Temple Square is one of the strangest places I’ve ever been to, oddly clean and full of virginal women who immerse groups of tourists in their sweet-smelling perfumes and Mormon doctrine, smiling when not talking and laughing at everything you say.
We were looking for the Mormon tour we’d been told about, one that showed visitors around the heart of Salt Lake City and the Temple which marked its center. Because unlike most cities SLC has the Temple at its center, not City Hall. Our first glimpse of the Temple revealed a wedding, where smiling guests posed for pictures outside the church. The women were perfectly made-up and beautiful (though oddly similar looking), and the men were a flood of skinny-tied cardboard-cutouts. Strangely enough they were carrying a literal cardboard cutout of a woman, a guest who presumably couldn’t make it. She was smiling and posing (a hand on the hip, a skirt that went to the knees) just like the rest of them. It was if they were all a kind of cutout– but maybe that’s just how you feel as an outsider looking in to a group you don’t belong to.
But I’ve always said, smiling Christians unnerve me. I was raised a Catholic, so when I see a smiling Christian I just think to myself “What’s there to be smiling about?”
Me and Kevin wandered into the Tabernacle, a domed building inside of which sat a woman at an organ, playing to an almost empty, cavernous room. The music was blaring, echoing and discordant; I couldn’t tell if she was a terrible player or it was just a terrible instrument. Kevin pretended to snap his fingers to a nonexistent beat.
“I love it. Sounds like video game music,” he said.
“I’m gonna ask the lady at the front where the tour is,” I said, getting up.
She looked similar to the other women who seemed to be leading groups of tourists: unlike the women at the wedding her dress was wholesome, with a long loose skirt, flat shoes, and a high-cut blouse. The cloth was pastel-colored and covered with small flowers. When I went up to her she turned her large eyes on me, and could see from close-up that she was highly made-up, with the kind of heavy makeup a naive man might call “natural.” She looked up at me through a canopy of thick, black mascara.
“Can I help you?” she smilingly said (and she’d never stop.)
“I was looking for the tour.”
“The tour begins in twenty minutes, but we could arrange to have a private tour now.” I couldn’t pin down her accent but the flag pinned to her chest was the flag of Brazil.
“Okay, awesome,” I said.
“You want to have the tour now?” she said, looking a little confused. Her English was clearly somewhat limited.
“No, it’s fine, we’ll just wait for the next tour. Thanks!”
“You’re welcome,” she said, sweetly displaying her set of pearly-white teeth.
“I feel like that Mormon lady was giving me a flirty vibe,” said Kevin as we walked away to wait for the tour.
I knew what he meant; I’d felt it too. She was giving off an air of distinct, submissive sweetness. One word stuck in my mind thinking about her, a word that made me distinctly uncomfortable:
Nubile.
Twenty minutes later we were gathered at the flagpole, around two more oddly nubile, smiling women. One had a pin saying “Sister Rodriguez,” with the flag of the Dominican Republic pinned to her chest. The other woman, Sister Hansen, was Norwegian. She was white and thin, with a slightly stiffer smile pinned to her face and eyes that she kept uncomfortably wide so that you could see the whites around her pale-blue irises. They were making small-talk about the weather with the rest of the group, all older folks who seemed very middle-of-the-road American. The Sisters seemed so intent on keeping everything pleasant (smiling and laughing about everything mentioned) that me and Kevin felt distinctly tense.
“Maybe we should just join one of the other tours,” muttered Kevin as we waited, the look of flight in his eyes.
“No,” I said. “This is perfect.” I was loving every moment.
“Hello everyone,” said Sister Rodriguez with a thick Dominican accent. “Now that we’re all here let me introduce myself. I’m Sister Rodriguez, I’m from the Dominican Republic.”
“And I’m Sister Hansen,” said Sister Hansen, her eyes growing ever-wider.
“We don’t want this to just be a tour, with us lecturing you,” said Sister Rodriguez, making a fake-stern face and laughing again. “We’re not just here to tell you about us, we’re here to learn about you!”
From the corner of my eye I could see Kevin’s expression, an amber alert blaring in his brain.
“So please, tell us your name and where you’re from,” said Sister Hansen. And both the women turned their grins towards me.
A heavy pause seemed to fall on me like an anvil.
“Um… Hi!” I said, somehow feeling the need to match their manic tone and smiles. “My name’s Michaela! I’m from Chicago!!!”
“Hello Michaela,” the Sisters chirped.
Kevin, shooting me a we-should-have-run kind of look said, “I’m Kevin, from Chicago.”
“Hello Kevin,” the Sisters chorused.
The couple next to us was from New Orleans, older and black. “We’ve come to escape all the heat!”
The Sisters laughed, obediently. “Well I hope you’re not disappointed! It’s very warm today!”
The group laughed, clearly having been taking under the spell. Even I might have laughed.
“Well we’re from Kansas!” said the woman next to them. “It’s awful hot there too!”
And the group enjoyed another nervous round of laughter.
After the rounds had been made we learned that Bob, Barbara’s husband, was somewhere taking pictures.
“No problem!” said Sister Rodriguez. “We’ll just wait!”
And we did. Another pause fell heavily, and the Sisters hastily re-opened the topic of the weather, with a general chorus of laughter following, as if silence were an abyss we were hastily trying to escape at every moment.
Bob finally appeared, a man in his early sixties, lumbering and announcing in a distinctly Old White Dude kind of way: “I’m Bob! I’m from Oklahoma!”
“Hello Bob!” said the Sisters.
“So,” said Sister Rodriguez. “What does everyone know about Salt Lake City so far?”
Another pause fell.
“It’s hot!” said one lady, leading to another general chorus of raucous laughter.
“Oh it is!” agreed Sister Rodriguez, having recovered from her own fit of mirth. “And it was on the day our prophet Brigham Young led his people here on their holy quest. When the settlers first came here in 1847 all they found was an arid desert, and a lake full of salt!” she giggled, charmingly, and the others followed suit.
“It was Brigham Young who designated the site of our beautiful temple!”
“Who was that?” asked Bob loudly, clearly a most curious soul.
“Brigham Young,” repeated Sister Rodriguez. “The Church’s second prophet.”
“Wow!” said Bob, clearly impressed, snapping another photo of something over the Sisters’ heads that only he could see.
“Now is there anything you all would like us to talk about?” said Sister Hansen. “We want this to be a conversation!”
A heavy pause.
“What’s that?” asked one woman pointing behind them, clearly desperate to fill the abysmal silence.
“Behind us is the Tabernacle,” announced Sister Hansen. “Would you all like to see it?”
“Yes!” we all shouted, relieved to find a concrete way out of our interrogation, even if it meant having to endure the awful cacophony of the sole organ player.
Inside we sat in the front row (or at least everyone except me and Kevin did) and the Sisters mouthed us information presumably about the Tabernacle. The sound of the organ was so loud that it was impossible for me and Kevin to hear anything else, but I heard a couple “Wow”s out of Bob, and saw a few mimes of appreciative laughter (clearly the discussion of the weather was back on the table.) Groups of Koreans (our greatest modern-day explorers) were filing in and out and seemed to have an immunity to the organ playing that the rest of us did not possess. Finally we made our way back outside.
“Now, can anyone tell me what a prophet is?” asked Sister Rodriguez.
“Someone who speaks with God!” announced Bob decidedly, with the conviction of someone reading a dictionary.
“Someone who can predict the future,” said the woman from New Orleans, more mystically.
“Good, good, those are great definitions,” said Sister Rodriguez, with the air of an approving kindergarden teacher. “A Prophet is a man who is in communion with God.”
The “man” part hit me right in the feminism, and I began to glower.
“And if you had the chance to speak with a modern day prophet,” said Sister Hansen, “what would you ask him?”
“How do we attain peace in the world,” said the Kansas lady.
“That’s a great answer!” said Sister Rodriguez. “I think that’s what I’d ask him too!”
There was a pause, and Sister Hansen glanced at Sister Rodriguez before saying: “We actually have a modern day prophet. His name is Thomas Monson. And just like Moses and Abraham, he receives divine revelations from God!” Her tone had become distinctly stiff; clearly the words were memorized.
As we moved to our next location, I asked Sister Hansen how the Prophet was discovered. It took a couple tries because her English was clearly still a bit new, but eventually I made myself clear.
“The Twelve Apostles pray to God and are given a revelation of who the new Prophet is after one of them dies.”
“Is he usually old?” asked Kevin.
“Yes,” said Sister Hansen. “He is usually older. Prophet Monson was very old when he became Prophet. There is his picture.”
We were inside a museum now, and a picture of an old white man in a suit hung in an elaborate frame. He looked like a lawyer or a CEO– there was nothing ostensibly religious about his appearance, and nothing very distinct about him at all.
“He is also referred to as the President,” said Sister Rodriguez. “Now, the Temple is not open to the public. But would you like to see a model of the Temple?”
We were led to a glass case which had a miniature model of the Temple, one with an open face so we could pear into its rooms. As you may or may not know, only members of the LDS are allowed into the temples, and even if you wish to convert it will take a minimum of a year to gain that privilege. The man who’d driven us to SLC (Tim the Weed Farmer) had told us he’d once hatched a plan to get inside one with one of his Mormon friends. He’d prepared by getting the right outfit, even the right underwear, but the head of the district somehow had gotten wind of the plan, and it had to be abandoned.
“What are you grateful for?” asked Sister Rodriguez abruptly, again gazing around the group with eye contact that was impossible to avoid (Sister Hansen seemed able to peer at everyone and yet only me simultaneously; it was like being under the Eye of Mordor.)
After a pause one woman offered: “Life!”
“That is a great answer!” laughed Sister Rodriguez predictably. “No one has ever said that!”
“I’m grateful that my husband saved my life!” blurted out the woman from Kansas. “I had a near death experience and my husband brought me back from it! I wasn’t able to speak about it for fifteen years!”
The Sisters’ glanced at one another: clearly their script hadn’t prepared them from such bold-faced personal information. I could practically see their minds racing, rejecting their first instinct (to laugh charmingly) and ultimately decid to adopt a look of sober respect.
After the longest pause we’d yet experienced Sister Hansen spoke up shakily: “Well I’m grateful for my family! My father and mother, my sisters and brothers, I don’t know what to do without them!”
“…And that’s what our Church is all about!” recovered Sister Rodriguez, steering the conversation back to a place of comforting predictability.
“Have you ever thought about what your purpose is on this Earth? What is it?” asked Sister Hansen.
“That’s a very personal question,” shot back Barbara Wife-of-Bob, leading to her attaining a new-found respect in my mind.
“Yes, it is,” backpedaled Sister Rodriguez. “We go to the Temple to ask ourselves these questions. Each room represents another aspect of existence.” She pointed to the lowest chamber, which was a small room filled almost entirely by what appeared to be a kiddy pool held up by a group of amenable cows. “This is our baptismal chamber. These twelve ox represent the Twelve Apostles.” Seeming to see this as self-explanatory, she moved on to the other chamber. “This is where we go to worship,” she said, pointing at a normal-looking row of pews behind an author. “And this room represents the world,” she said, pointing to a smaller room covered entirely by a mural. “And this represents heaven.”
“Heaven” looked like a fancy waiting room; it was entirely white with a few ornate couches, and much gilded furniture.
“I can’t tell you the feeling of peace and serenity you feel when sit in this beautiful room and contemplate heaven,” said Sister Hansen, her eyes widening even further.
“I can’t take this much longer!” muttered Kevin.
“No please stay! This is perfect!” I whispered back, my mind reeling with the information that America’s most American religion used a rich person’s white living room to approximate heaven.
The Sisters led us to view the other side of the building.
“This is called the Sealing Room. It’s where our priests marry couples.”
My jaw visibly dropped as I looked upon the model of a tiny, cramped room, in the middle of which there was what looked like a bed. I peered at it from the side, and from that angle it looked distinctly like a tomb.
“As you can see it’s very intimate,” said Sister Rodrigeuz. “In the center is the alter, where the priest seals the couple together for eternity.”
“At our weddings we don’t say ‘Till death do us part.’ We say ‘For time and all eternity.’ Because marriage brings us closer to God,” said Sister Hansen, demonstrating with her fingers a triangle which collapsed so that the bottom met with the central point.
“I have a question!” announced Bob importantly, and the Sisters turned their smiling faces to him. “What’s the Book of Mormon!”
“That’s a great question!” said Sister Hansen. “At the end of the tour we were going to hand out some of them for free, but we happen to have some here with us,” she said, pulling out the book she’d been conspicuously carrying. “We–”
“Lemme see that!” said Bob, taking it from her and opening it up, beginning to read outloud. “‘THE BOOK OF MORMON–‘”
“Yes, Bob, that’s a great idea, why don’t you read it out to the–”
“‘THE BOOK OF MORMON IS A VOLUME OF HOLY SCRIPTURE COMPARABLE TO THE BIBLE. IT IS A RECORD OF GOD’S DEALINGS WITH ANCIENT INHABITANTS OF THE AMERICAS AND CONTAINS THE FULNESS OF THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL.’ Wow!”
“Yes!” said Sister Hansen. And there’s free volumes for anyone interested at the end of the tour.”
“Say, how much for one of these books?” said Bob, still flipping through her own.
“Zero dollars and zero cents!” said Sister Rodriguez, getting the biggest laughter she’d gotten yet.
As they were handing out books to those interested, I asked the question that had been burning in my mind.
“Uh, Sister, why are the tours only given by, well, sisters?” I asked. “I haven’t seen any men giving tours.”
“Oh the Elders?” said Sister Rodriguez, referring to the men standing around in black ties and white shirts who were definitely of the same age as the female tour guides. “They’re outside of the Temple square. We give the tours because people think the Elders are bodyguards. You know, all these serious men wearing suits,” she gave a falsely stern look, then laughed. “But us, we’re much nicer, you know,” she said, smiling radiantly and giggling, cupping her hands under her chin, rocking her head from side-to-side. “So people like to talk to us.”
“Cool, thanks!” I said. “Let’s vamoose,” I said to Kevin, who nodded eagerly. “Thanks for the tour!”
Just as we were leaving, I heard running and turned to see Sister Rodriguez. “Here’s a pamphlet in case you were interested,” she panted, handing me a pamphlet covered with the faces of couples of many different races.
When we were finally outside we sat and examined the pamphlet, which wasn’t particularly interesting, discussing the more bizarre moments of the tour, and the strange attractiveness of the women.
“They must specifically just choose the prettiest member of their church from around the world and ship them here to give tours,” I said. “Creepy.”
“Do you smell that?” said Kevin.
And only then did I notice a sickly-sweet smell pervading the air, a tantalizing odor something like maple syrup.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here and go dumpster diving.”
this is real this is fiction 