The Book of Mormon Girl (15 page)

You can’t go on like this
, I told myself. And You can’t possibly want me to feel this way, I demanded of God. God didn’t argue. Forced to choose between my nostalgia for the faith of my childhood and my dignity as an adult, I put down the doll and drove away.

•   •   •

Who watches over us when we go? Who remembers our names when we disappear from home? Who hears the absence of our voices? Who misses the sound of our stories?

My grandmother Pearl was always my refuge. For my brother and sisters and I, Pearl was the one who sewed our back-to-school outfits, scratched our backs, and stood over the stove stirring tapioca, milk, and sugar as long as it took to make pudding.

Late in her life, my grandmother sat down at the kitchen table of her house in Los Angeles to write her own life story. She remembered how it was in Garland, her small Utah hometown, how her own parents kept a coffee pot on the stove, and how people were not as strict about rules or doctrine, but still taught the gospel as it should be taught, and who else were they to be, anyway, but Mormons? Who else in all the world were we supposed to be?

My grandmother remembered the day she turned eight years old, the age at which children are baptized into the Mormon Church. Pearl was living with her mother Maude in Salt Lake City. On the morning of her birthday, with her
mother sick in bed, Pearl set out by herself to walk the long blocks down South Temple Avenue, past the mansions of prophets, seers, and revelators, governors and bankers, homes where her mother cooked and cleaned for a living, to present herself for baptism at the Mormon Tabernacle downtown. Alone, she changed into a homely little handmade one-piece suit of white clothing and stepped into the baptismal font, a majestic golden bowl resting on the back of twelve golden oxen, representing the gathered tribes of Israel. A stranger took her in his arms, lowered her beneath the water, and raised her up again. Pearl always remembered the terrible forlornness of that day, sidewalks wet and littered with elm pollen, her Dutch bangs under a little crocheted cap, her long and lonely walk.

A bone-soaking sense of loneliness pervades so much of my Mormon pioneer history: dead mothers, sick mothers, missing mothers, daughters marooned in loneliness, daughters trudging on. But there is to me in the story of Maude and Pearl an undeniable sense of warmth and loyalty as well. Scattered out from Zion by forces beyond their control, my great-grandmother and her daughters clung together and cared for one another without fail. When my grandmother turned eighteen, she and my great-grandmother again packed their few things in paper suitcases and boarded the train for Los Angeles. What a terrible mistake, my grandmother thought, to leave Zion for this great chaotic city, to dwell so far from the familiar company of other Mormons,
in a place where strangers sometimes rubbed her head to feel for horns. But my grandmother had also learned a few things about survival. Maude and Pearl settled into a tiny apartment with her sister Edna and brother-in-law Alme, who worked at the local Firestone tire plant. Pearl got up early and took the red car, memorized the names of the downtown city streets, and found a job at a blouse factory. Alme bought her a bathing suit at Woolworth’s. She met my grandfather Frank, a kind and churchless Los Angeles Basque, who made Pearl a home under the palm trees in a working-class suburb and helped her support and care for her mother until the day she died. This was their triumph: that unlike the generations of pioneer mothers and daughters before them, Maude and Pearl came all the lonely miles together.

My grandmother married outside the faith and never held what others might consider an important church assignment or calling. She did not receive her temple endowments until she was well into her widowhood. She was unimpressed by hierarchy and utterly averse to harshness or cruelty. Hers was a tender Mormonism carried in the bone, a faith forged in the small acts of care that stand between family survival and oblivion.

During my years away from church, it is the Mormonism of my grandmothers that keeps me company: their brave and forlorn walks, their small acts of care, their loneliness companioning mine. The impetus of faith. The mystery that brings us across the empty distances.

•   •   •

When my daughter Ella is almost two years old and my second daughter, Rosa, curled up in my belly, my grandmother Pearl makes her own final crossing, passing away after a long struggle with dementia.

Standing on the driveway of the funeral home back in Orange County, six months pregnant, I worry that because my life has taken an unorthodox path, I will not be invited in to help dress my grandmother’s body. When observant Mormons die, their bodies are dressed for burial in sacred vestments: white undergarments embroidered with small symbols commemorating vows of obedience and devotion, long white dresses for women and white suits and ties for men, and embroidered green aprons. Mormon family members and friends dress their bodies ourselves, partly out of modesty, not wanting to reveal the private aspects of our faith to outsiders, and partly as a final act of love and service. I worry that I will have to spend the time staring at dusty silk plants and electric candelabra bulbs in the funeral home lobby, just as I had sat outside the Mormon temple during the weddings of my two sisters and my brother.

My worry is for nothing. When my sisters arrive—wearing giant sunglasses, toting oversize leather bags, perfectly arrayed in the sumptuous exhaustion of their grief—my mother leads us all into the mortuary dressing room.

Everything inside is pink, from the seashell pink
wallpaper to the mauve couch to the pink box of pink tissues resting on the faux mahogany side table.

The body of my grandmother rests on a gurney under a white drape.

The funeral home manager withdraws with a gentle, knowing smile. (He too is Mormon.) We four living women stand in a circle and bow our heads.

“Help us to do this service for Pearl,” my mother prays.

In her death, Grandma becomes just
Pearl
. Alive, she ruled our worlds, a full five feet four inches looming above us, queenly in her ranking. Now her spirit stands next to us, like another sister positioned at the long bathroom mirror on a warm June Sunday morning before church, arranging her bangs in the glass. She cannot reach the buttons on her own dress. So we will button it for her.

My mother has brought new undergarments and new temple clothes—dress, apron, stockings, slippers—all in their plastic packages. She has also brought a pair of scissors to help us prepare the clothing so we can slip it over her limbs and around her body. We stand around the gurney. I allow my mother and sisters to position themselves near her head and shoulders, out of respect and deference: they have been through the temple and will know how to dress my grandmother in her ceremonial clothing, as I do not. I will tend to my grandmother’s feet and legs.

My mother draws the sheet down to my grandmother’s shoulders.

“Hello, Pearl.”

What a relief it is to see her body. I am startled to feel so relieved, but I do. It is blindingly plain that she is no longer there. Her body is shiny, dry, all surfaces, like a beautiful piece of paper.

Since the time that we were small children, we have rehearsed the Mormon belief that the human body is a transitory habitation for a spirit being that existed before this life and will exist afterward. We rehearsed the parable of embodiment in small church classrooms, around the family dinner table: here is the fleshy, animate hand—here is the cotton gardening glove—at birth the hand enters the glove—at death the glove is peeled from the living hand and laid out on the table.

When she was alive, I never saw my grandmother naked. Now I see that she has parts like mine, hips like mine, hair like mine. I reach for her hands. I welcome the feel of the pads on her thumbs, worn softly impermeable against the steady press of paring knives in the kitchen. I welcome the sight of her legs, uncurled from the infantile palsies of her long decline into dementia.

I slip my arm under her legs and help my sister slide her sacred undergarments over her bare hips. I hold her bare feet in my hands, her toes contorted by four decades of fashionable women’s shoes. I ease the white stockings over her feet, rolling the nylon above the calves. I put on the white slippers and gently pat her feet.

I step back to let my mother and sisters put her ceremonial clothing in place.

“You look beautiful, Pearl,” my sister says.

My mother pulls the sheet back up to her chin.

•   •   •

What will I leave my own daughters, my own granddaughters? What stories will accompany them across the miles they will travel in their lifetimes? For their sakes, finally, I decide to stop feeling like a bad daughter in my own tradition. For their sakes, I decide I must make and tell my own version of the Mormon story.

I start with Pioneer Day. It was on July 24, 1847, after crossing fifteen hundred miles of rattlesnake-infested and sagebrush-choked plains that Brigham Young, stricken with Rocky Mountain spotted fever, raised himself upon one elbow from his carriage sickbed, gazed down at the Salt Lake Valley, and pointed a finger: “It is enough. This is the right place. Drive on.” Mormons around the world celebrate this memory every July 24 on Pioneer Day, our one and only Mormon holiday, the birthday of our lovely Deseret.

I have photographs of myself as a little girl on Pioneer Day in a calico bonnet and ankle-grazing skirt sewn by my grandmother. In the photographs, my two sisters and I stand bonneted astride our Huffy scooters in a suburban California cul-de-sac. Now I have a yellow eyelet bonnet for four-year-old Ella, freckle faced and irrepressible, and a white
bonnet with red and blue stars for two-year-old Rosa, her head full of golden curls. My own bonnet is hot pink with tiny flowers.

This year, July 24 falls on a Sunday. I am up early, standing barefoot on the kitchen linoleum, my hands squeezing cream of chicken soup through frozen shredded potatoes. Two Pyrex casseroles of Jell-O are already cooling in the refrigerator, ready for our annual Pioneer Day dinner, an event that delights my curious non-Mormon friends and horrifies my sweet Jewish husband. David maintains his urbane culinary preferences like he was keeping kosher. To him, classic Mormon cuisine is totally
treif
, the bottom-feeding depths of
goyishe
: long-suffering Crock-Pot pot roast, Jell-O dishes with canned fruit and dairy product, white rolls, iceberg lettuce, and ranch dressing.

Right now I am making the hallmark Mormon dish: funeral potatoes, a heart-stopping, lipid-sodden, church-dinner comfort food—two 32-ounce bags of frozen shredded potatoes, two cans cream of chicken soup, two cups sour cream, a cup of grated cheese, a half cup butter, mixed together and topped with cornflakes, then baked in a 350-degree oven, serves twelve. As I stir the melted butter in with the potatoes, David sits at the kitchen table with the
New York Times
, shaking his head to perform his revulsion. Ella and Rosa dance about my ankles, unclad but for bonnets and cotton underpants. I harangue them about their pioneer ancestors: “Your great-great-great-grandmother crossed the
plains when she was just your age. Would you be ready to do the same?”

My daughters are getting old enough now, Ella especially, to either grow or not to grow a living connection to Mormonism. And it has been—I count back—how many years since I have attended church myself? But I think of Ella and Rosa. How badly I want them to know what their grandmothers knew. How badly I want them to have a claim on the curious beauty and the power of this tradition. How badly I want them to make their own place in this Mormon world. My daughters embolden me with a renewed urgency to try again.

I rinse my hands and dance Ella and Rosa down the hallway to their bedroom. I kneel before them, slide pink dresses over their heads, and fasten the buckles on their sandals. I take off my hot-pink pioneer bonnet and zip myself into a dress. David, gamely, smiles and puts on a shirt and tie. We pack bags of snacks and games and snap the girls into their car seats. We arrive a few minutes late. I duck my head and move to the back of the chapel; David follows: we each have a girl by the hand. We set up a half circle of folding chairs in the overflow area. I position toy cars, dinosaurs, soft books, juice boxes, and Baggies of Cheerios. I herd Ella and Rosa while we all listen, more or less, to ritual retellings of the hardships of our pioneer ancestors. No one loves a tale of pioneer hardship better than I do. No one better loves the pioneer babies born in oxcarts and rude tents, rain pouring through the ceiling, sisters holding tin plates to collect water
and shelter the mother in travail. No one better loves the frostbitten pioneer feet and toes, partially amputated with a butcher knife. No one better loves the old pioneer ladies inspired by the Holy Ghost to arrive on the doorstep at midnight with a medicinal poultice. No one—
no one
, I tell you—loves a good pioneer poultice more than I do.

After the last speaker the congregation sings the beloved hymn of our Mormon exodus to Zion:

Come, come, ye Saints, no toil or labor fear;

But with joy, wend your way.

Though hard to you this journey may appear,

Grace shall be as your day.

We’ll find the place which God for us prepared,

Far away in the West.

Where none shall come to hurt or make afraid

And the Saints will be blessed.

Even when I had no idea where I was headed, or where I was to lead my daughters, every night, I have sung all four verses to my daughters Ella and Rosa in the rocking chair. Now four years old, Ella knows the words by heart. Hearing them rendered not just by my solo voice but by a congregation of hundreds is to her a revelation. She cocks her head, arrested. She leaps to the aisle, scattering dinosaurs and juice boxes. She explodes into interpretive dance. She spins.
She sails. She waves her arms. She shakes her hips and sings into her thumb as though it were a microphone. In some churches, liturgical dance is an honored art form. Ours is not one of them.