What Love Doesn't Conquer
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Instructions for Mac Users WHAT LOVE DOESN’T CONQUER by Jessie Szalay A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of George Mason University in Partial Fulfillment of The Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Committee: ___________________________________________ Director ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ Department Chairperson ___________________________________________ Dean, College of Humanities and Social Sciences Date: _____________________________________ Spring Semester 2015 George Mason University Fairfax, VA What Love Doesn’t Conquer A Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at George Mason University by Jessie Szalay Bachelor of Arts Kenyon College, 2005 Director: Kyoko Mori, Professor Department of Creative Writing Spring Semester 2015 George Mason University Fairfax, VA This work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noderivs 3.0 unported license. ii DEDICATION To my family: my father Tom, my mother Arlene, and Caitlin and Emily, who gave me the privilege of being their big sister. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the many friends, relatives, and supporters who have made this happen. Kyoko Mori, Tim Denevi, and Susan Shreve provided me with unwavering support and encouraged me to expand my writing beyond where I’d ever imaged it could go. It is thanks to you that I have gotten so much out of this MFA. Alex Henderson, Steph Liberatore, Danielle Harms, Erica Dolson, and Emily Heiden, who provided the best workshop comments I’ve yet seen. Bill Miller, whose advocacy and willingness to help with financial support allowed me to attend this wonderful program in the first place. Amy, Alice, and Lee Triplett and Brett Harvey, who provided me with a sense of family on the East Coast. Rest in Peace, Lee. And, lastly, thank you to my dearest one, Ryan Kamitsis, who has taught me what it is to feel beloved. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract .............................................................................................................................. vi Non-Mormon Pioneers........................................................................................................ 1 Who You Know ................................................................................................................ 36 In the Holiest of Places ..................................................................................................... 44 A Lot of Room to Move Around ...................................................................................... 90 Homecoming ................................................................................................................... 102 Four Boys ........................................................................................................................ 114 The Impossibility ............................................................................................................ 138 On Othering .................................................................................................................... 165 Epilogue .......................................................................................................................... 193 v ABSTRACT WHAT LOVE DOESN’T CONQUER Jessie Szalay George Mason University, 2015 Thesis Director: Dr. Kyoko Mori This is a collection of thematically linked narrative essays. vi NON-MORMON PIONEERS The Mormon women and I do not walk from house to house. Instead, we pile into minivans and SUVs, drive for three minutes, and unpack ourselves at the next high- ceilinged residence. We step gingerly over snowy gutters and driveways confettied with ice chunks. It is a cold December night in 2007, in West Haven Utah, forty miles north and west of Salt Lake City. Thirteen Mormon women are visiting their neighbors’ homes to see each others’ Christmas decorations and learn about their yuletide traditions, to drink water and eat Santa-shaped cookies smeared with red-dye icing. I have joined them, though I am not Mormon. I never have been, and have no Mormon relatives or ancestry. I do not consider myself Christian. I don’t even live in Utah. Though I did, once. During middle and high school and for a little while after I graduated from college in 2005, I lived in my parents’ mountain bungalow situated within an hour’s drive of four Mormon temples and countless wards, in which the faithful meet on Sundays. But a year ago I traded my Utah residency for a working visa in Kyoto, Japan. I live there now, teaching English to preschoolers and dating my way through the expat community. I have escaped, thank Heavenly Father (as the Mormons would say), and can now swear in public, wear tank tops, and drink coffee and alcohol without a second glance—all the sweetness that comes from living outside Utah. But the holidays 1 and their accompanying vacation days have arrived, and I’ve returned to the West’s sprawling skies and towering mountains for a visit. I am slipping and sliding into these women’s illuminated homes because SueZan Wight, my longtime best friend, has invited me along. (Her name, pronounced “Suzanne,” is part of a long Mormon tradition of bestowing strange names or odd spellings.) It is her local congregation’s Relief Society women’s organization activity. She’s helped arrange it. SueZan—blue-eyed, twenty-five-year-old mother of three, National Merit Scholar back in high school, and devout Mormon—is such a delight to be around and I have missed her so much while in Japan that I readily agreed to join this group of strangers as they parade through each other’s suburban mansions, congratulating themselves on their holiday displays. The paint on the white walls is as smooth and flawless as their makeup. At one house, a miniature Christmas train covers the floors, counters, and tables. We all have to dance around the tracks like bank robbers navigating a laser security system. At another, a woman shows us crèches from around the world displayed throughout her home. I wander the house, finding nativities from countries I’ve visited. Japan. France. Mexico. The woman’s father, her husband, her brothers-in-law, her male cousins, and her sons all brought them back for her, after their Mormon missions. The two-year missions aren’t technically required for LDS men, but not going raises eyebrows. The nineteen-year-old missionaries are assigned a destination, from overseas to just a few states away, where they will go door to door wearing nametags and pressed white shirts, trying to open the eyes of the world to the teachings of the Church of Jesus 2 Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). They phone their families only on Christmas and Mother’s Day. At her house, SueZan shows off her Austrian Christmas carousel, which she picked out and purchased during a Vienna vacation. The women coo. Most of their husbands have been abroad on missions, but the women probably haven’t. Women can serve missions, too, though they are shorter in length and far less common. The homes we are visiting are part of a development in the flatness around the shores of Great Salt Lake, where the wind sometimes carries the scent of rotting eggs, the smell of brine shrimp dying or dead. My parents’ bungalow is fifteen minutes east, nestled in a crook halfway up Mount Ogden in the Wasatch Front, the westernmost edge of the Rocky Mountains. SueZan’s parents live down the street from mine. Looking left from my parents’ kitchen window, one sees Mount Ogden’s granite summit fill half the blue sky; it’s as imposing as standing next to a blue whale. Looking right, there’s horizon-to-horizon expanse of valley and Great Salt Lake, itself festooned with small islands that shine purple in sunset. Beyond that, Nevada’s peaks glimmer on the horizon. But out at the flat development where SueZan now lives, new houses and big box stores block the views of the mountains and the slippery edge of Lake. I tell SueZan that her neighborhood reminds me of the Midwest’s flat stretches of strip malls, and she recoils. “Ugh,” she says. “I know. It’s like Nebraska.” Her own parents’ mountain house is spacious and warm, and minutes from the best sledding hill in town. When we attended Ogden High School together, I dreamed of a New York sky rise apartment and SueZan wanted to live in Europe, to raise her children in the centuries- 3 old townhouses of London or Brussels. She’d spent her junior year of high school in Liverpool and four years later married Rex, who had done his mission in the UK—steps, she thought, toward eventual European residence. But Rex brought her instead to West Haven, where without consulting her, he’d purchased a house. SueZan was devastated, but she followed him with two babies in tow. “What else,” she’d said, eyes on the floor, “can I do?” SueZan wouldn’t want me to be such a snob, to look at these other women and think that she was better than they. To think that her Austrian carousel trumped that woman’s crèches because she’d chosen it herself, had walked the streets of Vienna with her own two feet. And it’s not as if these women were unsuccessful. There is no failure in managing a functional marriage and raising healthy children. When I lived in Utah before, Mormonism—its values, its culture, its assumptions—encircled me completely. I lived in the empty space in the center, the hole in the middle of the ring of acceptance and certainty, which the Church provides