“It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass (4 page)

About the same time, God told Harmston to knock off the
informal meetings and start a church, a real church. He even told Harmston what
to name it:
The True and Living Church of
Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days.
Mercifully, God added that it was
OK to call it “the TLC,” short for “True and Living Church.”

Like Mormonism, the TLC was to have the same organization
that Jesus allegedly put together back in the day. At the helm was the “First
Presidency,” a trio reminiscent of Peter, James, and John. Harmston took the
role of Peter in, you could say, more ways than one. God bestowed the James and
John roles upon Harmston’s sons-in-law.

Second in authority to the First Presidency were the Twelve
Apostles. Through Harmston, God appointed Jeff to be the head apostle. Harmston
explained that the head apostle’s principal duty was to act in a missionary and
public relations role. Handsome, likable, and good on his feet, Jeff was the
ideal choice. I was proud. In a most humble way, of course.

Thus saith the Lord … inasmuch as you have inquired of
my hand to know and understand wherein I, the Lord, justified my servants
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as also Moses, David and Solomon, my servants, as
touching the principle and doctrine of their having many wives and concubines …
prepare thy heart to receive and obey the instructions which I am about to give
unto you; for all those who have this law revealed unto them must obey the same
… for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory.

—Doctrine and Covenants 132: 1-4

By the time Jeff and I bundled up the kids and moved to
Manti in 1993, I was both resigned to and enthused about polygamy. Resigned
because, delusions aside, the decision to share your husband doesn’t come
easily. Enthused because, having discussed the matter at length, Jeff and I
experienced inner promptings assuring us that polygamy was not just God’s will,
but God’s law. We believed that to attain the highest reward in the next life,
we had to be polygamists in this one.

To us the doctrine of polygamy was so sacred, so serious,
that we didn’t allow ourselves to joke about it. It would have been a
blasphemy. Not that wisecracks and dirty jokes didn’t readily come to mind. We
just pretended they didn’t.

Not all of the women in our group were as ready as I was to
invite additional wives to share their husbands. “I’m fine with it,” I enjoyed
assuring them, fantasizing that they admired my willingness to be the Handmaid
of the Lord.
Besides,
I thought but
wouldn’t admit aloud,
when a man sees
another woman on the sly, it’s disrespectful and deceitful, because the wife
has no control. But when he sees another woman with the full knowledge and
support of his wife, everything is aboveboard. It gives the wife control. It
accords her respect.

Or so I told myself. I conveniently overlooked the coercion
part, the part about how the Lord would destroy me if I didn’t cooperate. It
was kind of like telling yourself you had control over gravity and that you
were only staying earthbound out of choice.

The cool thing about being a First Wife, or “a Sarah” as we
called them, was that your husband couldn’t just show up and surprise you with
a new, hotter-than-thou sister-wife. Husband and First Wife were to work
together as a couple, a team, in choosing and recruiting. A husband was
required to obtain his First Wife’s permission before he could take additional
wives, and she maintained veto power over each of his choices. There was,
however, a Catch-22. A First Wife had those rights only if she didn’t exercise
them. Otherwise, she became “the transgressor.” Her husband was then “exempt
from the law of Sarah,” which meant he was free to proceed without her
permission. More than one man in our cult had availed himself of that canonized
caveat from the Doctrine and Covenants to abandon his family and start a harem
in Manti.

Harmston said that “helpmeet” as used in the Bible meant
“helping” prepare your husband to “meet” God. He wasn’t even close to right,
but then, Harmston the prophet felt no need to double-check his pronouncements
against biblical scholarship. The more wives and children a man had, Harmston
explained, the more ready that man would be to meet God. It was an attractive
deal for everyone, since in turn the man would drag his wives and children to
heaven along with him. I was eager to be a helpmeet, so Jeff and I prayed
together for God to reveal the women besides me whom Jeff should marry.

God is quite the prankster. Many of the First Wives in the
cult received divine revelations saying their husbands could only take on
plural wives who were fat, ugly, or both. I shopped for wives for Jeff the same
way I shopped for his clothes, with an eye toward choosing what I thought he’d
like.

A fellow female cult member who did much the same thing
admitted something insightful to me. Painfully aware that her husband didn’t
really love her, she sought to win his affection by generously recruiting hot
wives for him. “I thought if they were gorgeous, everything I’m not,” she said,
“maybe that would make him happy, make him appreciate me, make him love me for
giving them to him.” When I asked how that strategy was working out for her,
she said, “He’s too busy having sex with them to give me a second thought.”

Jeff and I prayed until God came through by bringing an
eligible woman to our attention. A man moving to Manti in search of plural
wives for himself had brought with him an attractive, single daughter not quite
20 years old. Jeff did not seem to find the prospect of bedding a pretty woman
who was 14 years younger than me the least bit off-putting. The more we
discussed her and prayed about her, the more we experienced tingly feelings.
Like the Mormons, we took tingles for a “burning in the bosom,” a sure sign
that the Holy Ghost was telling us to proceed. Never mind that a sumptuous pot
of chili induces tingles when you’re hungry enough. Considering the burning
sensation many men in our clan experienced when looking for additional wives, I
can say with authority that the bosom on men is located much lower than on
women.

Assured that God wanted this young woman to marry into our
family, we invited her father to one of many dinner bashes we enjoyed hosting
in our home. Jeff found an opportunity to pull the man aside from the 50 or so
guests milling about and ask for his daughter’s hand.

You just never know about that God, what with his mysterious
ways and all. After telling Jeff and me to recruit this man’s daughter, God
turned around and told the man to turn us down flat. The fellow was even
offended. Can you beat that? Offended.

I was confused. Revelations weren’t supposed to go awry. I
felt hurt, too. Rejected. Maybe she didn’t like me.

Not to worry. God was at work prompting Kenneth and Eleanor
to move from New Mexico to Manti, and to bring with them their breathtakingly
gorgeous daughters.

Even as a young man, Kenneth must have been a big part of
God’s plan, because God went to no small effort to get his attention. It seems
that in his infinite wisdom, God guided Kenneth’s car, with Kenneth at the
wheel, into a nasty collision. While Kenneth teetered at the brink of death in
a New Mexico hospital, God appeared to him in a vision and told him great
things lay ahead.

God has a flair for the dramatic. He could have skipped the
whole accident thing and simply shown up at Kenneth’s trailer—yes, they
lived in a trailer—for a nice, heart-to-heart, sit-down chat. But it
wouldn’t have been nearly as cool. Kind of like those old TV shows where George
Reeves as Superman burst through a wall to save Lois and Jimmy even though a
perfectly good door was right there.

Kenneth emerged from the hospital a religious man. Some 20
years later, he found himself checking out Harmston and the TLC. Liking what he
found, he prepared to move to Manti.

Kenneth was neither the most handsome nor thinnest fellow
you’d hope to meet. Yet he was instantly likable, which may explain how he
managed to get Eleanor, who looked a lot like Ann-Margaret, to marry him. Their
marriage led to three daughters, two of them traffic-stoppingly gorgeous. At 14
and 15, Katie and Lisa were supermodel material. They would have caused a
sensation anywhere. In small-town Manti they became instant rock stars.

Hold on. This isn’t the time to put down the book and go retch.
Unlike some cults, ours wasn’t into marrying 14 and 15-year-olds. Harmston’s
policy adhered to Utah law. In Utah it is legal to marry without parental
consent at 18. It is legal to marry at 16 or 17 only with written permission
from a legal guardian. To marry younger than that requires a guardian’s written
permission plus a court order.

Which meant that, at 17, Kenneth’s oldest daughter Judith
qualified as fair game.
Now
you may
put down the book and go retch. I’ll wait.

Judith didn’t cause the stir that her younger sisters
caused. Though pretty in her own right, her out-of-this-world, drop-dead
beautiful sisters clearly stole the show. Plus, Judith was a bit plump. Not
obese, mind you, but “a bit plump” is no advantage when your out-of-this-world,
drop-dead beautiful sisters happen to be shapely and svelte.

Still, Judith’s face was lovely. Personality-wise she was
bubbly, funny, and likable. She stood at a striking 5 feet, 9 inches tall and
was accessorized with enviably big boobs that preceded her everywhere.

Harmston’s wife Elaine saw Judith’s and my relative cup
sizes as part of God’s plan. She observed that if you averaged my
under-endowment with Judith’s over-endowment, we would each come out about
right. Marvelous, mysterious, and just are the ways of the Lord.

Perhaps to compensate for the plumpness thing, God gave
Judith a special power over Manti’s male hormones. To understand this uncanny
power, recall the Old Testament tale of Jacob and Rachel. Jacob loved Rachel.
He worked for her father for seven years to earn her hand, only to have her
father pull a fast one by making him marry Rachel’s older sister first. Jacob
was required to work another seven years before he could finally marry Rachel,
the woman he wanted in the first place.

The potential parallel was not lost on the libidos of the
Manti males. They speculated that marriage to Judith might a few years hence
provide an opportunity to marry Katie and Lisa. Knees wobbled at the thought.
Enduring a few years of intimate relations with a not unappealing older sister
did not seem too steep a price.

In the Old Testament, it’s clear that the older sister
wasn’t thrilled at being the price for marrying Rachel. Judith was no more
thrilled at the prospect of being the price for her own younger, hotter
sisters. She once asked me if Jeff’s interest in her had anything to do with
hopes of someday adding Lisa and Katie to his harem. “He might have thought
that at first, but he doesn’t now,” I lied. Judith nodded as if she believed
me.

Kenneth was receptive to our interest in Judith. On the day
we arrived in New Mexico to help the family move to Manti, Kenneth broached the
subject with her. A high school senior, Judith had just arrived home from
school. The proposal was hardly news, as Jeff and I had made overtures in her
presence for some time. But now it was official and out in the open.

Judith was all for it. She had been raised with the idea of
polygamy, so instead of thinking “This is gross,” she reacted like any giddy
bride-to-be: “Whee! I’m going to be married!”

As we drove back to Manti, Jeff asked, “What do you think?
Should we go through with it?”

“I guess so,” I said. We worried about how young Judith was.
But then,
someone
had to marry her.
She was a whopping 17 years old, not too many years from becoming an old maid.
Her height ruled out all but the cult’s tallest men. No one thought to ask why
a husband had to be taller than his wife; we took it as a given. Jeff was 6
feet, 6 inches tall, making him a good candidate. Jeff worried that none of the
other tall men in the cult would want her because of her few extra pounds. We
began to look upon marrying her as an act of duty and compassion.

With Kenneth, Eleanor, and their daughters newly installed
in Manti, Jeff began officially courting Judith. Except for the minor detail
that Jeff was already married to me, it was not unlike an old-fashioned
courtship. Jeff spent hours calling on her at Kenneth’s home. He and Judith
were rarely together alone. They were usually in the company of other family
members and neighbors.

I panicked one night when Jeff returned unduly late. I told
myself that I wasn’t jealous. Rather, I was afraid that he and Judith might
have gone “too far” and sinned. Our agreement was that Jeff would behave
himself until he and Judith were married in the sight of God. If they messed around
before that, it would be an affront to my rights as a First Wife. Which meant,
when you come right down to it, that I was jealous. As it turned out, Jeff had
been up late that night talking with Kenneth.

The time came for Jeff to make a formal proposal, engagement
ring and all. Kenneth approved and Judith accepted. Giddy with excitement,
Eleanor, Lisa, Katie, Judith, and I set to work planning a big wedding.
Outnumbered by Judith’s family, I felt overwhelmed and left out. We were
planning a party—and who doesn’t love a party?—and besides, I was
the First Wife, dammit. But First Wife or not, I was also a fifth wheel.

At last, on a sunny June day in 1994, our wedding party of
about 50 souls entered a barn and walked past the sheep and chickens to a door
hidden in the back. Behind the door, a stairway led upstairs to a large room we
had converted into what we called the Endowment House. The room sported
powder-blue carpet and a pine altar I had painted to look like marble. It was a
place set aside for rites too sacred to hold in an ordinary church building. It
was not, however, too sacred for occasional infestations of weevils from the
grain stored in the barn below.