statement amazed me: What did she mean? How could anyone make friends so quickly? It began by phone. My siblings all lived in Seattle and, without hesitation, she called my sisters, my brother, as well as my children, to give them the daily news and keep them informed about what was happening in her family. Appointing herself gossip coordinator, Lola added us to the already appreciable telephone list scribbled on the wall behind her phone in two-inch wobbly and cryptic numbers. She called me from the grocery, the department store, the jeweler’s, dressmaker’s, her son’s house, Katy’s storefront, street corners. She would often call me to come over to her apartment “right now.” “I just fixed the best meal in town, she would say. “What you doing? Studying?”
She did not approve. In her silence I recognized dismay and disapproval at an enterprise resembling inertia, and one lacking the immediate joy of jokes and conversation, human sympathy, financial reward or anything else she cherished.
When she called, my teen-aged children often answered. I’d come home to find a list of messages: “Milo’s got a sla (Saint-day).” “Keka has a baby.” “Come quick, I’m at the sale at Sears.” On the phone her drill-sergeant voice—untempered by the warmth of her expressive face, her curving hands, the rapid swings of her restless samba sandals—could be intimidating. At first my children were uncertain how to respond to queries of “What you doing?” Raised to honor privacy, they found her unfailing intimacy and the flood of personal questions about their lives and their friends disconcerting. They repeated the details of what she said when she called, what they said, and looked to me for direction, trying to get it right. But they likely knew, as children often do and probably better than me, how I really felt about the situation:my admiring dismay, my vexed adoration.
Sometimes when I came in, my daughter would stomp about, tossing her hair-long, brown and ironed curtain straight-in frustration. “She kept me on the phone for an hour!” she complained, and I knew how she felt. Even I couldn’t seem to terminate our conversations. “Now I really must go, Lola,” I’d say, sounded damaging and cold when the voice on the other end was so full of concern, and so devoted to contact.
THE FIRST SIGNIFICANT Gypsy lesson to be learned was that a cold and unfeeling heart is unforgivable. California, not Washington, is the Machvaia people’s community headquarters, and Lola lived alone in North Seattle, far from her aging peers. The Roma in Seattle are of the Vlax-Roma variety—two-thirds of the American Romani population are Vlax-Roma-Gypsies who had been enslaved in Romania for hundreds of years and had developed ample reason for resentment. To the Roma, an old woman living alone implied that no one cared, which was a shame to her family, a slur to the credit of family reputation, a wounding blow to the corporate strength of community life. It was a notion arousing fear and dismay. For whatever happened to any one of their number might happen to them all.
Even still, I can hear this sentiment in the extended phrasing of the Machvaia table songs, addressing the mournful separation from a child, a mother, a husband, songs that were born in the days of traveling. “Alone,” the men sing, “Korkorvo!” clasping one another for support, poignantly dragging out the final syllable.
For Lola, being alone was a recent development. Her early years had been spent in an overloaded wagon, traveling across America with her mother, father and siblings. As a young woman, she had been an invaluable member of her husband’s expanding family unit, his four brothers, their wives, children, aging parents; they slept in tents and traveled, at first by horse and wagon, and then, in a caravan of several cars. Then, she was the mother and central feature of a family of ten growing children living in a single storefront. Now, as the fates would have it, after so much company, laughter, body warmth, conversation, mutual challenge and sharing, she lived alone. She never complained, however. Having been through “all the trouble and misery in the world,” as she defiantly put it, what was left to be afraid of?
At any rate, she claimed to live alone by choice. Bahto, her decorously polite former husband, an ailing old man, bow-tied and fragile, and whose name she never mentioned—she respectfully referred to him as “he”—lived two miles away with Miller, their youngest son, and his family. Daughter Katy’s downtown storefront was a bit farther. Before moving to Los Angeles, Boyd, another son, was about the same distance away. Three children, thirteen grandchildren, one godchild, several cousins, all in the same city. To me, she hardly seemed alone.
When asked why she no longer lived with any of her nearby children, she explained, “I tried it with all my children all over America. That didn’t work. They argued. They said things to each other I shouldn’t hear. I left. I can’t stand arguing.” What she meant, of course, was that their households showed a lack of solicitude for her mental comfort, advancing age and the respect she felt was owed to an elder.
She never stayed home for long, and went everywhere by city bus. Sometimes the routes changed and she got on the wrong bus, and would call to ask in that insistent musical voice if I knew where she was. No, she wasn’t lost, she had been there before, she’d tell me. She was between a gas station and a Safeway. But I struggled to respond to her calls for help. How could I tell which gas station and which Safeway?
She would insist that I drop what I was doing and head off in whatever direction my intuition might suggest, utilizing the mindto- mind connection she presumed was universally given, searching the entire north end of Seattle for her, if necessary. But when I tried, I failed, having not yet developed the psychic radar necessary to give me her whereabouts. Later, when I asked how the lost lady who couldn’t read the street signs managed to get home, she would irritably refuse to say.
I knew I wasn’t her only transportation option; she had others, her customers, her sons, plus one enterprising daughter-in-law, Duda, who could drive. Still I hated to refuse her and she knew it. She may have preferred me to Miller—by tradition, the youngest son has the chief responsibility for the care of the parents—because I was more compliant. This was certainly the case at ceremonial events. There, “good-time Miller” liked to leave last, and Lola liked to leave whenever she liked.
I WAS GRATEFUL, of course, to find the frustrating evenings on Katy’s sofa no longer a necessity for fieldwork. But Lola was demanding, at times even abrasive.
We were oddly matched; her flamboyant appearance attracted more notice that I had ever known or was ever likely to command. Dressed for town, she danced along, perfectly balanced on pretty legs and graceful clear plastic Springolator sandals that conveyed the effect that she was walking on bare toes. She liked vividly printed, soft materials and the unfettered style of plunging necks and flowing lines.
To get enough air, to ensure the chance to breathe and move, as she explained it, she routinely cut down the necklines and armholes in her dresses. Like many older Gypsies who grew up traveling, her body thermostat had been “cold-adjusted” and she never needed a coat or seemed bothered by the cold.
She always left the house well put together. But her accelerating motion and the tipsiness of her pinned-on ringlet soon prevailed. The tucks and dips hand-basted in her bodice added to the slapdash effect. I was so preoccupied with Lola that I didn’t consider how my teenage daughter felt about appearing in public with Carnival-in-Rio Lola. Leslie was at that self-conscious age when her image had to be worriedly addressed in every store window we passed. Even today she admits the pain of being seen with such an eccentric was considerable.
LOLA WAS ACCUSTOMED to challenge. When the linen clerk at I. Magnin (at that time a high-end department store) stared huffily at her outfit, then acted as if she hadn’t heard us, I wanted to complain to the manager. But Lola had a better idea. She insisted on viewing, at slow seated leisure, two dozen tablecloths, unfolded, smoothed and experimentally set with fine china. “No, that’s a little flashy. Now let’s see how the table looks with this pattern over here.”
Lola talked with everyone. And if they averted her eyes to establish a need for privacy, or tried to profess a polite lack of curiosity at the unconventional statement of her dress, she was bound, as she said, to “bring them out.”
Her chutzpah was incredible. She had discovered something I had never before realized, that many people are geared to do exactly as directed. Once, when we had stopped for a red light, Lola rolled down the window on her side and signaled an adjacent truck driver to follow us home. Sputtering in protest, the trucker arrived at her door just behind us and was persuaded to pick up a sofa from Katy’s, four miles away, and deliver it to Lola. Then, while telling his fortune as payment, Lola extracted his promise to return the following weekend to fix the roof “so I won’t have rain where it doesn’t belong.” Later, realizing how a younger woman can be a lure in attracting clients, I suspected I might have been an unwitting agent to the trucker’s compliance.
The smallest thing, like not being able to sign her name, could provide Lola with the opportunity to perform. One day, when we were shopping, she made a number of purchases at the five-and-dime and tried to pay with her Social Security check. Instead of signing her name, she made an X, and while the cashier went for the manager’s authorization, the line of women behind us began to shift and grumble. Lola, hands on hips, assumed a dramatic pose. Her voice rose huskily to reassure her Woolworth audience: “It’s all right. Don’t worry. I’m a responsible woman. I make my own living. I raised ten children here in America, the United States of America. I did it by myself. And without any reading and writing.” She was never too proud to ask for help; it was, I suspect, by virtue of the good will of passing strangers that she had gotten by from day to day and raised all those children. Her insurance against hard times was a continuing network of favors owed and favors given. She was curious about how I had managed to survive with my noblesse oblige policies, my awkwardness at confessing human need, my cavalier attitude toward money.
“You must be lucky,” she decided. When my chronic lack of ready cash challenged this opinion, she suggested I get a job making airplanes at Boeing.
LOLA KNEW EVERYTHING about feelings; the currency of feelings was her specialty. She cried at the sad parts in the movies, sighing audibly, and then during the recounting—she loved the showmanship of telling stories-she cried again. She cried at the sight of little children walking to school in the rain: “Why do they do that, the mothers? They let those babies out by themselves in this terrible weather.”
I took her to see the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Our seats were cheaply bought and high in the balcony, and she kept standing up to see more of the stage. When the good-hearted Tevya agreed to give his lovesick daughter in marriage to a poor tailor, Lola, enthralled, hollered and clapped. “That’s like us! We do that!” my sisters and I cried out. “The older people tell the children who to marry.” Then, realizing everyone was looking, she sat down, unabashed, and lowered her voice only slightly. “But we get paid for the girl! You know that!” Yes, feelings were something Lola never hesitated to share.