The Book of Mormon Girl (2 page)

For I had been born of goodly parents who, in the wilderness of the late twentieth century, saw the wreckage of empires, markets, and civilizations, but did not know how to disentangle effects from causes, nor had the vocabulary to name the strands of these knotted histories, nor their place in them, nor the mundane and disastrous traumas of their own common American upbringings, nor the mundane and disastrous traumas lived by a millennium’s worth of their poor and common ancestors, and who heard all around them mocking crowds like faceless laugh tracks of sitcom television threatening oblivion.

Every night in my second-story room in the tract house in Orange County the year before I was baptized, my father
and I read the Book of Mormon, the stories of ancient Israelite peoples led by God to the Americas, and their wars, visions, and wanderings. No one else in the world believed in the Book of Mormon but Mormons like us. So we huddled together, my nursing father and me, safe in tender longing, as the currents and the garbage and the television laugh tracks ran down the streets and fell into the storm drains and rushed along the concreted river channels, alongside the freeways, past abandoned orange groves, out to the black and trackless sea.

•   •   •

In those days we Mormons, most of us, were not a wealthy people. We were people one or two generations from the alfalfa farm, or the homestead. We were high school teachers, bookkeepers, nurses, engineers, and mechanics, people who fed eight children on bread homemade from wheat stored in great tins in the garage and milk reconstituted from powder. And in addition to the 10 percent of our incomes we dutifully tithed to build temples around the world, the offerings we paid the first Sunday of every month when we skipped two meals to provide for the poor among us, and the pennies we collected for the Mormon children’s hospital in Salt Lake City, we raised money to construct our own church buildings.

I had heard the stories of long ago that when Mormons built their first sacred temple at Kirtland, Ohio, from timber
and local sandstone, Mormon women smashed their dishes and glasses to press into the plaster so that it would sparkle in the sun. In the 1970s, when Mormons were building meetinghouses across North America, our grown-ups came up with all sorts of homely schemes to pay into the building fund. Our mothers baked dozens of pumpkin pies for a church Thanksgiving supper and then bought them back one slice at a time for us to eat on paper plates at the ward-house supper. Our fathers volunteered to drive Hertz rental cars from one airport to another, collecting ten dollars an hour to help the agencies sort out their inventories. And every year my father, being bishop, organized a holiday bazaar where we could sell our homemade crafts to one another: gingerbread houses, jars of peach preserves, handmade pioneer bonnets.

Sister Simmons was in her eighties, a widow, Utah-born, one of the numberless Mormons who moved down to California during the Depression, or the War, seeking work. She told my father she wanted to do her part for the building fund.

“What are your talents?” my father asked from his seat behind the desk in the bishop’s office.

“I can crochet,” Sister Simmons said. “Though it takes me a while.”

“Well, that’s fine,” my father said. “Why don’t you make a real nice afghan, Sister Simmons, and we’ll make it the centerpiece of the night. We’ll put it up for a silent auction.”

What materialized at the bazaar was the ugliest afghan
my father had ever seen: alternating chevrons of burnt umber and brassy yellow, with a brassy yellow fringe.

But who would dare say a word to Sister Simmons? So proud of her dedicated labors: her eighty-year-old hands curling around their crochet hooks as she sat in the soft chair in front of the television in her little house on the edge of a concrete river on the alluvial plains of Southern California, her devotion galvanizing into purpose, while her children are all grown, her husband is gone and waiting to call her name and bring her across the veil into heaven, while leggy blondes in short shorts and espadrilles bounce across the screen of the little television, and the laugh track issues forth in random little bursts, faceless and sort of menacing.

So my father put the afghan on display and set out the bid sheet.

Late in the evening he saw that no one had bid. Not one single bid.

He looked at my mother across the room, as she supervised us four children, pushing Jell-O salads across our paper plates with plastic forks. And then he wrote a number down on the bid sheet:
$100
. A lot of money in those days.

But how Sister Simmons smiled when she stopped by the table where her afghan was displayed and spied the $100 figure on her bid sheet. And how proud she felt that by the labors of her hands she had transformed burnt umber and brassy yellow acrylic yarn into a sacred offering, a handsome sum for the building fund.

You will say these are treacly widow’s mite stories, and I will say, yes, they are. But this is how I first came to understand what a story is, and how to define salvation: salvation is the eye that sees in secret and rewards the labors of homely hands. Salvation is the steady work of elderly women who remember the long avenues in Utah lined with cottonwood trees, and their fathers working their hands rough on the local ward house, or the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. What was there to compare to this feeling of belonging to one another, belonging to the only people who believed as we believed, as our mothers and fathers, and pioneer grandmothers and grandfathers believed, safe from the mocking and fashionable faceless crowds, safe where no one would say your books of scripture are all made up, or the sacred undergarments you promised to wear every day are funny, or your afghan is too ugly, or, old woman, there is nothing in you the world loves anymore.

•   •   •

This is the world I willingly joined when at eight years old I put on a white dress with a Peter Pan collar sewn with special intention and purpose by my Utah-born grandmother and stepped to the edge of a font of turquoise-blue water, where my father, dressed in an all-white suit, stood waist deep in the water and beckoned me to come. He placed one of his arms around my narrow shoulders and prayed, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
I squeezed my eyes tight as he lowered me entirely into the water, as special witnesses watched from beside the font to make sure that the immersion was total. Not a thread of my white dress or a filament of my dark brown hair floated to the top in this perfect enactment of my own death, my own passage through the veil.

This is the world I joined when I stepped from the font into the towel held by my mother, who, with my grandmother, fussed over my wet hair and helped me change into dry clothes in the church bathroom so that I could once again go out into the embrace of friends and family, take my seat, and have the hands of my father come down upon my head and with his words command the Holy Ghost as my companion, to walk beside me, an invisible guide and guardian. This is the great sweet weight I felt being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Mormon not just by birth but also by choice and baptism, making and keeping sacred promises, a member of a people chosen because we had chosen to be ourselves.

I grew up in a world where all the stories I heard arrived at the same conclusions: the wayfarer restored, the sick healed, the lost keys found, a singular truth confirmed. And an orthodox Mormon story is the only kind of story I ever wanted to be able to tell.

But these are not the kinds of stories life has given me.

Every Mormon carries with them a bundle of stories like a suitcase of family secrets. Polygamous ancestors we have
learned to be ashamed of. Histories that reveal the human flaws of the ones who came before us. Doctrines we dare not mention in public for fear of ridicule. Sacrifices we refuse to believe God would ask of us. Stories of loss that do not end neatly with restoration and stories of leaving that do not conclude with the return home.

In the world I grew up in, it was not okay to tell unorthodox stories. We did not hear them in church. We did not read them in scripture. But sooner or later they break through to the surface in every Mormon life, in every human life, in every life of faith. I am not afraid of them. Because this is the story life has given me to tell.

sparkling difference

G
rowing up in Southern California—outside the Utah precincts of our Zion, our lovely Deseret—I was almost always the only Mormon girl in the room. I knew this because everywhere I went, I looked for other Mormons. The first day of third grade, I sat at my desk and counted head by head, red, blond, and brown: how many of my deskmates did I go to church with? Whose parents did I call “Brother” and “Sister” and whose “Mr.” and “Mrs.”? Which ones knew all the Book of Mormon stories, or spent their summer vacations with Utah cousins, or piled their old clothes into bundles for the Deseret Industries, our special chain of Mormon thrift stores across the American West? In my third-grade classroom, I was the only one.

And when I went to birthday parties, I made sure to check if I was the only Mormon girl. For then I would have to ask if
I could please have a root beer instead of a Coca-Cola like all the other children were having. Because it was our rule that we did not drink Coca-Cola, or Dr Pepper, or Mountain Dew, or Sunkist (the only orange soda with caffeine), or even Aspen soda, the new apple-flavored soda they advertised on television with the pretty blond skier going down the powdery slope to communicate its deep refreshment. That Aspen soda sure looked beyond delicious, but it was not to be.

For these were our rules: No tea. No coffee. No cigarettes. No alcohol of any kind. No caffeine. Which is how I became an expert in the world of American sodas, knowing that those cardboard flats of grocery-store-brand orange, grape, and strawberry sodas, the root beers, ginger ales, and 7UPs were all beloved of God and the Mormons, while all others containing caffeine were strictly off limits. This is how I learned to discipline my appetites around the words of the prophets.

When I went to the large birthday parties at the local ice cream parlor with the faux stained-glass windows, red vinyl booths, and marble tabletops, it was up to me to whisper to one of the parents: “No Coke, please; only root beer, thank you.” There was no need to explain such things when I went to the birthdays of Juli, or Shayne, or the other Mormon girls at my school. There was no need to explain at all, no waiting in nervous anticipation for the big tray of sodas to arrive, fifteen identical glasses of bubbly soda and who would stop to help me find out which one—not the waitress, and not the
parents busy with so many children. It was up to me alone to figure out how to locate the no-caffeine soda without risking so much as a taste of a Coke, maybe just smell the drinks, or rather go totally without—yes, no problem. The challenge of it all raised a simple birthday party refreshment into something of a sacred offering.

Yes, to tell the truth, I loved being a Mormon girl, a root beer among the Cokes. I relished my sparkling internal difference, all but invisible to the untrained eye.

•   •   •

Invisible as our differences might have been to the non-Mormons we lived among, we Mormons were never invisible to one another, especially in the Book of Mormon belt, the sacred geographical domain that ran south from Canada down through Idaho, Utah, and Nevada to Arizona, then west into Southern California and my home at the edge of the orange groves. Even in airports, gas stations, and department stores, we Mormons could spot other Mormons: married people with several children in tow; always modestly dressed, our dresses and shorts to the knees, our shoulders covered, the shadow of the neckline or hemline of our sacred undergarments barely visible through the clothes; our faces soft and pale from the church commitments that kept us indoors most of the weekend; our men clean-shaven and sort of girlish because they were free of vices, and still wearing haircuts short as missionaries’; never a curse word uttered,
never a Coke or a coffee or cigarette in hand. Maybe driving a two-toned blue passenger van with bench seats, and always carrying an extra book of scripture: never just the Bible but our Book of Mormon too.

We could identify other Mormons just by the sound of their names: older men named Rulon, Larue, or Lavell; older women named LaVera. Some of us named Brigham or Spencer for modern prophets, and some of us named Moroni, Mahonri, Nephi, or Jared for Book of Mormon ones. Some even had well-known Mormon last names like Allred, Hatch, Rigby, Ricks, Tanner, Cannon, and Young.

We knew we all followed the same code of rules. Not only the easy and obvious ones, such as no murder, no lying, no stealing, no taking the name of the Lord in vain, of course, but subtler ones handed down by our prophets in Salt Lake City. No playing with face cards. No masks, even on Halloween. No two-piece bathing suits. No dating a non-Mormon; no dating before age sixteen. No R-rated movies. For Mormon women: no working outside the home. No work, sports, shopping, swimming, or television on Sunday. Keep a personal journal. Grow a vegetable garden. Keep a year’s supply of food in your garage. Hold special family worship meetings every Monday night. Read the scriptures every day. Pray morning and night. Pray always.

How we loved to see one another, we Mormons, out and about in the confusion of the greater world we traversed each day, undetectable, to be able to grip one anothers’ unstained
hands with firm missionary handshakes and speak the familiar language of our people, a language of modern prophets and apostles, small Utah towns, church auxiliaries, missions and missionaries, words that smelled like laundry detergent, hymnals, and cottonwood trees, words as comforting as bread made from home-ground wheat and smothered with home-canned peach preserves. How we loved to see the family vans out on the highways of the Mormon corridor, steaming along the I-15, up past the old Mormon outpost at San Bernardino, through the old Mormon settlement of Las Vegas, through the red bluffs of St. George, Utah, up through the Great Basin to our family reunions and missionary farewells. A man in our ward named LaRue had a personalized California license plate that read “LDSRU12,” LDS being the acronym for “Latter-day Saints,” another name we Mormons called ourselves. How it felt to be LaRue, fielding friendly noncaffeinated honks and waves all day long from other Mormons, so happy to be Mormons, so happy to know and be known.