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 that
followed she searched for something else I could do, something Dad
wouldn’t forbid. She’d noticed the hours I spent in my room with Tyler’s old
boom box, listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, so she began looking
for a voice teacher. It took a few weeks to find one, and another few weeks to
persuade the teacher to take me. The lessons were much more expensive than
the dance class had been, but Mother paid for them with the money she made
selling oils.
The teacher was tall and thin, with long fingernails that clicked as they
flew across the piano keys. She straightened my posture by pulling the hair at
the base of my neck until I’d tucked in my chin, then she stretched me out on
the floor and stepped on my stomach to strengthen my diaphragm. She was