Sugarhouse

We’d been living in Sugarhouse for over a year, and the only real friend I had was Colette Wilde, the sixteen-year-old from down the street who babysat my kids. I suspected this was because we weren’t Mormon enough for our neighbors. They attended the Sugarhouse ward, worshipping together in a boring Mormon meetinghouse around the corner. They were probably friendly people as long as you were the temple-going, garment-wearing, tithe-paying type. But Cody had left the church entirely, and my attendance was spotty. Colette didn’t seem to care about that. She made up her own mind about people. She was a lovely, ambitious girl, someone who would figure out her own path.

In the early 2000s, our neighborhood on Salt Lake City’s east bench was coming up. The sweet postwar starter homes in Sugarhouse were built on deep lots, and buyers saw room to add on. We thought the house was a good investment; I planned to remove the blighted blue star junipers; I wanted to paint the front door. I imagined hosting get-togethers, cramming new friends into the dining room once I could afford matching chairs. The money didn’t magically appear when we moved in, though, and neither did the new friends.

When our neighbor, Bethany Ashton, invited me to a ladies’ progressive dinner late one spring, I decided to go. She was a leader in the Sugarhouse ward, the president of the Relief Society, which was the church’s organization for women.

 “You know what you’re getting into,” Cody said.

 “I want to see inside their homes. Aren’t you curious?” I didn’t say that I needed the company of other mothers. I thought he should have known that I sensed an opportunity to “connect.”

He would’ve preferred that I ignore Mormons altogether, but they were everywhere, and my best option. I wanted people to invite our children over for play dates. I wanted someone who would join me for morning jogs at Sugarhouse Park. Someone who would share a sourdough starter with me. Cody didn’t understand the profound isolation of staying home all day with two kids under age five. When I dragged myself to Sunday meetings, I sensed pity in my neighbors’ greetings. Someone always asked where my husband was.

The evening began at Bethany’s house. Bethany was an enviably thin mother of twins, and she dressed in a way that was aggressively modest. For months I’d watched contractors come and go, and finally I could see what they’d done. Bethany showed off her slate floors, her cherry cabinets, her gleaming granite countertops. She displayed assorted crackers and spreads on her brightly lit kitchen island.

I admired Bethany’s six-burner range. I’d never seen a Viking outside the pages of Martha Stewart Living. Could I be friends with someone who had so much more than I did? It was a silly thought, but I imagined her touring my quirky kitchen and silently deciding that the golden yellow, gadget-free space was a punishment for my lack of faith. Being around Bethany made me feel pathetic.

I’d showed up with an empty stomach. After sampling Bethany’s homemade jalapeño jelly on a cracker, I pulled out a chair at the corner of the table. Bethany’s best friend, Allisen Snow, heiress to an ice cream fortune and also an interior decorator, chose the seat next to me. She had a platinum bob and a teddy-bear face. She poured herself a glass of Diet Coke. Shauna Warner, a retired schoolteacher from down the street, was also there, as was Megan Patterson, who lived two doors over.

Allisen asked, “What would you think about repainting your front door? I could get you some paint samples, Denise. What about red? I’m thinking cinnabar.”

“There are already a lot of red doors in our neighborhood,” I said. I knew we needed to work on our curb appeal. But was Cody miraculously going to let me pick a paint color? Was he going to watch the kids while I painted the door myself? I didn’t want to say that my husband was an obstacle to all of my progress. And there were too many houses on our street with white siding and red doors.

“Pots with geraniums would look so cute coming down your front steps,” Bethany said, taking a seat and flashing her substantial diamond solitaire. “I can help you get started. Small projects are so satisfying. It’s the least I can do after luring away Colette Wilde.” There was a note of apology in her voice, a hint that she was making a slight concession that she’d inconvenienced me.

I took a sip of ice water. “What do you mean? We have her almost every Saturday night, but sometimes we do Fridays instead.”

“No, you have her next Saturday. We’re spending the summer in Sun Valley, and she’s coming with us to watch the kids. She didn’t tell you? We’re leaving after school gets out. My parents have a place up there. The cabin has a pool and there’s lots of hiking nearby. Have you ever been? It’s gorgeous. You’d be surprised by how many celebrities own homes in Sun Valley.”

Colette was probably waiting for a good time to tell me about her summer plans. Sometimes we talked for hours after I wrote her a check. She was more mature than the average teenager, unusually wise and insightful. She’d warned me that some of the other girls in the neighborhood went through people’s underwear drawers while babysitting. One of them “borrowed” jewelry from dresser tops one week, then “returned” them the next.

But Colette wasn’t like that. She was trustworthy. When I was with her, I had the feeling I was in the presence of someone I was meant to know, that we were placed in the same neighborhood at the same time because we were supposed to help each other. I felt comfortable telling her anything. She knew my siblings ostracized me for not being active in the church. They wouldn’t let their children visit our house simply because Cody kept beer in the fridge. She knew I worried that the neighbors wouldn’t ever let their kids play with mine because we hadn’t been married in the temple. She also knew that I had actually been married there once, but quickly divorced— a mistake I made at nineteen that only lasted a year. When I told her the details of that story, she gave me an extra-long hug before she left that night and brought fresh-baked banana bread over the next day. She promised me she’d complete a college degree before she ever got engaged. Maybe she’d get a master’s, or even a PhD. When she talked about pursuing a serious career, I felt I was getting through to her. She had so much potential, and I wanted to see her go for it. She wasn’t just our babysitter.

But I didn’t have a family cabin in Sun Valley tucked into a hillside covered with quaking aspens. I couldn’t afford to bring a babysitter with me on a summer vacation. I could only give her twelve dollars an hour, free reign of my refrigerator, and the love of my mischievous children. I could feel the huge gap between what I wanted and what I had. I told myself that wasn’t unusual, though in this setting it felt like a personal failure.

“Colette will be gone the entire summer?” I asked.

“Sun Valley is magical,” Bethany said.

I hadn’t been there. I imagined Salt Lake but better, with a layer of shimmering sunlight covering the foothills. Maybe Salt Lake without its many meetinghouses, without a temple at the center.

The heat from the jalapeño jelly made my nose run. Someone started another conversation, and I sat there wondering what I could do to convince Colette not to go. I thought I’d planned a fun summer. Now my plans were cancelled. I felt acutely that I’d been invited to dinner that night not because Bethany wanted to get to know me better, but because my name was on a Relief Society list. Being neighborly towards me was just another task for Bethany to check off.

Soon we left Bethany’s kitchen, and we walked down the street together to Shauna Warner’s house. She’d lived in her home for thirty years and hadn’t changed a thing—not the original shag carpeting, not the baroque wallpaper, not the sagging upholstery or the swag lighting with its dimpled amber orbs. Her home was just as outdated as mine, but she commanded respect due to her decades of service in the Sugarhouse ward, whereas I was a pity project at best. Given the outdated décor, my expectations for the salad course weren’t high, but I was hungry.

Allisen Snow slid into the folding chair next to mine. She seemed highly caffeinated, and apparently, she was ready to return to the subject of my summer plans. “About the babysitting thing,” she said, “our daughter Kelsie is available this summer. She just turned fourteen. She would be super excited about making some money.”

Megan jumped in: “Kelsie’s a great babysitter.”

“I’m sure,” I said. “But what we have with Colette is really special.”

They didn’t understand that she was irreplaceable or that I needed to help her avoid the mistakes I’d made because it wasn’t too late for her to have a perfect life. I was encouraging her to apply to college out of state to get a grasp of the world outside our bubble. I thought she should spend a semester studying abroad. I imagined her enjoying foreign cities with famous churches and fabulous food. Maybe Madrid? Barcelona? I always wished I’d done that. When I was the right age for studying abroad, I was recovering from my disastrous first marriage. I’d married a returned missionary in the temple, but he was no angel. For the first few months, I believed what he told me, which was that because he was my husband, the patriarch of our home, I wasn’t ever allowed to tell him no. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night with him on top of me. Colette wouldn’t be stupid enough to get married at nineteen.

I was too distracted to touch my iceberg salad. I let Shauna Warner take my salad plate though I’d only had a few bites. We soon headed to the Pattersons’, where Megan had prepared sweet pork in her twenty-two-quart slow cooker. Megan Patterson had self-published a whole crockpot cookbook. She’d also penned a guide to storing emergency food supplies.

Her entire house was copied from a Pottery Barn catalog: blocky wood furniture painted opaque white, a linen slipcovered sofa, large lanterns on the hearth filled with candles too precious to light. She apologized for the mess, but everything looked perfect. She really wanted to impress us, but that put me off, especially when Bethany made a fuss of how everything was “spotless.”

“Do you have cleaners?” Bethany asked her. “I’m looking for someone good.”

“Pete would never allow it,” Megan said. “You know how he is. But I don’t think it’s prideful to ask for a little help.” I could tell she loved Bethany’s praise, and that of everyone there, Bethany’s opinion mattered most. It probably wasn’t supposed to matter to me that Bethany took my babysitter because she was Bethany, who deserved every blessing coming her way.

Allisen sat next to me again. I wasn’t sure why she’d attached herself to me. Could we be friends? Her kids were so much older than mine. And did she worry about people using her for her ice-cream money?

“You’ve been an incredible example,” she said. “Going to church by yourself must be hard. What a blessing to your children.”

I didn’t attend that often. I showed up in Sunday clothes when I felt like I had to try something: to get to know people; to end the interminable isolation; to announce to everyone in Sugarhouse that I existed. But I never enjoyed it anymore. What had I gained for following the church’s path? The “perfect” returned missionary, then a few years of senseless guilt for leaving him.

“I’m not sure what they’re getting out of an hour on the bench with their quiet books,” I said. The “quiet” books had been one of the projects Colette and I tackled together. Cutting out the felt shapes took us forever. Felt apples to pick from felt trees. Felt balloons soaring in a felt sky.

Maybe Allisen was trying. But now it was easy for me dismiss her because she was Bethany’s best friend.

Megan stood with a ladle in her hand over the slow cooker brimming with sweet pork. She wore an apron with the title of her cookbook embroidered across the chest. I watched Bethany serve herself a tiny portion. I wanted a big helping— it smelled so good— but I didn’t want to take more than she did. She was so thin. I took an even smaller portion than she had given herself. Maybe if she hadn’t stolen Colette, I wouldn’t have cared.

“Delicious pork,” Shauna Warner said.

“Restaurant quality,” Allisen said.

The pork was as good as it smelled. Cody would have liked it. I wondered what he’d fed the kids at home.

I turned from Allisen back to Bethany. “When did you make your arrangements with Colette?”

Bethany hardly touched her plate. She pushed the pork around a little with her fork. She smiled at me, trying to appear friendly, believing in her own friendliness, even proud of how friendly she could be. She wasn’t the Relief Society president for nothing. She could lead with this confidence, with a sense that every decision she made was decided correctly. What would that be like?

“I’ve known Colette since she was three. Her older sisters used to tend for us. Claire, then Celeste. We would’ve taken Celeste again, but did you know she just got engaged? She met someone wonderful at BYU. I heard he’s from Orem, the son of a humanities professor.” She neatly folded her napkin to the side of her plate.

Wasn’t Celeste Ashton a freshman? I hoped she’d graduate before having babies.

“The thing is, she made a prior commitment to us,” I said. “Now we don’t have a babysitter. This sort of throws off my plans for the summer.” I wouldn’t have said it that way if I was still interested in making her like me.

“I’m sure you’ll find someone.”

“I told her Kelsie will be available,” Allisen said.

“I wanted Colette specifically.”

“You can ask her about it yourself. We’re going to the Wildes’ next.”

I hadn’t paid much attention to the night’s itinerary. Colette’s mother, Rebecca Wilde, was hosting the final course. I didn’t know if I could talk to Colette without crying.

“I need to duck out early,” Shauna Warner said. “I’m watching my sugar intake.”

It was a great opportunity to leave. I could’ve skipped dessert entirely. I could’ve gone home and complained to Cody about Colette’s disloyalty. But he would’ve told me she was just a babysitter. He was annoyed by what he saw as my interest in “high school drama.”

Maybe talking to her would be helpful. Maybe we could chat. I followed the women across the street.

The Wildes had expanded their house out and up, diminishing most of their backyard. They’d shown everyone what was possible for the neighborhood. Their home was a chaotic place with signs of eight children everywhere—backpacks spewing loose-leaf papers, stacks of sheet music from their piano lessons taking over one corner, a pile of pink sponge curlers on the stairs— but evidently, the eight Wilde children and their friends had been banished to the basement with their Nintendo 64. Rebecca Wilde greeted me with an oozing chocolate lava cake sitting in a raspberry sauce axis on a scalloped paper plate.

“Is Colette home?” I asked. I took a bite of my dessert. I could easily devour the whole thing, then another, because I’d hardly had anything to eat.

“I can’t keep track of them all!” Rebecca Wilde continued serving.

“Could I check upstairs? Or downstairs?”

“I don’t want to embarrass her,” Rebecca hesitated, reaching for a squeeze bottle filled with raspberry sauce. “She’s with her boyfriend.”

I set my plastic fork down. “I had no idea Colette had a boyfriend.”

“He’s a good kid.”

“I thought the church discouraged the youth from pairing off.”

“We’re not worried.”

I had several friends who’d married their high school sweethearts. They’d waited for them while they served missions, and then hurriedly planned weddings as soon as they arrived home. Sometimes they called themselves “child brides,” but I didn’t see that as a funny joke. I’d married my first husband before I turned twenty and turned my world into a tiny place at exactly the moment when I should’ve been expanding it. Then I married Cody at twenty-five because he offered me a secure path, and I was blind to other options. I had only recently started to see that I’d had alternatives.

A boyfriend? Colette didn’t need that kind of distraction. I resented Rebecca Wilde for even allowing it. I thought I’d respected her parenting, but I had to question this call. Didn’t she know how disastrous this could be for her daughter? How damaging? I actually agreed with the church’s guideline.

I didn’t need to look for Colette. She entered the kitchen from the mudroom off the garage with a sloppy teen boy trailing close behind her. They both wore bulging backpacks. Perhaps they’d been alone together studying calculus? In the five days since I’d last seen her, she’d ruined her hair. Chopped off at least six inches. Had she cut it on a whim? At least she hadn’t dyed it blonde like everyone else. I hoped the boy would duck out to join the Mario Kart crew in the basement.

“Colette! Can we chat?” I asked. She seemed unprepared to encounter me in her kitchen. She knew me well enough to know I was upset. I emanated distress. I was visibly shaking.

I left the unfinished cake behind and led the way to the mudroom. Though he had no place there, her boyfriend followed along.

“How can we fix this?” I asked.

“I promised the Ashtons.”

“Didn’t you promise us first? You were going to take the kids to swimming lessons. You were going to help me decorate their bikes for the Fourth of July parade. Remember our plans for Sadie’s birthday party, how you were going to do the face painting? Did I need to make it more exciting? What if I got a zoo pass? I’ll fill the freezer with popsicles. Would that make you happy? What would make you happy? Please tell me what we could do to keep you. I’m really going to try not to cry. I’m not going to cry.” My voice took on a childish whine. I couldn’t help myself. Her stupid boyfriend leaned awkwardly in the doorframe.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Sun Valley. My sisters spent summers there with the Ashtons. There are other babysitters in our ward. Kelsie Snow is really good at face painting. Your kids will like her.”

“Could you excuse us?” I wanted the boyfriend to leave.

“You can stay, this is almost over,” Colette said.

“I can go,” he said.

“No, just stay,” Colette said.

“I don’t know your name,” I said. “Colette never told me about you.”

“I’m Graham.” He stuck out his hand like a good future missionary. I left him hanging.

Colette said, “There are other girls in the ward who will be free this summer.”

I let myself cry. “Yes, there are other girls in the ward, but you warned me they might go through my underwear drawer! Did you go through my underwear drawer? What did you think you might find?”

Graham was blushing because I’d mentioned underwear. “She wouldn’t do that,” he said.

“I didn’t go through anything. I can get you Kelsie’s number,” she offered. “Do you still have a ward directory?”

I pinched the skin between my thumb and pointer finger as hard as I could, a trick I’d learned to stop crying. “I can’t believe I had to hear it from Bethany.” Colette probably looked up to Bethany. That thought was infuriating. I wondered if Bethany had ever had any ambition beyond marrying a tall Mormon guy with rich parents.

“That I’m going out with Graham or the Sun Valley thing?”

“Both! I tell you everything!

“I’m going to head downstairs,” Graham said. He opened the door back into the kitchen. That teen boy was embarrassed for me. The three of us exited the mudroom. Colette probably thought that was the last of it.

I whispered to her angrily. “I thought you were better than this.”

“You just accused me of going through your underwear drawer.”

“I trusted you,” I said. “I really did.”

I should’ve left right then.

Maybe she thought all I needed was another babysitter. Maybe she didn’t understand that during our late-night conversations I’d finally felt I had someone to confide in about my mistakes and my failure to fully correct them.

I sat down in the kitchen again, simply because I didn’t want to make a scene by storming out. I hadn’t eaten Shauna Warner’s salad, then I hadn’t gotten enough of Megan Patterson’s pork. I wanted to finish Rebecca Wilde’s cake, but my plate had already been cleared.

“I hope that went ok,” Megan Patterson said. I gestured for her to come closer.

“I have no idea what I’m going to do without her. Do you know what I mean?”

Megan didn’t know quite what to do with me, so she offered me a paper napkin. “The Ashtons go to Sun Valley every summer. Bethany’s parents own a home there. It would be strange for Colette to pass it up.” She got up to throw away her plate.

I dabbed at my eyes, then crumpled the napkin in my fist.

The others gently started prodding me about my church attendance.

 “Does your husband travel a lot?” Bethany asked.

 “He races triathlons on Sunday. The occasional Iron Man. He won’t be coming anytime soon.” I meant that he wouldn’t be coming ever.

 “How old is your little one? Two? The nursery right now is huge. He could have lots of fun there.”

 “We’d love to see you this Sunday,” Bethany said. “I’m teaching a lesson about the plan of happiness.”

It was the church’s flagship message, one I’d heard over and over again. There was no way I was going. I might never go again, though I had no idea where else to find a babysitter or where else I could ever possibly find a real friend. I wasn’t Mormon enough for the Mormons, not non-Mormon enough for the non-Mormons, not anti-Mormon or pro-Mormon. I understood that being Mormon was a whole-hearted thing—it was a “high-demand” religion— and being semi-Mormon didn’t make any sense. I didn’t make sense in Sugarhouse. I made sense somewhere else, but I didn’t know how I’d ever get to that place. There was no obvious path.

Before I even noticed she’d decided to pull up a chair to join us for cake, Colette started talking. She wasn’t afraid to command a room. I had loved that about her. She was a teenager who believed she deserved to be heard. I hoped she’d ditch the boyfriend. He was only going to hold her back, no matter how “good” he was.

She started explaining what was wrong with me. “Denise doesn’t come to church because she had a bad bishop once,” she said.

 “A bad bishop?” Bethany asked.

 “Denise married a real jerk. Not Cody. Her first husband.”

 “And he was a bishop?” Megan asked.

 “I was never married to a bishop,” I said. “And I have been married twice but—”

 “Colette, go downstairs,” her mother said.

Colette continued. “He was watching porn all the time and making her do lots of weird stuff, and the bishop told her to stay with him. He said her husband was a good guy who needed her help.”

 “The help of a righteous woman,” I said, quoting him directly. It was what I had been told, even after I’d unraveled a scarf to show that bishop the bruises on my neck.

I looked at the table, which was covered in scratches and dings. I didn’t know if I could breathe. Besides Cody, Colette was the only other person I’d ever told about that bishop who wanted me to stay with my first husband. I’d always wondered if he treated his own wife the same way.

 “It was a long time ago,” I said, though really, less than a decade had passed.

 “I’m just saying that it explains why Denise doesn’t want to come to church,” Colette said.

I let out a breath. I thought of a clever, self-deprecating quip I could make about my starter marriage. Or I could launch into an impassioned lecture, telling Colette to take my story as a warning. I thought about cataloguing the other starter marriages I knew of, or the other bad bishops, to normalize my experience. It was normal to encounter terrible men on the path set out in “the plan of happiness.” Could I say that out loud? Probably not.

I couldn’t think clearly on an empty stomach surrounded by these women that I no longer wanted to fit in with. I wondered what Colette had already told the neighbors about me, what I didn’t know they already knew.

The fixtures in the kitchen were beautiful, and the appliances were shiny stainless steel, but dishes filled the sink. I wondered if the floor was real hardwood or if it was that new increasingly convincing laminate.

I knew there, in the Ashton’s kitchen with a grumbling stomach and a solid sense of betrayal, that I would not return to the Sugarhouse ward. Cody and I would hardly talk about it. I would no longer wake up on Sunday mornings and wonder if I should shower and get ready for church. Eventually, going wouldn’t even occur to me. My children wouldn’t remember having been.

 “Colette MacKenzie Wilde, did you hear me? Go downstairs,” her mother said. “Now.”

Though from her expression it appeared Colette felt perfectly innocent, she obeyed her mother. She tossed her paper plate into the plastic bag that was tied around the doorknob and disappeared down the stairs.

I had trusted that returned missionary who was eager to marry me because he seemed smart, even ambitious. I kept trusting people who would casually betray me. Of course, he had been worse—the worst—and Colette’s betrayals were small in comparison. I didn’t worry anymore about what he chose to do with his life. I no longer cared to imagine. Colette was different that way. I wanted to know what would happen to her. She didn’t have stay in Salt Lake City.

As the years passed, we made small improvements, but I was never happy with that house. I caught glimpses of Colette and heard the occasional rumor. I never received her graduation announcement or a wedding invitation. For as long as I lived in Sugarhouse, some part of me waited for news that she’d succumbed to a major temptation or that her world had collapsed. I imagined a lot of things; I was good at that. Sometimes I convinced myself she remained in the church and felt rewarded for her faithfulness. But that isn’t what I really wanted. I hoped that as time passed it occurred to her, perhaps painfully, that we’d all been sweetly deceived.