43 pages • 1-hour read
Etched In Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island
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Prologue-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness, child abuse, child sexual abuse, graphic violence, cursing, emotional abuse, and death.
Prologue Summary
Regina Calcaterra, chief deputy executive of Suffolk County, Long Island, is in a helicopter surveying devastation of Hurricane Sandy. Seeing the place she grew up destroyed is a strange and saddening experience. Although Long Island is the place where many horrific memories of her and her four siblings’ childhoods began, it is also the only home she knew as a child. She recalls how she and her siblings, often left alone as children, would sometimes sneak down to the beach to build sand castles and write their names in the sand. They would circle their names in hearts, signifying their love for each other. When the waves washed their names away, they would write them again.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Bitten Bones: Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, Summer 1980”
Regina (age 13) is sitting in the back seat of her mother’s beat down Impala with her brother Norman (age 12) and sister Rosie (age seven). Camille (age 16) is in the front seat next to their mother, who goes by Cookie (but whose full name is also Camille). Their eldest sister, Cherie, moved out with her husband after becoming pregnant and marrying him, leaving Camille and Regina to take care of their younger siblings. Cookie cares only about herself, and she physically abuses her children if they complain or talk back to her. As she drives, she smokes and flicks ashes, which land in Regina’s face, but Regina says nothing.
The family pulls up to a dilapidated old house, and Cookie commands her daughters to unpack the car, yelling cruel insults at them. Everyone’s belongings are stuffed in garbage bags, and Camille and Regina want to unpack quickly because they know their mother is likely to go out and drink once they’re done. They assign bedrooms and begin cleaning, and Regina and her siblings are just happy to have some furniture and partial beds. They also have cockroaches, which means they have to store all of their food in the fridge. Regina suggests that Norman and Rosie play a board game, and Cookie soon drives away, leaving her children alone with no explanation. Norman is the only one who wonders when she’ll be back.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Building Sand Castles: Summer 1980”
Camille and Regina are never sure how long their mother will be gone, but they’re always glad when she leaves. They assume she will be off drinking or staying with a current boyfriend. Camille and Regina are used to taking care of the house and the younger siblings, doing what is necessary to avoid the attention of social services or the police, and avoiding their mother’s wrath. The two older sisters typically leave Norman and Rosie alone while they go to the grocery store. Camille finds $5 in food stamps in one of Cookie’s bras, and she and Regina head to the grocery store, where they steal a wide array of food and pay for only a couple of things. They bring the food home and cook supper, which is when Camille confesses that she plans to go stay with a long-time friend named Kathy for the summer. Regina has been left alone before, and knows how difficult it will be again. She tries to convince Camille to stay, but Camille craves a stable life and her childhood back. She promises to send money and check in, and Regina has no choice but to watch her go.
Prologue-Chapter 2 Analysis
By situating the Prologue of Etched in Sand in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Calcaterra draws a parallel between the physical destruction of the storm and the emotional devastation of her and her siblings’ childhoods. Now a successful adult with a prominent role in local government, she reflects on leading and protecting a place that was once a source of fear, creating emotional resonance. The storm shifts thousands of tons of sand, eroding beaches and displacing communities, demonstrating on a large scale the same impermanence that Calcaterra evokes on a smaller scale in describing how she and her siblings, as children, wrote their names in the sand, encircling them with hearts to signify love for each other. When the waves washed the names away, they rewrote them, a memory that establishes sand as a motif symbolizing persistence, resilience, and the theme of Resilience Through Family Bonds.
Regina Calcaterra establishes a setting that is both physically and emotionally unstable, showcasing the harsh realities of her childhood. The family’s transient lifestyle is immediately conveyed through imagery of a beat-up car and an old, dirty house whose permanence as a home is uncertain. Regina refers to herself and her siblings as “homeless,” emphasizing the precarity of their situation. The descriptions of Cookie, their mother, further demonstrate this instability: She smokes with ashes flying into her daughter’s face, wears revealing and unkempt clothing, and is wanted for theft, fraudulent checks, and drunk driving. Her harshness is magnified through her words, as she calls her children “sluts and whores” and frequently subjects them to physical abuse. Amidst this negative environment, Rosie is depicted as “a little flash of life scampering barefoot across this gray scene” (10), emphasizing Rosie’s love for her, as well as her vitality amid the gloom.
Since Cookie is alternately absent and abusive, older sisters Regina and Camille are forced to serve as surrogate parents, a degree of responsibility for which they are not prepared. This parentification deepens their trauma, but it also catalyzes their emotional growth as they guide and protect their younger siblings, Norman and Rosie, while navigating Cookie’s volatility and neglect. The children show strong adaptation skills and have learned to communicate silently: “[T]he less we speak, the less likely it is that we’ll throw our mother into a rage without knowing why” (14). Regina’s closeness to Camille in particular is emphasized through shared experiences of stealing and caretaking, but tension grows in Regina’s life as Camille prepares to leave, leaving Regina responsible for the younger children. Since the eldest sister, Cherie, has already left, the book establishes a pattern in which the siblings grow up and leave the house one by one, leaving the eldest remaining sibling in the role of caretaker to the others.
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