The Book of Mormon Girl (9 page)

And it was their job to take us, a dozen fifteen-year-old Mormon girls, up into the High Sierras, to teach us the basics of wilderness survival through the Mormon Campcrafter program. For months we had met down at the church on Tuesday afternoons, mastering each of the Campcrafter
skills, learning to tie boat-line knots, build fires, lash tables, and administer first aid. We had selected our external frame backpacks and backpacker tents from the congregation’s vast inventory, stored in Sister Tucker’s garage. Only thirty pounds, Sister Williams had instructed. We’d be hiking a talus-littered trail up to ten thousand feet, after all, and then spend three days creekside among the lodgepole pines. This was not the time to pack a mini Pac-Man game (Natasha!) or cans of SpaghettiOs (Shirley!).

The first morning of Girls Camp, we loaded into Sister Williams’s blue Econoline family van. It seems like every other family in the ward had a blue Econoline family van, with bench seats—not captain’s chairs—and hose-down floor mats. It was the perfect vehicle in which to haul about one’s natural-born nine children, as Sister Williams did, or a pack of fifteen-year-old girls to camp in the High Sierras. The van left our orange grove suburb, wound through the Los Angeles freeway system, and started the long ride up California Highway 395. In the Owens Valley, we passed old mining towns, crystalline lake beds, and prison camps. A left turn took us away from the arid valley floor and into the glacier-carved Eastern Sierras.

The van doors popped open. Out we stepped—Sister Williams, Sister Larsen, Natasha, Shayne, Charlotte, Shirley, Kristi, and me from the one van; Sister Tucker, Sister Barnes, Jennifer, Jennifer, Juli, Missy, Tammi, and Joy from the other. We hoisted our packs onto our backs, cinching the
belts until the edges lodged on the tops of our fifteen-year-old hip bones, and set out on the four-mile trail to Tom’s Place. The air was already thin at seven thousand feet, the trail steep and rocky. Within minutes of leaving the parking lot, I was sucking air between my teeth, trying to will away an attack of my childhood asthma:
gasp, caw, gasp, caw
. Natasha’s shoes came untied, and she dragged the laces along through the rocks. At a switchback water break, Shirley wobbled over, her ankles unsteady, and leaned down to help. A can of SpaghettiOs rolled out of her pack and off the side of the trail into the manzanita.

Sister Williams and Sister Barnes brought up the rear of the group; Sister Larsen and Sister Tucker led. “One foot in front of the other,” she called back to us stragglers. One foot in front of the other was what I did.

Maybe it was just my oxygen-deprived brain—
gasp, caw, gasp, caw
—but it struck me that Sister Tucker’s words held the key to, well,
everything
. Yes, with every foot Natasha, Shirley, and I ascended, the world around us assumed a kind of luminescent meaningfulness. Everything was haloed with spiritual significance—from the jagged granite peaks ahead of us, to the glacier-carved valleys, to the yarrow and mule ears at the creeksides.
Gasp, caw, gasp, caw
. I fixed my eyes at the head of the line of backpackers, on the back of Sister Tucker’s head, her brilliant white hair. One foot in front of the other. It was difficult, sometimes, being a fifteen-year-old Mormon girl, with scrawny lungs, a bad perm, and
wobbly ankles. But this was the very point of it, the very point of
everything
: our spirits had been sent to earth to persist against the weak and messy medium of our bodies, one foot in front of the other, until we reached higher places. That was the lesson we came to Girls Camp to learn.

A white tennis shoe dropped from Shirley’s backpack. I stopped and gulped down air. Sister Williams placed her feet in a wide stance, eased down to reach the shoe, while balancing her pack on her capable hips, and tied the shoe to the back of Shirley’s external frame pack.

Gasp, caw, gasp, caw
—we resumed our trudge up the mountain.

•   •   •

When night fell in the Eastern Sierras, we had reached our camp, set up our backpacker tents, unrolled our sleeping bags, gathered up wood, and set foil dinners to cook on campfire coals.

We gathered around the fire and lodged our backs against fallen pines. Sister Tucker, Sister Williams, Sister Larsen, and Sister Barnes took their place among us. We ate warmed peas and carrots and potatoes from our foil packets, and washed them down with canteens of water pumped from the glacier-fed creek.

So many questions we had about the mysteries of our impending Mormon womanhood. So many things we could
not ask on a regular Sunday at home, locked inside the cold cinder-block-walled church, tied up in Sunday dresses. Where better to talk about these matters than up here at eleven thousand feet, under the guidance of four unflinching Mormon women?

The fire crackled. Natasha shifted against the log. I swallowed hard and looked at Sister Tucker.

“Will there be polygamy in heaven?” I asked.

Everyone knew that the Church had officially stopped polygamy in 1890. But Mormon doctrine still taught that one had to be married to enter the highest realms of heaven. And polygamy was still in our scriptures. And sometimes, even in these latter days, men who had lost a first wife were sealed for time and all eternity to a second wife as well. There was plenty of reason to believe there would be polygamy in heaven, and the topic always hovered at the back of female conversation.

“Your father and I have discussed it,” my mother would tell me from time to time, a white-hot metal edge to her voice, her words terse and final. “He will not do that to me.”

Sometimes, at church parties, with all the women in the kitchen heating so many spiral-sliced hams and trays of homemade wheat rolls, an older woman would joke, “Now, girls, can’t you see the sense in polygamy?” which would make the younger women laugh, or lower their heads, or grumble wearily.

How did Sister Larsen, Sister Williams, Sister Tucker, and Sister Barnes reckon it?

There was a pause. Sister Tucker looked at Sister Barnes, the firelight reflecting in her thick glasses.

“You know,” Sister Barnes offered, “some difficult things, we just put them on a shelf until we can take them up with God directly.” In her face I could see a wisdom without edge, a patient deferral of certainty, the very crux of faith:
one foot in front of the other
.

If God was indeed merciful, I thought, I would not spend the eternities living in second-fiddle misery. But if it were indeed the rule that you had to be married to go to heaven, and if there were (as all appearances suggested) so many more righteous women than men in the world, would I refuse to share my husband, even if it meant keeping a sister out of heaven?

The stars turned like screws in the black skies.

No, I decided, I was not so enthralled by the earthly ideal of single marriage that I would lock another woman out of the eternities.

And maybe it was not as we imagined, this polygamy. Perhaps it was a gesture toward a vaster spiritual truth, the outlines of which my oxygen-deprived brain could begin to perceive as I stared into the fire. Perhaps none of us entered the eternities alone, but with our souls all hooked together, multiply, through and across the generations, a kind of eternal belonging the grammar of companionate marriage could
never capture. Up in the Sierras, my mind could begin to encompass such an idea.

My thinking was interrupted when Natasha blurted out question number two.

“Do you have to wear your garments on your wedding night?” she asked.

Shirley, Joy, and Shayne coughed and giggled. But we had a right to know. Did we really have to wear the knee-length, shoulder-capping Mormon undergarments our parents and grandparents wore, embroidered with simple markings to remind us of our promises to live faithful Mormon lives? These and not the curious red-and-black satin contraptions we saw in shop windows at the mall, the sex costumes the world prescribed?

Sister Tucker looked at Sister Williams. Sister Williams looked at Sister Larsen and smiled. Sister Larsen leaned over to Sister Tucker and whispered something behind cupped hands. Sister Tucker laughed and nodded.

“Yes, of course,” Sister Larsen said. “You’ll wear your garments on your wedding night so that you can have the fun of your husband taking them off!”

•   •   •

These questions of sex were not just curiosity seeking. Our whole Mormon world was organized into domains of the male and female.

We saw that women did not:

hold the priesthood

prepare, bless, or pass the bread and water sacrament

preside in meetings where men were present

receive tithing

make or keep records of tithing or other monetary offerings

make or keep membership records

give the closing prayer in church meetings

wear pants at church

perform baptisms, confirmations, ordinations, and marriages

conduct funerals

hear confessions

anoint or heal the sick

provide spiritual counsel to men

receive revelations for anyone besides themselves and their children

Conversely, we saw that men did not:

supervise the nursery for children under the age of three

teach the young women

preside over the women’s Relief Society

A few of us remembered or had read in slim volumes of Mormon women’s history that women had once:

healed the sick by the laying on of hands

blessed and anointed one another’s bodies for childbirth

prophesied

spoken in tongues

But these powers had generally fallen out of practice in the early twentieth century.

The actual work of being in charge, receiving revelations, and presiding over home and church belonged exclusively to men. We had motherhood; men had priesthood. Their priesthood authority, we were taught, made up for their inability to bear children. For if God did not give them a big priesthood consolation prize, the story went, what other purpose would they serve in this life? What powers to compare to the lauded marvels of motherhood?

But those marvels seemed light years away to me. I had gotten my first period only a few months before Girls Camp, and no special ceremony marked the onset of my procreative powers. Numb to the silent inner workings of my own pelvis, I had discovered alone the black stain in my underpants in the stall of the yellow-tiled school bathroom. I told no one until I got home from school. Standing in the driveway, my mother and grandmother turned their faces away from me and to each other and laughed. “It’s the curse, the curse,
the curse of the world
—that’s what my mother always said,”
explained my Utah-born grandmother, her voice for once strangely devoid of tenderness.

Alone into the bathroom I went with a box of tampons; my fingers trembling and slippery, I swallowed hard and put the tampon inside myself.

That Sunday I sat in our regular pew, silent and bleeding, my breasts and belly a riot of puffiness and pain, while the boys my age stood before the congregation in clean white shirts to prepare and pass the white bread and tap water that was our sacrament.

•   •   •

On Sundays no one really talked about actual feats of women’s power, the physical heroics of making and losing and bearing and nursing the many Mormon babies who filled our pews and punctuated our meetings with their cries. Nowhere in the scriptures was there any special mapping of the spiritual domain of women. But around the fire at Girls Camp, we could prod Sister Larsen, Sister Williams, Sister Barnes, and Sister Tucker into recounting, as if from a secret canon, brave epics of women’s labors and deliveries.

“Tell it again,” we begged Sister Barnes. “Tell us the one about Mexico.”

Sister Barnes was the mother of nine children. She belonged to a vast sixth-generation Mormon family, with its roots among the earliest followers of Joseph Smith, and branches that extended out into the Mormon colonies of
northern Mexico, where many of the most faithful had fled after the Mormon Church’s official abolition of polygamy, to continue the practice beyond the reach of United States law.

Her eldest daughter Laurie married at nineteen and with her Idaho farm-boy husband settled into a little basement apartment south of the Brigham Young University campus. They were poor as church mice, and very soon they were pregnant.

Sister Barnes lived in the nearby town of Orem. One day she was standing in the kitchen ironing her way through a giant pile of men’s white Sunday shirts when Laurie called to say she was in labor. “Let me finish this basket of shirts,” Sister Barnes told her daughter, “and then I’ll be right over.”

Sister Barnes finished the shirts, turned on the slow-cooker to start dinner, wrote her husband a little note, grabbed her purse, and hopped into her blue Econoline family van. There was no money to have the baby in the hospital. “Let’s go see Uncle Vern,” she told Laurie. “He can deliver it for you.”

Sister Barnes helped Laurie up the steps of the basement apartment and into the back of the van, and the two set out down Highway 89 to see Uncle Vern, who had in fact delivered many, many babies during his decades in the little Mormon settlement of Colonia Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico.

It was early afternoon. If they made good time, they could get to Mexico in about fifteen hours. Plenty of time for
a first labor, Sister Barnes knew, having had nine children of her own.

Down Highway 89 through the little Mormon towns of Richfield, Panguitch, and Kanab flew the blue Econoline van. Laurie started to wince. “You’ll be fine,” Sister Barnes hollered back over her shoulder, elbows wide across the steering wheel as she piloted the red rock canyons of southern Utah and northern Arizona.

Winces became grimaces. At a gas station in Cameron, on the Navajo reservation, Sister Barnes hustled in to pick up a six-pack of Sprite. Laurie was now lying on the floor, twisting and turning, gamely trying to find a comfortable place between the bench seats. Sister Barnes opened the van doors, handed Laurie a Sprite, said, “Drink this,” then shut the van doors and got back in the driver’s seat.