She always surprised.
That first day I met her, she came up to me in the classroom, stood in front of me and said, “My name is Ginger.”
I remember staring at her and mumbling, “It can’t be.” I thought ‘Ginger’ was what people named their cats, not their children.
She was certainly new in school. I’d never laid eyes on her before; but it wasn’t the shock of her arrival, it was Ginger herself who amazed, then as always. Her hair was auburn. It wasn’t that burnished copper that shone in the sun like Mary Ellen Ryan’s. It had a soft, earthy intensity to it and fell in long spirals around her shoulders like a mane. Her eyes were green, unless you saw them under the ceiling lights in the library. Then they were yellow. Her skin was dusted here and there with tiny beige specks. It looked like a jar of cinnamon flew open leaving its precious powder all over her.
She moved in a faint aroma of something delicious , though it wasn’t any of the perfumes my sisters or mother liked. I was up on all the top fragrances of the day. I asked her what she was wearing and she said, “Bermuda Spice.”
“Girls don’t wear aftershave,” I told her; “men do.”
“I wear what I like,” she announced calmly.
How did Ginger find me? Who knows? Just like the feline ancestors I was convinced she’d come from, she made up her mind about me and I had no say in the matter. We became ‘best friends’ for the next six years of school. The relationship didn’t require any collaboration. I was never sure why she needed me around at all; but I was addicted to her looks and her mystery, and she seemed to prefer my attachment to anyone else’s. Perhaps it was my naïveté and the ease with which she lead me astray that attracted her. I was always the one who got punished for her escapades. It didn’t seem unfair to me at the time; she was so much faster and smarter than I. My parents weren’t always pleased with our ‘friendship’, but Ginger knew how to rub them the right way too, so she got around them somehow.
The smoking incident was the one that almost blew us apart. My mother claimed it was doing it on the roof where we could have been killed or burned the house down, not the smoking itself, that kept me locked up in my room after school every day for a month. Ginger just went about her business; but she was there waiting for me under my window on the day they let me out. I was surprised she’d come back. Our relationship survived many challenges until the hurricane.
We had a lot of storms in those days; pretty much every fall, and twice a month until winter. We were used to them, but that didn’t mean we took them for granted. In the absence of all the environmental studies we have now, and all the nomenclature from ‘Tropical Storm’ to “Micro Burst’, we knew that all hurricanes had the potential to be deadly by the seashore. Every one of them produced leaking windows and roofs (the flood used to pour in down the stairs like the falls at Niagara) and the aftermath when we drove around to assess the damage to our town was predictably overwhelming. Huge elms always lay across the roads with their roots exposed, as if the storm raped them and left them bare for all to see. We never got power back for days, which meant we were very tired of playing board games and entertaining each other by the time we got out.
That year of the special hurricane we were fourteen. The storm was so destructive it kept us inside for five days. Ginger’s parents had gone to Europe to visit family and she was staying with us. Either the unusual barometric pressure or the strain of living indoors for so long, both difficult for someone with her feline proclivities, brought out Ginger’s true colors. They were not pretty. She was fussy and argumentative; and worst of all she snatched everyone else’s food. We were down to some careful rationing, and the day she ate all the baking powder biscuits and eggs seemed the last straw; but it wasn’t.
Suddenly I realized I couldn’t find her anywhere. My sister said she’d seen her prowling around the back door. We climbed into the car, even though it was too soon to do the after-storm tour of the neighborhood, and I’ll never forget the sight of Ginger when we finally spotted her, leaping from limb to limb on one of the huge old trees drowned by the hurricane. The water was half way up the trunk and she capered through the wet branches lying horizontal on the road. Gusts of wind still hurled sticks through the air, and shredded leaves clung to everything, including Ginger’s hair, like green confetti. She didn’t exactly look happy; just free.
Back home my mother’s panic and relief exploded in a maelstrom of rage over Ginger’s foolishness and lack of responsibility. What was she thinking? She does as she pleases, I said; but I didn’t understand at the time either. We both drifted further apart in school. That gave me time to make new friends like Billy Williams. He said he was glad I wasn’t hanging out with Ginger anymore. When I asked why, he said because she was wild and crazy. Then he added it gave us more time to be together. I was glad it was about me and not her, but she wasn’t crazy.
Looking at the flyleaf inside my school’s new Alumnae Bulletin just arrived, I’m struck by a blurred picture of Ginger on the In Memoriam page. She moved too fast for any camera to catch her. The text below the picture says she’d gone hiking (alone, naturally) on Mt. Hood and been lost in a freak snowstorm. She’d never been found.
Like most feral spirits, she did what she liked and had a very short life.
I am not surprised.
By Sidney S. Stark