The Lonely Polygamist

by Brady Udall

  Along with the illicit thrill of reading about the newest Cleavage Enhancement Brassiere and the woman from Ohio who claimed to have sex thirty to forty times a week, she felt an unexpected longing for the life she had left behind, the life in which reading a magazine like this wouldn’t have caused her a moment of shame, a life where Cleavage Enhancements and bikini waxes were an option if not a necessity, a life she thought she had given up on forever.

  She paused at one of the feature articles titled “Advanced Lovemaking Techniques For the Rest of Us.” Wearing the casual expression of somebody checking out the newest advances in Tupperware technology in Family Circle, she read:

  A BIRD IN THE HAND

  Pleasuring your man manually—whether it’s a prelude to full-fledged sex or an erotic act in itself—is an incredibly sexy sack skill that’s sadly overlooked

  She felt a touch on her shoulder and nearly leapt sideways off her chair. Rose-of-Sharon was already backing up, saying, “Oh dear, I didn’t mean, I just wanted to—” She squeezed her hands against her breastbone, her shoulders braced in an apologetic hunch. She was a woman, Trish thought, who might have been pretty if she didn’t look scared to death fifty minutes out of every hour. Trish stood, slipped the Cosmo under an old National Geographic, and took Rose-of-Sharon by the wrists to calm her. When Trish first met her, Rose seemed shy, unsure of herself in a charming country-girl sort of way, but over the past year her nervousness had come to seem almost pathological—she avoided eye contact, had difficulty finishing a sentence, went skittish around anyone but her sister and her children, framed every conversation in terms of apology and regret. A few years before Trish joined the family, Rose had spent six weeks in a hospital after a nervous breakdown, and while no one spoke about it openly, there was a worry among Golden and the other wives that she might be headed down that path again. Even as Rose grew pale and unsure and small, her sister widened at the waist, added new hips and busts and stomachs, became even more bombastic and full of color, telling jokes, teasing anyone who happened into her sights, yelping with please-don’t-kill-me laughter.

  “I was wondering if you wanted a shampoo,” Rose-of-Sharon said in her choked little powder-soft voice. “I can do it, if you want. But if you want Nola to do it…”

  “Oh no!” Trish said. “Of course. A shampoo. Thank you. That would be lovely.” She practically had to drag Rose-of-Sharon over to the shampoo sink, where she sat back in a swivel chair and placed her neck in the sunken lip, thinking, for some reason, of some famous person she’d read about—was it Sir Thomas More or maybe Louis XVI?—who had asked to be positioned in the guillotine with his face toward heaven so he could meet his doom head-on.

  While Rose-of-Sharon wetted down her hair, Trish kept up a stream of questions to keep her sister-wife comfortable. How were the kids? Who was looking after the younger ones while she was here at the academy? Had Sybil gotten over her flu? But once Rose-of-Sharon began to massage the shampoo into Trish’s hair, the questions dropped off and Rose’s answers—if there were any—lost themselves to the gurgling of the spigot, the pleasure of the warm water, the peppermint scent of the shampoo, the soft and steady pressure of Rose’s massaging fingertips. For a moment she felt luxuriously alone in her pleasure, the crackling of shampoo suds in her ears blocking out every other sound, her eyes closed to the unforgiving brilliance of midday light slanting in from the window, and the phrase advanced lovemaking slipped into her mind, and full-fledged sex, and she began to feel oddly relaxed and aroused, a tingling at her chest and inside her thighs, and then she heard a faraway voice:

  “…going to Cedar City tonight?”

  “What?” Trish sat up a little, the tingling blood in her chest moving quickly up her neck and into her cheeks.

  “Oh. No. I was just—I was just wondering if you knew about my Pauline’s recital? In Cedar City? Tonight?”

  Blinking, Trish craned her neck to look Rose in the eye. A second ago she had barely been able to formulate one-word answers to Trish’s questions, and now she was engaging in what sounded suspiciously like idle chatter. “Yes,” she said, settling back in. “Beverly mentioned it.” She closed her eyes, hoping that would end the conversation once and for all.

  Rose-of-Sharon’s hands were still in her hair, but instead of moving across her scalp with a soft kneading motion as before, they had begun to tremble. Trish opened her eyes again and caught Nola and Rose exchanging a look—Nola’s encouraging and Rose’s full of doubt—and she realized with a start what was going on. This was not an innocent shampoo-and-rinse, a nice moment between sister-wives. Rose-of-Sharon, her shy, sweet sister-wife, had maneuvered her into this compromising position to ask Trish to give up her night with Golden—her first night with him in over two weeks—so he could accompany Rose-of-Sharon to her daughter’s recital in Cedar City, so they could stay together in a hotel and sleep in a hotel bed with everything that implied, and eat at a restaurant and have a fine old time while Trish sat at home, alone, throttled with jealousy and loneliness.

  This, to put it impolitely, was an ambush.

  Not that long ago Trish wouldn’t have minded so much. It was normal for the wives to barter and trade their time with their husband, and Trish, a fourth wife with nothing but her goodwill to offer, was always ready to give in, to make allowances. Generosity. Selflessness. Lovingkindness. These were, as the women so often reminded each other, a large part of what living the Principle was about. But not tonight. She hadn’t been alone with Golden in two weeks, had hardly seen him at all during that time, and though she didn’t like to admit it, she missed him so greedily, was so hungry for him that she wanted nothing more than to attach herself to him like a feral cat.

  She had begun at five this morning with a preliminary shower, plucking the two rogue hairs from her chin, taking a pumice stone to her elbows and feet, and finishing up with a regimen of lotions and leave-in conditioner that made her feel like she’d been dipped in lard. Then she moved on to the house: scrubbed the walls and floors spotless, washed and hung out the sheets, vacuumed and dusted. When she couldn’t stand to be inside a second longer she had come to town for groceries and a hairdo, all for him, for her rumpled Golden, as if he were some kind of visiting dignitary instead of a graying construction contractor with a limp who had three pairs of shoes to his name and demonstrated a persistent inability to keep track of his own wallet.

  It amazed her still how quickly, how easily, she had fallen for this man. She had arrived in Virgin a damaged, frightened girl, and though she came with firsthand knowledge of the complications and drawbacks of plural marriage, something in Golden’s shy, deferential manner had disarmed her. He represented everything she needed: acceptance, forgiveness, a safe place to land. She loved the soft touch of his large hands, his bright, prominent teeth, the way he paused meaningfully before he spoke, as if each thought were as important as the next. And it didn’t hurt that when they first kissed, on a warm fall night in the front seat of the hearse, the moon rising hoary and gold over the far peaks, she felt a sharp little tug in her soul.

  Before Trish married into the family, Golden’s rotation schedule was simple: three nights a week at Old House, four nights at Big House. But things got complicated when Trish moved into her own place—a two-bedroom duplex at the northern edge of the valley—and suddenly there didn’t seem to be enough days in the week to accommodate everyone. They managed with the help of a calendar, a chalkboard overlaid with a grid, and a calculator (which they used to figure out the ratio of Golden’s time with each wife in direct relation to the number of children that belonged to her), until these last couple of years Golden began working at distant job sites, spending four or five nights a week away from home, and his schedule became so unpredictable a grand council of the world’s greatest logistical minds couldn’t have come up with a schedule that made any sense or satisfied everyone. Every Sunday they met for what had come to be known as the Summit of the Wives, in which each wife made her case for the
week, claiming Golden for an anniversary or a birthday, a teacher’s meeting or 4-H show.

  Of Golden, big as he was (and whose presence at these meetings was considered more or less irrelevant), there was simply never enough to go around.

  Often at these meetings Nola and Beverly, whose relationship had developed into one long rivalrous dance, would lock horns over who had been shortchanged the week before, which wife deserved an extra night that week, which child had been deprived of her father’s presence at something so emotionally formative as the county spelling bee. Trish and Rose-of-Sharon made it a habit to stay out of the way, occasionally making a point or taking sides in a way that favored their own particular agenda, taking whatever leftovers they could get. Never once had they had a run-in until, it seemed very likely, right now.

  Rose-of-Sharon had begun to talk in a way Trish had never heard before, a kind of breathy, headlong chatter, about Pauline’s recent ascension to first chair in the high school band, and her advances in the French horn, which is the most difficult of all the brass instruments by the way I don’t know if you knew that or not and because of its mellow sound was often included with the woodwinds and anyway Pauline is so excited about going to Cedar City for regionals that she hasn’t slept in two nights! and oh she’s been practicing like MAD for a month and it’s going to be quite a treat to stay in a motel and see the sights without the rest of the children tagging along…

  As she spoke, her trembling hands had begun to grip Trish’s head, her fingertips slowly increasing the pressure until it felt like a bird of prey had sunk its talons into her skull and was attempting to lift her bodily out of the chair.

  “It’s a big deal for her, a very important event,” Rose said, her voice thin and distressed.

  “Yes—oh, ow—I can imagine,” Trish said.

  “She’d really like it—it’d really be nice, you know…”

  Here it comes, Trish thought, hoping it would come very soon, before Rose-of-Sharon’s fingernails pierced her scalp.

  “…if she had her family there, besides just me…”

  Come on, Trish thought, get to it, please.

  “If maybe. If her…”—she seemed to hold her breath for a moment and then let it out in a rush of words—“father-could-be-there-oh-it’d-be-something-she’d-never-forget.”

  Trish grabbed Rose’s hands, now locked into paralysis, and with some effort pried them from her head. She sat up and tried to look her in the eye, but Rose stared resolutely at the swirl of water disappearing down the sink’s drain.

  “He hasn’t been over in two weeks,” Trish whispered, even though now that the dryer had rattled into silence her words carried easily into every part of the room. “I’ve seen him twice in the past month. If I don’t see him tonight, who knows how long it will be, you understand? Rose? I’m beginning to think he won’t even recognize me anymore.”

  She laughed—a pathetic attempt to lighten the mood—but Rose only nodded. Unable to speak or make a gesture of condolence or regret, Trish sat in the sunken chair, a black-hearted villain in her bank-robber’s mask, her shameful features hidden from view. Nola, whose scissors had been poised above her customer’s springy hair during the entire exchange, sighed and resumed her snick snick snick. Rose eased her hands from Trish’s grip and gently dried her hair with a towel.

  She did not wait for Rose to comb out her tangled hair, did not wait for her turn in Nola’s chair. A bitterness had risen in her throat, sudden and hot—that she should have to feel guilty for wanting to be a participant in her own life, that she should be ashamed of wanting to spend a few hours with her own husband!—and she knew she should leave immediately. She made an excuse about a forgotten appointment at the clinic and on her way out made sure to slip the Cosmo from underneath the teetering magazine pile and tuck it under her arm as if it belonged to her. She stepped out into the bright day, the sidewalk scorching white beneath her feet, the sky a pale panel of blue over her head, and walked slowly at first, her hair wet and wild, her face still covered with the handkerchief, and then began to run, making a break for it like the outlaw she was.

  4.

  THE A-HOLES OF OLD HOUSE

  THEY CAUGHT HIM IN THE UNDERWEAR. HE HAD JUST SLIPPED HIS foot into a pair of nylon tights when that little bubble-eyed freak Louise peeked in the room and ran down the stairs screaming her head off, “Rusty! Oh no! Rusty! He’s in the underwear! Rusty’s in the underwear!” Like she was Paul Revere telling everybody the Russians were coming.

  He happened to be wearing some panties over his jeans too, he wanted to see how they looked, kind of like an experiment. They were made of a smooth blue satiny material with a tiny bow on the band and were so small he had a terrible time getting them off. He yanked and pulled and had them down to his ankles when Aunt Beverly walked in and scared him so bad he tipped backward and cracked his head on the edge of the dresser.

  Even though his head hitting the dresser had made a noise, and he was now in a lot of pain, Aunt Beverly didn’t say, Are you okay, Rusty, hmm, you want an ice pack or something on that? She just watched him squirm around on the floor trying to stretch the panties around his feet. Rusty thought, Aunt Beverly, you old witchy woman, which made him feel a little less like he might crap his pants in fear.

  Someday, when he had discovered his own mysterious personal superpower, which would most likely be chemically radioactive laser beams that shot out of his eyes, he would do battle with Aunt Beverly and blast that witchy stare right off her fat face until her hair caught fire and she had to jump through a window and into the cow trough outside to put out the flames. And all the brothers and sisters would run screaming before him and his deadly laser beams, and he would blast one or two of them in the back before he said, Come on back, guys, I’m just kidding, ha ha, I won’t harm the rest of you as long as Aunt Beverly apologizes for all her wrong actions and crimes against humanity, and Aunt Beverly would come up to him all wet from the cow trough and her bald head still smoking and say, I’m sorry, Rusty, please forgive us all, won’t you, we will do whatever you say as long as you’ll allow us to keep our precious lives.

  Now there was a bunch more girls gathered in the doorway laughing, oh, so insanely happy about what was going on here, it looked like their big white teeth were going to pop out of their mouths. Rusty laughed too, just to show them he understood how funny this underwear situation was, but instead of laughing he snorked, which made them laugh harder, which made his face get hot and itchy. Aunt Beverly trained her witchy-woman stare on them for a second and they ran away howling and giggling, Hee hee, oh my gosh! Stop it! Shhhhh! and in about thirty seconds everybody in the family, including the neighbors and other innocent bystanders, would be up to date on the underwear thing. What a gyp.

  Aunt Beverly stood right over him and asked what he thought he was doing, creeping around in the Big Girls’ room like some kind of pervert, trying on their underwear.

  Rusty held his breath and had to concentrate extremely hard not to let her make him cry. When he had to breathe again he tried not to snork, which was what came out anyway.

  “This is funny?” she said. “You think any of this is amusing?”

  No, Rusty didn’t think any of it was funny, especially not the snork. He mumbled that he had been looking for his tube socks in the Big Girls’ drawer because they sometimes took his socks just to make him mad.

  “Honestly. You want to blame this little abomination of yours on the girls now? You sneaking through their drawers and putting on their intimate items is their fault, is that what you’re saying?”

  He looked down at his shirt, which was too small with a tear-hole and grease spots on it, not that anybody cared. And come to think of it, weren’t his own underwear gross and ratty too? Gray and full of holes and so stretched out the Jolly Green Giant could wear them under his little skirt thing no problem? Of course the girls’ underwear was clean and fresh and extremely elastic. If he had good underwear, the nice tight kind that lo
oked sharp and made you feel good about yourself, then maybe he wouldn’t have to go trying on other people’s intimate items, would he?

  Aunt Beverly told him he was to go to his room, where he would stay for the rest of the day, until she and the other mothers decided on an appropriate punishment.

  Appropriate. This was Aunt Beverly’s favorite word, her power word, the word that granted her her awful destructive might, which she would surely lose forever if she didn’t say it at least fifteen times a day.

  That sort of talk isn’t appropriate. Let’s find a more appropriate activity, children. We’ll discuss this at an appropriate time. Your shoes, Rusty, do not smell very appropriate. How about, Rusty thought, you kiss my appropriate behind?

  “What?” said Aunt Beverly. “What did you say?”

  What? He hadn’t said anything! Had he? He turned his head away so she could not look into his eyes. The possibility that Aunt Beverly might be able to see deep into his inner brain with her witchy-woman stare did not surprise him at all.

  “Not only will you stay in your room for the rest of the day,” Aunt Beverly said, “but you will go without dinner tonight. And no dessert for the rest of the week. One more word from you and you will be grounded for the rest of the month. I will not allow this kind of perversion in my house.”

  At this, Rusty just stood there like a big buttfudge bawling his fat brains out. He thought about his own sorry stretched-out underwear, which made him cry harder, and how everybody would know that he was trying on girl’s panties in the middle of the day, and the worst, no dessert for a week. What a big dang gyp! He cried so hard he began to cough, and slobber came out of his mouth, which often happened because he had some kind of condition that made him have too much spit in his mouth. But Aunt Beverly did not hug him, or say, now-now, or make him a glass of chocolate milk on ice like his own mother would’ve, she just gave him one last stare and went out the door.