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long-suffering sighs of the salesclerks. Shirley imitated her mother’s imitations. “That’s not very nice!” Walter would protest. But he laughed anyway. Copycatting people’s voices was great fun, and Shirley had picked up her mother’s gift for it.
    Then Mattie would get the blues. In the living room she would obsessively polish her cut glass and Haviland dishware, turning the pieces over and over, murmuring about their beauty. When Shirley interrupted to play the Peggy game, Mattie kept talking about dishes.
    “Look at the cat!” Shirley would implore, and Mattie would snap. “I can’t look at the cat. I’ve got work to do. Who do you think would get things done and meals ready on time if I stood around looking at the cat?” Shirley would feel enraged, with an overwhelming urge to smash her mother’s glassware. But she stayed quiet and docile. For Adventists it was a sin to be angry. 18
    Shirley had few friends, but there was one boy she adored—Bobby Moulton. Skinny and snaggletoothed, Bobby was pitied by other children because his mother was ill and he had to push his baby sister’s stroller through the neighborhood. But he and Shirley were kindred spirits in creativity. At age eight Bobby was tap dancing professionally. He loved dolls and doll clothes, and could sew costumes for Shirley’s Peggys and Peggy Anns. He made little playhouses out of wood and cardboard, and recruited Shirley’s dolls to stage Shakespearean dramas in the sunroom.
    And there was a pretty little girl named Anita Weeks, who was almost three years younger than Shirley. She was the only other Adventist in public school besides Shirley, and the two girls saw each other in church. 19
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    The Second Coming seemed nigh to the congregation after the stock market crashed in October 1929. Walter lost his contracting business then and felt lucky to have an $18.50-a-week job as a hardware store clerk on Main Street. Not long after, the Dust Bowl blew out of the Dakotas, blackening the Minnesota sky even by day. Soon the countryside was withered with drought.
    Desperate to make ends meet, Mattie took in a $12-a-week boarder, an elderly man from church who was so sick that he needed her help eating and using the toilet. He died in 1935. So did Walter’s father, Neill, who had spent his final years rejoicing in international financial collapse and its prophetic relationship to the End Time. After his death Mattie accepted more boarders. The Masons, once one of Dodge Center’s “best” families, were financially strapped and practically running a hotel.
    Things had gotten so bad that Walter stopped tithing to his church—a major travesty for Adventists. And Shirley was still kept from Adventist schooling. After local Adventist children completed their grade-school studies in town, they graduated to a boarding academy over a hundred miles away and only came back to Dodge Center on weekends. Shirley’s parents did not want her to join them. The plan was for her to receive twelve years of secular education in Dodge Center. 20 That decision was hard on Shirley, and as the years went by she developed severe problems at school and at home.
    She moped about how Adventism was separating her from her classmates. Her faith absented her from the Sunday schools that everyone talked about, and it kept her from birthday parties on Friday nights or Saturdays. Even at festivities held on other days, she couldn’t dance or play checkers or cards. Because Adventism banned pork, she had to skip after-school wienie roasts—important social occasions for the town’s young people. The other kids knew about her strict diet and the fake, vegetarian “meat.” “Cow food,” they taunted, and called Shirley the “White Jew.”
    She was angry with her religion but fearful about her ire and worried that her hostility was Satan’s work. She tried to broach her concerns to her father. But Walter, a man of few words and a workaholic, never wanted to