Follow the Dotted Line

by Nancy Hersage

  “It’s gonna be fine, Lil. You all had chickenpox when you were little. Both Sam’s kids have had them.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “And everybody thinks breaking up those multi-vaccines is a good idea.”

  “I know.” Lil was breathing deeper now. Sighing. Feeling better. “I think I’m just exhausted.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “And I want my Mommy,” she whimpered, playfully.

  “Good. I’ll book a flight tonight.”

  “I already did.” There was that familiar voice, the one with the twinkle in it. “I emailed you the ticket.”

  Andy decided it was safe enough to show a little mock indignation. “You could have let me check my schedule first, Lilly.”

  “You don’t have a schedule, Mom,” Lil countered, fully recovered and sounding like her old self.

  “And yet, it would be nice of you to pretend.”

  “Maybe next time. For now, I’ll meet you at baggage claim. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  The flight, it turned out, left at seven in the morning, so Andy spent the remainder of the evening packing and getting things organized for her departure. The one impediment she hadn’t counted on was Harley. Foolishly, she’d assumed he’d love the idea of flying solo for a while. But when he arrived home at ten that evening, he wasn’t all that enthused.

  “How long will you be gone?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. A few days, maybe a week.”

  “You won’t get the chickenpox?”

  “I had them. Years ago. Don’t worry,” she said, in an attempt to soothe his evident anxiety. “So you know to put the garbage out on Friday morning?”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “You’re not afraid to stay in the house by yourself, are you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  For someone who aspired to become a professional shepherd, he was being annoyingly sheepish about her leaving.

  “You want to ask a friend to stay with you?”

  This idea appeared to alarm him more than being home alone.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said.

  Aware she was losing both patience and valuable sleep, Andy vowed to give it one last try. “Maybe you could have a group of friends over for a party or something,” she ventured, eyeing the silver ring thing on his left hand. After all, how dangerous could the Abstinent really be?

  “I don’t think so,” he said automatically. But after a moment’s consideration, he added, “Maybe I’ll have a prayer meeting, though.”

  “Sounds like a great idea,” she lied. “Can’t wait to hear all about it.”

  Chapter 12

  Superior Color Commentary

  For people who delight in the adoration of small children, and Andy was one of them, being a grandparent provided unparalleled opportunities for experiencing her version of the Divine. Until about age six, she knew, kids literally worshipped the ground their grandparents walked on; you had to be either stupid or downright cruel to drive them away. After first grade, however, it was more of a crapshoot. The Catholic Church used to call it the Age of Reason. But Andy called it the Age of Choice. Because this was when children began to make their own friends—and their own judgments. Once a kid reached age seven, a grandparent had to begin to earn it.

  Lil’s four boys were not yet old enough to be either reasonable or judgmental. They were still in the honeymoon phase. Almost anything Andy did pleased them. Which was why Lil had called Andy off the bench and was putting her in the game. The truth was, her grandsons desperately needed someone to play with. While the worst of the illness was over, they remained in quarantine. Not because they were sick but because the pox on their house was still clearly visible, and the tiny brothers looked like a team of baby zombies.

  “You don’t have to nurse them, Mom. I’ve already done that,” Lil said, laying out the plan as they drove home from the airport. “Your job is strictly entertainment.”

  “How fitting,” Andy observed. “Will I be getting residuals?”

  For the first day or two, Grandma Andy’s programming involved kickboxing matches between her grandsons and imaginary opponents with evil intentions. Her role was to provide a play-by-play of the action, describing the prowess of each boy’s moves and his final victory over the enemy. This was particularly challenging for the twins, who were now 18 months and had a tough time kicking anything, imaginary or not. After each fictional match, it was her job to award medals, hanging them around the boys’ necks as they stood in their pajamas on cardboard boxes of varying heights, while she hummed the theme from NBC’s Olympic coverage. The boys loved the game because it made them feel invincible. She loved it because she believed her color commentary was far superior to that of most network sportscasters.

  Following the kickboxing matches, they switched to a game called Hotel McCall, in which the gang of four crawled into a king-sized bed with her and pretended they were all staying at an Idaho resort. This enabled them to lie back on big pillows, get their next dose of medication, and rest. More importantly, it enabled them to call Lil on a pretend telephone and order room service. There really were few things more sublime than eating in bed with your grandchildren.

  It was on the third day of Andy’s visit, during one of these fanciful trips to the Hotel McCall, that Lil arrived from the kitchen with a plate of warm nachos and planted herself next to her mother on the bed.

  “Are you dead yet?” she asked Andy, as the boys grabbed for the chips.

  “I think I am in the throes.”

  “You put the grand back in grandmother. Thank you, Mom.”

  “I do it all for the jalapeños,” Andy quipped, trying to keep the cheese off the bedspread.

  “Joey and I are thinking of rewarding you with a cocktail party.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. We’re itching to have some adult company, so we thought we’d invite a few of the neighbors over Friday night after the boys are in bed.”

  “I thought all your neighbors were Mormon.”

  “Not all of them,” Lil said. “And half of those say they’re in recovery.”

  “Which means they drink?”

  “As a form of therapy, they tell me.”

  Everything Andy knew about the Book of Mormon she had learned from the Broadway musical. “Can I ask them about their religion?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” Lil said. “You have no respect for religion, as cousin Harley knows by now.”

  “Pretty please.”

  “Perhaps you weren’t listening, Mother. I said, absolutely not.”

  Meridian, Idaho, the Boise suburb of Joey and Lil’s choosing, was filled with a surprising mixture of mechanics, doctors, firefighters, and lawyers. The cost of housing made five-bedroom homes affordable, even to couples bereft of college educations or retirement funds. It was a potpourri of people that one would almost never find among the five-bedroom dwellers in the greater Los Angeles area. Andy found it disturbingly refreshing.

  However, it did not take long to conclude that the little cocktail crowd in Lil’s kitchen had been carefully culled from among the neighbors. The majority of guests were clearly the white-faced descendants of Celts and Saxons. There were, indeed, Mormons among them: both practicing and self-exiled, who drank and wore nothing more complicated than boxers under their jeans. The twenty-five or so partygoers also included two Latino couples, a Chinese American cardiologist and her Indian husband, and a UPS driver who’d been born in Nigeria. What made them eligible for Lil’s guest list, it turned out, was their attitude towards firearms.

  If Lil had a line in the sand, it was guns. As a native of California, she’d seen few guns and rarely thought about the dangers. But Idaho was full of them. People used them for hunting. They used them for target shooting. They used them for home décor. There were families on her block, kind people with good intentions, who a
ctually bragged about their stockpile of semi-automatic weapons. In the end, Lil had simply divided the neighborhood by her own prejudice: households that were armed and those that were not. Her friends might occasionally drink too much, but at least they wouldn’t shoot one another.

  Which was probably why the main topic of conversation around the sangria pitcher was a new bill before the Idaho legislature that would allow students at Boise State University, a campus of more than 20,000 aspiring scholars, to carry concealed weapons.

  “That’s what we need,” Joey was saying, “more frat boys with pistols.”

  “What about Bronco Stadium?” the cardiologist asked. “How long before kids start bringing guns to football games?”

  “You know what bothers me,” the UPS driver said, “that the students did not want this law. No one affiliated with the campus thinks this is a good idea. Who are these gun nuts?”

  “Our neighbors,” Lil called from across the room, where she was refilling a fondue pot with cheese dip. “Do you know the first question I ask when one of the boys is invited over for a play date? ‘Do you have guns in the house?’ And do you know what my fear is? That many women say ‘no,’ when the answer is ‘yes.’ They don’t even remember their husbands have them. Or where they are, if they do. Or if they are locked up. So I have to keep pressing them. It’s embarrassing, and it’s stupid. Sometimes it’s just easier to keep the boys at home.”

  Andy listened to the discussion, marveling at the human capacity for self-inflicted tragedy. She’d inflicted a great deal of it on herself during her adulthood. And had there been guns in her house, she was exactly the kind of emotional idiot who might have picked one up and used it. She shuddered at the thought and then jumped when someone tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Andy?” She looked up to see a good-looking thirty-something standing over her. He put out his hand. “Mike Anderson. We live across the street. Four houses down.” He sat down on the sofa next to her. “Lil talks about you all the time.”

  “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “Hey, the cocktails tonight are in your honor. That can’t be too bad, can it?”

  Andy smiled.

  “I hear you and Lil write together.”

  “Well, we do. When she has time. Which means not much lately.”

  “Yeah, she says you’re a worse pest than the boys.”

  “Gosh, that’s pretty high praise!” Andy said.

  “Anyway, she told me about the World War II spy story. She thinks it would make a great screenplay.”

  Andy felt a rush of satisfaction and responded, “Really? I’m glad to hear it.” It meant that Lil was actually ruminating on the idea, which meant she might actually commit to working on it.

  “Anyway, Lil knows I have kind of a personal interest in World War II. And we started talking one day about history and about you and about me. One thing lead to another, and I began to think that you and I might have a mutual interest.”

  Andy sipped her drink and wondered where this was leading.

  “You see, I’m Mormon,” he said.

  Oh, god, this is forbidden territory, Andy reminded herself. But she hadn’t asked. He was the one bringing up the subject.

  “At least I was raised Mormon,” he told her.

  “But you left?”

  “I did. Almost ten years ago. Over the Baptism of the Dead tenet. Do you know what that is?”

  Andy wasn’t following, but she wanted to. Lil was right about her mother’s antipathy toward religion, and yet Andy had always been fascinated by it. Andy had studied world religions in college and was a minor expert on Deism, the theology favored by some writers of the Constitution. She also knew more about the European Reformation than most American fundamentalists. She looked over her shoulder to see her daughter still fully engaged in the gun battle near the kitchen counter. The coast was clear, so she plunged in.

  “No. I don’t know. But I’d love to be enlightened. You baptize dead people?” she prompted.

  “Well, my church—my former church—likes to baptize non-Mormons after they die in hopes they will choose to be Mormon in the next life.”

  Andy had no idea what he was talking about and wondered why the subject had not been fully covered in the Broadway musical.

  “It’s kind of a postmortem proselytizing scheme. If you can’t get them in this life, try to get them in the next.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Very. It’s called a proxy baptism. A living Mormon, in this case—me, is fully immersed in a baptismal font as a stand-in for the dead person.”

  She stared at him in amazement.

  “I know. It would be funny if it weren’t so, well, not funny,” he continued. “Especially when you consider who we’ve been trying to convert in the afterlife.”

  There was an unrelated explosion of laughter from the other end of the room. They both looked to see Joey flying a toy helicopter around the chip bowl with a remote control. Andy leaned in closer to Mike; he had her undivided attention now.

  “Who were you trying to convert?” she asked.

  Mike leaned closer, as well, as if he had no desire to broadcast the conversation. “Jews from the holocaust,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. Did you say . . .”

  “I said, we used the names of people who died in concentration camps. As far as I know, the Church probably still uses those names.”

  He saw her look of disbelief and pushed forward. “I know it sounds surreal, but it made complete sense to me at the time. In fact, I felt good about it. Exalted. I was barely twenty and imagined myself gathering in all these souls for the Lord. I convinced myself that I had ‘saved’ eight people from the fires of hell.”

  Andy strained to wrap her mind around the theology here; somebody somewhere deserved an Oscar for Best Adaptation of a Sacrament.

  “So what happened?” she asked. “Why did you change your mind about the baptisms?”

  “Well, one day I woke up and realized that all these people we were trying to save had already been through the fires of hell. And it was all because they were Jews. What we were doing, the whole point of our proxy baptisms, was to take their Jewishness away from them all over again.” He stumbled for an instant, and she could tell he was choking a little on the words as he tried to get them out. “I couldn’t believe how arrogant we were. How arrogant I’d been.”

  The pain was seeping from his eyes. She searched for something comforting to say.

  “I don’t believe the Mormon Church has a corner on arrogance, Mike.”

  “No. But I felt this enormous sense of . . . shame. You know?”

  She nodded, thinking what an oddly courageous moment she was witnessing, particularly for a cocktail party.

  “And after that I quit,” he said. “And I’ve never returned.”

  He sank back into the sofa, not looking all that satisfied with what he’d said. She waited to see if there was more, and—when there wasn’t—all she could think to say was, “Would you like another beer?”

  But he apparently didn’t want her to give him a way out. Instead, he forced himself to get to the point. “What I wanted to tell you,” Mike finally said, “was that I actually remember the names of all eight of the holocaust victims I was the—the, ah, proxy for.”

  “Oh,” Andy said.

  “I find them very hard to forget. One of them was a man who died at a camp near Bessarabia on the Black Sea in the Ukraine. Do you know Bessarabia?”

  “I do,” said Andy. A little chill inched up her spine. “My family is from there.”

  “His name was Emanuel Bader.”

  “Bader,” she repeated.

  “Lil once told me that’s your mother’s maiden name.”

  The tingling sensation now seized her entire body, but she wasn’t exactly sure why. Was it the serendipity of the young man’s story colliding with her own or the fact that she might have a history she hadn’t imagined?

  “Yes,” s
he said, slowly. “Bader. I use it as my middle name. They sailed from Odessa. But no one ever said—I mean, I don’t think we were Jewish.”

  “Maybe not,” he agreed. “But lots of people don’t think they were Jewish.” He finished his thought with one of those impish grins that said, ‘because lots of people don’t want to admit we’re all drinking from the same gene pool.’

  Andy returned the grin. It was true. Most people in the U.S. knew almost nothing about their family history and might be upset by it if they did. Because a great many families intentionally cut their histories short the minute they boarded the boat for the New World. Coming to America had always been an opportunity to discard any baggage weighing you down, Andy had to admit, like a criminal record or a bad marriage or a god who upsets your neighbors.

  “Anyway, I just thought it was interesting,” he said.

  “It is,” she said. “I’ve never really thought about it.”

  “And, of course, there’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” he teased. “She’s pretty Jewish. Maybe you’re related to her.”

  Andy pondered the possibility of adding a Supreme Court Justice to her unadorned family tree. Not bad. And talk about a woman who knows how to stay relevant.

  “I could find out more information, if you’d like me to,” Mike offered. “You know how we Mormons are about genealogy. Do you know much about your family history?”

  “Not really. But I know someone who does. At least she knows as much as anybody.”

  “Lil’s sister, Samantha, right? The historian who lives in Scotland?”

  “I’ll give you her email. Thank you, Mike. For . . . you know . . . bringing all this to my attention.”

  He sank back into the sofa again. This time his anxiety had completely dissipated. “I’ll take that beer now,” he said.

  Andy fetched them each a drink and returned to sit down next to him.