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thankful each night she presses her breasts and belly against my curled back, rests her tiny toes on my calves. We have three dogs. One of those dogs has a female symbol tattooed on her belly. Zora and I appreciate living cage-free. Each Easter, Lucy and I put chicken and ham inside plastic eggs and hide them around the yard. Our dogs sniff them out. Roll them with their noses. Crack them open with their teeth. Eat the meat and lick the plastic. And as we laugh at their discovery, I feel like a child who has found a way to set characters free.

The Right Fit
    Kami Day

    O ne summer when I was about nine, my mother, brother, sister, and I spent a few months in Seattle with my maternal grandparents. My mother asked me to walk to a nearby store to buy her some Tampax, so I did and then carried the box home in full view rather than asking the store clerk for a bag. My mother was mortified—and maybe realizing I had no idea what Tampax were motivated her to have the sex talk with me. I remember we were lying on my grandparents’ living room rug as she used all the technically correct terms to describe how sex works. She then told me Heavenly Father had made one man whose penis would fit just perfectly inside my vagina. She wanted me to believe the only man I could have sex with was my husband. I was too young to think about the logistics of making sure every man met the woman he was designed for, and vice versa. And later when I learned what rape was, I thought it must be painful because the rapist was not the man Heavenly Father had designed for the victim. A few years passed before I began to have disturbing questions about women who married more than once, and I remember feeling nauseated when I finally realized people who were not married were having sex, and not always with just one partner. Yes, we were told that when you love someone and are married in the temple, sex is wonderful, but we were also told that sex before marriage is terrible.
    What my mother told me about this perfect fit seems extreme, but she was only doing her best to inculcate the teachings of the Mormon Church. She and my father are Mormons, and their parents and grandparents were also Mormons. For almost forty-four years, the church controlled my life. It was part of nearly every decision I made, every breath I took. I had been taught from infancy that the Mormon Church was the only true church, and that being a member was the one way to salvation, to returning to live with Heavenly Father. I was told that I would grow up, fall in love with a worthy Mormon man, get married in the Mormon temple for time (earth time) and all eternity (afterlife time), and have many children. I would find joy in devoting my life to serving my family and the church. I would find motherhood fulfilling and meaningful, and in my old age, I would revel in my grandchildren and look forward to being reunited in the Celestial Kingdom with Jesus Christ, Heavenly Father, and my deceased relatives.
    There was a great deal of preaching and teaching about remaining sexually pure until marriage. Sex was connected to love, joy, marriage, and righteousness, but also to misery, sin, loneliness, and uncleanliness. We heard sad stories about young women and men who had defiled their bodies—which we were to think of as temples that housed our spirits—by having premarital sex. These stories were always filled with shame and remorse, creating a disturbing mix of titillation and disgust that washed over the whole idea of sex for me. As a young teenager, I was in the habit of reading whatever was in my parents’ bookcase, and I found Marjorie Morningstar in their collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books . I carried it to school with me, and as I was reading in class one day, I stopped and closed the book. I had come to the part of the story in which Marjorie has sex for the first time, and the description includes the words “horrible uncoverings . . . and then it was over.” As I