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Show house// 402 It had been more than twelve years since we lived there all together - the mothers and their children and my father. In the course of those years, I had made pilgrimage to the Great Salt Lake, had entered its buoyant water and emerged feeling unreborn and irritable, scratching dry burning skin and nerves jumping from the eerie touch of peculiar brine-shrimp that squirm like maggots in the water. I had traveled alongside the bilious Jordan River, sewer stench strong in my nostrils. I had journeyed to the Oquirrih Mountains, watching sludge pour from the mouth of the copper mine - our dragon-in-residence wheezing poison into the sky. I had taken the bus to the heart of Salt Lake City, had stared at its monuments and peered at the temple doors where my family has been forbidden to enter. "Zion - beautiful Zion - home of the free. Where the clear breezes blow and the pure streamlets flow, How I long to your bosom to flee!" The words from the hymn learned in my childhood came back to me as I stared out at the city- No, all was not "well in Zion.' And all was not well with me, although Brian was home on furlough and we planned to be married. I had made the decision almost unconsciously, writing the words before I thought them: "I want to be married before you go to Vietnam. I want to have your child." He had telephoned his assent immediately. was But there ./, still the question of our parents. We wsrre not even officially engaged, but we were living together, feeling that time was too precious to waste. Brian interrupted my thoughts, easing through the French d°ors, a coffee-cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other -- |