The Book of Mormon Girl (11 page)

Together, we took the tram to the top of Bridal Veil Falls where, like all the other soon-to-be missionaries and their teenage intendeds, we allowed ourselves to be gripped by the granite magnitude of these mountains and the cold, vast horizon of the eternities. He begged me to wait for him, to marry him someday, and, of course, I did not refuse, the way one cannot refuse a drowning person, or a riptide.

And yet I knew, sick inside, that I could not help but fail John Swenson, that all my promises would surely be broken. Which they were, sullenly, late that summer, on a stuffy and boredom-suffused August night, trying to break the monotony of my summer job in the office parks of my orange-grove suburb, my body frozen from eight hours under the industrial air-conditioning, not warming up one bit even in the
backseat of a car, with an old high school classmate (how did I get there? by what strange gravity? so accidental and yet so inevitable?) who lifted up my shirt, while I hovered somewhere a few feet away, witnessing, not feeling. His name was Chris Ramos. His hands on my chest were evidence that I was not capable of keeping promises to John Swenson, chaste and lonesome in faraway Portugal, who would no longer want to marry me when he returned. It was then that the invisible weight of LeVar Royal’s pearl necklace dropped from my neck.

As was specified in the rules, I went to the bishop’s office the very next Sunday. The bishop’s name was Grant Jensen. He was a short, square man, with a face like an owl’s and a brushlike gray mustache. He was a professional Republican party pollster. I had worked for him the summer I was fifteen, in his little air-conditioned office in an industrial office park in my orange-grove suburb, printing out on transparencies, in shades of magenta, cyan, and green pie graphs charting voter opinions on gun control.

Bishop Jensen sat behind the great Formica-top desk in a high-back swivel chair. I sat next to the frosted window in a pool of afternoon light. Methodically, plainly, as was specified in the rules, I told him the events in the backseat of the car. While I confessed, I sat beside myself on the next chair, looking into the fuzzy light through the scalloped glass on the window.

I was eighteen. He was forty-three, maybe forty-four.

Bishop Jensen leaned back in the swivel chair. His lips began to move beneath his brushlike mustache.

“Let me tell you a story.”

Bishop Jensen told me about a school bus driver who every day on his route traversed a hazardously steep hill and a set of railroad crossings. Up one side of the hills he piloted his bus, and then safely down the other, and across the tracks. Up one side, down the other, across the tracks. Every day, without incident.

One morning, with his bus full of schoolchildren, and running just a few minutes late, the driver felt his brakes fail just as he crested the hill. At the bottom of the hill, he saw a herd of goats in the road and the gates on the railroad tracks closing. Without a moment to spare, and yet without any panic, the bus driver took his foot off the gas, pressed the clutch, downshifted into first gear, and pulled on the emergency brake, bringing the bus full of children safely to rest just yards from the herd of goats and the railroad crossing.

A policeman who witnessed the incident rushed to the bus to see that everyone was okay.

“How did you do it?” the astonished policeman asked.

“Well, you see,” said the bus driver, “every day when I drive my route and I bring the bus over the hill, I rehearse what it is that I should do if the brakes on the bus were to fail. In my mind, I imagine taking my foot off the gas, pressing the clutch, downshifting into first, pulling the emergency break, and bringing the bus full of children safely to stop just
yards from the crossing gates. Today, when I had to put my plan into action, I was prepared.”

“And you see,” said my bishop Grant Jensen, “I want you to think of yourself as that bus driver. Practice in your mind the steps you will take to stop yourself if you feel your brakes failing, so that you can prevent this kind of situation from ever happening again. If you prepare, you will be able to stay in control.”

I thanked Bishop Jensen for his counsel. I shook his hand, walked methodically down the church hallway to the parking lot, started my car, and drove home. Nothing inside me felt any better for confessing. In fact, what I felt in his office was what I felt in the backseat of the car that August night: nothing, nothing at all.

•   •   •

What I did not know how to say then was that the story was all wrong.

What if my body were not a bus with brakes that sometimes failed, hurtling me, thrilled and giddy, along with the onrush of some kind of sex?

What if, instead, I were just a doeling goat at the bottom of the hill, nosing about in the roadside blackberries, not entirely aware of my surroundings, not quick enough to know what to do when the brakeless bus of sex came hurtling down the hill toward me? Or what if I were just a child on the bus, and sex was like school, a compulsory education I
never signed up for? Or what if I were like the policeman standing back and watching sex happen, a disastrous collision I had no power to stop? Or what if I were a mighty freight train steaming ahead toward my own horizon, and sex was the runaway bus that kept crossing my path?

What if the problem of sex always came uninvited, time and again, fleets of someone else’s buses always losing their brakes, and me frozen in the roadway? What if it were always someone else’s thrilling hurtle rushing headlong into the inert matter of my body?

It took a long time for me to realize that the story was all wrong, a long time to be able to ask these questions.

It was only after my mind had caught hold of all the corners of all the dim memories: when I was six, the face of the neighbor girl’s father looming high above me; when I was thirteen, the neighbor boy catching me on the street in broad daylight on my walk home from cheerleading practice and forcing his grubby hands down my pants; what it was I had not been feeling in the backseat.

Then, slowly, I began to piece together an understanding of the problem sex had been, why it always felt inevitable and unchosen, something unavoidable to be avoided at all costs. I began to understand why my body felt like cold luggage, not at all like a pearl on a golden chain but more like a millstone, a constant reminder that my fate was to be drowned.

•   •   •

In the story I want to tell, there are no more drownings. I am waiting in the parking lot behind the church under the arc of a street lamp. I see my sixteen-year-old self leave the office of LeVar Royal. I see myself hurry down the steps, shoulders curled.

Would you like to go for a drive? I ask my sixteen-year-old self.

I hand her the keys.

My sixteen-year-old self gets into the front seat, takes the wheel, rolls down the window, and hollers, dark hair blowing.

We are driving in a muscle car, with shiny orange paint and an eight-cylinder engine. On the radio we hear the wailing guitars of the genius Wilson sisters of Heart, then witchy-wise Stevie Nicks.

We drive the long boulevards from the orange-grove hills down to the big industrial beaches bordered by power plants, concrete piers, giant piles of boulders, and long stretches of empty parking lot. The air is damp and salty and smells like mollusk.

We sit on the hood of the car and watch fires burn on the beach in great pits, then we walk out on the pier and watch the waves heave themselves on shore. Maybe we drink a Diet Coke.

Standing twenty feet above the heaving black ocean, not putting my arm around her, standing side by side, I tell my sixteen-year-old self:

It is not a doughnut.

It is not a rose.

It is not a plank of wood.

It is not a bus without brakes.

It is not a pearl on a golden chain, nor is it a millstone.

It is neither a fragile treasure nor a heavy burden.

It is nothing that can be damaged, taken, lost, or given away.

It is not an
it
.

You, your body, your
self
—you are not an object lesson.

You are an ancient spirit in a young body. You will make choices. You will make some good choices, and they will feel good in body and soul. You may also make some
moderately
bad choices, and they will leave you feeling a kind of confusion and loneliness. It might be that you do not choose some things that happen to you, and these are not your fault, and these too will leave you feeling alone and confused. You will learn to sort out your feelings. As you do, protect yourself. Be kind to yourself. It takes time.

How badly I want her to know that after many years of confusion, she will come home to a house she chose herself, with a man she chose herself, a man whose body does not menace, a man who does not dream of owning her. She will share a bed with him. She will go to bed wearing her own name. Two daughters in sweaty pajamas will dream sovereign dreams in their bedrooms down the hall. Doves will roost on the power lines, and hummingbirds will wet their
beaks in the split fruit on her orange trees. The neighborhood roses will sit undisturbed atop their woody stems, fascicles tight with promise, or blowsy and exhausted from the expense of their perfume, unashamed.

On those nights, I want to tell her, if the stars align, and the girls stay asleep in their beds, and memory does not rattle at the windows, she will feel how sex feels. Like a state of levitation, like flying, like concentrating and letting go: she will feel . . . she will feel . . . she will feel. For a few seconds, she will be in another place: that place we reach when we come home to our bodies and find ourselves, for the first time, ready to travel.

This is what I want her to know, my sixteen-year-old Mormon girl self. But she cannot know it. Yet.

files

I
have not seen them, but I know they are there: millions upon millions of files entombed deep in the granite mountainside at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon, just southeast of Salt Lake City. I have seen the narrow driveway that leads up from the canyon road to the parking lot carved into the mountainside; I have seen granite boulders the size of buildings split in half, a few neat drill marks remaining at the top where early last century our tireless ancestors dynamited a vault in the ancient gray canyon, a vault strong enough to withstand war, weather, even the end of time. I do not know whether the files are paper, computer tape, or digital, but I know they are there: millions upon millions of names rescued from census records and baptismal registries by Mormon genealogists, saved from oblivion, these names, the names of our ancestors. Wearing all white,
we have carried their names on little paper slips through our holy temples. We have stepped into giant golden fonts resting on the back of twelve life-size golden statues of oxen, and we have been baptized, fully immersed in the shimmering turquoise water, maybe a dozen times in a row, for a dozen ancestors, in one day. By our labors, our ancestors are baptized again and married to each other once again, but this time for the eternities: beyond the scuttle of drying leaves, and the clouds of fruit flies, and the musky warmth of bodies in bed in the morning, they are sealed up against chaos and perdition. We are sealed to one another back through the generations. Our names are safe in the granite vault, and they will stay there until Jesus comes back and the stone is rolled away.

From end to end, everyone who has ever lived must be identified, baptized, and married again, either in the living flesh or by proxy, in one of our Mormon temples. Everyone who has ever lived—trillions upon trillions of them—their inscrutable names whirring before our eyes on reels of microfilm, or dissolving into paper powders in damp European sacristies, or dessicated like husks of scarab beetles and scattered out into the great deserts of the world, numberless as the sands of the beach or the stars of the skies, names of the dead forgotten even by the dead.

They are not forgotten by us. In time, the story goes, all the names will be fished out one by one by Mormon genealogists like my mother, who rise each morning in a thousand
orange grove and alfalfa field suburbs across the American West, step into their sacred undergarments and modest workaday clothes, and with only a simple breakfast of milk and cereal, without even so much as a cup of coffee to steel them, set to work again at a task that will take the rest of time: the bureaucratic reorganization of chaos into order.

It used to hurt my head, when I was a kid, thinking about the impossibility of the work.

That’s when my mother would smile, and rinse a dish in the sink, and explain that wonderful things would happen to hasten the work along, that in the millennium, someday, the temples would be open around the clock, that ancestors on the other side of the veil would provide unexpected assistance, that forbidden troves of records now hoarded by Communists and other unfriendly governments would soon fall open, that by unknown means the skies themselves would roll back like screens, as John the Revelator predicted, and great sources of knowledge would flash across them.

What is to stop a people who have sized up the infinite forest of human souls tangled and uprooted by the avalanche of time, and said, cheerfully, yes, we will sort it all out and have it stacked as neatly as cordwood by sundown.

What is to stop such a people?

•   •   •

When I was seventeen I drove with my parents up the I-15 from Orange County, California, to Provo, Utah,
where I moved into a narrow little room in a college dormitory named after a Book of Mormon prophet.
Brigham Young University
. How I loved
Brigham Young University.
How many mornings had my mother roused me from bed at five a.m. for early morning seminary with the words of the BYU fight song: “Rise and shout! The Cougars are out!” How long I had looked forward to the day when I too could finally live among people who would understand me, to whom I would have to explain nothing, with whom I could wordlessly share knowing looks over mint chocolate-chip milk shakes in the very bosom of Zion. With my father and my mother at each elbow, I carried my boxes into Helaman Halls. In every room, girls from Mormon towns throughout the West—Mesa, Arizona; Burley, Idaho—were unpacking their boxes too. Well-scrubbed boys wearing short haircuts and long Levi’s tossed a football on the perfectly manicured greens outside under the shadow of the twelve-thousand-foot Wasatch Mountains.