The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir (31 page)

She drove me up the canyon to Park City and paid for a day at the spa. I was too out of it to really enjoy myself, but I will always be grateful for the gesture of kindness. As we drove back down the canyon I stared out the window at the rocks, and the melting snow, and thought,
I am at a crossroads right now, and rarely does one get to be at a crossroads and realize it.
I focused on what it felt like.
Ha,
I laughed, it was the same feeling I’d once loved, the state of being between unlimited possibility and reality.
In an hour I will go to Hayes’s house, knock on his door, and find out if I’m going to get married in a Mormon temple. Or in an hour Hayes will break up with me and I’ ll be right back in the middle of the unknown.
As scary as it was, I wanted the unknown. To me, not knowing was living.

Hayes broke up with me an hour later. In spite of my realization that this was what I wanted, I took it very badly. I cried for two days and then, in an attempt to win him back, I sat on his doorstep and waited for him to come home from school.

Only he was late—two hours late.
I should’ve brought a book,
I thought.
Oh, no, now I have to pee.
To keep myself distracted, I started collecting these giant dried peapods that’d fallen from a nearby tree. Soon I had a whole pile of them. Which is how the idea came to me. Crawling on all fours I arranged the peapods into giant letters: I LOVE YOU HAYES, I wrote for everyone, even people flying overhead, to see.

I sat down on the steps to admire my handiwork. Only as I stared at those giant words, a crippling feeling came over me.
Is that even true?

Just then, Hayes’s car pulled into the driveway. For a split second I thought about diving onto the ground and scattering the letters. As it turned out, I didn’t need to. Hayes thanked me for the gesture, told me our relationship was definitely over, and said that I should go back to New York. I tried to wrap my arms around him, to hug him one more time. But he jerked away. It was unintentional. Still, it startled me, the idea that this person who had once so certainly loved me could change almost overnight.

I packed my bags and left the following morning.

“Breakups are good practice for dying,” Jim consoled me in an e-mail. “Since that’s what they are anyway.”

Great,
I thought.
Now everything reminds Jim of death.

 

I spent the next two months living in New York and behaving like a heartbroken zombie. Luckily, I had something to look forward to: I’d been accepted to Yaddo, an artist’s colony.

I left for Yaddo in July. The month I thought I was going to be married ended up being the month I began this book. It brought me back to life. I met other artists, I lived in a mansion, I worked harder than I’d ever worked. Suddenly, I felt happy again. Right on cue, Hayes e-mailed me. He wanted to know what I thought about starting again. He wasn’t convinced himself, but thought we should revisit things. His e-mail sent me into an emotional fit. I didn’t know what to do.
Is Hayes really my destiny?
I went on a walk to think it over.

I was wandering through the Yaddo forest, overthinking, when I stumbled upon a small lake with a huge broken tree slumped over it. It looked like a rainbow, something straight out of a fairy tale. I decided to climb it. I wrapped my arms and legs around the trunk and shimmied up to the highest point twenty-five feet off the ground and overlooking the forest.

The answer to my dilemma came in an unexpected form: a bird. It was perched on a branch next to me. As I sat there, I watched it dive into the water, and then return to the same branch and shake its feathers off. A second later, it dove back in, shook itself off, and dove back in. The bird repeated this action so many times that I started to wonder if there was something wrong with it. That’s when it occurred me.
It’s just having fun.
My eyes welled up with tears. I’d spent so much time thinking that God had created me to “do what was right” that I’d forgotten,
I was also created to be happy.
Hayes did not make me happy, a document from a patriarch could not tell me how to be happy, I was in charge of my own happiness.

In spite of the fact that I have terrible balance, I set my hands on the tree trunk and pushed myself up into a standing position. Looking out at the lake, the forest, the blue sky, I raised my arms above my head and let out an exhilarating scream. For a second, it felt like I was flying.

The E-mail That I Wasn’t Supposed to Send

I bet you thought that was the end of the book. I did, too, or at least when I proposed writing a book, that’s where I thought the story would end. But then something seemingly impossible happened: I sold the idea for my manuscript, and for the first time in my life I wasn’t just a struggling artist, freelance dog-walking and hostessing at Nobu. I was a girl with a book deal and a cash advance. I looked at my check and tried to wrap my head around the number of zeros. It would’ve taken me another forty years of picking up pieces of shit, or seating them, to earn the same amount.

While I planned on saving most of the money, I decided to treat myself to one thing:
If I could buy anything I want, what would it be?
I knew the answer immediately.

 

Hey, Matt.

 

 

I opened up my laptop and wrote the following e-mail. For the record: I was never really going to send it. It was more like a dare. One I had given myself, but still one I had to take. The dare, as I imagined it, was to rewrite history by facilitating a second chance.

I read the e-mail over. It was pretty good except for a few points: 1. I didn’t have a trip to South Africa on the horizon, and 2. There were no family friends. Okay fine, my e-mail was ridiculous—
Is Zambia close to South Africa?
As if I didn’t own a map. If I was going to be this indirect, why even bother with an e-mail? I might as well just show up at his local food market with a fruit basket balanced on my head and say, “Oh, hey, fancy running into
you
here!”

At the same time, when Hayes and I broke up the bottom had dropped out: A Mormon man wasn’t going to solve everything. When we were together, I’d still questioned my faith.

As a result, I spent the six months following our breakup living in limbo. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be Mormon anymore. Only I hadn’t acted on it—instead, I felt like I was standing on one side of a stone wall, looking over it. The other side was intriguing. So intriguing that I’d built an entire imaginary life there: In that world, I smoked, hung out with artists, took lovers, had tattooed sleeves, and frequently wore dresses without any underwear.

In reality, my life was the same as always: After Yaddo I returned to Manhattan and continued going to the singles ward. In September the bishop gave me an assignment, probably to keep me on the straight and narrow. Every Sunday I was supposed to teach a “Marriage Preparation” course. As I stood in front of the class and told them about the benefits of temple marriage, I felt like I was treading water, speaking in hopes that I’d believe again. When what I really wanted was to be on the other side. Only, crossing over the wall and living out my fantasies meant letting go of everything that I already knew. And I wasn’t ready to walk out into the unknown, to let go of my convictions, to live without God.

And yet for all of the “factual discrepancies” in my e-mail, it was the most honest thing I’d ever written. I was actually going after what I wanted in life, no apologies. I reread it.

P.S.
I added in my head,
I miss the shit outta you.

And just like that, I pressed SEND. In fact, I was so determined I accidentally sent it twice.

 

When I woke up the following morning, I felt immediate regret. Sending my e-mail was the equivalent of drunk dialing Matt only without the excuse because I’d done it stone-cold sober. I opened my laptop to assess the damage when I saw his reply in my inbox. It was brief and to the point:

I reread the last sentence.
My girlfriends and me? Shit.
I’d forgotten this lie altogether. Why had I been so specific? The good news was: Matt wanted to see me. The bad news: I had to find not one, not two, but several female friends and convince them to go to Africa on a whim.

I called every girl I’d ever met. “Want to go to Zambia in a few weeks? It’d be fun!”

“Doesn’t your ex-boyfriend live there?”

“Oh, that old fling? I’m just going for the cultural experience.”

No one took the bait. It was too expensive, too hard to get off work, there were visas, shots, and a coup had just broken out in Kenya, a neighboring country. Big deal.

God bless Alison and Pri, I dedicate this book in part to both of them. We’d worked together as pages at the Letterman show. In fact, they were both there the day I met Matt. Alison had moved to Oregon and Pri was living in both New York and Pakistan. We’d been meaning to get together, and they both had the travel bug, so when I begged them to go to Africa, they actually agreed.

Two girls equals “girlfriends,”
I thought.
YES!
And so I began the complicated process of organizing everything—not exactly a strength of mine. I was happy to blow my entire advance but Alison and Pri were on a tight budget. And after talking to several travel agents I realized going to South Africa and Zambia was twice as expensive. While I’d love to visit South Africa some day, I was really only doing it for the sake of my bluff. And so, to cut down on costs, I sent another e-mail to Matt.

Technically I gave him two excuses for one lie. Could I be any more transparent? Matt wrote me back and said he was happy to host us the entire time. He also recommended we fly into Tanzania and spend a few days in Zanzibar since it was en route and the most beautiful country he’d ever visited. The following day I bought a ticket from New York to Tanzania to Zanzibar to Zambia and return.

“Whom are you traveling with?” The travel agent made small talk while she waited for my ticket to print.

“My two girlfriends,” I answered.

“Well”—she handed me the ticket and smiled—“enjoy your
ladies’ vacation
.”

It was either the gayest thing I’d ever heard, or this is an actual term reserved for trips where girls take girlfriends to visit ex boyfriends in faraway lands. Still, holding that ticket in my hand was unbelievable. Going to Africa was no longer just a crazy idea in my head,
it was actually happening
.

I wasn’t going to tell my parents about my trip. Tina (their spy) had moved to Boston a few months earlier and they, along with my youngest sister Jill, had moved to Siberia. They really did. I’m not kidding. They relocated for my dad’s job. Boeing started a joint venture with a Russian company to make titanium parts for the new Boeing 787s. My father is currently the CEO of a titanium factory near the Ural Mountains. Which makes him sound like an evil villain. While they’re isolated in the freezing cold, I think it’s the perfect addition to my bit: I’m a Mexican Mormon with a home in Siberia now.

I actually haven’t been to visit them yet, but when I do, my goal is to run down the halls of the factory and knock things over while chanting, “It’s Daddy’s factory!” in a pretentious British accent.

But back to my Africa trip. With an ocean and a vast land mass in between my parents and me, I felt like I could do whatever I wanted without getting caught.

Only at the last minute I was worried that something bad might happen to me, so I called to tell them about the trip. They were unfazed. I expected my mother at the very least to disapprove. A year earlier, when things weren’t going well with Hayes, she warned me not to “blow my one and only chance at love.” After I did, it was as if she’d given up hope that I’d ever want the life she wanted for me.

A week after our breakup she called to tell me about a dream she’d had. “It was so strange,” she began. “You were a famous person who’d fallen from grace and to make money you were giving tours of your hometown. Only it was a fake hometown, not a place we ever actually lived.
Oh, Elna
, it was awful. You were heavy again, you had grown facial hair, and you were incredibly bitter. In fact, you reminded me of Rosie O’Donnell. ‘Step right up and see the home of the famous Elna Baker,’ you kept saying. It really worried me Elna, please don’t let this happen.”