1000 words from
Ben and Rebecca
Jace Pedrotti and my father had long discussions about the model Connor would build for the new Mormon visitor center. For the prototype, we set up a plywood base taking up half the studio space. He intended to construct something more elegant, more lasting, as soon as he saw what was needed. For now, to this base we taped, on successive layers of thinnest cardboard held above each other with brads, overlapping progressive images of Salt Lake City from the nineteenth century onward. A tent encampment; a mostly empty grid of extra-wide streets stretching east and west, north and south from the templed and tabernacled center of Brigham Young’s envisioned capital; a landscape painting of the spacious unpopulated valley with the Wasatch Mountains in the background, snow-capped and grand; an 1891 view, with the Great Salt Lake to the west and north and a deep canyon slicing through the mountains to the east. In the later photographs and posters, twentieth-century industry and building proliferated. Later these images would be collaged to the base, made permanent if they were approved.
Some aspects of the modern city of Salt Lake still corresponded to these images—Temple Square, the affluent east bench neighborhoods, the clusters of commercial buildings lining the main streets, designed to be wide enough for two full wagon teams to pass by each other. This was the city where my mother grew up and where her father now lived in a memory care facility. Though I had no graspable memories of the place, the city was always there, a sort of sub-base pattern in my mother’s life, the memory and imagined center of a gestalt—a feeling and a physical reality—which my mother congratulated herself for escaping.
So this model, this base with its representations of the phases of the city, intrigued me. Why had we always avoided Salt Lake City till now? Why had we never gone there? I had never asked before The Assignment. Some things you don’t even think to ask; they’re just the way things are.
The next layer of my father’s model would expand the base pattern upward, into the next dimension. My father experimented for days, looking for the perfect representation of the changes he wanted to express, from those early pioneer days through the Manifesto, the Welfare and Correlation Days, and now the Internet and the Gospel Topics essays and the hundreds of temples whose inner workings were dumbed-down so newcomers would not be threatened by them and yet even more secret than ever. How to show these?
…
Over the course of the next month, Connor meditated, in his waking hours, on what might be the correct texture and size and shape to hover just above those maps on his model so fraught with personal and cultural history. For years he had collected and preserved second-layer possibilities—beads and balls, pebbles and marbles, bone buttons and seeds. For Salt Lake City, we tried tiny wooden stars (“because the early pioneers believed they were led by the heavens”), lentil-sized copper coins (“this is an important one, Ben, money propels everything, even in Salt Lake”), an assortment of small-scale hammers and screwdrivers, pliers and wrenches and picks (“they were builders, they were stonemasons, they felt themselves called”).
Finally he said, “I know. I’ve got it.” Over several afternoons, he crafted a set of minuscule Masonic tools and tokens from tin—a square and compass, a sunstone, a gavel, an anchor, an ark. It was this set he settled on for his second layer, rising perpendicularly from the maps and images at irregular intervals, irregular heights, no repetitions. “Masonic,” my father said, “because the Church and the country were both constructed on Masonic principles,” reaching with tweezers to fasten a sheaf of corn to a nearly invisible length of wire whose other end was buried deep in a sepia image of a garden plot blocks from the sepia tabernacle under sepia construction.
My dad never faltered while he was working. Only afterward did he drop, deeply fatigued, into his chair, to let Rebecca fuss over him, give him meds, lead him carefully back up to their room. During the day, when my father was alive with creation, she leaned over the model, her hands behind her back, peering at the miniature compasses, suns, disembodied handclasps, caps—tiny representations of things she’d seen in the temple (my father told me), whose significance outside of Mormonism intrigued her deeply.
Still, she spoke harshly to Pedrotti during his drop-in visits, about every other week. “I never asked for this thing to take root in my living room,” she would say.
“Tell us the truth,” Pedrotti said to her one afternoon in early June. “Don’t you ever think about going home to Salt Lake?”
“This is home,” my mother said. “Salt Lake hasn’t been home for twenty-five years.”
“Did you ever go to Gilgal?” Pedrotti said. “Trude really liked it. Weird fun.”
“Gilgal!” my mother said. “It’s called a Sculpture Garden now, a Salt Lake City park, but there was a time when a boy—Bennion was his name—when he took me there, when I was younger than you are now. It was someone’s back yard then. You couldn’t find it unless someone showed you how to sneak in the back fence, and then you couldn’t fathom what you were seeing. It’s all stones—carved, stacked, arranged, engraved. A monument to mystery, right there in the middle of Salt Lake City. I didn’t know what to do with it. I was gobsmacked.”
“It’s twisted Mormon,” Pedrotti said, running his fingers through a bucket of fasteners near the base of Dad’s model. “There’s a mound covered with stone body parts, like a bomb went off. And a sphinx with the head of Joseph Smith.”
“The place just blew my mind,” my mother said. “I mean, Joseph Smith as a sphinx? I kind of loved it.”
“You kind of loved young Bennion,” said my dad, leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed, more or less dismissing Pedrotti and the rest of us.
Feeling out the softness in my mother and the good-humored victory in my dad, I said, “Who was that?”
“Nobody,” said my mother.
But after Pedrotti left, when Brock returned in Esmerelda, he and Ellie and I got her to tell us, and later we wrote it down.
This novella has been jiggling around in my mind, and in dozens of drafts on at least five computers, for about eight years. The idea of the model just popped in during a NaNoWriMo sprint, and it took over: Connor’s model of Salt Lake City became a central image/prop/metaphor/symbol in the book. In some drafts Rebecca makes her own model alongside Connor’s, one that she believes has nothing to do with Salt Lake, but you’ll have to read the book when it comes out to see what ultimately happens: she doesn’t make her own—most of us don’t ever make our own models—but I believe it’s inevitable that we all interact with, modify, transform, and create anew the models we’re born with, or are handed, or are expected to fit.
That’s one of my favorite things about writing fiction: truth happens with such generous abandon when we set our stories free!
And in revision, we see what the story doesn’t need but what we needed. In revision we also see what the story does need that we left out, that we jumped over, that we pretended we needn’t explain. Writing fiction requires so much of the best of us—so much attention to story structure, choices of point of view (this one is polyvocal, a contemporary trend I don’t know how to buck) and character and scene—it’s exhausting. Novels do not write themselves. They suggest, and parts of them endure through drafts, and other parts arise at the very end of things. Just before I sent the “completed” clean manuscript off to BCC Press I suddenly knew a whole other level of Ben’s and Rebecca’s mutual backstory. There was not time, or space in the novella as it stood, to incorporate it. So there will be a sequel, one that ties up loose ends, raises the stakes, and explodes even what looks to have been fully and finally disrupted in B&R. The six-word story of my life is, “There is never just one story,” and that’s true of this novella as well. Stay tuned. 🕮