Thumbsucker

by Walter Kirn

  The meetings and services lasted half the day. Audrey went to Relief Society, the organization for Mormon women, while Mike joined the elders at a priesthood meeting. Joel and I went to a younger priesthood meeting. All faithful Mormon males were priests, I’d learned, and possessed such powers as healing and tongues, which Elder Jessup explained to me once as the ability to translate languages, both foreign and ancient, without studying them.

  The topic in priesthood that morning was survival. The church believed in preparing for emergencies and all Mormon families were urged to stockpile two years’ worth of food and water, I learned. Various methods of storage were discussed and soy pellets were praised for their longevity. I left the meeting depressed. The goal of outliving the general population after a nuclear war or major catastrophe seemed selfish to me. And lonely. Very lonely.

  At the sacrament service following the meeting a squad of teenage boys in suits and ties passed around silver trays of torn-up bread and tiny paper cups of water. It was the elders’ first food of the day, but the rest of us had to pass. We weren’t full Mormons yet.

  Afterward, when we were finally free to eat, we drove the elders to a Perkins restaurant. The elders tucked their ties inside their shirts and dove into their sausage links and hotcakes, surprising me with their lazy table manners. Mike ate an omelet bursting with orange cheese and Audrey and I had Belgian waffles piled high with berries and banana slices, while Joel ordered oatmeal from the Lite-Line menu.

  “So?” said Elder Jessup, leaning back once we’d cleaned our plates. “Think you can do it?”

  “I feel good,” said Audrey.

  “Describe that feeling.”

  “The church is like a community,” she said. “It’s not just us on our own now. Just the four of us. We have all these new friends who want the best for us.”

  “Joel?” Elder Jessup said.

  “I’m scared. The war. In priesthood they said there’s going to be a war maybe.”

  The elders looked at each other with merry eyes. “Don’t you go worrying,” Elder Jessup said. “That war won’t be for a while, and you’ll live through it.”

  “We all will,” Elder Knowles said. “Guaranteed.”

  It was my turn to comment. I didn’t know what to say. I felt like our family had gotten itself into something that we might have trouble getting out of. If only I could remember my preexistence. If only I could remember what I’d seen when I’d surveyed our future before my birth.

  “You keep thinking, Justin,” Elder Jessup said. He turned to Mike. “So tell us: is it a go?”

  “Whatever they want. They seem happy.”

  “What do you want? You’re the father. The decision maker.”

  The waitress came with our check then. She seemed unsure about whom to give it to, so she tucked it under the pepper shaker in the middle of the table. Mike slipped it out. He reached behind himself, got out his wallet, drew out a credit card, and held it high, trying to catch the waitress’s attention. Everybody started chatting again, as if we’d forgotten a question had been asked. When it was time to go and we stood up together, I saw Elder Jessup open a small brown date book and scribble “Cobb baptism” across one square.

  Audrey moved a step stool into the liquor closet and started handing things down to me: pint and quart bottles of whiskey, gin, and vodka, packets of powdered margarita mix, jars of cocktail onions, tins of cherries. I packed everything in a cardboard box lined with plastic so it wouldn’t leak, then taped the box shut and got another one. The last item was a stack of paper napkins printed with truth-or-dare-style party questions. “Have you ever pinched a waitress? Where?” “How long was your worst-ever hangover, in days?”

  “I feel like I ought to donate all this junk,” Audrey said as she stepped down from the stool. “Who to, though? The VFW? The Elks?”

  Next we collected tobacco products. Raiding drawers and closets all over the house, we threw away pipe cleaners, ashtrays, lighters, matches. Mike talked about keeping a couple old briar pipes—one of them had been his grandfather’s, he said—but Audrey advocated a clean sweep. We crushed packs of cigarettes, tossed out cans of snuff, and even got rid of the filthy mason jars Mike kept in his workshop as spittoons.

  “Maybe we’re going overboard,” he said as Audrey twist-tied another garbage bag. “It feels like we’re sacrificing family history.”

  “We are,” Audrey said. “That’s the point. Be ruthless, baby.”

  Tea and coffee things went next, including a new Mr. Coffee machine that Audrey had bought the same day the elders showed up. On top of it we piled magazines—Esquires and Vogues and Harper’s Bazaars. We saved our National Geographics and Mike’s Field and Streams but discarded some old Lifes. The difference between the publications seemed clear to us.

  But we still weren’t finished. We kept finding things. Decks of cards. Poker chips. A Ouija board. I knew that the project had gotten out of hand when I saw Audrey hovering near the shelf containing the series of Time-Life Ancient Mysteries books that Joel had secretly ordered off TV once by memorizing the number on Mike’s Visa card:

  “What are these about exactly?” she asked me.

  “They’re fine,” I said. “They’re the only books he reads. One’s about Stonehenge.”

  “Joel, can you come here?” she yelled.

  She thought for a moment and then called out, “Forget it.” Then, to me:

  “I’m losing it. Need food.”

  The porch was overflowing with boxes and bags by the end of the day, but rather than hauling them out to the street for the garbage truck, Mike insisted on driving them to the dump. I volunteered to go with him but he said no. I suspected he wanted to salvage a few things.

  I woke up early the morning of our baptism and waited in the kitchen for the elders. Audrey was still at work and Mike was sleeping. Joel was in the bathroom, learning to tie a tie. I boiled water for Postum, a coffee substitute that Mike complained tasted like moldy toast but drank by the mugful nevertheless, then opened my Book of Mormon for a quick, last skim.

  Audrey came in yawning from her night shift.

  “Bad one. Full moon. Lots of accidents,” she said. She spooned some Postum into a blue cup. “You ready?”

  “I am. I’m all dressed.”

  “That tie looks nice on you. Is that one of Mike’s? It’s so dashing.”

  “It’s mine,” I said. “Elder Knowles helped me pick it out.”

  “That lifts my spirits. Maybe we won’t lose touch with everything, after all.”

  While Audrey was upstairs changing into a dress, the elders drove up in a borrowed car and came to the door with a bouquet of flowers. I put them in water, then read the clipped-on note: “Your Heavenly Father welcomes you to his garden.”

  “We’re going to drive you ourselves,” said Elder Jessup. “I hope that’s okay with your folks. It’s safer.”

  “How?”

  “The devil loves to play tricks at the last minute. He might cause a wreck or something. We’ve seen it happen.”

  I heard a toilet flush upstairs and wire hangers scraping on a clothes bar. Joel appeared in the kitchen with his tie tied wrong, its thin part hanging lower than its fat part. Elder Knowles said, “I’ll show you a trick,” and started adjusting it.

  “The thing I still wonder,” I said to Elder Jessup, “is how you knew. How you knew we needed you. Is that preexistence, too?”

  “God led us here.”

  “Go ahead and tell him,” Elder Knowles said. “He’ll be out on a mission of his own soon.”

  Elder Jessup fiddled with his cuffs. “My partner and I are detectives, in a way. We scout around for clues. For leads. We hear things.”

  “You saw him somewhere. You caught him singing,” I said.

  “No,” Elder Jessup said. “It’s nothing like that.”

  I sensed him growing nervous, backing off. I faced Elder Knowles, who’d just finished arranging Joel’s tie.

  “This t
own has an LDS pharmacist,” he said. “Sometimes we eat dinner at his house. Don’t worry, he’s not a spy, just very helpful. He gets concerned about certain customers, the ones who are maybe taking too much medicine.”

  “The store where we get our prescriptions?” I said. “The Rexall?” I was shocked; this seemed illegal. Unfair.

  “Tim, that was stupid,” Elder Jessup said. “That was idiotic. What a moron. Somebody’s going to kick your Mormon butt for that.”

  We were late getting going, though only by a few minutes. Elder Jessup drove with special care, checking his mirrors in a steady rotation and staying five miles per hour below the speed limit. Audrey, Joel, and I huddled in the backseat and Mike rode up front, wedged in between the elders. I found it hard to look at him. His new short haircut and clean white collar, the dabs of shaving cream behind his ears and smell of witch hazel coming off his neck, reminded me of a man on trial, a suspect being escorted to a courtroom.

  To block out this thought and some others that were bothering me, I rehearsed the baptism in my mind, going over the ritual step by step just as Elder Jessup had described it for us. We’d enter the chapel. We’d put on soft white robes. There would be an audience. A crowd. We’d pray together as a church and family, and then, one by one, we’d be led to the baptismal font. We’d go down barefoot into the clear pool, rest our bodies against the elders’ arms, and let ourselves be slowly lowered, backward. We’d have to trust them, they’d warned us, or we’d flinch. We’d have to go limp, like dolls, or we might splash.

  Despite our nerves, things went off without a hitch. The water was cool and clear and deep, and afterward, when I dried my hair, I could smell swimming pool chemicals on the towel. We gathered in a room with a buffet table and snacked on corn chips and cheese dip prepared by our new Mormon brothers and sisters, who offered their hands in welcome and gave us hugs. Mike kept his arm around Audrey, their faces glowing, and Joel was surrounded by a flock of girls in frilly blouses and long, old-fashioned skirts. Elder Jessup settled his hands on my shoulders and said, “When you’re on your own mission, remember this. This is the payoff: bringing in new souls. I swear, there’s no better feeling in the world.” He looked in my eyes and I looked into his, thinking back to our talks on preexistence and wondering why, if I’d known him before my birth, he seemed like such a stranger suddenly.

  2

  Mike started taking his Mormonism seriously. At church he made friends with a group of men his age who heated their homes with wood, owned diesel generators, and stockpiled Krugerrands in safe-deposit boxes. Though some of these men had higher-level jobs at major corporations in St. Paul, they didn’t let their families watch TV, and they traded books with titles like Prepare! and Riding Out the Crash. They attended gun shows and swap meets throughout the state, and Mike would come home from these outings all fired up about our family’s potential for self-sufficiency.

  “Living in town,” he said to me one night, “is like being on life support in a hospital. Sooner or later they’re going to pull the plug.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they can. To show their power.”

  “What would it get them?”

  “A terrible satisfaction.”

  In anticipation of the time when nothing modern could be depended on, Mike began pulling plugs of his own. He moved our TV set out to the garage and fitted our thermostat with a governor that kept the house at a nippy sixty degrees. He kept the cassette deck and stereo receiver but threw out all but two of our tapes: the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s rendition of The Man of La Mancha and A Nat King Cole Christmas.

  Audrey, who’d grown pious in her own way, tried to relieve our sense of deprivation by focusing Joel and me on mystical matters such as the power of prayer. Her enthusiasm was touching, but slightly frantic. Now that we had no TV to pass the evenings, we’d sit with her at the kitchen table listening to stories she’d heard at church concerning sudden cancer remissions and miraculous recoveries of long-lost valuables.

  Her favorite story, which she told us twice, was of a young woman who learned that she was pregnant, had an abortion, and then regretted it. She spent a whole weekend praying with the bishop, and a few months later gave birth to healthy twin girls. That Audrey, a nurse, could believe this story worried me.

  “You’re saying the Heavenly Father restored her pregnancy?”

  “The person who told me this story doesn’t lie,” she said.

  “Maybe the girl didn’t really have an abortion.”

  “The rational mind can’t handle it. I know.”

  The more Mike got down to basics around the house, the deeper Audrey’s mysticism grew. The week he installed a basement backup generator, she brought home a book which purported to demonstrate, by assigning numerical values to the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, the divine perfection of the Bible. “ ‘Jehovah’ adds up to twelve,” she informed me. “So does ‘Jesus Christ’. An accident?” Armed with a pencil and a spiral notebook in which to record her cryptic calculations, she studied the book every morning after breakfast and by noon she’d be in a tizzy of speculation.

  “I added our names up. My name comes to nine. Yours is seven. Mike’s is also seven. Nine plus seven plus seven is twenty-three. Two plus three equals five. And guess what five is?”

  I shook my head.

  “The word ‘family’ comes to five.”

  “You left out a number for Joel.”

  “He’s seven.”

  “I’m seven.”

  Audrey’s face fell. “You’re right. He’s six.” She scribbled something. “Give me a little time to readjust this.”

  I began avoiding Audrey in order to escape such conversations. For the first time since I was eight or nine years old, I started spending time with Joel.

  He’d grown into an interesting kid. Slim and strong after years of dieting, made confident by his successes at junior tennis, Joel was physically fearless. Nothing scared him. Along the river were cliffs that people dove from, and one afternoon Joel got a running start and jumped from the highest one as I watched and shuddered. Eighty feet down a canoe was gliding past. The paddler looked up. Joel plummeted toward him and the paddler screamed. Joel sliced the water just inches from the stern.

  He didn’t resurface. A minute or two later he snuck up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder.

  “I thought you were dead,” I said. “That really stunk.”

  “I like it when people think I’m dead.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “It makes me feel all warm.”

  Joel had grown mentally fearless, too. Despite Mike’s standing orders about our clothing—that Audrey was only to buy it from Sears and Penney’s and never pay extra for national brand names—Joel had amassed quite a wardrobe for himself by trading clothes with friends. One day, after locking his bedroom door, he gave me a fashion show.

  “This pair’s for tennis. These are running shoes. I like Adidas because the leather’s soft. The polo shirts with the penguins are Monsanto, the alligators are Izod. Feel how thick.”

  I stroked the fabric. “Don’t wear these in the house.”

  “Don’t worry, I just like to look at them. To own them. Check these jeans out: Sergio Valente.”

  He tried them on. It almost made me cry. The too-small jeans were threadbare in the seat.

  “They’re designer,” Joel said. “I like designer things.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. They feel special. Nicer lines.”

  Joel modeled the running shoes. They were huge on him. Though he was only three years younger than I was, I’d noticed that he and his classmates lived different lives than I had at their age. They styled their hair with gel. They wore real shorts instead of cut-off corduroys. And schoolwork that I would have gotten C’s for earned them A’s. They knew how to use computers.

  Joel returned his treasures to their box, slid the box to the back of his closet, and draped a blanket over it.

>   “Come on. Let’s go watch TV in the garage,” he said. “I hooked up an extension cord.”

  “What’s on?”

  “I don’t care. Commercials. The commercials are better produced than half the shows.”

  As we passed through the kitchen on our way outside, Audrey said, “Hold on. This ought to interest you.” She was hunkered down at the table with her writing pad.

  “I found out our family’s true number. I did the math. The numbers of our names make twenty-nine, and two plus nine is eleven.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, eleven—one plus one, that is—is two. So our number is two.”

  “Is two significant?”

  Audrey consulted the index of her book. Joel was already out the door. “Go on,” she said. “This book’s more complicated than I thought.”

  On Wednesday nights, like Mormons across the country, we held Family Home Evening in the living room. Mike opened the church-written workbook on his lap while Audrey scooped strawberry ice cream into bowls. Since our conversion we’d turned into sugar fiends. All the Mormons I knew were sugar fiends.

  That night’s topic was “Glories of the Temple.” We’d never been inside a Mormon temple. Before new converts were allowed this privilege, they had to put in a year of good behavior.

  Mike quizzed us from the workbook: “Name and list the Utah temples. Justin?”

  “Salt Lake City. Ogden. Logan … Manti?”

  “Good,” Audrey said. “And one more.”

  “St. George?”

  Mike turned a page. “It’s your turn, Joel. Sit up.”

  Joel stretched his arms and spread his fingers and yawned.

  “Explain the meaning of the sealing ceremony.”

  “Can’t remember. To keep people from dying?”

  “You can do better than that.”

  “I trashed my racket. I need a new Prince. A graphite.”

  “Pardon me?”