A Sort of Reunion

Salt Lake City is the world's biggest small town. Everyone, at least on the wealthy Mormon East Bench, knows everyone else. Parties are all sugar and polite affable chatter on safe topics and astonishment at the accomplishments of the other young couples: Christmas shopping completed the first Saturday of December, children looking so handsome, decorations just so, the appearance of effortless managment of very busy schedules. Everyone leaves early. The men are tired, the women have dealt with demanding children all day. The boiled-wool sweater sets, the blandly maculine uniforms of acceptably professional employment, the neat hair and the practiced smiles belie a deep exhaustion that must not be mentioned, but is visible around the eyes. To an outsider, the main impression is of conformity to a very strict code, in which men are emphatically masculine and clueless, women are pretty and wear seasonal outfits and are always agreeable, and children are cutely overdressed, and strangely clean. Houses at Christmastime are decorated with great care and control, with apparent reference to design magazines and catalogs: trees are allowed one color of light, one color of glass ornament, and a few pewter figurines with the engraved names of the family members. These East Bench houses tend to look like hotel lobbies, in their starchy regularity, their matched sets of chairs, their cleanliness. There are few signs of individual taste, and one front room can look much like another.

This time of year I am a ragged eccentric, trailing shreds of strangeness where I go, causing disruption, arousing exclamations of astonishment, drawing attention to my self, though what I want most is to be invisible, or absent. I forget that my silver bracelet is a small transgression in these homes. My hair, normally so unremarkably short and brown, appears almost radical in its slight disorder. And I always forget that politics is taboo. I silenced a room today when I volunteered that Mit Romney had swung Southern in his positions during the '08 campaign. Recognizing my faux pas as soon as the chatter stalled, I glanced up, and saw many weatherman smiles above plates of Vienna Wieners and cheese balls. All the teeth were straight and white. All of them. It was uncanny, and I felt so alone I almost cried. I could just barely hold it together.

An old friend, from my grad-school days in Boston, dropped in. She was so warm, and such an able smalltalker, that I started jabbering about myself, my divorce, my flailings at single fatherhood, even my creative ambitions. A few people joined us and listened, murmuring their polite interest, apparently hanging on every word, until I suddenly felt that I was irritating them, making a fool of myself, showing my failed history, looking maybe exotic or delusional or at least ineffectual.

I was the only one there who'd left the church. I was the only one divorced. I have the unfinished house, the dented truck, the old boots. I forgot to shave. I can't stomach the sugar. I feel superior and I feel humiliated and I feel free and I feel alone. I think maybe I have missed something important.