The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir (16 page)

And then, I saw him behind two Asian women; holding a red umbrella, he looked up at me and smiled. I panicked.
What do I do? Do we kiss, do we say hello, do we acknowledge we like each other, do we shake hands . . . ?
Christian walked up to me, placed his hand on my lower back, gently pulled me into him, and kissed me like I always thought lovers would kiss. Softly, confidently, like a declaration.

The euphoria set in. We kissed on the subway platform, we kissed on the train, we kissed walking across the parking lot into the Home Depot. We kissed in the nuts-and-bolts aisle. We entered a display shower, shut the faded glass door behind us; he pressed me up against the wall and we KISSED.

And it was just kissing. Christian didn’t try to fondle me, or get dirty, which I took as a great sign. The night of our first kiss I’d told him that I was Mormon and that I didn’t have premarital sex. His response astonished me. “That’s so refreshing,” he said. “My last relationship was entirely based on sex; it’d be nice to have something where sex wasn’t part of the equation.”

I decided to hear the second part of the sentence, and not the first. It was a personal triumph, in my mind. I’d stood up for my religion, and he respected that and now we could have an entire relationship based on kissing. And I cannot tell you how happy that made me.

So happy, I just kept kissing him. We kissed while looking at saws in aisle ten, we kissed in line, and then Christian, his arms wrapped around my waist, said, “So even if you fall in love, you still won’t have sex?”

He said it lightly like he was saying something normal and uninteresting, like “Kellogg’s is a great brand of cereal.” But I understood what he was really asking.

It took me a moment to answer. “No,” I said, “I won’t have sex. Not even if I fall in love.”

“Cool,” was his response, and he kept his arm around my waist, which I thought was a good sign. It turned out not to be so “cool.”

From that moment on it was like I saw our date in rewind, Christian was backing up, pulling away, we were kissing in aisle ten, then in the display shower, then nuts-and-bolts, then the parking lot, the subway, the platform, the corner of Forty-second and Fifth, and then he was walking backward and away from me. Holding his red umbrella, he disappeared behind the two Asian women. Soon he was out of sight. (They were really tall Asian women.)

The Object of My Disaffection

Learning how to kiss opened the floodgates for me. During the months of June, July, and August, I went out almost every night and got attention from men who wouldn’t have given me the time of day six months earlier. When you do this enough, it feels necessary. The more men that liked me, the more it proved that the change was real. But like with Christian, each encounter was brief. I wanted to experience true love, but because I was “waiting,” the longest relationship I was able to sustain was four weeks—and that’s only because for two of those weeks, the guy was out of town.

To compensate for this repeated rejection, I took up kissing with vigor. Kissing a new man every other night was almost like having a boyfriend. Only, the attention was addicting. If a tree is pretty in the woods and no one tells it that it’s pretty, is it still pretty?

After a summer of flings, I flew to Seattle to visit my grandparents.

“You look so amazing, we’re so happy for you—” my grandmother began.

“Enough small talk.” I cut her off and headed straight for the closet.
The sacred dress
. I wanted to get into that thing now.

My grandmother lifted it out of her closet and handed it to me. I slid it over my head and zipped it up. It fit like a glove. My grandfather, who had carried that fabric all through the war, looked at me and started to cry. And my grandmother turned to me and said she wanted to give me this dress as a gift because she was so proud of me for losing all the weight.

I turned to look at myself in the mirror, and for the first time since going on the diet, I stood still and let all of my hard work sink in. I didn’t need men to kiss me in order to prove that the transformation was real. It was real.

 

I headed back to New York City the following day, the dress tucked neatly in my luggage. And that’s when I remembered my daydream:
I’m all grown up
I thought.
I have the dress, I’m finally beautiful. Where’s Brian Egbert, the most popular guy in first grade?

Brian was living in Washington State, and he had a kid. And high school, or any system where I could enter and prove my popularity, was long gone.
But wait,
I thought,
what about the Mormon singles ward?

I stopped going to singles activities two years earlier. But I thought,
I bet my new body will get me new attention.
And it wasn’t just that. There’s something I haven’t shared with you about my religion that might illuminate some of my choices: When I was fourteen I went to a Mormon patriarch to receive a blessing. This is a tradition unique to Mormonism, and you can only do it once in your life. The patriarch, an old man I’d never seen before and never saw again, put his hands on my head and said a prayer in which he described my future. This blessing was later transcribed into a two-page letter and mailed to me. It sounds creepy but it was actually pretty cool, like Keanu Reeves visiting the oracle in
The Matrix
.

Over the years I’ve reread my patriarchal blessing at least a hundred times. It describes the life God intends for me, and it says that this life is not a guarantee; it’s predicated upon my choices. I like it because it feels unique to me and at the same time it’s obscure enough to be loosely interpreted. It does, however, say one thing that allows no room for interpretation. It says that I will marry a Mormon man who loves me dearly and that we will be married hand-in-hand in a Mormon temple and sealed for time and all eternity.

I’d think about this line every time I was in a relationship with a non-Mormon.
Am I going against my fate? Am I forfeiting the ideal future that God has in store for me?
Dating outside my faith was something I did for the fun of it, but I understood it couldn’t lead to anything. I figured, best-case scenario, I’d find a Mormon who I liked and this would align my will with God’s will for me. Which is why, in spite of my resistance, I went to Mormon singles activities, and ended up at the Halloween dance every year. I was supposed to marry a Mormon man. . . . I’d resigned myself to this fate.

 

And so, with my tail between my legs, I went back to the New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, for the sixth time in a row.

Only, when I got there, the same scenario kept repeating itself: A guy would spot me in the corner and his face would light up with what looked like genuine interest. He’d start walking in my direction. As he approached, my mind would go a million miles a minute:
Maybe I was right, maybe this year will be different, maybe I will meet the one!

And then, five feet from me, he would begin to drag his feet, and in his eyes I’d see what could only be recognition. “Wait”—he’d process it—“isn’t that Elna Baker?”

He’d shimmy backward and bolt in another direction, like a car making a three-point turn.

Think positive Elna, think positive.
I surveyed the pathetic scene. A man lingering near the doorway was wearing a baby suit with a bib saying,
Got Milk?
Two other men were dressed as competing kissing booths, each with a sign advertising a
twenty-five-cent kiss,
instead of a more accurate slogan:
undersexed and overage.

I was halfway out the door when the most beautiful Mormon man I’d ever seen up close walked in.

His name was Brady. He was a recent addition to the uptown ward and he was by far the hottest male to ever frequent the Mormon singles scene. The music stopped, the disco ball exploded, and the women lost their shit. Myself included. I spent the rest of the night dreaming that this beautiful stranger would be mine.

Within a week, I was attending every single church activity. After three weeks, I exchanged actual words with Brady at a combined ward Linger Longer. (Every first Sunday of the month the church activities committee will set up refreshments for the congregation to eat after church services. They like to call this a “Linger Longer” or “Munch and Mingle” or a “Chat and Chew.” It’s all about the alliteration. If it were called “come and eat and talk,” people wouldn’t know what to do.)

At every activity, all Brady had to do for attention was enter a room. He pivoted from side to side while women introduced themselves, brought him dessert, and laughed too loudly at whatever he happened to say. They were baking him cookies and breaking their faucets for Brady to fix. Flirting in a way only Christian girls know how to do. That night at the Linger Longer, I watched them watch us, and that’s when it hit me.
Brady is the Prom King and if he chooses me—I’m the Prom Queen.

He would be mine. But while I was quickly become a kissing connoisseur, I’d never really dated anyone. I couldn’t compete with these women. And by these women I mean one woman in particular: Amber Cunningham.

I hate Amber Cunningham. I completely utterly hate Amber Cunningham. For the record, the girl I’ve chosen to call Amber Cunningham isn’t actually named Amber Cunningham. Her real name is Eliza. And before Eliza she was Ashley, and before Ashley she was Jamie, and before Jamie she was Kelsey—my first archnem esis at church, dating all the way back to church primary school. If this were a biblical story it would go like this: Kelsey begat Jamie who begat Ashley who begat Eliza who begat Amber Cunningham. I lump these women into one because I resent them for the same reason: They’re crazy dogmatic Christians on a quest to find celestial popularity. An Amber is like a Heather only she’s attacking your spiritual worthiness and your dress size at the same time.

Our first encounter was in primary. We were in the same Sunday school class and as long as we were being reverent, our teacher let us play outside after church. One Sunday, Amber gathered a group of kids around her.

“Someone here hates me,” she said. “It’s not Christlike.”

“Who is it?” we all asked.

“Elna.”

Huh?
My mouth dropped open. All the kids turned to face me.

“I don’t hate you, Amber,” I insisted. “I like you.”

“That’s a lie,” Amber said. “You glared at me.”

“It was the sun,” I pleaded with her. “Sometimes I squint my eyes in the sun.”

“If you are on the Lord’s side,” she said, “you will be my friend. If you are a follower of the dark angel, Satan himself, you will be friends with Elna.” In retrospect it is easy to see that this sort of illogic can land you in a lot of trouble, like a war in Iraq. But to a second grader it was devastating. Naturally, Amber won this imaginary war in heaven.

It wasn’t until returning to the States from living abroad that I encountered the remaining Amber Cunninghams. In the nine years I’ve been in the singles ward I’ve cycled through many Ambers. It’s supposed to be a place where I go to receive spiritual enlightenment. Unfortunately, church is often a battlefield.

Since most Mormons believe you need to be married to make it into the highest level of heaven, every member of the congregation is operating with the same agenda:
If I don’t get married to one of these people, I limit my eternal progress
. Only there’s a major problem with this setup. In Manhattan, and in the Mormon community in general, there are far more women than men. If you do the math, it doesn’t add up—at least one third of the women won’t get a Mormon marriage. There’s nothing a Mormon woman will not do for a handsome returned missionary. Add Amber Cunningham into this mix and my only advice is,
Step out of the way
. I repeat,
Get the fuck out of the way.

At church, Amber’s goal is to make all the other women feel bad about themselves. This way, when a new attractive guy moves in, Amber can easily move in for the kill, having already reduced the remaining female members of the ward into gibbering neurotics.
That’s an interesting outfit?
She’ll say, or
I noticed you didn’t take the sacrament today; is it because you’re not worthy?