To kick off the 1983/1984 school year, we were supposed to pray for a mate, but I didn't believe it could be as easy as asking.
It was not the praying that was the problem. Praying was like walking, which I did all the time. I also bent all the time to pick up the add/drop slips that skated away from me across fake marble floors. Other times, I shopped for wristwatches, calendars and fudge in the campus bookstore, because they had fudge at this place as well as watches, and if there was nothing else that was great about this college, that alone was remarkable to me.
But back in the dorm I did not like to make a big show of kneeling with my back to my roommate.
Because I had to watch her constantly.
Like now, I opened our dorm door and she is struggling into my one truly beautiful sweater in an unauthorized fashion.
"Don't," she said and left swiftly, not stretching it out in a way that would have been painful to watch, but scrunching it to her body with both hands, which was not great, but better.
In our dorm room alone, someone was there and sometimes not there, and I was fine with either possibility.
But sometimes I felt it, like how right now I felt like I should look out the window, and I got up and looked. And in the distance, I saw two joggers, but could not tell anything about them.
And then it happened: a boy from the boy's dorm wanted to go jogging with me.
He had one of those new pigskin backpacks that were not for sale in the bookstore and were difficult to get, because I had tried, and I openly admired his. He slung one strap off his shoulder so it could be closer to me. We did not end up jogging, because he wanted to take me to one of the fun old movies playing in the Kimball Tower, but instead we stumbled into a closer theater, which had Ordinary People, starring Mary Tyler Moore, and he emerged afterwards in a blown-away state. So much so, that he could barely move, and nearly stumbling, he made his way into the step-down lounge, and I grabbed and tried not to grab his elbow. We sat on the hearth in front of the fireplace and he hid his face by bending to loosen the drawstring of his pigskin backpack and rummaging through.
I, too, was similarly moved and tried to let this be a connection between us.
Then the next day when I saw him, he was only merely slightly stunned. And the day after that he was totally fine, and kept using the word "mind set," and I had no idea what that meant.
So I tucked this away, hoping to use it, too. Because, truthfully? I wasn't doing well--neither in the dorm nor my classes, neither spiritually nor temporally, neither did "date" or "mate" rhyme with either 1983 or 1984, so the bishop or first counselor or whoever else wanted to make the announcement could take no pleasure unfurling the sentence like a banner from the pulpit.
What they had wanted to say turned out to be difficult.
By spring semester, I would have taken enough of classes to know that this sentence was not good marketing.
But this was still fall semester, so I was only beginning to be aware of the power of things, like words and where they showed up.
And I felt emotionally open for me, which was about as far as I could open this dorm window, or about four inches, which presented an unsolvable problem for those who wanted to jump.
But I was going to keep going and show up every day, even though I was prone to detachment. It was not just refusing to pray aloud. It was that I spent hours in my dorm staring off while holding open copies of magazines. I rubbed their perfume samples on my wrists, but had every intention of staying intact, not cutting myself, eating right and not too much.
So the next time the dorm cafeteria doors were thrown open, I was not waiting to go in.
Days passed, and at a dance near the step-down lounge, this same boy took my whole body between his hands and lifted me up because he thought I needed to see something. He was taller and stronger than I remembered and I did not squirm, but hung limply in between his hands, which were large. Hanging this way, I could make myself heavier and punish him.
Later, I would tell my resident advisor that I had felt violated.
"What else?" she asked. She pushed her large prescription glasses on top of her head like the women Erma Bombeck was always wistfully jealous of in her hilarious fictional essays.
"He proposed," I said.
Because this was the way it was at our college. People had impressions of things that were to come. There were no more visions, but they heard voices, or just one voice coming from one source, and so because of this, I had not taken his proposal for a joke.
"Just to let you know," I shouted after her.
But the RA was already hustling down the hall. There was a lot to attend to, like the opening of closed doors on the alternate Sundays that were set carefully aside for boys and their visits.
The RA was after something else, which turned out to be my roommate, who had set up a huge speaker, not hers and not mine, in our window, and through the four-inch gap between the window's edge and the frame, she blasted soft music recorded by some of the best singer songwriters of the 1970s. The cassette held her own careful compilation and it was her answer to the voluminous heavy banner that had just been unfurled with the cooperation of the boys in adjacent rooms in the dorm tower opposite, a blanket for a god, which held, not the logo of a band as it would at another more reasonable college, but a proposal.
It was the usual question with a name attached.
The RA pulled the plug on the receiver. The guy, whose banner made no noise at all, but perhaps the slightest whisper of nylon in canyon breezes, got to keep the banner up until there was an answer.
It did not matter that soft music was what was popular here in 1983 and '84. It did not matter that the music was appropriate and ultimately praiseworthy. That didn't rhyme either. But it became the thing that I said to myself: Music you could not dance to.
So I put my roommate's cassette in my headphones and began to jog, which I did not do easily. My roommate had taken my sweatpants somewhere, so I had to go out in white church tights under shorts. I wore a sweatshirt with the name of the college. In case I was found, I could be returned here.
Sweating already, I ran through the adjacent off-campus streets and took blocks in endless circles. At some point, I knew I could not get back. Of course, I was still in Provo, close to my dorm. The mountains were over there, now behind me. In fact, they were practically on top of me. I turned my back, tried to ignore them. Because if I looked up now, I would see their crevices, their canyons benign and close, and I would be tempted to run into them. And everyone who knows me knows I would never make it.
A car, in the process of backing out of the driveway, tapped me lightly, but I did not crumble. I kept jogging, though my leg had begun to throb.
The car crept along as if searching for something, and I kept after it, following it out of the neighborhood that I could not seem to leave on my own. By the time I got back to my room, I was dirty and injured and I had sweated my tights to nothing--gone, like everyone on my floor.
Outside, the proposal banner still obscured a few of the windows on the boys' dorm, but it was too dark to see joggers or anything else.
And then I remembered where everyone was and what I was missing--nothing less than the first candle passing of the year, and I, full of judgment, headed down to the basement.
The elevator opened non-judgmentally, however, and I descended and the doors opened onto a circle where a single cinnamon-scented candle was moving from hand to hand. And somewhere in there, a girl we did not know had become engaged.
All around her, girls were singing, except for my roommate who held my sweatpants, which flowered from her hand, and a blanket draped over her head like she was ill. When the candle came to her, she took it and passed it on. She did not pinch it out with her bare fingers or throw it, or try to render or otherwise harm it.
Instead she was channeling what I had forgotten was the best of me, doing her work, being responsible, not staring off.
The girls were singing, and I knew the song. It was something from my roommate's cassette. Everyone knew it, not just here in Provo, but in the great country beyond, and I sang it too and the candle came to me, the ring so small it could have been baked into the smallest square of fudge. My roommate saw me and waved the sweatpants around, and then tossed them to me too late. I could not catch them and the sweatpants hit the candle, which toppled with no drama to the floor. There were some unnecessary screams.
The fire was small and easily put out, the ring undamaged, but the candle, a mess. In the excitement, the ring's owner--the engaged girl--tore the ring from it and put it on her finger.
And then I grabbed the pants and everything was over quickly.
"It got screwed up," the engaged girl began to cry.
Other girls ran to her, some of them screamed screams of joy.
What was going to happen to her? I had no idea. I had no idea what happened after any of this, although we had been promised a kingdom.
We rode the elevator up together.
"Could you let me know?" I asked. "How it all works out?"
She said she would, but I knew she was trying to leave as she held out her ring hand, and let me take it. I let her go. I got out of her way. And now when I do aerobics in the Joseph Smith Fieldhouse, I don't even think of Joseph Smith.
Former Utahn Julie Turley is an adjunct academic librarian in New York City. She blogs at www.writermama.blogspot.com and www.marginalmormonlit.wordpress.com.
Archived at http://girlswithinsurance.com/index.php/prose/short/144-jt-0310-music and shortlinked at http://frsh.in/7j
