Miss Misery

by Andy Greenwald

  I quivered a little in my seat. “That’s comforting,” I said. “That’s very, very comforting.” Ashleigh snapped the stereo back on and I didn’t stop her. The Used bellowed something about cutting so deep that it didn’t even bleed. I tried to tune out the music in my head and remember that I was just a visitor here. But it proved an awfully difficult thing to do. Mostly, I hoped I would make it back to Brooklyn without being Bortched. Ashleigh sang along to the song on the stereo unselfconsciously, drumming her palms on the dashboard as downtown Salt Lake City ambled into view. Who was I kidding? I’d already been Bortched. There was no turning back now.

  Downtown Salt Lake seemed plausible enough at first glance. There was a refreshing age to most things, a pleasant lived-in look to many of the storefronts. As Rulon had promised, there was indeed an efficient little train zipping along South Temple Street, making left turns difficult, but local life easier, no doubt. The road into town led us past the Delta Center, where the Utah Jazz play and where the Neville Brothers seemed to be performing that very night, and in the rearview mirror I caught sight of what looked to be an old train station.

  “Is that an old train station?” I asked Ashleigh, visions of faded gold-rush glamour filling my head. “I love train stations.”

  “It used to be,” she answered without looking back. “Now it’s a mall. They built it for the Olympics.”

  I wanted to ask: Why would the Olympics need a mall? But some questions are better left unanswered.

  “Temple Square is just up on the left,” Ashleigh said. “If you want to see it, let’s park here.”

  I steered the rental into an empty space on the south side of the street. Across the street, past the light-rail stop, a plain-Jane Best Western stuck its blunted snout into the purplish sky. The car made a hospital-like dinging noise to remind me I’d left the lights on. As soon as the AC went off, the famous dry heat penetrated my bones. There were shockingly few people on the street.

  “Where is everyone?” I said.

  “Home, probably.” Ashleigh undid her seat belt and opened the door. “Where do you want them to be?”

  Where, indeed. I locked up the car and followed Ashleigh across the street to the walled-in square. The air was hot but still—almost enjoyable. As soon as we set foot on the curb, two mousy-looking young women with name tags and ankle-length black skirts approached us, smiling as if they were auditioning for an orthodontist’s catalog. Squinting in the glare of their megawatt teeth, I’d never felt more New York—or more Jewish—in my life.

  “They’re missionaries,” Ashleigh hissed. “Total wack jobs.”

  The two swooped down on us like God-fearing vultures. They even walked in sync, their legs pistoning over the stone ground in easy steps. There was no similarity between them in looks—one was tall and blond; the other was stumpy and Asian—but their plasticine expressions united them in creepy Stepford sisterhood. I wanted to turn around and run, but they were already upon us.

  “Good evening!” said Stepford sister number one. “Welcome to Temple Square! May we be of assistance?”

  “Um,” I said, feeling somehow guilty even though I hadn’t done anything. “No, thanks. We’re all right.”

  “There’s a screening of a film beginning in ten minutes,” said Stepford number two, smoothing out the pleats in her skirt. “It explains the glorious history of Brigham Young and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Her eyes brimmed with God-loving tears. “Would you like us to show you where the screening is?”

  “Ah,” I said. “No, no. We’re just, um, browsing.” The two smiled serenely. I started to blurt out another ridiculous pleasantry when Ashleigh grabbed my arm and steered me away from them and toward the giant, glowing temple.

  “For a writer, you sure can be sucky with words.”

  “Writers don’t have to speak out loud, Ashleigh. They are allowed to be mute.”

  “Whatever.”

  A gentle breeze pushed through the square, moving the hot air around and making me feel the thousands of miles between me and my humid home. Small groups of stern, anachronistic bald men in suits strolled by in every direction, muttering church business into one another’s ears. There didn’t seem to be many tourists. Ashleigh pointed out the giant round tabernacle building to the left and then steered us toward the burbling fountain at the foot of the imposing, bone-white temple. The turrets were lit from below by muted, glowing spotlights, and they pointed toward the star-filled sky with a stern austerity of purpose.

  I gazed upward and thought: a story. A story traveled here and built this. No matter what my personal beliefs were, in that moment I was duly humbled and impressed. All of this for a story. Now that’s dedication. Or good storytelling. I turned to Ashleigh, who seemed bored. “Can we go in?”

  Ashleigh shook her head. “Only members of the church can go in. And even then, not always.”

  I felt the eyes of the missionaries with the lacquered smiles on us so I steered Ashleigh around the square to another corner of the temple. “Have you ever been in there?”

  She sighed. “Once. When I was like seven. The whole family got sealed in there.”

  I frowned. “You were sealed in there? Did you have to, like, fight your way out? Indiana Jones–style?” I pictured Ashleigh, mud-streaked and panting, dodging rolling boulders and blowgun darts with trusty Short Round at her side.

  Ashleigh sighed again, with infinite patience. “No, dummy. It’s what the LDS Church does. It’s a ceremony for the totally true believers. If you get your family sealed together, then you’ll always be together, even after death.”

  “So if something were to happen to you and your parents, you’d be reunited with them in heaven or whatever?”

  “Yep.”

  “You’re stuck with your family for all eternity?” I shuddered.

  “Now you see why I ran away.”

  “God, yeah.” I whistled. “Eternity is a long time. If you had told me all this before, I would have at least let you go on a few more rides this afternoon. You deserved the break.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s go get something to eat.” But as we walked, I stopped again. “Like, eternity eternity?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I told you, yes.”

  “Man, oh man. Bortched for all eternity. That’s something else.” I dodged Ashleigh’s kick, then raced her back to the rental car.

  As we drove east, Ashleigh pointed out the landmarks we didn’t have time to see up close: the grand old Joseph Smith Memorial Building, formerly the first hotel in Salt Lake City, named for the brilliant confidence man Joe Smith, who witnessed a vision from the angel Moroni in upstate New York and received golden tablets straight from God telling him about the ancient white civilizations of North America and leading him to found the LDS Church. Smith got dozens of people to believe his tale and even more to follow him across the country and marry him multiple times, all before getting himself shot to death in suspicious circumstances by angry nonbelievers in Ohio. Rulon had written a particularly florid passage about Smith, as well as about the impressive genealogy library housed inside the building that bears his name. As interested as I was in seeing what sort of record of Gouldian life might be found here in a practically Jewproof state, I drove on. We also passed the Beehive House, one of the creatively designed abodes of Smith’s successor, Brigham Young. We also passed two malls and a Borders.

  “Where are we going now?” Ashleigh was skipping tracks on the CD player, seemingly nonplussed by my rubbernecking tourism.

  “Turn right up here,” she said. “I’ll take you to, like, the only cool place in this dumb city.”

  “Sounds good to me.” And I did as I was told.

  Driving Salt Lake was actually pretty simple, once Ashleigh explained the road system to me. It was another one of ol’ Brigham’s brainstorms: Everything was labeled in terms of its relationship to the temple. The east–west road that was two blocks sou
th of the temple was 200 South. The north–south road that we were currently on, four blocks east of the temple, was 400 East. For a man who believed in a prophet named Ether, it seemed like a crushingly unpoetic solution, but it was darn efficient. We passed all the signs of modern American sprawl: fast-food joints, movie-rental chains, electronic wholesalers. We also passed a take-out pastry shop called Sconecutters.

  “You know why the streets are so wide?” Ashleigh was staring out the window.

  “Because there’s a lot of space to use up around here?”

  “No, the rumor is that it was so Brigham Young could walk arm in arm with all of his wives.”

  “Huh.” I looked around—the streets were wide, though no one seemed to be walking anywhere with any of their wives. “Is that true?”

  “Who knows. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what to believe. They keep changing their story.”

  “That’s the beauty of stories, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe.” Suddenly, Ashleigh snapped upright. “What do you believe in?”

  I laughed. “What, you mean like religion?”

  “Sure. Why are you laughing?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I just don’t spend much time thinking about it. I don’t really believe in God or any of that.”

  “But aren’t you, like, Jewish?”

  “More than ‘like,’ Ashleigh. I am a full-fledged Jew.”

  “So doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  I honked at a mammoth SUV that didn’t seem interested in proceeding through the green light. For people with such big cars and wide roads, the locals certainly were lousy drivers. “Sure, it means something. But it doesn’t affect my beliefs, really. Other than my natural cynicism—and charm.”

  “That must be nice.”

  I looked over. Ashleigh seemed to be losing enthusiasm the farther south we drove. “What do you believe, Ashleigh?”

  She nibbled on her thumbnail. “I don’t know. I used to believe in the church, you know? It’s everything here, and it meant so much to my parents and, well, there’s just nothing else. Like when I was a kid, not having the church would have been like not having sunshine or something. But when I got older, I started asking questions. And people wouldn’t answer my questions, which I thought was just rude, at first, but then it seemed creepy. Like, why can’t you answer these questions? Why do you have to make me feel like a freak for asking them? I used to pray to God to make me normal and have normal thoughts and not ask things all the time. But I couldn’t help it. It’s like when you tell someone not to think about an elephant. You know? Like what are you thinking about right now?”

  “Right now I’m thinking about getting out of this turn lane. But I’m sure as soon as I manage to navigate that, I’m going to have a richly detailed elephant in my brain.”

  “Don’t be a dork. I’m serious.”

  “I know. Sorry. So what happened?”

  “Well, when I was fourteen we got America Online, and one night when I was in my room and didn’t have any more homework to do, I went to this Web site about this TV show I really liked and saw that they had, like, a FAQ. You know, like the list of questions?”

  “I know what a FAQ is! Oh, go through the light! No!” I braked abruptly as the Mazda I was trailing suddenly pulled up lame at a yellow. “What show was it?”

  Ashleigh blushed. “Seventh Heaven.”

  “Ha!”

  “Shut up!”

  “Sorry, go on.”

  “Well it got me thinking. If you can get answers to questions about TV shows online, why not, like, religion? So I did a search and…well, it all kinda fell apart from there.”

  “Why did it fall apart?”

  “I found all these sites, right? Where people could ask questions about the church and real people would answer them. There’s even a giant site called Exmormon.org where people who got excommunicated tell their stories. And it was just…brutal. I cried and cried all night. I wasn’t the only one who had questions. And when I read the answers—I couldn’t unread them, you know? I read all this stuff about Freemasons and Mormons and how the twelve witnesses were all close friends of Joseph Smith and just all this terrible stuff. And I couldn’t believe it anymore.”

  “Yeah, but Ashleigh, all religions are inconsistent. I mean, my family used to have a rabbi who ate a ham sandwich for lunch every day.”

  “It wasn’t about it being inconsistent. It was about being part of something that wouldn’t let me ask questions—that I couldn’t stand. That’s just not who I am.”

  I glanced over again at Ashleigh, feeling strangely proud of her. “No, I wouldn’t want that either.”

  “It’s funny,” she said, lost in her own world. “The Internet opened me up to so many things, you know? New people, poetry, music…life. But it totally closed me off from the life my parents set out for me. Which just totally sucks.”

  “The Internet was just the tool you had, Ashleigh,” I said. “It was like a shovel, but you’re the one who dug your way out. Face it: You’re just not a closed-off person. Which is a wonderful thing. There are far too many closed-off people in the world today. If you hadn’t had that shovel, you would have just dug the hole with your hands. And then totally messed up your nails.”

  She punched my shoulder. “What are you talking about? Digging holes?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe all this mountain air makes me poetic.”

  “Well, quit it.”

  And so I did.

  After a twenty-minute drive south and east, past a minor league baseball stadium, a state park, and some upscale shopping centers, Ashleigh had me pull into the parking lot of the Blue Plate Diner on 2100 East. The mountains loomed large in front of us, and when I cut the engine, the faint sound of crickets filled the air. Still, I was feeling antsy. “Are you sure we have time for this?”

  “I promise,” she said. “Plus, I’m starving!”

  The diner was, in the end, worth visiting. Located on the east side of Salt Lake, closer to the university, it had that retro-funky, relaxed vibe familiar in all college towns. There were a few tables scattered outside, filled with recognizable boys with too much stubble drinking coffee too seriously next to white girls sporting trust-fund dreadlocks. I felt instantly comfortable—here was an oasis of liberalism in a conservative sea—and predicted (correctly, as it turned out) that inside the fixtures would be vintage, the coffee mugs would be oversize (and bottomless), the local alt weekly would be available to browse, and some variation on a vegan tofu scramble would be on the menu. The woman who led us to a booth in the back had cat’s-eye glasses and a cute, sardonic smile. I felt like we had stumbled into a completely different movie.

  When we were seated and had both ordered Cokes, Ashleigh leaned across the Formica tabletop and whispered, “I love this place.”

  “It’s really nice.” The gaggle of indie-rock boys seated at the middle table let out a wild guffaw and clinked their glasses. They were a familiar bunch: hooded sweatshirts up over their heads, spiked belts, and Dickies pants with shredded cuffs. The “bad boys” of any town, who were actually good boys, just bored out of their skulls. I saw Ashleigh watching them longingly and asked, “Do you know any of them?”

  She blushed two shades of crimson. “What? No! I don’t even live around here.”

  “Well,” I said, shuffling the ketchup bottle between my hands. “I think they like you.” More hooting and whispering from the table of boys.

  Ashleigh kicked my shin under the table. Another day of girls like this one and I’d be covered in bruises. “Shut up! No they don’t.”

  “I think they might,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “That one with the nose ring has an Against Me! T-shirt on. Isn’t that one of those rock-and-roller groups you’re always IMing me about?”

  “God, Dad, you’re so embarrassing.” But she was smiling, too.

  I stopped teasing her then, hoping her good mood would last until I was able to drop her off, and concentrated on the
menu. When the waitress came back, Ashleigh ordered the chicken sandwich and fries, and I got the veggie burger. The food came quickly and was awfully good, so we concentrated on eating. Which is to say I concentrated on eating, while Ashleigh concentrated on the table of boys. I took advantage of her distraction to lead a vicious raid on her french fries. I was remorseless. I took many prisoners.

  “You could have ordered your own, you know.”

  “I know, but it’s more of a challenge this way.”

  Ashleigh smiled, but the smile faded quickly. “Do we really have to do this?”

  “I’m afraid we do, Ashleigh. It’s the rules of dinner. I am charged by divine law to steal your fries and you are compelled by the almighty to defend them.”

  “No, I’m talking about this. Me, here. Do you really have to take me home?”

  I wiped my mouth and took a swig of Coke. “Yeah, Ashleigh. I really do. This has been fun. Strange and prohibitively expensive, but fun. But it has to end before either of us gets into serious trouble.”

  “This has just been so…different. Like even though I’m back here already, I still feel free. I don’t want to lose that.”

  “I know.” I licked a dollop of ketchup off my finger. “You have to hold on to the feeling. You have to remember that even if you’re trapped here—for the moment—you are and always will be as free as you want to be.” I hummed a fragment of “Free to Be You and Me” for good measure.

  “Tell that to my parents.”

  “No, I won’t. But you should.”

  She laughed, but it was a bitter sound. “Right.”

  “Ashleigh, the most important thing for you to remember is that they’re your parents. You have to love them, because as rough as they are on you, I’m willing to bet it’s just because they love you. And because they’re scared of losing you. But loving them doesn’t mean you have to like them right now.”

  “That’s not a problem.”

  “Look, don’t forget about any of this, OK? The places we’ve been today. How far it’s possible to travel.”