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  Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

  Mennonite in a

  Little Black Dress

  a memoir of going home

  Rhoda Janzen

  Henry Holt and Company New York

  The names and identifying aspects of

  some characters in this book have been changed

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

  Publishers since 1866

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, New York 10010

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  Henry Holt® and ® are registered trademarks of

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  Copyright © 2009 by Rhoda Janzen

  All rights reserved.

  Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Janzen, Rhoda.

  Mennonite in a little black dress : a memoir of going home / Rhoda Janzen. - 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8925-7

  ISBN-10: 0-8050-8925-X

  1. Janzen, Rhoda. 2. Poets, American-21st century-Biography. I. Title.

  PS3610.A59Z75 2009

  811'.6-dc22

  [B]

  2009003146

  Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and

  premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

  First Edition 2009

  Designed by Kelly S. Too

  Photographs reproduced on pages 232-233 are from

  Gerhard Lohrenz's Heritage Remembered (Canadian Mennonite University Press) and are reprinted with permission.

  Lyrics on page 25 are from Connie Isaac's album Sing Alleluia!

  and are reprinted with permission.

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For Mary Loewen Janzen

  CONTENTS

  1. The Bridegroom Cousin

  2. Touch My Tooth

  3. Fear of Mosquitoes

  4. Wounding Words

  5. A Lingering Finish

  6. What the Soldier Made

  7. The Big Job

  8. Rippling Water

  9. Wild Thing

  10. The Trump Shall Sound

  11. And That's Okay!

  12. The Raisin Bombshell

  13. The Therapeutic Value of Lavender

  Appendix: A Mennonite History Primer

  Acknowledgments

  Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

  ONE

  The Bridegroom Cousin

  The year I turned forty-three was the year I realized I should have never taken my Mennonite genes for granted. I'd long assumed that I had been genetically scripted to robust physical health, like my mother, who never even catches a head cold. All of my relatives on her side, the Loewens, enjoy preternaturally good health, unless you count breast cancer and polio. The polio is pretty much a done deal, thanks to Jonas Salk and his talent for globally useful vaccinations. Yet in the days before Jonas Salk, when my mother was a girl, polio crippled her younger brother Abe and also withered the arm of her closest sister Gertrude. Trude bravely went on to raise two kids one-armed, and to name her withered arm Stinky.

  _____ Yes, I think "Stinky" is a cute name for a withered arm!

  _____ No, I'd prefer to name my withered arm something with a little more dignity, such as Reynaldo.

  Although breast cancer also runs in my family, it hasn't played a significant role. It comes to us late in life, shriveling a tit or two, and then often subsiding under the composite resistance of chemo and buttermilk. That is, it would shrivel our tits if we had tits. Which we don't.

  As adolescents, my sister Hannah and I were naturally anxious to see if we would turn out more like our mother or our father. There was a lot at stake. Having endured a painfully uncool childhood, we realized that our genetic heritage positioned us on a precarious cusp. Dad was handsome but grouchy; Mom was plain but cheerful. Would we be able to pass muster in normal society, or would our Mennonite history forever doom us to outsider status?

  My father, once the head of the North American Mennonite Conference for Canada and the United States, is the Mennonite equivalent of the pope, but in plaid shorts and black dress socks pulled up snugly along the calf. In the complex moral universe that is Mennonite adulthood, a Mennonite can be good-looking and still have no sartorial taste whatsoever. My father may actually be unaware that he is good-looking. He is a theologian who believes in a loving God, a servant heart, and a senior discount. Would God be pleased if we spent an unnecessary thirty-one cents at McDonald's? I think not.

  At six foot five and classically handsome, Dad has an imposing stature that codes charismatic elocution and a sobering, insightful air of authority. I've considered the possibility that his wisdom and general seriousness make him seem handsomer than he actually is, but whatever the reason, Dad is one of those people to whom everybody listens. No matter who you are, you do not snooze through this man's sermons. Even if you are an atheist, you find yourself nodding and thinking, Preach it, mister!

  Well, not nodding. Maybe you imagine you're nodding. But in this scenario you are in a Mennonite church, which means you sit very still and worship Jesus with all your heart, mind, and soul, only as if a snake had bitten you, and you are now in the last stages of paralysis.

  I may be the first person to mention my father's good looks in print. Good looks are considered a superfluous feature in a Mennonite world leader, because Mennonites are all about service. Theoretically, we do not even know what we look like, since a focus on our personal appearance is vainglorious. Our antipathy to vainglory explains the decision of many of us to wear those frumpy skirts and the little doilies on our heads, a decision we must have arrived at only by collectively determining not to notice what we had put on that morning.

  My mother, unlike my father, is not classically handsome. But she does enjoy good health. She is as buoyant as a lark on a summer's morn. Nothing gets this woman down. She is the kind of mother who, when we were growing up, came singing into our bedrooms at 6:00 a.m., tunefully urging us to rise and shine and give God the glory, glory. And this was on Saturday, Saturday. Upbeat she is. Glamorous she is not. Once she bought Hannah a black T-shirt that said in glittery magenta cursive, NASTY!! She didn't know what it meant. When we told her, she said sunnily, "Oh well, then you can wear it to work in the garden!"

  Besides being born Mennonite, which is usually its own beauty strike, my mother has no neck. When we were growing up, our mother's head, sprouting directly from her shoulders like a friendly lettuce, became something of a family focus. We'd take every opportunity to thrust hats and baseball caps upon her, which made us all shriek with unconscionable laughter. Mom would laugh good-naturedly, but if we got too out of hand, she'd predict that our Loewen genes would eventually assert themselves.

  And they did. Although I personally have and appreciate a neck, I was, by my early forties, the very picture of blooming Loewen health: peasant-cheeked, impervious to germs, hearty as an ox. I rarely got sick. And the year before the main action of this memoir occurs, I had sustained a physical debilitation-I won't say illness-so severe that I thought I was statistically safe for years to come.

  I was only forty-two at the time, but my doctor advised a radical salpingo-oopherectomy. For the premenopausal set, that translates to "Your uterus has got to go." A hushed seriousness hung in the air when the doctor first broached the subject of the hysterectomy.

  I said, "You mean dump my whole uterus? Ovaries and everything?"

  "Yes, I'm afraid so."

  I considered a moment. I knew I should be feeling a kind of feminist outrage, but it wasn't happen
ing. "Okay."

  Dr. Mayler spoke some solemn words about a support group. From his tone I gathered that I also ought to be feeling a profound sense of loss, and a cosmic unfairness that this was happening to me at age forty-two, instead of at age-what?-fifty-six? I dutifully wrote down the contact information for the support group, thinking that maybe I was in denial again. Maybe the seriousness and the pathos of the salpingo-oopherectomy would register later. By age forty-two I had learned that denial was my special modus operandi. Big life lessons always kicked in tardily for me. I've always been a bit of a late bloomer, a slow learner. The postman has to ring twice, if you get my drift.

  My husband, who got a vasectomy two weeks after we married, was all for the hysterectomy. "Do it," he urged. "Why do you need that thing? You don't use it, do you?"

  In general, Nick's policy was, if you haven't used it in a year, throw it out. We lived in homes with spare, ultramodern decor. Once he convinced me to furnish a coach house with nothing but a midcentury dining table and three perfect floor cushions. You know the junk drawer next to the phone? Ours contained a single museum pen and a pad of artisan paper on a Herman Miller tray.

  Nick therefore supported the hysterectomy, but only on the grounds of elegant understatement. To him the removal of unnecessary anatomical parts was like donating superfluous crap to Goodwill. Had the previous owners left a beer raft in the garage, as a thoughtful gift to you? No thanks! We weren't the type of people who would store a beer raft in our garage-not because we opposed beer rafts per se, but because we did not want to clutter an uncompromising vista of empty space. Nick led the charge to edit our belongings, but I willingly followed. Had you secretly been wearing the same bra since 1989? Begone, old friend! Were you clinging to a sentimental old wedding dress? Heave ho! Nick's enthusiasm for the hysterectomy made me a little nervous. I kept taking my internal temperature, checking for melancholy. The medical literature I was reading told me I should be feeling really, really sad.

  But in the weeks before the surgery my depression mechanism continued to fail me. I remained in a state of suspicious good cheer, like my mother, who had also sustained the trial of early menopause. I called her up. "Hey, Mom," I said. "How did you feel about having to lose your uterus when you were my age?"

  "Fabulous," she said. "Why?"

  "Did it make you sad?"

  "No, I got to take the day off."

  "But did you mourn the passing of your youth?" I pressed.

  She laughed. "No, I was too busy celebrating the fact that I wouldn't have to have my period anymore. Why, sometimes I used to have to change my pad once an hour! The flow was so thick-"

  "Okay, gotcha!" I interrupted. My mother was a nurse, and she had a soft spot in her heart for lost clots, used pads, yellowed bandages, and collapsed veins. If I didn't cut her off, she'd make a quick transition to yeast infections and all would be lost.

  After I had talked to my mother, a friend told me gently that I needed to prepare myself for the upcoming shock of not having a uterus. My fifty-four-year-old friend was troubled, she said, by my cavalier attitude to this major rite of passage. I thanked her. Ah, in my heart I had known that my mother's cheery zeitgeist was not the norm! I got good and nervous. I called the doctor's office. "Does a salpingo-oopherectomy come with any weird side effects?" I asked. "For instance, a rash?"

  "No rash," said the physician's assistant. "You'll be sore for a couple of weeks, though. No sex for two months."

  "Will it decrease my libido?"

  "No."

  "Will it make me fat?"

  "Not unless you stop taking care of yourself."

  "Then why do I need a support group?" I asked.

  "Many women appreciate a community to support them during this transition," she said earnestly. "Many women find that it is hard to adjust to a new phase in which their childbearing years are over."

  I decided to compromise between a posture of pleasant indifference, which was what I actually felt, and a posture of gentle, sensitive loss, which was what I tried to feel over a journal and several pots of soothing elderberry tea. Because I was sensitively writing in a journal, trying honestly to face and feel my emotions, I figured I could give myself permission to dispense with the support group. I'd never been much attached to my uterus to begin with, since I had elected not to bear children. So boo to the support group. What I mean is, God grant those supportive gals abundant sisterly blessings!

  But God knew that the journal was a fake, and he ended up punishing my callous insensitivity. (Have I mentioned that the Mennonite God is a guy? Could anyone have doubted it?) During the surgery, Dr. Mayler, who is in most cases quite competent, accidentally punched a hole in two of my organs. He didn't notice. Oops. When I came to, I was piddling like a startled puppy.

  So I who had always been the picture of vigorous health was returned to my husband two weeks later in a wheelchair, thin as a spider and clutching a pee bag that connected to my body via a long transparent tube. The first couple of days I was too ill to care, but then my mother's disposition began to assert itself. The truth started to sink in: Pee bag. Tube. I kept watching bubbles drift down the tube, thinking: I am peeing. Right now. At this very moment. Or: I am eating and peeing at the same time. I am woman, hear me pee! That is, hear me empty the pee bag into a plastic basin that is too heavy for me to lift!

  I lay there doing nothing, unless you count peeing, which was an ongoing activity. But instead of mourning my lost uterus, I took naps and read the New York Times, which in my regular life I never have enough time to finish. Reading the paper at my leisure smack in the middle of the day was not unlike being on vacation-deluxe! said my Loewen genes. The new doctors had told me there was a chance that I would be permanently incontinent, a possibility that would seriously mess with my love life, not to mention my gym schedule. But like my mother, I immediately began telling myself that permanent incontinence wasn't the end of the world. It was better, for instance, than quadriplegia. I had great friends, a husband, and a cat. Large-sized diaper products, although hazardous to the environment and destined for decades in the landfill, were cheap. Why, just the other day, I had seen a coupon for Depends.

  Because of Nick's rough childhood, we were both worried about how he would handle a much more difficult convalescence than either of us had bargained for. Nick's mother, who had a long history of mental illness, had subjected her children to what nineteenth-century doctors called "a tyranny of vapors"-meaning that she used her many aches and complaints to control folks. No matter what was going on in the lives of her children, it was all about Regina. As an adult, Nick had distanced himself from her, loathing the trope of the Invalid Woman, and he had often told me that he wouldn't be with me if I were one of those clinging, hysterical types.

  During our infrequent visits with Regina, I tried to distract her by getting her to talk about her extreme beauty. This wasn't a stretch. Even at eighty-one, Regina had that vavavoom Italian wow factor. She really was physically beautiful-Nick had to get it from somewhere-and she looked twenty-five years younger than she was. She usually wore a tremendous glam wig and stretch pants. I didn't mind asking pressing questions about how many men had asked to marry her. All in a day's work.

  I have a story that sums up the essential Regina. Twelve years ago, Nick and I were poor grad students when we got the call that his father had had a severe stroke and was dying in a West Virginia hospital. We couldn't afford to fly, so we hopped in the car and drove nonstop from Chicago to Fairfax, about a twelve-hour drive. We drank gallons of coffee, driving as fast as we dared, willing Nick's father to stay alive until we got there. When we finally pulled up to the hospital, we didn't even stop for the restroom; we ran upstairs as fast as we could, chuffing down the critical-care corridor. There they were, Nick's dad at death's door but still in the game, and Regina, looking every bit the lovely and distraught wife. She jumped up and stretched out her arms to me. "Dear!" she exclaimed intensely. "What do you think of my hair!"


  Having Regina for a mother would have freaked anybody out. Would Nick be so repelled by the sight of a feeble female that he would be unable to take care of me?

  The lion's share of the gross-out work would fall on him-changing dressings, cathing me, emptying my pee bag into a basin, disposing of my urine like a good old-fashioned chambermaid. "I'll do my best," he said gamely. "But that pee bag's fucked up."

  Then Nick surprised us both. He turned out to be a natural in the sickroom. Crisp, competent, almost jovial, he sailed into my sickroom opening windows, fluffing pillows, and lubricating tubes. He appeared with cups of coffee and odd sandwiches. I'd wake to a tray of peanuts, a new maroon nail polish, and a literary journal. "Here," he'd say briskly, handing me a midmorning gin-and-tonic. "Time to take your pills!"

  My best friend, Lola, happened to be in the States that summer, and she flew in to hang out with me. Lola was kind of like a support group, and her timing was perfect. I didn't want Nick to have to bathe and toilet me too; it was bad enough that he had to swish my pee. We were the type of married couple who prefers not just separate bathrooms but bathrooms separated by two thousand square feet. I had been intermittently sharing bathrooms with Lola, however, for upwards of thirty-five years, so during her visit, she helped me into and out of the shower. I had gotten so weak that I couldn't even wash my own hair. But Lola and I hardly ever got to spend time together now that she had married an Italian, so, pee bag notwithstanding, what we really wanted to do was maximize our two weeks together. We were on fire to go shopping.

  In Italy, most expat Americans find the shopping scene challenging. One, things are hugely overpriced. Two, Italy has a sale only twice a year. Three, Italy does not offer clothing sizes for women with generous opera-singer bottoms. So Lola has to wait to go shopping until she comes stateside, and that summer, in spite of my postsurgery frailty, we were itching to go to Nordstrom Rack. We were trying to find a way to make an afternoon at Nordstrom Rack a reality. "Let's just tuck your pee bag into a colorful tote, and then you can carry it like a purse," said Lola.