The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir (9 page)

We decided to take the subway to a retro diner near my house. I thought it was a good idea until we were on the train. I live really far from work. We’d already covered all the basic information: where we were from, why we liked acting. We had five stops left and we’d already run out of things to say. You know it’s bad when you catch each other reading the subway advertisements.

When we got to the diner we ordered milk shakes, cheesy fries, and hot dogs and sat across from each other in a cozy booth, still scrambling for conversation. That’s when I noticed, a few feet from our table, a chest full of board games.

“Want to play?” I suggested. Jeff pulled out Monopoly, Connect Four, and Boggle, but they were all missing pieces. So we ended up choosing the game Guess Who? That was when things got weird.

Jeff sat the Guess Who? board in the center of our table and explained the game: We both had to pick a card from the deck. This card would show us who our player was. The object of the game was to guess the other person’s “player” by asking yes-and-no questions.

“I think I remember this,” I said, and I picked a card. Just as I was about to turn it over, Jeff put his hand on top of mine. “Let’s make a wager,” he said. “You win, I won’t touch your boobs; I win, I get to touch your boobs.”

I thought it over. There really wasn’t anything in it for me. If I won, my boobs would not be touched. I didn’t exactly have to play a game to earn that. I could walk down the street and no one would touch my boobs.

I looked across the table and into Jeff’s blue-green eyes. Then I asked myself the real question:
Do I want someone to touch my boobs?
Two different guys had tried to touch them before, both at college parties, but because they were drunk and clumsy, and I was sober and astute, I had pushed their hands away. Still, at that moment, looking at Jeff, I was intrigued. I wondered if a man would like my boobs. Did I have nice boobs? My boobs are big, men like big boobs, but then again everything about me is big, and men don’t seem to like that. I decided that half of me wanted to be touched and the other half did not. Jeff ’s fifty-fifty wager matched my indecision.

“Okay,” I said. “It’s a deal.”

Jeff and I shook on it, as if having someone grope you always involved an official handshake.

I turned my card around and looked at it. Ben Forrester was the name of my person. Ben had brown eyes and a round face with a dark beard and he was wearing a hat. I looked at him again. He looked like my dad.
Great.
The last thing I wanted to think about was what my dad would think if he knew about this wager.

“Does your person have red hair?” Jeff asked.

“No,” I answered. “Is your person wearing a hat?”

We asked each other a dozen yes-or-no questions. I tried to apply all of my intelligence, but I couldn’t focus. Why? What I call my “Mormon filter” kicked in. Every time I consider doing something wrong, this happens. I can’t just make a bad choice. I analyze the consequences too thoroughly and I filter all the information through my religion.

For example, if someone offered you a glass of wine, you’d probably be able to reach out and just take a drink. Not me. Before my hand reaches the glass, I’ve asked myself,
Is it worth it to put yourself in the position of being addicted to something?
I’ve thought,
The entire purpose of life on earth is to make choices, and addiction limits your freedom of choice
. By the time my hand gets to the glass of wine, I’ve already talked myself out of it. It’s exhausting.

As I sat across from Jeff, I could think only of the things that would happen to me if I did something impure like let a man touch my boobs. My body was a temple and I needed to respect it as such and not defile it. The things I did with other people before I was married would limit my ability to completely love my partner because it introduced an element of comparison. Sexual acts were supposed to make me feel unholy in the presence of God, like my light had been diminished. I thought about what Mormons call the “eternal consequences” of your actions: Sexual immorality is the second worst sin, the first being murder. And I was so busy analyzing these potential consequences that I wasn’t at all focused on figuring out who Jeff’s player was.

That’s when Jeff said it—before I was ready, before I knew what I wanted to do.

“Is your person Ben Forrester?”

I looked down at my card; the man who looked like my dad smiled unknowingly. He had failed me.

“Yes,” I answered.

Jeff smiled.

“I live around the corner,” I said. “We can do it there.”

 

It’s weird how your senses heighten when you’re about to break character. If someone asked me, “As a Mormon, do you let guys touch your boobs?” I would say no. But there I was, not ten minutes later, sitting on my couch across from Jeff, lifting up my shirt. I was wearing a black bodysuit. Once I discovered bodysuits I always wore them under my clothes. It’s really a pain when you have to pee. But just when I was about to give them up, I’d look in the mirror. My body looked so much neater with a bodysuit; I couldn’t give it up.

When I lifted up my shirt I was worried Jeff would ask me what I was wearing. He didn’t, though; he just stared at my chest and shifted in his seat to get closer to me. “Under bra or over bra?” Jeff asked.

“Over,” I answered. Under was too big a step. Jeff looked disappointed.

“Fine,” I said. “Under.” I hardly knew him, but I didn’t want to be the cause of any major letdown. Jeff awkwardly placed one hand inside the bra of my bodysuit and around my right breast. His fingers were cold and bony. Then he took his left hand and placed it on my left breast. We sat there like that for five minutes, not really talking.

I thought about whether I really liked Jeff. I guessed I didn’t. On the subway ride we hadn’t had much to say to each other, and the conversation only picked up at dinner because of the thrill of possibly doing something wrong.

But this wasn’t so different than any of the other guys I’d been with. At this point I’d been kissed four times. I kept a list in my journal documenting all of them. Not counting Wade, the horny twelve-year-old I’d kissed on the trampoline, it was a list of strangers, location-based instead of name-based: guy at Joe’s Pub
,
guy at Katie’s dance party, and guy at Grassroots Tavern. Each of these kisses happened like my rendezvous with Jeff, behind closed doors, feeling somehow wrong. The major difference between Jeff and the other guys was that they’d all been drinking first. With thick beer goggles on they’d led me to a corner and tried to stick their tongues down my throat—not to romanticize it or anything. I guess I allowed these experiences because they made me feel like I was, in some way, part of the game. At least when friends talked about romance or relationships I could honestly say, “I’ve kissed a few guys, and I think. . . .”

Remembering these past screwups made me feel better about Jeff. At least he hadn’t been drinking. An average cute guy—who was completely sober—liked me. Sort of.

Jeff bent his elbows so that he could move closer to me while still keeping his hands on my breasts. We made eye contact and he moved in for the kiss. I hated kissing. I didn’t tell Jeff this—or anyone—but I hated kissing because I had no idea how to do it. The few encounters I’d had were all so sloppy and brief that even though it’d happened four times, I still didn’t know how to kiss. This left me feeling overly anxious.
If I don’t kiss well Jeff will think I’m a terrible kisser,
I worried,
when really I’m only a bad kisser because I haven’t had time to practice. With the proper teacher, I could very well become a connoisseur.

But Jeff was about to kiss me whether I knew how to kiss or not. He looked up at me and asked, “Is this okay?”

I nodded my head, but it wasn’t okay. It wasn’t okay to have his fingers on my breasts and it wasn’t okay to kiss him. But it was what it was, and it’s probably all it would ever be. I’d learned years earlier that the men I actually liked would never be attracted to me and I accepted it.

I let Jeff kiss me several times just on the lips, and then he stuck his tongue in my mouth. I never know what to do when a guy does this.
Do I put my tongue on top? Do I suck his tongue in? Will somebody cut me a break and just give me the answers?
For lack of a better response I decided,
Just play dead
. I flopped stiff to one side and let Jeff’s tongue sit in the center of my mouth. I let it move back and forth, and then I let it retreat.

This was obviously not the right choice. Jeff stopped kissing me. He took his hands off my chest and sat up. Our make-out session was officially over. I immediately started to overanalyze.
Did he sit up because I’m a horrible kisser, or was he getting a kink in his neck? Should I have flicked my tongue? Oh, no . . . do I have hot dog breath?
Neither of us spoke. I thought of a few things I could say, but I couldn’t figure out how to begin the conversation.
So how were my boobs?
just didn’t sound right.

After a few moments, Jeff broke the ice. He stood up, walked over to my DVD collection, and said, “
Old School
’s a great movie. Do you mind if I borrow it?”

I could see we were just going to pretend it didn’t happen.

“No problem,” I answered, pulling my shirt down as he turned to face me. With the DVD under his arm he said, “Well, mission accomplished,” followed by, “I really should be going.”

Mission accomplished
. I thought about his choice of words. What a stupid thing to say. Was he some sort of spy trying to touch virgin boobs all over the city?

“Do you work tomorrow?” I asked, walking him to my door.

“No, do you?”

“No.”

“Okay, well, I’ll see you on Monday.”

“See you on Monday.”

I unlocked the front door and opened it. Jeff took a step forward and then paused. His lips were slightly open and he looked like he wanted to say something more. So I waited.
Is he going to ask me out? Does he want to date me?

He took a deep breath. “Don’t tell anyone at work about this, okay?”

Babies Buying Babies

I wanted to keep my job at FAO Schwarz, to rise in the ranks, become an elf or dance on the piano some day. Only, something terrible happened.

It all started in November. At first the month was slow as ever. The maintenance crew installed a ceiling fan in the nursery. For fun, we’d toss Nubbins on it and watch him spin until he flew. But then one day, everything changed. A few months before I started working as a toy demonstrator, two girls from the MTV reality show
Rich Girls
came into FAO Schwarz and adopted a baby. On November 15, the episode aired. The Lee Middleton Doll Collection skyrocketed to instant fame. By nine o’clock the next morning our dolls were the “hot” item to get for Christmas and every mother on the Upper East Side had to have one for her child. There was a line of anxious parents and spoiled children outside the store. We were doing adoptions left and right. Gone were the days of horseplay and pranks—this was real work, and it was exhausting. “Do you promise to love and care for the baby?” “Will you read to the baby?” “Will you change the baby’s diaper?” “What do you want to name the baby?” Fill out birth certificate. Repeat.

Business was so good that no one saw it coming, until it was too late. Within a week of the episode’s airdate, we sold out of all the white babies. All we had left were incubators upon incubators of minority babies.

The manager of FAO Schwarz had a conniption fit. With Christmas only five weeks away the Lee Middleton Factory was already on back-order. There was absolutely no way to get a new shipment in until mid-January.

Day after day after day, the same scenario repeated itself.

Eager mothers would rush to the adoption center. “Is this the Lee Middleton Doll Collection?” they’d ask. Then they’d stop, dead in their tracks. I’d watch their heads go from incubator to incubator—they’d pause briefly at the Asian baby. “Oh wait—no. . . .” Then, trying as hard as they could to be politically correct, the mothers would look at us and say: “I’m sorry, but do you have any other shades of babies?”

Chad, the toy demo manager, had prepped us with a response. He’d taped a memo in the women’s locker room reading: “If the mothers express a disinterest in the babies due to ethnicity kindly inform them that while these are all the babies we have in stock, there is a wider selection available online and they are more than welcome to order online.”

But this was not what the mothers wanted to hear. They went on and on about how their child had to have a Lee Middleton Doll. Meanwhile there were dozens for sale behind them. Only they were the wrong color. “These dolls don’t look like my little Susan,” they’d explain, pointing to their child. “I want something that looks like Susan
(wink, wink).”

We nurses decided to make the most of the situation and invented another game. Here’s how it went: If a mother didn’t want to adopt a doll because of its ethnicity, we worked on her child. It was pretty easy. First we would ask the little girl if she wanted to hold one of the babies.