sister williams’s tampons
Sister Tucker stood almost six feet tall, with short white hair and sharp eyes in a pretty face. Sister Larsen was five foot two, quick tongued, smart-alecky, and redheaded. Sister Williams had wide hips and soft hands; her short hair was feathered like the wings of doves and her accent was Utah gentle. Sister Barnes had thick ankles and thick glasses, her face lined with deep intelligence. Between them, they had born and raised twenty-four children. None of them foolish, weak, or neurotic; all of them uncomplaining bearers of sixty-pound packs—these were our Girls Camp leaders.
And it was their job to take us, a dozen fifteen-year-old Mormon girls, up into the High Sierras, to teach us the basics of wilderness survival through the Mormon Campcrafter program. For months we had met down at the church on Tuesday afternoons, mastering each of the Campcrafter skills, learning to tie boat-line knots, build fires, lash tables, and administer first aid. We had selected our external frame backpacks and backpacker tents from the congregation’s vast inventory, stored in Sister Tucker’s garage. Only thirty pounds, Sister Williams had instructed. We’d be hiking a talus-littered trail up to ten thousand feet, after all, and then spend three days creekside among the lodgepole pines. This was not the time to pack a mini Pac-Man game (Natasha!) or cans of SpaghettiOs (Shirley!).
The first morning of Girls Camp, we loaded into Sister Williams’s blue Econoline family van. It seems like every other family in the ward had a blue Econoline family van, with bench seats—not captain’s chairs—and hose-down floor mats. It was the perfect vehicle in which to haul about one’s natural-born nine children, as Sister Williams did, or a pack of fifteen-year-old girls to camp in the High Sierras. The van left our orange grove suburb, wound through the Los Angeles freeway system, and started the long ride up California Highway 395. In the Owens Valley, we passed old mining towns, crystalline lake beds, and prison camps. A left turn took us away from the arid valley floor and into the glacier-carved Eastern Sierras.
The van doors popped open. Out we stepped—Sister Williams, Sister Larsen, Natasha, Shayne, Charlotte, Shirley, Kristi, and me from the one van; Sister Tucker, Sister Barnes, Jennifer, Jennifer, Juli, Missy, Tammi, and Joy from the other. We hoisted our packs onto our backs, cinching the belts until the edges lodged on the tops of our fifteen-year-old hip bones, and set out on the four-mile trail to Tom’s Place. The air was already thin at seven thousand feet, the trail steep and rocky. Within minutes of leaving the parking lot, I was sucking air between my teeth, trying to will away an attack of my childhood asthma: gasp, caw, gasp, caw. Natasha’s shoes came untied, and she dragged the laces along through the rocks. At a switchback water break, Shirley wobbled over, her ankles unsteady, and leaned down to help. A can of SpaghettiOs rolled out of her pack and off the side of the trail into the manzanita.
Sister Williams and Sister Barnes brought up the rear of the group; Sister Larsen and Sister Tucker led. “One foot in front of the other,” she called back to us stragglers. One foot in front of the other was what I did.
Maybe it was just my oxygen-deprived brain—gasp, caw, gasp, caw—but it struck me that Sister Tucker’s words held the key to, well, everything. Yes, with every foot Natasha, Shirley, and I ascended, the world around us assumed a kind of luminescent meaningfulness. Everything was haloed with spiritual significance—from the jagged granite peaks ahead of us, to the glacier-carved valleys, to the yarrow and mule ears at the creeksides. Gasp, caw, gasp, caw. I fixed my eyes at the head of the line of backpackers, on the back of Sister Tucker’s head, her brilliant white hair. One foot in front of the other. It was difficult, sometimes, being a fifteen-year-old Mormon girl, with scrawny lungs, a bad perm, and wobbly ankles. But this was the very point of it, the very point of everything: our spirits had been sent to earth to persist against the weak and messy medium of our bodies, one foot in front of the other, until we reached higher places. That was the lesson we came to Girls Camp to learn.
A white tennis shoe dropped from Shirley’s backpack. I stopped and gulped down air. Sister Williams placed her feet in a wide stance, eased down to reach the shoe, while balancing her pack on her capable hips, and tied the shoe to the back of Shirley’s external frame pack.
Gasp, caw, gasp, caw—we resumed our trudge up the mountain.
• • •
When night fell in the Eastern Sierras, we had reached our camp, set up our backpacker tents, unrolled our sleeping bags, gathered up wood, and set foil dinners to cook on campfire coals.
We gathered around the fire and lodged our backs against fallen pines. Sister Tucker, Sister Williams, Sister Larsen, and Sister Barnes took their place among us. We ate warmed peas and carrots and potatoes from our foil packets, and washed them down with canteens of water pumped from the glacier-fed creek.
So many questions we had about the mysteries of our impending Mormon womanhood. So many things we could not ask on a regular Sunday at home, locked inside the cold cinder-block-walled church, tied up in Sunday dresses. Where better to talk about these matters than up here at eleven thousand feet, under the guidance of four unflinching Mormon women?
The fire crackled. Natasha shifted against the log. I swallowed hard and looked at Sister Tucker.
“Will there be polygamy in heaven?” I asked.
Everyone knew that the Church had officially stopped polygamy in 1890. But Mormon doctrine still taught that one had to be married to enter the highest realms of heaven. And polygamy was still in our scriptures. And sometimes, even in these latter days, men who had lost a first wife were sealed for time and all eternity to a second wife as well. There was plenty of reason to believe there would be polygamy in heaven, and the topic always hovered at the back of female conversation.
“Your father and I have discussed it,” my mother would tell me from time to time, a white-hot metal edge to her voice, her words terse and final. “He will not do that to me.”
Sometimes, at church parties, with all the women in the kitchen heating so many spiral-sliced hams and trays of homemade wheat rolls, an older woman would joke, “Now, girls, can’t you see the sense in polygamy?” which would make the younger women laugh, or lower their heads, or grumble wearily.
How did Sister Larsen, Sister Williams, Sister Tucker, and Sister Barnes reckon it?
There was a pause. Sister Tucker looked at Sister Barnes, the firelight reflecting in her thick glasses.
“You know,” Sister Barnes offered, “some difficult things, we just put them on a shelf until we can take them up with God directly.” In her face I could see a wisdom without edge, a patient deferral of certainty, the very crux of faith: one foot in front of the other.
If God was indeed merciful, I thought, I would not spend the eternities living in second-fiddle misery. But if it were indeed the rule that you had to be married to go to heaven, and if there were (as all appearances suggested) so many more righteous women than men in the world, would I refuse to share my husband, even if it meant keeping a sister out of heaven?
The stars turned like screws in the black skies.
No, I decided, I was not so enthralled by the earthly ideal of single marriage that I would lock another woman out of the eternities.
And maybe it was not as we imagined, this polygamy. Perhaps it was a gesture toward a vaster spiritual truth, the outlines of which my oxygen-deprived brain could begin to perceive as I stared into the fire. Perhaps none of us entered the eternities alone, but with our souls all hooked together, multiply, through and across the generations, a kind of eternal belonging the grammar of companionate marriage could never capture. Up in the Sierras, my mind could begin to encompass such an idea.
My thinking was interrupted when Natasha blurted out question number two.
“Do you have to wear your garments on your wedding night?” she asked.
Shirley, Joy, and Shayne coughed and giggled. But we had a right to know. Did we really have to wear the knee-length, shoulder-capping Mormon undergarments our parents and grandparents wore, embroidered with simple markings to remind us of our promises to live faithful Mormon lives? These and not the curious red-and-black satin contraptions we saw in shop windows at the mall, the sex costumes the world prescribed?
Sister Tucker looked at Sister Williams. Sister Williams looked at Sister Larsen and smiled. Sister Larsen leaned over to Sister Tucker and whispered something behind cupped hands. Sister Tucker laughed and nodded.
“Yes, of course,” Sister Larsen said. “You’ll wear your garments on your wedding night so that you can have the fun of your husband taking them off!”
• • •
These questions of sex were not just curiosity seeking. Our whole Mormon world was organized into domains of the male and female.
We saw that women did not:
prepare, bless, or pass the bread and water sacrament
preside in meetings where men were present
receive tithing
make or keep records of tithing or other monetary offerings
make or keep membership records
give the closing prayer in church meetings
wear pants at church
perform baptisms, confirmations, ordinations, and marriages
conduct funerals
hear confessions
anoint or heal the sick
provide spiritual counsel to men
receive revelations for anyone besides themselves and their children
Conversely, we saw that men did not:
supervise the nursery for children under the age of three
teach the young women
preside over the women’s Relief Society
A few of us remembered or had read in slim volumes of Mormon women’s history that women had once:
healed the sick by the laying on of hands
blessed and anointed one another’s bodies for childbirth
prophesied
spoken in tongues
But these powers had generally fallen out of practice in the early twentieth century.
The actual work of being in charge, receiving revelations, and presiding over home and church belonged exclusively to men. We had motherhood; men had priesthood. Their priesthood authority, we were taught, made up for their inability to bear children. For if God did not give them a big priesthood consolation prize, the story went, what other purpose would they serve in this life? What powers to compare to the lauded marvels of motherhood?
But those marvels seemed light years away to me. I had gotten my first period only a few months before Girls Camp, and no special ceremony marked the onset of my procreative powers. Numb to the silent inner workings of my own pelvis, I had discovered alone the black stain in my underpants in the stall of the yellow-tiled school bathroom. I told no one until I got home from school. Standing in the driveway, my mother and grandmother turned their faces away from me and to each other and laughed. “It’s the curse, the curse, the curse of the world—that’s what my mother always said,” explained my Utah-born grandmother, her voice for once strangely devoid of tenderness.
Alone into the bathroom I went with a box of tampons; my fingers trembling and slippery, I swallowed hard and put the tampon inside myself.
That Sunday I sat in our regular pew, silent and bleeding, my breasts and belly a riot of puffiness and pain, while the boys my age stood before the congregation in clean white shirts to prepare and pass the white bread and tap water that was our sacrament.
• • •
On Sundays no one really talked about actual feats of women’s power, the physical heroics of making and losing and bearing and nursing the many Mormon babies who filled our pews and punctuated our meetings with their cries. Nowhere in the scriptures was there any special mapping of the spiritual domain of women. But around the fire at Girls Camp, we could prod Sister Larsen, Sister Williams, Sister Barnes, and Sister Tucker into recounting, as if from a secret canon, brave epics of women’s labors and deliveries.
“Tell it again,” we begged Sister Barnes. “Tell us the one about Mexico.”
Sister Barnes was the mother of nine children. She belonged to a vast sixth-generation Mormon family, with its roots among the earliest followers of Joseph Smith, and branches that extended out into the Mormon colonies of northern Mexico, where many of the most faithful had fled after the Mormon Church’s official abolition of polygamy, to continue the practice beyond the reach of United States law.
Her eldest daughter Laurie married at nineteen and with her Idaho farm-boy husband settled into a little basement apartment south of the Brigham Young University campus. They were poor as church mice, and very soon they were pregnant.
Sister Barnes lived in the nearby town of Orem. One day she was standing in the kitchen ironing her way through a giant pile of men’s white Sunday shirts when Laurie called to say she was in labor. “Let me finish this basket of shirts,” Sister Barnes told her daughter, “and then I’ll be right over.”
Sister Barnes finished the shirts, turned on the slow-cooker to start dinner, wrote her husband a little note, grabbed her purse, and hopped into her blue Econoline family van. There was no money to have the baby in the hospital. “Let’s go see Uncle Vern,” she told Laurie. “He can deliver it for you.”
Sister Barnes helped Laurie up the steps of the basement apartment and into the back of the van, and the two set out down Highway 89 to see Uncle Vern, who had in fact delivered many, many babies during his decades in the little Mormon settlement of Colonia Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico.
It was early afternoon. If they made good time, they could get to Mexico in about fifteen hours. Plenty of time for a first labor, Sister Barnes knew, having had nine children of her own.
Down Highway 89 through the little Mormon towns of Richfield, Panguitch, and Kanab flew the blue Econoline van. Laurie started to wince. “You’ll be fine,” Sister Barnes hollered back over her shoulder, elbows wide across the steering wheel as she piloted the red rock canyons of southern Utah and northern Arizona.
Winces became grimaces. At a gas station in Cameron, on the Navajo reservation, Sister Barnes hustled in to pick up a six-pack of Sprite. Laurie was now lying on the floor, twisting and turning, gamely trying to find a comfortable place between the bench seats. Sister Barnes opened the van doors, handed Laurie a Sprite, said, “Drink this,” then shut the van doors and got back in the driver’s seat.
As darkness fell, the van bumped on down through the Sonoran Desert, down through the White Mountains, down into and through small Mormon mining towns of southern Arizona. Sister Barnes could hear Laurie’s pains steadying, cries sharper, intervals shorter. Her foot pressed against the gas.
“Laurie, you’ve got to sit up and be quiet now,” Sister Barnes commanded when they pulled up to the border crossing at Agua Prieta, a single spot of light on the vast desert frontier. Sister Barnes smiled brightly, using the Spanish she remembered from her summer visits to cousins in the colonies. The border guards shined their flashlights into the windows of the van. Somehow Laurie, deep into her transition phase, pants wet with amniotic fluid, managed to hoist herself upright, clutch her empty Sprite, and grit her teeth in the shape of a smile. The guards waved and the blue Econoline lurched on, kicking up dust in the darkness.
When they pulled into Colonia Juárez, it was early morning. Uncle Vern was out hunting turkeys, and a cousin was dispatched to find him. The last thing Laurie remembered was being led into the clinic, then seeing a white-masked nurse douse a tray of medical instruments in rubbing alcohol and toss a match on top of them. Flames leaped three feet into the air. Next thing she knew, Laurie came to with a black-haired baby girl at her side, and Uncle Vern smiling down at her.
• • •
After three days and two nights at eleven thousand feet, we packed our tents, hoisted our packs back onto our hips, and descended the High Sierras, picking our way back across the talus slopes and down through the Jeffrey pines. Natasha, Shayne, Shirley, Joy, Charlotte, and our ensemble of Girls Camp leaders—we were all as dirty as Boy Scouts, our noses filled with campfire soot, our legs insect bitten and unshaven.
Back into the Econoline van we packed, and with Sister Williams at the wheel, returned to Highway 395, passing Bishop, Lone Pine, Independence, the small towns and dry lake beds of the Owens Valley.
It was dark and late by the time we reached California City, the one-stop-sign town that marked the edge of the high desert. All the other girls had conked out in the first three rows of the van, their scraggly heads pushed up against the windows, their mouths wide open. But on the back bench seat my friend Natasha and I were wide awake, giddy, and filthy. Holding warm cups of root beer between our knees, we rummaged around the cargo-strewn floor of the van for something to entertain us.
Then we found it: a small blue Coleman cooler, the name WILLIAMS written in magic marker across the lid, and inside a cache of the largest tampons we had ever seen. Fatter than fingers! Fatter than shotgun shells! As we beheld their size and sheer number, Natasha and I dissolved in the backseat, our mouths frozen round.
I looked up in horror and awe at Sister Williams, the mother of nine blond Williams children, her face periodically illuminated by passing headlights in the rearview mirror. There she was, chatting happily with redheaded Sister Larsen in the passenger seat beside her, her elbows wide across the steering wheel, hips spilling over the driver’s seat edge.
I tried not to derive from the size and number of these tampons information about the condition of Sister Williams’s insides. I tried not to think about nine big-boned Williams children making their way down into the world. But there it was, in our laps, the evidence. Giant tampons. They looked nothing like the slender pink pearlescent tube I had learned to hold with slippery fingers just a few months before.
Did she get these on special order?
Natasha pulled a tampon from the cooler, stripped away its paper wrapper, pushed the cardboard plunger, and launched the jumbo wad of cotton into the warm cup of root beer between her knees. Silent laughter seized us as the cotton absorbed and expanded, filling the cup to its edges.
My mind rushed through the roof of the van out into the stars, and I saw the roles of men and women telescope outward to infinity: in the world of Mormonism, priesthood belonged to men, and motherhood to women, and these were not just temporary roles for this lifetime, but a pattern of what would be in the eternities. And we had been taught that only married couples could enter the highest realms of heaven, where they themselves attained the godly powers to frame worlds and populate them with spirit children. And we knew that our God, the Mormon God, was a set of Heavenly Parents—a Father, and a Mother, if not Mothers. Did this then suggest, by simple reasoning, that it would take a lot of spiritual procreating to generate the billions of souls who came to earth? And was I then to understand that if I worked hard enough to get to heaven, eternal pregnancy in the company of plural pregnant wives might very well be my reward? Surely I had heard as much implied, in the murmuring tones of kitchen chatter at the ward dinner, in the panicked edge to my mother’s voice.
My mind rushed back into my body in the backseat of the van, where Natasha and I were still peering, transfixed, into the cup, at Sister Williams’s giant tampon and all that it inferred. Nine pregnancies. Nine children. Eternal pregnancy. Millions of spirit children. Children numbered like the grains of sand in the California desert, or like the stars in the desert skies.
I tried to put the whole matter on the shelf like Sister Barnes suggested; I tried to follow Sister Tucker’s advice and put one foot in front of the other.
But I could not.
Instead, frozen with horror, I leaned into my best friend Natasha. The van bumped and jostled through the desert dark, kicking up dust and scattering jackrabbits into the brush. Who knows what Natasha was thinking, but I took comfort in the sound of her laughter as I tried to get used to the feeling of being in the backseat, never driving, always driven, headed for destinations not of my choosing and vast beyond my control.