The Book of Mormon Girl (5 page)

When Brother Christianson finished, we left the air-conditioned lecture halls and wandered out into the bright ninety-degree summer afternoons, changed from our Sunday dresses into modest one-piece swimsuits, and walked to the dormitory pools, or bought ice cream from the BYU agriculture department creamery. Grasshoppers gnashed their heads against the cinder-block walls and yellow grasses. Redheaded boys from nearby farm towns, wearing ropers and Wrangler jeans, waited around outside the lobby daring themselves to strike up a conversation with out-of-town girls. A few blocks away at the Missionary Training Center, a pageant of farm families and city families boiled over with tears as they, one after another, kissed their nineteen-year-old missionary sons good-bye for two years.

At night the nineteen-year-old missionaries in training memorized lessons in Spanish, Japanese, Portugese, and
Italian, preparing to fulfill the prophecy that in the last days the gospel would be taught in every nation, to every kindred, and in every tongue. Meanwhile, up in the high-rise Deseret Towers dormitories, Laura and Doreen, my new summer camp girlfriends from small Mormon towns in Wyoming and Nevada, and I lay down on our narrow dormitory beds in our cotton flannel pajamas. Outside the window, the golden spires of the Provo Temple shone brightly against the shale-covered Wasatch Foothills.

Gazing up at the acoustic tile ceilings, Laura, Doreen, and I talked about all that was afoot in these latter days:

How the inexplicable little Procter & Gamble insignia—a crescent man-in-the-moon face and stars—was in fact a Satanic emblem, with little “6 6 6”s curled up in his beard in the design.

How according to the journals of nineteenth-century Mormon missionaries, Bigfoot is Cain, marked by a suit of dark fur for his crime against his brother, and condemned to forever wander the foothills of the intermountain West.

How three faithful men from Book of Mormon times who were excused from death by Jesus himself are also, like Bigfoot-Cain, now wandering the backroads and byways of the intermountain West
in the guise of friendly hitchhikers who bail out Mormon cars broken down in the heat or snow.

Growing giddy as the night grew late, Laura broke out in Disney torch songs adapted for the end-times: “Someday, my prince will come . . . in the
millennium
!”

I lay on my back and felt the cotton flannel on my flat chest. Could it be that we would not attain our maturity before the second coming of Christ? Could it be that the end would come before our first kiss, our first boyfriend? Could it be that a rent in the fabric of time would circumvent our destined confrontation with the unspeakable mysteries of the marriage bed, the reality of the adult male member? Could the end-times save us from that end? Might we be transmuted into the eternities unchanged, as chaste as we were in our flannel pajamas in the single-sex BYU dormitories, as chaste as ministering angels?

We could only hope.

A few months after I got home from summer camp at Brigham Young University, my cousin, Danny, a Judas Priest fan, shot himself between the eyes with a Saturday night special. He survived, the entire left side of his body crumpled inward and palsied, a living, limping monument to all the warnings and forewhisperings of our teachers and parents in these latter days.

•   •   •

Saturday’s Warrior
was the name of a Mormon musical that made the rounds of church houses across the American West during those last years of the Cold War. The play opened in the gauzy realms of pre-earthly life, with a family promising to look after one another on earth and help each other return safely home to heaven. The urgency of their promises were, of course, heightened by the fact that it was the Saturday of time, and many apostasy-inducing dangers afoot on the earth threatened the security of the family. In ward-house cultural halls all across the Mormon West, we saw ourselves, our families, onstage, and we sang:

These are the few, the warriors

Saved for Saturday,

to come the last day of the world

These are they, on Saturday.

These are the strong, the warriors

Rising in their might

to win the battle raging in

the hearts of men, on Saturday.

I dreamed one night that my father and I were running down the empty freeways of Orange County, California, up and down the overpasses, as the hills turned red with fire and dissolved into great pools of oil. “Oh,” I turned and said to him in great relief, “isn’t it wonderful that what is going
on outside finally matches what is taking place inside the human heart?”

I was eleven. And what a gift it was, growing up in a world taut with conflict and luminous with meaning. Time was not empty; the days were not a sequence of identical rooms to be filled with whatever thin fantasies I myself might collect from television sitcoms and project upon the Sheetrock walls. No. Time was a vector of godly intention, the fractal plume of something expansive and infinite, and my purpose—and I knew it—to discern the patterns of its unfolding. We rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed the great stories of destruction, the fall of the ancient American civilizations of the Book of Mormon. In my illustrated edition the gray-haired prophet Mormon collapsed in exhaustion on a hill of slain Nephites, cradling the golden plates of the Book of Mormon in one arm, the other arm outstretched toward the red horizon, the wingspans of vultures arcing against the sky: “O, ye fair ones, how could ye have departed from the ways of the Lord?” We grew up always ready to abandon this world, to take our small backpacks of bottled water, freeze-dried food, first-aid kits, and candles, and simply walk away, walk as far as Missouri if we had to, if that was where the New Jerusalem would be built.

What comfort there was in going to sleep each night with a head full of first-aid tips, a three-day backpack in the bedroom closet, and down the hall a thousand pounds of wheat
sealed up against doom. What a gift it was to be a girl nestled high and tight in the dormitories at Brigham Young University, while the missionaries in training chanted their lessons just a few hundred yards away and the couples in church clothes with little suitcases came to and went from the Provo Temple at all hours, steadily doing proxy baptisms and eternal marriages for dead United States presidents and regular everyday people. Like bees in a hive, we were all about our business—workers, receivers, and foragers—held together by the frequencies of our dance. What a gift it was to be taught to think of myself as a soldier. A warrior.

I belonged. I belonged. And if I did not belong, what would become of me? What mockery would time make of my small, freckled life? What of the dark aimlessness ebbing at the edges of my life, where Mormonism stopped and the world began? What if, like Danny, I got pulled under?

And where else, as a middle-class girl in the suburban American West, would I find anyone who dared to map an unfolding universe on a chalkboard, or hint that time itself might be capable of dilation and compression, as what was experienced as one day in heaven constituted more than a thousand years on earth? Who else could confirm my not altogether incorrect perception that there were powerful forces at work that I myself had little hope of directing, and yet might somehow survive? Who else would teach me how to do the actual work of surviving?

It is September 1, 1983. I am almost twelve years old. We
are folding laundry in front of
Days of Our Lives
on the little television set in my mother’s bedroom. Suddenly a somber-faced Tom Brokaw appears onscreen, with an illustration of a plane hovering over his left shoulder. He announces that Korean Air Lines Flight 007 has just been shot down by Soviet jet fighters over the Sea of Japan.

“Oh!” my mother exclaims, bolting upright, her eyes fixed on Tom Brokaw.

My younger sister looks to me to explain.

“Mom?”

“Shhhhh! It’s the Soviets!” she hisses. Her voice is electric with thrill. “This could be it! This could be the end!”

marie osmond’s guide
to beauty, health & style

T
he year we all turned twelve, the boys in my Sunday School class received the priesthood: the spiritual authority to lead, bless, and baptize, passed from Mormon father to Mormon son by the laying on of hands.

That’s what Chuckie, Mike, and Brian got for their twelfth birthdays.

I got
Marie Osmond’s Guide to Beauty, Health & Style
.

Which is not to say I would have ever traded.

No, I needed Marie. I needed her sparkly clear television voice to guide me through the daunting mysteries of
Beauty, Health & Style
and initiate me into my young womanhood.

She was, after all, someone I could really trust. A Mormon girl, for starters—and better yet, a rare kind of Mormon girl, just like me, with dark hair and a twinkle of definite ambition in her eye. Marie’s head was full of pioneer histories,
end-times prophecies, and hymns, just like mine. Like me, she had probably already puzzled over the problem of polygamy: since you had to be married to get into the celestial kingdom, the highest level of our Mormon heaven, and it was obvious to all concerned that righteous women outnumbered righteous men, might God and our husbands ask us to accept a second wife for the eternities? And which would be worse, to share a husband, or keep another woman out of heaven? No doubt, Marie was still puzzling over that one, as I was. But unlike me, Marie had already mastered the intricacies of
Beauty, Health & Style
. Who else could give me up-to-date but faith-tested insider information on “turning 12 clothing separates into 3 dozen outfits,” “ten hair do’s and don’ts,” “complexion routines for four kinds of skin,” and my “three makeup personalities.” Marie was not only set on getting to the celestial kingdom, the highest level of our Mormon heaven, but on arriving there without split ends or blemishes, with just the right makeup personality, wearing a precisely placed beauty mark and an impeccable apricot-colored crepe de chine shirtwaist dress, or a cream cowl-neck sweater and forest-green corduroy skirt, or a yellow jacquard tunic.

I pored over the pictures in
Marie Osmond’s Guide to Beauty, Health & Style
, gorgeous publicity stills shot on location in and around
Provo, Utah!
home of Brigham Young University, and the city of my destiny. First, there was long-haired, chubby thirteen-year-old Marie in a white evening
dress with Donny in a matching white-quilted tuxedo vest, and both of them flashing their trademark smiles on the Osmond holiday television special. I flipped the pages forward. There I saw a transformed short-haired skinny seventeen-year-old Marie eating a takeout salad in her dressing room at Osmond Studios. And a few pages later, there was college-student Marie in a velour jogging suit, running, chin up, down a leafy lane in
Provo, Utah!
Marie, in full makeup, hair slicked back into a chic chignon, kneeling on the floor of her mother Olive’s sewing room, nibbling on a perfectly manicured index finger while puzzling over the instructions on a dress pattern. Marie strolling across the Brigham Young University campus with two friends, smiling, all wearing unconstructed blazers, bootleg jeans, and stacked heel boots, their arms full of notebooks. Marie and her same two friends in jeans and sweatshirts playing a flirty but chaste coed game of touch football on the dormitory lawn, then petite Marie getting “tackled” by three hunky guys (one shirtless, none of them Osmond brothers) in the same flirty but chaste coed game of touch football. Marie and BYU roommates piecing a quilt. Marie looking pensive on the stairs outside the BYU Wilkinson Center, wearing a button-down plaid shirt and a pair of home-sewn jeans with a custom
MARIE OSMOND
label on the back pocket.

All these Maries I studied carefully. Memorized their poses. Longed for a manicured nail to nibble on, or a velour jogging suit, or a pair of jeans with a custom
MARIE OSMOND
label on the back pocket, or best of all, a touch football game on the dormitory lawn at BYU.

And though I was only twelve and years away from
Provo, Utah!
I resolved that I was not too young to begin to make myself into the woman I hoped to be. And for this,
Marie Osmond’s Guide to Beauty, Health & Style
was my instruction manual.

•   •   •

The
Guide
contained a repertoire of routines essential to my personal transformation. First things first, I should scrutinize my skin in the bathroom mirror to determine whether it was
normal
,
dry
,
oily
, or
combination
. Each type had its own set of rules, its own morning and evening routines, even its own special homemade facial recipe, to apply once a week. For combination skin like mine, the key—Marie said—was to strive for “balance” between the dry spots around my cheek and eyes and the oiliness of my dreaded “T-Zone.” The dry spots I should lavish with gentle cleansers, splash lightly with warm water, and dab with moisturizing lotions,
using circular
,
upward motions only
to preserve skin tone and texture. The T-Zone, however, called for an alcohol-based astringent to bring my active oil glands into line. The weekly facial would help too, especially if I steamed my face over a basin of boiling water, applied Marie’s special mixture of oatmeal, honey, egg, and water to exfoliate, soothe, and tighten all at once, rinsing with cold water to close my pores.

Of course, having combination skin also required general lifestyle considerations to minimize break outs, such as drinking several large glasses of water every day to cleanse my system, eating fresh fruits and vegetables, and getting enough rest to combat stress and fatigue, which would only aggravate my worrisome oil glands. Exercise was important too. The
Guide
said that dance rehearsals at Osmond Studios every week kept Marie fit and slender, as did the occasional game of touch football with her eight Osmond brothers. Since I had neither a studio nor eight brothers, perhaps, I could make an especially enthusiastic effort during seventh-grade gym class, or ride my bike home from school. (As long as I had my inhaler with me.) If I did, within just a few weeks, Marie promised, I would look better and feel healthier. I resolved to take her at her word.