Mennonite in a Little Black Dress Page 14

  "Where? I don't see him," I said, scanning the crowded room. "He's right there, in those seats right in front of the stage," said Deena.

  "Oh, there he is!" I said, but I was thinking "!!!!!" because I had been looking at Aaron all along. I just hadn't recognized him. Although I had seen him only weeks before at our family dinner, in that roomful of strangers I was seeing Aaron with new eyes: he looked like any other middle-aged, square-faced man with a cap of close-clipped salt-and-pepper hair. Authority was on him like a sportcoat. He had the air of a principal.

  I imagine that Deena had thought that Aaron and I would welcome the chance to catch up. We sat in silence. Together my brother and I watched his daughter interpret the elemental concept of rippling water, her hair unfastened, cascading behind her like the sheer azure chiffon that clung to her slender form. When her partner swung her up into a lovely high arc, her chin tipped back, her arms seeming at once to stir and settle, I shot a glance at him. How did it feel to see your fourteen-year-old Mennonite daughter borne aloft in the arms of a man twice her age? Where were the man's hands during these liquid lifts-on Phoebe's waist, on her firm little heinie? Phoebe looked like a professional dancer up there on stage, all the softness of childhood stretched taut, all the roundness worn away to a flicker of muscle across her fierce slim shoulders, while Aaron sat immobile, opaque as a Buddha. But it spoke volumes that this man, who knew nothing about dance and who had probably never danced a step in his own life, was prepared to go without a second car so that his daughter could ripple like water.

  NINE

  Wild Thing

  I was making myself a tuna salad for lunch in my parents' kitchen, draining the can of tuna into a small bowl. "Hey," I said, "are there any cats in the neighborhood who would appreciate this tuna juice?"

  My mother looked at me as if I had entered the final stages of dementia. She swiped the bowl, chugged the tuna juice, and said, "Schmeckt gut! Tastes like tooooona!"

  Then she asked me if I would run to the grocery store for corn on the cob and heavy whipping cream. You can never have enough corn on the cob and heavy whipping cream is what I always say, and it's a pleasure to provide them for a mother who does tuna shooters.

  Rounding the corner from Produce to Dairy, I smiled as I passed the snack aisle: a man was bending over to shout in the ear of an oldster, "YOU WANT SOME BRIDGE MIX, DAD?"

  "Eh?" said the dad. "What's that?"

  "NUTS, DAD? MIXED NUTS?"

  "I like nuts!" cried the old man.

  "DAD, I'M GONNA GET YOU SOME SALTY NUTS!"

  "Get the salty ones!" advised the dad.

  The man tossed a can of mixed nuts into his cart. The dad grabbed his son's sleeve and suggested, "I like those salty nuts you got last time!"

  "PLENTY OF NUTS, DAD," shouted the son.

  There was something dear about a buff, shaved-headed rocker taking time out on a Thursday afternoon to take his old dad grocery shopping.

  Later the man and his deaf old dad were in the next checkout aisle. The son had run into a church acquaintance and was saying something about prayer-ah, the rocker was religious. This promptly scotched my interest. I still thought he was dear for shouting about mixed nuts to his dad, but my rocker had suddenly joined the ranks of Sexy Men I Wouldn't Date.

  In the snack aisle the man and I had exchanged a meaningful glance, as if to say, Bridge Mix, $4.99. Shouting the same thing eight times in a row to your old dad-priceless. This rocker and I had shared a few seconds of that delicious unspoken awareness that sometimes heats up the space between strangers. Thus I was not wholly surprised when I heard somebody pull up behind me in the parking lot as I was loading groceries into the trunk of my parents' Camry. The rocker pulled up directly behind me.

  "Excuse me."

  I turned, knowing it was he.

  "Ma'am," said the rocker, extending a muscular arm from the window of his car. He was offering me a piece of paper. "If you're a single woman of God, I surely wish you'd e-mail me. That's my e-mail address. You can throw it away. But I hope you don't."

  "Oh!" I said, stunned at the Single Woman of God. I put the paper in my pocket.

  He went on, "I was noticing you in the store. And it was heavy on my heart to say something to you. It was like, Go talk to her, very heavy, three times. So I pushed myself out of my comfort zone, and here I am."

  The old dad leaned over to the driver's side. "Is that the gal? Is she pretty?"

  The rocker reached over and patted his dad's shoulder. "This is my dad, Albert. He's blind. And I'm Mitch."

  We shook hands. "I'm Rhoda."

  "Rhonda," said Mitch. "I surely hope you e-mail me. If you're single and all."

  He drove off with his dad and his nuts.

  The note was printed in hasty caps on Twilight Shores stationery. Twilight Shores was the assisted-living facility across the street from my parents' house. That sealed it. Who hits on a woman with a blind old dad in tow? I e-mailed Mitch the very next day and set up a coffee date. I wasn't exactly a Single Woman of God, but hey, I could quote scripture. There had been something unusual, even compelling, about this guy. Although I would never have suggested that a divine voice was urging me in his direction, I did understand what it meant to go with your gut. And my own gut was whispering, "Mixed nuts!"

  The following week my heart sank when I approached the coffeehouse where Mitch was waiting for me at an outside table. Even from across the street I could see what he was wearing around his neck. A big-ass three-inch square-headed nail on a leather thong.

  To the uninitiated, a nail necklace might seem like no big deal for a huge goateed guy with a hard edge; you might consider it the quintessential accessory for rockers and metalheads. But I already knew in my heart what this nail was.

  This big-ass nail was a tribute to the agony of Our Lord and Savior.

  Thousands of undereducated zealots had adored Mel Gibson's cinematic presentation of the Passion of Christ. Moviegoers had rushed out to pay $16.99 for "Authentic Nail Necklaces," fondly believing that the square-headed nail of the Turin Shroud kerfuffle confirmed Christ's divinity. These were the same folks who, a decade earlier, had dared people with their eyes to ask them what their bracelet meant-WWJD, What Would Jesus Do? I was so embarrassed when I saw the nail that I couldn't even look at my new friend. Should I head back to my car and pretend that the Mixed Nuts Encounter had never happened? Should I go forward and tell him that this was a mistake? WWJD? WJSDAOL? (Would Jesus Sit Down and Order a Latte?)

  That's what I did anyhow. And, wow, I liked him. The rocker, not Jesus. I liked his simple declarations. He'd been married twice; his daughter was dating a convict; God had granted his prayer for sobriety on March 12, 2001. He attended a church called Faith Now. Faith Now, I learned, had something called an Affliction Ministry Team.

  I was immediately reminded of the Salem witch trials, when a group of adult men and women who called themselves the Afflicted alleged that they were suffering from various forms of demonic harassment. History makes much of the group of young women accused of witchcraft, but it was the Afflicted who always held my attention.

  "Affliction Ministry Team? Really?" I leaned a fraction closer.

  "The team is called in whenever there's a situation involving spiritual affliction," Mitch told me.

  "Demons, you mean?"

  "Demons, sure," said Mitch, "but also afflictions with substance abuse. Or depression."

  I smiled at the thought of the Affliction Ministry Team, dressed in short-sleeved shirts and ties and carrying corduroy Bibles with pockets on the front cover, showing up on our doorstep to exorcise my husband's depression. Nothing could have made Nick destroy more furniture faster. And what a pottymouth Nick had! He could swear up the bluest streak I personally have ever heard: "Jesusmotherfuckingchrist on a damn melba toast with a two-minute egg!" he'd shout. This outburst would no doubt have sealed the deal for the Affliction Team, more evidence that Satan's minions were abroad and active in the world.


  "I gotta tell you, Mitch, I don't believe in an external evil entity like Satan."

  "Why not?"

  "I think Satan is a dodge," I said. "It gives us someone to blame for the evil that we create."

  "Then who do you think is powering those Ouija boards?"

  "What Ouija boards?" I asked, looking around, hoping for one nearby.

  "Those Ouija boards you play when you're a teenager in Frankie Versalini's basement."

  Tasty! "Tell me about that," I invited. As an obedient Mennonite, I had respected the injunction not to tamper with the supernatural. Even now at age forty-three, I'd never seen a Ouija board in real life. Here's what I've gathered from odd Ouija-related tidbits over years of general reading: The Ouija presents as a board game printed with the alphabet and numbers. There's some kind of pointer device on which all players are asked to rest their hands. From there I imagine the game proceeds like a nineteenth-century séance: dimmed lights, a spooky feeling, an invocation to summon supernatural forces or dead friends. The device is supposed to channel a disembodied element, which may or may not have an urgent message from the great beyond. If this supernatural entity does have such a message, it allegedly spells out the message using the letters and numbers on the board. Why it doesn't state its business out loud I do not know. Maybe it is shy. Maybe this supernatural entity is an introvert, passing us a note as in third grade.

  Since the players' hands must physically rest on the Ouija board at all times, it would be impossible to tell just who is conveying the urgent message. Poltergeist? The spirit of Houdini? Your buddy across the table? Your own psyche? Following the pointer as it moves from one letter to the next must be an intensely slow, suspenseful process. A letter-by-letter spelling out of a ghostly message is a faithful reflection of the way we seek to impose meaning on chaos. Funny to have a board game, banned and censored for centuries, whose very punch line is the literal act of reading. You have to decode a message from the great beyond, the perfect metaphor for how we interpret those parts of ourselves that we cannot understand. Or that we don't want to understand.

  "I'm sorry to say that me and Frankie played with a Ouija board," said Mitch, "and I've prayed that nothing bad stuck to me from it. I've prayed that prayer ever since I found the Lord on June 19, 2000."

  "What would stick to you, for instance?"

  "I don't know, and I don't want to know. Some bad vibe."

  I tried to picture this. "A bad vibe that gets on you and stays on you, like a piece of toilet paper permanently trailing on your shoe?"

  He frowned. "Except that a piece of toilet paper on your shoe isn't evil. It's just toilet paper."

  "Touché," I said. Mitch's assertion had a ring of fresh truth to it, and I liked it so much I repeated it. "Toilet paper isn't evil."

  "As Christ-followers, we're not supposed to even open the door to evil."

  "Because evil might wedge its foot in there, like a fifties salesman?"

  "You like to compare stuff to other stuff, don't you?"

  "I'm a writer," I apologized.

  "I will always remember the day when Frankie Versalini brought out his sister's Ouija board in his basement. The thing went wild. It moved around a lot, wildlike, all over the thing." Mitch shook his head at the memory of the thing going wild on the thing.

  "Did it spell out a message?"

  "No. But it sure moved around. Me and Frankie weren't doing it, I swear. You ever do anything like that?"

  I liked the idea of the thing gone wild, of some kind of urgent longing to communicate coupled with an inchoate inability to do so. It had a message, dammit! But it couldn't quite articulate it! Or maybe the message was that there is some ineffable longing, some core need or pain, that can never be articulated. It spins our thing on the thing, and we are helpless before its frenzy.

  This may have been my oddest first date of all time. Usually people exchange information about their careers, their families, their politics. Here we were revealing chinks in our spiritual armor. I was so floored that when Mitch suggested a walk down the street to a little café, I realized I couldn't not have lunch with him. This man and I were destined to have lunch. First the nuts and now the chink.

  But here's the best part. As we began walking down the street, I suddenly spotted my friends Alba and Raoul having lunch at an outdoor café just ahead. We were going to walk directly past them, which meant that I would be forced to introduce them to Mitch. I hadn't seen this couple since the spring before in Bologna, when they were visiting Lola. Alba, like Lola and me, had grown up Mennonite, and although she had broadened her horizons, she still cherished her community of origin. Alba and Raoul had heard about the divorce; naturally they would be interested to see what kind of a man I was now with. Alba was a cognitive therapist who did trauma counseling in developing countries. Raoul was a plastic surgeon who traveled with Doctors without Borders to perform cleft-palate surgeries. This was going to be sticky.

  We hugged. I introduced Mitch, mentally willing him not to inquire about the status of my friends' salvation. The four of us small-talked for five minutes. So far, so good. Just as I was exhaling a breath of relief, thinking we were going to emerge from the encounter unscathed, Alba focused on the big-ass nail.

  "I have a nail like that," she said. "It's from my great-grandfather's barn. When we moved it onto our property, we saved some of the old nails."

  "We made some groovy paperweights out of them," said Raoul. "That barn was originally built in 1850."

  "1860," Alba corrected. "It was right after Garibaldi met with Victor Emmanuel at Teano." She turned to Mitch. "What's the story on your nail?"

  This was where the demonic juju that had stuck to Mitch jumped to my own shoe, metaphorically speaking.

  "My nail is the nail in the hands and feet of Jesus. He was crucified for our sins."

  "Oh," said Alba, embarrassed.

  "It's not the actual nail, though," said Mitch. "This nail is a replica."

  "Right," said Raoul.

  "Good to have run into you two!" I exclaimed brightly. "I'll be here for a couple of months. We should do lunch!"

  I saw a different side of California culture when I was with Alba and Raoul. Usually I hooked up with them in Europe; this was the first time I was seeing their new house in the States. Their son, Holden, was a big boy now, three years old, in the process of being promoted from Cub to Dragon at his expensive day-care facility.

  When I arrived for an overnighter, Holden ran up to meet me and demanded a surprise. I proffered a sheet of dinosaur stickers, which he accepted with pleasure. These he laboriously affixed to the wainscoting of Alba and Raoul's 1912 Craftsman bungalow. The next hour, and every subsequent hour, Holden greeted me with the same question, "Rhoda, do you have a surprise for me?" I had planned three surprises for my overnight stay: the dinosaur stickers, a can of Silly String, and a magic washcloth. But I had no more surprises. And to tell the truth, I was beginning to find the whole demand-and-supply thing a little fatiguing. Holden always began to shriek and whine when I apologized that no, I didn't have any more surprises. To give, that is. Once I did receive a surprise. A kick to the shin.

  Alba and Raoul, seasoned parents by now, were unperturbed by their son's behavior. If Holden's howling outburst was especially dramatic, they might observe conversationally to their boy, "Caro, sometimes people won't give you a surprise." Then they would turn to each other or to me and simply resume the thread of adult discourse.

  Both Alba and Raoul had known Nick very well indeed, and they were united in their efforts to make me feel better. I'd been suffering from an ongoing sense of impaired judgment. Just why was it, I wondered, that an ostensibly self-aware woman had remained for fifteen years in a marriage with a man who didn't love her? Had Nick ever loved me? If so, when had he stopped? And why was it important to know that? Raoul said, "Hey, we were there too, remember? Of course Nick loved you. In his way. Bipolarity can be pretty damn charming. We fell in love with Nick,
too. Don't beat yourself up over this."

  "What you need," said Alba firmly, "is to get out there again. It's been eight months. Unless you count the guy with the Jesus nail."

  "Not exactly eight," I said. I explained about the interlude with the pothead.

  "The pothead doesn't count," she said. "That was just to show you that you still know how to kiss. What I'm talking about is really getting out there and meeting a guy you have something in common with. You know, a man who will appreciate you. A man you don't have to call the police on." Alba was remembering the time I had called the police on Nick: January 3, 2001. I sound like Mitch, I thought. How lame is it that this date is etched so firmly in my memory?

  Alba proposed that I tag along to a couple openings and concerts. Between her and Raoul, they knew everybody.

  One evening the four of us were going to an art opening. Alba and Raoul believed that children rise to the level of social intercourse we model for them; they insisted that children deserve exposure to the fine arts from infancy. If tots fill their pants, fuss, or throw raging tantrums in public, so be it. Thus they take Holden everywhere. Alba theoretically allowed Holden one sweet per day, and he had already had a chocolate-chip cookie earlier that afternoon. (By "one," I mean "four.") Yet Holden was pitching such a royal hissy that on the way to the gallery Raoul stopped and bought him some Pop Rocks.

  At the opening, I was conversing with an artfully disheveled hipster: shaggy hair, intriguing stubble, Dries Van Noten pinstripes, flip-flops. The hipster was name-dropping a list of bands and famous musicians whose cachet was lost on me for two reasons. One was that throughout my fifteen-year marriage my husband had been the one obsessed with music. He had seen it as his job to determine what we liked and listened to. At every dinner party it was he who decided what jazz, and when. The other reason was that, as a native Mennonite, I had so little knowledge of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, that it seemed easier for everybody if I just backed out of music altogether.