The Book of Mormon Girl (10 page)

As darkness fell, the van bumped on down through the Sonoran Desert, down through the White Mountains, down into and through small Mormon mining towns of southern Arizona. Sister Barnes could hear Laurie’s pains steadying, cries sharper, intervals shorter. Her foot pressed against the gas.

“Laurie, you’ve got to sit up and be quiet now,” Sister Barnes commanded when they pulled up to the border crossing at Agua Prieta, a single spot of light on the vast desert frontier. Sister Barnes smiled brightly, using the Spanish she remembered from her summer visits to cousins in the
colonies. The border guards shined their flashlights into the windows of the van. Somehow Laurie, deep into her transition phase, pants wet with amniotic fluid, managed to hoist herself upright, clutch her empty Sprite, and grit her teeth in the shape of a smile. The guards waved and the blue Econoline lurched on, kicking up dust in the darkness.

When they pulled into Colonia Juárez, it was early morning. Uncle Vern was out hunting turkeys, and a cousin was dispatched to find him. The last thing Laurie remembered was being led into the clinic, then seeing a white-masked nurse douse a tray of medical instruments in rubbing alcohol and toss a match on top of them. Flames leaped three feet into the air. Next thing she knew, Laurie came to with a black-haired baby girl at her side, and Uncle Vern smiling down at her.

•   •   •

After three days and two nights at eleven thousand feet, we packed our tents, hoisted our packs back onto our hips, and descended the High Sierras, picking our way back across the talus slopes and down through the Jeffrey pines. Natasha, Shayne, Shirley, Joy, Charlotte, and our ensemble of Girls Camp leaders—we were all as dirty as Boy Scouts, our noses filled with campfire soot, our legs insect bitten and unshaven.

Back into the Econoline van we packed, and with Sister Williams at the wheel, returned to Highway 395, passing
Bishop, Lone Pine, Independence, the small towns and dry lake beds of the Owens Valley.

It was dark and late by the time we reached California City, the one-stop-sign town that marked the edge of the high desert. All the other girls had conked out in the first three rows of the van, their scraggly heads pushed up against the windows, their mouths wide open. But on the back bench seat my friend Natasha and I were wide awake, giddy, and filthy. Holding warm cups of root beer between our knees, we rummaged around the cargo-strewn floor of the van for something to entertain us.

Then we found it: a small blue Coleman cooler, the name
WILLIAMS
written in magic marker across the lid, and inside a cache of
the largest tampons we had ever seen
. Fatter than fingers! Fatter than shotgun shells! As we beheld their size and sheer number, Natasha and I dissolved in the backseat, our mouths frozen round.

I looked up in horror and awe at Sister Williams, the mother of nine blond Williams children, her face periodically illuminated by passing headlights in the rearview mirror. There she was, chatting happily with redheaded Sister Larsen in the passenger seat beside her, her elbows wide across the steering wheel, hips spilling over the driver’s seat edge.

I tried not to derive from the size and number of these tampons information about the condition of Sister Williams’s insides. I tried not to think about nine big-boned Williams
children making their way down into the world. But there it was, in our laps, the evidence.
Giant tampons.
They looked nothing like the slender pink pearlescent tube I had learned to hold with slippery fingers just a few months before.

Did she get these on special order?

Natasha pulled a tampon from the cooler, stripped away its paper wrapper, pushed the cardboard plunger, and launched the jumbo wad of cotton into the warm cup of root beer between her knees. Silent laughter seized us as the cotton absorbed and expanded, filling the cup to its edges.

My mind rushed through the roof of the van out into the stars, and I saw the roles of men and women telescope outward to infinity: in the world of Mormonism, priesthood belonged to men, and motherhood to women, and these were not just temporary roles for this lifetime, but a pattern of what would be in the eternities. And we had been taught that only married couples could enter the highest realms of heaven, where they themselves attained the godly powers to frame worlds and populate them with spirit children. And we knew that our God, the Mormon God, was a set of Heavenly Parents—a Father, and a Mother, if not Mothers. Did this then suggest, by simple reasoning, that it would take a lot of spiritual procreating to generate the billions of souls who came to earth? And was I then to understand that if I worked hard enough to get to heaven, eternal pregnancy in the company of plural pregnant wives might very well be my reward?
Surely I had heard as much implied, in the murmuring tones of kitchen chatter at the ward dinner, in the panicked edge to my mother’s voice.

My mind rushed back into my body in the backseat of the van, where Natasha and I were still peering, transfixed, into the cup, at Sister Williams’s giant tampon and all that it inferred. Nine pregnancies. Nine children. Eternal pregnancy. Millions of spirit children. Children numbered like the grains of sand in the California desert, or like the stars in the desert skies.

I tried to put the whole matter on the shelf like Sister Barnes suggested; I tried to follow Sister Tucker’s advice and put one foot in front of the other.

But I could not.

Instead, frozen with horror, I leaned into my best friend Natasha. The van bumped and jostled through the desert dark, kicking up dust and scattering jackrabbits into the brush. Who knows what Natasha was thinking, but I took comfort in the sound of her laughter as I tried to get used to the feeling of being in the backseat, never driving, always driven, headed for destinations not of my choosing and vast beyond my control.

object lessons

W
hen I was sixteen years old, LeVar Royal, the fifty-five-year-old “godfather of pool plastering,” asked me to visit his office at the church.

LeVar (a Mormon name, to be sure) had salt-and-pepper hair and a beaklike nose. He spoke with a southern Idaho farm-boy accent, vast and flat as the plains he came from. Sometime in the 1950s, LeVar escaped that endless dirt horizon, married a pretty redhead, and came down the I-15 to California, where he won himself the title “godfather of pool plastering” by revolutionizing the industry with his trademark plastic trowel and cleats.

They say he plastered more than a quarter of a million pools in our orange grove suburbs. Trackless, like a spider, he glided all day across the bottom of empty swimming pools, trowel in hand, skin bronzing in the California sun.

At church, LeVar Royal held the office of stake president, which meant he oversaw the spiritual lives of two or three thousand Mormons, including me. He’d sidle up to you, slide an arm around your waist, give you a little wink and squeeze. He was Idaho smooth, smooth like volcanic loam running through the fingers.

His was no easy job, for sure, making sure that all the Mormons in our town were getting along, keeping the commandments, loving one another, and fulfilling the hundreds of volunteer offices it took to keep our clergy-free congregations running. His office was the place the most serious matters got ironed out—including the matter of our teenage virtue. All of the girls in the Stake were expected to see President Royal once, in their sixteenth year. When my turn came, I found myself not at all soothed by a friendly wink and a quick squeeze, but rather cringing in my own skin.

President Royal wore a dark business suit and sat in a high-back swivel chair behind the grand Formica-top desk ordered straight from Salt Lake City. I sat stiffly in my Sunday dress.

“Well,” he began, leaning back to get a better look at me. The words burbled out, rising and falling, in that singsong Idaho way.

“You’ve come to that special time in your life when you are becoming a young lady.”

My mind zoomed around the room, looking for a high window, a way out.

“And I know of the challenges you will face, and of the
tremendous blessings that lie in store. I have daughters, and I know the pains they bear. I have held their heads at those difficult times of the month.”

I cringed. I imagined his daughters, basketball players, passed out on the sidelines, in the wooden bleachers, their sweaty heads in their father’s hands.

“But as you come into your maturity, you should know most of all that your Heavenly Father expects that you will keep your purity and virtue about you. And
I
expect you to keep your virtue about you, until the day you are married in a temple of the Lord.”

It was clear LeVar Royal had done this dozens of times, with dozens of other sixteen-year-old girls, each of whom had sat alone in this standard-issue Salt Lake City chair.

“Now, I want you to remember this talk we have had.”

Smooth in his routine, President Royal opened the right-hand desk drawer. He withdrew a sky-blue velveteen jewelry box and slid it across the desktop to me.

“Go ahead and open it,” he said.

The tight gold hinges on the box squeaked, then popped open. Inside, a faux-gold chain strung with a single pearl rested on a paper card.

I could feel the godfather of pool plastering search my face for a reaction. I kept my head down and pretended to admire the soft yellow chain.

“Now, if you are to lose your virtue before you marry, I want you to remember, you owe me a pearl necklace.”

Perfectly composed, I shook LeVar Royal’s hand and left his office. I have no idea what happened to the necklace—did I shove it in the back of a dresser drawer? did I throw it in the bushes?—other than to say that I know I never wore it.

•   •   •

So important it was to keep our virtue about us that our church leaders reserved entire weeknight meetings to offer us strict how-to instructions. On those Standards Nights, we all wore our Sunday dresses, and our Young Women’s leaders draped the little tables in the church classrooms with lace tablecloths, dimmed the lights, and placed vases of white long-stemmed roses before us.

I would rather have been out in the church gym, dangling my legs and crossed ankles over the edge of the stage, gossiping and watching the sweaty boys run around bouncing basketballs.

I bet my teacher Sister Duncan would rather have been somewhere else too, maybe home baking bread for her husband, Boyd, a soft-spoken man who had lost one of his fingers in the war. But just as my father and mother did, so too Sister Duncan felt keenly the currents of worldly peril rushing around us on all sides. We were
her
girls. It was her job to keep us safe from the disastrous mess the MTV world made of men and women, safe until we could find someone like Brother Duncan to take us to the temple and promise
to work hard and love us forever and ever. No, it was not an easy job talking to a room of sixteen-year-old girls about so sensitive a subject, but Sister Duncan set herself to it, a bird-voiced soldier.

So there I sat, along with Shayne, Juli, Jennifer, and Natasha, all of us in our Sunday dresses on a Wednesday evening, shifting on our metal folding chairs, the hollow sound of bouncing basketballs echoing in the halls.

Sister Duncan took one white rose from the vase and handed it to Shayne.

“I want each of you to take a turn with this rose,” Sister Duncan told us. “Go ahead, smell its fragrance, feel the soft petals. Each of you, have a turn.”

We did as we were told, one after another, pressing our noses into the velvety lobes and fingering the outer petals.

By the time the rose made it back to Sister Duncan, it was a different creature: its tight inner bud pried open, petals missing, others crimped and browning.

“Now, girls, who would want to take this rose home,” she said, holding up the damaged flower, then drawing an untouched rose from the vase, “when they could have one as pure and delicate as this?”

Standards Nights were all about object lessons.

Some years, it was not roses but cupcakes, or doughnuts, passed from girl to girl around the semicircle of folding chairs, losing glaze or frosting, fingers getting sticky, and
the inevitable question: “Who would like to eat this damaged doughnut? And who would rather have one of these untouched doughnuts here in this pink box?”

Natasha told me that once, in her old ward, the bishop stood before the girls pounding a series of nails into a board, then removing them one by one with the back end of his hammer.

“You see,” he would say, holding the board up before them, “even when the nail is removed, the hole is still there, and there’s nothing we can do to make it right again.”

•   •   •

At Standards Night, they always taught the rules about things that are done with the body that must be confessed.

Kissing: okay.

French kissing: maybe okay, maybe not—be careful.

Light petting (breasts involved): must confess to bishop.

Heavy petting (below the waist involved): must confess to bishop.

Oral sex (unthinkable): must confess to bishop, possibly serious.

Fornication: must confess to bishop, definitely serious, may be required to confess before a court of church leaders, may be disfellowshipped.

I never had anything to confess until the summer after my freshman year in college. I had just promised myself to a blond boy from Orem, Utah. His name was John Swenson.
All spring, while the cherry trees blossomed on the hills, John Swenson stood under my second-floor dorm-room window making plaintive noises. One Sunday after dinner at his family home in Orem, I saw for the first time the miracle of the Utah irrigation canals, how a crank turned up the block sent a flood of cold mountain water through the carefully dug canals to water the neighborhood orchards. There were no irrigation canals in my arid orange-grove suburb.

In June, John Swenson was to leave for a two-year mission to Portugal, and he was terrified. His hands were stiff and cold. His tongue made dry, urgent forays into my mouth. Of course, I loved him, compulsively, the way one cannot help but love a drowning person.