Cage of Stars, Page 2

  But none of that time would tell you about the real us. That’s why I also don’t want to start by telling about how I flipped out, after the story was on CNN and on the front page of the Arizona Republic, in letters a mile high; and people drove from all over Utah and even Arizona and Colorado to our yard. They came and stood in front of our house with lighted candles, singing “Amazing Grace.” About how I kept screaming that Ruthie and Becky were ours, and why did other people get to feel good about themselves, singing and crying over my sisters they never knew?

  I’d like it if you could see us, just for a minute, the way we were before then. Otherwise, we’ll just be set down forever as what I kept screaming that night, while my parents tried to make me stop and come inside—just another story under a newspaper headline. A tragedy that used to be the Swans.

  We were an ordinary family, a little bit more Birkenstock-y than some (my mother knitting a sweater for everyone but the horse), a little more National Geographica than some (my father tromping around applauding at sunsets and making teas from rose hips and his own special root beer from scratch). They were semi-hippies. Sort of cute. Not obnoxious. And they were parents who were in love. When I was little, I thought everyone’s parents kissed each other every time they said good morning and hello.

  What a surprise I had when I got out in the world! Most people who say they’re in love are just putting up with each other because they’re lonely. When I saw how most marriages were, I began to hope that I’d fall in love fast and young and forever like my folks. And it’s not because I wanted to be Molly Mormon (that’s what some people call it, because you’re sort of supposed to fall in love young and get married young and have kids right away if you’re LDS. You know that means Latter-day Saints—which is the real name of all Mormons; it’s the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), but because I really wanted to. It makes a whole lot of things in your life easier if you have another self right by your side, for all time, for all strife, someone who remembers you as well as you remember yourself.

  I never wanted to get married as young as my parents, though. They were only nineteen, but they were pretty amazing. They did everything on their own, without help, with scholarships and working right through college. They met in high school and went through their missions without anything but letters between them; but my father said he never looked at another woman after he saw Cressie Bonham, the tall girl with her long brown hair blowing every which way in the wind. The day he came home to Cedar City, he proposed. They went to Brigham Young University in Provo together and were perfect students. They tried right away to have me, but it took ten years. And that’s how Mama got so passionate about art. I think she made ceramic babies from her sadness. Here she had the perfect mate, and no soul seemed to want to come to them. I think waiting for having kids might have made them closer to each other than other parents I knew who had families right away, though. They sometimes didn’t have to even speak to be able to say, I know just what you mean.

  They weren’t perfect, though. I think sometimes my father thought he was the smarter one. And sometimes my mother thought the same thing. Although my father was definitely the captain of the ship, which is how it has to be, my mother got her two cents in. They had their moments.

  Once, when I was really little, I heard my father say in his big radio announcer voice, “What do you expect from this conversation, Cressida?”

  She said, in a voice that was a perfect imitation of him, “To have it with a person who has an informed opinion on the subject.”

  And then, as usual when she imitated him, it would crack my father up. And then they would forget to fight.

  My papa says no family is normal. And we had our share of unusual people, for sure. He was one of eleven brothers, for starters. Imagine thinking up all those names. That’s how my father came to be called London, because he was close to the end, and my grandparents were getting creative. They started out with Kevin and Andrew and William and wound it up with Jackson, Dante, and Bryce (like the canyon). My grandma Swan went to college and got started having babies after; but she’s still alive and living in Tampa. (There are more Mormons in Florida than Utah; did you know that?) She’s . . . smaller and more irritable than she used to be. Since what happened. But I still go to see her. We watch old Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movies. All her sons are still alive, too, which has almost driven her crazy, to obsession, not because she wants her sons to die, but because Ruthie and Becky died first. She has a total of sixty-eight grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and she sends every one a ten-dollar bill on their birthday and a book at Christmas. Every one.

  The other way we were unusual was that Papa was “known” as a liberal, at least for a Mormon, in our little community. When I say “community,” I’m exaggerating. I’m talking little. Just these few houses sprinkled around Dragon Creek, which people said ran all the way down from the mountains to St. George. (Get it? St. George and the Dragon?) For about half the summer, the creek was a dry bed that hikers could jump right over. But long ago, someone had dammed a little part; and it made a swimming hole that stayed fresh, though shallow, a little longer if there’d been a lot of snow the previous winter. We considered it ours. We built a fort next to it by bending down scrubby willows and chinked up the outside with mud. It hardened like an actual building. That was our changing room in the summer. The boys just swam in their underwear when we weren’t around. It was understood that we didn’t swim together except suited up or at the Sissinellis’ pool parties. Where we lived, it wasn’t rare that it would get to a hundred degrees, and they can tell you what they want about “dry heat,” it was still hot.

  Cedar City, nearer by us, was not as big as St. George, but big enough to have a college and a temple as beautiful as a Russian castle. We didn’t go there often. There was our little church a mile or so up to the road (I used to run as hard as I could down the road, touch the railing on the porch, and jog back home to build my wind for basketball), a post office, a place that did hiking tours, and a general store where Jackie and Barney sold everything from cappuccino to Wonder bread, from rag dolls and quilts to ice skates and gasoline. And candy. They had, like, half the store given up to candy shelves, from the fancy gold-foil kind rolled in cocoa to the forty-pack of Pixie Stix. Papa used to say Methodism was born in song and Mormonism was bred in sugar. People in Utah probably eat more sugar per person than anywhere else in the United States. They can’t have anything else, so it’s their addiction, you could say. There was also an old house someone converted into an antiques and rug store, open only during the fall. And that would be it.

  But even in a teeny place, there were enough people around to gossip, though they wouldn’t have called it that.

  What people said about Papa was that he was always questioning everything, telling people that the LDS church had so much power in Utah, it was almost unconstitutional; how the church took long enough respecting black people; how he was against capital punishment—even the “humane” kind; that he would half like to move his family to New York or Michigan, where being a Mormon would be unusual and would mean something bigger to his children than living where everyone was LDS. The talk was partly because Papa’s brother Pierce was the bishop for our little ward—our congregation, if you want to call it that. Uncle Pierce was about as conservative as you could get while still being normal enough to talk to. He lived nearer Cedar City than we did, but he came down for our Sunday services and for holy days and for our special family reunion, around the time of Pioneer Days, and anytime anyone else needed him to. All of Papa’s brothers (except the one who lives in Alaska and married out of the church, though we still like him) and my mama’s sister and brother and all their children would come to the reunion, too. . . . Every year in early July, the first day of our family festival lasted practically all night. People tented out and cooked over fires. There was live music and dancing; and adults wore these silly old-time dresses and bonnets; and everybody invit
ed their relatives from Colorado and Illinois and all over. The little kids had a Pioneer parade on the second day. People swam and hiked and ate and rock-climbed for four days until they were worn out and ready to go back to the suburbs—away from what was normal life to us all the time. (I don’t mean the bonnets and buckskin pants!)

  Obviously, a lot of our life focused around our church. That’s true of most Mormons. If you have Young Women’s program on Wednesday night and your family says scripture together before school and then you have church for about four hours on Sunday, it can’t help but be. But when that’s how you grow up, you mostly don’t mind it. You see the reason that the church has a plan for everything. It makes life easier. It’s not like we’re sheep in a herd, all doing exactly what the Prophet and his apostles—these are his sort of board of directors—say. You always have your free will. But if you’re going to believe it, you might as well do it.

  There were whole years when I hardly did anything but show up at church, like a shadow walking; but I did believe.

  We used that building for church and everything else, too.

  From looking at it, you could hardly tell it was a church. It was small, made of simple white boards, and barely had a peaked roof. But it was beautiful inside—the floor especially. Mr. Emory inlaid circle upon circle of different woods like maple, hickory, and birch. Mama (my own mother) made a small ceramic statue at the entrance, of flowers and bumblebees surrounded by two uplifted hands, because the beehive is a big symbol for Mormons, who really are always pretty busy. It was only about three feet wide and four feet tall, but it was gorgeous. It took her nearly six months, when she was pregnant with Ruthie. Inside the sanctuary, we had movable pews, but the other rooms had folding chairs that could be set in semicircles or linked together. In the back were the offices and tables where we did our schoolwork when there was something, like art, that we didn’t do at home. The art room was made of partitions, the shelves filled with paper, easels, and supplies for painting and drawing. It even had a little kiln and a potter’s wheel that had been donated to us by the Sissinelli family, after my mother wished it out loud in their presence, saying she sculpted because she had to “feel the shape of art.” It embarrassed her later, that they might have seen it as hinting she wanted to sell them something, because the Sissinellis were rich. But Mrs. Sissinelli loved my mother’s vases and sculptures. She ended up owning six of them and kept three in her house by the ridge. She told Mama to think of the kiln as the answer to a prayer if she couldn’t think of it as just something nice to do. My mother used it when she taught art to us and anyone’s kids who wanted to come on Tuesday evenings.

  There was a little regular private school in our church, with a part-time teacher paid by a collection of all the parents in the ward. We had a really small library, made simply out of shelves facing one another on three sides. There were rooms for Sunday school for adults and the children’s primary, but they were tiny, too. Only about fifty people came on a regular Sunday. A curtain with stars on it, sewn of this lush fabric, almost like a theater curtain, separated the school and offices from the church rooms. Some of the kids held little shows there—like The Divine Comedy. It wasn’t like the famous one at Brigham Young University. But some of the teenagers in high school or the local college wrote and performed a Mormon Saturday Night Live. They started with a prayer, but then they threw light sticks and Three Musketeers and Snickers all over the crowd, running up and down the aisles. Then, the rest was music, from Motown to techno, and skits like The Lord of the Engagement Rings, spoofing how proud Mormon girls usually are to prove they’re getting married. It didn’t get too bad, but it got a little bad. Like there was this skit with a song about how California girls wear their jeans too tight, and they’ll love you but they put up a fight, or something that made the parents a little tweaked and embarrassed me, too. My cousin Bridget, who had the reddest hair in our family and could write and act, and my friend Clare, who sang like an angel, were in it a couple of times.

  When the Prophet—you might call him the Super Bishop, although we don’t have ordained priests like other churches, because every grown man who’s a good Mormon is more or less a priest—addressed us on TV from Salt Lake, all of us would gather at the little church. If a lot of guests were in town, that would mean not much room. There would be us, counting my uncle Pierce and his wife and kids; our neighbors the Emorys from next door; the Tierneys, the McCartys, the Woodriches, the Barkens, and the Lents, who lived a mile the other side of the clinic but were still in our ward; the O’Fallons; Jackie and Barney Wilder, who had no kids; and the Breedwells. Some people had family members who weren’t LDS but came, too, out of curiosity.

  There were lots of gentle jokes about “Brother” Trace Breedwell and “Sister” Annabella Breedwell—“Brother” and “Sister” is what you call adults if you are one, “Elder” if the person is a big leader in the church or a man who’s a missionary. It’s normal for LDS to have big families, but with the Breedwells, we’re talking majorly big even by our standards! There are different theories about why Mormons have so many kids. Personally, I think at first it was probably because they needed a lot of us when Joseph Smith started the religion so that at least somebody would survive a lot of persecution. Many Mormons still think the more Mormons the better, to spread the word, which is what missions are for. Church teachings say it’s because we all live in heaven before we’re born, and we have to have a lot of children to make physical bodies for those souls, like God’s and Jesus’s physical bodies were made, so that the souls can come down to earth and be tested. People are tested so they can become more like God, and it goes on—you go on trying to get better and doing good—even after you’re dead. You can even be baptized as a Mormon after you’re dead, whether you want to be or not. The guy who wrote The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a devout Anglican; and he’s been baptized a Mormon half a dozen times.

  Unlike most people who have a lot of kids—not necessarily on purpose—most of us turn out pretty okay even if we rebel growing up.

  I rebelled.

  I was always stubborn. My father said my first word was “Why?”

  But I was more so afterward. I seemed to need to feed on the dark side of human life. I read Dracula and Wuthering Heights and other books that were sinister and pretty evil and while not exactly forbidden, were not encouraged. I read and loved In Cold Blood, which is not what my grandma used to call a story that sprang from “the life source.” It was a story that sprang from hell in a human heart. But I had to know about that stuff. And my mother knew perfectly well that I was reading them.

  The minorly bad stuff other kids did was more the obvious kind.

  Like in our small neighborhood, one person the term saint really didn’t apply to was Finn O’Fallon, who was nineteen and barely out of high school, although he was pretty smart. Ditto the Tierney girls, Maura and Maeve, a few years older than me, who were way too into fashion and cutting it close, with short skirts and belly buttons showing, although their older sisters weren’t like that. But none of them was really bad, if you know what I mean. I know that Finn, who was named after Finn McCool, this Irish hero like King Arthur or Paul Bunyan, drank coffee and had smoked cigarettes a few times. Total no-no, but not the end of the world. Maura and Maeve had gin and tonics with Serena Sissinelli, but only once.

  That doesn’t sound that bad, does it? Compared with ordinary kids? Believe me, I heard stories on my basketball team that would make your hair stand up. But Maura’s parents were half-crazy with worry about one alcoholic drink.

  They turned out okay, though, probably because Mormons spend a lot more time (I used to think too much time) with their children. My parents weren’t as whacked out about spending every minute with us as some. They had a one- or two-hour date every other weekend, plus my mother worked about a day a week outside the home. That was another thing that set them apart. She was the only mother around us who had a job besides being a mother. But it’s
not like she went out to be a stockbroker in Salt Lake. She did her work in her studio in the shed, where there was no heat except a space heater—although my father did put in heat and new windows after she stopped using it, maybe to try to coax her back. It didn’t work, so when I got older I would sometimes stay out there when I came home, for privacy. Back when I was young, after spending an hour or so working, she spent most of her time with us, cooking with us, hiking with us, or teaching us, and she had her calling, which Uncle Pierce told her was what she should do for service, which was the art teaching.

  I thought it was a little confining when I was a kid, and I looked forward to having friends who weren’t LDS—like girls I met when I played on the basketball team at the high school, which even homeschooled kids were allowed to do. I really wanted to have friends who were Japanese or French or whatever, to be sent to some exotic place I would have to have shots to go to; but I would have to wait for that. You didn’t find a lot of exotic people, except the occasional Japanese tourist, in the hills near our house. When I did finally have friends who weren’t LDS, I liked a lot of them. But I would always feel there were things I couldn’t explain—not just the things I literally couldn’t explain because you can’t talk about them, like the rituals, but why we are how we are. The old saying is that every Mormon is a missionary, but I wasn’t. I just kept that part of myself to myself.

  The Sissinellis were the only family around us who weren’t Mormons.

  They moved here just because the hills of the Pine Mountain range are pretty in autumn and pretty warm in the winter. You could drive in a few hours to the Grand Canyon and places to ski and hike. They were big rock climbers, with all the gear and helmets and junk. It’s their main home—we all thought of it as a mansion—although they have another one. They live on Cape Cod in the summer. Dr. Sissinelli is an anesthesiologist—the kind who makes the most money and commits suicide the most often, or so I read someplace. I definitely did not want to be an anesthesiologist. He had a driver who drove his car for him all the way to St. George when he went to work, so he could sleep or go over his files in the backseat. Mrs. Sissinelli was an accountant. She worked for private clients all over the country, just by Internet. They had a daughter and a son, and the son was so handsome that he looked like Johnny Depp. The daughter, Serena, was pretty, too, and really nice, not stuck-up the way you would think a girl would be who lived in a house that had three floors and an indoor pool. She got away with a lot, though—maybe not a lot by regular standards, but a lot by LDS standards. There was the night of the gin and tonics. We were all swimming in the Sissinelli pool. It was okay that the parents weren’t home because Miko, the son, was a lifeguard in the summers. His real name was Michelangelo—which he would have killed Serena for telling me if he had known. We were swimming, and Serena brought the drinks down like they were lemonade, which we all thought they were until we took one sip and practically puked. Miko was, like, I’m so not into this. He got up and told no one to dive until he came back. Maeve and Maura seemed to think that they had to prove something by finishing theirs. I just sat there and watched. That was just one time, though, like I said; and they told their parents. It was normal to tell your parents pretty much everything, even the bad stuff. When Clare and I drank the Earl Grey tea we’d stolen from one of Mrs. Sissinelli’s canisters, we confessed, and we barely got punished. My father said, “Everybody kicks the gate a little.” We had to apologize to Mrs. Sissinelli and write an essay about caffeine and addiction. Writing that essay, I found out that Coke and chocolate also have caffeine; and I came stomping up to my father and demanded to know why I could have Coke and Hershey bars but not coffee. He laughed and said that Hershey bars weren’t in the Word of Wisdom revealed to Joseph Smith because Hershey bars weren’t invented in the 1800s. But I found out that Mrs. Emory kept a year’s supply of Diet Pepsi along with her year’s supply of everything else, like canned tuna and peanut butter—we have to do that, to be self-reliant—so I think she had a little dependency thing going.