Mission to America (3 page)

“I'm feeling the twitch,” Sarah said, and she was off me, quickly enough to avoid a pregnancy but not to avoid a gluey wet mess. She wiped us both clean with the hand towel (had she planned for this?) and reminded me, after pausing to let things settle, that a clock had just started on our eventual wedding. Once I'd proven myself as a provider by amassing the money and Virtue Coupons necessary to buy a house and a share in the Bluff co-op, we would be married in this very field, on this very spot beside the creek. Until then, more intimate contact was forbidden; our memories of the Frolic would have to serve.

“We're in the Book of Love now,” Sarah said.

In practice, this meant meeting for Sunday suppers at her family's house on Isis Street, a standard aluminum-sided three-bedroom cube built by community labor in the eighties from plans drawn up by the Church Domestic Architect. These blueprints changed only every thirty years or so, resulting in uniform little neighborhoods that I found cozy and reassuring but that the fussier women of our town (my grandmother called them “the Parisians”) loved to gripe about. And, yes, each house style did have certain flaws, such as the tendency of my parents' roof to collect so much snow in the winter that when spring came the copious runoff would flood the basement and swell the soil near the foundation. Repairing the damage this caused was often expensive, but the fact that every squat white stucco bungalow clustered around ours was ailing in the same manner softened the blow.

At the Kimmels' house the problem was lack of air, which made me groggy and inarticulate during my weekly visits. Sarah's father, a laborer in the talc mine that was Bluff's chief source of outside income, suffered more spectacularly, coughing nonstop and rubbing his runny eyes until the lashes all fell out. Sarah blamed the dustiness and stuffiness for her dull skin, her dandruff, and her dry mouth. Only her mother seemed unaffected, perhaps because she seldom took a breath. The woman was a husky kitchen whirlwind who cleaned as she cooked and had no true feminine features aside from a great wild mass of dyed dark hair that looked like it had sprung down from a branch, claws extended, and attacked her scalp.

The meals she served had less flavor than the stale air. The Kimmels were fish people, their Maternal Foodway as determined more than a hundred years ago by Mother Lucy, our founder and first Seeress. The only fresh fish to be found in Bluff was trout, and Sarah's mother prepared it according to two main recipes in which I could taste her own mother's wrinkled hand: oven-baked trout fillets garnished with forest herbs and parboiled trout on stewed dandelion greens. This would be my diet once I married Sarah, so I tried to eat enthusiastically, even when my appetite was stifled by her wounding behavior at the table.

It usually showed itself midway through the meal, after the Prayer and the Lesson. The Lesson was Paul's job. Paul, the little brother—a prim blond twelve-year-old whom I was expected to take an interest in by helping him with his math and science homework and admiring his collection of fossil insects dug from the shale deposits south of town—read to us from the Three Foundational Works in a high fearful voice familiar from my own school days. He lived in terror of mispronunciations, just as I had at his age. The teachers punished them harshly. “Be always incorruptible in intention,” he quoted from Mother Lucy's
Discourses,
“and indefatigable in execution. The Transcendent Immanence yields but slowly to the instrumentalities of will.”

“How did I do?” he asked, looking at his big sister, who functioned as the household magistrate and ruled on all of life's little daily questions. Her mother was too distracted, her father too tired, and her little brother too young and fretful.

“Moderately inadequately,” said Sarah.

The crisp extra syllables were a cruelty. Paul's eyes fogged over with shame. His throat turned red.

“Better than I'd have done. That was hard,” I said.

“Mason?”

“What?”

“Respect,” said Sarah.

“Sorry.”

“Paul, don't cry,” she said.

“I'm not,” he sniffled.

“You were about to cry. Mason?”

“Yes?” I said.

“Eat. You're not eating.”

“Because we're talking now.”

“And now we're finished talking. Eat,” she said.

After supper the parents released us for a stroll into the hills along a raw dirt logging road that was a favorite spot for couples like us, their affections stretched thin between memories of pleasure and forebodings of commitment. Whenever we passed them, we lowered our heads to show we weren't interested in their conversations, but faint vibrations passed between us anyway: of sympathy for one another's awkwardness and—between the future husbands, at least—of mutual condolence.

Sarah used our night walks to disclose to me her hopes and expectations for our life together. She planned to teach at the college once she graduated and put aside money for certain small luxuries that we might not be able to save for after she started having children. To me, the luxuries didn't sound small at all, though.

“I'd like a nice car. A Saab.”

I made her spell it. The word's outlandish foreignness annoyed me. Most AFA families owned two vehicles, the husband's pickup truck and the wife's sedan, both of them used and minimally equipped. The talk that a car such as Sarah described might cause would isolate us from our friends and neighbors.

“Maybe. If it's a few years old,” I said.

“I'd like a new one. The new ones are much cuter. I saw a nice red one in Missoula last August.”

Sarah's grand notions all came from the same place. Because of her trips to the trade fair with her mother, who crafted cedar spoons and cooking tongs, she'd spent too much time, I felt, comparing herself to the vain free-spenders with poisonous diets whom the All-in-One had set around us as a reminder of how not to live and, especially, how not to eat. As the Seeress had been telling us for years, the buildup of yeast in people from bleached white flour promotes a restless, selfish temperament that atrophies the pituitary glands and plays havoc with natural peristalsis. If such defectives were Sarah's models now, then she was sick, too, I feared, and might grow sicker. Once she'd secured her abominable Saab, she'd look around for something else—a second Saab, maybe, in another color.

“No Missoula this year. It's bad for you,” I said.

“You've hardly been there.”

“That's immaterial.”

“Clever long words don't suit men.”

“They suit me fine.”

“Where do you get them? I'm curious.”

“The library.”

“The library is for dandies,” Sarah said. “If you have to use it, be quick. Don't sit and read there. It gives the wrong impression.”

“So do Saabs.”

When I finally told Sarah plainly that our marriage might be an undertaking beyond my means, she yielded a bit in the area of chastity. One night when she'd been describing her future kitchen, and specifically the built-in ovens that would allow her to run a home-based business using the Kimmel women's beloved recipes for marionberry bran cakes and the like, I let go of her hand and walked three steps ahead of her, turned around in the middle of the logging road, and announced from a formal, manly distance that I would need an extra two years, at least, before I'd be in a position to set a wedding date. I led her through a cold, mathematical formula relating my projected weekly wages to the estimated costs of aping the Missoula way of life.

She opened her hands and held them out to me at the level of my hips. “I'm frustrated. We don't touch enough,” she whispered. The gap between our bodies became charged and my scalp prickled as before a lightning strike. The wish flared up. I gave in. I went to her. Her warm, grabby hands crawled into my back pockets and she lowered her face so her lashes tickled my neck. “You never push me to break the rules,” she said. “I wonder why not. Don't you love me? I love you.”

“I love you but not when you talk about the Saab.”

Sarah kissed me then. In the kiss I could feel the squirming energies of unborn children impatient to leave the spirit world. Sarah wanted three children, she'd told me—two girls, one boy—but it felt as though at least twice that many souls were swarming up at me through her throat and lips. She moved a hand to my right front pocket, dug deep, and held me through the cloth. Her fingertips moved along me like a flute player's, with meticulous sequential pressure.

“Fine, then. A three-year-old model. But red,” she said.

This was the night before the talk with Lauer that freed me to imagine no Saab at all.

         

The key was to make everything look like my fault. That was my mother's opinion. She'd thought things over. She'd even secretly contacted Sarah's mother, a second cousin, and discussed the matter. They agreed that although I was leaving Sarah to do the bidding of the Church, my departure might harm her social desirability unless it appeared that she'd rejected me first—and for some clear and fundamental reason that wouldn't scare off future suitors by confirming her growing reputation as a finicky, prickly, demanding shrew.

I had to be seen as a lost cause, irredeemably unmarriageable.

Rumors about the disqualifying trait that Lauer, the mothers, and I decided on were planted around town the following week. Within a few days they were rustling all about me whenever I stepped outside the house. When Sarah, as I knew she'd soon feel forced to, questioned me about the troubling stories, I planned to turn surly and evasive so as to head off any urge in her to empathize with me, accept my limitations, and love me despite them—or because of them.

While I waited for the breakup, I trained for my mission at Lauer's mansion. He taught me to indebt the people I met by sending them off with a trinket or a free book. He told me to think the words “I am now inside you” whenever I looked a prospect in the eye. He told me that an angled stance invites your listener to move in closer while a squared-off stance pushes him away. Then he showed me how to end a handshake. “Person One, who's you,” he said, “loosens his grip slightly, cuing Person Two to loosen his grip in response, at which same instant Person One—the power figure—lets go completely.” Another trick he showed me was to sit with my head a bit lower than Person Two's and then, very slowly, over several minutes, straighten back up until my head was the high head.

“Person Two feels like he shrunk,” I said.

“‘Remote Infantilization.' That's the term.”

“But how does it help me persuade him to join the Church?”

“In every interaction between two people, one plays the Parent, the other plays the Child. There's no third way,” Lauer said. “But there's an art to this. The Parent can't just dominate the Child or the Child will resist the Parent. To earn the Child's respect and love and trust, Person Two needs to share his power now and then.”

“Person One, you mean.”

Lauer smiled at me. He held the smile in the way a person does when he wants you to ask him why he's smiling so that he can reveal a thought he's having that you, if you were cleverer or sharper, would have already guessed or had yourself.

“Why are you smiling?” I knew what he'd say next and that my response would be “Tell me, I don't know,” and that his tone when he finally explained things would be the parental power-figure tone. I'd never felt so tired in all my life.

“Why do you
think
I'm smiling?” Lauer said.

His secret, when we got that far, was that he'd intentionally erred a moment ago by mixing up Person Two with Person One in order to give me, the Child, a chance to correct him, the Parent, and feel proud and “valued” as a result. Without asking me if I'd actually felt these feelings (which I hadn't, though I would have said I had just to end the session) Lauer declared the experiment a success.

It was a slip. The Child felt condescended to and erupted with his true thoughts. “If these tricks can really convert people,” I said, “then people aren't worth converting. They're machines. And AFAs are fools.”

I left the session, my seventh in two weeks, despairing about my mission and my life and unusually eager for Sarah's company. I assumed she'd heard the gossip by then and was weighing the risks of repeating it to me. Our walk the next night was uncomfortable and odd. A porcupine with reflective golden eyes waddled across the road and Sarah said, “Maybe people are nocturnal, too. Maybe we're happiest in the gloomy murk but somehow it's been bred out of us. You think? Maybe we lived in caves because we crave caves but maybe there weren't enough of them eventually so we moved into houses and tried to change.”

She seemed to be pushing at something, but timidly. There was only one thing to push at by that time.

“Who can say?” I told her. “I know I do get restless when the sun sets.”

“Or maybe it's just men,” she said. “You think?”

“A lot of our primitive hunting took place at night.”

“And in groups,” Sarah said. “Men hunted in groups back then. No women. Just men and the mammoths. In the night.”

But that was as far as Sarah was willing to go that evening.

I figured we had a week before our rupture. I passed it by getting to know Elias Stark, whom Lauer had chosen as my mission partner. His bristly stiff brown hair was more like beard hair than normal head hair and the chunks of gray in it didn't make him look mature, just troubled. His comma-shaped nostrils were the blackest I'd ever seen, as were the holes in his ears. His pupils, too. The impression was that the cavity of his skull was packed with some sort of infernal shadow matter—or maybe it held absolutely nothing and he operated on reflex, not higher thought. Still, Elder Elias Stark was local nobility: his mother was in line for Seeress someday and already endowed with Gifts and Powers. She resembled a female version of George Washington, already white-haired at fifty-two, with a broad unwrinkled polished forehead that looked like the perfect setting for a third eye.