The music ended. The girls glared at me as we left the stage—I had
ruined the performance—but I could barely see them. Only one person
in that room felt real to me, and that was Dad. I searched the audience
and recognized him easily. He was standing in the back, the lights from
the stage flickering off his square glasses. His expression was stiff,
impassive, but I could see anger in it.
The drive home was only a mile; it felt like a hundred. I sat in the
backseat and listened to my father shout. How could Mother have let
me sin so openly? Was this why she’d kept the recital from him?
Mother listened for a moment, chewing her lip, then threw her hands
in the air and said that she’d had no idea the costume would be so
immodest. “I’m furious with Caroline Moyle!” she said.
I leaned forward to see Mother’s face, wanting her to look at me, to
see the question I was mentally asking her, because I didn’t
understand, not at all. I knew Mother wasn’t furious with Caroline,
because I knew Mother had seen the sweatshirt days before. She had
even called Caroline and thanked her for choosing a costume I could
wear. Mother turned her head toward the window.
I stared at the gray hairs on the back of Dad’s head. He was sitting
quietly, listening to Mother, who continued to insult Caroline, to say
how shocking the costumes were, how obscene. Dad nodded as we
bumped up the icy driveway, becoming less angry with every word
from Mother.
The rest of the night was taken up by my father’s lecture. He said
Caroline’s class was one of Satan’s deceptions, like the public school,
because it claimed to be one thing when really it was another. It
claimed to teach dance, but instead it taught immodesty, promiscuity.
Satan was shrewd, Dad said. By calling it “dance,” he had convinced
good Mormons to accept the sight of their daughters jumping about
like whores in the Lord’s house. That fact offended Dad more than
anything else: that such a lewd display had taken place in a church.
After he had worn himself out and gone to bed, I crawled under my
covers and stared into the black. There was a knock at my door. It was
Mother. “I should have known better,” she said. “I should have seen
that class for what it was.”
—MOTHER MUST HAVE FELT guilty after the recital, because in the weeks