Chapter Five

Time passes. Whatever else you can say about life, at least you’re guaranteed that.

Some see time marching grandly onward like a military parade. Others view it as flowing, a river emptying into an endless sea.

But to me time halts and limps and then lurches forward, like a wounded sailor in a foreign port trying to make it to his ship before it sails at dawn.

Six months had passed since my wife’s death; the original white-hot ache had decayed to a bleakness of routine and duty and responsibility.

The turning point occurred in March when the bishop called me to be one of the single adult representatives in the ward. We met once a month with our ward committee and also once a month with the stake committee.

At my first stake committee meeting, I met Jon Stevens. We were both about the same age. He had never married.

He told me he was building a boat from a kit and said if I’d help him with it, he would let me use it anytime I wanted. Once a week after that, I bundled Adam up and we went to Jon’s garage and worked.

He was sort of a cross between the Marlboro man (with no cigarettes) and a young Archie Bunker. Sometime after he turned eighteen he must have sat down and taken a stand on every possible political issue. We spent hours arguing politics as we fitted and glued and sanded and painted.

Another source of interest in my life came from home teaching. Two weeks after going with Brother Porter, I was assigned his route.

My home teaching companion was a senior in high school who was involved in sports. I was happy for his success but sometimes found it difficult to arrange a time to go out with him home teaching. Sometimes I took Jon with me even though we weren’t in the same ward.

One day after church, Shirley told me she had joined a computer pen-pal club and had been writing a man who lived in Pennsylvania. She had told him about the Church, and he was taking the missionary lessons.

Three weeks later she told me he had been baptized.

And then, a few days after that, she asked me to come over that night because she had something important to talk to me about.

Since my regular companion was out of town, I asked Jon to go with me. When we arrived, she told us her pen pal wanted to meet her, and maybe even marry her, and that he was coming in five weeks.

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

She burst into tears. I asked her what was wrong.

“This!” she said, handing me a picture of her taken forty pounds earlier. “I sent him this. He thinks I look like that.”

“Oh, well,” I stammered, “looks aren’t everything. Nobody can top your bright happy smile.”

“I’d still have the same smile if I were thin,” she cried.

“Good grief, lady!” Jon barked, unable to cope with crying women. “If you don’t like being fat, go on a diet!”

“I can’t! It won’t work! I’ve tried it before.”

“We’ll help you this time,” I said. “Won’t we, Jon?”

“Hey, you help her. I’m not her home teacher.”

“Jon, won’t you help her any?”

“Oh, all right!” he barked, turning to Shirley. “Look, if you don’t want to be fat, then don’t eat so much! Quit stuffing your face!”

Then he turned back to me. “There, I helped.”

“What he means,” I said, trying to smooth things over, “is that if you carefully plan what you eat, you’re sure to lose weight.”

“And get off your duff and get a little exercise too!” Jon added.

“Perhaps,” I translated, “a little excercise would be helpful too. I think that’s what Jon is trying to say, isn’t it, Jon?”

“I got no respect for somebody who gorges food,” Jon muttered.

“Fred plans on coming from Pennsylvania in a month,” she said. “Can I look like I did in this picture by then?”

Jon grabbed the picture and compared it with Shirley. “You’ve really let yourself go, haven’t you. I wouldn’t be caught dead looking the way you do. Your arms—look at that flab—they make me sick.”

She cried for a while and then stopped and smiled. “Where did you find him—in an old Gestapo movie? But you know what? I like him. I think he’s just what I need now.”

We wrote down some rules for eating and then talked about exercise at the Deseret Gym. “Jon, will you work out with us too?”

“I’ll work out with you,” he grumbled, “but don’t expect any leniency. When I work out, I work out—none of these namby-pamby exercises. I’ll run you both into the ground.”

A few days later I got Jon onto a racquetball court. I didn’t try for the immediate point, but instead ran him after the ball from the front to the back court, while I stayed in the middle and watched him sweat. By the end of the second game, his sweatshirt was dripping wet and he was uncharacteristically quiet.

“Thanks for the game, Jon,” I said, smiling. “How about another one?”

He was too busy sucking air to answer me.

Shirley was my next opponent. When she entered the court, I had to force back laughter. She was wearing layer after layer of gray sweat shirts and pants, and she looked like a dreary version of the Pillsbury Doughboy.

But she was a game girl and never gave up.

After racquetball we exercised, working on our individual tummies. And after that, there was swimming.

And then supper—two fillets of fish and a tossed salad.

It was hard on her at first, and she phoned every night about nine-thirty so I could talk her out of a bedtime snack. When she called, I calmly reasoned with her that the body can only store the food eaten at night because there is very little need for it during sleep.

After a few days of my calm reasoning, she quit calling me and started to call Jon because he was more effective in helping her curb her appetite. “You think I want a tub of lard for a friend?” he’d say in his usual subtle, well-thought-out manner.

“Thanks, Jon. I needed that,” she’d say, and hang up and go without food.

Each time she got a letter from Fred in Pennsylvania, she would phone and read part of it to me. She was very excited about his visit, and that she was losing weight.

Finally the week arrived for his visit. The day before, Jon and I bought her a new dress. We knew her dress size. In fact, we knew all her measurements because we’d plotted her progress. I’d made up a little computer program that gave her a week-by-week printout of what she’d accomplished since the beginning of the diet. Somehow, having it done by a computer made it more official to her.

When we gave her the dress, she started to cry.

“Hey, none of that!” Jon growled, but I could tell he was just a little emotional himself.

“You two have been so good to me,” she sniffled.

“It’s been okay for me too,” Jon admitted.

“I’m so excited about tomorrow,” she bubbled a little later as she modeled the new dress. “His bus gets in at four o’clock, and then we’re going out for supper.”

“Skip the dessert!” Jon warned.

The next evening as I washed diapers and helped my mother around the house, trying to ease her burden of caring for Adam every day, I wondered how Shirley was doing.

I didn’t have to wonder very long, because at eleven o’clock she phoned me and, in tears, asked me to come over. I phoned Jon and he grumbled a little, but then said he would pick me up in five minutes. Jon always picks you up—you never pick Jon up.

At first she just cried.

“Something went wrong tonight, I bet,” I said.

More tears. She had her head buried in a couch pillow.

“Let’s see—did he show up?”

“Yooaah!”

“Is that a yes?”

She nodded her head.

“So he showed up. Well, then, let’s see, he doesn’t want to get married. Is that right?”

“Nooaah!”

“He does want to get married? Then what’s wrong?”

“Nano me!” she sobbed in the pillow.

“Shirley, I can’t understand you. What does ‘nano me’ mean?”

“Not to me!” she called out, lifting her head up for a second, and then burying it back into the pillow.

She cried, and I thought, and Jon, who had to be at work at five the next morning, sat and yawned.

“Not to you—he wants to get married but not to you. Who to, then?”

After a few minutes she sat up and talked. “He got off the bus, shook hands with me, and introduced me to a tall blonde girl. She’d gotten on in Chicago, and they’d talked, and her parents have quarter horses on a ranch, and he loves horses, and she invited him to stay with her folks in Heber. Then they collected their bags and left. She took my convert! It’s not fair! If things like that can happen on a bus, then Greyhound ought to warn people about it. I should’ve told him to fly!”

She started to cry, stopped, and said very deliberately, “Sam, I want you to get me the bag of marshmallows from the kitchen.”

In a minute I was back, and she put a marshmallow in her mouth.

“How can a blonde get a tan in Chicago? And what’s so neat about quarter horses anyway?”

In a minute, she had another marshmallow.

“They’re going to get married, you know. That’s what’s going to happen. Do you know what I hope? I hope all his children are as blonde as their mother, and someday I hope they all go to the beach and fall asleep in the sun and get terrible sunburns!”

She cried some more and continued eating.

“What’s all this gotten me?” she complained. “Before I was a fat miserable girl, now I’m a skinny miserable girl.” A minute later she said she wanted some hot chocolate to go with what was left of the marshmallows. We went into the kitchen to make it. Just before the water boiled, she turned to me and said, “It’s never going to happen to me, is it? I’m never going to get married in the temple and have a family.”

“It could still happen, Shirley.”

“Yeah, but you don’t believe it will, do you?”

“Miracles still happen.”

She shot a withering glance at me.

“Not that it’d require a miracle,” I backpedaled.

We poured our cups of hot chocolate and sat down. Jon was snoring in the living room.

She stared at the melting marshmallow in her cup and shook her head. “It’s so hard, Sam, you know that?”

“The marshmallow?”

“No—being twenty-eight and single. It’s a lot harder than being a teenager. Why do we worry so much about teenagers anyway? They grow up and become just like us.”

“That’s why we worry. We hope they won’t be like us.”

“When you’re seventeen and nobody is taking you out,” she continued, “you dream about a missionary who’ll come back and marry you. Well, that’s been my dream for twelve years, and tonight the bubble burst. I finally realized it’s never going to happen.”

I took a drink of hot chocolate and burned my tongue.

“I guess I should’ve realized it when I read that one of the boys from my high school class was called to be a mission president. And I’m still waiting for a missionary to come back. But tonight—tonight made it crystal clear.”

I guess I agreed with her. It might never happen in her life.

“So what’s left for me?” she asked. “Sitting in the back row of the chapel, hating the young mothers ahead of me with their noisy kids and Cheerios and diaper bags and husbands. It’s not fair!”

“I know—it’s not fair.”

“So what good is my well-protected virtue?”

I choked on my hot chocolate. “What?”

“If I can’t have an eternity of love, how about one night of it?”

I stood up and suggested we go into the living room with Jon.

“Not with you, Sam.”

“Oh,” I said, relieved.

“Unless you want to,” she said.

“Well, no, actually. You see, I’ve always valued my membership in the Church, and I’d hate to get excommunicated, and besides that—”

“Relax,” she smiled. “Do you know where I went after Fred left me? I didn’t want to go home, so I decided to go to a movie. And I walked around from one theater to another trying to decide, and even the posters embarrassed me. Finally I found a Disney movie and went in and watched it, ate popcorn, and cried. But those other posters got me thinking—maybe I’ve been missing something in my life.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Why not? Every movie in this town is selling the virtues of not being virtuous.”

“It’d turn to ashes.”

“All I want is, instead of watching soaps, for once I want to be in one. Can that be so bad?”

“It’d bring you unhappiness.”

“How do you know?”

“Alma said so.”

“Who’s he?”

“C’mon, Shirley, you know who Alma is.”

“Is he from Shakespeare?”

“He’s from the Book of Mormon.”

“And he talked about that?”

“He said wickedness never was happiness. I’ll let you read it yourself. Where’s your Book of Mormon?”

“I don’t know. It’s around somewhere—maybe in a box of books I’ve never unpacked.”

“Have you ever read it?”

“Not all of it, but I’ve read parts.”

“you mean you go to church every week and you’ve never even read the Book of Mormon?”

“No, but I believe it’s true.”

“Scrud! That makes me mad!” I roared, pounding my fist on her kitchen table. Unfortunately the impact knocked over a vase sitting on the edge and it shattered.

“Gee, I’m really sorry.” I knelt down and began picking up the pieces.

She began to laugh. “You cursed, Sam. You know that? You cursed and then you broke my vase. I’m going to tell the bishop. ‘Bishop, you’ve got to change my home teacher. He comes into my home at midnight, curses, and breaks vases.’”

“Shirley, please read the Book of Mormon from cover to cover.”

“What difference will it make? I’ll still have these ‘secret yearnings.’”

I dropped the pieces of glass in her wastebasket. “Will you quit saying that?”

“Why? It was on one of the movie posters.”

“You’re making me nervous.”

“Well,” she smiled, “at least that’s something.”

“Look, I’ll make a deal with you. Jon and I will come here every Friday night and talk with you about what you’ve read during the week, and then we’ll take you out for a salad bar supper—if you promise to read ten pages a day.”

“You and Jon will both take me out every weekend?” she asked.

“Yes, but no flirting with disaster.”

“Who’s he?” she teased.

“I’m not leaving till you promise.”

She grinned mischievously at me. “Give me couple of years to think about it.”

“C’mon, Shirley. This is serious.”

“Okay, it’s a deal. Now you’d better go before the neighbors start flattering me with gossip.”

We returned to the living room and I kicked Jon in his cowboy boots. He got up and walked like a zombie to the car.

She stopped me on my way out. “Sam?”

“Yes?”

“Let me hear you curse one more time,” she smiled.

* * * * * 

The three of us were talking about Third Nephi in the Book of Mormon.

“After his resurrection, Jesus visited the people in North or South America. After a few hours, he said he had to go visit others, but he saw how sorry they were to have him leave, and his heart went out to them. He asked if they had any sick or lame or blind or lepers, and they brought them to him, and one by one he healed them. Later the children were brought to him, and with them all about, he knelt down and prayed. It says that nobody can conceive of the joy they felt to hear Jesus pray for them. Then he stood up, and took each child individually, one by one, and blessed them and prayed to Father in heaven for each one.”

We were all quiet as we thought about that. Finally, Shirley said, “I wish I’d been there.”

“Do you think he loved any of them more than he loves you?”

“He loves me, too, doesn’t he?” she asked.

“If you’d been the only one to benefit by it, he still would have come to earth and suffered and been crucified—if only for you, he would have done it all.”

“Where does it say that?” Jon asked, always ready for a debate.

“I don’t know—it’s just a feeling I have,” I admitted. “This church is his church, and when we remember him, then miracles happen. Mormons are professionals in doing things because somebody is going to make a report about it. We all want to look good for the report. But the Savior is the real reason we should try to help each other. And that’s why we should live the commandments. Because if we don’t, we’ll disappoint the Savior. I don’t want to do that.”

“I don’t either,” Shirley said. I understood.

We finished the chapter, then headed out for a salad.

“Sam, I love the Book of Mormon. Why do we become so fascinated with frog stories when there’s so much in the scriptures?”

“When we quit focusing on the Savior, we’re left with frogs in buckets, and we think it’s the gospel, but it isn’t.”

“Well, I feel terrific now,” she said as we pulled in front of the restaurant. Jon was, of course, driving.

“Me too,” I said.

“But in a way nothing’s really happened. I’m still in the same boat. I may never get married.”

“That’s true.”

“So the Savior can’t make everything right, can he?”

“No, but he can help us get through whatever happens.”

“Well, I’m not going to stay single,” Jon added out of the blue.

* * * * *