The Lonely Polygamist (6 page)

The will to live, which had earlier deserted him, returned in short order. He was without food or reliable water, his boots were useless, and he would never make it back to civilization on foot. So, after piling a series of rock cairns to stake his mining claim, he built a makeshift raft out of driftwood lashed together with his bootlaces, belt, and scintillometer strap and pushed out into the churning Dirty Devil River. He clung to the makeshift contraption for twelve harrowing miles, grinding against canyon walls, bouncing off boulders, swamping in the rapids, foundering in the pools and shallows, until a rancher found him washed up on a sandbar.

The last page detailed the finale of this great adventure: after six months of attempting to excavate the mine himself, Royal Richards said what the heck and sold out for two million dollars to the Vanadium Corporation. On the opposite page was a picture of Golden’s daddy, looking handsome in a tuxedo, holding up a bubbling bottle of champagne and brandishing a cigar. Underneath it read:

ROYAL RICHARDS, TOGGED OUT IN DINNER JACKET, CELEBRATES HIS ASTOUNDING TURN OF FORTUNE!

Golden stood in the dim closet, dust motes swirling in his vision, unable to do anything but stare at the image of his father, who looked, amazingly, exactly like the man who had left eight years before and never returned. He put the glossy paper to his nose, hoping he might smell his father’s cologne.

Golden thought he heard a noise outside, maybe his mother coming up the outside stairs. He stuffed everything back into the cigar box and hobbled out into the living room, his breath suddenly coming out of him in gasps. He waited, but heard nothing else. He thought about stepping into the closet to have another look, to read all of the letters, to stare at the pictures again, but he was afraid if he went back into that closet he would take the wooden cigar box down from the high shelf and find it empty.

He went up to his room, took his place at the window. It’s what he always did when he didn’t know what else to do. For so long he had hated everything he could see from that window, the pathetic little square with its scrubby oak bushes and defunct fountain, surrounded by faded storefronts and cobbled streets crumbling at the edges and cratered with potholes, but now it all seemed alien, strangely beautiful: the fountain and its tattered coat of moss, the broken beer bottles glinting like treasure in the crabgrass, the old peckerwoods snoozing in the heat with their bright straw hats and multicolored suspenders, the leaves of the persimmon tree ticking in the breeze.

The idea rang in his head like a bell: his daddy was alive. His daddy was not only alive, but a hero, a millionaire, a man in a magazine. Everything, suddenly, seemed possible. He rested his chin on the windowsill.
I’m going to leave this place
, he thought, understanding for the first time why it all seemed so suddenly beautiful,
and I’m never coming back
.

W
HEN SHE STEPPED INTO THE VIRGIN COUNTY ACADEMY OF HAIR DESIGN,
the first thing she noticed was that the women inside—all five of them—wore western-style handkerchiefs around their faces like bandits. The second thing was the scorched-hair smell of a recently administered permanent, which explained the handkerchiefs. Nola, the establishment’s owner and sole licensed stylist, provided hankies spritzed with dime-store perfume to her customers when one of them received a perm.

“Anything,” she always said, “to keep my girls happy.”

Trish let the heavy glass door rattle shut behind her, and Nola, who was giving an unidentifiable middle-aged bandit a trim, pointed her scissors at Trish and said, “Stick ’em up, chicky! Your money or your life!”

Trish tried to laugh with the other ladies but fumes caught in her throat and she gagged.

“Oh come on,” said a flap-eared crone baking under one of the hair dryers, “somebody get her a hankie before she kilts over on us.”

Rose-of-Sharon, who was behind the counter studying needlepoint samplers, padded across the tiled floor to a drawer on the other side of the room, pulled out a blue cotton handkerchief, spritzed it with a faux-crystal decanter of Night Passion—a perfume that smelled to Trish like something they might use in a funeral home to improve the odor of a corpse—and carefully, almost tenderly, tied it around Trish’s nose and mouth.

It was only the second time she’d been in here during the past year and it looked like nothing had changed, not even the identical pair of old ladies with identical perms flipping through old seed catalogs. There were still the ancient Christmas cards and wedding announcements taped to the cracked mirror, the three naugahyde barber chairs in a row next to the black bakelite shampoo sink, the series of white styrofoam heads on a shelf, some of which sported wigs, some of which had gone bald, one of which gazed mysteriously down upon the room through a pair of false eyelashes.

Nola had been running this place for years, even before she became Golden’s second wife. She had taken a keen interest in hair at age fifteen when she permanently lost all of her own. Her father, a man who managed to support three wives and eighteen children on a bricklayer’s pay, couldn’t afford the extravagance of a wig, so Nola had saved up her egg money and bought a book called
The Wigmaker’s Art.
With hair donated by her sisters, she practiced making her own extensions, weaves and full-wefted caps, all of which she sold as fast as she could make them. She learned a dozen different styles, even tried her hand at toupees and hairpieces, which turned old bald cowboys into screen idols overnight. The more wigs she made, the more hair she required, and so she began making house calls, offering a cut-and-style free of charge. Plural wives who had not cut their hair in their entire lives were suddenly jumping at the chance to be shorn at the skilled hands of Nola Harrison. Because Nola was engaged in a good cause—there was a significant number of women who had lost their hair to cancer or radiation poisoning or simple old age and needed a good wig—the priesthood council could make only feeble protests.
As long as the hairstyles stay modest, none of them Marilyn Monroe haircuts or dye jobs, and the women don’t get into shenanigans like getting their nails painted, then I guess we can go along with it
. Within a year Nola saved enough money to lease the old Anderson Building, which at one time had been the Tender Brothers Drugstore and Café. She dreamed of teaching other women from the valley to cut hair and make wigs, but it turned out she was the only hairstylist and wigmaker this part of the valley needed. Though the academy had never produced a single graduate, it provided, on Tuesdays and Thursdays and an occasional Saturday afternoon, a place where the town women could get a perm, where the plural wives could get a trim or shampoo, where any woman at wits’ end could go to get a break from the incessant demands of children and men.

“Oh, we’re a bunch of desperadoes, all right,” Nola said now, her eyes as bright as brass tacks above her red bandana, her scissors going
snick snick snick
, the hammock of fat under her arm quivering. “But we do like to smell pretty.”

Trish sat in one of the folding chairs along the wall to wait her turn. Next to her, a pile of old magazines a foot high threatened to slide to the floor. She flipped through a finger-worn copy of
Life
and wondered if a poisonous cloud of hair chemicals might be preferable to a handkerchief soaked with cathouse perfume. She’d come in wanting only a shampoo and trim for her big night tonight, maybe catch up on a little gossip, but now she felt on the verge of vomiting or passing out or both.

Doing her best to breathe through her mouth, she shuffled through several more magazines until she came upon something unexpected: a
Cosmopolitan
whose cover featured a heavily made-up woman in ultra-tight tennis shorts and halter top standing in the face of a stiff breeze. Next to her head of feathered, windblown hair was the headline:

OBSESSED WITH YOUR BREASTS?

HOW TO DEAL WITH THOSE FEELINGS

And below that:

THE CRUEL LOVER: WHY ARE YOU

DRAWN TO HIM? HOW TO FREE YOURSELF

FROM HIS DEVASTATING ATTRACTION

She wondered how long it had been since she’d seen a magazine like this, and how could such a thing have managed to end up in Nola’s reading pile? Flushed with adolescent guilt, she turned the pages filled with underwear advertisements: women in bra and panties having lunch, wearing fur coats, conducting board meetings, gazing thoughtfully out of windows. There was an article called “Alternatives to Bikini Waxing” and a column about the misunderstood affliction known as nymphomania.

Along with the illicit thrill of reading about the newest Cleavage Enhancement Brassiere and the woman from Ohio who claimed to have sex thirty to forty times a week, she felt an unexpected longing for the life she had left behind, the life in which reading a magazine like this wouldn’t have caused her a moment of shame, a life where Cleavage Enhancements and bikini waxes were an option if not a necessity, a life she thought she had given up on forever.

She paused at one of the feature articles titled “Advanced Lovemaking Techniques For the Rest of Us.” Wearing the casual expression of somebody checking out the newest advances in Tupperware technology in
Family Circle
, she read:

She felt a touch on her shoulder and nearly leapt sideways off her chair. Rose-of-Sharon was already backing up, saying, “Oh dear, I didn’t mean, I just wanted to—” She squeezed her hands against her breastbone, her shoulders braced in an apologetic hunch. She was a woman, Trish thought, who might have been pretty if she didn’t look scared to death fifty minutes out of every hour. Trish stood, slipped the
Cosmo
under an old
National Geographic
, and took Rose-of-Sharon by the wrists to calm her. When Trish first met her, Rose seemed shy, unsure of herself in a charming country-girl sort of way, but over the past year her nervousness had come to seem almost pathological—she avoided eye contact, had difficulty finishing a sentence, went skittish around anyone but her sister and her children, framed every conversation in terms of apology and regret. A few years before Trish joined the family, Rose had spent six weeks in a hospital after a nervous breakdown, and while no one spoke about it openly, there was a worry among Golden and the other wives that she might be headed down that path again. Even as Rose grew pale and unsure and small, her sister widened at the waist, added new hips and busts and stomachs, became even more bombastic and full of color, telling jokes, teasing anyone who happened into her sights, yelping with please-don’t-kill-me laughter.

“I was wondering if you wanted a shampoo,” Rose-of-Sharon said in her choked little powder-soft voice. “I can do it, if you want. But if you want Nola to do it…”

“Oh no!” Trish said. “Of course. A shampoo. Thank you. That would be lovely.” She practically had to drag Rose-of-Sharon over to the shampoo sink, where she sat back in a swivel chair and placed her neck in the sunken lip, thinking, for some reason, of some famous person she’d read about—was it Sir Thomas More or maybe Louis XVI?—who had asked to be positioned in the guillotine with his face toward heaven so he could meet his doom head-on.

While Rose-of-Sharon wetted down her hair, Trish kept up a stream of questions to keep her sister-wife comfortable.
How were the kids? Who was looking after the younger ones while she was here at the academy? Had Sybil gotten over her flu?
But once Rose-of-Sharon began to massage the shampoo into Trish’s hair, the questions dropped off and Rose’s answers—if there were any—lost themselves to the gurgling of the spigot, the pleasure of the warm water, the peppermint scent of the shampoo, the soft and steady pressure of Rose’s massaging fingertips. For a moment she felt luxuriously alone in her pleasure, the crackling of shampoo suds in her ears blocking out every other sound, her eyes closed to the unforgiving brilliance of midday light slanting in from the window, and the phrase
advanced lovemaking
slipped into her mind, and
full-fledged sex
, and she began to feel oddly relaxed and aroused, a tingling at her chest and inside her thighs, and then she heard a faraway voice:

“…going to Cedar City tonight?”

“What?” Trish sat up a little, the tingling blood in her chest moving quickly up her neck and into her cheeks.

“Oh. No. I was just—I was just wondering if you knew about my Pauline’s recital? In Cedar City? Tonight?”

Blinking, Trish craned her neck to look Rose in the eye. A second ago she had barely been able to formulate one-word answers to Trish’s questions, and now she was engaging in what sounded suspiciously like idle chatter. “Yes,” she said, settling back in. “Beverly mentioned it.” She closed her eyes, hoping that would end the conversation once and for all.

Rose-of-Sharon’s hands were still in her hair, but instead of moving across her scalp with a soft kneading motion as before, they had begun to tremble. Trish opened her eyes again and caught Nola and Rose exchanging a look—Nola’s encouraging and Rose’s full of doubt—and she realized with a start what was going on. This was not an innocent shampoo-and-rinse, a nice moment between sister-wives. Rose-of-Sharon, her shy, sweet sister-wife, had maneuvered her into this compromising position to ask Trish to give up her night with Golden—her first night with him in over two weeks—so he could accompany Rose-of-Sharon to her daughter’s recital in Cedar City, so they could stay together in a hotel and sleep in a hotel bed with everything that implied, and eat at a restaurant and have a fine old time while Trish sat at home, alone, throttled with jealousy and loneliness.

This, to put it impolitely, was an ambush.

Not that long ago Trish wouldn’t have minded so much. It was normal for the wives to barter and trade their time with their husband, and Trish, a fourth wife with nothing but her goodwill to offer, was always ready to give in, to make allowances. Generosity. Selflessness. Lovingkindness. These were, as the women so often reminded each other, a large part of what living the Principle was about. But not tonight. She hadn’t been alone with Golden in two weeks, had hardly seen him at all during that time, and though she didn’t like to admit it, she missed him so greedily, was so hungry for him that she wanted nothing more than to attach herself to him like a feral cat.

She had begun at five this morning with a preliminary shower, plucking the two rogue hairs from her chin, taking a pumice stone to her elbows and feet, and finishing up with a regimen of lotions and leave-in conditioner that made her feel like she’d been dipped in lard. Then she moved on to the house: scrubbed the walls and floors spotless, washed and hung out the sheets, vacuumed and dusted. When she couldn’t stand to be inside a second longer she had come to town for groceries and a hairdo, all for
him
, for her rumpled Golden, as if he were some kind of visiting dignitary instead of a graying construction contractor with a limp who had three pairs of shoes to his name and demonstrated a persistent inability to keep track of his own wallet.

It amazed her still how quickly, how easily, she had fallen for this man. She had arrived in Virgin a damaged, frightened girl, and though she came with firsthand knowledge of the complications and drawbacks of plural marriage, something in Golden’s shy, deferential manner had disarmed her. He represented everything she needed: acceptance, forgiveness, a safe place to land. She loved the soft touch of his large hands, his bright, prominent teeth, the way he paused meaningfully before he spoke, as if each thought were as important as the next. And it didn’t hurt that when they first kissed, on a warm fall night in the front seat of the hearse, the moon rising hoary and gold over the far peaks, she felt a sharp little tug in her soul.

Before Trish married into the family, Golden’s rotation schedule was simple: three nights a week at Old House, four nights at Big House. But things got complicated when Trish moved into her own place—a two-bedroom duplex at the northern edge of the valley—and suddenly there didn’t seem to be enough days in the week to accommodate everyone. They managed with the help of a calendar, a chalkboard overlaid with a grid, and a calculator (which they used to figure out the ratio of Golden’s time with each wife in direct relation to the number of children that belonged to her), until these last couple of years Golden began working at distant job sites, spending four or five nights a week away from home, and his schedule became so unpredictable a grand council of the world’s greatest logistical minds couldn’t have come up with a schedule that made any sense or satisfied everyone. Every Sunday they met for what had come to be known as the Summit of the Wives, in which each wife made her case for the week, claiming Golden for an anniversary or a birthday, a teacher’s meeting or 4-H show.