“Did you make it into Idaho Falls all right?” Awkward. Awkward conversation. How do you talk to your husband who is lying in bed with his boyfriend?
He affirmed, a little coldly, a little confused. Everything was all right. He was upset still, but listen, he guessed he’d be okay. Was I okay? Where was I?
“Yellowstone. We got here last night.” Silence. If I knew my James, he didn’t like the sound of we. “There’s not much signal here, so I might lose you.”
“What do you care if you lose me anyway?”
“Come on, don’t be like that. I know this is hard on you, but don’t you think this will be better for both of us?”
“No. I don’t think this will be better for either of us, and I still can’t believe you’re doing this to me. I thought you were a better person than this.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, James. I just want us both to be happy.”
We exchanged a few more chilly sentences. He made some attempts at making me feel guilty, which mostly worked. I said good-bye before he could turn the conversation into a fight. There was a nasty hard thing in my stomach, painful, the sharp pit of a sour fruit.
I did not go back inside immediately. I found X’s big dusty hybrid and climbed up onto its hood. The metal was cold enough to make me shiver. I laid my back against the slope of the windshield and watched the glow deepen in the eastern sky. I was still vibrationally aware of my place in nature; my place in un-nature, too – even the coldness and hardness of the car seemed significant, and its hollowness. An angry rasping bird called from the thin pine trees across the parking lot. Its voice was nasal. I felt the call grating inside my own head, but I didn’t mind. The bird and I were plucking strings of the same chord.
Once, when I was a very little girl, I had believed that a caring God had made everything for me, for me and for everybody, and that He had nothing better to do with His eternity than watch and rejoice as we rejoiced in His Creation. He had a great book of parchment papers with a cracked old leather cover and binding, and in it was written everything that would ever happen: the day a little girl in a sunlit field would discover the delicate way a ladybug’s glassine wings emerged from its candy carapace, the symmetry of its four wings spread, the dramatic pause just before it lifted into flight, an orange blur trailing a wake of childish laughter. The day a little girl would learn that she loved the scent of rain in the sagebrush, that it was as right and real to her as the feel of bricks in the church wall. The day a girl would sit alone on a car in a parking lot and feel a bird call inside her chest, and feel a man cry inside her chest, and feel the precarious stirring of the earth, and would love it all because it was all life, and all real, and all hers to rejoice in. And God would rejoice with her, because He had made it all for her.
I miss that feeling. I long for the simple comfort of myth, the warmth of the blanket tucked up to my chin in the night, the nightlight glowing. I still want to be the innocent heart that can truly believe that His eye is on the sparrow and the ladybug and me.
4.
The bird calling in the pines, the vibration of nature. The last time I felt that way, the deep awareness of the world that made me almost sick with its relevance, I had been a girl in Rexburg, reeling from the fresh loss of Adam.
The new school year after that windy summer had begun. The park’s birches had turned as golden as the fields surrounding the town, though like the fields, fleeting touches of green still clung doggedly and flashed here and there in the wind. The implicit tragedy of that failing summer color and its obvious parallel to my secret turmoil made me want to weep with understanding or bitterness or both. But if I had done so, my friends would have known I was hiding something, so I nursed my heartbreak in absolute, well-groomed silence.
Ever since I realized my fiery Bench-bound affair with Adam must be kept out of the hands of Katherine and her disciples or else, I had come to dread the skittish prim sex talks she always initiated. Katherine’s interest in marriage and its requisite activities had been increasing every day, fanning itself into a barely restrained frenzy. In spite of her rampant hormones she was careful to set a good example for the rest of us girls, and always steered our little conversational dinghy just so, skirting the reefs of out-and-out lust where we were all in danger of wrecking and despoiling. Yet she couldnt leave the subject alone. She always managed to bring it up one way or another, sitting in the grass at the park, arranging her lovely tanned teenage legs in just the right way to suggest sweetness and modesty, or over milkshakes in a corner booth, whispering and twisting a plastic straw around her ring finger. She poked at the subject of sex relentlessly, professional and fascinated, a junior gynecologist. Inevitably, after encouraging our talk, Katherine would let the giggles and puns swell and flush, and then she would douse the whole antsy conflagration with a reminder that all that sort of thing wouldn’t be any fun anyway unless it was done after one’s wedding, with one’s ordained husband, to whom one had been sealed in the temple for time and eternity.
Oh yeah? I’d think with a plaintive pang, watching the leaves shiver in the dying wind.
She was the same age as the rest of us, but something about Katherine – her prettiness? Her perfection? – commanded a greater share of respect and deference than we gave to anybody else. Secret love lives aside, we were all good Mormon girls, cut from the same sturdy, clean, handsome if unembellished cloth. Yet God or nature had put a little extra twist in the fabric of Katherine, a little extra sheen. She stood out. All of us wanted to be her. She had a straight bright smile, academic success, hair that was flawlessly, freakishly smooth and golden, and a knowledge of scripture that was both encyclopedic and intimidating. Her skin was always glowing, her pores always invisible. When she entered the school gym or the parched flat ball field in her crew-neck t-shirts, her small breasts and thin legs looking all the more sensual for the unconsciously modest way she clothed them, the boys all watched Katherine to the exclusion of everything else around them – flying basketballs, looming fence posts, speeding trains. She held sway over the girls as easily as she did those poor awkward boys. Silently, from the outer edge of the group, I would watch Katherine take control of a perfectly pleasant conversation and prod it just to the edge of badness, then reel it back in so deftly and demurely, and every time I would think that Katherine could be free of the lust that plagued her if she would just give in and have a good roll in the weeds with some boy from our grade.
She would wax ecstatic over the bliss that awaited us all after our temple marriages. I would feel smug, illuminated, wise, because I already knew that fumbling bliss. And I would feel guilty, because by pursuing my lusts I had altered my path forever, had denied myself the life that pure Katherine had earned: peaceful and unchallenging and well delineated, if not strictly blessed by a God I could not understand.
I often wonder whether those flighty conversations during our younger days, all that time spent comparing my prospects to Katherine’s, originated my nuisance ember of guilt. Even more maddening than its source is the question of why it still has the power to burn me, years later. It flares up from time to time like a bad case of indigestion, and I am embarrassed to admit this, because after all...well, after all, I am no believer.
Incidentally, I am not the only Rexburger, ex- or otherwise, who struggled with her relation to sex. All the women of the town – and the men, too, I suppose – kept a veil drawn tightly around their celestial bliss that felt more like defensiveness than politeness or modesty. Are amorous anxieties pandemic to eastern Idaho?
I have good evidence that even Katherine ran into trouble when she finally got her anticipated temple marriage to some returned missionary or other, a clean-cut, smiling boy like all the rest of them. She was the first of our group to marry. This fact surprised no one, as she was the prettiest young woman in town, the most charismatic, and the most impatient to become a wife. A few weeks after her honeymoon I invited her out for cupcakes and hot chocolate at the campus cafe, m
y treat. My ruse was to hear all about the manufactured romance resort in the Bahamas where she and her bewildered new husband had spent ten days getting sandy and tanned – and, one would assume, thoroughly acquainted. My true motive was to compare notes: to find out whether the marriage bed was the divine, Godapproved bliss Katherine had expected it to be, and whether I could discern any real difference between her experience and mine.
She had been happy enough to wax rapturous on the beauty of the islands, the azure warmth of the water, the attentive service of the resort staff. She showed me pictures on her little camera: beach vista with plantation of palm trees captured mid-sway, sunburned new husband on horseback, awkwardly handling reins in the surf. But when I gently coaxed the conversation toward the bedroom as she, smiling behind her hand, had done so often before, Katherine clammed up. I was almost embarrassed to see the panic in her eyes, the cloud layer of distaste. I had intruded into a place where even Katherine didn’t want to go, and now I felt sorry. I chalked this up to first-timer’s nerves and allowed her to change the subject.
But it happened again, after Katherine’s family was well established, when my own ill-fated marriage had just begun.
Our ward director had designated Katherine my Visiting Teacher – a sort of religious advisor/spy who made inconvenient house calls, prying into her charge’s health, finances, state of emotional crisis. I had always found Visiting Teachers a bit violating. Didn’t I get enough Church on Sundays? Privately, James and I referred to ours as the Visiting Creatures. We largely shirked our own home-teaching duties, sparing our charges unwanted midweek drop-ins, James on the excuse that he did enough teaching at work, thank you very much, and I on the excuse that I was generally no fun to be around and no help to anybody besides.
James and I were perhaps three or four months into our celestially ordained bliss, but there was no bliss to be had, and for once I was relieved and glad to see my Visiting Creature making her monthly trip down my walkway in her smart flats and modest capris. I welcomed Katherine with a genuine hug and a glass of lemonade.
We sat on the couch near the view window. We conversed. We laughed. We were young Mormon wives, and life and eternity spread out before us like a brightly colored, well-drawn map, lucky us, lucky us. How is your baby, Katherine? Oh, he’s such a little treasure, such a good boy. How is the college treating James? He loves his work; life is perfect, we are so blessed.
Soon enough, though, we wore out the call and response. A somewhat strained silence settled over my living room. I could hear the wall clock ticking in the foyer. I shook my glass gently. The ice cubes rattled. At last Katherine cleared her throat, and softly inquired as to the health of my marriage. It was the question I had been waiting for. James’s nature may never have been a fit topic for conversation, but the town still knew, and Katherine had surely wondered how we were getting on. The moment the question was out of her mouth I opened a floodgate on my friend which I am afraid nearly drowned her. I confessed that James seemed to have little physical interest in me. When we did go to bed together the whole experience was awkward and impersonal. Certain crucial parts refused to work reliably. I despaired of ever having children. At the rate we were going, I said, I might become a mother somewhere around the age of sixty-five.
Katherine looked well beyond her depth, the poor thing, stupefied with her lemonade glass clutched in both hands. I realized as I unburdened myself all over her that in the act of camouflaging myself so carefully amidst the Rexburg milieu I had actually swallowed the party line, hook and all: marriage was supposed to change James. Once he had a wife, his life would take the shape he wanted it to have, like magic, like an endowment. But the proscribed cure was having no effect, and I felt cheated and dismayed, and raged on his behalf as much as my own.
Finally Katherine interrupted me. You just need more time. It takes a while to get to know each other; you can’t expect to be comfortable with intimacy right away. Pray about it. Heavenly Father will open your hearts. I know he will.
“How long did it take you and your husband after you were first married? I mean, how long until it became...fun?”
Katherine’s eyes went as dull and flat as old coins. But the smile stayed on her face, the precise perfect smile of the happy wife. “Well, it’s wonderful now, of course. Wonderful.”
What was this strange duality in Rexburg? What made Katherine, who was once so eager for a husband, deflect any questions of intimacy with that soulless plastic smile? What drove James to even try in our bed, for the short time he did try, when he longed for something I could never give him? Something about the town or the temple, the masks we all wore, kindled those fires and compassed us all with sparks, and all of us lay down in sorrow.
And why, even after I left, did that wretched guilt consume me? It smoldered inside me; it obscured the world with its sickening smoke. And how could I feel so splendidly alive, so awakened to the world, with the bird in the pine trees scolding inside my head, with the pines moving in the breeze of my pulse, with the sunrise coloring my skin and my skin coloring the sunrise, and yet feel so ashamed of you, X, of my love for you, which was the very thing that had finally made me live?
It wasn’t fear of a vengeful God. Not on my part.
I set my face like a flint, but the shame still flooded me. So many questions still came. And no answers for me, or for anyone else.
5.
Yellowstone was a strange stinking utopia of beautifully colored pools, the slap of hot water against calcified pillars, ghosts of steam rising from the earth to drift knee-high into the spread arms of our headlights (night drive), views of river rapids down a road’s precipitous drop, and a single bison, right on the shore of Yellowstone Lake, black against an impossible June blue. We stood with the crowd to watch Old Faithful erupt, and the tourists oohed and aahed right on cue, and X kissed me and pulled me against him, and the wind blew that special geologic smell into our faces, ripe rich brimstone and choking heat, sulfur mist on our cheeks, X’s mouth against my ear, a foreglimpse of the adulterer’s very pleasant and very cheerful hell.
During those earliest days of our joy ride I bounced between two distinct poles. So long as we hiked some rocky trail thick with insects and the fresh smell of mountains, or took in a sunglowing mountain vista, or lay catching our breath in a hotel room, I could fade my guilt into any picturesque background that presented itself. I sat at picnic tables in park after park, pretending to read, watching X paint scene after scene on his blocks of watercolor paper, his sun-browned hands so big but so precise, and always I felt a warm reassurance, sunny, the vague but comforting idea that everything would eventually be okay, that I was having a good time after all, that all of us were on an adventure, even James.
It was when we took to the highway again that my dread returned. The monotony of long stretches of road, the grayness, the oppressive relentless tempo of telephone wires scooping and rising in passing, the black flash of their poles like heads in a congregation nodding – something about the repetition of travel wore down my defenses, so that I felt no awe for my inner strength anymore, only horror at my own stupidity.
X did what he could to distract me. He told stories and jokes. He sang songs. I was aware that I had an obligation to be a good travel mate, and I responded to his gestures with something I hoped looked like sincerity, or at least gratitude. I even taught him a song of my own, the day we left Yellowstone and headed east for points unplanned and unknown. It was a childhood song, sung in a very special, irreverent way.
Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, we sang. Only we rolled our windows down so we could shout the word beam at the top of our lungs.
To shine for him each day.
It was the only rebellion Mormon children were ever allowed – a mutiny cry carefully modulated so as not to offend too much.
In every way try to please Him, at home, at school, at play.
A sunBEAM, a sunBEAM, Jesus wants me for a sunBEAM.
All those poor Sund
ay school teachers, gritting their teeth as their classrooms exploded on beam, delivered in a screech intended to shatter eardrums. But nobody ever banned the song. The teachers had sung it that way, too, back when they were children. In the very young something primal wants to push back. All those sweet darlings in their sweater vests and their crisp little dresses, singing of being so pleasing while they fired off that rifle report. You could tell which teachers had been the most defiant in their own days. Those sly grinning mommies allowed us to sing it every Sunday.
With X I sang and shouted along the straight stretch of highway, the wind pulling the word out over the grass, BEAM, where it made birds spring up from wire fences and range cattle flick their ears, but otherwise was as useless as it had been years ago within the walls of church classrooms.
Singing only kept me buoyed so long. The desolate empty grasslands kept pace with our car and seemed to groan at me in disapproval. The further we went into Wyoming’s featureless prairie the heavier my sadness grew.
Evening came on and we were getting hungry. We found a motel in Gillette, a low, flat, grimy facsimile of my hometown. It was a colorless place with the clustered silhouettes of grain elevators indicating its halfhearted boundaries. A line of coal power plants smoked against a vast orange sunset, a wan industrialized specter of Rexburg’s temple. Our motel shared a parking lot with a drug store; we raided its shelves for bottled juice, candy bars, trail mix, ultra-thin condoms. I thought sadly as I set our purchases on the cracked checkout counter, So this is what my life has come to. And then, in the parking lot, X took my hand in his as we walked toward our rented room. He sang a funny song that I suspect he’d made up on the spot, and without warning he spun me under his arm, around and around as if the parking lot were an elegant ballroom, and sad Gillette at dusk became a bright fairyland, all sunbeams and rainbows in spite of the coal dust obscuring everything. The gloom of the road fell away. An intense desire for him rose up, and I smiled at my X, the first real smile since leaving Rexburg. He grinned back with is big-toothed grin and his blue, blue eyes, and I thought, So this is what my life has come to. And there was never a time before, not at church, not at temple, when I had felt so grateful or, dare I say it, so blessed.
Baptism for the Dead Page 10