The Book of Mormon Girl (14 page)

So I did. I married him. I said,
Yes
. Like the glass crushing
under my bridegroom’s heel, I gave way and I said,
Yes, God, do with me what you will
.

David and I finished our degrees. We moved halfway across the country, to my first job as a professor, into a little two-bedroom wood-frame house on a pecan tree-lined street near the university. My files, we brought them with us.

And exile cast no shadow over our marriage.

•   •   •

One humid summer morning, six months pregnant with our first child—a daughter—I set to work turning our office into her bedroom.
Room
. There was not enough room. I boxed up surplus books, dragged old furniture out on the lawn, then turned to face my files, taking up too much space in the room I now needed for my daughter. I sat down in a puddle of light on the wooden floor, my belly giant in my lap. I opened the file cabinet drawer. I read all the memos and clippings again, reviewed all the hurt and the evidence, wept again, and again, and rehearsed my case one final time. Then, from the giant stack of files, I pulled out a few pieces of paper I wanted to share with my daughter, things I wanted her to remember, things I needed her to carry forward. The rest of it—my files, my carefully prepared defense case, the evidence of fearful treachery, the speech that named me an enemy among my own people, the bitterness of exile I wanted no part of her memory—all of this, I heaved and toted out to the garbage.

During the exile years, I wore my faith under my clothing, threads of stubborn refusal and hopeful determination, bound tight about my rib cage. During the exile years, I lived within my faith like a narrow pillar of light: above me, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, a hundred great-grandmothers dressed in white; above them God the Mother, God the Father. Every month a woman came to visit me from the local Mormon congregation. Her name was Sister Bryson. She had wide hips and puffy hands, wore pastel-colored scarves, and talked with a soft Mormon accent that made my heart ache. When my daughter Ella was born, Sister Bryson filled my fridge with creamy casseroles. She talked to me in a womanly way about how exhausting it was, the breast-feeding, for she knew, having nursed three, four, five children herself. Back in the small Arizona Mormon outpost where she grew up, she would tell me, her mother pointed out the cows standing around and lying down in the irrigated pastures, explaining that that’s how exhausting nursing was, and so it was okay just to lie down and take it easy through all the nursing months. Once in a while, as we sat on my couch, my eyes welled up with tears of fear and loneliness. “You’ll be fine,” Sister Bryson would say, sensing my fear that I had done it all wrong, read wrong, thought wrong, loved wrong, married wrong, lost my way. “You’ll be fine,” she would say, resting her hand on mine, “because you are searching for truth, and truth is what matters.”

During the exile years, every few months I received
a newsletter from the Mormon Alliance. It came, I knew, directly from the hand of Lavina, a woman with wide hips and puffy hands. There was always a little heart in blue ink penned in above my address label.
Love
. How I loved the blue inked heart that came to my mailbox from the hand of Lavina. Standing on the front lawn of my safe house in a college town miles away from Salt Lake City, I pressed my lips to the heart. During a long decade in exile, that heart and my visits from Sister Bryson were church to me.

•   •   •

I do not know for sure, but I suspect that I may very well have my own file in the Strengthening the Members Committee storeroom in one of the great church skyscrapers in downtown Salt Lake City. I am, after all, a Mormon feminist, scholar, and writer.

I can guess about how thick the file is now, for I have furnished it myself. I have been writing and publishing since I was eight years old, when my first Christmas poem appeared in the
Friend
, a glossy Mormon children’s magazine. I think of the minor exposés and navel-gazing essays I published in the underground student newspaper at Brigham Young University, and the raw feminist poetry that leaked from me in my college years. I think of the speech I gave when I returned my diploma at a press conference after Cecilia’s firing in May 1993. I don’t think I have a transcript, but that’s okay: it’s probably there in my file.
Maybe the diploma I sent back to Brigham Young University is there too. Or the articles and poems and stories I wrote and published in Mormon liberal magazines during those early years in exile, writing full of images of bruised and occluded Mothers and burning sacred groves. Maybe too there are the one or two scholarly essays I wrote about Mormon feminism during the exile years, only on assignment, clenching my jaw and dragging myself through fear to write what I know.

Of course, if I have a file, it will soon contain the very words I am now typing into my computer,
click
-
click
-
click
-
click
. Surely by the time you are reading them these words will have been clipped and summarized.

Here, let me sum it up myself:

All are alike unto God: male and female, black and white, gay and straight.

God is a Mother and a Father.

Mormon women matter.

Sometimes over the last few years, when I have felt tired or out of sorts or very alone, I have imagined cheerful, tireless clerks, men of thinning pates who wake each morning in the alfalfa field suburbs of the intermountain West and call their wives “mother.” I have imagined them, the agents of an infinite regime of spiritual surveillance, as a second audience to every insignificant email.
Click-click-click-click-click-click
.

For what is to stop the everyday Mormon people who, without so much as a cup of coffee to bolster their assurance, expend days tirelessly tracking through thickets of print the scent trail of the beast called “apostasy”? What is to prevent everything we write—the actual human dimensions of our living faith, our own unvarnished histories, records of our searching hungers—from being used as evidence against us? If we have already been judged to be the enemies of our own Church, what keeps us from excommunication, from having our names removed from the safekeeping of the granite vaults in the mountains, from the company of our ancestors, made dead to our own dead?

Mercy, only mercy keeps us.

Click-click-click-click-click-click.

sealed portion

[Here are parts of the story I do not want to tell.

But I will for you, wayward Mormon boy or girl. I will for you, girl seeking.

Because our stories are not told in sacred books. They are not told over the pulpit. They are not told by the prophets.

No one says: I felt my church turn away from me, and it was a kind of death to me.

No one says: I drove into the desert. I wandered around the city in the dark. I was alone and it was cold and inside me was desolation.

No one says: I sat in the hotel lobby bathroom, my rib cage wracked with sobs, until a stranger, insistent, knocked at the stall door, handing me a Kleenex and urging me to be strong.

No one says: when my family treated me as a stranger, I preferred the company of strangers, and I walked among
strangers and what did I find but God in every one of their faces.

No one says: I broke rules, I broke rules, I broke rules—I broke all the rules. That one. And that one. And that one too. Yes. I did.

No one says: I lay on the floor of the Venice Beach apartment and Parliament Funkadelic was on the record player and my friend and I, we looked at the ceiling, and I waved the smoke from the air with the back of my hand, and when he asked, “Help me understand what Mormonism means to you?” I said, “it is my first language, my mother tongue, my family, my people, my home; it is my heart, my heart, my heart.”

No one says any of these things. But they should.

Because no one should be left to believe that she is the only one.

No one should be left to believe that she is the only Mormon girl who walked alone into the dark. No one should be left to feel like she is the only one broken and seeking.]

pioneer day

H
ow is it we come through the most difficult miles? Do we come silent or singing? Do we come in company, or do we come alone? Are we all alone on the open plains under starlit skies, all alone with the cooing owls in the dark of early morning? Our ancestors, our grandmothers, will their spirits take pity on us?

I am a descendant of Mormon pioneers. My great-great-great grandmother Lucy Evalina Waterbury Wight crossed the plains from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to the Salt Lake Valley with her husband and one-year-old daughter Rachel in 1852. She was nineteen years old. Lucy was born in 1833 in the cold northern reaches of St. Lawrence County, New York. One winter afternoon, when Lucy was twelve, her father left her to watch over her dying mother and two younger siblings while he went to the neighbors for
help. Charlotte Post Waterbury died, and Lucy, terrified, could not bear to stay in the house with her mother’s body. She bundled up herself and her two siblings and trudged out into the deepening dark of the afternoon. Three years later, just fifteen years old, she would arrive alone at the Mormon settlement of Nauvoo, Illinois. How she came through those miles, no one knows.

My great-great-grandmother Rachel Jane Wight was one year old when her mother, Lucy Waterbury, and her father, Stephen Wight, pulled the family’s few possessions in a handcart from Iowa to Utah. Rachel grew up in Brigham City, a town named for the prophet Brigham Young, with her father, her mother, two sister-wives, and seventeen other siblings. In 1864, her father sent back across the Missouri River for a piano, only the second to be brought to Brigham City. Rachel taught herself to play the piano as hornets buzzed under the house eaves on hot summer afternoons. At seventeen, she married John Thorpe, a Yorkshire-born Mormon convert, and returned with him to his family home among the box elder trees in the Malad Valley of Idaho.

Rachel Wight Thorpe died in April 1884, three weeks after the birth of my great-grandmother, her third child, Rachel Maude. John Thorpe could barely stand to look at his infant daughter. Maude was sent off to be raised by her grandmother, Elizabeth Sims Thorpe, a toothless and gossipy midwife from the ancient forests of Derbyshire, who
had at great trouble insisted on carrying a trunk of teas with her from England and across the plains. Little Maude wandered in and out of the dimming eyesight of her grandmother, wearing a dirty dress and dragging around a bottle of milk with a rubber nipple until she was five or six years old. At nine, she was sent back to live in the shadow of her father’s bitterness. Sitting out by the family well one summer evening, Maude saw a girl with long black hair in a white dress come across the field and through the gate. She spoke to the girl. She asked her if she were a friend of her older sisters Florence or Minnie, but the girl did not answer. Frightened, my great-grandmother ran into the house. She told her father what this girl—this “personage,” as my grandmother described her—looked like. John Thorpe told Maude to go to bed and went outside. When he came back into the house, he called for my great-grandmother. “Lass,” he said, “that was your mother you saw.” John Thorpe showed Rachel Maude Thorpe to a trunk containing her mother’s clothes and told her she could have them.

How Maude made her way to Garland, Utah, no one knows, but it was there one night outside the great sugar beet factory built by the Mormon Church for the benefit of Zion that she met my great-grandfather, a migrant beet worker named David Dorton. She married him in the upper room of a local furniture store, settled in a little house across the street from the factory, and had six children. Their youngest was
my grandmother America Pearl Dorton, born in April 1917. For a few years, Pearl grew up in an oven-warmed kitchen, yeast-start on the windowsill, playing at her mother’s feet as Maude rushed to get lunch on the table for noontime boarders from the factory. But bad times came for the industry: overproduction, declining prices, white fly. The Dorton family scattered out from Garland and tried to outrun failure. The older boys, D. J. and Bill, hopped freight to find work on the ranches of Montana, and the older sisters, Vera and Deon, left for the cities.

During the cold bottom years of the Great Depression, my great-grandfather abandoned my great-grandmother Maude, and grandmother Pearl in a lonesome little sugar beet factory town in western South Dakota. The sugar mill where he was working failed, and the marriage followed. Left to fend for themselves, marooned hundreds of miles from their lovely Deseret, Maude and Pearl filled their abandoned house with roomers and boarders. It was tough sledding, as my grandmother used to say. One day my great-aunt Vera came back from the cities in her four-seater Chevrolet. “We’re here to get you,” she told them. “You can’t go on like this.” There was only room enough for Maude and Pearl to bring their few clothes in paper suitcases. Not even room, my grandmother remembered, to bring the old doll she played dinner with under the apple trees in happier days at her childhood Utah home.

•   •   •

You can’t go on like this.

For years, I cried every time I set foot in a Mormon ward house. Crying out of fear and anger and loneliness and misunderstanding. Crying that the Church had punished women like me, people like me, leaving us exiled among our own. Still, I kept bringing myself back, sobbing in the pews, nursing my baby daughter Ella to keep her quiet. Even after services, when the dark-suited bishop would materialize to shake my hand, I would stand there in the foyer with tears coming down my cheeks. Ridiculous. Is this how God wanted me to spend my Sundays, lonesome among my own people, obvious, angry, and humiliated?

You can’t go on like this
. How badly I wanted to belong as I had when I was a young Mormon girl, to be simply a working part in the great Mormon plan of salvation, a smiling exemplar of our sparkling difference. But instead I found myself a headstrong Mormon woman staking out her spiritual survival at a difficult point in Mormon history. “You’ll leave the Church,” non-Mormon friends would sometimes confide, patting me gently on my hand. They could see the depths of my anguish. “You don’t deserve to belong here
,”
said conservative voices in the Church.
No, no, no
, I pushed back, in my heart, in my prayers. How to pull myself out of this desolation?