Thumbsucker (29 page)

I gave her a nod that said I would consider this. In truth, such hands-on healings didn’t work for me. Six months ago, at Christmastime, I’d come down with a terrible earache and asked for help. Two elders sat me in a folding chair, settled their palms on my skull, and started muttering. After requesting Heavenly Father’s aid, they went on to predict my future. They foresaw a life of shining promise: important work, wide influence, a loving wife who would bear me many children.

My earache subsided over the next few hours, but when I woke up the next morning my head was throbbing. Afraid that the relapse might further harm my family’s weakening faith, I tried to ignore the pain. It didn’t work. After lunch Audrey gave in and phoned a specialist. Mike looked disappointed, let down. Part of
what had attracted him to Mormonism was the prospect of no more medical bills.

In central Iowa the landscape flattened and Opal drifted off to sleep. A silver stream of drool ran down her chin. Her left arm hung over the aisle, charm bracelet jingling. I’d never known a girl with so much jewelry. Her abundance of tinny lockets, fake gold chains, clip-on earrings, and cutglass rings gave her an ancient, almost Persian, appearance, as if some sultan had weighed her down with gifts.

Orrin elbowed me. “Got the Holy Ghost yet?” His joke referred to Elder Tinsdale’s promise that we would feel a warm stirring in our stomachs as we approached the tour’s first stop.

“Not yet.” I stood up from my seat. I had to pee again.

“Where you going?” asked Orrin. He knew full well. I’d made the mistake of confiding in him once about my condition.

“Shut up,” I said.

Orrin looked at his watch. “One minute—I’m timing you. Anything over a minute, I’ll break the door down.”

I flushed with embarrassment as I walked away. The time limit was an antimasturbation trick promoted in booklets distributed by our bishop. Other recommendations included sleeping with your hands outside the blankets and wearing a jockstrap inside your underwear. Apparently, the church believed that convenience was a
big part of masturbation and that the slightest delay in getting going would cause a young man to give up.

Unfortunately, Orrin’s warning got me thinking, and once I was inside the bathroom with the door locked I wanted to linger there. The image of Opal’s wet chin was getting the best of me. To control myself, I employed another technique—one that Bishop Salaman had taught me during our monthly moral fitness talks. “When you feel like you’re going to touch yourself,” he’d said, “imagine your fantasy woman has a wound. A deep, bleeding cut. You’ll snap right out of it.”

My medication made the image vivid. The oozing wound in Opal’s side—a slash of luscious red beneath her rib cage—succeeded only in heightening my excitement.

“You went overtime,” Orrin said when I returned. He’d put on his brown beret and mirrored sunglasses. A notepad lay on his lap, its top page headed: “Distortion and Misinformation Checklist.”

“If it was me next to Opal,” Orrin said, “I’d go overtime, too. It’s no coincidence.”

“What isn’t?”

“That they sat you two so close.”

“They?”

“The powers that be. The bishopric. They must be afraid you’re going to leave the church. Most converts do. So they sat her there as bait.”

Orrin enlarged on this theory as we rode. The
church, he believed—and he cited several examples—perpetuated itself through sex and romance. The lure of marrying pretty Mormon women was, finally, what kept Mormon men in line. My own observations supported Orrin’s idea. Mormon girls, unlike the others I went to school with, were precociously poised and seductive, strangely lush. They pitched their voices low and used mascara. They rarely wore sneakers, preferring shoes with heels, and were always smoothing cold cream on their hands.

“The church is against premarital sex—it
says
—but in fact it promotes it. It has to, to survive. It’s been that way since the beginning, since pioneer days. And believe me, the girls know their duty. They
do
their duty.”

“Opal, too?”

“The moment she saw you next to her, she knew she had an assignment. She blushed bright red.”

“You’re lying. You’re making fun of me again.”

“It’s bred in a Mormon girl’s bones. She has this instinct. She sees a straying sheep, she herds it back. But fine, don’t believe me.”

“I don’t.”

“Smart attitude. Don’t take statements on faith—hold out for proof.” Orrin gazed back out the window at the highway. “You feeling the Spirit yet?”

“No.”

“Me neither,” he said. “I’ll let you in on a secret: there’s no such thing.”

“Before the Saints trekked west to Utah, driven out by hate and persecution, they built this city, the largest in the state. They raised a militia. They built a towering temple. The Prophet, Joseph Smith, campaigned for president. Nauvoo, Illinois, was a nation within a nation, thriving and vibrant, the envy of its neighbors.”

Elder Tinsdale finished speaking and asked for questions. Orrin raised his hand.

“What about plural marriage? You left that out. That’s the
real
reason the Mormons were driven west.”

Elder Tinsdale turned to Sister Helms, the sternest and oldest of our chaperons. “Polygamy,” she said, “is not church doctrine.”

“It used to be,” Orrin said.

“What’s past is past. The church moves on. It changes.”

“I thought the idea of this trip was learning
history
.”

The group formed a line and we followed the chaperons into the church-run visitors’ center. We passed a painting of a farmer at prayer and another of Jesus Christ in Central America, where Mormons believed he’d appeared to the natives following his death and resurrection. In a diorama of Joseph Smith at home, life-size mannequins sat in antique chairs around a fireplace. Elder Tinsdale flipped a switch that lowered the lights and caused movies of human faces to shine on the mannequins’ featureless heads. The plastic figures came
eerily to life, their “voices” filtering out from hidden speakers.

Polygamy wasn’t spoken of again, and Orrin moved along with shuffling feet. “What a whitewash,” he kept whispering. My eyes were fixed on Opal, in front of us. Her skin was the glossy brown of caramel apples, plumped by the thinnest layer of baby fat. Her lashes were so long that they looked false. She asked no questions and seemed annoyed when others did. I envied the simple faith she seemed to radiate, her willingness to be guided and instructed. It impressed me almost as much as Orrin’s wit.

Lunch was a buffet picnic on the lawn. The chaperons sat together under a tree, drinking grape Kool-Aid and gnawing chicken drumsticks. They were all women except for Elder Tinsdale. Ever since his divorce, six months ago—a split that the church considered honorable because Sister Tinsdale had joined the Scientologists—he’d been surrounded by helpful older women who cleaned his house and shopped for groceries for him. Now they leaned forward slightly and watched him eat. Whenever he spoke they nodded, sighed, or laughed, and when his glass was empty they refilled it.

“I talked to Opal,” Orrin said, snatching the uneaten drumstick off my plate.

“What happened?”

“She thinks you’re a fox. She loves your hair. She thinks you could maybe wear it shorter, though.”

“When do you think she’ll make her move?”

“Don’t know. I just wish
I
was a convert,” Orrin said. “Layer by layer, you get to go inside. Uncover the mysteries. Find the buried treasure. Me, I was born inside. It’s all so stale now.”

After lunch we toured Nauvoo on foot. The Mississippi gave the town a fishy smell and drew my attention to the western horizon. In the house where Joseph Smith had lived, we stood behind velvet ropes and viewed a kitchen where mannequin women were canning beans and corn. I stood back to accommodate the shorter kids and found myself next to Opal. Our elbows knocked.

“I hear you’re related to Brigham Young,” I said.

“Who isn’t?” Opal joked. It made me like her more. “At the turn of the century, in St. George, Utah, there was a man with over a thousand grandkids.”

“I’ll bet he was tired.”

“Tired of what? You
pervert
!”

Next we admired the Prophet’s study. Opal turned her bracelet on her wrist. She examined the back of one hand, as if for flaw’s. “My skin’s getting wrinkly,” she said. “I’m seventeen. A hundred years ago, I’d be married by now. I wouldn’t have to worry about my looks.”

“I like your looks.”

“Thank you. That helps. I like yours, too.”

Elder Tinsdale sidled in between us and Opal edged away. He rested his broad, hairy hand on my shoulder. His talent for “getting down on kids’ level” was famed throughout the ward, though all it consisted of was lots of touching.

“Spectacular trip,” he said. “What a way to learn.”

“What are we seeing tomorrow?”

“Carthage Jail. That’s where the mob shot Joseph Smith, the bastards.”

I looked at him.

“Excuse me.”

“I swear, too.”

“I take the Prophet’s death personally. I shouldn’t. It all worked out exactly according to plan.”

A silence fell. Elder Tinsdale’s stomach growled. I was starting to wish I had eaten lunch.

“Opal’s a special young woman,” said Elder Tinsdale. “Heavenly Father gave her singular gifts.”

“I know,” I said softly.

“How’s your family doing?”

“Better. Much better. My brother’s a tennis star. My father got a big offer for his business. We’re moving to a big house beside a golf course.”

“Sounds like their prayers are being answered. I’m glad. Listen now: you enjoy this trip, okay?”

“Yes. I promise.” I glanced at Opal’s shoulders.

Elder Tinsdale squeezed my arm. “Spectacular.”

We slept that night on the cold linoleum floor of a church gymnasium. I woke after midnight with an urgent bladder and quietly peeled off my sleeping bag. I tiptoed between the rows of snoring Mormons, feeling pleasantly guarded and surrounded. Before the conversion
I’d belonged to nothing, nothing but my family and my school, but now I was part of a movement, a community. I had friends all over the country, all over the world.

Coming out of the bathroom, I heard a sound. I turned to see Opal in shorts and T-shirt, barefoot. There was a crust in the corners of her mouth and one of her cheeks was red and grooved from lying against the zipper of her sleeping bag.

“I can’t fall asleep away from home,” she said. “I miss my ferrets.”

“Do ferrets make nice pets?”

“Until they grow up and get fat. They start to stink then. Let’s go outside—I’m smothering in here.”

From the church’s back lawn we could see the Mississippi, its surface slick and luminous and vast. The stars were so near they appeared to have volume. A blinking satellite arced across the sky. Opal shivered and took my hand and squeezed it.

“It’s up there, I know it,” she said. “In all its glory.”

I took her to mean the Celestial Kingdom, the highest realm in the three-tiered Mormon heaven. The lower two realms, the Terrestrial and Telestial, were nice enough places, but not truly exalted. Only in the Celestial Kingdom could a faithful Mormon husband summon his wife by calling the secret name divulged to him in the temple wedding ceremony. The couple, once reunited in the afterlife, could then go on to reproduce eternally,
populating new planets with their offspring and ruling over these worlds as God rules ours.

“I feel sorry for kids who don’t have our beliefs. They look at the sky and all they see is … sky.” Opal moved my hand onto her knee. “Is it selfish to want other people to have what I have?”

“No. I think it’s the opposite of selfish.”

“Scoot closer. I’m cold.”

I put my arm around her.

“I’m a happy person,” Opal announced. “I know that’s uncool to admit these days, especially if you’re young. Tough luck—I’m happy. I know where I’m going. I know where I’ll end up. It shows in my eyes, people say. In my expression. It used to embarrass me, looking so contented, but now I don’t care. I’ve decided to let my light shine.”

At this, Opal rested her head on my shoulder. My nose filled with the smell of Prell shampoo. She shifted around and blew air against my earlobe, a series of delicate, regulated puffs.