by Walter Kirn
My father had tried to prepare me for the Frolic by taking me out on a drive the previous week in his Chevrolet cruiser and speaking frankly for hours, even drawing a couple of sketches in his citation log as we idled at the edge of Martyr's Pond, the site of the 1880 hacking death of a runaway polygamous wife by a posse of vengeful Mormon patriarchs. There had been three other murders in Bluff's history, but none of them so momentous and galvanizing, perhaps because the victims were all men and at least two of them were drunken men. The dead woman's name was Eliza Wofford Bingham, and we honored her with a two-day September holiday that was my least favorite weekend of the year. From dawn on the first day to sundown on the second, all AFA males had to stay inside their houses while the women of Bluff paraded in the streets drinking from flasks of elderberry spirits and—in imitation of Eliza fleeing her killers through the thorny brush—casting off their clothing as they went. The holiday ended here, at Martyr's Pond, with a ceremony I'd never seen but once heard described as “rambunctious naked splashing.”
After hastily going over the mental exercise meant to arrest my pleasure at the last moment, my father recalled the Frolic of thirty years ago, when he'd first enjoyed contact with my mother. He said he'd been tired that evening from staying up late kidding around with his buddies, and he regretted it. He was drowsy and inattentive during the ritual, while my mother, he said, was alert and fresh and avid. He told me that he feared he'd hurt her permanently and compromised their marriage before it started. He advised me to go to bed early beginning that night and to double my daily intake of citrus water.
“You'll be judged by the girl,” he said, “and it will linger. I don't think it's right, and they're warned they shouldn't do it, but most of them—the lively ones—can't help it. What's worse is that what they're judging you against isn't another man but their idea of one.”
“What idea? From where?”
“You'll never know. They don't know, either. Just rest and build your strength.”
I asked him with some reluctance what I should do if Sarah didn't suit me. I didn't consider that I might not suit her.
“There's nothing to be scared of there,” he said. He explained that my pairing with Sarah was not an accident but the result of continuous observation by our most intuitive church leaders. They'd been watching us since our childhoods, he said, and our compatibility was assured, although it might not be evident right away. “With your mother and me it took about six years. In your case, I'd be surprised if it takes two.”
I tried to look cheered by this news but it was hard. Two years was more than seven hundred days.
“You're kinder than I was at your age,” my father said. “You thrive on their approval. You nod. You listen. Love will come quickly, I know it. You're a knight.”
“Sometimes I act that way. I'm not sure,” I said.
“Acting that way is enough for them, I've learned.” My father laughed and seemed eager for me to join him but something in what he'd said felt grim to me. It suggested I'd have to be false for women to like me, or at least for Sarah Kimmel to like me. Women in general were irrelevant now.
“And of course there's your other great virtue,” my father said. “The midwife and I discussed it at your birth. But I've told you that story.”
He had. It made me bashful. How the old woman had measured me with her thumb and marked its tip with a pen to show her friends. I knew he expected me to share his pride in this, and maybe I did, but it didn't feel proper to show it. Not to him, and not to any man. And what Sarah might think didn't matter; I'd thought this through. If she'd dabbled in much love play before the Frolic, she might feel appreciative and pleased, but she wouldn't be able to tell me without revealing embarrassing facts about her youth that AFA females simply never spoke about lest it should ever dawn on AFA men that the Frolic was not worth waiting for. And if Sarah hadn't dallied with other partners (which seemed to me more likely), she wouldn't know that I was any different. I'd know, however, and it might breed resentment to watch my oblivious, complacent mate take for granted what her worldly sisters might dote on and covet and treat me like a king for.
“Can we please just forget that old story?” I asked my father. I loved the man, but not right then. “It hasn't helped me any. It's upsetting. When you tell it to other people, it always comes back to me. I don't think you know that.”
My father looked wounded, pierced. The story was about himself, I saw then, about the potential hidden in his seed that had emerged so grandly in his son. But was it even true? I wondered now. The physical fact it referred to was true enough (I'd peeked around at my buddies while growing up and confirmed that I had a modest advantage, especially in warm weather and in the morning), but the awestruck midwife and her thumb felt like devices invented to mask and soften an outright boast that my father dared not risk. He was a shy man. He rarely polished his badge and he wore a Windbreaker over his uniform even in broiling late July.
He gazed through the windshield at muddy Martyr's Pond. It was miserable being a man in Bluff sometimes. Perhaps it was even worse elsewhere. We hoped so, anyway.
“The Frolic,” my father said. “I wouldn't have named it that.”
“What would you have named it?”
“Hmm . . . I'll think.”
“Not that they let us name things. Or ever will.”
“Don't talk that way, Mason. It's a downhill road.”
“Don't be so somber. Let's hear your name.”
“‘The Clench.'”
Exactly sixty minutes after sundown, Sarah had me lie on my back with my arms beside my trunk and my legs about a foot apart so that she could kneel between my ankles. She was as thin from the front as from the side, an index finger of a woman. She spread her hands and gripped my goose-bumped shins and seemed to be steadying her mind for something that she'd mastered while alone but found more daunting now that I was here. I asked her if she'd intended to leave my socks on.
“It's brisk tonight. I thought you'd want warm toes.”
“It looks wrong,” I said.
“No one's looking at you.”
“You are.”
“But you don't know at what. It's not your socks, young man.”
Surprising. Enlightening. Her quip meant that she did know the difference, but it meant more than that. It meant she didn't care to hide her knowledge and even that she enjoyed it. And felt entitled to.
Like the five or six other young women at that year's ceremony, Sarah had made a small campsite along a stream at the edge of a cut alfalfa field. She'd pitched a loose tent of gray mosquito netting supported at its corners by sharpened willow sticks and spread out a freshly laundered flannel sleeping bag made fragrant with drops of purifying sage oil. On the ground, beside a kerosene lantern, her purse lay open, filled with her supplies: a tube of skin cream, a folded yellow hand towel, and a pocket edition of Mother Lucy's Discourses bound in white elk skin, stitched with yellow thread, and marked with a lavender ribbon near the end. I'd never managed to read that far myself, but Sarah was a student of theology, about to complete her fourth year at Coleman College, the Church academy for women. There was no such institution for men. Men in Bluff trained for jobs, for concrete tasks, but women cultivated a higher view that showed them what all our sweat and toil would come to. They spoke of this vista in parables, symbolically, and my hunch was that they withheld important elements out of fear of lowering men's morale.
“Your body needs to form a line,” said Sarah. “North-south, to take advantage of magnetism.” She grasped my heels and tugged my legs out straight, gently shaking them to relax my hips, and then, beginning with the little ones and working methodically inward, she cracked my toes. Afterward, I couldn't feel them. The lantern light through my closed eyelids was mottled pink, its patterns shifting with my heartbeat, and I could smell concentration on Sarah's breath—a burned odor, not unpleasant, like peanuts roasting—as she positioned herself athwart my pelvis.
“All the
way flat. No tension. Dead,” she said.
I'd assumed we'd pray first. Maybe later. She gave me all of her weight. She gave it smoothly. I drew a deep breath, then felt Sarah blow it out. That people could breathe for each other was strange new knowledge and I felt suddenly enlarged by it, like the moment I'd learned to stay upright on a bicycle. A needle of hay stubble pierced the sleeping bag and I arched my back to avoid it but couldn't go high enough without disturbing a balance that had developed. I let the stalk scratch me, its sharp dry tip, and then let it cut me when she drove me flat again. I must have made a sound then—Sarah stopped.
“Are you close?” she said. “How close are you?”
My father had said it would jolt me, but not wholly. First would come a sense that a jolt was likely.
“I'm pretty sure we're safe,” I said.
She touched me near where we were connected, in a spot where I'd never been touched as an adult and hadn't wished to be. Now I wished to be. This new wish would endure until I died, I sensed, and might even float free from my gray corpse and drift forever in the Etheric Breeze, a permanent speck of quintessential Mason-ness that couldn't think or remember or speak its name but only wish and wish and wish.
“I'm supposed to be able to feel it. Here,” said Sarah. “A little bump-bump or twitch that tells me when.”
“Did you?”
“Not yet.”
“Let's keep going.”
“If you're confident.”
“I'm confident.”
“Confident or just determined?”
“The longer you jabber and pester me,” I said, “the more confident I get.”
Across the field, by some wonder of acoustics that summer in the mountains brings on sometimes, I could hear the voices of our chaperones—four ancient ladies drinking mint tea from thermoses and plotting their annual trade fair in Missoula. AFAs lived to ninety quite regularly, and not a touchy, arthritic, dependent ninety but an unflappable productive ninety that, among the women, led to supreme achievements in the crafts realm. They sewed and crocheted with the patience of near immortals, complicating and miniaturizing their stitches, detailing and elaborating their patterns. It was as though they were working their way down to some primary depth of tininess and fineness that, if they ever succeeded in touching it, might allow them to reweave the cosmos or, if their fingers slipped, unravel it. They didn't hold on to their handiworks, however; they sold them to strangers from a rented stall at a Missoula's weekend farmers' market. Their pieces commanded handsome prices. Those old crones loved their money, it was plain to see, though why they loved it wasn't clear. They rarely spent it, just packed it into shoe boxes or sewed it into the linings of their coats for their heirs to come across someday.
“I'm feeling the twitch,” Sarah said, and she was off me, quickly enough to avoid a pregnancy but not to avoid a gluey wet mess. She wiped us both clean with the hand towel (had she planned for this?) and reminded me, after pausing to let things settle, that a clock had just started on our eventual wedding. Once I'd proven myself as a provider by amassing the money and Virtue Coupons necessary to buy a house and a share in the Bluff co-op, we would be married in this very field, on this very spot beside the creek. Until then, more intimate contact was forbidden; our memories of the Frolic would have to serve.
“We're in the Book of Love now,” Sarah said.
In practice, this meant meeting for Sunday suppers at her family's house on Isis Street, a standard aluminum-sided three-bedroom cube built by community labor in the eighties from plans drawn up by the Church Domestic Architect. These blueprints changed only every thirty years or so, resulting in uniform little neighborhoods that I found cozy and reassuring but that the fussier women of our town (my grandmother called them “the Parisians”) loved to gripe about. And, yes, each house style did have certain flaws, such as the tendency of my parents' roof to collect so much snow in the winter that when spring came the copious runoff would flood the basement and swell the soil near the foundation. Repairing the damage this caused was often expensive, but the fact that every squat white stucco bungalow clustered around ours was ailing in the same manner softened the blow.
At the Kimmels' house the problem was lack of air, which made me groggy and inarticulate during my weekly visits. Sarah's father, a laborer in the talc mine that was Bluff's chief source of outside income, suffered more spectacularly, coughing nonstop and rubbing his runny eyes until the lashes all fell out. Sarah blamed the dustiness and stuffiness for her dull skin, her dandruff, and her dry mouth. Only her mother seemed unaffected, perhaps because she seldom took a breath. The woman was a husky kitchen whirlwind who cleaned as she cooked and had no true feminine features aside from a great wild mass of dyed dark hair that looked like it had sprung down from a branch, claws extended, and attacked her scalp.
The meals she served had less flavor than the stale air. The Kimmels were fish people, their Maternal Foodway as determined more than a hundred years ago by Mother Lucy, our founder and first Seeress. The only fresh fish to be found in Bluff was trout, and Sarah's mother prepared it according to two main recipes in which I could taste her own mother's wrinkled hand: oven-baked trout fillets garnished with forest herbs and parboiled trout on stewed dandelion greens. This would be my diet once I married Sarah, so I tried to eat enthusiastically, even when my appetite was stifled by her wounding behavior at the table.
It usually showed itself midway through the meal, after the Prayer and the Lesson. The Lesson was Paul's job. Paul, the little brother—a prim blond twelve-year-old whom I was expected to take an interest in by helping him with his math and science homework and admiring his collection of fossil insects dug from the shale deposits south of town—read to us from the Three Foundational Works in a high fearful voice familiar from my own school days. He lived in terror of mispronunciations, just as I had at his age. The teachers punished them harshly. “Be always incorruptible in intention,” he quoted from Mother Lucy's Discourses, “and indefatigable in execution. The Transcendent Immanence yields but slowly to the instrumentalities of will.”
“How did I do?” he asked, looking at his big sister, who functioned as the household magistrate and ruled on all of life's little daily questions. Her mother was too distracted, her father too tired, and her little brother too young and fretful.
“Moderately inadequately,” said Sarah.
The crisp extra syllables were a cruelty. Paul's eyes fogged over with shame. His throat turned red.
“Better than I'd have done. That was hard,” I said.
“Mason?”
“What?”
“Respect,” said Sarah.
“Sorry.”
“Paul, don't cry,” she said.
“I'm not,” he sniffled.
“You were about to cry. Mason?”
“Yes?” I said.
“Eat. You're not eating.”
“Because we're talking now.”
“And now we're finished talking. Eat,” she said.
After supper the parents released us for a stroll into the hills along a raw dirt logging road that was a favorite spot for couples like us, their affections stretched thin between memories of pleasure and forebodings of commitment. Whenever we passed them, we lowered our heads to show we weren't interested in their conversations, but faint vibrations passed between us anyway: of sympathy for one another's awkwardness and—between the future husbands, at least—of mutual condolence.
Sarah used our night walks to disclose to me her hopes and expectations for our life together. She planned to teach at the college once she graduated and put aside money for certain small luxuries that we might not be able to save for after she started having children. To me, the luxuries didn't sound small at all, though.
“I'd like a nice car. A Saab.”
I made her spell it. The word's outlandish foreignness annoyed me. Most AFA families owned two vehicles, the husband's pickup truck and the wife's sedan, both of them used and minimally eq
uipped. The talk that a car such as Sarah described might cause would isolate us from our friends and neighbors.
“Maybe. If it's a few years old,” I said.
“I'd like a new one. The new ones are much cuter. I saw a nice red one in Missoula last August.”
Sarah's grand notions all came from the same place. Because of her trips to the trade fair with her mother, who crafted cedar spoons and cooking tongs, she'd spent too much time, I felt, comparing herself to the vain free-spenders with poisonous diets whom the All-in-One had set around us as a reminder of how not to live and, especially, how not to eat. As the Seeress had been telling us for years, the buildup of yeast in people from bleached white flour promotes a restless, selfish temperament that atrophies the pituitary glands and plays havoc with natural peristalsis. If such defectives were Sarah's models now, then she was sick, too, I feared, and might grow sicker. Once she'd secured her abominable Saab, she'd look around for something else—a second Saab, maybe, in another color.
“No Missoula this year. It's bad for you,” I said.
“You've hardly been there.”
“That's immaterial.”
“Clever long words don't suit men.”
“They suit me fine.”
“Where do you get them? I'm curious.”
“The library.”
“The library is for dandies,” Sarah said. “If you have to use it, be quick. Don't sit and read there. It gives the wrong impression.”
“So do Saabs.”
When I finally told Sarah plainly that our marriage might be an undertaking beyond my means, she yielded a bit in the area of chastity. One night when she'd been describing her future kitchen, and specifically the built-in ovens that would allow her to run a home-based business using the Kimmel women's beloved recipes for marionberry bran cakes and the like, I let go of her hand and walked three steps ahead of her, turned around in the middle of the logging road, and announced from a formal, manly distance that I would need an extra two years, at least, before I'd be in a position to set a wedding date. I led her through a cold, mathematical formula relating my projected weekly wages to the estimated costs of aping the Missoula way of life.
