Mennonite in a Little Black Dress Read online

  "So? What's wrong with that?" Like me, Hannah perks up when a man can cook. "What's wrong with this skirt?" Hannah peered at her rear reflection over her shoulder. "Does it make my ass look like a party tray?"

  "A little," I said. "Lola was house-sitting a friend's condo, and this guy shows up with a grocery bag full of cool ranch chips, a jar of Prego, and a thing of prefab dried spaghetti. Correct me if I'm wrong," I said, folding the rejected skirt, "but if a man is teetering on the brink, a bag of cool ranch chips is gonna seal his doom forever."

  "What is cool ranch-I've seen those flavors on Allie's field trips."

  The previous night we had imbibed a fair amount of wine under the auspices of learning how to talk like wine snobs. Now I couldn't resist showing off my new skills. "Some kind of corn chip with artificial flavoring. I believe it shows with a Velveeta topnote and a bracing character of radish, which then gives way to a powdery suggestion of sour-cream-'n'-chive, ultimately yielding a powerfully robust beer-belch finish."

  "Sicko," said Hannah, standing in her underwear with her hands on her hips.

  "Hey, I'm not the one who brought the cool ranch appetizer. So Lola said that during dinner it became painfully clear that there was no chemistry whatsoever. This guy excuses himself after dinner, and she thinks that he's just gone to the bathroom."

  "And who wouldn't have to go to the bathroom after a bag of chips? Poor guy, he was probably gassy for days. Zip this up."

  "Well," I said, obediently zipping, "the guy remains gone for a curiously long time. Finally she gets worried, so she goes to tap on the bathroom door. But the bathroom door is open. He's not in the bathroom."

  "This story is starting to creep me out," said Hannah.

  "Lola goes into the only place she hasn't checked, the bedroom. And there's the guy, stretched out on the bed, completely naked-"

  "Ew!!"

  "And he has posed himself like some kind of centerfold gone horribly wrong-"

  "Unbelievable!"

  "And here's the punch line: he has an indescribably tiny erection. That he's proud of!"

  "A peenie!"

  "A teeny weenie peenie," I affirmed. "Lola said it was the smallest thing she'd ever seen, like a fuzzy caterpillar."

  "What'd she do?"

  "She just stood there, amazed and horrified in the doorway of the room. But suddenly a flock of ducks flew up from the water feature in the gated community outside the bedroom's sliding glass door. The ducks began quacking up a storm as if in response to the guy's wee genital salute. Poor Lola couldn't help bursting into laughter. And she burst into laughter all over again when she told me the story, twenty years later," I added, "so it must have been pretty damn funny."

  "Funny, yes, but tragic too. A man's not to be blamed for his genital deficiency. However, he has complete control over the appetizer. Amazing that Lola had the chutzpah to laugh to his face. I wouldn't have, no matter how much he deserved it."

  "Me neither. Remember Mr. Epp?"

  "Who? Does this dress look timeless or church-lady?"

  "Church-lady. Easter church-lady. That neckline is just beggin' for a choir robe." I hummed a few bars of an Easter cantata that the Butler Mennonite Brethren Church had often presented on Palm Sunday.

  Hannah looked confused for a second until she placed the tune: "Paid in Full." Then she ignored my advice and put the church-lady dress back on the hanger. "I'll wear this to look in on Phil's mother. You were saying?"

  "Mr. Epp was a guy I dated."

  "Mister? Why are you calling him Mister?"

  "I can't remember his first name."

  "That's a little weird." Hannah frowned. "So what about this Mr. Epp?"

  "Maybe I never mentioned him to you. I agreed to go out with him on the strength of a single pick-up line. This was in Kansas years and years ago, when Dad was teaching for a semester at the Mennonite college in Hillsboro. You were away at college, and I had flown in for a visit. I got direction-turned coming out of the college gym. So I'm standing there on the step for a second, trying to get my bearings. A guy pauses and says, 'Can I help you?' And I say, 'Yes, can you tell me where I am?' And he smiles a slow simmering smile and says, 'You're in Kansas, Dorothy.' I thought that was cute enough to go out with him."

  "That's pretty cute," Hannah admitted. "It ain't no bag of cool ranch chips. But I take it that your Mr. Epp was not consistently cute?"

  "No. It turned out that the Kansas line was the high point. It was all downhill from there. He was one of those guys who get maudlin after two beers. Mr. Epp was driving me home through some rural wheat fields. It felt very rural. And guess what he starts waxing sentimental about?"

  "His peenie?"

  "Close. Losing his virginity."

  "But why?" Hannah asked blankly. "Why would any man talk about such a thing on a first date?"

  I shrugged. "Why are there cool ranch chips in the world? It's a question for the philosophers, like the ongoing presence of evil. All I know is that Mr. Epp made a big wet confession of it, in a voice all sloppy with emotion: 'It was in a field like this, under a moon like this, that that little thing called Virginity was lost . . .'"

  "Faugh," said Hannah, grimacing. "Did you kiss him goodnight?"

  "I most certainly did not," I said, indignant. "I have some standards. I gave him my hand to shake."

  "Did he shake it?"

  "No." I grinned, knowing how this would gross her out: "He kissed it."

  She made inelegant gagging noises.

  "Some women like that kind of faux medieval gallantry," I observed.

  "Some women like a cool ranch flavor too, but that doesn't make it right. Pour me more tea," she ordered, queenly.

  "Gladly." Continuing to show off my witty wine-tasting know-how, I declared, "This tea shows with a devil-may-care dash of cinnamon and a lusty topnote of Darjeeling, with a protracted but bold finish, as if eager to post pictures of its cock on Gay.com, using its wife's computer."

  More women should have two comfy chairs and a tea table in their closet. We settled down for a break in the arduous process of making pronouncements on the currency, fit, and fabric of the many items in Hannah's wardrobe.

  "Well," said Hannah late in the afternoon, folding the last of the garments for Goodwill, "I'm going to have a whole lot more room in my closet."

  I nodded. "You got that right. It's all about being able to let go of the past."

  SIX

  What the Soldier Made

  Although the thermos was invented in 1892 by Sir James Dewar and fully operational forty-five years before my mother's childhood, in 1942 her schoolmates never brought anything to drink. To my mother's one-room Mennonite schoolhouse, the idea of a perpetually hot beverage would have seemed futuristic and otherworldly, even if the Mennonites could have kept abreast of important cultural innovations such as the thermos. When Mennonite children were thirsty, they drank out of a bucket of water, from a long-handled Schleif. The bucket was drawn up on a rope from a well in the schoolhouse yard.

  "Once there was a dead rat in the well," my mother told me conversationally over breakfast. I had been in the act of raising a spoonful of homemade granola to my lips. "My brother Franz brought the dead rat up in the water bucket."

  I set my granola down. "What'd he do with it?"

  "Some of the boys buried it in the woods. It stank something awful-that sickish-sweet smell of decaying flesh, ugh. And, oh, did it ever make the water rank! We had to drink with our noses pinched shut, like this."

  "Lemme get this straight," I said. "You drank the rat water anyway?"

  "We were thirsty," she explained. "But we never got the plague!"

  Until that moment my father, who was gravely buttering toast, had not participated in the conversation. Now he made a contribution: "In my school, we did not drink from a communal Schleif. I brought milk in a jar."

  "Gross," I said. "Warm milk in a jar?"

  "It was cool milk. The milk stayed cool."

  "How could
the milk have stayed cool? I thought you didn't have a refrigerator."

  "We did not have an icebox. If we wanted to cool something off, we'd pour it into a jar, screw the lid on tight, tie twine around the jar, and lower it down into the well forty or fifty feet. It stayed cool down there."

  "Were you embarrassed to bring a jar of milk in your lunch?"

  "Nothing embarrassing in that! Why should I have been embarrassed about milk in my lunch? "

  "What kinds of lunches did your mothers pack for you?" I asked.

  "Lard sandwiches," said my mother. "I didn't like it when the lard looked pink. But it tasted okay with salt. Salt brings out the flavor of lard."

  "Peanut butter sandwiches," said my father. "Every day, two peanut butter sandwiches. Occasionally, for a treat, there was a sardine sandwich."

  "And you're telling me that a sardine sandwich was not embarrassing?"

  "Lard was embarrassing," said my mother.

  "That's a given," I agreed. "But sardines?"

  "No, I was proud of the sardines. They were delicious," Dad answered reminiscently. "Why don't we ever have sardines?" he asked my mother. "I even gave my friends a taste of my sardine sandwiches. There was a young fellow, name of Fritz Vanderkamp, and we used to tease him about his strange lunches. His mother would send along an unusual sandwich. It was bread on top"-he began chuckling at the memory-"and a pancake on the bottom. He would eat it like this." Dad cupped his hands furtively around an imaginary half-pancake sandwich, hiding it from prying eyes.

  Mom and I laughed heartily, as much at my father's merriment as at the partial pancake sandwich. Ah, does it ever change, the Sturm und Drang of embarrassing lunches? My heart went out to poor humiliated Fritz Vanderkamp, who may or may not still be alive. If he is, I hope that he can now contemplate a pancake without shame.

  Hannah and I have often thought that it would be pleasurable to revisit the very Mennonite foods that used to shame us as we tried to conceal them in the cafeterias of our youth. After considerable reflection, we came up with a list of Shame-Based Foods, which I urge the reader to imagine tucked into Shame-Based Lunchpails, dooming the transporter whereof to social ostracism at Easterby Elementary School. Well, but wait. That is not quite true. Hannah says that by the time she reached her third or fourth lunchpail, our mother had accidentally purchased for her a nonembarrassing Holly Hobbie lunchbox. Knowing that this serendipitous outcome would, like Halley's comet, occur once every seventy-six years, Hannah clung to her Holly Hobbie lunchbox well into junior high.

  I had blazed the trail with long-suffering complaints about my own lunchpail. Most children at Easterby Elementary School carried brightly patterned tin boxes, Aquaman and Underdog and so on. The lunchbox that would have set my metaphoric pants on fire was Josie and the Pussycats. It is extremely unlikely that a Josie and the Pussycats lunchbox could have rescued me from the pit of uncoolness into which I had already sunk, but at age eight I begged to differ. I figured that Josie and the Pussycats would magically make up for the knee-length homemade skirts or the blonde tails braided with neurotic precision, like Heidi on crack.

  However, Mennonite circumstances beyond my control required me to carry a mature navy vinyl bag on a long strap. It was obviously designed for adults, and I have since wondered if it wasn't a diaper bag. (There was a family precedent: for picnics and the rare Disneyland outing, my mother loaded up a plump gray diaper bag with moist tuna sandwiches.) The memory of my mature navy diaper bag goes a long way toward explaining my interest in Prada today.

  Our mother wrapped most luncheon foodstuffs in gently used-nay, preowned-wax paper. She eschewed the plastic sandwich bag on grounds of cost. When we complained that the other kids made fun of us, the cheerful parental rejoinder was "When the seventeen of us were your age, my mother packed our sandwiches into two tin Roger's Golden Syrup buckets! At least you have wax paper!"

  So here, in order of least to most embarrassing, are the top five Shame-Based Foods for Mennonite youth lunches:

  5.Warmer Kartoffelsalat (Hot Potato Salad)

  This tangy potato salad, although delicious, had two significant strikes against it. The first strike was that it had cooled and congealed by the time we opened our Shame-Based Margarine Containers to eat it. The second strike, and this was somehow more critical, was that we were unable to consume Warmer Kartoffelsalat without thinking of our mother's merry little ditty:

  Auf den Hügel

  da steht ein Soldat.

  Er macht in den Hosen

  Kartoffelsalat!

  (On the hillside

  stood a soldier.

  In his pants he made

  potato salad!)

  The reader might well inquire why a pacifist Mennonite family was singing songs about soldiers. Further, and perhaps this is more pressing, the reader might justly inquire why this soldier was making potato salad in his pants. Hannah and I certainly discussed it at length as we compiled our list of Shame-Based Foods. Hannah thought she remembered other verses that suggested that perhaps the soldier had seen a bear; maybe the poor fellow was a-feared, thus soiling himself. So I called my mother from Bend, Oregon, to ask why the soldier had lost control of his bowels. Was he ill? Was he traumatized? Did he have regrets? My mother disclaimed all causal knowledge. "It's just a little soldier standing on a hill making potato salad in his pants," she explained. "Does there have to be more?"

  "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," I said.

  "You're not going to put the Kartoffelsalat into your book, are you?"

  "It is my opinion that the Kartoffelsalat deserves a wider audience. Hide it under a bush, oh no! I'm gonna let it shine! Maybe I'll use it for my epigraph."

  "Okay," she said, resigned. "But I want to make it clear that I didn't write it. I just quoted it."

  "Duly noted," I said.

  That night as I prepared for bed, I intoned "Auf den Hügel da steht ein Soldat" like a mantra. It was oddly soothing. I found that when uttered out loud, at night, as I brushed my teeth at the sink, the soldier poem assumed the clarity of a haiku, a lucid distillation of the world's mystery. After I had said it five or six times, it began to gather the heft of an orphic utterance, like the prophecies of Nostradamus at his brass bowl in 1555. This soldier may be someone we know right now, and he may have already begun the hillside ascent. He shall rise. He shall stand. And his bowels shall move. It's just a matter of time. Who knows why the soldier stands and craps his pants? Not I. Not you. Certainly not he. What can we say but that we like this soldier's attitude? This is one enlightened soldier. See him shrug with gentlemanly insouciance there on the hilltop, as if to say, Eh! My pants may be full, but my heart is warm!

  4. Damp Persimmon Cookies with a Raisin-Walnut Motif

  In recent decades our mother has often understandably boasted that she never gave any of us the grail-like supermarket snacks that glowed in the unattainable lunches of our peers: Ho-Hos, Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Little Debbie pudding-filled pies, crackers and Cheez Whiz in cunning sealed packages. There was one snack that looked deliciously intriguing, but I never did get the opportunity to try it, and now I feel the thrill window has closed. The treat in question was a stiff plastic finger containing four orangey-cheesy crackers and a square dab of hydrogenated sugary peanut butter. Cheese-'n'-peanut butter-what's not to love? I used to long to trade for one of those packets. But trading wasn't an option. I had nothing the other kids wanted.

  Everything that went into our mouths was homemade and chemical-free. However, the Shame-Based Lunches' putative nutritional strength was a distant consideration from our mother's number one criterion in preparing school lunches. This was cost. My mother thriftily made persimmon cookies from the bruised culls sold half-off at the Japanese fruit stand. The cookies, spicy and moist and possibly succulent to adults, were the ultimate anticookie to us children, we who pined for store-bought treats.

  3.Platz

  Platz consists of a kneaded egg dough topped with sweetened fruit, in this
case the stunted, picked-at-by-birds cherry-plums from the backyard. Hannah and I executed a triple responsibility with regard to the cherry-plums: we had to pick them, pit them, and then prepare the Platz topping-three labor-intensive steps to produce a result of which we wanted no part. We did not like Platz for the same reasons that we objected to the moist persimmon cookies, but adding to our general disfavor was the fact that when unwrapped from preowned wax paper, Platz emitted an embarrassing yeasty odor that made the other kids glance at us headlong and scoot away. This yeast smell was the product of the Platz's final layer, a sandy-crumbed streusel, sticky as well as odorous.

  2. The Cotletten-and-Ketchup Sandwich

  As the penultimately embarrassing Shame-Based Food, Cotletten were bad enough served hot in a cream gravy besprinkled with minced onion. Cotletten are Mennonite meatballs. What makes them Mennonite is the addition of many, many saltine crackers, bagged in a preowned plastic bread wrapper and decimated with a rolling pin. If you add an entire carton of saltines to two pounds of fatty ground beef, throw in an egg or two and some condensed milk to moisten the whole, you will have enough meatballs for a week's worth of appetizing cold lunches. Cold Cotletten are hard to describe. Each pungent saltball assumes a jellied viscosity, heavy as a puck. The addition of ketchup is an intriguing choice. It gives homemade bread a moist pink pliancy, not unlike damp Kleenex.

  1. Borscht

  There was really no contest here. Honors for Most Embarrassing Shame-Based Food went hands-down to Borscht, which is the hearty winter soup of the Russian steppes. Our people borrowed it from the Russians during the long Mennonite occupation of Ukraine. Borscht has a distinctive ruby color, a stain to anything it touches. This distinctive color comes from beets. The soup also has a distinctive smell, a noxious blast of savage fart. This fart smell comes from cabbage. As if that isn't appetizing enough, Borscht is served with vinegar and a dollop of sour cream. The vinegar curdles the cream so that the whole thing looks and smells like milk gone bad. Yet there is more. The bottom note, the lingering afterwhiff, presents with an intensity reminiscent of our friend the soldier's lumpy Hosen.