At the Carousel

As a child I loved all things related to travel. Watching my mother study an open suitcase at home as she puzzled over how to fit an extra pair of walking shoes. The smell of my father’s small leather carry-on. The shiny floors of airports. The taste of Goldfish crackers while waiting to board. And those old-style silver pay phones where, if you remained devoted as you checked the coin return of every phone you passed, you might find, in the little slot, a prize: a nickel, a dime, or even a quarter, something someone mistakenly left behind. Because I was a God Girl, I prayed silently for my family’s safety once we boarded the plane. Because I was a God Girl, once we landed, I thanked God for our safe return. And once we made our way through the airport to Baggage Claim, I swooned over my favorite part: the silver baggage carousel, where I stood and watched all those bags circle, waiting to spy mother’s yellow Samsonite, my father’s hard-shell camel-colored one, or the matching denim canvas weekenders belonging to my sisters and me. Watching all the bags going round was dizzying at first, but finally when we reunited with ours came sweet relief. Because I was a God Girl, growing up in Salt Lake City, the hub of Mormondom, I silently thanked God once again.

A God Girl spends her childhood praying for the health and well-being of her family. At eight, a God Girl stands in waist-high water, wearing a white cot- ton dress. Shafts of light shine through a small window in the basement of her church. All her life the God Girl will remember that. The light. The texture of the white cotton dress. The baptismal font. And then? A man who is not her father leans her back, immersing her in water, ushering her into the age of accountability. By the authority of the Melchizedek priesthood, the man baptizes her, lowering the God Girl into the water and lifting her. She holds her breath. When she stands, she’s wet-haired, smiling, free of sin.

Eighteen years later, another man. A black couch. Two wine glasses. The man takes her hand—it could be any woman’s hand—and kisses her neck, which could be anyone’s neck, and unbuttons her blouse, and she knows her blouse could be anyone’s blouse but then again, touch is touch and always feels singular, and even though she has not been inside a church in years, something in the church must remain, a stain. She is, without knowing it, still a God Girl, not someone who believes, as she once did as a teenager, that sex outside of marriage is a sin or that marriage is sacred or that those covenants made in the temple of the Lord allowing for the bounty of eternal life are something to aspire to. No, not that. That’s long gone. She’s read her feminist theory. She knows marriage can be a scam. She can decenter men with the best of them. She rolls her eyes at talk of love. But she cannot help herself. She still believes an unbuttoning means something. She wants this unbuttoning to mean some- thing, maybe the chance to move from the generic to the specific. For why else has she perfumed her solitary bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon?

I met the baggage handler at Green Street, a generic bar in Trolley Square, an open-air brick building that once housed Salt Lake City’s old transit system but now featured upscale Italian restaurants and shops where you could find imported Indian dresses. We were both there with friends. I was twenty-six; he was thirty, or at least a few years older than me, and slight but muscular, with sandy blond hair, hazel eyes, an easygoing manner. He worked at the Salt Lake City International Airport as a baggage handler, pulling suitcases off planes and onto trucks, which someone else then pulled off those trucks and onto conveyer belts.

We talked easily. He teased me for drinking Diet Coke and asked if I was Mormon, in a tone that made it seem like it was okay either way. That was the divide: You were Mormon or you weren’t. That had always been the divide. That would always be the divide. I knew that most people at a bar like Green Street would likely answer no.

As did I.

But I had been, I added, speaking carefully, for in this moment he could stay or go.

“Now?” he asked. “Now, I don’t like to drink and drive,” I said, raising my Diet Coke.

He smiled.

The rest was easy, giving him my phone number, written in black pen on a wet napkin, something I’d done with hope plenty of times before. And soon, like magic, he called and then there he was on my little black couch, kissing me, telling me about his job as a baggage handler.

He took my hands in his and placed them on his upper arms.

“Wow,” I said when he flexed his arm muscles. “You’re really strong.”

I opened a bottle of white wine. He worked on a second glass while I sipped on my first.

It’s true, I worried about drinking and driving, but if I’d answered hon- estly, I would have said my daddy drank. Too much. I knew well to steer clear myself.

We sat on my little black couch that night, talking and kissing, and talking some more, when someone knocked on the apartment door. It was midnight. We froze. I remember wanting to button my blouse but I didn’t dare move.

He whispered, “Are you expecting someone?” I shook my head, no.

Truth was, a knock on the door at an odd hour wasn’t altogether new. Sometimes people confused my apartment for the neighbor’s across the hall. My neighbor, I’d heard, sold cocaine. I’d usually ignore the knocking, much as it rattled me. Sometimes I mustered the courage to say through the locked door, “You’ve got the wrong place. Try the door across the hall.” And often that did the trick.

On this night, I looked out the peephole. A young man I didn’t recognize looked back. He looked jittery to me and glassy-eyed, but maybe I was imagining as much.

I said nothing and went back to the black couch, whispering, “I don’t know who it is.”

I must have wanted him to do something, but what? I had no idea. The knocking continued.

Finally, I got up again and looked out the peephole. Whoever it was, he had dark hair. A sharp nose.

I said in a firm voice, “You’ve got the wrong apartment. Try the apartment across the hall.”

I went back to the couch. In the bedroom we would act as if nothing unusual had happened, but for now, we listened to a new set of knocks on someone else’s door. Then the sound of a door opening. Then low voices. Two men. Then a door closing. Then nothing.

We continued drinking wine. Kissing. Speaking in whispers. Then he took my hand and said, “Let’s see your bedroom.”

Afterward, I wore a white cotton nightgown that had belonged to my grandmother. It had a delicate crocheted neckline. Had I imagined, years be- fore, wearing such a gown on my wedding night?

When I left the church—that’s what we called it: the church—I was twenty-one years old. I did not intend to leave and never return, but I felt I needed a break from Sunday afternoons, hours on a pew, singing hymns, thinking about God. God would understand, I thought. My older sisters had left. Most of my friends had left. New friends didn’t understand how anyone could, in their right mind, remain affiliated with an institution that did not, to put it diplomatically, politi- cally align. I did not, that first year, start drinking rum and Coke. I did not run out to have sex. I did not, at twenty-two or even twenty-three, stop praying altogether.

At twenty-six, while I bore no obvious outward sign of Mormon roots, I still hoped to make decent, if not wise, decisions. And I still wanted to meet someone. I had faith, as so many do, that I would find love, whatever that generic, all-purpose word love might mean.

Because once a God Girl, always a God Girl? A God Girl doesn’t have to believe to believe.

But I was. A God Girl who sat on a pew for the last time not knowing it was the last time. A God Girl who drifted away rather than breaking clean. A God Girl who could, yes, swear with the best of them and talk a good secular game and think of herself as long ago trading scriptures for novels. And yet the stain of those scriptures, the rhythms of Proverbs, like oxygen in her bloodstream, remained:

When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom. Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird.

I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.

For who could be satisfied by a soggy turkey sandwich wrapped in plastic from an airport kiosk when there was, somewhere out there, a street vendor selling empanadas or falafel or warm gyros on a cold winter’s night?

Three weeks after our night together, when I was tearful the baggage handler had not called, my friend Val tried to console me. “You’re still so young!” she said. “Don’t you want to take advantage while you can? Live a little? Play the field?”

Val was twenty years older than me. She had married young, and because it was a bad marriage—her husband drank and when he drank, like so many, he got mean—when she divorced, she’d never felt happier or freer. Val didn’t think my inadvertent one-night stand was such a big deal. I was too serious, she said. Why was I so upset? She was a single parent to a teenage boy. She had a longtime boyfriend—someone she would eventually marry, she said, but not yet; not now. She said she’d wished for a chance to do what I was doing, to sow my wild oats.

“Enjoy!” she instructed me.

She did not understand why I would cry over some guy.

But I had no wild oats. And if I did, I would not want their useless crops. I also did not believe that having sex outside marriage was bad, that I was like a piece of chewed-up gum now. Neither metaphor of wild oats or chewed gum made much sense to me; deep down, I knew what I wanted. One person, not one night. The long conversation. Not the fleeting, generic one, which seemed paltry, like pretending you’d visited a country and luxuriated in its wet, humid nights when you’d only spent a few hours in an air-conditioned airport.

Finally, I met someone. He was forty-four. I was forty-three. I had lived alone nearly twenty years. He told me his stories. I told him mine. How he’d listened to the rain fall on his family’s house in Woodside, California. How I’d grown up on the rhythms of the King James Bible. How he’d taken a bus from California to New York with $500 in the arch of his boot. How I’d traveled in my twenties and thirties. How it had started at nineteen when I did what a God Girl would do: apply for Study Abroad, that narrow way that made adventure respectable.

He told me how at eighteen, as a student at the New School, he met a young woman who, much to his surprise, wanted to sleep with him. They went out for falafel afterward. Falafel became a code word for sex. I told him how during sophomore year of college, on my way to the cafeteria, I stared at a random poster on the bulletin board. Isn’t that where the dream began? With an image of foggy weather, ornate streetlights, a pointy cathedral in the distance. Vienna, the poster said. Roman ruins, medieval streets, baroque churches, and pastries galore. Basic German not required but recommended.

I scribbled an address, sent away for materials, talked to my mother, who said it was a great idea, and within the month I had signed up for the six-month program that would start the following fall. Halfway through my second semester of German, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. I hated German, its guttural and impenetrable sounds. I hated how futile my efforts to learn seemed to be, even as I sat in the small, dark basement room of the language lab for three hours, headphones on, repeating phrases again and again. Entschuldigung Sie bitte. Es tut mir leid. Ich verstehe Sie nicht. When my time in the lab ended, I’d walk out outside, the cold air, no matter how sharp, a relief.

I wrote to the director of the Vienna program and said I was sorry. Please accept my apologies. I would have to cancel.

Then, another poster. Another building. Another program in another place. I went to London instead. I ate curry takeaway and bought lavender soap and drew sketches of the ducks in Hyde Park and wrote in a journal: Don’t forget this, meaning the thrill of the new, the excitement of that endless number of cities you could visit, just like that, by ticket and train.

I told him about my early years, the God Girl days, and the years that fol- lowed, and I told him that my recollection of Mormon theology was rusty now, but yes, the hereafter involved three kingdoms of glory, degrees of exaltation, and I drew a picture for him, 1-2-3, the Celestial Kingdom, the Terrestrial Kingdom, and the Telestial Kingdom, and I pointed at the middle one and said that’s where we’d go, should the cosmology turn out to be true. He laughed and said, not unkindly, “With Mormons, it’s all about the real estate, isn’t it?” and the condo kingdom was fine with him as we were apartment people anyhow.

We told each other our stories over meals of lentils and rice and cod and kale and cauliflower. Our talks grew long and our days even longer, and days blossomed into years as I told him about my family, my girlhood, my Mormon mother and atheist father, and my travels, the crazy travels, and also all the years I spent loving someone who didn’t love me back, and even the nights spent wandering rain-soaked streets of Tokyo, stunned by then how the novelty of new cities had worn off. He listened. Isn’t that what some of us crave all along? For someone to listen?

Last month, I flew home and thought of the baggage handler. Before the plane reached San Francisco and touched ground, I was sleepy. Somewhere in my dream it was nighttime, hot and humid. Somewhere, late afternoon, an alley was covered in ice. A vendor looked up. The skillet sizzled. The scent of lamb and onion filled the air. A woman turned. A door opened. And so it began.

When the plane landed, I roused myself, alert now, watching as someone in the distance drove a little cart. A man wearing a black cap and orange vest. He looked old now, but like all of us, he used to be young. Strong. Attending to that ancient job: helping travelers to make their way home.

By the time I hustled through the airport and used the restroom and situated myself at Baggage Claim, I forgot all about him, the baggage handler from so many years ago. Twenty? No, longer than that. I texted my husband to say, Almost home.

As bags emerged and circled around the silver carousel, I wondered if they look for us, our bags, the way children look while riding a merry-go-round, clinging to those bright silver poles, searching the crowd for the one they love. Up and down, round and round, it’s a blur when you’re a child, riding the blue rhino, the golden pony, the elephant covered in small pink hearts. What a relief to spot your person, waiting patiently for your carousel to stop, for the ride to end, for the thrilling dizziness to wear off.

When I spotted my bags, I went outside and waited for a ride.

The Lyft driver, I knew, would spin a story as all drivers, as all humans do, speaking as traffic slows and speeds, then stops and starts. A young man from Pakistan once described ten kinds of mango he missed from home. A middle-aged man from Romania told me he arrived in this country when he was twenty-seven because he was young and crazy. Another said wistfully that at home, his father grew tomatoes. His father lived two hours away from the war in Ukraine. Yes, he worries, he said. Of course, he worries. His wife and children, he said, are visiting his father now. They are all eating tomatoes from the garden right now. He will join them in two weeks.

“How lovely,” I said, but what I meant was How lovely and how sad. We both went quiet.

Last month, a driver from Afghanistan dropped me off at home. My husband stood outside our apartment building, waiting to carry my bags. “Is that your husband?” the driver asked. “Yes,” I said.

“I know him,” he continued. “He’s from Afghanistan, no? I saw him at my cousin’s house just last week.”

“No,” I said, knowing the driver was unconvinced. Everywhere we go, someone says my husband looks familiar. An Everyman, he is, appearing to belong everywhere, to everyone, but I know he belongs to me.

These days, if you ask me what I believe in, I’ll say falafel. Mangoes. Cinnamon. Long conversations. I remember the strain of music. Fragments from a hymn.

Fast falls the eventide.

Because darkness deepens. And comforts flee.

Because in California, it gets cold. Because it’s nice for someone to carry your bag inside, to make you a bowl of soup after a long day of travel.

Because it’s surprising, isn’t it, when you stand at the silver baggage carousel looking for yours, how much the bags look alike? Our suitcases—so many of them nondescript, black or blue or charcoal gray. So many, mine too, featuring hasty attempts to stand out. Clumsy bits of red ribbon. A neon green tag purchased from a dollar store. A flimsy piece of bright orange string, fastened with hope and evergreen tenderness, a gesture that says, That’s mine, please see me, please lift me, please carry me, lost soul that I am, that we all are, burden to the weary beast, please carry me home.

Read more from Issue 22.2.