Just One Please

My first English essay. she gave me a 95% and advised that ir needs more to the conclussion. I'm not sure that I'm very good at this sort of thing!
English 1010
January 23 2009


Just One Please

I sat motionless, not able to breath, my stomach twisting into a tight knot, like a wet rag being wrung out, threatening to expel everything it contained all over the trailer house porch. Mathew, the young man who was supposedly in love with me, had just asked me to convince my innocent, 15 year old sister, Joy, to become one of his polygamous wives!
My emotions confused me at first. Why should I have a problem with the request? Most of my life I had felt a deep sense of sympathy for all the poor, misguided souls, in a world that I had rarely been exposed to, who didn’t understand the, so called, truth as I had been taught it. There was another, not so kind, feeling as well- superiority. I had always been told, and believed, that I would have a secure place in the “Celestial Kingdom” if I would only overcome the selfish and jealous nature that my gender is “naturally cursed with”. I had to prove to God and everyone that I was beyond such mortal feelings by one day sharing my husband with other women.
I knew that I was perfectly capable of it. There had never been a doubt in my mind! After all I had many sisters and brothers with whom I shared my parents. Once in a while a mean thought would creep into my young mind like, “I wish I were an only child!” But the thought never lingered long. I enjoyed my siblings and was generally happy to share the attention we received from our mother and sometimes our father. There was enough to go around. What difference would it make to share my husband and the father to my children? My father often made the comparison, “A father loves all of his children alike. It’s the same with wives.” Polygamy was my calling. Really the only thing required of me in life; well, besides the multitude of babies I would have.
I was 17, eager for life and sick of the boredom I felt every moment of every day with no society beyond my family. Mathew was my step-mothers brother and I babysat in his home. Unlike other “plyg” kids, as we called ourselves, we did not face the possibility of an arranged marriage. We were free to choose for ourselves from our limited society.
As Mathew and I sat together that afternoon in the warm glow of sunset, on the steps of his trailer house porch, his arm draped over my shoulders, and I with a feeling of happiness and belonging, he casually asked me if I would try to procure my little sister for his wife as well.
I wanted to stiffen, maybe even gasp in disgust, but I was not used to having an opinion let alone expressing one! So I sat quietly trying to make sense of what he had said. In those few moments of quiet rage, images began to creep into my mind. I could clearly see the young, laughing face of my little sister. Then the memory of my aunt leaping out of my brother-in-laws traveling car when she found out that her husband had gone to Mexico to get a new wife. I had thought her so pathetic and cowardly! And, closer to my heart, the memory of my mother sending me to find my dad because she feared she was having a miscarriage, only to have him roll his eyes and inform me it was “Aunt Carla’s night.” And the subsequent lonely miscarriages she endured.
How different ones outlook becomes from just a little first hand experience! In an instant, gone were the thoughts of disgust at women I had thought were “rebellious” wives.
It was at that moment, as my emotions raged unchecked, that reality hit me full force, like a sonic boom in my head! The anger was exhilarating! I felt alive! Being the quiet and scared person that I was I did not say anything, but I knew, if this was my path to “heaven,” I would rather take a one way ticket straight to hell!
A week later I was on a plane to a summer job in Alaska and my mother was in the process of putting polygamy behind her and my sisters for good.