Free Enchantments by Linda Ferri

me to get it into my head that I'll marry at least a notary.” She burst into tears again, and I tried to find something comforting to say, and I racked my brains for some ray of hope or some dramatic turn, but nothing came to mind so I began to cry too, praying with all my might that Papa wouldn't take after his cousin Mariapia.

This ship is a city without danger where Clara and I can live on our own. Of course our parents are there, but we don't have to ask their permission and there's so much space we don't have territorial disputes with our brothers. We have a cabin all to ourselves—the key is by turns a hard little bulge in my pocket or my sister's.
    We can do whatever we want whenever we please—either play “sky” on the promenade deck or go to the movies—in the morning, for free. When we come out we're blinded by the unbroken light of the sky and the sea. Some nights, with blankets pulled up to our noses, we lie on deck and count the stars, starting all over again when we lose count until we begin to see red and greenplanets and it's time to go to bed. For the first time in our lives we stay up till dawn, but it turns out to be a disappointing paleness.
    One morning we see a whale's spout draw a mustache on the horizon, but no one believes us, neither our parents nor our brothers, four sniggering faces at the dinner table. We ignore them—we're strong after all these days that are ours alone.
    The crossing to America lasted ten days, and then my mother pointed to the Statue of Liberty and the ship came into port, entering her slip to a volley of skyrockets. In the crowd on the pier there are Mama's cousins, their eyes glistening and laughing, their mouths forming words that are lost in the general cheering and fanfare.
    In New York, Mama spends all her time talking with her cousins, so Clara and I always go out with Papa, walking for hours along avenues that are like immense diving boards stretching out into space. For some reason I kept expecting to see Cary Grant coming out of a revolving door from one of the buildings in Midtown, his necktie blowing in the wind—all of it in black and white.
    Papa took Clara and me to a huge storewith three floors where there was nothing but toys.
    At the entrance he turned us loose, saying, “You can pick three toys each.” He turned to me and said, “You keep an eye on the clock. When the hands reach here and here it will be half past ten, and we'll meet at the cash register. All right?” Yes, that's fine, but I'm already losing my head and I say to Clara that we'll never manage to choose, all those possibilities are making my head spin. And of course I go wrong. In the coloring section alone there are two dozen shelves. I finally pick a box of crayons, which I don't usually like to use, but on the box there's a tiger with three tiger cubs, my favorite animal of the moment. Then I grab a teddy bear dressed like a forest ranger, not much of anything but certainly better than my next choice, completely absurd— a baseball mitt, for a sport that it has never entered my head to play but whose red stitching and beautiful leathery toughness somehow hypnotize me.
    When I meet my father at the cashier's counter I'm discontented and upset, as if I've been defeated in a way I can't bear to admit, and I start complaining about how cold I am because of the air-conditioning. So it all ends badly withme getting a scolding: “Stop that sniveling. What a whiner you are! And you're spoiled.”
    We take a trip to the north in a rented station wagon that for days and days I saw as completely immense until my eyes got used to that big country, filled with highways that had no curves. We reached Cape Cod on a gray afternoon, with the sea, the sky, and the dunes all the same color. My brothers and I suddenly got a desperate urge to run on the beach, so we began chanting our “chorus of persuasion” that consisted of each of us, one after the other, saying “Come
on,
Papa!” faster