**
For months after I’d earned my temple garments they felt raw and unfriendly. My clothing moved now in strange ways, poked or pulled at armpit or hem by the fidgeting of the holy garb underneath. They made my body an inelegant blocky half-sculpted form, a stiff incomplete maquette. Ugly puckered seams turned the roundness of my breasts into slack hanging rumpled white, an old lady’s chest. No definition at the waist, so all the soft curve I’d been so proud of was gone in a flash of ceremony, poof: Grandmama in her unmentionables. To shower, to swim, to remove them for any reason at all was a relief. But of course I never told anybody about that.
I knew none of the girls would admit to feeling relieved at being rid of her garments for a quick shower or some illicit sunbathing, even though they must feel pleasure in their own nakedness. They must. I assumed all the girls felt the same way I did, but of course I expected them to pretend these underthings were everything they had ever wanted. These were our sacred garments, the markers of our Mormonhood. We would all just have to learn to live with them. I would just have to learn to live with them, because that’s what good women did.
The week after my endowment ceremony, long before my body had grown used to the feel of the temple garments, I went shopping for shoes in Idaho Falls. I passed, by chance, the lingerie department of one of those big stores with the oatmeal tile floors and the sales girls in button-up shirts. Little bras and panties hung in matches sets, cute, two for twenty-four dollars, pink and teal, thongs and bikini cuts. And I thought, Well, what’s the point now? What’s the point of any of that cute stuff, ever again?
Then I remembered that I was about to marry a man who wouldn’t much car whether I wore a pink thong or shapeless holy garments or a gunny sack, and I laughed out loud right there in the store until the sales girls stared at me and whispered. Leopard, I reminded myself. Viceroy.
Such funny things, those garments. Funny that X opted not to draw me wearing them. What a sketch that would have made, what a nature study. The field marks of the good wife: white throat, white belly, white on white with an oily crown. Oh, my X, what an opportunity you missed! And by the time our first evening together was over, all you had left was my molted coat, a specimen skin discarded on your hotel chair.
Creation
1.
if a strange man comes through your town and asks you to model for him...
if a strange man comes through your town and you see him drinking beer in a restaurant...
if a strange man comes through your town and his eyes are just like those unforgettable eyes, oh the warmth of summer at the top of the Bench where the wind moves the scent of growing things, where the wind moves the scent of potatoes and dust and alfalfa drying in the sun, where the wind moves your bodies in a shy rhythm where the wind smells as sweet and earthy as his skin
if you want to blend into rexburg (Concealment Disruptive Disguise Mimicry) you must be as simple and clean as a long white gown, as alike as bricks in a red wall, as straight and featureless as a steeple.
I saw a strange man drinking beer in a restaurant. He was as sweet and earthy as long grass drying in the sun.
I saw a strange man in a restaurant, and the wind moved over me, and I was as simple and clean as a blade of grass and as hungry as Adam in the Garden.
You want to blend into Rexburg, but you are as stark and unbroken as a steeple. You are only a brick in a broken red wall. You are only a blade of grass, and the wind will move you, and the wind will move you.
2.
The night of the modeling I couldn’t sleep at all. The bed I shared with James Sunday through Wednesday felt emptier than usual. The sheets crawled over my bare skin. Eventually I kicked them off and lay naked and chilled in my bedroom while the moon swooned over the distant Snake River. I hadn’t felt sheets or night air against my exposed body for more than two years. Was it the lack of temple garments or the tight, hopeful, hopeless knot in my stomach that strung me up in such a state of discomfort?
I moved all night in an unpleasant trance, not awake and not asleep, hemmed by the naked bed’s edges, a gray restless territory with stern boundaries. Every hour or so a lone car approached up Poleline Road; its headlights crept through my blinds and pulled me fully into consciousness, and I would look down the length of me, foreign and vulnerable and zebrastriped with transient bars of shadow and light. Immediately I would lapse back into a blur of half-sleep where the shadows became dark pencils slashed across the mobile brightness of X’s mouth. And the cars passed, and the illusions passed, and I stumbled through a blurred forest on weary feet, chasing the clarity of deep sleep, a stricken and ineffectual hunter.
I knew that I loved you, X, but I didn’t yet realize I knew.
Sometime around three in the morning I woke and saw that I would not haze back into semisleep again. My heart was hammering with some inconvenient second wind. My eyes were like eyes at a bonfire, burning and purple-scarred by the memory of moving light. Not knowing where to go or what to do, only that I had to move, I dressed and pulled back my tangled hair, and got into my car.
I drove west without a plan. Houses dark, roads empty. Here and there a single lit window cast its orange glare over cottonwood leaves and I caught in passing the dark fast silhouettes of mothers tending sick children, men up too late, sleepless and vague with worry. Pumpkin-orange light, rapid silhouettes.
Once I reached the highway I drove with a hawkish alertness. My destination had decided itself. North Menan Butte is the dead volcano’s proper name, but everybody in Rexburg calls it R Mountain, for the big ugly white letter branded onto its northeast side, facing the town. The R is a mark of ownership. We took possession of the place, claimed it for our own, and it is as obedient and good as any Mormon. Extinct volcanoes tend toward an appealing tractability.
James always liked to call it Our Mountain, and I would say, Very punny in a tone of mock annoyance. James and his word games. James the extinct volcano. James with an R over his heart.
The sun would not be up for another hour at least, but already the R on the butte’s flank was fading into view, bird’s-egg pale asserting itself against the plush black of foreground mountain and background mountain and valley and sky. I drove toward that weak beacon like a sailor toward a pole star.
The parking area near the trail head was empty, of course. No one goes hiking before dawn. The air was cold even through my layers. I pressed my hands under my armpits. There was enough starlight and enough of a retiring half-moon to find my way up the steep trail to the rim of the crater. The ground was hard and dark, and I was grandly alone, and out of breath. I hunched at the top, leaning on my knees, my cold hands braced. The heat of the climb slowly passed off me. I began to shiver. My body and my mind were both exhausted, but I have always found that I do my best thinking in such a state.
True stone-heavy weariness strips away all superficial concerns and only frank rationality is left.
Options are narrowed and sorted. Questions ask themselves.
Far below me, Henry’s Fork turned the same matte deep violet as the sky. The pale pointillist reflections of stars fainted away. A growing shimmer of light spread down the twisted length of river, east to west, bluing and brightening. Irrigation canals revealed themselves among spectral wheat fields. Retention ponds gleamed like sunken gems against featureless, pale skin.
When I was lying on that hotel bed, bared clean, I was as deep as this valley, I was as complex as stone. When X’s hand moved over the paper and revealed me, I was as singular as the river, as distinct as the clear cut of mountains against the warming sky, there on the eastern horizon, where I could see off into a distance grown rapturous with light.
Questions ask themselves, and answers form like land rising from the water. And oh, the sky at dawn is beautiful, beautiful.
3.
Dawn.
Sky wheat-gold, skin-gold.
A sunrise like the first sunrise, soundless and welling. The last star held, wavered,
wilted. A dulled half-moon sank placidly behind the distant Bench.
The sun glowed like the smell of linseed oil. Its light fell on my hands, a square of light falling onto a dark floor; color of warmth, color of X’s skin.
4.
It was early June, and the great flat expanse of the Snake River Basin lay like an olivine quilt, a thin assemblage of rectangular and round patches stitched by lines of dark cottonwood. From the top of Our Mountain I watched the Basin stretch away into an impossible distance, a dizzying flat of muted greens and emerging gold whose horizonward crawl felt as slow and inevitable, as certain as the Second Coming.
Above, the morning sky blued into eye-blue, overlaid with a delicate dawn-pink mackerel lace. The sky in its hugeness was overpowering. I felt compelled by its one great ever-open eye to crouch down on the trail, as if by making myself smaller I might escape the scrutiny of such an honest stare. In the sky far to the west, pale lines of cloud drifted together, lazily considering a convergence but in no hurry to get there; their movement was unfocused, of no pressing urgency (it’s all inevitable, certain in the end.) Sky and earth never met at the horizon, but confused themselves in a brown-violet haze, a dwindling somewhere just beyond the irregular line of tiny distant mountain ranges.
The surface of the butte was minutely alive, moving constantly in a rising southwestern breeze, a visual disruption like snow on a TV set. Low, long-stemmed plants shivered. The constant wind carried the scent of growing sage from deep and far into the valley, the bright warm tang of sun on dry yellow stone. The movement and scent of this place comforted me. The dawn air tasted of water in a glass.
My body trembled with a satisfying combination of cold, weariness, and revelation. Weeds with glaucous leaves shivered in sympathy. Everything was rooted in place. All these little stragglers holding fast, the thin evening primroses with uncertain buds, fiddleleaf and blazing star, every one of them dug down deep.
Send out your seeds by burr or by bird. Send out your runners just feet away. Generation after generation with roots wound up together in this hard yellow soil.
**
Birds woke downslope. The brush-covered flank of the mountain volleyed with song. I walked the trail along the rim of the crater, watching specks of birds in bounding flight over small fields. They scattered like poppy seeds spilled from a spoon. A falcon rose up from nowhere, rotated slowly on the high morning air, dropped to earth again to merge with the golden-brown plain.
Three mule deer moved far below me, drifting between stands of sagebrush, vanishing among the thickets, re-emerging as hesitant as ghosts. From the remoteness of the river, which was no more than a silk cord dropped along the length of the valley, a cow’s bellow rose up broken and faint like a heartbeat.
The sound of earth and rock shards under my feet. The sound of cold wind. My nose ran; I wiped it on my sweatshirt’s sleeve as I walked. Rapid diagonal dash: the motion blur of an unseen lizard. I looked in the direction of its flight. Nothing. Then, as I drew closer, it zinged away again, far off the trail and up among a stand of boulders. It had been nearly under my feet; I hadn’t seen it at all. As long as it held still and pressed itself to the earth it was invisible. But when it moved, it cut across the bland landscape like lightning in a gold-dust dream, and though it was only a simple, small creature, the impossible speed of its movement made it seem as great and fearsome as a dragon.
5.
Weariness always makes my thinking easier, my thoughts more starkly defined. Why should that be?
When you appeared on the rim of the crater, X, pausing and gathering the morning in, all my questions were asked and answered. You do not ignore a sign.
The sun had finally begun to warm the dew from the air. The mountain was rich with the scent of the day’s heat to come. I started toward you on the trail. You started toward me, your knees-out, goosey walk, your long arms swinging, a small muscle deep in the soft crease of your elbow twitching.
Of course you would come to the mountain this morning. Of course.
I was nauseous from hunger and lack of sleep. I was a dragon speeding among the pebbles. When I reached you, neither of us spoke, but I reached up to your mouth and kissed you.
Your kiss was wetter than I expected it to be, your mouth rougher. Your hands on my back were warm. When I raised my own hands and laid them against your body, the trace of your ribs beneath your shirt was like the bowing of a river.
Garden of Eden
1.
We had a couple of hours yet before the parking lot filled up and the butte’s trails became lousy with teenagers. X and I walked out to a great rippled dome of black lava and sat close together, sharing a muffin and fruit from his backpack while the valley yawned. He had come to sketch the view, but his plans had changed.
A little food in my stomach did me good. The stark smooth slope of lava rapidly drew in the morning’s warmth. Like a lizard on a rock, I thought, and stretched, and reveled in the tired humming of my body. I was ready for sleep. I could have slept right there on the exposed ground, with the world mumbling and minutely stirring far below, but every particle of me was hyper-aware of X’s closeness and warmth, and my mouth was still electrically pulsing with the feel of his kiss.
A little tangerine-slice segment of my brain was aware that I should feel terribly guilty. The rest of my mind – a much bigger and louder and juicier portion – wondered at the fantastic paradox of physical exhaustion and hart-lurch that was turning my muscles and bones to honey.
X told me stories of his short time in college, and of the week of his road trip before he had arrived in Rexburg. I listened to the cello note of his voice in a sun-stupefied trance. His words ran together, a thick warm slow-moving river. There was nothing in the world to concern me but X and his currents.
When the sun grew so bright that we had to squint, I led him along the trail to the caves, shallow sharp cuts back into the basalt of R Mountain, still dew-cold and dark. We settled into one, shoulder against shoulder, thigh against thigh. It took my tired eyes a long time to adjust to the violet shadow of the cave; X obscured and twisted into thrilling shapes within the dim reach of my blinking, bleary vision. He was all kinds of possibilities. X the escaped convict. X the Soviet spy. X Pratt the expat. In the shelter of the caves he and I could have been anybody, any assortment of nobodies, without past or obligation. But soon enough my fogged vision cleared and there we were, just us, a cheating wife and an itinerant artist hunched in a cave looking down on Mormontown. There was something Cro Magnon about the whole business, rather depressing and doomed but earthy and sexy and wild, ancient and impermanent.
“So you’re married,” X said.
“Kind of.”
“Kind of?” “I’m not sure you can really call it a marriage.” Long, long pause. Distant sound of an engine. Distant sound of a barking dog.
X drew in a breath and I knew he was about to break the silence, but I needed to make it clear to him first, this whole fiasco, my life. My stomach was tender and tenuous around the hollow of my exhaustion. I dropped words I had sworn I’d never say like little uncertain gifts into X’s hands.
“My husband is gay.”
I didn’t know what to expect. Two years never saying those words...there must have been some reason why I’d never said them, some Curse of the Cat People, some hex. But nothing. No lightning fell from the sky. There was no consequence. A dumb insect clicked and tumbled in the scrub outside the cave’s mouth. A breeze stirred the sagebrush. Years of painful silence amounted to this: nothing. “Jesus,” X said.
I stared at him stupidly.
His brow was furrowed. “Why did you marry him if he’s gay?”
“Well, everybody’s supposed to get married,” I said, suspecting that what I said was idiotic beyond all measure.
“Why?”
The appropriate response would have been, Because that’s what God wants us to do. But I had already outed myself as a nonbeliever. I had dropped the camouflage act
back in his hotel room. I had no good answer, for him or for myself, and the sudden realization of that fact embarrassed me. I settled on, “That’s what everybody expected us to do.” Which was, of course, the truth.
“Everybody? Who? Your families? Your town?”
I nodded. I could not speak. The injustice of my situation had finally revealed itself in all its enormity. It was a great ugly monster of a reality. Why had it taken me so long to see this? But of course, twenty-five years of Rexburg could not be shaken loose as easy as that. There was marrow in the bone.
“You don’t understand what it’s like, living here. You don’t just do your own thing.”
“Why not? What’s the worst that could happen to you if you did?”
“Anything. Everything.” My whole family...everybody I’ve ever known... Total and absolute isolation. Allowed to live among them, but functionally banished, a social leper. Or worse. Driving off into the sage flats on a quarter tank of gas.
Baptism for the Dead Page 6