1986
Silent … speaking hands … be sure they say nice things about you—always.
—IVORY SOAP
A big story lasts seven days in a news cycle before viewers tire of it and producers move along. Seven astronauts had died, a dozen more Jane Does had come forward, and now, a week later, Celeste and Vincent were getting married.
And I was getting unmarried. Divorced. Why did the word have to be so ugly? I thought of other words with -vor sounds, like carnivore. Maybe my marriage had eaten me alive.
Celeste’s wedding dress probably cost $30,000.
I thought of Stella, dead. Stella as ash, like Halley.
I thought of my wedding to Wyatt, how when I walked down the aisle my world tunneled until it was just the two of us in that room, younger, thinner, our futures spooled out to eternity.
His face held wonder and astonishment, like that blind man seeing for the first time.
When had he stopped looking at me like that?
After the ceremony and reception and dancing, we retreated to the hotel room.
We drank champagne and ate chocolate-covered cherries room service had left us.
Let me slip into something more comfortable, I’d said, a line I’d heard in a movie, but Wyatt stopped me: Wait, he’d said.
One more look. I want to remember you in this dress.
I want to burn it in my brain. He spun me slowly, and we danced there by the bed.
To be honest, I never really liked weddings. The pageantry. The artifice. It’s all acting, but without professional actors. Community theater—and what’s worse than that?
I pressed my foot to the gas and sped up toward the gate. The factory came into view over the hump of the hill. I parked my car on the lot farthest from the studio because the main lot had been blocked off by police vehicles trying to keep the crowd at bay.
The show must go on. Not will. Must. Both a promise and a threat.
Souvenir vendors had lined their carts along the road, selling yellow visors, and foam fingers, and air horns, and T-shirts airbrushed with photos of Celeste and Vincent.
As I walked past, I saw a little girl in a pink dress with a chiffon skirt.
“Mommy,” she cried. “It’s the bride!” I’d committed the ultimate faux pas—I was wearing white to a wedding. I felt the bulge near my ribs.
If anyone had been with me an hour earlier, they’d have seen me step out of my clothing like I was shedding my skin.
I stepped into my Earthshine dress, that tattered secondhand wedding costume Halley had bought with me.
I slid inside, arm by arm. I twisted my back and managed to zip myself up, then I stood in front of the mirror.
Now I was my own bride. If anyone were watching, they would have noted those letters Edith left me were fanned out like a poker hand on my bed.
They would have said I looked like a ghost in that antique dress, that I was wearing a necklace that seemed to glow, even in the dimness of my room.
The crowd was a mix of celebrity sighters and protesters, gawkers and journalists.
A wiry man had climbed the statue of Bertie and threaded a rope in and out of her bronze arm and was now rappelling down her leg.
When he reached the bottom, he doused the rope in lighter fluid, lit a Bic, and set the statue on fire.
I’ll admit, an energy seized me as I watched the flame follow the guidance of the gasoline and snake toward the statue.
As soon as the fire met the metal, it briefly expanded, disappeared, and was replaced by a long swirl of smoke.
I thought of the Challenger explosion, and I thought of Christa McAuliffe, and I wondered what she was thinking in the final moments of her life, when she realized she’d never see Earth from space, that she’d, in fact, never see Earth again.
If I allow myself to get into her character, I can access her final thoughts: She was not thinking of immortality.
She was not thinking of herself as a hero or the future winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, or of how breathtakingly beautiful the world appeared, so high up in the sky.
If they make a movie of her, I hope they get it right.
At moments of crisis, the camera of one’s mind narrows.
The angles are tight. The shots are close.
She was thinking small: detangling her daughter’s hair after a bath.
Her son’s fat hands when he was small. The smell of the mail, of books, of her classroom, of rainy New Hampshire evenings, of her husband when he kissed her goodbye.
The sounds of things, too: morning birds and small footsteps from the second floor and pens scratching paper and the radiator when it kicked on in winter and all the details that seem so dull in our regular lives.
In the end, I imagine, ordinary details become extraordinary.
“Nona Dixon?” I heard behind me. A woman’s voice.
I turned. I didn’t know her, but I recognized her standing there in her visor, the same braids she wore at the Riverview restaurant.
She still had the camcorder strapped against her chest like a purse.
I started to backpedal. “No,” she said. Her voice wasn’t harsh, not like it was when I first met her.
“Stay.” She held her hands up. She was wearing mittens and a hat.
“Aren’t you cold?” she asked. She removed her scarf and gave it to me. I wrapped it around my neck.
“I need to get to the front,” I said. “I need to get to the studio.”
She sized me up, scanned my outfit.
“I thought they wrote you off,” she said.
“They did.”
“Then what?” She reached for her camera. She took off one of her mittens and put her hand through the strap.
Women have a native clairvoyance. Perhaps it’s because of the way we’ve been trained from an early age to be polite, to observe, to not put words to what we’re really thinking.
She didn’t ask questions, didn’t turn on the camera to film me. “Get her to the front!” She yelled, and moments later, I was hoisted in the air, carried on the shoulders of strangers.
The factory was in front of me, and I tipped my head back.
Suspended in the air, I wasn’t thinking of drugs in the soap, or my impending divorce, or the way I’d spent most of my life pleasing other people.
I wasn’t thinking of the Jane Does or Bertie, despite the giant statue of her that gave off smoke because the crowd was still trying to light it on fire.
I was thinking of how light my own body felt being carried by those women.
The sky was vast above me, far away and close at once.
I reached out my forefinger and thumb to measure the distance between the sun and the moon.
Humans are always trying to contain the things they can’t.
The news had said you’d able to see the comet with your naked eye if conditions were right.
But that’s the problem with life—the conditions.
I moved shoulder to shoulder, through the heavy crowd, passed from one stranger to the next, until I was set down before the security booth that stood between me and the studio doors. The guard recognized me immediately.
“Well, if it isn’t Stella,” he said.
“Mr. Security Guard,” I said to Mike.
On his hip was a gun, and a walkie-talkie, too, from which I could hear another staticky voice. “You’re not on the list,” he said, flipping through pages. “At least, I don’t think. Didn’t you die again?”
“I’m not on the list,” I said. “Surprise appearance. Elliot doesn’t even know.
They wanted Celeste and Vincent to be truly surprised.
Something about the Stanislavski Method.
Live television, am I right?” I became conscious of my body, the way I held my frame.
I grazed his arm. I leaned in close and squeezed my boobs together.
He peeked at my cleavage, then his walkie-talkie buzzed again, just empty static noises, and he turned it down. “Had to call half the police precinct in for backup, just in case.”
Someone from the crowd threw something against the building—a glass bottle from the sound of it. A woman’s voice rose above the crowd: “Burn it all down!”
He looked past me, and I watched his hand tickle his walkie-talkie.
“All for soap!” I said.
“Next thing you know, they’ll be blaming shaving cream,” he said, his voice warming. “Or toilet paper!”
“Rubs them the wrong way,” I said. “Everyone looking for a cause.” I leaned in until I could feel his beard against my cheek. “And those stupid visors,” I whispered. “They look like deranged tennis moms.”
He laughed. Then, he lifted his walkie-talkie to his lips and said something to the man on the other end. I walked right past him.
“Hey,” he called out. I turned. I was prepared for him to stop me, to tackle me, or worse. “Break a leg!”
I hopped one-legged, holding a knee. Then, I opened another set of interior doors, and immediately I could smell it: paint, electricity, hairspray. The set of Stars and Shadows.
I was home.