Ginger was born in 1908 in a small town somewhere to the northwest of New York City. Her mother, Lila Fontaine, died shortly after giving birth. She was subsequently raised by her father, Simon, who when asked what he was going to name his new daughter, told doctors her name was “Ezekial”.
No one believed him. Except for Ginger herself, people seldom believed Simon.
For the first years of her life, Ginger’s father called her Ginger, because “she had her mother’s beautiful red hair”. Because of this, Ginger believed for quite awhile that the color black was called “red”. In fact, she later discovered, her mother had blonde hair. Ginger’s was black, like her father’s. When Ginger was five, she started attending a small school run by her mother’s childhood friend, Catherine. Catherine was like a mother to Ginger, and had known her since shortly after her birth. She was constantly trying to convince Simon to allow Ginger to live with her permanently. Catherine did not have much confidence in Simon’s ability to raise his daughter on his own.
Simon would have none of it. He loved Ginger more than anything else in the world, and took good care of her, making sure she had not just a good education from Catherine, but was also well steeped in her own family history and had a good knowledge of the beauty and wonder that was inherent in everything she ever came across in her life. Ginger took these lessons to heart just as thoroughly as she did Catherine’s. She believed whole heartedly that she was born to the granddaughter of a Kiowa Indian princess, and spent much of her teenaged years trying to track down what little information was available on the Native American rights and rituals at that time of history and in that corner of the world, which was not much, and mostly apocryphal. She determined that her “spirit animal” was the tiger, and took up painting in order to properly represent her spirit guide on the walls of her small bedroom.
When she was ten, WWI came to an end, and her father told her it was because the Germans had been defeated by a troop of disgruntled Zulus that the American army had recruited in order to confuse Kaiser Wilhelm. Ginger, who was an avid reader by this point, discovered the truth quickly enough in the local newspaper. When she called her father on the lie, he simply smiled and asked her what truth was. She was unable to answer.
When Ginger was eighteen, she was married to Catherine’s son, Alex, who was five years older than her, and believed himself to be an up and coming businessman. He invested heavily in the stock markets, and when they crashed three years later, lost a sizeable fortune. He killed himself shortly thereafter, leaving Ginger behind with her eccentric father, who immediately began asking her why she hadn’t bothered to get him any grandkids while she had the chance. Ginger, who was deeply in love with Alex and heartbroken by his death, resented her father for belittling their relationship. However, as he was now one of the richest men in town, having never trusted banks that he hadn’t made of wood himself, she stayed with him. Though she was intelligent, she had no money of her own, and did not relish the idea of trying to get a job in the horribly depressed economy.
She quickly grew tired of having to rely on her father’s large, wooden, padlocked stash of one dollar bills, and upon his increasingly strange philosophies and tendency to lie outright at any given opportunity. When she was 24 she broke into his “safe” with one of his own hammers, took one hundred dollars out, stuffed them into her large, canvas purse, and ran away to New York City, to join up with a troop of disenfranchised actors who were struggling to practice their art in the increasingly MacArthurian climate of the city. She soon discovered a natural talent for performance, and became quite skilled with a make-up brush and grease paint. As the American economy slowly pulled itself from the depths of the Great Depression, she began to break her way onto the Broadway stage, mostly in small, conservative character roles which payed her in room and board and nothing more.
Her father tried to join the Army when America entered World War II, only to be turned away because of his age. He tried to join the workforce, but was refused because of his apparent insanity. He was institutionalized, and died of “natural causes” shortly thereafter. He left everything he had to Ginger, who found herself returning to her home town to stay with Catherine, who was herself getting on in years, to take care of the woman she thought of as her mother and to sort through her father’s things. Catherine commented that though more than ten years had passed, Ginger did not look as though she’d aged a year since Alex had died. Ginger, who was well versed in all manners of rhetoric and art, but had never made much headway in science, was surprised to hear that she ought to have. When Catherine asked her what her secret was, Ginger shrugged. She simply had decided, when Alex died, that she didn’t want to age any more.
In her father’s belongings, Ginger found her birth certificate and learned that she was, indeed, named “Ezekial”. She also learned that her mother was, in fact, the granddaughter of an ornery east European couple, whom had left their homeland in their early twenties to make their fortune in “the New World”. Her mother’s paternal grandparents could trace their ancestry back several generations, to nearly the time of the Mayflower, and her mother was not, in fact, of the Kiowa tribe, but rather you classic, American mutt. Her father, however, had a more sordid ancestry, including, but not limited to, a black slave woman from South Carolina, who had escaped north to Canada with the help of Harriet Tubman, while carrying her master’s daughter. This information she found in an earnest letter from Simon’s mother, a woman she had met on a few occasions when she was very young, and found to be the complete opposite of Simon. The letter begged Simon to teach Ginger about her family history, to make sure that she knew about “the long line of amazing women and men who had given their lives in order to make sure that [Simon and Ginger] had the best lives they possibly could”. Ginger, who had long since accepted and even adopted her father’s eccentricity, was scandalized that Simon would hide such important information from her. She hired Catherine a full time nurse and promised to send money and letters whenever possible, then used what was leftover from her father’s fortune to move across the country to Hollywood, where she promptly failed spectacularly at breaking into the beautiful world of the silver screen.
This confused Ginger, who had always been considered a very skillful actress in New York. For some reason, though her performances could move the cameramen and the director to tears, her work was always left on the cutting room floor after it was shown to a test audience, which found her “flat” and “unemotional”. Getting more and more desperate as her money ran low, Ginger finally compromised her morals and the memory of her departed husband, and slept with one of the directors. While lying in bed after a full night of dirtiness, she ventured to ask him what he thought of her acting, and why she couldn’t seem to make the emotions come through the camera lens. He laughed.
He asked her how old she was. She told him (she was nearly forty now), and he asked her why she still looked twenty-one. She shrugged, just as she had for Catherine. He dug deeper, and she told him that she simply didn’t want to age. Somehow, it had worked. He laughed again, and told her a story.
It was a story that went back many, many hundreds of years, and that she couldn’t quite grasp all the details of. It was a story of magic, of the mages who wielded it, and of the infinite possibilities that opened up for an individual when she awakened. She learned, that morning (for that’s what it was), that when she “acted”, she was not simply showing an emotion in herself, as most did, but actually projecting it onto her audience, as a camera projected her image onto a screen. Without her in front of her audience to perform her magic, it was lost, leaving them unfeeling.
Ginger said several very unladylike things to him, then, and began to get dressed. She did not appreciate being lied to, though she did appreciate how much fun it was to lie.
As she was leaving his bedroom, he asked her how she changed her appearance so completely. She growled at him, and threw her makeup case at him. Inside was a tube of mascara, a case of blush, and some lipstick. He asked her to use her makeup to make him look like a young woman. Ginger nodded. She could make herself into an old man, why couldn’t she simply reverse the process on this director? It didn’t work. The director simply looked like a middle aged, balding man, who was wearing women’s makeup. Ginger began to cry.
The director asked her to stay for lunch (for that’s what time it was by now), and washed the make up from his face. He told her, over a rich salmon (money was once again flowing through the American economy like water), that her “make up” was also magic. That she could alter her own appearance through her will, just as she had stopped her aging, and made people feel things. He explained to her that he, himself was “one of the awakened”, and demonstrated it by floating a dish of sugar over to her coffee, flavoring it exactly to her tastes.
Ginger stayed with him for a year.
She worked as a waitress at a local dinner theater during that time, while at home with George (for that was his name), she worked on fine tuning her skills and her control over them. She learned that she could literally become “thick skinned” when she chose to, keeping herself from getting cut; she learned that she could, after a fashion, even hear George’s thoughts, when he was not protecting them well enough. She did not learn how to float a sugar dish, and George did, because she believed it was “vulgar, and unladylike”.
On the anniversary of their first night together, George proposed to her.
Ginger was scandalized. Though she was done mourning for Alex, and had been for quite some time, she knew that she didn’t love George. She was terrified that she had somehow, over the year that they had lived together, managed to convince him that he loved her. She hadn’t meant to, but if she could make an audience feel sadness, or laugh, couldn’t she have somehow projected love onto him? She had been trying to make sure neither of them grew too attached to the other, as George was still growing older, while she still hadn’t aged beyond 21. She cared for him a great deal, and couldn’t handle the idea of watching him grow old while she didn’t. She said no.
George was heart broken. Ginger left his apartment, and LA, shortly thereafter.
She bought a train ticket east with her savings from the dinner theater. World War II was over, businesses were booming, and she had no doubt that now, she would certainly be able to make a career on the Broadway stage. With her abilities, it would be easy to convince a director to hire her, and with her work at the dinner theater, she had learned a thing or two about “real” acting. Even if her power didn’t, somehow, work on the entire audience, she could, she thought, act well enough to carry herself anyway.
She also now knew that she was unique, and that telling people she had simply decided not to grow old wouldn’t work on the increasingly canny and skeptical society of the United States. Science was making more and more progress every day, but they had yet to discover a definitive cure for old age. She changed her hair color to a soft auburn color, the sort, she figured, was what her father had always hoped she’d have anyway, and her eye color. Any of her old friends from the thirties she ran across in New York simply thought she might be a relative, certainly, of “their” Ginger, and she often heard them marveling about how similar she looked to “her namesake”. This would make her laugh, lightly, cheerfully. She was enjoying her deception, as much or more so than her father had ever enjoyed any of his. The best part, she thought, was that it took little or no actual lying on her part. She simply let people assume, and never corrected.
She worked in mostly off-Broadway venues, never quite good enough to make a real name for herself outside of the theater going circles. Some of the money she made was placed into banks, two or three different ones at a time. She never bothered to invest in the stock market, having known first hand the dangers of that particular sort of gambling, and the rest of her money she kept in cash form, in various tin, and later, plastic banks. Anything she bought she kept. Fifties mentality meant that anything considered old, or antique, was next to worthless anyway, but Ginger had watched the economy and culture of her country swing several times now, and knew better. Someday, her jewelry, her furniture, and her old books, would be worth something.
The fifties passed swiftly, seeing Ginger taking more and more character roles, and carefully aging her appearance as would be appropriate. She took no lovers, fearing them learning the truth about her. They wouldn’t understand. She wasn’t certain she herself did. She had her well practiced tricks, she didn’t experiment.
She heard from George on occasion, asking her how her magery was coming along, what shows she was doing, and if she would come back to LA and marry him already. She responded politely.
In the privacy of her own home, Ginger remained eternally 21.
In the early sixties, she grew tired of the New York theater culture. The world, it seemed, was gearing up for war again, something that Ginger, having seen two world wars go by, did not relish, or fear. Life, she knew, would go on, and eventually, everything would be peace and joy all over again. She left the city in favor of something new, though she didn’t yet know what. Once she was beyond the world of New York, she was a stranger again. She passed through cities in her sputtering old Ford, twenty-one and free again. She realized she missed the love of a man. George passed away in 1963, and Ginger, after hearing the news, got herself thoroughly drunk in Georgetown, DC, in his honor. After her fifth scotch (she had learned to drink young, and preferred the hard stuff), she found herself in the gents, staring into the mirror. On a whim, she set about altering herself, a feature at a time. Hair short, blonde. Eyes, green. Nose, a little longer, perhaps? She lowered her cheekbones for fun, and strengthened her jaw line. The face looking back, she decided, was definitely masculine. She laughed, a deep chuckle that had once been her father’s, or maybe Alex’s. A glance over her shoulder showed her a man, jaw open, eyes wide. He burbled, and ran.
That night, she learned what it was like to have reality smack you back in the face. She woke, the next morning, with a hangover, and an extra organ between her legs.
She spent the next three weeks as a man. When she returned to herself, she swore up and down that she would be more careful. She also joined the feminist movement.
Really, she thought, men do have it better in this world.
She moved to the northwest of DC for a few years, burning bras and learning to write strong minded, hard headed articles for a local feminist newsletter.
But New York had always been her home, and she returned in 1968.
America was at war again, but this time, something new had happened. There were kids, living in Central Park, refusing to give in. All over the country, young people were speaking their minds, railing against the system, and crying out for the country to “make love, not war”. Well, Ginger thought, she might be 60, but she still LOOKED young enough. No one in the city remembered her, certainly not with her newly waist length, jet black hair (natural, for once, she let herself just be herself for these kids, that’s what they really wanted, after all). Their fashions were wonderful, the fringe of her teenaged years, with women in skirts or jeans, and Ginger would be damned, she decided, if she ever let society tell her again that she had to wear nylons to be a woman. The hippies dubbed her Raven, and she let them.
She went to Woodstock, and sometime afterwards found herself married for the second time, this time to a man who went by Meridian. He was short, only a few inches taller than she was, deeply tanned, and blonde. He was wild, and deeply in love with Ginger. She loved him back, more than she had anyone for thirty years. She was not honest with him.
To Meridian, she was the Kiowa princess her mother had seemed to be in her youth. These days there was much more information on the culture than before, and she embraced it with all of her might. They held bonfires with friends, then bedded down with them. They smoked, they drank, they danced, and as the sixties ended and then the war in Vietnam ended, they explored the country in Meridian’s beetle. They slept under the stars, heading south for the winter like birds.
In 1974, Meridian overdosed on heroin, never having realized his lifelong dream of kissing Jerry Garcia full on the mouth during “Box of Rain”. Ginger had encouraged his drug habits, hoping that they would take him to a new level, awaken him to the magic that she now practiced rarely, but missed dearly. After his funeral, Ginger drove his beetle back north to New York one more time.
Disco, she decided over the next few years, was not her style. She lived a rather hermit-ish existence for the rest of the decade, renewing her old magics, going out only when she was wearing someone else’s face. She drank rarely, but still smoked fairly often. She considered a dog, but knew it would only die before she did, a fact which did nothing but depress her. She spoke rarely.
The eighties came, and big hair was ugly, and Ginger stayed inside, and the eighties went.
When the Berlin Wall fell, Ginger lost a little bit of herself. She had been old already when it had been erected, but it still seemed as though some part of her child hood, of her world, was collapsing. She looked in the mirror.
She was still 21.
She looked at her old photographs, documenting fashions from the twenties to the sixties. Fifty years of living in the world and loving every minute of it.
She wondered what truth was.
She collected up an armload of her old silver jewelry, put on a bit of make-up and a dress that was now “vintage”. One of Meridian’s old denim coats, and she stepped outside.
New York, at least, was still New York. Things had changed, but oh so much had stayed the same. They were still her people.
She payed her way to a bachelor’s degree in musical theater at NYU with three piggy banks, a savings account that had been collecting interest since 1963, and occasional sales of her “antiques”. She grew older by changing fashionably with the times, and modeled a bit. She enjoyed school, and the idea that she, too, could be “generation X”. To her classmates, she was someone who had lived a “sheltered existence”. She pretended to have her first drink, to celebrate a birthday that she had forgotten the date of, to experiment with drugs for the first time. She experimented with women, but found it not to her taste. She flirted, she roller bladed, and when she graduated, she decided it was time to try a real first.
She studied abroad, in London. For two years, she marveled at life like it was the first time around. She traveled extensively on her breaks across Europe, and having earned her masters, used another bank account to spend another year simply traveling.
New, she decided, was too much fun to give up. She was nearly a century old, but there was still so much she hadn’t seen or done.
She wept, openly, at Dachau. So did her tour guide. She visited Istanbul, traveled to Stockholm, and spent two long, glorious months in Paris. Fashions that were so immensely familiar to her were like new again. She picked up many of her old habits, her old sayings were similarly made new to the youth that surrounded her.
In her nineties, she was young again. She remembered why she had decided not to grow old. She learned that truth was what you made it. To her new friends, it was true that she was Ginger Fontaine, born in New York, who loved life more than most. To them, it was true that she was twenty-one years old.
In Edinburgh, Scotland, she met master of Time, by the name of Peter. He took her home, and loved her passionately, and over breakfast the next morning, she learned the things that George had never told her.
There were, it seemed, rather a lot of mages. All over the world. They had a mission. They had an enemy. Ginger learned, to her horror, of the technocracy, who’s goal it was, and had been since the middle ages, to keep people like her from “infecting the populace”. They did so so thoroughly, so insidiously, that Ginger, who was, she admitted, rather naive when it came to magic, had never noticed. What she saw as the natural swing of society away from wonder was really carefully planned out and executed. So, she learned, were the members of the Nine Traditions.
Peter told her about each of the traditions. He asked her about her own magic. He asked her if she wanted to find a tradition to be a part of. She had a duty, he seemed to be saying, to fight the same war he was. She said no.
She was something now though, she had a title she’d never known she deserved. She was an Orphan, and it seemed to her, that that was entirely appropriate. She had been without a family for most of her long life, and had made quite a habit of staying aloof and alone. She never in her life had had a friend for more than a few years. Her family had died with George and Catherine, or, perhaps, with Alex in 1929.
She left Edinburgh a little heavier, and somehow, a little older than she was. She had new lines, small, subtle, but there. She had a responsibility.
She would be damned if she would let anyone lose the wonder of life.
She returned to the states for the new millennium. A few years in New York were spent selling off the remains of her extra things, those items that, in spite of being kept for decades, meant little or nothing to her. She researched where she was to go, and started applying for jobs. She wanted to be a teacher; she wanted to get up close and personal with the young people of this new century and teach them the lessons she had piled up over the last one. She would teach them to lie extravagantly, to see the wonder and beauty in everything life had to offer. She’d teach them theater, it seemed, since that was what she knew the best.
She was old, and there was one place in the States that the old went: Florida.
In the fall of 2003, at age 95 years old, Ginger Fontaine moved to Tampa, Florida, and started a job as an associate professor of theater at a small, private college in St. Petersburg. She was pleased to note that small changes, a line or two here, heavier eyebrows there, and she might have been in her thirties. They were easy to maintain in her classes. In her apartment, and in the streets of Tampa, though, she is still 21.
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