The Moth (32 page)

So I got a job, then another, then a third: three shifts, three restaurants, six days a week. That would show them, I thought. But they weren’t watching. I wrote them letters, lots of letters, about nothing: It’s Tuesday, and it’s hot; my new roommate is named Cathy; my friends took me out for my birthday yesterday. They didn’t write back.

Living, for me, sort of ground to a halt despite the fact that my life just went on and on. I didn’t think about my future. I didn’t think about my needs. I didn’t think about my sadness. I didn’t have to, because I had Hope, every day, whispering in my ear:
Don’t give up, don’t walk away, you’re almost there. Don’t grow, don’t develop. Don’t make any sudden movements or you’ll never get them back!

Six years went by like this without a word from them. Finally, hurt and confused beyond my ability to hold it in, and frankly finding it difficult to maintain the illusion that this was temporary, I decided to make one last attempt to force the issue. I flew home and showed up, unannounced, at my mother’s office.

It was an amazing visit.

I asked the receptionist to page my mother and tell her that she had a surprise visitor. Then I stood in the lobby and watched as my mom walked down this long hallway toward me. Halfway down the hall she looked up, she saw me, then recognized who I was, then turned and walked away again. It was an amazing ninety-second visit.

Two and a half weeks later, a black funeral wreath was delivered to me at my office with a note that read, “In memory of our son.” Clearly it was time to give up Hope and take up therapy.

I talked to a counselor who asked me why I had “invited this turmoil into my life.” I talked to a minister who suggested a Christian Youth Camp. I talked to a lesbian who offered to slash my mother’s tires if I’d pay for her flight there. I signed up for scream therapy where I beat pillows with a tennis racket and screamed obscenities—and tore my rotator cuff. Mostly I talked to friends. Mostly the pain persisted.

The sheer weight of it threatened to crush me, or at least that’s how it felt. Since it was my constant companion, I spent most of my time turning it over in my mind, fingering it like some sort of psychological worry stone. Over the years it’s been eroded by so much handling. All that remains now is a small, hard, nearly weightless pebble, really. Worn away is most of the anger and much of the hurt, yet one question remains: how is it my parents taught me love and loyalty in excess of what they, themselves, possessed?

I have come to believe that it’s not possible to understand what they did. Not possible for me, anyway. To understand it would mean there was some justification for it, and I know for certain that there is not.

Still, there is no escaping my parents. This thing they did, this extreme and unfathomable and many-layered thing they did, tore a hole in the middle of my life. I have spent years, and a lot of money, darning that hole while trying to keep the rest of my world from unraveling.

And yet their influence on me is enduring. My parents loved
me, terribly. I have been courageous in the face of bullies. I now know there is such a thing as too much patience, but no such thing as too much forgiveness. And love? Love has seen me through every misfortune.

Jeffery Rudell
is a graphic designer and writer. His work has appeared in window displays, magazines, and advertisements. His wide-ranging clients include Tiffany & Company, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. He is also the author of three books of paper crafts. As a writer, his stories have been featured on NPR’s
All Things Considered
, the National Storytelling Tour, and on stages from the New York Public Library in New York to the Newseum in Washington, DC. In 2005 he was a candidate on the television show
The Apprentice: Martha Stewart
. He did not win. He lives in New York City with his partner, Albert. More information at jeffrudell.com.

ELNA BAKER

S
o I am twenty-four years old, and I’ve never had sex. I also don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t do drugs, and I don’t drink coffee.

I’m a Mormon.

And I’ve lived in New York City for six years as a Mormon, and it is hard to be a Mormon here if you don’t drink or if you don’t do drugs, but it is especially hard to live in New York City if you don’t have sex. Because I’m young and I wanna have relationships, and I wanna play too and like, date and stuff. But unfortunately, because I don’t have sex, the longest relationship I’ve ever been able to sustain is four weeks… and that was only because for two of them he was out of town.

There’s this huge part of me that wants to be considered sexy. But if you’re not selling sex, you really shouldn’t advertise, and so I don’t really ever get to come across as sexy. But one time I was at this vintage boutique, and I came across this 1940s slip. It was dark navy blue—lacy at the top and then silk—and it was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. I tried it on, and
I looked in the mirror, and I thought,
Oh my gosh! I am sexy! Wow! Who knew I could be sexy?

And so I bought it. I took it home, and I put it in a drawer, and no guy has ever seen me in it. But occasionally late at night I’ll try it on and look in the mirror and think,
I’m sexy!

And I know that Mormons are notorious for saying no to things, and you would think as a person who says no to a lot of things, I wouldn’t be any fun. But while I say no to some things, I try to say yes to everything else, which makes me a really enjoyable person.

I learned the power of saying yes when I was going to NYU. They used to have these career fairs, and I was a drama student, so they wouldn’t even set up booths for us. But for all the business school students, they had tons and tons of booths with the coolest trinkets they would give away. And I discovered that if I said yes to all the questions they asked, I could get presents.

They would ask, “Are you a Stern student?”

“Yes.”

“Are you interested in a job at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter?”

“Yes.”

And if I answered yes enough, I would get a cool triangle highlighter with three different colors. And I know that technically that’s lying, and Mormons aren’t supposed to lie by any means, but I figure I do everything else right so I can do that.

And then another time I was walking by the Javits Center and someone said, “Are you looking for the paper convention?”

And I immediately was like, “Yes!” I walked in and there were all these booths, and I just said yes to everything people asked me, and I left with a bag full of amazing stationery. I thought,
This is awesome!

It all led up to the mother of all conventions. I had some
friends in town at the Marriott, and we had breakfast. I glanced under the table and saw a badge, and it said, “Bob Barnett, 7-Eleven Convention.”

And I was like, “YES!” So I put the badge on, and we went down to this banquet hall, and they were celebrating seventy-five years of 7-Eleven. So I start mingling with people. I’m making friends, taking free samples. And I end up meeting the woman who’s running the whole convention. And I was like, “I go to conventions all the time, and this is so well organized.”

And she said, “Did you need tickets for today’s events?”

And I said, “Yes.” And so she gave me four tickets to Madame Tussauds, four tickets on a bus tour, four tickets to Radio City Music Hall, and then she said, “Will I be seeing you on tonight’s cruise?”

And I said, “Yes, but, you know, I sent all that stuff in, and they never mailed me anything back.”

And she was like, “What?!” And she ran off and came back with four tickets worth $150 each on a dinner cruise around Manhattan.

So that night I got all dressed up, and me and my three friends went on this cruise. It was fifteen hundred 7-Eleven employees and us. And we start mingling. We dance. We get going in karaoke. And then they serve this four-course meal. And at the end of dinner my friend turns to me, and he says, “Elna, I dare you to make a toast.” I don’t even drink, so I’ve never made a toast before, but I’ve seen movies, so I took a knife, and I was like,
tink-tink-tink
on my glass. Everybody shut up, and I said, “I’d like to make a toast to 7-Eleven for redefining convenience.” And they cheered.

And the thing that I love so much about saying yes is that where you start at the beginning of the day and where you end
up can be two totally different places based on all the things that you say yes to.

But then there’s this other side of my life, which is that I do say no to a lot of things. And with sex, the thing I’ve learned is it’s one thing to say no to having sex with someone you’ve dated for two weeks. It’s actually pretty easy ’cause for me that would be kinda slutty to just say yes after two weeks.

But it’s a whole other experience to say no to having sex with someone when you feel like you’re in love. I met my yes counterpart a year ago, and his name was Nick. And when I met him, immediately I was like, “You!” And he was like, “You!” And we were like, “YESSSS!”

Our first date was amazing. We were walking by a movie set, and we decided to sneak on and pretend we were extras. And so we were extras in the back of all these scenes, and we ended up in the makeup department. And they asked us what we needed, and at the same time we both said, “Black eyes!” So they gave us these huge black eyes, and we spent the rest of the day going around New York City with black eyes.

We had so much fun. We just kept going on adventures. And we were dating. I didn’t tell him I was Mormon, ’cause I thought,
You know what? In addition to being Mormon, I am a lot of other things.
But I really, truthfully didn’t wanna tell him I was Mormon because I wanted to get to date him, and I knew that it probably wouldn’t work out if he knew I was Mormon.

And so as casually as you can bring that up, a couple of weeks into dating him I said, “Oh, by the way… I’m Mormon.”

And he was like, “Oh, um… I’m an atheist. Can you be with an atheist?”

And I was like, “Yes. Can you be with a Mormon?”

And he said, “Yes.” So we kept dating. And we kept going on
adventures, and it was really, really wonderful. But then there were these grander things than we were that kept interfering, as much as we tried to ignore them. And I remember one of the bigger ones was when I found out he didn’t believe people had souls.

I was like, “What? What!?!? Doesn’t everyone believe that? I mean, religious or not, doesn’t
everyone
believe people have souls?”

And he said, “No. I don’t believe people have souls.” I grabbed him by the shoulders, and I looked him in the eyes, and he was like, “What are you doing?”

I said, “I’m looking at your soul. I can see it. I can hear it. I know it’s there.”

And he was like, “Really? And what does my soul have to say?”

And I listened really close and said, “It says…‘Fuck you. I’ve been inside you for twenty-nine years, and you’ve been ignoring me the entire time. Argh!’ ”

So we kept dating, even though at this point I realized my soul mate didn’t actually believe in souls. But I was willing to be okay with that. And then the sex thing came up, and he asked, “Are we gonna have sex?”

And I said, “No.” And then he did that thing where like, he started to pull away. And I could tell he was starting to phase me out. It’s so interesting because every girl knows when a guy starts to phase her out, even if it’s just a coincidence that he didn’t pick up his phone. You feel it and you know. And so I started thinking,
Why would he wanna phase me out? It’s because I’m Mormon and it’s because I won’t have sex.

And then I started thinking,
What if he’s the love of my life, and I end up marrying a Mormon guy that I like okay, and I spend the rest of my life regretting this decision? What if he’s right, and
what if God doesn’t exist, and then I’m making this sacrifice for this totally imaginary reason.

And then I started thinking about sex, and how when you’re in love sex is totally different. It almost feels like a natural progression of things. And I thought,
You know, maybe I could have sex.

And then we went out again, and I sensed it was one of the last times we would get to go out with each other. We were supposed to go to this outdoor exhibit, but it got rained out, so we ended up back at my apartment. It was the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday. We made grilled cheese sandwiches and put on a movie. I was still wet from the rain, so I said, “I’m just gonna change into something else.”

I walked into my bedroom. I was just gonna put a T-shirt on. I opened the drawer, and I saw that blue slip. And I thought,
What if I put that on?
I was like,
Why would you do that? It’s the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday.
I thought,
Well, I own that, and I’ve never worn it. And what is this sex thing? I can do that. I can say yes to having sex.

And what I love about saying yes is when you do say yes, everything can change. And so I took that slip out, and I put it on. And I walked into the living room, and he said, “What are you trying to do to me?” And I was like, “Shh.” And we started kissing. And we lay down on the couch. And the moment was building, and we were kissing. And I leaned into his ear, and I heard myself say, “You need to pray and find out if God exists.”

And he was like, “What?”

So I was like, “Never mind.” And we started kissing again. And the moment started to build again. And it was all going well again. And it happened again. I leaned to his ear, and I heard myself say, “How can you know if God exists unless you’ve prayed?”

And he was like, “WHAT?!?!”

And I thought,
What am I doing?! All I wanna do is have sex right now, and instead I have God Tourette’s syndrome!

And he sat up, and I sat up, and he asked, “What are you trying to say?”

And I said, “Well, it’s just the only reason I believe in God is because I prayed, and I asked, and I got an answer. And so all these choices that I make are a result of that feeling.”

And he asked, “Do you want me to pray?”