“It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass (14 page)

It might have been different had we sought rebaptism into
the Mormon Church. Mormons celebrate and parade people who have seen the error
of their ways and have made drastic life changes to join or rejoin the fold. It
makes for great stories. They weren’t quite sure how to handle a family that
saw the error of their ways but didn’t rejoin the fold.

Many people who leave Mormonism turn to born-again
Christianity. One such showed up at our door in hopes of saving us. Undaunted
by our candid response that we were through with religion, she left behind a
pamphlet. I thumbed through it later that day, and a five-dollar bill fell out.
I knew the ploy. I was to assume she had left it there by accident and call her
to offer its return. This would provide her one more opportunity to witness to
me while lavishing praise upon me for having the integrity to return the money.
Never mind, of course, her lack of integrity in trying to pull such a ruse in
the first place. I put the five bucks in my pocket.

At times I missed my gorgeous Victorian home. We missed our
Manti friends. Not being above morbid curiosity, we speculated as to what
Harmston’s devoted followers might be saying about us. Ostracized in Manti and
ostracized in Orem, we continued looking for a place to start over.

When you emerge from polygamy and you see the success of TV
shows like Big Love and Sister Wives along with scores of bestselling books by
former polygamists, one of your first thoughts is a heartfelt, “This is good. I
am glad the message is getting out. Perhaps bringing the topic into the open
will prevent other people from getting sucked into a cult, and help people
already sucked into one find the courage to leave.”

But over time, it’s impossible to suppress another, somewhat
more worldly thought. Something along the lines of, “How can
I
make money off of having been a
nutcase?”

When we were in the cult, Jeff did a good job of attracting
media attention. Now that we were out of the cult, we decided to go for it
again.

Vogue
magazine was
the first to call. Early in 2003, Jeff and I met a reporter at Salt Lake City’s
new and elegant Grand America Hotel for an extensive interview. A few weeks
later,
Vogue
sent an entire crew from
New York—a producer, production assistant, makeup artist, hair stylist,
and well-known photographer—to shoot photos of our family. The producer
took Jeff to an upscale men’s store and bought him an expensive designer
jacket. Back at the hotel, the crew fussed over the girls’ and my hair and
makeup for two hours. The production assistant led me to a room in the hotel
where she had arrayed dozens of sweaters, jackets, pants, and shoes she had
purchased for me to choose from. Keeping my ego in check wasn’t easy. I kept
reminding myself that I wasn’t the real celebrity. Polygamy was.

The
Vogue
crew
decided to hold the photo shoot on the famous Bonneville Salt Flats, about a
90-minute drive west of Salt Lake City. If you saw the opening of
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
or the Anthony Hopkins movie
The World’s
Fastest Indian,
you have seen the Salt Flats. The more than 30,000 acres of
almost perfectly flat, glistening salt were what remained after the waters of
prehistoric Lake Bonneville receded into what is now the Great Salt Lake. Out
we went in our fancy clothes and heavy makeup on a windy, cold spring day. The
cold weather was just as well. Sunburn is not easy to avoid on the Salt Flats.
On a bright, hot day, a hat may protect you from the sun’s rays coming from
above, but not from the rays the salt reflects back up at you.

I didn’t tell anyone in Orem or Manti about the article.
Fame among total strangers was fine, but I had no interest in infamy among friends,
neighbors, and family. The article appeared in the June 2003 issue of
Vogue
. Reese Witherspoon was on the
cover. Local stores placed an opaque shield on top of the stack of magazines,
having deemed the cover too racy for public display. Welcome to Utah.

I headed into a bookstore and, hands shaking, purchased a
copy. I felt conspicuous, as if everyone had seen the article and was staring
at me. I paid the clerk and hurried out to the car. There on the cover was the
teaser headline, “Understanding Elizabeth Smart: A Mormon Perspective.” That
was our article. Eager to see how the article turned out, I opened the magazine
and sat staring at the full-page photo of my family. It was quite a nice
picture, I thought. I scanned the article and found that the reporter treated
us and the subject with fairness. Having heard horror stories of interviewees
being misquoted or quoted out of context, I breathed a sigh of relief.

Jeff didn’t share my desire for local anonymity. He would
walk into a store, open a copy of the magazine to our article, and point it out
to the clerk. “That’s me,” he would say. Clerks usually responded with
interest, which, on occasion, was genuine. He phoned family and friends and
told them to pick up a copy. His non-Mormon family members liked the article.
His Mormon family said they “disagreed” with it—whatever that meant. How
do you disagree with a factual account of a family’s experience?

Eventually my mother saw the article. Her only comment was,
“I learned some things.” I didn’t ask.

Next we heard from CNN. Paula Zahn of the show
Paula Zahn Now
saw the
Vogue
article and wanted to do a story
on us herself. Jeff was enthused, and I, as usual, was terrified. CNN offered
to fly us to New York for an in-studio interview with Zahn, but the timing
didn’t work for us. CNN settled for hiring a Salt Lake-based film crew and
sending them to our home to do the story. The show aired in September 2003. At
the end of the year, CNN re-aired our story on their New Year’s Eve special,
The Best of Paula Zahn Now
. We were
featured alongside stories about Saddam Hussein, John Edwards, Clint Eastwood,
and Gloria Estefan. Somehow I doubt they were as giddy about sharing a show
with us as we were about sharing one with them.

As interview requests continued pouring in, Jeff and I
decided that it was time to write a book about our experience. The only
problem? Neither of us is a writer. We made three abortive attempts with ghost
writers. As you may have surmised from my use of the word “abortive,” nothing
productive came of any of them.

We might have gotten somewhere with the third writer if her
associate, a former polygamist himself, hadn’t frightened her with tales of
vengeance. The tales were not spurious. As recently as a few decades ago,
polygamous clans in Utah were known for exacting revenge on “traitors.”
Personal journals and newspaper accounts suggest that the practice originated
with the Mormon Church in its early days. In
Roughing It,
Mark Twain describes meeting “a Mormon ‘Destroying
Angel’ … set apart by the Church to conduct permanent disappearances of
obnoxious citizens.” Our writer, barely into her assignment, promptly resigned.

In more recent years, there have been no reports of revenge
at the hands of polygamist cults. I am not terribly worried about the TLC. They
were and probably still are a peaceful lot. It may be a while before this book
finds its way to them, anyway. Still, should I suddenly disappear, Manti might
be a good place to look for clues.

In time we gave up on the book. Our passion for publicity
ebbed, and the interview requests dried up.

We remained in Utah for a little over two years. Once our
financial feet were back on the ground, we resumed looking for the ideal place
for a fresh start. We found it. In 2004, we purchased and moved into a humble
home in a quaint, rural Eastern Oregon town.

Fresh starts are sometimes easier said than done. I didn’t
exaggerate when I said our new home was humble. We had no friends in the area.
Once again our children had to face being the new kids at school. Jeff had to
build a practice from scratch in a town where we knew no one. I missed my
parents.

But at least we had each other. That was what I’d said in
our
Paula Zahn Now
interview—that
we were lucky to have emerged from seven years of polygamy with our family
intact.

I spoke too soon.

A few months after our move, Jeff took me on a drive through
the lovely Oregon countryside. He told me he had been imagining what our life
would be like once the kids finished school and left home. Before my mind could
drift to an idyllic picture of the two of us cuddled up alone in our home in
front of a warm fireplace, he went on to say that we had too little in
common—and suggested a divorce.

I couldn’t speak; I could only cry. No way had I seen this
coming. I had noticed that Jeff had been quiet for a few days, but I’d assumed
he was only worried about his practice. As we drove on and I regained control
of my voice, we talked. This was not a decision to make immediately, we agreed.
Yes, there was no rush. Maybe counseling would help. Yes, we would see a
marriage counselor. We went through all of the motions we imagined responsible
people who are trying to save a marriage should go through. Yet at some level,
I think we understood that we were doing exactly that—going through
motions, perhaps so that after the divorce we could tell ourselves we had
tried.

We went through the motions for a little more than two
years. During that time, my old insecurities, the feelings of “I can’t get a
man, much less keep one” attacked me with a vengeance. I knew that it wasn’t as
simple as “we have nothing in common.” I doubt any divorce is, and either way,
it wasn’t true in our case. We had children together. We had shared one dilly
of a roller-coaster ride history. We now shared a nonreligious outlook. And, in
spite of everything, at some level we truly cared about each other.

There had to be
something wrong with me,
I fretted. What was it? My nose was no longer big.
My hyperhidrosis was long gone before Jeff and I met. But it had to be
something wrong
with me.
It was as if
I needed to make everything my fault, so that if I could just change, I could
save our marriage and everything would be fine again.

Jeff was born and grew up in Las Vegas. He had always
dreamed of having an office there. He obtained a license to practice in Nevada
and began taking our daughters there on getaways to visit family. At any
moment, I expected him to return and tell me it was time for the divorce and
that he would be moving to Las Vegas by himself. In 2007, he did.

It took me a great deal of time, therapy, and work to calm
down and quit beating myself up. Nor am I entirely through. A lifetime of
insecurities are not shed overnight.

So, what ended our marriage? Suffice it to say that, for us,
a number of not terribly dramatic lines intersected on that point labeled
“divorce.” If I described those lines, you’d be bored. If you were hoping I’d
give you enough so that you could take Jeff’s or my side, sorry to disappoint.

We worked out the terms of the divorce like grown-ups. Jeff
moved to Las Vegas, stayed in touch, and honored the financial obligations of
the settlement. I moved with the children back to Orem, Utah, this time into my
parents’ home. Taking in a newly divorced daughter with three teenagers wasn’t
exactly the retirement these wonderful, giving people had planned for
themselves, but take us in they did.

I searched hard for a silver lining in the divorce. I found
one. “At least,” I told Jeff one day, “I don’t have to defend chiropractic any
more.”

Though the Mormon Church has stated for the record that God
wants fathers to preside and mothers to nurture, it would be unfair to blame my
attitude of dependence and of letting men make my decisions for me entirely on
the church. There are Mormon women who grow up with a strong, independent
streak. Perhaps someday neurologists will unravel what percentage of us comes
from our environment versus our biology, and how they affect each other,
spiraling endlessly in some sort of chaotic system. All I can tell you is that,
for the first time in my life, I was in a position of having to make decisions
for myself. It would be inaccurate to say that it scared me. More accurately,
it scared the hell out of me.

But I discovered something.

I can do it.

I hadn’t held a job in 20 years, but I applied for jobs and
got them. I marketed myself as an artist and secured commissions. In time, I
realized that the illusion that I needed someone to make decisions for me, to
take care of me, was just that. An illusion.

As my confidence grew, I decided to retackle something I
felt I had failed at 30 years earlier. This time I would succeed.

I was going to date.

When you don’t go to school, attend church, or hang out in
bars, meeting men can be a challenge. But, I reasoned, that was why the god I
no longer believed in gave us the Internet.

I posted a profile and, to my surprise and relief, men
responded. Of the men I met, not much clicked, unless you count the man who,
after a few dates, let slip that he had lied about not being married and then
expressed surprise that I was so prudish as to dump him over a little thing
like that. I have since learned that married men pretending to be single online
are not unusual. Not just cult leaders are charlatans.

Oh, and then there was the fellow who, after a few dates,
confided that he had firsthand knowledge about alien abductions. That,
and—
shhh!
—the government
was after him. Having finally attained something halfway close to sanity for
myself, I had no interest in a relationship with a man I expected would show up
any day wearing an aluminum foil hat to keep “Them” from messing with his head.

I was about to give up on online dating when the Internet
came through in a way I didn’t expect. Remember that book I would have written
if only I were a writer? One fellow I met through an online dating site turned
out to be a published author. You are reading the fruits of our collaboration.
Even better, we are an item, going on four years. I don’t know if Steve will be
comfortable with my saying that here. If he isn’t, he can delete it.