The Lonely Polygamist (34 page)

I
n this house there is chaos. Not your everyday sort of entropy, the kind that swells and intensifies before inevitably settling back into orderliness—the warehouse fire that rages and dies, the storm that blows itself out—but chaos of the endemic variety, the kind that expresses itself not only in the full-throated shouts and erratic movement of children who refuse to be counted, in the snarls of will and purpose of the husband and wives, but in the very walls of the house itself, dented and pocked as if someone had gone after a renegade mouse with a hammer, in the finger-and face-smudged windows, the knots of hair clogging every drain, the beds in disarray, the broken clocks and temperamental doors that only the initiated can open, in the poor, swaybacked piano with the half-eaten apple secretly rotting inside its case, in the burned-out lightbulbs and hidey-holes that offer protection to the scam artists and gossipmongers who ply the halls, and in all the broken spaces of the house, ragged and piebald and worn, littered with stacks of paper and battered toys and drifts of unidentifiable objects that speak of the vast and sometimes terrifying manyness of things.

The kind of chaos that begets itself, over and over again, until it becomes a kind of order, a way of life.

Today it is Sunday afternoon, the Summit of the Wives, and there is the Father, in the middle of it all. The wives have just gotten started arguing about something—powdered milk, by the sound of it—and at least half of the children are swooping around the racetrack like a tribe of Visigoths on the attack. Mother #2:
Oh, gag.

Mother #1:
We can at least give it a try.

Mother #2:
You ever tried it? Horrible. You never know when you’re going to get a lump, and when you do, you think you’ve swallowed a cockroach.

Mother #1 gives Mother #2 a cold stare, which Mother #2 returns, as she always does, with an aggressively cheerful smile. Mother #1:
It’s not that bad. You have to mix it well.

Mother #3, whispering into her lap:
It’s pretty bad.

Mother #1:
It is not that bad.

Mother #4:
And the kids won’t like it, there’ll be a revolt.

Mother #1:
The kids will do as we tell them.

The Father, in a stupor at the head of the table, has missed the last two summits and is paying dearly for it now. The wives are angry at him, which is evident in the way they have agreed, despite their innumerable differences, to ignore him. He sits forward in his chair, straining to arrange the muscles of his face into an expression that suggests attentiveness, wondering how he’ll make it through the next two hours. Nodding meaningfully at nothing in particular, he sneaks a glance at the Official Summit Agenda, which informs him there are sixteen items still up for discussion, and he can’t help it, he closes his eyes and whimpers a little in anticipation of the suffering ahead.

For weeks the wives have been telling him the family has reached a crisis point, and though he has been gone enough that he doesn’t know every detail, he knows things have gotten bad. In the past couple of months, especially, the houses have grown increasingly clannish, their grudges and rivalries dragged into the open for all to see. The ongoing feud between Mothers #1 and #2 has escalated into a series of almost daily skirmishes waged at meetings like this one, during Sunday dinners and Family Home Evenings, through the channels and byways of church gossip, along telephone lines. The children of the respective houses, never terribly fond of one another in the first place, have followed their mothers’ leads, needling and teasing each other, closing ranks and marking off territory, even the young ones taking sides in disputes beyond their understanding.

By increments they are approaching an agreement: to abandon the mass illusion of themselves as a happy, God-fearing family, bound together for all eternity by obligation and love.

Today, in protest against a series of slights and insults from some of the girls of Big House, Daughters #2 and #3 have refused to show up for Sunday dinner, which is precedent-setting, and made all the more remarkable by the fact that Mother #1 has allowed it. In response, Mother #2 has released a few of her oldest from Summit babysitting duty and allowed them to watch TV in the basement (an enormous no-no on the Sabbath) with the volume cranked high, mostly because she knows how much it will annoy Mother #1.

It will only get worse, the Father knows, this is only the beginning. At the moment the wives are bickering about carpooling and the cost-to-pleasure ratio of powdered milk, but another quick glance at the Summit agenda tells him that shortly they will be moving on to more serious matters, such as how to apportion the family’s dwindling finances or whether they should continue sharing weekly meals or celebrate birthdays and holidays together, which is simply another way of asking themselves if they want to go on pretending to be a single loving family or give up the charade and move on. Because the Father is in attendance (for once!) they’re planning to put it all on the table: the impossible scheduling conflicts, the out-of-control sibling rivalries, the lack of leadership and example, the separate laws of engagement, the spousal fatigue. They’re going to try to force him to make decisions, to take sides, which will only focus the spotlight on him more brightly, bringing them around, of course, to the same, irrefutable conclusion: that he is the one responsible for this mess they’re in.

The Father, knowing he is probably already a little pale, holds his stomach and assumes the posture and stricken countenance of a sick person, looking to his wives for pity, but they pay him no mind. Some of the older children continue watching TV in the basement, dinosaur screams and torture-chamber noises wafting up the stairs, and the younger ones, having already splintered into various bands, come whooping around the racetrack, slapping the walls and speaking in tongues. Mother #2 laughs too enthusiastically at one of her own jokes, Mother #4 presses her temples with her thumbs and Mother #1, coughing into her fist, looks around the table as if deciding who to kill first. And where is Mother #3? There she is, holding her blue earmuffs carefully in her lap, ready to clap them on at a moment’s notice.

And here, at the head of the table, impossible to miss, is the Father, catalyst to an explosion he can’t control.

For some time the Father has been trying to suggest to his wives that they have been exaggerating the family’s problems, that they are too close to the action and with the benefit of distance and perspective they would see, as he does, that their family is no different than any other. It has its struggles, sure, its ups and downs, a rough patch here and there, but if they keep persevering there will be better times ahead. He’s repeated these clichés so often he’s nearly convinced himself, but he knows the truth: the family is coming apart.

The proof of which he witnessed up close last Saturday afternoon. He had been upstairs, fiddling with the broken heat register in the Little Kids’ room, when he heard a shriek he mistook for the distressed cry of a bird, possibly a wounded chicken. He went down the hall to investigate, thinking one of the kids had brought their 4-H project into the house. He paused in the doorway of the Big Girls’ room, confused. What he saw, mostly, was hair. An overturned bureau, a torn lampshade, scattered notebooks, and a lot of hair. Under all the hair were two of his daughters, he wasn’t sure which ones, kneeling on the bed facing each other, grunting and clutching each other’s hair in great double-fistfuls. One of them—Daughter #2, it appeared—reared up, teeth flashing, and dragged the other, who appeared to be Daughter #5, backward with her off the bed. There was more breathy screeching and when they rolled toward him, limbs flying, he backed up to get out of their way. From the safety of the hall he called on them to cut it out.

Daughter #2 didn’t surprise him—she had always been a bit aggressive and unpredictable, ready to mix it up with the boys or any neighbor girl who dared look at her funny or say the wrong thing. But Daughter #5, Mother #2’s oldest girl, was pure sweetness, a girl who loved everyone openly, without shame, a paragon of generosity and Christ-like love, who was now attempting to ram her sister’s head into the bedpost.

By now Dog #1 and several of the younger kids had crowded in the doorway to spectate, and the Father was reminded of his fatherly obligations. He pushed past the kids, grabbed Daughter #2 under the armpits, and hoisted her, bucking and kicking, onto the bed.

Cow!
she screamed.
Ugly mudhole pig!

Daughter #5 made a sudden, catlike lunge at her sister, screeching,
WITCH!
with such ferocity that Daughters #11 and #14 began to cry and Dog #1 bolted for the bathroom. The Father cut her off, herded her toward the door while she tried clawing her way past him. There was a moment of silence, the girls glaring at each other with naked hate, their faces flushed and slick with tears, their hair wrenched into otherworldly shapes: snags and horns and gnarls.

For a moment the Father believed he had everything under control, but when he tried to speak the girls started screeching in unison as if he’d cued them. Now the little ones were really crying and Dog #1, down the hall, began to howl, which made it difficult for the Father to make out what the shouting was about, something having to do with Mother #1 withholding money, about Mothers #2 and #3 spreading lies about Mother #1, about Mother #1 trying to control the children of Big House in any way she could, and the Father understood then just how bad it had gotten, that his sweet daughters, on their mothers’ behalf, could be acting out the long-standing conflict between the houses in this way.

Gently, he tried to shush them. This has always been his role: peace-maker. Since the beginning he has displayed a singular talent for absorbing criticism and nagging, has even become, over the years, something of a punching bag for the wives and children alike, and now that he’d been away so much it looked as if they’d gotten used to taking out their aggression on each other. The girls kept at it, as if he were not in the room at all, and he clapped his huge hands in quick succession—the same thing he did when he caught Dog #1 in the act of urinating on a pile of clean laundry—but this only made them turn their attention his way, and they went from lobbing accusations and threats at each other to shouting rationalizations and explanations at him—who had said what to whom, who had been wronged and how badly—but he stopped them. He didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to be responsible for hearing any of it. It was one of the first pieces of advice the Leader offered after he’d married Wife #2 and officially entered the covenant of plural marriage: don’t get involved. Getting involved, the old man advised, means getting more involved, which inevitably leads to further involvement. Let them work out the little things, he said, your job is to keep your eye on the big picture.

At the time, the advice had meant very little to the Father, but now it makes perfect sense. Except, honestly, the part about the big picture. He has no idea what the big picture is. At the moment, the only picture that matters is the one in front of him: his children in riot, his wives preparing to roast him on a spit.

Here is the big picture:

• 1. The Father has feelings for his boss’s wife.
  
• 2. His own wives are giving up on him.
  
• 3. His family is falling apart.
  
• 4. His finances are drying up.
  
• 5. He has a condom in his wallet and large clump of gum in his pubic hair.
  
• 6. He has no idea what to do about any of it.
  

As the children flow past, he tries to name them as they go, a game that distracts him a little, calms his mind. In this house, naming has become something of an obsession; the naming disease, as Mother #4 calls it, this is where it began. First, there had to be a way to differentiate it from the original house, so it became Big House, which immediately created the need to designate the original; this sort of naming and setting apart, this is how languages begin. As the family grew, they required a new language to distinguish groups and territories: the First and Second Twins, the Three Stooges, the Pink Bathroom and The Black Hole of Calcutta, the Big Kitchen and the Small, the trio of Big House washing machines which, for some reason, work under the aliases of Winken, Blinken and Nod.

In a life so vast, in a family so forbidding, there must be ways to cut things down to their proper size. Such a life cannot abide individuals, only groups, and if you are not a member of a group, if you are on your own, well then, God help you.

Mother #2 gives the Father a smart slap on the shoulder, which startles him out of his trance. The wives are all looking at him, wanting his input. He lets his attention wander for a few seconds and suddenly they are terribly interested in him, in what he has to say. He rubs his eyes and asks them to repeat the question, he didn’t hear it clearly as he would have liked. Mother #4 gives him a look and Mother #2 puts her two index fingers behind her head like donkey ears, a secret sign the Mothers have been using for years to indicate when the Father is being a Jackass.

Mother #1 asks the Father what’s wrong and he shrugs, and when Mother #2 asks him why he is moping he says he is not moping, which is what people who are moping tend to say. He glances down at the agenda, hoping to come up with a pertinent comment, when, in answer to a prayer he had not yet found the courage to offer, the phone rings. It is Sister Barbara, bless her soul, informing him there is a problem with one of his rental houses, a real emergency.

An emergency? the Father prompts, loud enough that the wives can hear.