Sisters One, Two, Three
Page 6
In Ginger’s opinion the pantry was an awful choice for a secret meeting. For one thing, it was right beside the den, and for another, it had a thin vinyl accordion contraption of a door meant to be kept shut by magnets that had years ago lost their pull. Now, whenever anyone tried to close the door, it immediately retracted. If her father walked by, he could see right in, see them huddled close, staring at the snapshots of the house Glory rented behind his back.
Something about this had gotten Glory so excited she gave off heat, perfuming the small space with a mix of Albolene cleanser, Breck Shampoo, and Je Reviens perfume. Queasy, Ginger sat down, accidentally dislodging her mother’s journal from the shelf behind her. It fell into her lap, splayed open, and she averted her eyes.
Glory’s journal went up with her every night so she could write in it in peace before she went to bed, but during the day it might pop up anywhere. By now, Ginger had seen enough of it to know its contents. Reviews of plays her mother hoped to star in, lists of cities she dreamed of visiting, and musings about her day. It was the last part, the musings, little glimpses inside her mother’s mind, that made Ginger so uncomfortable her body would itch. Her policy now when she spotted the journal: Close it up. Look away. Move on fast.
As Ginger set the journal on a high shelf, Glory ripped open the envelope. On the other side of the wall her father was whistling to the theme song of All in the Family. If she could hear him, why did Glory think he couldn’t hear them?
Her mother passed her a photo of a spindly chair. “That’s an antique,” she explained. Ginger nodded, noncommittal. Glory tapped the next picture, her fingernail polished to a new shade she called mauve. “Roses.” She brought the photograph to her nose and inhaled the imaginary scent of the pale-pink flowers that spilled over a white picket fence. “Divine.” She let out gasps of muted delight as she shuffled through the rest. Porthole windows! Screened-in porch! California King!
Solly’s program broke to commercial. “Where’d everybody go?”
Glory stuffed the photographs back in the envelope, grabbed Ginger’s arm, and whispered, “You know where my jewelry box is?”
Her mother kept her jewelry in a wooden puzzle box hidden in plain sight on her closet floor, but Ginger wasn’t sure she was supposed to know this. “Closet?” Glory nodded and pressed the envelope into Ginger’s hand.
“Think you can figure out how to open the box?”
Another thing Ginger was not sure she should admit. The puzzle box was a gift from a toy manufacturer in Japan. There were four steps to opening it, and Mimi had timed it so Ginger knew she could open it in under a minute. “I can try.”
“Good. Put the pictures in the bottom compartment. Hurry. Go.” She yanked open the accordion door. “I’m making Harvey Wallbangers,” she sang out to Solly. “Be right there.”
“We got drinks?” Solly said. “We got an occasion I don’t know about?”
After the photographs were stashed in the puzzle box, it was easy to pretend the house on Martha’s Vineyard did not exist. But that daydream ended one morning when Ginger came down to breakfast and found Outside Glory in her favorite dress, a floral number that showed a peek of cleavage and emphasized her tiny waist.
“Look how beautiful.” Glory opened her journal to show Solly photographs mounted with black corners on one page, and on the other, an advertisement of a beach, cut out of a magazine.
“What do we got here?” Solly asked.
After Glory broke the news, she tried to soften the blow. “Just one month. Just July.”
“I’m supposed to go away for a month when I got shipments coming every day?”
“You won’t stay a month,” Glory told him. She was smiling, but it wasn’t real. “You’ll come the first week and after that you’ll come weekends. With Paul Clarke. That’s what men do, Solly. They come weekends.” Her face looked serene, and for a moment Ginger was tricked into thinking she was happy.
This time when Glory stood up, she rose so fast her chair toppled over. For a moment they all stared at it, the chair on its side on the floor, like some kind of kitchen roadkill. “If I don’t get out of here, so help me god I will—”
“No.” Solly cut her off. “We’ll go. That’s it. We’re going.”
And so it was decided.
CHAPTER SIX
They had just finished dinner—Richard was clearing the table, Ginger was loading the dishwasher—when the side door opened. After three nights at Angie’s, Julia was back. No explanation, just a brief nod to her parents—what that meant, Ginger had no idea—and up she went, disappearing into her room.
Had positive thinking actually worked? Ginger gave it another try. “Do you think this means the Nick thing is over?”
The answer came in the form of a sharp rap at the front door. Richard answered it. The boy walked in, grunted hello, and went up the stairs, two at a time. Ginger heard Julia’s squeal of delight and recalibrated. Was Julia home because Angie’s mom finally realized she was being played?
It didn’t matter. They had a new problem now. Without discussion or permission—was this a permission situation?—Nick set up semipermanent residence in their house. Now when Julia came home from school, Nick was with her. Every night at dinner, Nick sat down and joined them. And as if they were in some kind of reverse fairy tale, he stayed until just before the clock struck twelve.
Most nights, Ginger and Richard were in bed by eleven, but Ginger wouldn’t fall asleep until she heard the sound of the boy clomping down the stairs. He wasn’t quiet—it wasn’t as if he was sneaking out—but sometimes she had to strain to hear the door close over the sound of Richard’s snoring. It really was galling that Richard could drop off to sleep while the boy was still across the hall in Julia’s room.
Ever the adapter, Ginger made accommodations. Cooking for four was not that different from cooking for three, and after she explained to Nick that they didn’t wear shoes inside the house—a quirk of Richard’s that she understood—he was pretty good at remembering to leave his disintegrating sneakers on the metal shoe tray near the door. The hardest part was watching Julia trail after him like a pet as he lumbered from their refrigerator to their basement to her bedroom. She’d made a brief attempt at declaring Julia’s bedroom a “No Nick Zone” but surrendered that point after Julia replied, “No problem. We’ll hang out at Nick’s instead.”
This wasn’t the solution Ginger had in mind, and it gave her pause. Why weren’t they hanging out at Nick’s?
Nick gave her the answer. “We can go to my house now if you want. But my mom’s home. It’s going to smell.” He turned to Ginger. “My mom smokes and the smell makes Julia sick.”
At least there was that to be grateful for. Julia didn’t like the smell of cigarettes. And while she was being all positive-thinking about it, she might as well also be grateful that so far Julia kept her bedroom door open and so far there’d been no appeals for the boy to spend the night. Those were her new lines in the sand, though the possibility of Julia crossing them hovered like a threat.
To minimize her distress, Ginger tried to make the sight of Nick go blurry. She could do that if she concentrated, turn the actual boy padding around her house into a vague tall shadow. And Nick, it appeared, had figured out a way to do the same with her.
Richard developed a different strategy for dealing with their unwelcome house guest, a combination of a things could be worse attitude and a sudden spike in late nights at the office. Dinner went back to a threesome, Ginger reduced to an appendage.
When the line in the sand was finally crossed—Julia closed her door with Nick inside her room—Richard wasn’t home. This left Ginger standing her ground alone, in the hall, knocking hard on her daughter’s door.
“Jules? Open the door.” She knocked again. “Sorry, Jules, but your door has to stay open.” She waited another moment. “I’m coming in.” She gave them one more warning. “I’m opening the door now.” She squinted, afraid of what she’d see.
Julia jumped up and the headphones split in half. “God.”
“Door has to stay open. Understood?”
It was Nick who answered, “Sure.”
She waited an hour to check. This time the door was closed but not latched, a technicality, really, but by then she was too tired to start a new round of battle, so she let it be.
When Richard came home, he was surprisingly unsympathetic. “What were they doing wrong?” he asked. “They were on the computer, right? How is that bad?”
She chalked up his brusque tone to another bad day at work.
That night, as she lay in bed waiting for Nick to go—his departure, she noticed, had now slid to one o’clock—Ginger decided this business of having the door shut but not latched was plain wrong. Same went for the new departure time. She made a list in her head of nonnegotiable rules and turned to share it with Richard. “You awake?”
His reply was a snore that sounded fake. Okay. It didn’t matter. Her decision was made. She would handle this on her own.
The next night at half past eight—Richard at work as usual—Ginger was in the living room catching up on back issues of the American Journal of Public Health when she heard movement above.
Upstairs, her suspicions were confirmed. The door was shut but not latched. This time she entered without knocking. “Sorry.”
Julia looked up. “What?”
“Sorry, but shut is the same as closed.”
Julia shrugged and went back to what she was doing.
Ginger surveyed the scene. They were sitting on the floor. Julia’s computer was on Nick’s lap. Nick had on a new set of headphones—probably because the other set broke. Julia was cutting up a bedsheet. Before Ginger could figure out why Julia would cut up a bedsheet, her attention was drawn back to Nick. He was fiddling with a helmet. The helmet had wings sprouting from the ears.
Nick, she now noticed, was wearing something other than his usual torn shirt. He had on a jacket, military-looking, though what branch she couldn’t place. The jacket was old, the material shiny, with maroon epaulettes, and on one sleeve, just below the shoulder, a crest with a bar and stars.
She glanced over and saw Julia was wearing an identical jacket, though hers had a pin on the lapel. It was the letter S. Ginger took a moment and put it all together. “You’re wearing Salvation Army uniforms. Did you join the Salvation Army?”
“Very funny,” Julia said, but she didn’t look up.
“And why are you cutting up my sheet?”
“We bought the jackets today,” Nick said. “Cool, right? Wait, that’s your sheet?”
Julia set down the scissors. “I don’t think you want to know the answer.”
Ginger felt her cheeks flush. Julia was both wrong and right. She absolutely did want to know, but she also absolutely did not. “Door stays open,” she told Julia. “Or Nick goes home.”
She was back in the living room, eyes skimming over words in the magazine without taking them in, when Julia and Nick ran down the stairs and, without a word to her, retreated to the basement. When Ginger opened that door and brought down a load of laundry so small no one could be fooled into thinking it was worth washing, she found them sitting surrounded by toys. There was an American Girl doll, a doll suitcase, a doll cello, an old coffee can filled with markers, a decade of forgotten craft kits, modeling clay, glitter, string art. In the middle of it all was a garbage bag, which Julia seemed to be methodically filling with the remnants of her childhood.
Ginger deposited the laundry basket on the washing machine and headed back upstairs. As she passed them, she saw they were texting and laughing. Were they texting each other about her?
“You have to help me out here,” she told Richard later, in bed, after she filled him in on what happened while he was at work. “Can you come home early tomorrow? Talk to her, maybe? See if you can find out what’s going on? She’ll talk to you.”
Richard sighed. “Okay.” He closed his eyes. “I’ll try.” He turned on his side, giving her his back. “But I really don’t think it will help.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The house letter arrived; three single-spaced pages of instructions. Beach towels would be provided; they needed to bring linens. Windows should be closed each time they left the house; sudden storms could blow in without warning. The wooden pegs in the outdoor shower were coming loose; never use them. Glory read that part, twice. “Outdoor shower. Imagine.”
As soon as the school year ended, Ginger’s mother’s-helper hours were expanded. But the Clarke kitchen was no longer a sanctuary because now, every day around lunchtime, Glory showed up, journal in hand, to find out everything Evelyn knew about Martha’s Vineyard. Ginger didn’t have to be asked to give up her seat at the kitchen counter. Her mother slipped onto her stool the second Ginger got off and the questions began: which beaches have the best sunset, which farm stand has the best fruit, which church has the best lobster rolls.
One week before departure day, Glory’s planning ratcheted up and Ginger’s duties got a downgrade back to watching Thomas watch TV. As she reluctantly made her way to the Clarke’s den, she heard her mother ask, “What about secret places? Any places where famous people like to go? Like Lillian Hellman, for example?”
Thomas turned up the TV, so Ginger never heard the answer to that one. But Thomas did explain the reason his uncle Casper wasn’t around: he’d already left for the Vineyard. That’s what the Clarkes called it, the Vineyard, or else, the Island, as if there was only one. He also explained that while Ginger’s family was going up the following Friday and his family was supposed to go up the day after that, there was a problem with his family going. What the problem was, he didn’t say, and Ginger decided it was best not to ask.
The day before they were to leave, Glory marched into the Clarkes’ kitchen, opened her journal, and showed Evelyn what was written inside: one word too big for Ginger to miss, KAPUT, in the center of the page, block letters colored in with a black Bic pushed down so hard the paper at the top of the T was torn. Ginger lingered on her way to the den, listening in.
“That’s all he said. The plan is kaput. Can’t get away. Trouble in toy land.”
Ginger could hear the curious tone of Evelyn’s question and then the sharp words of her mother’s answer. “Beats me. First it was, a shipment went missing. Then it was, some big-shot competitor went under and the inventory is up for grabs. Whole thing smells like rotten fish.”
At home that night, with Solly still at work, Glory served them an early dinner, five foil trays of Salisbury steak and buttered mashed potatoes with a compartment of green beans, which they all, even Glory, passed over to get to the apple cobbler. “It’s fine,” she told them as she scraped out the last of the dessert from the ridges of the small square. “We’ll go without him. Don’t give me those puppy eyes,” she told Callie. “He’ll come when he can. Next weekend, I’m sure. Now go pack. Pack to blend in. Imagine the kind of person who has a beach house and bring that.” They cleared their tins and scattered to pick out clothes.
While Charlie jammed T-shirts and shorts into a couple of sand buckets and then snuck out to hide the ant farm on the floor in the backseat of the car where Glory wouldn’t see it, Ginger headed to the spidery storage side of the basement in search of a suitcase. She found Mimi down there too, lugging a green monstrosity of a valise to the stairs.
“Not that one,” Ginger told her. “Take something smaller.”
“But we’re supposed to blend in, right? Only what do they wear? Should I bring my skorts? My peasant blouses
? My huaraches? I don’t know. You don’t know.”
Glory came to the top of the stairs. “Girls? Is something wrong?” And they both called up, “No.”
Since she couldn’t convince Mimi to pack light, Ginger evened things out by taking less herself. Although she had bought into the hope that her mother truly would be happier when they got to the rental house, there was no guarantee. Keeping things orderly and calm would at least improve the chances for a positive outcome. She took care of Callie’s packing after she finished her own, grabbing what seemed a reasonable amount of clothes and squishing them in beside hers in the small suitcase she picked because it wouldn’t impose on the other luggage in the car.
As it turned out, Glory didn’t care who packed what. She also didn’t care who left orange peels on the kitchen table, who asked for Bosco and didn’t drink it, and who forgot to flush the toilet, again. Even when Solly came home and immediately fell asleep in front of the TV, her good mood stuck firm.
Departure day, it was rise and shine at the crack of dawn. Glory presented Solly with a buttered bialy toasted the way he liked it, nearly burnt, and kissed him noisily inches from his lips. Solly slid his arm around her torso and swept her into a dip and a spin.
“Aw, Solly.” She playfully pushed him away. “You’ll hurt your foot.” She got his hat, stuck it on his head, and opened the door.
“Don’t use up all the fun before I get there,” he teased. “Don’t forget to leave me the number. Don’t forget to call soon as you’re in the house so I can hear how nothing went wrong on the way. You’re a good driver,” he added quickly. “But the other drivers, I’m not so sure.”
“I’ll leave the number. But if I don’t call soon as we get there, it might be because the phone isn’t turned on yet. Don’t give yourself agita,” she told Solly, who’d stopped, halfway out the door. “The house letter said the phone’s been off, but they’re turning it on for the season today. It just didn’t say what time.”