The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir (23 page)

You Will Meet a Beautiful Woman Tonight

Everything I needed to know about sex, I learned in church. Only the lessons were never direct. Mormons love object lessons—I mean it, I grew up on them, the more obscure the better. Instead of just telling it like it is, the teacher will explain a basic concept like “forgiveness” with windshield wipers, wet naps, and an Etch A Sketch pad.

The lesson on chastity involved food. Our young women’s teacher, Sister Nelson, walked into the classroom holding a tray of cookies that she proceeded to slam onto the table with a loud metal
clank
.

“Does anyone want a cookie?” she asked in an aggressive tone. We perked up in our seats; young women’s was easier to endure when they brought food, but something was amiss. Upon further inspection I realized what it was: The cookies were half-eaten, broken, and sprinkled with dirt.

“Anyone?”
she repeated, her eyes panning across a room. When no one answered, she nodded her head emphatically. “That’s right,” she said, as though we’d just proven her point for her. “
No one
wants a dirty half-eaten cookie.”

And that, my friends, was how I learned not to have sex.

I was taught a similar lesson in regards to dating and “nonmembers.” When I was twelve I attended a church youth conference called “The Dangers of Dating Outside of Our Faith.” We learned about Esau who sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, and Sampson who lost it all for the whore Delilah. But the most valuable lesson was saved for the closing remarks when the speaker, a middle-aged football coach, stood in front of a hall of Mormon youth and held up a small branch.

“Does anyone think that they can break this twig?” he asked.

A kid in the front row raised his hand.

“Well, let’s see you do it.”

The kid walked up to the podium and took the twig in his hands,
snap.

“Good work.” The speaker smiled. The boy was about to head back to his seat, when the speaker stopped him. “Wait . . . ,” he said. From behind the podium he pulled out a pile of twigs tied tightly with twine. “Do you think you can break this bundle of twigs?”

The boy flashed the audience a cocky smile. Taking the bundle with both hands, he began to twist and pull. Nothing happened. He shifted his arms for leverage, his face flushing red with frustration—and still nothing happened.

“That’ll do.” The speaker took the bundle out of the boy’s shaking hands and held it up triumphantly. Not a single twig was broken.

“So it is with us,” he concluded. “If we stick together, all the forces of the adversary combined will not be able to break us.”

Sitting there, in white tights and Sunday shoes, I thought about everything I’d learned about love. From
Pocahontas
to
Cinderella
, to the copy of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
that I was trying to decipher.
What does this have to do with love?
I wondered.
Because I am not a twig. I’m a human being with complex emotions and when I fall in love I fall in love.

It was with this attitude that I left home, moved to New York City, and tried dating everyone from Jeff to Christian to Matt. It was a noble cause, the pursuit of love, but it got me into a lot of trouble. And more than that, it made me feel torn. Like every date I went on that wasn’t with a Mormon was an act of defiance against God.

And so, after Matt and I broke up I decided to just give in.
Okay, fine, God
, I said, in a state of post-breakup despair,
I will do what you want me to do. I will date only Mormons. But you need to bring in a Mormon man of my dreams and you need to do it right now.

Never make a deal with God where you set the terms. Trust me, it’s a bad idea.

On my way out of church the following Sunday someone handed me a flyer.
The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance
.

I couldn’t stop what happened next:
Hope.
I started making connections no one had asked me to make . . .
You don’t receive a witness until after the trial of your faith
, I paraphrased a scripture.

I flipped the flyer around to look at the back. “Join Us for Jolly Jack-O’-Lanterns This Spooky Saturday, October Twenty-ninth.”
This can’t just be a coincidence? I’ve ended up at the dance every year for a reason. It’s all been leading up to this year: the year I meet the Mormon man of my dreams. God, you owe me at least that.

If only I’d stopped there. But, no, my inner overachiever kicked in.
I’m going to go to that dance,
I decided,
and I’m going to meet the one . . . but in order to do that I have to have the best costume ever.

I started to brainstorm:
a Barbie doll
, no, too cliché;
a bearded woman
, yeah, right.
Marie Osmond . . .
only the gay Mormon men would appreciate this. Just then it hit me, in a flash of light
. I’ll be a fortune cookie, and when guys pull out the fortune it’ll say, “You will meet a beautiful woman tonight,”
at which point I can wink and say, “Look no further.” Brilliant.

I spent all week building my fortune cookie costume. I bought a beige mattress pad, wire, and a whole bag of cotton stuffing. Once I had all the ingredients, I drew a giant circle in the center of the mattress pad and cut it out. I used the wire to shape the fabric, and I pulled the ends of the folded cookie together just above my head, making a crease that spanned from my stomach to my chin. Finally, I added the cotton to give it a nice fortune cookie puff. But by far the most complicated part of the costume was the fortune. I decided to make it retractable, that way every guy could have his own experience with it. In order to do this I took apart one of the stanchions from my job at Letterman and I “borrowed” the mechanical part at the top. It was ingenious. I detached the red rope and replaced it with a roll of thick receipt paper. On this paper I wrote “You will meet a beautiful woman tonight” in black Sharpie. I must’ve written it at least fifty times. That way a guy could pull the fortune out, let it go, and it’d retract. Or if he wanted to, he could rip the fortune off and keep it, and I’d still have forty-nine more chances.

The night of the dance arrived. I put on beige leggings, a nude tank top, and a pair of white flats. Then I slid the finished cookie over my head. I looked in the mirror and marveled at my own creative talents. YOU WILL MEET A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN TONIGHT. I pulled the fortune out and let it roll back inside.
This is the best costume ever.

I walked from my apartment to the subway wearing the fortune cookie. On the way there, I noticed people staring. A lot of people thought it was really funny, which made me smile. And so, with a spring in my step, I got on the N/R train, took it to Forty-second Street, and then switched to the 1 train heading uptown. That’s when things got weird.

The minute I entered the car I heard a shrill voice. “
Oh,
noooooooo!” it said.

My costume wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to maneuver in, but I managed to crane my neck and find the source of the noise (like everyone else on the semicrowded train). A black woman was sitting with two small boys, looking furious.

“
Oh,
noooooooo! No, no, no, no, nooooooooooooo!”

I was trying to figure out what was wrong, when the woman looked directly at me. “I got my children with me,” she screamed.
“I got my children with me!”

Is she talking to me?
My peripheral vision was limited so I turned to my right and left. No one else was there. The woman moved on to making eye contact with the other passengers, trying to get their affirmation. “Can you believe—?” She pointed at me. Now there was no mistaking it, all of her aggression was directed at me.

“You should be ashamed.” She shook her head slowly. “I got my children with me!”

Just then, the subway doors sprang open, Sixty-sixth Street, Lin coln Center. I ran out of the car, still totally confused. Walking up the steps, I tried to get back into my previous groove, but her anger was disconcerting.
I guess she had a bad experience with Chinese food,
I decided.

I crossed the street and walked through the front door of the Mormon temple. DANCE-GYM, THIRD FLOOR, a sign read. I walked over to the elevators and pushed the UP button.
Bing,
the doors opened. I was about to get in, when I just so happened to glance to my right—and into the full-length mirror.

“
Oh,
nooooooooooo.” My jaw dropped open in horror. “No. No. No. No. No.”

Something had happened to my costume. As I was walking, the center had folded in on itself—creating flesh-toned flaps. I did not look like a fortune cookie, I looked like a giant vagina. And you can’t go to a
Mormon
dance dressed like a giant vagina.

I held my arms up at my chest in an attempt to cover up my indecency.
What do I do?
I had a moment of crisis.
Do I run? Do I stay? But “The One,” he’s supposed to be up there.

And so, in one last desperate attempt to win that Mormon Man of My Dreams, I took my vagina off and hid it in the broom closet (which I guess is what you do every time you go to church). In just beige leggings and a nude tank top, I took the elevator up to the dance.

When the doors opened, I ran out and ducked behind the floral print couch. “Psst.” I recognized a girl farther down the hall. “Pssst.”

She turned around.

“Hey.” I poked my head out. “Can you go find my sister, Tina, Tina Baker?”

The girl nodded her head and walked into the gym. A few minutes later Tina emerged dressed as a black cat. While we hadn’t planned it, we’d both chosen to go as pussy.

“Tina,” I whispered. She didn’t hear me. “Tina!” This time I practically shouted. “Down here!”

“Elna?” She walked over to me, her face looking more and more alarmed the closer she got. “What happened to your fortune cookie costume?”

“I looked like a”—I could hardly finish the sentence—“a giant vagina.”

“What?”

“My costume started to”—I made little gestures with my hands that demonstrated inward folding—“fold in on itself.” My voice cracked. “I looked like a GIANT VAGINA!”

Tina started laughing. “Wait right here.”

She came back a minute later with a poncho she’d stolen off of a friend. “Here, Brigham said you could borrow this.”

“Thank you.” I pulled it over my head and stood up. It came down just above my knees.

“Come on,” Tina said. “You’re missing the dance—it’s fun this year.”

We walked through the gym doors, moving long dangly orange streamers out of the way with our hands. And then there it was, the dance, preserved as if in a time capsule, the one consistent thing in this inconsistent world. “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston was playing over the loudspeakers. A guy dressed as a bean stalk, or a green crayon, I wasn’t sure which, immediately ran up to Tina and asked her to dance. She looked at me as if to ask for my permission.

Go ahead.
I nodded.

I wasn’t surprised when no one asked me to dance. The evening was far beyond “going according to plan.” Instead of wallowing, I walked to the side of the room and leaned against the stage. From where I was standing I could see the entire room. A disco ball was hanging from the basketball hoop. It sent little dots of light across the congregation as it spun.

A thirty-eight-year-old man—still a virgin, still dressed in a duck costume—was busy doing the electric slide. It was an all-time low. Also, the irony was not lost on me:
I am a dirty cookie.
After all of my restraint, my vagina had finally made its public debut, but wrong crowd.
Wroooooong crowd.

There’s a trick to knowing when to leave the party and I wish I knew it. Walking back through the dangly orange streamers and out into the street, I didn’t really know where I was headed but I figured,
You always have to go somewhere.