Sisters in Law Read Online Free Page A

quite a problem for all of those years, but somehow we survived.” Despite her pleas to return, with the exception of a single year in local schools, that’s where she stayed. There were simply no schools anywhere near the enormous cattle ranch.
    It was not easy being Harry Day’s favorite kid. When she was fifteen, she was driving the ranch truck across the unmapped terrain of the huge isolated ranch to bring lunch to her father and the crew when she got a flat tire.
    â€œI knew,” she recalls in Lazy B , “no one would be coming along the road either way to help. If the tire was to be changed, I had to do it.”
    But when she jacked it up, the lug nuts were stuck and she could not get the tire off.
    â€œFinally I decided I would have to let the truck back down until the truck rested on the ground again. . . . I pushed with all my might, but the lug nuts would not loosen. Finally I stood on the lug wrench and tried to jump a little on it to create more force. Joy! It worked. . . .
    â€œI started the engine and continued on.”
    But “it was late.”
    When she arrived at the work site, “I could see DA but he didn’t acknowledge my presence.” She set out the lunch she had broughtand “then I waited.” The crew finished branding and came over to eat.
    â€œâ€˜You’re late,’ said DA. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I had a flat tire . . . and had to change it.’ ‘You should have started earlier,’ said DA. ‘Sorry, DA, I didn’t expect a flat.’ . . . I had expected a word of praise for changing the tire. But, to the contrary, I realized that only one thing was expected: an on-time lunch.”
    Justice O’Connor says that she learned the value of no excuses from the incident. She must have quickly figured out that no excuses applied even when the incident was actually excusable. No matter how unfair, she would be better off not to directly defy the male authority figures in her life with demands for just treatment. As an only child for eight years and treated like a son, she had also internalized a sense of entitlement normally associated with straight white men. For the rest of her life she would combine her confidence in her own equal value with a unique ability to absorb a high level of injustice without complaint.
    Within a year of the flat tire incident, Sandra left the ranch for Stanford. Sandra Day cut quite a swathe when she appeared in 1946 at the ripe age of sixteen. One of her dorm mates tells the story of how the girl from a remote Arizona ranch by way of an obscure El Paso private high school quickly rose to the top of the social order. “She had the most gorgeous clothes.” And, “after the first school dance . . . she came back with this cute guy, Andy, a returning vet, who had a red convertible. We were blown away.”
    The Lazy B must have been a powerful experience. Even though after she turned six she lived on the ranch full time for only one year, all these years later, Justice O’Connor still calls herself a “cowgirl.”
    BROOKLYN BORN AND BRED
    Until she went away to college in 1950, Ruth Bader lived on the first two floors of 1584 East Ninth Street, in Brooklyn. It was a pretty, rectangular house. But it was a modest home. Ginsburg’s father, Nathan, had come from Russia and followed the classicJewish immigrant path of going into the garment business, first as a furrier and then as a haberdasher. He never achieved much material success. When Ruth was two, her older sister Marilyn died of meningitis, leaving her an only child.
    It’s a short block and a half from 1584 East Ninth Street to P.S. 238, on East Eighth, just across Avenue P. Seven years after P.S. 238 opened in 1930, tiny five-year-old Ruth Bader approached the high yellow brick building, pushed open the heavy doors, and walked across a terrazzo foyer to a big classroom with a hardwood parquet floor and high