The Big Love Read Free Page A

Dorothy Parker at an impressionable age she would have been who I wanted to grow up to be, but we didn’t get Dorothy Parker in Arizona when I was growing up; we got Nora Ephron. Who I proceeded to want to grow up to be. I didn’t find out until years later—after I’d been exposed to Dorothy Parker myself and had begun to idly contemplate attempting to become her—that Nora Ephron had wanted to grow up to be Dorothy Parker, which made me quite pleased.
    Unfortunately, it’s very difficult for somebody like me to become somebody like Dorothy Parker, or somebody like Nora Ephron for that matter, because I’m not Jewish. Not only am I not Jewish, I am the opposite of Jewish. I was raised as an evangelical Christian, a real born-again, a tribe which completely lacks a comedic tradition and is almost entirely missing an intellectual one. We also don’t have much in the way of a self-hating tradition, come to think of it, although God knows everybody else in the world wishes we would hurry up and develop one. Because—and I realize I don’t have to tell you this—people hate evangelical Christians. They hate, hate, hate them. They hate the Christian right, they hate the Moral Majority, they hate Jerry Falwell, they hate the pro-lifers, they hate people with the little silver fish on the back of their minivans, they hate the guy at the office with the weird haircut who won’t put money into the football pool. Of course, the guy at the office with the weird haircut could be a Mormon, but for some reason people don’t hate Mormons. Most people think of Mormons as just sort of inoffensive super-Christians. The only people who don’t think of Mormons as Christians, in fact, are Mormons and Christians. A few years ago, my mother called me and told me that the people who’d moved in next door were Mormons.
    “Do they have a trampoline?” I said.
    “How did you know?” said my mother.
    “Mormons love trampolines,” I said. “I don’t know why, but they do.”
    Anyhow, my mother befriended her counterpart next door, and the two of them spent the next three years swapping one-dish recipes and trying in vain to convert one another. Which brings us to people’s fundamental problem with born-again Christians, which is that they don’t want to be converted. They don’t even want to entertain the notion that they might need to be converted. The problem is that at some point in the conversation, the person being converted is going to say something like, “What happens if I decide to take a pass?” and the person doing the converting will get a drippy, painfully sincere look on his face and say, “Then you’ll spend eternity in hell.” This is upsetting, even if you think they’re completely full of shit. And, well, the rest of it sure doesn’t look like any fun. Even when I was a kid I knew it wasn’t any fun. In high school youth group, no matter what we were doing some kid would say, “See, we don’t need to
drink
to have
fun
”—even then I suspected what I now know is true—namely, that it is more fun to drink and do drugs and have sex than to not do so. It is much more fun.
    You’re probably wondering, if I was an evangelical Christian, what I was doing living with my boyfriend Tom in the first place. Well, the truth is I haven’t been much of a Christian for quite some time—since college, really, although some of the more glaring aftereffects lingered well into my twenties, the pink sweaters, the bad hair. If I’d stopped to give the matter any thought I would have jumped ship before I got to college, because being an evangelical Christian in college is unbelievably tedious. Everybody around you is busy drinking and smoking and trying psychedelic mushrooms and experimenting with lesbianism and sucking Jell-O shots out of the navels of strangers in Cancún during spring break, while you sit around, trying to be good. The worst possible thing to be is an evangelical Christian at an Ivy League