“It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass (5 page)

Jeff and Judith kneeled at the altar facing one another and
joined hands. Then I kneeled next to Judith and placed my hand atop theirs.
Harmston did the honors. This was only the clan’s third plural marriage. The
first one led to a rift in the cult on the issue of threesomes—more on
that in Chapter Eight—and the second one was on the occasion of
Harmston’s taking a plural wife of his own.

I was calm during the ceremony. But during the big wedding
reception we threw at our house—hors d’oeuvres, punch, cake, 200 guests,
the works—I began the process of inwardly freaking. This wasn’t just talk
any more. This was real. My husband was about to leave on a honeymoon with
another, younger—way younger—woman with to-die-for boobs. And have
sex with her.

SEX.

My brave front melted away. I felt as if someone had
died—perhaps a part of me did indeed die at that moment—and I
grieved. I told myself we were doing the right thing, that this was my
Gethsemane, or my moment on the cross where God was forsaking me and leaving me
to my inner strength. The self-talk didn’t help.

On the bright side, I was left with the remains of a wedding
bash to clean up and three little kids to care for while Jeff and Judith ran
off on their honeymoon.

Jeff called me the next morning. With no regard for privacy
or decorum, I asked if they had consummated. No. Judith was tired and reticent,
so Jeff backed off. I relived my anxiety as the next evening approached. Jeff
called again the next morning. Did they consummate? Yes. My stomach leapt to my
throat.

Yet—somehow—I felt relief. Knowing it was over
was easier than knowing it was going to happen. Much the way a bowel movement
feels better than constipation.

It was finally over. It was legit. And, as my friend pointed
out, Jeff wasn’t sneaking around. I was in control.

I was the First Wife.

It was time to get on with being a helpmeet. Which meant
finding more wives.

You better shop around.

—William “Smokey” Robinson & Berry Gordy

We needed to attend to one small matter of business before
resuming our search for sister-wives. The Mormon Church had invited us to
attend a church court, sometimes called a “court of love,” convened in our
honor.

Mormons call their geographic equivalent of a parish and the
congregation living within its boundaries a
ward
.
A cluster of five or more wards makes a
stake
.
I figured we’d be hauled before a ward or stake court sooner or later.
Harmston’s followers reported seeing local Mormon leaders drive by his home and
take down license plate numbers of cars parked outside. Fact or paranoia? It
wouldn’t have been without precedent. It wasn’t many years earlier that
Mormon-owned Brigham Young University campus police made a practice of running
license plate numbers of cars parked outside gay establishments and furnishing
to school administration the names of students whose records matched.

We hadn’t officially resigned from our Orem ward, so I
expected the summons to come from there. Nope. It came from a council of Manti
stake leaders, men we had never met. We were charged with the sin of apostasy.
But why only that charge? We had indeed apostatized, but we were also openly
practicing polygamy. Mormons consider polygamy far more serious, far worthier
of excommunication. Why didn’t they mention that?

Since we no longer recognized the mainstream church, you
might wonder why we even dignified their court with an appearance at all. Two
reasons. We were eager to bear witness of The Truth to them. And there was
something invigorating in defying the authority we once revered. We felt
deliciously bratty.

We drove to the local Mormon stake building where we were
greeted by a dozen men freshly plucked from tractors and stuffed into
ill-fitting polyester suits. The kind that come with two pairs of pants.
Strangers though they were, they assured us that they loved us and had our best
interests at heart.

Once the perfunctory assurances that they loved us and had
our best interests at heart were out of the way, they got on with accusing us
of apostasy.

They bore solemn witness that the mainstream Mormon Church
was God’s true church, that we had gone astray, and that we needed to repent
and return. When it was our turn to talk, we bore solemn witness that The True
and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days was God’s true
church, that the
Mormons
had gone
astray, and that
they
needed to
repent and join
us
. Back and forth it
went. It won’t surprise you to learn that the meeting was not terribly
productive in terms of reaching any kind of accord.

They asked us to wait in a room down the hall while they
discussed our case. Moments later they summoned us back and informed us that
they were going to excommunicate us. It was for our own good, explained the
polyester suit speaking for the council. It was a step toward helping us
repent. After all, in case we hadn’t caught it the previous umpteen times
they’d said it, they loved us and had our best interests at heart.

We suspected that the apostasy charge provided them with a
convenient way simply to avoid debating polygamy with us. If so, they were
wise. There was no way they could have had that conversation with us and come
out on top. They would have had to defend polygamy as part of their own
history. That would have meant admitting that polygamy was God-ordained. Then
they would have had to justify condemning people who practice polygamy today
while defending people who practiced it way back when. And they would have had
to keep a straight face while averring that the church didn’t give up polygamy
because the U.S. government was enforcing the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862
by jailing defiant church leaders and seizing church property, but because God
just happened, at that exact moment, by the purest coincidence, to say to the
Mormon prophet in charge at the time, “About that polygamy thing. It has served
my purpose for now. So until further notice, lay off.” So to speak.

The Mormon Church is eager to distance itself from that part
of its history and, therefore, from groups like ours. The open practice of
polygamy is a reminder and a public embarrassment to them. With a charge of
apostasy, the Manti stake leaders were able to dispatch us without having to so
much as utter the dreaded p-word, much less acknowledge their own church’s part
in it.

The court adjourned, and everyone went home, each side
convinced, perhaps by then even exasperated enough to relish the thought, that
the other was headed for hell.

We once feared excommunication. Now in the TLC and convinced
that the Mormons were the real apostates, we wore our excommunication like a
medal.

Looking back, arguing about whether their or our church was
the “true” one was kind of like arguing about which artist’s portrayal of Santa
Claus came closest to a true representation of the man himself.

At last I had a sister-wife. Back from the honeymoon as a
married woman, Judith dropped out of high school and moved into our home. She
and I grew close.

Really. As I said, she was bubbly and likable. Having her
around was fun.

Not that there weren’t problems.

Married woman or not, Judith was no grown-up. I mean, she
was a freakin’ teenager. Her daily routine consisted of sleeping in and playing
with my kids while I cooked, cleaned house, and did laundry. While I busied
myself with the duties of a homemaker, Judith busied herself being like another
one of my kids, albeit considerably older, and adding to my work load
accordingly.

Judith spent time with my children that I longed to spend
with them myself, but couldn’t, thanks in part to the extra work that having
her in our home created for me. Thus it was Judith who taught my younger
daughter to tie her shoes. She taught her to do it in a weird, inside-out way.
Even today I cannot look at my daughter’s shoes, still tied inside-out, without
remembering and resenting it. I should have been the one to teach my own daughter
how to tie her own shoes, dammit. And I wouldn’t have taught her to tie them
some weird, inside-out way.

Fair being fair, Judith had reasons of her own to be
jealous. Despite moments when the sounds of their encounters echoed off the
surrounding mountains, Jeff told me that sometimes when he was with her he had
difficulty getting excited, not to mention performing. Perhaps familiarity was
setting in. If you know anything about male anatomy, I probably don’t have to
explain why at such times there was no hiding from her his lack of excitement
and performance. If you know anything about women, I probably don’t have to
explain why at such times she didn’t find his lack of excitement and
performance terribly flattering. Sometimes in the morning after a nonperforming
night with Judith—she and I alternated nights sleeping with
him—Jeff would steal up to my room for sex. I felt guilty, as if we were
cheating on her. But then, I didn’t kick him out, either.

Ha!
Maybe I was
way older. Maybe I was way under-endowed by comparison. But
my—our—husband thought I was sexier.
Ha
and
ha
again. Not that
I inwardly or outwardly gloated. I was too righteous, too spiritual, and too
mature for that. Besides, today it is all consigned to a dimly lit past. I
don’t even think about it anymore, much less gloat.

Did I mention that Jeff thought I was sexier?

Polygamists love to set the record straight when you ask,
“Did you adopt this lifestyle for the sex?” The standard reply is that polygamy
is most emphatically not about the sex. It’s about doing the will of the Lord
and building up God’s kingdom on earth. Don’t think for one minute that men get
off on polygamy. Well, OK, they do get off on polygamy. But only literally.

But when a man takes a plural wife with designs on her younger,
hotter sisters and then has trouble getting it up in the name of God because
she’s chubby—and his First Wife, God forgive her, takes competitive
delight in the thought—come on. It’s not about sex? My ass.

Judith had something else to bemoan. An important duty of a
plural wife is to help her husband grow his kingdom on earth by bearing him
children. Judith experienced technical difficulties in that department. I
suspect that it was not her fault. I am no biologist, but I suspect that it had
more to do with Jeff’s vasectomy.

We told Judith about the vasectomy before she and Jeff were
married. We had opted for it following the birth of our third child, unaware
that a few years hence we would find ourselves under the divine imperative to
multiply and replenish the earth with the pitter-patter of tiny polygamist
feet. Sooner or later Judith would want her brood, and I was ready to dig back
in and add to mine. Accordingly, we returned to Jeff’s urologist for a
reversal. “Why are you back?” the doctor asked, his brow knitted in a way that
suggested to us that rumors had reached him and he knew very well why. “I
changed my mind,” I said. “I want more kids.” It was the truth—just not
the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We made two reversal attempts. We experienced
disappointment when neither one took. Today I thank my lucky stars.

Jeff’s lack of seed-sowing ability would eventually help sow
the seeds for Judith’s departure from our family. But for the time being,
jealousies and infertility aside, Judith and I for the most part hit it off and
grew close.

Meanwhile, Jeff and I remained on the lookout for his next
wife. God answered our prayers by bringing to Manti an older man, his wife, her
adopted sons, and Ginger, the man’s adopted daughter from a prior marriage. She
was 40 years old and had two adult sons of her own living independently in the
eastern United States. With Ginger’s sons successfully on their own, the man
and his wife agreed that at age 40, it was high time for Ginger to be
successfully on her own as well.

They began shopping her to all of the eligible polygamist
men in Manti, which, come to think of it, was every polygamist man in Manti.
Ginger didn’t mind being shopped. In fact, she played it up.

If sex had held its customary, first-place position in the
TLC at the time of Ginger’s arrival, the average Manti man would have shown
little interest in her. To be blunt, she fell short in the attractiveness
department. She was overweight, generally not pretty anyway, and had some
physiological problems.

Yet sometimes in a polygamist society, sex temporarily slips
to second or third place on the priority list. The occasional usurpers, not
wholly unrelated to sex, are power and money. Ginger lacked attractiveness, but
she represented power, and she had her own money.

The more wives a man had, the more power he held within the
cult. The race was on for every man to acquire as many wives as he could. The
result was an immediate shortage. Single women, already a commodity in the TLC,
now became a rare commodity. An available woman—
any
available woman—was not to be wasted.

Besides the promise of increased power, Ginger offered the
winner of her hand an unusual financial advantage. Polygamist husbands are
expected to provide for their wives. It can get costly. Because of her
disabilities, Ginger received government assistance. There was plenty for her
upkeep and to spare. From a financial standpoint, the man who added her to his
collection would likely come out ahead. Thus lesser-heeled men who might
normally have shied from seeking an additional wife were taking a serious look
at Ginger.

For Ginger, who had not been sought after in years, this was
nirvana. She flirted with reckless abandon. Severely abashed by my own
paltry-by-comparison physical troubles, I envied her self-confidence.