by Nancy Star
“You know what, Solly? You’re right.” Glory unbuttoned her most recent prize, a kelly-green raincoat. “Actions speak louder than words. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.”
“Think of what?” He sounded a little alarmed.
“A fresh start. That’s all she needs. A new school. You know, I read you can enroll your child in any public school you want, long as you pay tuition. Which we can, now that I’m working.”
“I don’t know. How much is tuition?”
Glory didn’t answer. She was busy flipping through the yellow pages, writing down the names and numbers of all the elementary schools in the surrounding towns. “One of these schools is going to be a lucky duck, getting Callie as a student in the fall.”
After several nights at the kitchen table with a calculator, Solly worked out that in order to pay tuition he would need to supplement their income, so he started taking on odd jobs on the weekends. Now they never knew where he might pop up. One day he was across the street, mowing a lawn. Another day, there he was, bulbous shoes balancing on the rungs of a ladder as he cleaned out muck from the gutter of a house around the block. One Sunday, on a trip to the mall, Glory pulled into an Exxon station, called to the attendant to check her oil, and there he was, Solly sticking his head next to her window saying, “What? No hello?” Now, along with the smell of onions, her father carried with him the faint odor of gasoline.
It was the doctor who suggested her father get a hobby to unwind in his spare time, but the one Solly picked wasn’t like the projects other fathers did. It wasn’t replacing rotted fence pickets or battling the crawl of ivy that kept displacing the mortar from the brick.
Solly’s project revealed itself first with a primitive sketch on a napkin, and shortly after that, with a delivery of rocks deposited in the driveway. After that he began, one stone at a time, building a wall along the front perimeter of their small patch of lawn. Ginger fretted about her mother’s reaction, but when Glory came home from work and saw what he’d started, all she did was cross her arms and say, “Why so piddly, Solly? Why not bigger rocks?” from which Ginger deduced the project had already been approved.
Once the base was finished and work on the upper wall began, Ginger wondered if her mother actually saw the wall at all, because surely if she did, she would have made him stop. Instead she let him go on and so, legs astride the metal folding chair he’d dragged to the sidewalk, Solly continued cementing stones, one atop the other, into narrow jagged peaks that from a distance looked like piles of dripping sand.
It was summer, two years after the accident, when Solly called everyone into the den to watch the evening news. Ginger was the only one who came. She made herself comfortable on the floor, leaning against her father’s chair as Walter Cronkite spoke to the nation.
“Good evening. President Nixon will announce his resignation tonight and Vice President Ford will become the nation’s thirty-eighth president tomorrow.”
“Get your mother.”
Ginger found her mother in bed, journal on lap, pen in her mouth, thinking.
“Mom is busy,” Ginger reported after Glory shooed her away. “She’ll come soon.”
Solly nodded. Although Ginger had never heard him say a single nice word about the president, it was clear from his pallor this resignation was a big deal. She lay on her stomach, head resting in the V of her hands, and watched as Dan Rather continued the report: “According to his staff, unless the president has a sudden change of head and heart—”
“Tell your mother she has to come now,” Solly said.
Her mother was on the phone, but Ginger pressed her father’s case. “He said you have to come. The president is resigning.” Glory cupped her free ear, which Ginger understood meant, Stop interrupting and leave me alone.
“She’ll be here in a minute,” Ginger lied. She returned to her position on the floor and noted how grim Dan Rather looked as he shared the news.
“On a Potomac cruise aboard the yacht Sequoia, his daughters urged him not to do it. He agreed to reconsider.”
“Will he?” Ginger liked the idea of a president who listened to his daughters.
“As of this hour,” Dan Rather answered her, “he has not changed his mind.”
Suddenly, this was all Ginger wanted, for the president of the United States to change his mind because of his daughters. “Do you think he might change his mind?”
Her father grunted a reply, which Ginger understood meant, Shh. I’m trying to hear.
“Last night,” Dan Rather continued, “at a family dinner upstairs in the White House, some of the family was in tears.”
This was almost impossible to imagine, the family of the president of the United States in tears. “Does he mean watery eyes or actual tears going down their cheeks?” This time when her father didn’t answer, she turned around. She noticed right away that his eyes were unfocused, but it took several moments for her brain to sort out the rest.
As the medics lifted Solly’s body onto the stretcher, Richard Nixon declared, “I have never been a quitter.” As they carried Solly out of the den, Richard Nixon said, “In passing this office to the vice president, I do so with a profound sense of the weight of responsibility that will fall on his shoulders tomorrow.”
“He fainted. That’s all,” Glory insisted and the president said, “As he assumes that responsibility, he will deserve the help and the support of all of us.”
When the medics finally got her to understand her husband was dead, Glory’s knees buckled. They offered to take her to the hospital but she declined, so they helped her to the couch.
There was much clattering—first the gurney’s wheels got stuck on the molding in the threshold of the den, and after that it banged into the wall in the narrow front hall—but finally, Solly Tangle’s corpse left the house.
Without being asked, Ginger went to the kitchen and filled a bowl with ice water. She came back and placed a cool washcloth on her mother’s pale forehead. “Heal the wounds,” Nixon said as Glory stood up, letting the washcloth fall to the floor. “Put the bitterness behind us,” he beseeched the American people, as she headed for the stairs. “Rediscover those shared ideals,” the president implored, as Mimi and Callie called from the kitchen, where they’d been hiding, “Is it safe to come out?”
“Yes,” Ginger told them. They sat together, three sisters huddled close, crying freely, as Richard Nixon promised the return of their strength and their unity as a great and free people.
Later that night Ginger considered calling Evelyn because, surely, Evelyn would want to know. But though Evelyn had promised she’d write, she never did. And Ginger, who had no idea how to go about looking for someone, knew better than to ask.
At the funeral she met many people she’d never heard of and a few she rarely saw. From her father’s side there was Clara, his sister who lived in Chicago. Clara was the one who sent dollar bills in birthday cards every year, the one they had to call to say thank you, which was awkward. There were also the cousins who lived on Long Island who felt so terrible they never visited that Ginger ended up comforting them. From her mother’s side there was only one person, Glory’s Aunt Ida, a tall, thin woman who sat by herself for the entire funeral with a look of such terror on her face, no one came near her.
By the time they got home from the cemetery, one more chair had been removed from the kitchen table, though by whom Ginger had no idea.
Glory did not wallow. At the end of her first week as a widow she went back to work. The sisters did their part, trying not to look too sad in front of her, and also not to look too happy. But at night, when they were alone in their room, one or the other and sometimes all three would slide under the covers, to muffle the sound of their sorrow.
In September, Glory surprised them by announcing Callie was not changing schools after all. This came after a long meeting with Miss Mackeral, the guidance counselor prison guard who Glory succeeded in turning into an ally. Ginger suspected
this had something to do with her father’s death. The latest sad event seemed to change how Callie was seen, from being a problem child to being a girl in need of rescue. Accommodations were made, a kind teacher selected, class friendships socially engineered. None of it worked. Callie continued to leave school in the middle of the day two or three times a week.
By January of that year, Ginger, Callie’s self-appointed search and rescuer, was labeled a chronic cutter. The punishment was afternoon detention. This presented a problem. If Ginger wasn’t home after school to distract her, Callie would roam the neighborhood, no matter the weather. Ginger solved the problem once she realized no one got detention for staying home sick. The first few times she faked it, but after a while her stomach cramps felt real.
Glory had no idea Ginger was playing sick, but she did notice she wasn’t eating much and cautioned her to watch it. “Gaunt cheeks are not becoming on a long face.”
Soon after that, Mimi joined in, the two sisters working out a schedule of alternating sick days so that one of them could always be on watch for Callie. It didn’t take long for Miss Mackeral to figure out their scheme. The consequences were swift.
“You heard me.” Glory paced back and forth in the small den. “You’re over the limit on absences. You have to repeat the year. All of you.” The girls stared into their laps. “Warden Mackeral says you’re bad for each other. Says I should split you up. I asked her which one of you she wants to adopt, but she wasn’t amused. As if one girl in trouble wasn’t enough. Now I got an epidemic on my hands.” She went on to rail about Mr. Freeze, who’d blown his top when she told him she had to miss work for another school meeting. Ginger wasn’t sure which problem was upsetting her more.
Her mother’s solution was to ask Mr. Freeze if she could go back to working part-time. But her former champion was no longer interested in making accommodations for her chaotic home life. These were tough days, he told her. Newark stores were shutting down. Widow or no widow, one troublemaker at home or three, part-time was not an option. And if she continued to miss work, full-time would be at risk too.
Minders were hired to watch the girls after school, but none of the women could manage to keep up with Callie’s expert disappearing acts. And so the next incarnation of Glory Tangle arrived: a woman in charge. With no one to consult or convince, she made swift plans.
“Your father was right. They don’t give Callie enough to do. That’s why she walks out of school all the time. She likes being outside better, and they haven’t come up with a single reason for her to stay in. Who can blame her? But I found a place. A very good place.” And with that, Callie was packed up and shipped off to a boarding school in Massachusetts that specialized in young children with theatrical talent.
Ginger wrote Callie a letter the day she left, but Glory put the kibosh on mailing it, quoting from an information packet she’d received from the school. “Families aren’t supposed to send letters before a student is acclimated,” she explained. “Letters from home to unsettled students can make homesickness worse. They say to wait—to let Callie write us first.”
So Ginger waited. But just like with Evelyn, no letter arrived.
When parents’ weekend at the boarding school came around, Glory explained that Callie wasn’t ready to see her sisters. “Too hard on her. Besides, you know how it is when the three of you get together. It’s like a tornado. Someone always gets hurt. So you concentrate on you, and I’ll concentrate on her. I’m counting on you, Gingie,” she added later, when they were alone. “I don’t think I can bear it if one more thing goes wrong. Pinky swear, nothing more will.” Ginger pinky swore and Glory left and nothing went the slightest bit amiss.
When Glory came back from parents’ weekend out of sorts, Ginger asked if she’d done something wrong. Her mother shook her head so Ginger braved another question. “Did Callie?”
“Listen to yourself. Isn’t a person allowed to be down in the dumps? I mean, with all I’ve been through.”
Any mention of Callie seemed to bring the same response. The message was clear: the only way to keep their mother out of the dumps was not to mention Callie at all.
Ever the trooper, Glory bounced back. She kept her job, but Mr. Freeze lost his. Her new manager liked the idea of part-time so Glory cut back her hours. When her theater group got the opportunity to go on tour, she managed to convince her new boss that it would enhance her value to her clients if she took time off to work as an actress. Every time she left to go on tour, she made Ginger pinky swear nothing would go wrong at home. And nothing ever did.
For a while, Ginger and Mimi continued to talk about Callie when they were alone, wondering what her school was like, if she had any friends, if she thought about them as much as they thought about her. But one day Glory overheard them.
“Your sister is fine. This endless harping about her has to stop. Understand? Not another bird.”
“Another word?” Ginger asked.
Glory’s hands went to her temples. “I really don’t think I can stand this anymore.”
It had been challenging when Ginger and Mimi had to learn not to mention Charlie in front of their mother, but their years of practice paid off now. With Callie’s absence, the silence came easier. Ginger had an advantage. College was coming into sight. She focused hard on making her time at home as painless as possible. Everything was going along fine until Mimi asked when Callie was coming back for Christmas break.
Glory answered in a voice both calm and threatening. “I’ll say this once and never again. In acting school they go on trips during breaks. Right now, they’re in Canada cheering up people in nursing homes. I’m done with questions. I mean it. One more and, swear to god, I’ll lose my mind for good.”
So it was that by the time Ginger left for college, she had completely absorbed the idea of a new composition of her family, this time with Callie erased.
Her first night of freshman year, Ginger and her roommate Randee stayed up until dawn telling each other the stories of their lives. Randee, a perky blonde from upstate New York, started them off with a benign question. “How many brothers and sisters?”
Without missing a beat, Ginger looked her in the eye and answered, “One. My sister, Mimi. That’s it. Just one.” The lie slipped out easily, and Ginger was happy to let it become true.
PART TWO
FROM NOW ON
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Echo’s anxious breath filled the car as he paced the narrow backseat. When his whining increased to a high-pitched frantic bark, Ginger got out. She needed air. The dog immediately settled. A moment later he was up again, poking his head through the open window, barking.
“Fine,” Ginger told him. “I’ll look for her. But you can’t come. Callie said you’re not allowed on Charlie’s beach.” She shook off a chill. “I’m not going on the sand. I’m just going as far as the path.” Her tone seemed to satisfy him. He thumped down on the seat, head on paws.
“I can’t believe I just had a conversation with a dog,” Ginger said to no one.
As she walked to the path, Echo tracked her movement with his eyes.
The path to the beach was made of thin slats of wood, which the wind had dusted with sand, like a sprinkling of sugar. Head down, Ginger hurried. The path climbed in a gentle grade and at the highest point, when the wood slats stopped, she stopped too. Ahead of her, the sand snaked through high grass. Beyond the grass it spread out like a threat.
Her gaze skipped to the sea where, amid ribbons of teal, navy, and aquamarine, she could make out the bobbing heads of children in the surf. Their bellies slapped hard on boogie boards while their parents stood guard at the shoreline with watchful eyes, as if they could stop the waves with love. She scanned the water—no one was in trouble—and looked toward the cliffs.
Had it been a trick of memory? Were the giant rocks that loomed so large, the red-tinted fortress past which she and Mimi so stubbornly refused to go, nothing more than this: a few narrow towers of co
mpacted earth with enough space between them for a car to drive through? Was Callie there now, behind this disappointment of a cliff?
A noise caught her attention. Was it a dog? Was it Echo barking? No. That was impossible. There was no way she could hear him all the way here, not with the noise of the ocean and the wind. She pictured him anyway, Echo barking himself into a frenzy, jumping out of the car to look for her, landing wrong, whimpering and hurt. She turned around and hurried back.
Callie was sitting in the car waiting, her hands on the wheel.
“Were you at the cliffs?” Ginger asked as she got in. “The cliffs are so small. I remember them as huge.”
“They were huge. There’s been erosion.” Callie started the engine. “I didn’t go that way. I went in the other direction.”
“What were you looking for?”
Callie swiveled around to check behind her. “Didn’t find it. But I got in a run. I needed a run.” She slowly backed out and Ginger saw a flicker of a look she recognized, the lost look she knew from the faces of the children who didn’t fare well.
She wanted to reach out and touch her sister, wanted to tell her it was okay to feel sad, that feeling sad when your mother dies is normal. She wanted to say, even a happy reunion with a sister could feel strange if the sisters hadn’t seen each other for years. But she didn’t say any of it because she got it. This thing she did, her empathy and concern, turned out to have the unfortunate consequence of driving people away.
“It’s not far to the house,” Callie said as she pulled out of the lot. Minutes later, she turned down a rutted lane. The car bucked into a narrow gulley and then rocked onto steadier ground. Gnarly bushes scraped against the doors as if in protest. Echo nuzzled Callie’s neck and she made another turn. Tires crunched on crushed shells and pea gravel. Callie pulled into a clearing and parked.