Thumbsucker (25 page)

We were late getting going, though only by a few minutes. Elder Jessup drove with special care, checking his mirrors in a steady rotation and staying five miles per hour below the speed limit. Audrey, Joel, and I huddled in the backseat and Mike rode up front, wedged in between the elders. I found it hard to look at him. His new short haircut and clean white collar, the dabs of shaving cream behind his ears and smell of witch hazel coming off his neck, reminded me of a man on trial, a suspect being escorted to a courtroom.

To block out this thought and some others that were bothering me, I rehearsed the baptism in my mind, going over the ritual step by step just as Elder Jessup had described it for us. We’d enter the chapel. We’d put on soft white robes. There would be an audience. A crowd. We’d pray together as a church and family, and then, one by one, we’d be led to the baptismal font. We’d go down barefoot into the clear pool, rest our bodies against the elders’ arms, and let ourselves be slowly lowered, backward. We’d have to trust them, they’d warned us, or we’d flinch. We’d have to go limp, like dolls, or we might splash.

Despite our nerves, things went off without a hitch. The water was cool and clear and deep, and afterward, when I dried my hair, I could smell swimming pool chemicals on the towel. We gathered in a room with a buffet table and snacked on corn chips and cheese dip prepared by our new Mormon brothers and sisters, who offered their hands in welcome and gave us hugs. Mike kept his arm around Audrey, their faces glowing, and Joel was surrounded by a flock of girls in frilly blouses and long, old-fashioned skirts. Elder Jessup settled his hands on my shoulders and said, “When you’re on your own mission, remember this. This is the payoff: bringing in new souls. I swear, there’s no better feeling in the world.” He looked in my eyes and I looked into his, thinking back to our talks on preexistence and wondering why, if I’d known him before my birth, he seemed like such a stranger suddenly.

Mike started taking his Mormonism seriously. At church he made friends with a group of men his age who heated their homes with wood, owned diesel generators, and stockpiled Krugerrands in safe-deposit boxes. Though some of these men had higher-level jobs at major corporations in St. Paul, they didn’t let their families watch TV, and they traded books with titles like
Prepare!
and
Riding Out the Crash
. They attended gun shows and swap meets throughout the state, and Mike would come
home from these outings all fired up about our family’s potential for self-sufficiency.

“Living in town,” he said to me one night, “is like being on life support in a hospital. Sooner or later they’re going to pull the plug.”

“Why?”

“Because they can. To show their power.”

“What would it get them?”

“A terrible satisfaction.”

In anticipation of the time when nothing modern could be depended on, Mike began pulling plugs of his own. He moved our TV set out to the garage and fitted our thermostat with a governor that kept the house at a nippy sixty degrees. He kept the cassette deck and stereo receiver but threw out all but two of our tapes: the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s rendition of
The Man of La Mancha
and
A Nat King Cole Christmas
.

Audrey, who’d grown pious in her own way, tried to relieve our sense of deprivation by focusing Joel and me on mystical matters such as the power of prayer. Her enthusiasm was touching, but slightly frantic. Now that we had no TV to pass the evenings, we’d sit with her at the kitchen table listening to stories she’d heard at church concerning sudden cancer remissions and miraculous recoveries of long-lost valuables.

Her favorite story, which she told us twice, was of a young woman who learned that she was pregnant, had an abortion, and then regretted it. She spent a whole
weekend praying with the bishop, and a few months later gave birth to healthy twin girls. That Audrey, a nurse, could believe this story worried me.

“You’re saying the Heavenly Father restored her pregnancy?”

“The person who told me this story doesn’t lie,” she said.

“Maybe the girl didn’t really have an abortion.”

“The rational mind can’t handle it. I know.”

The more Mike got down to basics around the house, the deeper Audrey’s mysticism grew. The week he installed a basement backup generator, she brought home a book which purported to demonstrate, by assigning numerical values to the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, the divine perfection of the Bible. “ ‘Jehovah’ adds up to twelve,” she informed me. “So does ‘Jesus Christ’. An accident?” Armed with a pencil and a spiral notebook in which to record her cryptic calculations, she studied the book every morning after breakfast and by noon she’d be in a tizzy of speculation.

“I added our names up. My name comes to nine. Yours is seven. Mike’s is also seven. Nine plus seven plus seven is twenty-three. Two plus three equals five. And guess what five is?”

I shook my head.

“The word ‘family’ comes to five.”

“You left out a number for Joel.”

“He’s seven.”

“
I’m
seven.”

Audrey’s face fell. “You’re right. He’s six.” She scribbled something. “Give me a little time to readjust this.”

I began avoiding Audrey in order to escape such conversations. For the first time since I was eight or nine years old, I started spending time with Joel.

He’d grown into an interesting kid. Slim and strong after years of dieting, made confident by his successes at junior tennis, Joel was physically fearless. Nothing scared him. Along the river were cliffs that people dove from, and one afternoon Joel got a running start and jumped from the highest one as I watched and shuddered. Eighty feet down a canoe was gliding past. The paddler looked up. Joel plummeted toward him and the paddler screamed. Joel sliced the water just inches from the stern.

He didn’t resurface. A minute or two later he snuck up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder.

“I thought you were dead,” I said. “That really stunk.”

“I like it when people think I’m dead.”

“That’s sick.”

“It makes me feel all warm.”

Joel had grown mentally fearless, too. Despite Mike’s standing orders about our clothing—that Audrey was only to buy it from Sears and Penney’s and never pay extra for national brand names—Joel had amassed quite a wardrobe for himself by trading clothes with friends. One day, after locking his bedroom door, he gave me a fashion show.

“This pair’s for tennis. These are running shoes. I like Adidas because the leather’s soft. The polo shirts with the penguins are Monsanto, the alligators are Izod. Feel how thick.”

I stroked the fabric. “Don’t wear these in the house.”

“Don’t worry, I just like to look at them. To own them. Check these jeans out: Sergio Valente.”

He tried them on. It almost made me cry. The too-small jeans were threadbare in the seat.

“They’re designer,” Joel said. “I like designer things.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. They feel special. Nicer lines.”

Joel modeled the running shoes. They were huge on him. Though he was only three years younger than I was, I’d noticed that he and his classmates lived different lives than I had at their age. They styled their hair with gel. They wore real shorts instead of cut-off corduroys. And schoolwork that I would have gotten C’s for earned them A’s. They knew how to use computers.

Joel returned his treasures to their box, slid the box to the back of his closet, and draped a blanket over it.

“Come on. Let’s go watch TV in the garage,” he said. “I hooked up an extension cord.”

“What’s on?”

“I don’t care. Commercials. The commercials are better produced than half the shows.”

As we passed through the kitchen on our way outside,
Audrey said, “Hold on. This ought to interest you.” She was hunkered down at the table with her writing pad.

“I found out our family’s true number. I did the math. The numbers of our names make twenty-nine, and two plus nine is eleven.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, eleven—one plus one, that is—is two. So our number is two.”

“Is two significant?”

Audrey consulted the index of her book. Joel was already out the door. “Go on,” she said. “This book’s more complicated than I thought.”

On Wednesday nights, like Mormons across the country, we held Family Home Evening in the living room. Mike opened the church-written workbook on his lap while Audrey scooped strawberry ice cream into bowls. Since our conversion we’d turned into sugar fiends. All the Mormons I knew were sugar fiends.

That night’s topic was “Glories of the Temple.” We’d never been inside a Mormon temple. Before new converts were allowed this privilege, they had to put in a year of good behavior.

Mike quizzed us from the workbook: “Name and list the Utah temples. Justin?”

“Salt Lake City. Ogden. Logan … Manti?”

“Good,” Audrey said. “And one more.”

“St. George?”

Mike turned a page. “It’s your turn, Joel. Sit up.”

Joel stretched his arms and spread his fingers and yawned.

“Explain the meaning of the sealing ceremony.”

“Can’t remember. To keep people from dying?”

“You can do better than that.”

“I trashed my racket. I need a new Prince. A graphite.”

“Pardon me?”

“Listen, I’m pretty beat. Big match tomorrow. I think it has something to do with never dying.”

After Joel left, Mike made another suggestion for stripping down our lives. “That dryer in the basement just gobbles energy. Line-dried clothing smells fresher anyhow.”

“I like my washer,” Audrey said.

“I’m talking about the dryer. Just the dryer.”

“We could have both: a dryer
and
a line.”

Mike shook his head. “That’s overlap. Overlap’s what we’re trying to avoid here.”

The statement had a grim, definitive ring. The discussion halted and Audrey fetched more ice cream. I imagined her in the kitchen as she scooped, standing among her endangered gadgets and wondering what would go next. The toaster? The microwave? Week by week our house was emptying out, becoming less convenient and up-to-date. It was getting hard for me to tell what year it was.

When Family Home Evening resumed, Mike said, “I’m sorry. It’s all these other men. They wind me up. I’m going to try to spend less time with them. The washer and dryer can stay. They’re basic necessities.”

“You’re sure?” Audrey said. “I can try to do without.”

“You’d make that sacrifice?” Mike said. “For me?”

“I’d like to think I’d be doing it for God.”

I felt myself slowly falling out of the culture. Even at church, among other Mormon teens, I was at a disadvantage. We’d be in the sacrament room behind the chapel, tearing up slices of bread before the service, and someone would bring up that week’s Happy Days and quote their favorite gag. I wouldn’t know what they were talking about. I’d blank. And at youth dances, when a popular new song came on, everyone would rush onto the floor as if a switch had been flipped, while I’d hang back. At school, it seemed that all the jokes and wisecracks were based on catchphrases from TV commercials that I hadn’t seen.

It was worse for Joel. Mike caught onto his trick with the extension cord and locked the TV in his basement workshop, where Joel and I sometimes heard it through the floorboards tuned to the national news. Mike justified his news-watching by telling us how important it was to monitor the economy. Now and then Mike would report on some statistic—a rise in inflation,
a hike in interest rates—and warn us that America was on the brink.

Home became a scary place. One day, to get away, Joel and I swam to the sandbar in the river where kids from town liked to gather on hot days. Steve Hanson, a kid who’d graduated years ago but still hung out with students, was playing a radio.

“Turn it up,” Joel said. “I like that song. I never get to hear it anymore.”

The girl Steve was with was tanning on her stomach, paging through a beauty magazine. Joel read over her shoulder. The girl looked back at him. “There’s a whole stack in my beach bag. Be my guest.”