The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir (7 page)

“Are you okay?” he asked, kneeling down beside me. “Are you hurt?”

I was about to say no when Paul leaned in and pulled a twig from my hair. We had never been this close. He was eight inches from my face. I could smell his cologne. I looked into his green eyes, his lips, his braces (okay, so he had braces, but he was still hot). After all my daydreams the moment had finally presented itself. I was going to kiss Paul Stowe. That’s when I felt it in my hand—liquid. I knew without having to look that it was blood.
No
, I thought. I had to stop it. If I wanted to get kissed I had to will the blood back.

Paul was still looking at me, looking directly into my eyes.
Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me,
I tried to telepathically communicate. Then, a warm bead of liquid slid down the side of my face. I watched Paul’s expression change from admiration to sheer horror.

“You’re bleeding!”

I took my hand off my forehead. It was covered in blood. I wasn’t just bleeding—my head was gushing.

“Don’t move,” Paul said. He stood up and looked around, as if he’d find a first aid kit hanging from one of the trees. “Oh, shit,” he said, followed by, “It’s okay” and “We gotta put pressure on it.”

Paul frantically searched through his pockets in an attempt to find something that he could hold to my forehead and use to stop the bleeding. I, on the other hand, was too disappointed to do anything. I had spent six months engaged in deep religious conversations just so I could get kissed—and now that the moment had arrived, my forehead had spit blood.

I took a handful of snow and pressed it up against the wound. It didn’t help. The blood mixed into the snow, and the snow melted down my arm.
Alas
, I thought,
my newfound friend does not serve this purpose.

Paul was not handling the situation as calmly as I was. “We have to get back to the car,” he said.

I stood up, but my right foot—the one that had caused all the drama—buckled underneath me. Each step I took hurt more than the one before.

“Here,” Paul offered, “let me carry you.”

“That’s okay,” I insisted. When you’re fat, you never let people try to carry you. They think they can, but they can’t.

“Elna, we have to get back to the car and put something on your head as soon as possible.”

“You go,” I offered. “I’ll wait here.”

“I’m not leaving you.” Paul was suddenly very serious. “You could pass out. Come on—let me carry you.”

Paul reached one arm under my butt and tried to lift me. “Wait!” I practically shouted. To this day I regret the words that followed.

“I have my period,” I said, “and I have a pad in my pocket.” It wasn’t a new thought. When Paul had searched his pockets, I had searched mine, felt the pad, and then decided against it. But desperate times call for desperate measures—Paul could not try to carry me.

I pulled out the Maxi pad, carefully unwrapped it, undid the wings, and stuck it to my forehead. At the time I was only thinking about how to stop my head from bleeding, and how to stop Paul from picking me up. But when I caught a glimpse of Paul’s face, frozen in amusement and disgust, I wanted to rewind. I wanted to put the Maxi pad back and I wanted to bleed to death slowly.

But you don’t get second chances. I thought about this on the long car ride home. Paul sat in the driver’s seat staring straight ahead, both hands on the wheel, and I sat beside him leaning against the window, a bloody Maxi pad still pressed against my forehead.
After all of our profound discussions in the high school parking lot, this may very well be the meaning of my pathetic life.

Shortly after our road trip, Paul started dating another senior and we stopped hanging out after school. Sometimes we’d see each other in the hall and he would call me “Paddy.” When he used this nickname in front of other people I’d lie and say my middle name was Patricia.

A few months later, I moved back to London, Paul went off to college, and that was the end of Paul and me. Or at least I thought it was. Then, the summer before I went to NYU I returned to Seattle to visit my grandparents and get a summer job. I was working at the local movie theater when Paul came in with a few friends. I gave him free popcorn and a drink.

“We should hang out sometime,” Paul said casually.

“Great,” I answered, a lot faster than I should have. We ended up going out at least twice a week for the entire month of July. One summer evening, we were at a Mexican restaurant having cinnamon tortillas when I started babbling.

“You know, I feel like I’ve really matured this year,” I said. “I keep thinking that I’m going to meet someone, but I’ve never actually been ready. Now I feel like I’m aware enough of my individuality to have a boyfriend.” It was all nonsense.

“I’ll be your boyfriend,” Paul said. I choked on the water in my glass. Had I heard him right? Had he really just said that?

“You want to be my boyfriend?” I asked, looking hard into his eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “Elna, do you want to go out with me?”

It was like hearing the unimaginable. He had spoken the words that were supposed to break the spell. I felt a change come over me. Right there in front of Paul a circle of light surrounded me and swirled around like a tornado. I transformed. Not from a moth into a beautiful butterfly, which is always what I thought would happen if I could just get a boyfriend. But from an intelligent articulate person into a semiretarded schoolgirl.

“You want to be my boyfriend! So cool, good, so good boyfriend!” I blabbered.

“What?” Paul asked.

I glanced down at my chest, where huge red blotches were starting to form as they do when I’m embarrassed.

“Boyfriend,” I said pointing to him and giggling. The giggling would not stop.

When he said, “Elna, why are you acting this way?” I just laughed and laughed. When he said, “Stop that,” I repeated, “Stop that,” and then I laughed and laughed. I knew exactly how fatal this behavior was. I wanted to grab myself by the shoulders and scream, “Snap out of it.” Instead, I blew bubbles in my glass of milk.

Paul broke up with me three hours later. “I feel like you’ve changed,” he explained.

I tried to explain that I hadn’t changed, I tried to convince him to give me another chance, but all I could do was giggle and ask for high fives.

While we never went out again, technically my adolescent daily affirmation came true: Paul Stowe was my boyfriend, once, for 180 minutes. I should’ve been more specific.

My Grandmother’s Dress

I always wanted to be beautiful. I’m not talking inner beauty either. I wanted to be hot. As a kid I would daydream about it. I had this picture of my mother’s mother that I would stare at; she was twenty-five at the time, tall, thin, her hair pinned back in a 1940s-style and she was wearing what I called the “Sacred Dress.” I knew this dress was sacred because I could try on all her dresses except for this one.

My grandfather had served in the Korean War and while he was stationed in Japan he bought my grandmother this silk brocade fabric. She looked through all the magazines and carefully selected a dress in
Vogue
that was worthy of the material. She saved up for the pattern and, at night, when her babies were asleep, she would work on her dress. It took her two years to finish. The result is a dress that fits tight around the ribs, has cap sleeves and a V-neck, and flows out in a full skirt.

I would stare at the picture of my grandmother in this dress and daydream the same dream each time: I was all grown up, I was beautiful, I was wearing the dress, and I was on a date with Brian Egbert, the most popular boy in first grade.

I had daydreamed this so often that one day I couldn’t take it anymore. I snuck the dress out of my grandma’s closet. I stood in front of the mirror, delicately pulled the dress over my head, and then tried to zip it
. It didn’t fit
. I was seven years old and I was too fat to fit into my grandmother’s dress.

I was always chubby. Okay, not just chubby, I was clinically obese, but can we skip the semantics? I used to make up friends with birthdays so that I would have an excuse to bring cupcakes to school and then eat them for lunch. I was that kind of chubby, the lying-for-baked-goods kind.

And it didn’t help that Tina was gorgeous. On our family trip to Morocco when I was twelve years old, a man saw my sister on the street and stopped my parents to say: “Your daughter is the most beautiful creature on this earth. I will give you a thousand camels for her.” My parents said: “No, thank you” (and scooted Tina behind them). So the man turned to me, looked me up and down, and said: “I’ll give you a hundred camels for her.”

Nine hundred camels
, I thought.
There is a nine-hundred-camel difference between my sister and me?

The rest of my life can be described as a pursuit to be worth more camels.

Even at a young age I understood: Because of the way I look, I am worth less. I tried to have a sense of humor about it. I remember lying in the bathtub and squeezing my stomach fat for fun. I rolled the white chubbiness into a circle and decided I had a tangerine of excess fat. Through elementary school I continued to measure my fat in increments of fruit. When I was nine I had an orange of extra fat and then at eleven a grapefruit of extra fat, and then a melon, and then . . . I decided not to measure myself anymore because it was no longer a fun game, and I didn’t want to use the word
watermelon
.

Things only got worse from there. I was going through the back of Tina’s yearbook, my favorite activity, when I recognized two signatures. They belonged to the two most popular boys in my fourth grade class: “How come you’re so pretty and Elna isn’t?” and “I wish your sister looked like you.” I was devastated. Not because I thought they were being unfair, but because I agreed with them. My mother consoled me: “Don’t get mad, just get even” (a truly Christian philosophy). The next day I signed their yearbooks: “You will regret your comment in my sister’s yearbook next year when you beg to go out with me. Of course, I will refuse.” But that never happened; no one ever begged to go out with me.

God, please make me beautiful, I want to look like Tina, turn me into someone special.
I would’ve traded everything to be beautiful. This went against everything I was raised to believe. In fact, if you ask any Mormon the question “Why are we here on earth?” they will give the standard answer they’ve been taught since childhood: “To get a body.”

I remember my primary teacher holding up a paper doll and reading a quote from a Mormon apostle, “You have been given a body so you can exalt yourself to a nobler condition. . . . The intelligence that is in man . . . give it a physical body and you have enlarged its powers immeasurably.”

In other words, the primary purpose of life on earth was for me to get a body, any body; to appreciate it, make choices with it, and use it for good works; and then, when I am done with it, “to shuffle off this mortal coil” and return to God. By the age of five I had learned the meaning of life. There was only one problem: I got the wrong body—and I’d been hating it ever since.

Only, something happened my sophomore year of college to change my perspective. I went to a writing retreat and on the retreat I was given an assignment to write a story that began with the line: “My body finally speaks.” The last thing I wanted to do was to let my body speak. At the time I weighed two hundred fifty pounds; once it got started it might never shut up.

I sat in front of a blank piece of paper and thought,
Okay, fine, body, you want to speak? Now’s your chance.
I didn’t anticipate the effect this offer would have. Without any effort on my part, words started flowing onto the page.

I am made up of skin, and muscles and fat,
my body began.
I have a heart that pumps blood and a foundation of bones that are as vulnerable as paper because they too can become ash. But I move, and I can jump, and I feel, and I can do all of these incredible things . . . but you don’t love me. When are you going to realize—this is your only chance.

Reading these words over, it felt like someone had knocked the wind out of me.
Wow. Body certainly doesn’t hold back when body speaks
. It was a wake-up call. I left the retreat with a new mission: I was going to stop wishing that I was beautiful and I was going to learn how to love myself just as I was. And so, to start this off, I created a mantra:
I am what I am
. And I would repeat it every day:
I am what I am, I am what I am, I am what I am
. It was like my sound track. A little repetitive and not necessarily iTunes worthy, but it was my sound track nonetheless.

After doing this for a few months, I stopped hiding food and I started accepting my bad habits. Until one day, I was waiting on the subway plat form during rush hour when a man passed me. Helooked me up and down. I genuinely thought he was checking me out until he said in his loudest voice: “Damn girl, you better lose some weight!” It was like being back in fourth grade and opening my yearbook. But this time I had a defense.
I am what I am, I am what I am, I am what I am
, I repeated silently while the other people on the platform avoided making eye contact with me.

On the ride home I thought deeply about what I was trying to do. My entire life, I had defined myself by how others perceived me. I needed more than a mantra to change this habit. So I decided to pray about it. I didn’t pray to be skinny (I’d tried that one a million times before); instead I prayed to be able to see myself through God’s eyes so that I could realize my potential. I did this every day for a year, and I can’t tell you how or why it worked, but eventually something just clicked and I felt like someone greater than me, some force from on high, loved me tremendously. And this feeling encouraged me to let go. I stopped using my weight as the trigger for a downward spiral of self-loathing. What was the point if it only made me feel bad? Instead, I accepted the way I looked. Not completely, because that’s impossible, but I considered myself in a way I never had before, as an actual child of God, someone worth being created.