Cage of Stars
For the first time that night, I ate lobster (I’d forgotten that I got hives from oysters, but I had no problems) and decided this food had to be some kind of special blessing. My stomach literally protruded when I was finished. I’d brought my own traveler’s checks taken from my savings, but the Sissinellis just paid for everything as if money were a thing they didn’t think about.
They told me why they lived there part of the year.
Mrs. Sissinelli, who asked me to call her by her first name, Gemma, had grown up in Boston and met her husband there. But he’d spend his summers working on an uncle’s ranch in Arizona when he was a boy. So they’d compromised, once they could afford to do that. “The property costs so much out here, you have to be, like, a movie star to afford a house on the water,” Mrs. Sissinelli said, “and when the children were small, I didn’t want to worry about them wandering to the drink!” That night, as we sat in the restaurant, we actually did see a movie star, Dennis Quaid, with his son. Even Serena was impressed.
“Do you think he had a face-lift, Pops?” she asked her father.
“Pretty sure,” said Dr. Sissinelli.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t really have a rim of the white of his eyes that shows when he’s not trying to open his eyes all the way,” Dr. Sissinelli explained. “That’s kind of a clue that a person has had a brow lift. They’re a bit more common among men who have to depend on looking younger than they are for their jobs; but you’d be surprised how many regular businessmen have cosmetic surgery, too.”
“Do you do that?” I asked him.
“No,” he said, laughing. “This is my ordinary old face, Ronnie.”
“No, I mean do you do anesthesia for cosmetic surgery?”
“I do,” said Dr. Sissinelli. “But I do that for a special reason.”
“Why?”
“Because if people are determined to take such a big risk as having general anesthesia for such a relatively, well, trivial reason, they should have the best of care. You can die just as easily from cosmetic surgery as you can from surgery to remove an appendix or remove a tumor; and it would be a terrible blow to a family to lose a parent or a young adult for that reason.”
I had never thought of it that way. “You wouldn’t think of your doing that for a humanitarian idea,” I said.
“Just for the bucks, huh?”
“No, I didn’t mean that at all!” I said, and blushed.
“I know you didn’t,” he said, and Mrs. Sissinelli slapped his hand. “I actually teach cosmetic surgeons about the importance of anesthesiology in pain control and blood loss during these big operations, such as liposuction or skin tucks. That’s what I do in Boston, in the summer. So I essentially have two jobs.”
“You can’t only do cosmetic surgeries. People in Utah don’t have cosmetic surgery,” I said.
“You’d be surprised, Ronnie,” Dr. Sissinelli told me, wiping his lips with his napkin. “But of course, I do my work in all kinds of surgeries, planned and emergency.”
Later, we all sat on their deck; the sea air, even inland, was like a warm bath that never got you wet. “This is amazing,” I said. “The air feels like . . . it’s so soft.”
“You’re not used to humidity, Ronnie,” said Serena, laughing. “You’re going to end up looking like an old cowpoke if you don’t use moisturizer.”
“I use hand cream after I work in the barn,” I told her.
That night, I got introduced to washing my face with grains and putting on moisturizer. And Serena was right, it did make a person look glowy and clean, as if I had on blusher from my little French palette when I didn’t. Serena was pretty impressed with my Parisian makeup. It made me feel sophisticated that she was. I liked the softness of my cheeks and the sweet almond smell of Serena’s moisturizer and sunscreen. When I looked at the bottom of the jars, though, I saw the stuff cost fourteen dollars for a jar half the size of a pint of milk. Still, I thought I might save for it. It wasn’t the same as glitter eye shadow. She also introduced me to sports bras, which made running a whole lot easier, and gave me a pair of her, like, ten pairs of running shoes, to keep. I’d been running in my basketball shoes.
On the first Friday, I saw the ocean.
Serena drove me to the National Seashore. We took bikes and a picnic lunch. The dunes were like massive waves of the palest maple sugar and led down to something I had seen pictures of, but I could never have predicted how it would actually look—vast and in bright blue motion. There was something about its endlessness, its patience, and its . . . I can only say its face, changing with the light and the time of day, ruffling and swelling, delivering shells and sweeping them back with its indifferent hand. Serena was used to seeing it and wanted to go on riding toward the lighthouse, which she said had a light that would shine fourteen miles out to sea. But I couldn’t move. I laid down my bike and sat on the ground for so long that Serena said she’d grab me on the way back and pedaled off. And I sat, the sun burning my neck and forearms in a way I’d regret later that night, forgetting even to eat my lunch, until I felt the waves were inside me, their rise and rock and break and fall in rhythm with my breathing. I would have sat there all night, listening to the roar and the hiss. “I don’t think I could handle this all the time,” I told Serena when she got back. “It’s too much for a person. I don’t think I’d ever do anything else.”
“Maybe you’ll live by the ocean when you grow up. This one’s the scary one, the North Atlantic, the one that’s cold and rough. Down there”—Serena gestured—“there are a hundred wrecked ships that got driven into the rocks. The Sound, on the other side, is warmer. We can swim there. Have you seen the Pacific? I guess it’s scary, too, sometimes. But California, it’s different from here. The weather and the people are more gentle. More nuts, too.”
“I’ve never seen either one before now.”
“I can’t imagine never having seen it before.”
“I can’t believe that I am.”
One morning, when everyone else was asleep, I went into Miko’s room. There was a pile of clean clothes on the end of his bed and swimming trophies from when he was little on a pyramid of shelves. His closet door was open, and I recognized one of his old leather jackets and put my hand in the pocket. There was nothing in there except a flower, a purple clover, dried up. I opened his top bureau drawer. There was change, and a ton of arrowheads, some baseballs and a cologne bottle, a Scout knife and a bunch of little parts of things, like the insides of phones or speakers, and a couple of CDs out of their cases. In the raised part, where an older man would have cuff links and rings and such, Miko had an envelope of photos. I shook them out into my palm. I knew it was like looking at his diary, but I wanted to see a picture of him with his girlfriend, if he had one. They were mostly of his friends, skiing, either blowing powder or wiped out, laughing, gigantic, red, male smiles, and one of this blond guy I had seen a lot at their house sitting by a stone fireplace with a pretty girl on his lap looking mad at him.
But the next to last one in the stack was . . . me, on Jade, shot from one side and above.
I almost didn’t see it, because it was turned backward in the pack, facing the others, out of the usual order. I had to guess he took it from his bedroom window that day in June, because I was wearing my cutoffs and Jade was under saddle and going up the path to the ridge. I was sitting with the reins in my lap, trying to knot my hair up in back. From the light, it looked to be late afternoon. The scrub plants were smudges of gray and green, with a vivid yellow streak here and there. If it hadn’t been me, I would have thought it was beautiful, like a calendar photo. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with that picture. A part of me wanted to take it, as if it were proof of something. But it was Miko’s, and I would never know why he took it, if it was just to use up the roll. Still, something inside me hummed like a tight guitar string as for a second I let myself think about Miko focusing his camera on a girl with tangled red hair, her bare leg
s milky above her cowboy boots, tucked tight against the mare’s honey-colored coat. I put it back into the envelope just as he had left it.
I won’t say I didn’t think of it again, especially when Miko called and they put me on the phone with him. He asked how I liked the Cape, and I said, like a dumb little kid, “I saw the ocean for the first time.” I could hear him laughing the way you would at a child, and I gave the phone back to Serena.
But there were more than enough wonders to keep my mind busy. Out on a whale-watching boat, I saw a whale roll and looked into the great ruddy cave of its mouth, not thirty feet from me, as Serena told me about how this huge creature nourished its massive body by scooping up little shrimp smaller than my fingernail like a giant sieve through the thicket of tissue it had instead of teeth. When Serena’s father got us up at four A.M. to go fishing, I saw a whale shark longer than Dr. Sissinelli’s boat and almost fell out of the boat trying to take pictures. I saw crabs blurt and burrow into the sand and seals with their soft eyes and humanlike heads rise up to look at me as I looked back at them. There were miles of cranberry bogs and marsh grass that smelled of vinegar and lime. I saw more BMWs in one place than I thought there could be anywhere on earth except Germany, and more food in the Sissinellis’ fridges than I’d ever seen anywhere but on the shelves of our “year’s worth” of beans and peanut butter. I remember trying to explain the food stock to Serena and her friends, some of them just as nice as she was, but some who were stuck-up. It took a whole evening by a beach campfire. It wasn’t paranoia, like the people who holed up with guns and didn’t pay taxes, I told them, but a sort of way of remembering the pioneer ideal, how they had to put by for winter and surviving disasters. “Why wouldn’t you just go to the Stop and Shop?” asked a girl named Jessie. I could hardly look at her, because the only thing on her breasts covered by her swimsuit were the nipples.
“If it was destroyed, there would be no Stop and Shop. There would be no electricity, which is why we have a wood stove and a coal burner, and lamps that run on oil, but a regular stove that uses gas, too,” I told her. “It’s a tradition. If you are prepared, you are never lost, I think it says. It’s part of our commandments.”
“You mean your Ten Commandments?”
“No, we have those, too,” I said, almost laughing. “These are . . . social things, requirements that are part of our covenants, not really scripture, but sort of based on that and made into practical life.”
“Do you believe all of it?” a boy called Cameron asked me. I knew he was Serena’s boyfriend, although they hadn’t really had a date. He held her hand as they sat on the blanket, with his face, with soft lips as beautiful as a girl’s, made sharp by the shadows.
“I guess I don’t question it,” I said. “I mean, we’re not robots. You can be a Mormon in pretty wide limits. My dad is. The way I think of it is, anybody’s church beliefs would sound as crazy to us as ours do to you; and some of it is based on things that happened over a hundred years ago, passed down from the early prophets who started the church. It’s a pretty new religion. Some of it makes sense in the light of day, and some of it doesn’t. Some people say we’re not even Christians, because we believe that God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost are people who became gods, just the way Catholic saints became saints after they died. I grew up believing it because it’s a way of life. The older you get, and see how your church affects you, the easier it gets. It’s like a shield. It keeps you safe. Like, we don’t have to decide whether to smoke, because you can’t. It’s a pretty healthy way of life.”
“Except for the sweets,” Serena put in.
“Got me!” I said. “Mormons wouldn’t be Mormons without their desserts. That’s what ‘Deseret’ means. Pound cake.” Serena punched me on the arm.
I got some funny looks, but you’re used to that around people who aren’t LDS. Generally, the other kids were just curious. Most of them didn’t go to any church, though the Sissinellis went to Our Lady of the Waves. Serena’s friends seemed to kind of get a kick out of a girl whose whole life was planned out—well, not planned out, but more or less the same as every other Mormon girl’s life anywhere in the United States, right down to the lessons we learned on Family Home Evenings. Only one guy, this surfer dude, a guy Serena didn’t much like (though she had when she was younger), said, “It sounds like you have no freedom at all.”
“But that’s the thing,” I told him, “you do. You have free will, and the gift to you is that once you’re old enough, you choose it. You don’t have to be a Mormon because you were raised a Mormon. It’s like Jews who don’t practice their religion but they’re still Jews. Some people don’t. They’re called Jack Mormons. . . .”
“Like Catholics who don’t go to church except on Christmas,” Serena said.
“In a way, yes,” I agreed.
Overall, I learned that New Englanders had a certain pride about being tolerant of anyone’s way, as long as no one was hurt by it—toward gay people, for instance (I practically fell over when I saw the men in Provincetown, six feet tall and dressed up as Cher). They accepted me, asked me and Serena to come swimming at their pools, and one, a boy called Lucas, even got a mild crush on me. I didn’t feel the same toward him, though I liked the attention. I used the excuse that I was younger than Serena, too young for dates, because he was a nice boy.
The two weeks were over in an instant.
Before I left, Serena and her mother gave me this box, and it was filled with the lotions and creams Serena used, enough, it seemed, that it would last until I grew up. “But you didn’t have to do this,” I told them, shocked by their generosity. You never felt with the Sissinellis that they were trying to impress you; they just gave as if it were totally ordinary, a funny kind of tithing.
“You have a beautiful face, Ronnie, and beautiful skin,” Mrs. Sissinelli said. “That climate out there can punish it. And there’s skin cancer, too, if you don’t protect yourself from the sun.”
I was so thrilled—it felt like Christmas—that I hugged them. “This has been the best time, the best rest, I’ve ever had in my life.”
“You deserve it,” Serena said with an undertone of sadness in her voice, like the cello’s sound in the orchestra. “What will you remember most? From this time, I mean? I’m not saying that we never want you to come back.”
“Definitely the first time I saw the ocean,” I said. “Definitely. But so much else. Catching fish that weighed fifteen pounds. The picnics. Being in the water more often than a seal. Just . . . so much.”
When it was time to leave, everyone hugged me and Serena said, “Couldn’t you stay longer?”
But by then I was homesick, not for Utah, but for Rafe and my father. I hugged them again; they felt like family to me. “This is probably the farthest from home I’ll ever be in my whole life,” I said.
“A whole life is a long time,” said Serena’s dad. “I’ve heard you want to study medicine. There are plenty of good places here to do that. And there are Mormon wards in Boston. Utah is your home, but it doesn’t have to be the only place you live.”
I had known this, of course, but never entirely taken it in. I could live somewhere else and still be myself. Leaving for college had always been something out there, like a house being prepared for me to move into. But I imagined I’d go to BYU—like everyone else. Now, I reconsidered: I didn’t have to. I could study hard and get good scores and maybe get a scholarship to another place, a place where Becky and Ruth hadn’t died. A place where I could be both the Ronnie I was there and the Ronnie I was here. I could work until I had enough money for a year of college, or win a scholarship; and I could go away—at least for a while. It might be healing. It might be acceptable. It wouldn’t mean that I wasn’t a good Mormon girl. It would mean I was different, like my mother, but not in a bad way.
On the airplane home, I thought about it, examining it from one side, then another. I thought about how I would explain this to my parents to avoid hurting them. There was
no hurry; I had years to think this over, weigh it, change my mind, and change it back.
Still, it was exciting and frightening, yet reassuring.
My parents were quietly happy to see me so healthy and tanned, and Rafe was so excited that he ran under the security rope and jumped into my arms. I think they expected me to babble all the way home about what I’d done, but I was quiet. I wanted to ride Jade and see Clare and my other friends. I loved my family, but I felt as though I were sinking back into the mourning, the sad life edge that was like a dark border around stationery.
When I got home, I saw an envelope, unopened, on the hall table; and a terrible tang came up in my throat when I looked at the return address. It was from someone named “Early.”
“It’s not him,” my mother told me quickly. “It’s from his parents. I haven’t been able to open it, either,” she said, glancing at the plain gray envelope as if it were a scorpion. “But I think I should. I have no reason to believe that they want anything from us, Ronnie. I think it’s just that, as parents, they feel as much grief, of a different kind, as we do. I think they must have wanted to reach out; imagine if your child had done such a thing.”
“I’d just burn it,” I told her, carrying my clothes to the washing machine.
“That wouldn’t be fair,” my mother said. “I’m going to pray about the wisdom of reading this letter. And when I’m ready, I know there’ll be an answer.”
And there was, but it was an answer so far out beyond what I expected that, for the first time in my life, I wondered if my parents were sane.