They were brought into focus when I checked my email. There was a message from Shawn. An apology. But he’d apologized already, in my room. I had never known Shawn to apologize twice.
I retrieved my journal and I wrote another entry, opposite the first, in which I revised the memory. It was a misunderstanding, I wrote. If I’d asked him to stop, he would have.
But however I chose to remember it, that event would change everything. Reflecting on it now I’m amazed by it, not by what happened, but that I wrote what happened. That from somewhere inside that brittle shell—in that girl made vacant by the fiction of invincibility—there was a spark left.
The words of the second entry would not obscure the words of the first. Both would remain, my memories set down alongside his. There was a boldness in not editing for consistency, in not ripping out either the one page or the other. To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s. I have often wondered if the most powerful words I wrote that night came not from anger or rage, but from doubt: I don’t know. I just don’t know.
Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.
On Sunday, a week later, a man at church asked me to dinner. I said no. It happened a second time a few days later with a different man. Again I said no. I couldn’t say yes. I didn’t want either of them anywhere near me.
Word reached the bishop that there was a woman in his flock who was set against marriage. His assistant approached me after the Sunday service and said I was wanted in the bishop’s office.
My wrist was still tender when I shook the bishop’s hand. He was a middle-aged man with a round face and dark, neatly parted hair. His voice was soft like satin. He seemed to know me before I even opened my mouth. (In a way he did; Robin had told him plenty.) He said I should enroll in the university counseling service so that one day I might enjoy an eternal marriage to a righteous man.
He talked and I sat, wordless as a brick.
He asked about my family. I didn’t answer. I had already betrayed them by failing to love them as I should; the least I could do was stay silent.
“Marriage is God’s plan,” the bishop said, then he stood. The meeting was over. He asked me to return the following Sunday. I said I would, but knew I wouldn’t.
My body felt heavy as I walked to my apartment. All my life I had been taught that marriage was God’s will, that to refuse it was a kind of sin. I was in defiance of God. And yet, I didn’t want to be. I wanted children, my own family, but even as I longed for it I knew I would never have it. I was not capable. I could not be near any man without despising myself.
I had always scoffed at the word “whore.” It sounded guttural and outmoded even to me. But even though I silently mocked Shawn for using it, I had come to identify with it. That it was old-fashioned only strengthened the association, because it meant I usually only heard the word in connection with myself.
Once, when I was fifteen, after I’d started wearing mascara and lip gloss, Shawn had told Dad that he’d heard rumors about me in town, that I had a reputation. Immediately Dad thought I was pregnant. He should never have allowed those plays in town, he screamed at Mother. Mother said I was trustworthy, modest. Shawn said no teenage girl was trustworthy, and that in his experience those who seemed pious were sometimes the worst of all.
I sat on my bed, knees pressed to my chest, and listened to them shout. Was I pregnant? I wasn’t sure. I considered every interaction I’d had with a boy, every glance, every touch. I walked to the mirror and raised my shirt, then ran my fingers across my abdomen, examining it inch by inch and thought, Maybe.
I had never kissed a boy.
I had witnessed birth, but I’d been given none of the facts of conception. While my father and brother shouted, ignorance kept me silent: I couldn’t defend myself, because I didn’t understand the accusation.
Days later, when it was confirmed that I was not pregnant, I evolved a new understanding of the word “whore,” one that was less about actions and more about essence. It was not that I had done something wrong so much as that I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being.
It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there’s no greater power than that.
—
I STOOD OUTSIDE THE bishop’s office on a cold night in February. I didn’t know what had taken me there.
The bishop sat calmly behind his desk. He asked what he could do for me, and I said I didn’t know. No one could give me what I wanted, because what I wanted was to be remade.
“I can help,” he said, “but you’ll need to tell me what’s bothering you.” His voice was gentle, and that gentleness was cruel. I wished he would yell. If he yelled, it would make me angry, and when angry I felt powerful. I didn’t know if I could do this without feeling powerful.
I cleared my throat, then talked for an hour.
The bishop and I met every Sunday until spring. To me he was a patriarch with authority over me, but he seemed to surrender that authority the moment I passed through his door. I talked and he listened, drawing the shame from me like a healer draws infection from a wound.
When the semester ended, I told him I was going home for the summer. I was out of money; I couldn’t pay rent. He looked tired when I told him that. He said, “Don’t go home, Tara. The church will pay your rent.”
I didn’t want the church’s money. I’d made the decision. The bishop made me promise only one thing: that I wouldn’t work for my father.
My first day in Idaho, I got my old job back at Stokes. Dad scoffed, said I’d never earn enough to return to school. He was right, but the bishop had said God would provide a way and I believed it. I spent the summer restocking shelves and walking elderly ladies to their cars.
I avoided Shawn. It was easy because he had a new girlfriend, Emily, and there was talk of a wedding. Shawn was twenty-eight; Emily was a senior in high school. Her temperament was compliant. Shawn played the same games with her he’d played with Sadie, testing his control. She never failed to follow his orders, quivering when he raised his voice, apologizing when he screamed at her. That their marriage would be manipulative and violent, I had no doubt—although those words were not mine. They had been given to me by the bishop, and I was still trying to wrest meaning from them.
When the summer ended, I returned to BYU with only two thousand dollars. On my first night back, I wrote in my journal: I have so many bills I can’t imagine how I’m going to pay them. But God will provide either trials for growth or the means to succeed. The tone of that entry seems lofty, high-minded, but in it I detect a whiff of fatalism. Maybe I would have to leave school. That was fine. There were grocery stores in Utah. I would bag groceries, and one day I’d be manager.
I was shocked out of this resignation two weeks into the fall semester, when I awoke one night to a blinding pain in my jaw. I’d never felt anything so acute, so electrifying. I wanted to rip my jaw from my mouth, just to be rid of it. I stumbled to a mirror. The source was a tooth that had been chipped many years before, but now it had fractured again, and deeply. I visited a dentist, who said the tooth had been rotting for years. It would cost fourteen hundred dollars to repair. I couldn’t afford to pay half that and stay in school.
I called home. Mother agreed to lend me the money, but Dad attached terms: I would have to work for him next summer. I didn’t even consider it. I said I was finished with the junkyard, finished for life, and hung up.
I tried to ignore the ache and focus on my classes, but it felt as though I were being asked to sit through a lecture while a wolf gnawed on my jaw.
I’d never taken another ibuprofen since that day with Charles, but I began to swallow them like breath mints. They helped only a little. The pain was in the nerves, and it was too severe. I hadn’t slept since the ache began, and I started skipping meals because chewing was unthinkable. That’s when Robin told the bishop.
He called me to his office on a bright afternoon. He looked at me calmly from across his desk and said, “What are we going to do about your tooth?” I tried to relax my face.
“You can’t go through the school year like this,” he said. “But there’s an easy solution. Very easy, in fact. How much does your father make?”
“Not much,” I said. “He’s been in debt since the boys wrecked all the equipment last year.”
“Excellent,” he said. “I have the paperwork here for a grant. I’m sure you’re eligible, and the best part is, you won’t have to pay it back.”
I’d heard about Government grants. Dad said that to accept one was to indebt yourself to the Illuminati. “That’s how they get you,” he’d said. “They give you free money, then the next thing you know, they own you.”
