-
For Time and All Eternity
- University of Nevada Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
: : 35 : : In the spring of 1963 when I was a sophomore at Brigham Young University , something happened in a chemistry classroom built like a pit. The real chemistry happened when I walked through the door and down the stairs, swinging my purse on its long strap. I was only half aware I’d outgrown my gawky high school body and that I could register an effect when I ran my fingers through my long, silken hair, and slid my long, smooth legs under a desk. Unbeknownst to me, David sat in the fifteenth row, watching. Later, when safe to admit it, he said that when he saw me that day his heart skipped a few beats. He intuitively knew I was a woman with whom he could have children and someone who’d be gentle enough to understand him. Girls my age fantasized about love at first sight. The Knight. The Prince who was speechless with awe—that, of course, being my rendition of our beginnings. It was spring, when sap ran high and colts ran frisky. We’d gone to the chemistry pit to take a required constitution test—byu’s constitution. I was a candidate for Vice President of Culture (the office managing weekly student assemblies and serving as a liaison with faculty regarding visiting artists and performers); David was another hopeful for student body office—Vice President of Student Relations (the office managing pep rallies , songleaders, cheerleaders, flag twirlers, in other words, the campus hotties). He, a returned missionary enrolled as a junior, I a sophomore, :: For Time and All Eternity :: 36 : : r a w e d g e s conducted hectic campaigns and emerged victorious. At the executive council meetings, we bantered and flirted, and yes, there was chemistry. During summer vacation, David pursued me with carefully calculated, beautifully written letters sent from his home in California. Attending an executive council training in September at Aspen Grove in the canyon where Robert Redford would play a role as Jeremiah Johnson and where he’d soon buy a ski resort, name it Sundance, then bankroll a film festival of the same name, David asked me to be his wife. Beneath the autumn leaves drifting to the ground, he quoted Marx, something about striding through the fields of the world with our love to conquer all. I was impressed, political science major that I was. I said yes. And because we were introduced to sensitivity training that same weekend, a method encouraging us to speak our feelings truthfully, and receive each other’s truth, it became the basis for our communication. During that year, we met with the executive council weekly, sometimes with the university president and administrators, attended social functions as school dignitaries, and after being nominated by the Tribe of Many Feathers as their candidate for homecoming queen, I was selected as one of five finalists out of a field of fifty-five. Who knows why the president of this club for Lamanites—one of the four groups described in the Book of Mormon, seen as the ancestors of Native Americans—asked me to be their hope, but I was pleased. With my black hair and olive complexion, I could have passed. I was flattered, that is until the school newspaper’s photographer snapped my photo at the bottom of a dim stairwell near the student-body offices and said he was afraid it was difficult to capture beauty on film. The campaign photo appearing in the Daily Universe was abysmal, as semi-prophesied. I didn’t receive enough votes to make the royal trio. Traveling with David at Christmastime to meet his family, I was shocked after walking into his not-so-gregarious Mormon home. Even though my family had troubles of its own, it was alive with a rough-and-tumble sense of affection and loyalty. There was sterility permeating David’s small home—a starvation and an uneasy truce between his parents. I felt secrets in the walls, though no one mentioned the sister being kept at the [44.213.80.174] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:16 GMT) For Time and All Eternity : : 37 Veteran’s Hospital in Palo Alto. His father rarely joined our conversations, retired to his bedroom at 6:00 p.m., and disappeared onto the morning streets at 6:00 a.m. His mother seldom arrived at a period in her sentences and seemed full of a deep hunger to be heard. As our car crept back...