Baptism for the Dead

by Libbie Hawker

  “What is that?”

  “Huh?” X settled himself on the furthest bed, facing me, and crossed his legs beneath him. He propped his sketch pad on one knee.

  “That smell.”

  The pencils bristled up in a half-smile. “Linseed oil,” he said carefully through his full mouth.

  “It smells good.”

  “It smells good,” he agreed.

  X told me to arrange myself in a position that felt comfortable. Difficult, since I was vibrating with anxiety and no position felt comfortable for more than a moment. The armchair was hard, not evenly padded, and my stomach was unpleasantly knotted. Yet somehow I managed to keep still long enough that X nodded. He set his wrist watch. Beep. My hands rested lightly in my lap. My fingers felt cold where they curled in my palms. This was not a very dynamic pose, I knew, but for now it was the best X would get.

  With the sketch pad standing on one corner against the angle of his knee, he squinted at me, held a pencil in front of his eye and braced a thumbnail against it. The pencil slanted and drifted in the warm space between us. He measured me, marked a map in the air of my lines and proportions. The sleepiness vanished from his eyes. They sharpened, intensified; then he laid the lead of his pencil to paper and with a rapid, fluttering hand began to draw. In that peaceful scrutiny, that honest quiet moment, I knew that even if I had become nothing to him but spheres and cylinders, even if I was a transparent blur of color reflected on the lenses of his glasses, just then I was more real to X than I had been to myself or to anyone else in all my twenty-five years. Even to Adam.

  The smell of linseed oil had so permeated the hotel room and my head that I felt the tingle of it on my skin, on the chair, on the carpet. The scratching of X’s pencil was the honeyglow smell of the oil. I watched his face as he watched my unmoving body. His eyebrows – I had never noticed them before, but now I realized how much I liked them – they were totally unique to him, truncated little halfcircles, half-moons turned up to rest on their flat edges, and sparse, with his golden skin showing through the soft, fine hairs that scattered like fine powder. They were the kind of brows a woman would pluck and line, if a woman owned them. On X they looked not quite masculine enough to fit the rest of his face. I stared at his eyebrows for a long time, the way they moved, the way they jumped when he bent over the pad to correct a mislaid line.

  Then his mouth tightened, and the pencils clicked together. And I forgot the eyebrows and thought instead that if I kissed him his mouth might taste the way linseed oil smelled, golden and dream-blurred....

  “Hold still,” he reminded me gently. “Sorry.” Must have moved something at the intrusion of my thoughts. Keep still, keep still. Better not to look at him at all.

  I let my eyes go out of focus. The white rectangle of the sketch pad doubled and softened, became two indistinct shapes that drifted apart minutely and came to rest at a slight, furry distance. Two light-furred Xes held two vague but identical sets of pencils in their mouths. I thought very hard about my breathing, and kept my eyes off his mouth, and held still.

  Finally his wrist watch beeped. Five minutes up.

  “Okay,” he said. “You can move.”

  I stood. I stretched my arms above my head. X took the pencils from his mouth. He squinted at his paper, tilted his head, rolled his lower lip into his mouth and grabbed the little patch of hair below with his upper teeth, sucked on it. The gesture was unconscious, bird-like and quick. He was beaked like a bird, that sharp hooked nose so unlike Adam’s. How could Adam’s eyes be a part of this stranger’s face? And if this was a sign, what was the sign for?

  Another pose. This time I tried to get a little more creative. I propped my elbow on the table and rested my chin in my hand, crossed my legs, put the other hand on my knee.

  “That’s good,” X said, hardly glancing from his sketch pad. His hand moved quickly.

  After that, another pose: slouched back in the chair, hands behind my head. This one was harder to hold; my back had begun to ache less than halfway through, but I kept still. I grew more comfortable with X’s scrutiny; it no longer felt, in fact, like scrutiny. Each time he drew me, he raised the pencil to take a new measure of my body. Each time, I was light and shadow anew, shapes and lines, and this was just fun, just a little bit of Thursday therapy, nothing more.

  By the fourth pose we were talking easily and by the sixth we were joking. And soon enough the pauses between poses grew longer. We asked each other questions. We sounded the other’s depths. He had a nice smile – a big, broad, toothy smile and big hands and those impossible blue eyes.

  I watched his hand move dream-like over his work, and I wondered. What would it be like to take my clothes off in front of this man? Would it be different from the way I felt when I undressed with James? With Adam? Would I still be shapes and values to him, even unclothed? If I showed him even more of me, would he see even more? This internal monologue was all very rational; I proceeded at a carefully measured pace, I considered my next move with a quiet, tight-reined control.

  He finished sketch number ten or eleven. He asked if I wanted to see them all. I flipped back through the pad to the first drawing: his lines carried a strong, confident precision. The shape of my face was fantastically correct, accurate enough to be a photograph but softened, graced somehow by the pencil’s fast silver strokes. Even my tension was apparent in the first sketch – even that, so I knew at once that I hadn’t been wrong. X had really seen me, right into me, the stiffness of my back, the knot of my hands. And in each sketch that followed, he had noted and understood and communicated the loosening of my muscles, the relaxation of my fear, the growing ease of my smile.

  “Well, if you want to keep going you’re welcome to stay. You’re a natural at this. I could draw you for hours. It is getting late, though. If you need to go....”

  “No, let’s do some more.”

  He smiled. Grinned – the right word for that broadness and brightness. “All right. Want to try some reclining poses?”

  “Yes,” I said quickly.

  He gestured: I should make myself comfortable on the bed this time. I blinked and stared at it; it seemed to be dwindling to some dark green point on a wavering horizon, receding away from dizzy me and my cold hands and this private hotel room. But it was not, in fact, moving, I told myself sensibly. It was still right there in the same plane of reality where X and I bobbed and drifted, its coverlet as smooth and plain as a board.

  “You okay?”

  Yes, of course, all right, let’s do this. Let’s do some more. Let’s take the plunge. James is off having his fun, so why can’t I, why shouldn’t I? Pull your shirt off over your head, drop it, unzip your jeans and let them fall. Movement of my hands like an autonomic response, and then the air of the hotel room pressing very cool against my legs which were bare now and my arms which had no sleeves now but not anywhere else, oh God this is bad, this shouldn’t be happening.

  X’s eyebrows jumped. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

  Of course I was not naked. Of course; that’s why the air was only cool here and there but not where it mattered. I looked down at the crisp white fabric of my temple garments. Oh, I forgot all about you, I said silently to them, my thoughts embarrassed and thick and stupid.

  And then, a sort of visual cymbal crash, the whole scene brightening as if under flood lights, and the nauseating feeling that you are looking in on a movie starring yourself, out-of-body but entirely in-body: me standing there in my garments, two perspectives (my own eyes and some floating awareness peeking over my shoulder, very disapproving), and wrenching shame, and horror, and sin.

  Just for a flash. The ringing residue of the cymbal petering away into tin whining, into silence.

  Proceed with rationality. Tight-reined. There was nothing wrong here. I was doing nothing wrong. The lone audience looking over my shoulder expressed its dismay (its voice sounded suspiciously like Katherine’s), then horror when it realized I could shut it
up so quickly. But just like that I sewed its mouth closed with neat little deliberate stitches.

  If James can, why can’t I? I asked it.

  And it knew it had no sensible or fair answer.

  The flood lights dimmed. Katherine went to bed. I was only in a hotel room, standing in my sacred temple garments in front of a strange man. No reason for alarm.

  “Want to draw me with these on?”

  X was uncomfortable but too polite to admit it. I winnowed it out of the rapid blinking of his eyes, the slightly drawn-back posture. He was not the only one who could see what was right there before him.

  I dropped myself onto the bed, wild, smiling, a girl at a slumber party in her pajamas. The mattress rebounded and in the slow-motion bounce I watched confused X blur down and up, all those pencils still hanging out of his mouth.

  “They’re called temple garments,” I told him, trying to be helpful.

  “Isn’t that something I’m not supposed to see? Aren’t they sacred? Isn’t God supposed to get angry if you let me see?”

  I stopped bouncing. There was something safe in X. He had Adam’s eyes and that was a sign. I examined this final moment of my existence in a lovely crystal world, a world whose prism cast rainbows over everything. So simple here, this place where we all wore the same things beneath our clothing, where we all thought the same, all lived the same life. The air smelled of linseed oil and X’s skin. Outside, far in the distance, a train called, a powerful sound bent and distorted by the agony of so much empty space. Its wail shivered. Night insects fuzzed in the gray-green trees. The fan unit below the window rattled to life and one quick breath of the outside air brushed the hairs on my arms. It was heavy with the smell of fast-dying grass, fading in the wake of the hot day’s passage. Then came the smell of the building’s recirculated air, clean and cold. And the sound of X’s startled breath and the humming of the mattress springs, still alive with my weight. I had never spoken these words aloud before, not even to Adam. X was the first to hear.

  “I don’t believe in God.”

  I pulled the top off first, then the bottoms. I laid them not unfondly on the chair. I removed my bra and my underwear, settled back against the pillows, and turned my face toward X, and smiled at the movement of his hand as he worked, and the movement of his mouth as he frowned.

  When night deepened I dressed again, but I left my white garments where they lay.

  X asked, “Don’t you want these back?”

  I answered, “When can I see you again?”

  15.

  Just before James and I married, as I was preparing to receive the temple endowment I had put off for too long, I made a very special list on a little scrap of paper which I kept in my wallet.

  Whenever I found myself questioning, whenever I wondered whether I really could survive, I unfolded that scrap and read my list. I did this so many times that I soon had it memorized, and the scrap of paper became as worn as soft cloth along the folds. Here it is, in exact duplicate:

  Concealment (arctic fox, polar bear)

  Disruptive (zebras, leopard)

  Disguise (stick bug)

  Mimicry (viceroy butterfly)

  It helped to know that I was not the only creature who relied on camouflage to survive.

  16.

  Here is one particular memory:

  Scene: shoe-white new Rexburg temple. Morning. Women’s changing room. There are a handful of other women here, hanging their dresses in lockers, setting their clean shoes neatly side by side below.

  Anxious girls of nineteen bunch together like slender glancing does. They have pale faces and tense thinned lips and wide, eager, shining eyes. Like me, they are here to receive their first endowments. At twenty-three, I am the eldest of the first-timers. My age sets me a little apart from their group, so that I can watch them with the detachment of a field biologist.

  They don their sacred garments, drape themselves in long white over-gowns. There is such tension to their young bodies, so much fervency and fear. And all of that lovely sweet girlish energy is swallowed up and tamped out by the thick polyester gowns which fall down over their ankles with the swinging finality of a drawn stage curtain. Finis!

  Bang of locker door. Murmured apology for the abruptness of the noise. On the bench, two parallel hair pins with a third crossed over them, a slanted H. My toes blue and cold against the tiles.

  The rest of the women, the older ones, move with peaceful surety. They are here to stand in as proxies. Soon they will be waist-deep in the great central font, baptizing the dead. They wear the same soft, far-off, unfocused smiles that they wear for their husbands and children. A few glance now and then at the young girls in their restless knot, the little school of white fishes shivering, and their smiles sharpen and tighten in sympathy, just for a moment. Then back to patting their hair, and dwelling delicately inside the boundaries of their own private territories.

  My long white gown feels artificial and slow. But it is exactly as white as the other girls’, and when I walk past them toward my curtained cubicle to be washed an anointed and blessed, I blend flawlessly against their mirage.

  Sharp sniff. Quiet nervous giggle.

  Oh heck, somebody whispers, picks at a torn cuticle, sucks a drop of blood from her finger.

  I pass the older women, the distantly smiling ones, the vessels for the dead, the dutiful happy body doubles. They got up early to curl their hair, even though all that hard work will soon be ruined by the water in the font. Bend them backward again and again, again and again, immerse them until all the lost souls are free, and their flesh is wrinkled and softened and running with sanctification.

  Rattle of the white curtain being drawn back. Smell of textiles, hair spray, and faintly, an undertone, chlorine.

  I wonder as I enter my washing cubicle (a cool hand dabs a droplet of clean water to my forehead) whether there is some other world, some other reality, where a kind, sharp-eyed, straightbacked woman stands as a proxy for me, and undergoes a secret rite that will free me from my snare. As I am anointed with a dab of oil at my hairline, I imagine her naked and yellow-haired, bent backward into a black ocean, and when she rises up again, streaming with dark cold water, her smile is as bright as a slashing knife.

  **

  Now, of course the goings-on inside the temple were sacred and therefore secret. I could only discuss them so far with my friends. And I had to take care in how I approached the subject.

  I could no longer avoid the temple endowment. I had already put it off for years. Further avoidance would have made me more conspicuous. I settled on approaching it like a scientist, a curious observer who was not truly participating but only gathering data. And once I’d completed the ceremony and received my sacred garments, my desire to compare my data was overwhelming. In order to get my friends to talk somewhat freely about the temple, I had to veil our conversations in glowing feminine zeal, just the right balance of enthusiasm and humility. I did this without difficulty. I was adept at preening my camouflaged feathers.

  With my head to one side and a thoughtful half-smile I asked Katherine what she had felt during the ceremony.

  I expected her to reply that of course she had felt the Holy Ghost fill her heart, or words to that effect. Expected words, the rote recitation. I was not expecting the reaction she gave. Katherine paused in the act of stirring her cake batter. Her eyes swelled with tears. “It was...it was amazing,” she said. Her arms trembled. Her spatula rattled. “Oh, how can I even describe it? Like a fire inside me, like...” she trailed off, tears streaming, half embarrassed at her own rapture. She set down her bowl and walked to her kitchen window, folded her hands at her throat, and stood in the slant of natural light, smiling, eyes closed as if in prayer. Outside, children shouted in the street. Katherine sniffed. “I have never felt so alive before,” she said. “I finally knew what being alive really means, for the first time.”

  Now this threw me. I had thought I had felt the Holy Ghost a time or two i
n my life, when I’d prayed for guidance on the big questions that plague a child. Should I tell on the boy who had stolen the notes to the history test? Was it moral to have two best friends at the same time? And even when I wasn’t praying, the feel of the Lord’s love and assurance would sometimes sneak up and overwhelm me, fill me with a shiver of awe when I contemplated creation, prophecy, eternity. But nothing in my admittedly limited religious experience had ever moved me as the temple endowment had evidently moved Katherine. I watched her tremble and shed tears of joy and watched the air go out of her forgotten cake batter, and I wondered just what was wrong with me, anyway – where this brokenness in me had come from.

  I tried another approach to my research: Danae. We walked through the park and I told her how impressed I had been with the temple, how it was an amazing experience – and then I allowed my voice to trail off temptingly, and I prompted her with a goading, “But....”

  She gazed at me with concern. “But what? I’ve always thought it’s wonderful. I just love it every time I go.”

  “But nothing. It was nothing. Never mind.”

  I did do my best to kindle the same passion for the church which everybody around me seemed to possess by nature. I threw myself into the study of scripture, committing two hours a day to reading and contemplation, although this experiment lasted only a week. Each day I found myself staring at the illustrations in my Book of Mormon, ultimately contemplating nothing.

  There was one illustration all Mormons know as surely as they know the faces of their mothers: Joseph Smith the boy cowering in the forest, crouched in the leaf litter, a hand raised to shield his eyes as, in a terrible halo of white fire, Jesus and the Father gesture toward him, as nonchalant as a pair of housewives selecting melons in a supermarket. I eyed this illustration for days, hoping it would fill me with a small measure of Katherine’s passion. But the more I looked at it, the more the figured blurred. Eventually the sharpest and brightest things in the painting were the leaves, the woods themselves, the thickets where implied animals hid like the beasts in medieval tapestries, their necks curled backward at savage angles, brutal and waiting. I imagined that when young Joseph had stood and staggered back to town, smudged with the soot of revelation, the creatures of the forest emerged to slink down their hidden tracks and sniff the air, lithe bodies blending into shadow. The animals would taste the odor of a single man on the air, faint, ordinary, and already fading.