I searched my memories. In some ways the word “Holocaust” wasn’t wholly unfamiliar. Perhaps Mother had taught me about it, when we were picking rosehips or tincturing hawthorn. I did seem to have a vague knowledge that Jews had been killed somewhere, long ago. But I’d thought it was a small conflict, like the Boston Massacre, which Dad talked about a lot, in which half a dozen people had been martyred by a tyrannical government. To have misunderstood it on this scale—five versus six million—seemed impossible.
I found Vanessa before the next lecture and apologized for the joke. I didn’t explain, because I couldn’t explain. I just said I was sorry and that I wouldn’t do it again. To keep that promise, I didn’t raise my hand for the rest of the semester.
* * *
—
THAT SATURDAY, I SAT at my desk with a stack of homework. Everything had to be finished that day because I could not violate the Sabbath.
I spent the morning and afternoon trying to decipher the history textbook, without much success. In the evening, I tried to write a personal essay for English, but I’d never written an essay before—except for the ones on sin and repentance, which no one had ever read—and I didn’t know how. I had no idea what the teacher meant by the “essay form.” I scribbled a few sentences, crossed them out, then began again. I repeated this until it was past midnight.
I knew I should stop—this was the Lord’s time—but I hadn’t even started the assignment for music theory, which was due at seven A.M. on Monday. The Sabbath begins when I wake up, I reasoned, and kept working.
I awoke with my face pressed to the desk. The room was bright. I could hear Shannon and Mary in the kitchen. I put on my Sunday dress and the three of us walked to church. Because it was a congregation of students, everyone was sitting with their roommates, so I settled into a pew with mine. Shannon immediately began chatting with the girl behind us. I looked around the chapel and was again struck by how many women were wearing skirts cut above the knee.
The girl talking to Shannon said we should come over that afternoon to see a movie. Mary and Shannon agreed but I shook my head. I didn’t watch movies on Sunday.
Shannon rolled her eyes. “She’s very devout,” she whispered.
I’d always known that my father believed in a different God. As a child, I’d been aware that although my family attended the same church as everyone in our town, our religion was not the same. They believed in modesty; we practiced it. They believed in God’s power to heal; we left our injuries in God’s hands. They believed in preparing for the Second Coming; we were actually prepared. For as long as I could remember, I’d known that the members of my own family were the only true Mormons I had ever known, and yet for some reason, here at this university, in this chapel, for the first time I felt the immensity of the gap. I understood now: I could stand with my family, or with the gentiles, on the one side or the other, but there was no foothold in between.
The service ended and we filed into Sunday school. Shannon and Mary chose seats near the front. They saved me one but I hesitated, thinking of how I’d broken the Sabbath. I’d been here less than a week, and already I had robbed the Lord of an hour. Perhaps that was why Dad hadn’t wanted me to come: because he knew that by living with them, with people whose faith was less, I risked becoming like them.
Shannon waved to me and her V-neck plunged. I walked past her and folded myself into a corner, as far from Shannon and Mary as I could get. I was pleased by the familiarity of the arrangement: me, pressed into the corner, away from the other children, a precise reproduction of every Sunday school lesson from my childhood. It was the only sensation of familiarity I’d felt since coming to this place, and I relished it.
After that, I rarely spoke to Shannon or Mary and they rarely spoke to me, except to remind me to do my share of the chores, which I never did. The apartment looked fine to me. So what if there were rotting peaches in the fridge and dirty dishes in the sink? So what if the smell slapped you in the face when you came through the door? To my mind if the stench was bearable, the house was clean, and I extended this philosophy to my person. I never used soap except when I showered, usually once or twice a week, and sometimes I didn’t use it even then. When I left the bathroom in the morning, I marched right past the hallway sink where Shannon and Mary always—always—washed their hands. I saw their raised eyebrows and thought of Grandma-over-in-town. Frivolous, I told myself. I don’t pee on my hands.
The atmosphere in the apartment was tense. Shannon looked at me like I was a rabid dog, and I did nothing to reassure her.
* * *
—
MY BANK ACCOUNT DECREASED steadily. I had been worried that I might not pass my classes, but a month into the semester, after I’d paid tuition and rent and bought food and books, I began to think that even if I did pass I wouldn’t be coming back to school for one obvious reason: I couldn’t afford it. I looked up the requirements for a scholarship online. A full-tuition waiver would require a near-perfect GPA.
I was only a month into the semester, but even so I knew a scholarship was comically out of reach. American history was getting easier, but only in that I was no longer failing the quizzes outright. I was doing well in music theory, but I struggled in English. My teacher said I had a knack for writing but that my language was oddly formal and stilted. I didn’t tell her that I’d learned to read and write by reading only the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and speeches by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.
The real trouble, however, was Western Civ. To me, the lectures were gibberish, probably because for most of January, I thought Europe was a country, not a continent, so very little of what the professor said made sense. And after the Holocaust incident, I wasn’t about to ask for clarification.
Even so, it was my favorite class, because of Vanessa. We sat together for every lecture. I liked her because she seemed like the same kind of Mormon I was: she wore high-necked, loose-fitting clothing, and she’d told me that she never drank Coke or did homework on Sunday. She was the only person I’d met at the university who didn’t seem like a gentile.
In February, the professor announced that instead of a single midterm he would be giving monthly exams, the first of which would be the following week. I didn’t know how to prepare. There wasn’t a textbook for the class, just the picture book of paintings and a few CDs of classical compositions. I listened to the music while flipping through the paintings. I made a vague effort to remember who had painted or composed what, but I didn’t memorize spelling. The ACT was the only exam I’d ever taken, and it had been multiple choice, so I assumed all exams were multiple choice.
The morning of the exam, the professor instructed everyone to take out their blue books. I barely had time to wonder what a blue book was before everyone produced one from their bags. The motion was fluid, synchronized, as if they had practiced it. I was the only dancer on the stage who seemed to have missed rehearsal. I asked Vanessa if she had a spare, and she did. I opened it, expecting a multiple-choice exam, but it was blank.
The windows were shuttered; the projector flickered on, displaying a painting. We had sixty seconds to write the work’s title and the artist’s full name. My mind produced only a dull buzz. This continued through several questions: I sat completely still, giving no answers at all.