Mother, Sister, Wife, Daughter

Our father gave each of us a different reason for his departure. He told Katherine that he was taking part in a worldwide sailing race. He told Emilia that he was looking for treasure so our family could become even richer. He told Gracie, the oldest, that a dear friend needed his help on the other side of the ocean.

We knew better than to believe anything he said. Our father was a storyteller, a wishful thinker, a chronic promiser who never followed through. He loved nothing more than spinning a tale with himself at the center, believing in the moment that he was what he pretended to be: a treasure hunter, a rescuer, a good man. He pulled each of us aside, all seven of his daughters, and we listened stone-faced and only nodded. No matter how he dressed it up, he was leaving us.

We were stair-step in age: Gracie nine years old, Rosalind only three, with Carla, Dolores, Leah, Katherine, and Emilia in the middle. We lived in a big house—a mansion, really, though Mother said that word was vulgar—on the California coast. A private stretch of beach. Our own pier. Father moored his yacht there during the summers. He used to take us on day trips to the deep water, all seven of us armored in bulky life jackets, screaming and laughing as the prow sliced boldly through the waves, casting up cold shocks of spray. He taught us to fish, even Katherine, who was a vegetarian. He called us his brave girls, his amazons, the apples of his eye. That was something else he loved: giving out lavish compliments, as bright and insubstantial as fool’s gold.

We watched him sail away. It was early morning, and a brisk, steady wind blew off the ocean. We stood together on the western terrace, high above the water, huddled close for warmth. Rosalind, the youngest, cried. The sun was rising behind the house, throwing shadows across the beach. Father’s yacht cut a sharp wake across the gauzy surface of the sea like a run in one of Mother’s silk stockings. We watched him until he melted into the fog along the horizon, swallowed up by gray.

○

People said that there were so many of us daughters because our parents kept trying for a boy. Perhaps this was so. We did not know; we never could get a straight answer from our mother or father about anything. Father would smile and tell us whatever we wanted to hear: that every one of his girls was worth a hundred boys, that you couldn’t have too much of a good thing.

Mother was more difficult. She faltered and trailed off. Her mind did not move in straight lines. “Well, you see . . .” she would say, leaning languidly against the arm of the sofa. “There are many things in this world . . . I suppose . . . Let me say that between a husband and his wife, decisions are sometimes difficult . . .” She would go on this way for a quarter of an hour and communicate nothing.

All of us were built on the same template as our mother: strong and sturdy, with heavy black hair and round faces. Our father did not seem to have given us any of himself—not his slight frame, not his darting eyes, not his Cheshire cat grin. He was an impish figure, dwarfed by our tall, voluptuous mother. The only one who resembled him in any way was Emilia, and then only in manner—she was mischievous like him, a prankster. It was just like our father to withhold his genetic makeup. He was always doing that, keeping back what we most wanted.

After his yacht disappeared from sight, the seven of us gathered in our parents’ room. Mother had taken to her bed. She was a strange mix of opposites: a diaphanous, dithering personality inside the robust body of a farmhand or milkmaid. Hale and pink-cheeked, she languished beneath the covers with a hankie to her nose. The bed could hold all of us, a king-sized canopied behemoth that Father had ordered specially, each of its four posts carved to resemble a sword. We climbed up on the opulent quilt, surrounding our mother like a litter of kittens seeking warmth. Only Gracie, the oldest, elected to stand.

“When will Father be back?” Leah asked.

“Well, you see . . .” Mother began. “He and I have had many talks . . .”

“Will he come home soon?” Carla asked. “He wouldn’t tell us.”

“It isn’t always possible . . . What I mean is that it may be some time before . . .” Mother trailed off, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief.

“He’s never coming back, is he?” Gracie asked, standing apart.

Rosalind began to cry again. Gracie gathered up her little body and carried her out of the room.

○

Father had promised to write or call when he got where he was going. But Father promised lots of things. He once swore to Gracie she’d get a pony, that it was on its way, being shipped cross-country on a special train, coming soon. He said these things for months until she understood that it was never going to happen. He told Leah that he’d give her the moon, but it remained in the sky night after night, unclaimed. All Father really wanted was the generosity of the offering itself. Follow-through did not interest him. Still, it was hard not to believe him when he ignited the full arsenal of his charm. In spite of ourselves, we each craved the white-hot glow of his attention.

There was no way for us to contact him. He was out on the open ocean now, without an address or a phone number. Shortwave radio might have worked if he were near the shore, but he wasn’t; we’d watched him travel beyond such things.

Without Father, the house seemed bigger than ever. Twenty-one bedrooms, fewer than half of them occupied. Two grand, winding staircases at the front entrance and a third in back for the servants. The decor was lovely but lacking in personality. Matching upholstered chairs. Heavy damask curtains. Bland portraits of people we did not know. Ours was new money, and it showed, according to one of Gracie’s former friends who’d turned her nose up on her one and only visit to our house.

Now it was just ourselves and our mother rattling around that vast estate like beads in a rainstick. There were, of course, the butler and the gardener and the chauffeur and the maids and the cook too, but they rarely spoke to us or we to them. Dolores always tried to be friendly, asking after their children and remembering their birthdays, but it did no good. We were their bosses, more or less, and there’s nothing worse than making small talk with a little girl who could get you fired.

It was summer. Father abandoned us in the middle of June, when Gracie, Dolores, Katherine, and Leah were out of school. Carla, Emilia, and Rosalind were too young to have attended anyway. He abandoned us when we had nothing to do but wander the house and notice all the signs of his absence. No surreptitious wink at the dinner table. No quick step on the stairs. No outrageous stories before bedtime.

Leah believed he would come back soon. She spent hours on the western terrace, staring out at the shifting waves until her eyes ached. Carla brought her snacks and sat with her sometimes, less hopeful but unwilling to give up. Gracie said he was gone for good, and the sooner we accepted it, the better. Emilia refused to commit herself either way. She always kept an open mind about everything. She carried a coin in her pocket and tossed it every time someone brought up our father. Heads, he’d be back tomorrow. Tails, never.

Dolores and Katherine suffered nightmares about sea monsters and whirlpools. They often woke up screaming. Our bedrooms were all in the same section of the house, the eastern wing, overlooking the rose garden. Dolores and Katherine would run down the hallway after each bad dream and clamber into bed with Gracie.

Little Rosalind took it a step further—she flatly refused to sleep alone and began each night curled at the foot of Gracie’s bed among the stuffed animals. After a few days, we all followed suit. We dragged our sleeping bags out of a closet and took over Gracie’s floor en masse. We slumbered each night in a mesh of limbs and breath, slipping in and out of one another’s dreams.

○

Clara had learned a skipping rhyme at school:

Mother, sister, wife, daughter,

Waiting there beside the water.

All the men set sail at dawn.

How many days will they be gone?

Clara, Katherine, and Emilia were skilled at double Dutch, and they would chant the rhyme in unison, then count each slap of the rope on the floor. Sometimes the numbers went into the hundreds before the skipper’s foot caught and they began again.

○

A week after Father left, the chauffeur vanished too. Micky was his name, and the summers were always an idle time for him. Mother and Father kept him on year-round, living in the servants’ quarters, since he was necessary during the academic year, ferrying us to school and ballet and Mandarin and gymnastics and dressage.

We did not notice his absence. To us, he was as much a part of the vehicle that drove us where we needed to go as the steering wheel or the windshield wipers. Close-cropped hair. A thick neck, ropy with muscle. That was all we ever saw of him.

Then the butler informed Mother that Micky’s room was empty. One of Father’s best cars, a black Jaguar, had disappeared too.

The police came. Mother rose from her bed, swathed in a satin dressing gown, and received them in the living room—two men in middle age, both potbellied and slow-moving. Mother shooed us away, which was a useless endeavor in a house as big as ours. There was always somewhere else from which to eavesdrop. We tiptoed around through the drawing room and lined the wall in the corridor.

“A betrayal of this caliber . . .” Mother was saying. “And after everything . . . my husband, you know . . . the past few days have been . . .”

The policemen asked for the chauffeur’s employee records. Mother had no idea where any paperwork could be; Father always took care of such things. Here the butler intervened, and Mother swept down the hallway to her bedroom again.

It was exciting to watch the policemen pacing up and down in the rose garden and circling the fountain, looking for clues. But Emilia overheard them talking as they got back into their car. She reported to the rest of us that the officers did not expect to find Micky. They’d been alerted too late, they said. He and the stolen vehicle had probably left the state by now.

“There’s not much they can do at this point,” Emilia told us.

“But he’s a thief,” Gracie said, outraged. “He stole from us.”

“If Father were here . . .” Leah began. She trailed off, and in that moment she looked just like Mother, head tilted to the side, mouth open.

○

Summer brought days of unbroken sunshine and powerful wind, billowing off the water in violent, unpredictable gusts. We spent the breeziest hours indoors, playing hide-and-seek or listening to Gracie read aloud. On calmer mornings, we walked the length of our private beach, gathering driftwood and sea glass for Katherine’s art projects. The surf was too wild for swimming, but we had our own Olympic-sized pool on the leeward side of the house, sheltered from the wind. Little Rosalind wore arm floaties. Gracie was sleek and lithe in the water. Clara and Katherine drifted on inflatable rafts, holding hands to stay close like sea otters slumbering among the kelp beds, paws entwined so they would not be separated.

Father had left us in the past—quite often, actually—but always provided a return date. He would roar off in one of his Jags or Lambos and be gone a week or two. He usually said he was traveling for work, but of course he didn’t work; he didn’t have to.

Even when home, he had been a rare commodity. The estate was large enough that Father could spend days in the office or the blue room or the gazebo without any of us happening upon him. Sometimes he would come charging into the playroom without warning and chase us around, pretending to be a monster as we screamed with glee. Then we wouldn’t see him for a while. He would take his meals in the library, and we caught only hints of his presence—a slammed door, a squeak of shoe on marble.

We hadn’t missed him during his previous trips or his perpetual distancing and cloistering at home. But we missed him now. He’d never sailed away before. The fact that he’d taken the yacht this time, rather than one of his fancy cars—the finality of his wake slicing across the sea to the horizon—left the seven of us bereft.

Dolores took to shadowing the gardener, asking how to deadhead roses and what sort of fertilizer they required. Hamish had been there for as long as we could remember, and we knew he did not like children, or maybe just girls. He had a way of squinting incredulously at us whenever we spoke to him. Dolores persisted, following him around until Gracie pulled her aside and said, “Hamish isn’t Father. You can’t just pick some other man to replace Father.”

Dolores cried in her room all that afternoon but joined us in the evening on the beach, where we each wrote a letter to Father, the little ones dictating theirs to the older ones. Then we lit a fire on the sand and burned our messages, watching them disintegrate and rise on the smoke in a whirl of ash and embers.

○

Three weeks after Father left, we found Hamish dead. It was actually Rosalind who found him, but she did not know what she was looking at, a boot lying at a strange angle among the rosebushes. She was only three. She continued playing with her dolls until Katherine came to find her for lunch. Then there was screaming and running and calling the police, and Mother appeared in the living room once more, still in her dressing gown.

She dabbed her eyes with her hankie throughout the interview. This time the officers were a man and a woman. We’d never seen a policewoman before and were dazzled by her air of authority and the casual way she tapped her gun holster.

“A loyal gardener . . .” Mother said. “The roses, you understand . . . I don’t know what will happen to them now . . .”

The seven of us stood in the corner of the room, all of us touching, Gracie’s hand on Katherine’s shoulder, Emilia’s arms around Rosalind’s middle. The officers did not ask us a thing. They explained to Mother that it looked like a heart attack. He was an elderly man, Hamish. We hadn’t thought of him that way—all adults looked elderly to us—but now we realized that he’d been gray-haired and wizened as long as we’d known him.

We watched through the drawing room windows as the officers got back in their vehicle. An ambulance had come to take away the body. It purred quietly down the drive, no lights or siren. There was no emergency here.

Dolores was teary and touchy that night. “It wasn’t my fault that he died,” she shouted over dinner when Gracie reminded her to eat her vegetables.

“Nobody said it was,” Gracie said mildly.

“I just wanted to learn about roses. Roses are interesting.”

“You didn’t give him a heart attack by following him everywhere or asking him things,” Gracie said. “He was old, so he died.”

Father was the one who first explained death to us. He told us that all living things perished and there was no God. He told us that we’d better learn what brought us joy and seek it out, because a human life was a fleeting and precious thing.

And then he left us. The implications about where he found his own joy—or no longer found any joy at all—were clear as day.

○

We were all a little in love with the pool boy who came once a week to skim dead leaves off the surface and change the filter. He had a tattoo of a ship on his forearm. He smelled like chlorine. We would gather at the windows of the morning room whenever he appeared, pressing our noses against the glass and doodling hearts in the condensation left by our breath. He never noticed us, intent on his work, eager to finish up and thunder away on his motorcycle.

With Father gone, the pool boy’s appearances took on an extra importance. We all sympathized with Dolores to an extent; we might not have been desperate enough to ask grumpy Hamish about roses, but ours was an overwhelmingly female world now, missing that dash of otherness that Father had always provided.

The pool boy was the second to die. On a cloudy morning in July, Leah rose early with the intention of continuing her vigil on the western terrace. She was still waiting there for Father, though not every day; sometimes she joined us now for games or arguments. The rest of us were slumbering when Leah slithered out of her sleeping bag. She picked her way across our bodies sprawled over the floor.

As she padded along the hall, she glanced down through the broad mullioned windows and saw what appeared to be a shark in the swimming pool below. She drew closer to the glass, reluctant and curious at the same time. Something dark floated in the clean turquoise water—recently cleaned, in fact, skimmed and filtered that very morning by the same figure who somehow, we never found out exactly how, pitched headfirst into the pool once his work was done and drowned.

○

Two officers came, both women this time, resplendent in their uniforms. They wanted to speak to each of us alone, but we flatly refused to be separated, and Mother was in too much of a state to make us.

“I can’t cope . . .” she kept saying, leaning back against the plush cushions of the couch. “I really can’t . . . I don’t understand . . . if only . . .”

In truth, there was nothing we could tell the policewomen, much as we wanted to. We’d stayed up late the night before, using a Ouija board to see if the spirits had news about Father. Perhaps the ghosts that lived in our house (we’d never encountered one, but we were certain they existed) could see farther than we could, across the ocean. The results from the Ouija board had been equivocal: a series of letters that did not spell a word. Clara said they were clues. Gracie said they were nonsense.

After our midnight séance, we’d slept late, even Rosalind, who was barely out of her toddler years and usually woke before dawn. Only Leah had seen the body. She ran to find the butler, who hurried to remove the offending item from the pool with the help of the maids and the cook. All of us were annoyed with Leah for not coming to us first. By the time we woke up, we’d missed the whole thing.

The officers returned to their vehicle, and once again the ambulance drove off in funereal silence.

○

“We might be cursed,” Dolores said that night as we lay sleepless on Gracie’s floor, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling.

No one answered.

○

The police did not catch the chauffeur. Gracie overheard the maids whispering about it, but she could not glean any specifics, just a disapproving tone and a few snickers.

In August, Leah abandoned her post on the western terrace. She said that she was sick of seeing other people’s boats on the water. She always mistook them, at first, for Father’s yacht. He’d been gone six weeks now. Every time a trim little sailboat scudded by or a sluggish barge churned toward the horizon, Leah felt a surge of hope, then a reawakening of loss.

The butler was the only man left in the house. He was British, bald, and snooty, and we half suspected that Father had hired him as a sort of sustained practical joke. Mr. Gantry was so out of place in our California mansion that he almost seemed to have come from another reality, an Agatha Christie novel, maybe. He was even more frightening than the gardener had been. Hamish might have squinted at us disapprovingly, but Mr. Gantry treated us with such icy disdain that he cowed even brash Emilia. We tried to avoid sharing a room with him, though he always hovered in the doorway during meals, forcing us to eat faster than we wanted to. Then he removed the plates and silverware as rapidly and completely as though we’d never been there at all.

“I bet he’s going to die,” Dolores said on a rainy afternoon. We were gathered in the library, a windowless cave of a room ringed by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

“Mr. Gantry?” Clara asked. “Why would he die?”

“Because of us,” Dolores said. “We’re cursed. I’m sure of it now.”

“You’re so silly,” Gracie said, but she didn’t sound as confident as usual. “What makes you think that?” she asked, after a moment.

“First Father, then the chauffeur, then Hamish, now poor Frankie,” Dolores said. The pool boy’s name had been Frank, but we always called him Frankie, as though by nicknaming him we could manufacture some sort of intimacy.

“Coincidence,” Gracie said.

“If Mr. Gantry dies, we’ll know for sure,” Leah offered. “We’ll know if we’re cursed or not.”

“We are,” Dolores said.

“Maybe,” Gracie conceded. “If Mr. Gantry dies, maybe.”

○

Three days later, the butler quit without warning. He did not steal a car, as the chauffeur had done; he took only what belonged to him. The maids informed Mother that his room had been vacated in the middle of the night.

For once, Mother was galvanized into something like anger. She threw off her dressing gown and changed into the sort of clothes she used to wear, a conservative pearl-gray dress and stockings. She even put on lipstick. We sat with her in the drawing room as she spent the morning on the phone, hiring a female housekeeper to replace Mr. Gantry.

“Men are inconstant,” she informed us. “A woman, however . . . I do hope you realize . . . I want you to go out into the world with clear eyes . . .”

Emilia snuck into the servants’ wing, where we were never supposed to go. “Everyone needs their privacy,” Father always said. She found Mr. Gantry’s bedroom beside the cramped little lavatory the maids shared. The butler’s bureau stood empty, but his razor and shaving cream remained in a bathroom cabinet, evidently forgotten. Emilia stole them and smuggled them upstairs to Gracie’s room, where we all gathered around to stare at these relics of masculinity, foreign and unknowable, the last of their kind.

○

Before taking to her bed again, Mother hired a new gardener, a wispy blond woman with a faraway stare. Within days, the roses were blossoming again, no longer leggy and untamed. Mother hired a pool girl, too, who showed up in ripped denim overalls, snapping gum as she worked. We were not impressed. We convened at the morning room windows where we’d so often watched Frankie skimming leaves with his long net. The pool girl wore her hair in a doughy bun. When she noticed us pressed against the glass to stare at her, she stuck out her tongue.

At this affront, Gracie stormed away from the window and flopped on the couch.

“This is all Father’s fault,” she said. “All of it.”

“Why?” asked little Rosalind, climbing up on the cushion beside her.

“It’s obvious,” Gracie said, with a preteen eye roll. “The curse began when Father left.”

The seven of us considered this.

“I don’t know if you’re right,” Dolores said at last. We all stared at her open-mouthed. It was heresy to disagree with our eldest sister. Dolores flushed pink but continued, “What if the curse made Father leave in the first place? What if it was already inside us then? The curse might have done this to him.”

“No,” Gracie said with absolute conviction. “No. It was Father who did this to us.”

○

Chilly fog alternated with golden sunlight. At the two-month anniversary of Father’s departure, Leah made us all join her on the western terrace once more, despite the biting wind. We stood there in silence until Rosalind’s teeth began chattering and Gracie led us inside.

Then came the crash that woke us before dawn and sent us skittering into the hallway, Katherine dragging her sleeping bag, caught on one foot.

“It’s an earthquake!” Leah cried.

This was California, after all. Father always told us to stand in a doorway or climb into the tub.

“I don’t think so,” Gracie said. “It’s coming from downstairs.”

And she was right. Nothing was shaking around us, not the portraits on the walls or the light fixtures overhead. Instead, the clamor seemed localized to the front hall—a sound like we’d never heard, glass shattering and stone falling.

We ran down the stairs and found one of the maids already there, her mouth wide open in horror. The front door had been smashed in by the front end of a vehicle. The doorknob glinted on the floor, severed from the rest. Part of the wall was crumbling from the impact. The hat stand lay in pieces. One of the columns outside had been pulverized; we could see what was left of it through the gap in the shattered remnants of the heavy oak door that Father had ordered specially from Sweden.

Leah bounced anxiously on her toes. Rosalind clung to Gracie’s hand, and Dolores began to cry. But Emilia kept her wits about her.

“It’s the mail truck,” she informed us. “Look, you can see the stripes.”

She pointed. The headlights were cross-eyed now, gazing at each other across the concave wreckage of the front bumper. The windshield resembled a spiderweb. Yes, we could just pick out the telltale stripes, scraped and dirtied almost beyond recognition.

The maid wrung her hands. “I saw it happen,” she wailed. “I saw him turning in at the gate. Oh my god. Oh my god, he didn’t even try to stop. He just kept coming.”

○

The eastern terrace overlooked the front door. We could see the wreckage clearly from there. Every morning, the postman had trundled down our sweeping drive and pushed the day’s letters through the mail slot. He usually came before we were awake; we’d actually never seen him alive, only now, battered and bloody, a limp figure crushed against the snowy cushion of the airbag.

Apparently he’d driven straight up the marble steps and slammed full throttle into the house. He took out a pillar on his way, along with a portion of the wall to the left of the door. Not a door anymore—kindling, matchsticks. Even a nearby window had cracked, we could see now, presumably from the force of the impact. The stairs were chipped beneath the wheels of the mail truck. Smoke rose from the deconstructed engine.

“Look what happened,” Rosalind kept saying. We looked.

The sound of Mother’s weeping carried down the hall. She was distraught at this latest calamity, though her grief seemed to be focused on the ruined door. Our father had loved it so. We left her in the care of the competent housekeeper—a brisk, rotund woman with a voice like warm honey—who had replaced the butler.

An emergency team was busy extracting the body from the smashed vehicle. A stroke, they were saying. The postman must have lost consciousness during the final leg of his approach. His muscles tensed up—there might have been a seizure—and the vehicle careened onward. Hopefully he was dead before the impact.

“It’s only women,” Emilia said suddenly.

“What?” Dolores asked.

Emilia gestured toward the EMTs darting around the vehicle. One tall, one thin, one fair, one dark, all of them female.

○

Mrs. North, the new housekeeper, hired a work crew to come and fix the front door and the column and the demolished brickwork. She offered them an extravagant fee to turn up the very next morning with ten strong men and a new oak door.

But they never came. We waited for them, gazing through the windows at the empty drive. At noon we abandoned our surveillance and went to swim in the pool. Mrs. North shouted into the phone for an hour. Then, with the help of the maids, she affixed a sheet of plastic over the gaping hole, taping the edges to the wall.

She booked a second crew, but they never came either. Days passed, and the plastic remained, flapping when the wind blew like the sail of a ship.

Over lunch, Mrs. North complained to us as she laid out our bowls of soup. We sat in our usual places around the table, four on one side and three on the other. Father’s chair stood empty at the head, as did Mother’s at the foot. The only sign of life from Mother’s room lately was the trays of food that the cook sent up, which vanished and appeared again a while later, emptied of everything but crumbs.

“I don’t understand this behavior,” Mrs. North said in her sugary voice, which belied her obvious irritation. “I’ve tried four different companies now. Seven men were supposed to be here an hour ago. We confirmed the date and time. And then radio silence. It’s ridiculous! We can’t have a house with no door, can we, girls?”

Mrs. North bustled out to fetch us a pitcher of ice water. In her absence, Gracie leaned in, her face lit from beneath by the reflected glow from the linen tablecloth.

“You know what this means,” she said.

“It’s us,” Dolores whispered in awe. “We’re doing this. Men can’t be here.”

“That’s right,” Gracie said.

“We’re keeping them away,” Leah said. “The workmen can’t come. They want to, and they say they’re going to, but they can’t.”

“We kill men too,” Emilia said. “That’s right, isn’t it? Hamish and Frankie and the postman all died because of us.”

“We kill them, or we make them disappear,” Clara said. “Poof. Gone.”

“We’re cursed,” said little Rosalind, her voice high and sweet.

“We’re cursed,” we all echoed reverently.

○

At midnight, we snuck out of the house, even Rosalind, yawning and rubbing her eyes. She was a wishbone child, not yet grown into the solid limbs and apple cheeks that made the rest of us look so similar. Sometimes, in photographs, we appeared to be a single girl moving through different ages in stop-motion.

On our way outside, we paused at our mother’s room. Her hoarse breathing perfumed the air. She still kept to her side of the bed, leaving a blank space where Father used to sleep. We stood over her, all seven of her daughters. Then we left and moved silently in single file to the back door.

The moon rose buttery behind the house. Every window was dark. The grown-ups were sleeping—the women, that is. No men here. We had destroyed them and banished them, every one, with the strength of our curse.

Moonlight glazed the beach. The sand was cold beneath our feet, but the air felt surprisingly warm, like bathwater. No wind. There was the pier where our father had moored his yacht. There was the horizon he had crossed without us. Was that the moment the curse took hold? Did it happen when he first decided to leave us, or when he turned his prow away from us, or when he vanished from our sight?

With a grunt, Gracie yanked off her pajama top and threw it onto the sand. She kicked off her shorts and stood in front of us naked, hands on hips.

“What are you doing?” Dolores gasped.

“There are no men,” Gracie said. “No men can get near us.”

And then we were all naked and dancing. The moonlight rendered our bodies new, milk-pale, shimmering with eerie power. Gracie pirouetted down the sand, her dark hair tangling in her armpits. Katherine went up on pointe, as she had learned in ballet class. Clara and Leah did the twist, laughing as their bare bottoms wiggled against the balmy air. Dolores tangoed with an imaginary partner while Emilia twirled in place, her arms aloft. Little Rosalind was the wildest of all of us, cavorting and kicking through the gleaming tongue of each new wave that slid up the beach.

“We’re cursed!” Gracie shouted to the sea.

“We’re cursed!” we screamed, our voices reverberating over the water, bouncing and echoing as though there were more than seven of us. Dozens. Hundreds.

○

How should a story like this end? We could never agree. Seven sisters can’t agree on much of anything. We all had our own opinions, our own ideas.

Leah maintained that Father would return one day. He would come home chastened and apologetic, and the curse would be broken. We would nobly forgive him. She would, anyway.

Katherine was certain that Father had already taken up residence in some foreign land. She believed that as long as he lived, we would remain cursed, unable to leave the house for fear of killing or exiling any man we encountered. We would grow old together, seven white-haired crones in a dilapidated mansion with a broken door.

Rosalind thought the strength of the curse would fade as we got older. Eventually we would be normal again, no longer tainted by our father’s desertion. We could go out into the world and become like other people, whatever that meant.

Dolores felt sure that Father would come sailing back home many years from now, withered with age and racked by guilt. We would not recognize him, he would be so changed. Thinking him a beggar or miscreant, we would send him away. His heart would break, and that, in turn, would break our curse.

Clara believed that Father would die at sea, probably very soon. His ship would founder and sink, and when he breathed his last breath, the curse would lift. We could leave home then, and marry if we chose, but we would only ever have daughters.

And Gracie told us that the curse would intensify as we grew up. Now, in our girlhood, our sphere of influence was limited to our estate. But as we aged, the curse would ripple outward, spreading to the nearby town and maybe even beyond. Who knew how powerful we might become? As we transformed into teenagers, young adults, grown women, the curse would gather strength and speed, a wild wave splashing to the edges of California. It would wash away the male half of the population, taking them at work, at home, everywhere. Gracie could see it all, she told us. One day the force of our magic would devour countries and continents, surging around the wide world until all the men, including Father, were gone.

Lastly there was Emilia, who always kept an open mind. How would our story end? Each time the question arose among us, she took the coin from her pocket and flipped it in the air. She smiled no matter how it landed.