Cage of Stars

  Finally I shook myself and said, “I think you’re thinking of Amish people. They’re famous for quilts. As for modern-day Mormons, we only marry one person. That, the polygamy, was something that happened, only for a bit, a long time ago. Some of it was just a pioneer marrying women in name only, because single women couldn’t inherit property; and if their husbands died, no one might look after them and their children. The people who do it now are breaking the law. They’re sort of crazy, too. No one I know supports them. My father is a teacher, and my mother stays home with my two little brothers. One of them is almost four, and one is just a baby.”

  “And you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re quite a bit older. . . .”

  “I had two little sisters. They died.”

  “Oh, my dear,” said Mrs. Desmond.

  “Thank you for the cookies. I was famished,” I told her.

  “So you don’t drink tea. Do you have a great, shedding dog? Do you smoke?”

  “Oh, my goodness. No!”

  “Do you bring men home?”

  “Not unless my father comes to visit,” I said. “It’s . . . We’re pretty conservative that way.”

  “Well, the rent for that room is . . . eighty-five dollars a month. If you dine with me, that’s another five a week, and of course, you can cook small things in your room. There’s a laundry in there, on the first floor, and—”

  “Eighty-five dollars a month?” I couldn’t believe my ears. And I also knew that she was fudging, that she could get a lot more than that. “Are you sure?”

  “Well, yes, I am,” said Mrs. Desmond.

  “I can afford that!” I told her. “And I have references. . . .”

  “My eyes and ears tell me all I need to know. They haven’t failed me yet.”

  “I could be anyone.”

  “But you aren’t, are you?”

  Veronica was a lady in every sense of the word, Mrs. Desmond would later tell the newspapers, and I’m utterly certain she still is. She wasn’t typical of her generation.

  I moved in that night. She showed me a spot right behind the house to park my little Civic.

  In class two days later, I was daydreaming about how gratefully I would sink into my snowy expanse of pillows when the same Chinese guy whose grandma had died elbowed me gently. He whispered, “Is this all kind of a lot to you, or is it just me?”

  “It’s all kind of going right through me,” I wrote on my legal pad. “And I thought I knew some of this stuff.”

  “I think we’re finished,” the teacher said. “You look as though you’ve all had enough for one evening.”

  I began to gather up my thick text, which I’d bought just that morning, my various lists and handouts and forms, and to stuff them into my backpack. I’d spent the day getting my student ID and paying the first installment on my class. And that had left me just about broke.

  “I was going to ask you, do you live around here?” asked Kevin Chan. “Do you want to meet and study? I think some of the other people here might know each other, but I was majoring in English at UC Davis until this year . . . and I’m afraid I’m not going to make it. There are no doctors in my family. My father runs a restaurant.” I sized him up to see if he was trying to flirt with me, but he seemed to have nothing in mind except someone to help him wade through the organ systems.

  “Sure,” I said, and smiled at him. “What kind of restaurant is it?”

  “A Chinese restaurant,” said Kevin. “What else would you think? There are more Chinese restaurants in California than there are in China!”

  “I’ve never had Chinese food,” I said.

  “Get out. Everyone’s had Chinese food. You know, like fried rice or beef chop suey or that junk?”

  “I really never have had Chinese food.”

  “Are you, like, kosher or something?”

  “No,” I told him as we walked out into the California twilight. Weather here seemed to roll from one endless and seamless day of golden perfection into an exact replica. “I’m from Utah, and I live in a little town . . . it’s not even really a town. I’m sure they have Chinese restaurants somewhere, in the cities, but we just never went to one. The only restaurant food I’ve had is lobster and Mexican.”

  Kevin laughed. “That’s quite a contrast. But you’ll have to come to The Seventh Happiness.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s our restaurant. My mother oversees everything in the front, and my dad in the back, and my mother’s father cooks and my mother’s mother cooks and my mother’s sister cooks and my sisters wait on the tables and my little brothers clean up. When we can get them to.”

  “Why’s it called The Seventh Happiness?”

  “I think because there are only six,” he said.

  “Six happinesses?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but don’t ask me what they are because I don’t know any more about that than I know how to speak Chinese.”

  “You don’t know how to speak Chinese?”

  “What are you?”

  “I’m a Mormon.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m a Methodist. But I didn’t mean religion. I meant, what are you? Irish?”

  “I’m English and Danish. I have no idea why I have red hair.”

  “Well, do you speak Danish?”

  “I get it. But I just assumed, since you had a restaurant and you called your grandmother ‘Grandmother,’ that you were Chinese Chinese,” I said.

  “Context clues. But no, my great-grandfather was Chinese Chinese, but I’m ordinary American. I probably know five sentences in Chinese, mostly how to say thank you. Look, what’s your name?”

  “Ronnie. Veronica in class.”

  “Ronnie, when did you get to town?”

  “A couple of days ago. I haven’t even had time to buy milk!”

  “So why don’t you come tonight? I have to go over there and work anyhow. . . .” He saw my hesitation. “Okay. I’m sorry. You’re new here, and you don’t know that all of us in California treat each other like we’ve known each other all our lives from the minute we meet. It’s a So Cal thing.” He saw my stare. “Southern California? So Cal? I mean, I could be an ax murderer for all you know.” I winced then, and he held up both hands. “Ronnie, I was just trying to be nice. I have a steady girlfriend who’s at UCLA film school, and I’m just used to being the all-purpose big brother to my sisters’ friends. No biggie. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, breathing out through my teeth the way I’d taught myself to do when anything scared me. I hiked up my book bag. And then I thought, How could I have been frightened of this kid? He’s no older than Miko.

  “I’ll see you in class,” Kevin said, getting out his keys.

  “Okay,” I told him. He bounded down the steps. Kevin would remember afterward, when reporters asked him, that practically the first thing he’d said to me was that he could be an ax murderer. No wonder it freaked her out, he would say. As I watched him spring out to the parking lot, for some reason I yelled after him.

  “Wait,” I told him when I caught up. “Listen. I don’t know how expensive your restaurant is, but I can afford one dinner out. Right now I have Ritz crackers and peanut butter in my house, which isn’t really even a house, just a room full of suitcases and boxes, and I haven’t had anything since breakfast, which was one boiled egg in a cup my landlady made. And the landlady is really nice, but I don’t want to impose on her by asking to have dinner the second night I’m here. Not to mention that she probably ate her dinner hours ago. So if you’d like to bring me with you . . .”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to pay for it!” Kevin said, grinning. “The most you’ll have to do is wash dishes!”

  “I’m a champ at that! I’ve washed plates and forks for my whole church!”

  “Geez, Ronnie, I’m kidding about that, too! No, come with me and meet my parents and the kids, and you can take home Chinese food to last you the next week.”

  The Seventh Happiness was on
ly twenty minutes’ drive from the college. Kevin parked his car in back and we went in through the screen door, where a tiny old man was sitting on the steps, smoking a little cigar and muttering and pointing out things in the air. “This is my uncle Torrance, my father’s oldest brother,” Kevin said. “Uncle Torrance, this is my school friend Veronica.” The old man waved and kept on muttering. “He drinks,” Kevin said. “We let him think that he’s working here, but this is mostly what he does, get tanked and sit on the back steps and talk to his wife. She left him about forty years ago. He’s Torrance, and my uncle who’s a police officer is Barstow, and my father is Carson, after Carson City, California.”

  “This is so funny!”

  “Yeah, it’s nuts. This was my grandmother’s idea.”

  “No, what’s nuts is that my grandmother did the same thing!” I said happily. “We thought she invented it! My father’s name is London! And his brother’s named after Bryce Canyon. We’re probably the only two people in America whose grandmothers were nuts in exactly that way!”

  Kevin shook his head. “I knew I was right to ask you over. Must be the red thread,” he said.

  “What’s that?” I asked him.

  “Well, that is one Chinese legend I do know. It means if two people are meant to meet in life, they’re born connected by an invisible red thread. And no matter where they’re born or how far apart they live, eventually they’ll meet, because they’re already connected.”

  He pulled me inside, where everyone in the hot, scrubbed-bare little kitchen was screaming and banging on the lids of big pots and vats. There were maybe six people in white coats and hairnets in there, bashing away at a huge stove and steam table. Racks and colanders of sliced vegetables glistened on the sideboards, where a woman was chopping in a gleaming of flying cutlery. Overhead, plucked ducks hung from their necks on twine. As we stepped in, the woman cutting vegetables wadded up the little white hat she was wearing and began screaming at one of the men working at the steam table, using her big knife as punctuation.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked Kevin, hanging back.

  “What? Oh, nothing! That’s how my family talks to each other. Nobody talks in a normal voice if they can yell. That’s my aunt Rose. She’s mad at her husband because he bet money on the ponies. Mom!” Kevin yelled to a tall, pretty woman who looked like a model in her sandals and sundress. She slipped her apron off over her head and came toward us, smiling. “Mom, this is Ronnie from my class. She’s never had Chinese food in her entire life!”

  “Well, Ronnie, I’m Jenny Chan, and though I’m deeply shocked, I’ll get over it if you have some of ours,” she said. “Are you going to be an EMT also? We worry about Kevin doing this work. We thought he was better off with the idea of teaching literature. We think it could be dangerous.” Kevin’s auntie Rose was banging on the chopping block with her knife at that moment, pausing every couple of minutes to wave it in the air. I looked from one woman to the other.

  “I think he’ll be able to handle it,” I said.

  Kevin and his mother rolled their eyes.

  “Point taken,” said Mrs. Chan. “Rosie!” she cried. “That’s a good knife. Wait until home and fight with your own cutlery!” The older woman reluctantly went back to her supercharged chopping, the knife a twinkling silver blur. I was surprised she still had fingers.

  That night, I learned that Chinese food was one of the Lord’s blessings on earth. I sat at the bar next to the kitchen window and ate shrimp with lobster sauce and black prawns and gingered rice and Kung Pao chicken, which The Seventh Happiness made with so many hot peppers that I also drank three root beers. Kevin’s sister Marie was my age, and his sister Kitty was a year older. They turned up the radio and danced in the hall between the kitchen and the dining room while they waited for orders to be ready. Kevin’s little brother Scott, who took away the dishes, was only thirteen. His other little brother, Conner, who folded knives and forks into napkins and put a little decorated tape on each one to keep it together, when he wasn’t coloring with crayons on the place mats and playing Connect Four with me, was nine.

  Jenny Chan, Kevin’s mom, was one of the kindest people. She asked me all about my family and told me how brave I was to go so far from home on my own, how frightened she would be if Kevin went to another state for school, how she had painted the plates for the restaurant herself, and how angry she got at Uncle Torrance every time he dropped and broke a whole stack of them, “although I’m very sorry for him, of course.” Kevin’s father was also a nice man, tall and polite like Kevin, but distracted and perpetually rushed. I could see why. Two hundred people must have come through the beaded curtain over the door at The Seventh Happiness during the hours I was there, from the sort of sun-brushed blond family I’d come to associate with La Jolla—one in which the father and mother looked similar enough to be twins—to long-haired girls and boys who wore dreamy smiles, ripped T-shirts, and sandals, to big Jewish families coming to eat after services.

  “I thought Jews couldn’t have pork,” I whispered to Kevin when he got a chance to set down the phone for a moment. As soon as he put it down, it rang again.

  “Only Chinese pork,” he explained. I would learn, until one night, that almost everything was a joke to Kevin.

  On the third night that I fell asleep in California, I could still hear those pot lids clanging, but by then I had more on my mind than my happy stomach. Kevin drove me back to my car and followed me until he was sure I was on the right street. Mrs. Desmond was sitting on the porch when I got home. It was after ten.

  “You’re out late,” she said quietly.

  “A nice boy from my class took me to his family’s restaurant for dinner,” I said. “Normally, I wouldn’t have gone with a stranger, but I had a sense about him.”

  “People are very trusting here,” she said. “And generally kind. That part reminds me of home.”

  “It must,” I said, sitting down on the steps.

  “How are you adjusting, Ronnie?” she asked.

  “It’s too soon to tell. There’s too much to take in. The classes. The ocean. Chinese food. My mother said when I called home after I got here that I sounded as though I were sleepwalking. And I practically am. I should go in and sleep for twelve hours, Missus Desmond. But how do you manage it? When the air is like this? I’ve never felt air like this. It’s like . . . lotion.”

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” Mrs. Desmond asked. “And perhaps a biscuit? You look a bit shattered.”

  “I don’t think I could eat another thing,” I told her, showing her my little cartons of leftovers with the red dragons stamped on the sides. “I’d be grateful for a cup of herbal tea. I’m just . . . I guess my father would say I’m overstimulated, like my little brother gets before Christmas. Everything is so different. The sounds and the crowds. I’ve never been in so large a city,” I said. “To stay, I mean. I’ve been to Cape Cod, and Salt Lake City, but only for visits or a day trip. . . .”

  “It’s chamomile tea,” Mrs. Desmond said. “It will help you drop off to sleep.” I felt a pang. My mother gave us chamomile tea, with scalded milk, when I was little. Mrs. Desmond must have seen something change in my face. “Are you feeling homesick, Ronnie?” I nodded. “Would you like a shawl? I have dozens. I just wrap one more around me as it gets darker. I like to watch the water change as the light disappears.”

  Mrs. Desmond lifted an afghan out of a big hamper on her porch, and I put it over my knees. She went to get the tea, and by the time she came back, I had dropped off. I shook myself awake, slapping my hands, which had fallen asleep.

  “Come up here and have a chair,” she said.

  “I’m used to sitting on the floor,” I said. “My father says I wasn’t born to live indoors.”

  “Then put one of those lap robes beneath you and lean on my chair,” Mrs. Desmond said kindly. “I’ve got too many daughters to feel comfortable with a tired child lying flat on a damp porch floor.”

  We watched
as couples passed us hand in hand—heading for the pier, I supposed. California was apparently open all night. They were, most of them, impossibly beautiful people, like gazelles or some other exotic creature of the plains, people who moved with a sort of grace I thought must be particular to Hominidus californius. They had the longest legs and necks.

  “Do they all look this way?” I asked.

  “It seems so, doesn’t it,” Mrs. Desmond said, and then asked, “Ronnie, why are you really here?”

  My neck muscles gripped. “I’ll be getting a job in . . . in San Diego, but I don’t have one yet. I’m going to school at La Jolla Tech, studying to be an EMT. I told you. I came for school.”

  “Why would you want to do that? That job?” Mrs. Desmond asked.

  “I . . . well, I want to be a doctor one day, and this is a good path,” I said.

  “It’s very gruesome,” she said.

  “But not if you help save a life,” I said.

  “Paramedics came when my husband died,” she told me, “but it was far too late for him. He’d had a massive heart attack.”

  “How very sad,” I said.

  “Not really.” She smiled. “I suppose it was sad. In a general way. But I moved here with the wrong fellow, you might say, although I knew he was the wrong fellow forty years ago, when I married him. My children still live in Brisbane. Someday, when I get enough energy to pack up this place and sell it, I’ll move back there. I thought I was in love, I suppose. He was an American pilot. I was, you might say, an old maid, a governess if you can believe that! We have three lovely girls, but once he’d set his mind on moving back here, after he retired, and it was just him and me . . . Ah, well, that was fifteen years ago. He died the third year. I go home at Christmas and in summer, which is winter there, of course. That’s why I take in boarders, not because I need the income. So that there would be someone to look after the place while I wasn’t about.”