Mennonite in a Little Black Dress Read online

  I rarely approached the formidable wall of CDs, alphabetized in meticulous splendor. Most of the time I preferred the full sound of silence. Sometimes I hummed German hymns while cooking or cleaning, but very quietly, because Nick loathed anything religious, and he moreover wanted me to distance myself from what he called my Betty Crocker origins. But I like to cook and clean, and housework sometimes puts me in the mood for an old-fashioned hymn. Once a sympathetic girlfriend in grad school had given me an Andy Griffith CD of old gospel hymns. I kept it hidden inside a silicone oven mitt for long culinary projects when Nick wasn't home. Is it just me, or is there something richly satisfying about filling jam jars as you pick up the alto to "In the Sweet By and By"? Poor Nick-I always felt bad that I summoned so little interest in contemporary music.

  So the hipster's name-dropping was lost on me. I had the sense that he might be a bit of a gasbag. Then again, he could have been a famous producer. What did I know? Either way, he wasn't particularly interesting to me. Beautiful people were gliding in random patterns, holding their pomegranate martinis. Suddenly, just over this man's shoulder, I became aware of Raoul among the glitterati. Raoul had a big blue Pop Rock clinging to the corner of his lip.

  I made eye contact and brushed helpfully at my mouth. Raoul squinched his face as if to say, "Huh?" Okay, Plan B. I offered the internationally recognizable expression Dude, There's Something on Your Face. But this time he mouthed, "What?" Still pretending to listen to what Band Guy was saying, I whispered, "Pop Rock!" to Raoul, who finally took a tardy swipe at his lip.

  But Band Guy thought I had been talking to him. All confidence and charisma, he said, "Pop Rock? Ahhh, yes, I heard them last summer at the Roxy. I had a backstage pass."

  Don't get me wrong; I do love the cognoscenti. There's always a white scholar who identifies as black. There's always a cocktail with a retro ingredient such as Tang. There's always a conceptual artist whose preferred medium is her own menstrual blood. There's always an endive involving ginger chutney and a dance troupe that refuses to do any actual dancing. There's always somebody earnestly saying, "Subjected, like productive, is deceptive in that it can be quickly defined, but is not so quickly discussed because of the variant ways in which the definition can be interpreted." There's always a fashion-forward woman in a maroon dress, carrying a big matching Vidalia onion as an accessory. Then when you go home afterward, there's always a malapropistic nanny singing, "Row, row, row your boat, gently down the street."

  These things are pleasures to behold. If I can't have a good time at such a function, I can at least laugh about it. But for some reason I couldn't plug in this time. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I too closely associated this world with my marriage.

  One afternoon I was looking after Holden in Alba's courtyard. Raoul was in China performing cleft-palate surgeries, Alba was at Pilates, and the nanny was getting a pedicure. It was one of those perfect California late afternoons, warm enough to make me seek the shade of the jasmine-laden pergola. Holden was amusing himself with two drumsticks and an electronic keyboard that offered a choice of percussive rhythms. He had selected a techno beat, which was still playing at the loudest volume even when he left it on the step to approach me under the pergola. I dreaded what I knew was coming.

  "Rhoda," he said with awful quietness, "do you have a surprise for me?"

  "I'm sorry, Holden, but I don't."

  His face reddened and squalled. Just like that, his cheer was gone. He began to sob, whacking his little drumsticks on the post of the pergola. "YOU DIDN'T GIVE ME A SURPRISE!!!" he wailed. He was twisting and whacking like a tiny Tasmanian devil, so I couldn't gather him up in my arms. "I WANT A SURPRISE!!!!"

  "So do I," I admitted.

  Poor Holden! Rhythm savant, whacker of sticks, kicker of shins! He bawled and twirled, and I just sat there. But a part of me recognized his dissatisfaction. On the steps the rhythm machine marched on, and I was catching techno snatches between sobs. Alba's heavy jasmine vine honeyed the air. How could a garden so beautiful be so filled with unhappiness, with a sense of loss for what we never had? "WHERE'S MY SURPRIIIIIIIIIIIIISE?" he shrieked, and as he churned there with fists balled and cheeks aflame, his pain swelled until he seemed the very incarnation of pathos. His whole body became a rigid whirling wild thing. He was the emissary of us all, we who felt we had not received our due, we who felt the late afternoon of our lives stung with fury and with sorrow.

  TEN

  The Trump Shall Sound

  My mother suggested a visit to a feeble senior who was recuperating from pneumonia. She proposed that we bring Mrs. Leona Wiebe a plate of fresh Zwiebach and my mother's own signature calling card, a miniature jar of homemade strawberry jam: "Just a taste, that's why the container is so small. That way they don't feel like they have too much food in their little refrigerators." My mother's garage freezer housed hundreds of these personal-sized jams. They rose in military towers. She single-handedly kept two assisted-living facilities in the jam.

  When I first opened the door of her garage freezer and confronted the evidence of her largesse, I asked why she and my father needed so much jam.

  "Oh," she said. "I'm a deacon."

  "The position calls for jam?"

  "Well, you want to bring something to cheer those old ladies up. Homemade jam reminds them of the old days before jam got so fake. Who would eat store-bought jam when you could have the real thing? You should come along with me to visit old Mrs. Leona Wiebe. She's eighty-six," Mom added, as if that might be extra inducement.

  Actually, it was. I liked hanging out with the oldsters.

  "Is she mentally alert?" I asked.

  "Oh yes! She wears a wig!"

  Note to self.

  Old Mrs. Leona Wiebe greeted us graciously in her frosty wig and carefully applied makeup. We had called right before coming to give her a chance to wig up, and Mrs. Leona Wiebe had done a splendid job. My own makeup should look so fierce.

  "Leona!" My mother gave her a shadow hug, careful not to squeeze those frail shoulders. "You've got your color back! When I saw you in the hospital, you were so pale. I thought, She's not long for this world!"

  "God is good," said old Mrs. Wiebe. "I've got my breath machine. I'm supposed to do it every hour on the hour, but it's too hard to remember when I'm in the middle of something else."

  "An incentive spirometer? Can you get the ball all the way up?" my mother asked, ever the nurse.

  "No, about halfway. But I can hold it there for six seconds. A little at a time, praise God! I hope to be back on the track soon."

  Behind Twilight Shores was the Mennonite university's track, a gorgeous facility. Finally healed enough to exercise, I ran there every morning. Under a flat blue California sky, that track invited dreamy distance, hot bright miles. I ran as if in a trance, loving the cry of peafowl from the nearby Havakian estate. It was my first sustained exposure to peafowl. They meowed portentously, like netherworldly cats. If I got there early enough, I'd meet Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Penner. Together they walked twelve slow laps every day, holding hands the entire time. The only thing that could have improved my experience on this track was to see old Mrs. Leona Wiebe clinging to the turf like a blonde spider.

  We sat down on her floral couch.

  "I just turned eighty-seven, praise God," she announced.

  "Many happy returns!" said my mother.

  I did some math in my head. "Calvin Coolidge was president when you were born," I said. "You must have been a young woman already during World War II. Sugar rations, boys in uniform."

  "No, dear," said Leona, legs elegantly crossed in their taupe slacks. "I lived in China in those days. What I remember are fearful times under General Chiang Kai-shek."

  I sat up straighter. "Oh! It must have been terribly dangerous for missionaries to be in China then!"

  "It was. We feared for our lives. All of us kids were born in China, and we spoke Chinese before English, so we understood what people were saying in the vil
lage. Our parents didn't; they had a translator, who always made things seem better than they were. But even so, my parents were scared. My parents put food and water at one end of our compound and then they brought in a lot of mud bricks we'd made. My father's idea was to build a false wall inside and to hide behind it, so the soldiers would never know we were there. The soldiers who served under Chiang Kai-shek hadn't been paid or fed properly, so they were breaking away to prowl around the country. They would sweep into a village and steal all the food and attack the women. Those were dreadful times."

  "Did the soldiers ever come into your compound?" I asked.

  "Praise God, no. The Lord kept us from harm. But twice the soldiers terrorized the village, and we had to go into hiding. I remember once our security guard shouted down into our hiding place that we could stop praying. He said we were safe."

  "Were you?"

  "Well, we could hear a terrible ruckus coming up from the village, so we knew the soldiers were still there. My older sister Rebecca asked the security guard why he thought it was safe to come out. He said"-she leaned forward, bewigged and earnest-"that there were two angels on the wall." Her voice dropped to a holy hush.

  I had never actually met anyone who claimed an angel sighting, even a secondhand sighting. As far as I was concerned, angel sightings were not unlike alien kidnappings or Ouija juju on your shoe. Naturally Mrs. Leona Wiebe's story made me perk right up. In fact I couldn't have been any perkier. "Really?" I asked, jaw dropping. "Real live angels? Two of them?" Did they come in pairs? Mate like swans for life?

  "Two real live angels," confirmed Mrs. Leona Wiebe solemnly.

  "Were they-"

  "Well, we won't keep you," said my mother, frowning at me. "I brought you some Zwiebach and a taste of strawberry jam."

  "Thank you, my dear. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your visits. You're an angel yourself. If somebody had to see me in that state in the hospital"-she patted her wig-"I'm so glad it was you."

  Walking back home, I complained that Mom had cut me off just when it was getting good.

  "I don't think it's right to make fun of poor Leona," said my mother sternly. "She's entitled to a couple of angels on the wall."

  "I'd like a couple myself," I said. "I wasn't making fun of her. I just wanted to know what those angels were doing up there on the wall. Why weren't they down in the village, protecting the Chinese?"

  "Maybe the Chinese weren't praying."

  "Mo-om!" I said, stopping smack in the middle of the sidewalk, horrified. "Maybe there's something wrong with a religion that sends an angel to protect the Americans but lets the Chinese fend for themselves! I wonder what they were wearing."

  "The Chinese?"

  "The angels."

  "Old folks like Leona may be a bit literal in their beliefs, but God does work in miraculous and magnificent ways."

  "Mom," I said suspiciously, "are you trying to tell me you see angels too?"

  She laughed. "No. But there are powers and principalities. Speaking of cherry-plums, do you want to help me make Pluma Moos?"

  My visit was drawing to a close, but my mother continued to surprise. One of the greatest surprises to proximate auditors was her contribution of hortatory flatulence. Loud and astonishing were her expostulations, like the speeches of Daniel Webster. These outbursts had become so frequent, yet so casual, that she no longer apologized. She treated them stoically, with great inclusivity and tolerance.

  My friend Lola, who is also afflicted with intestinal turbulence, once reported that she had been deeply embarrassed at a cultural evening at a villa in Bologna. Two Italian artists had followed her to the kitchen, where she began to replenish a tray of appetizers. She broke wind suddenly, audibly, primordially, in front of these men. They froze, staring. Poor Lola improvised. She shrugged, laughed, and said, "Che posso dire? Sono americana!" (Translation: What can I say? I'm American!) I relayed Lola's story to my mother, suggesting that every time my mother was caught in a situation of similar social rupture, she could shrug jauntily and blame it on her nation of origin. She could murmur, "So sorry! I'm Canadian!" or perhaps, "God save the queen!"

  One day in my last week in California we were at Kohl's inspecting bundt pans. There in front of several shoppers and a seeing-eye dog my mother sounded the clarion call to all rogue farts-so rich, so specific, so thunderous, that really it was almost prophetic. This was the Moses of all farts, a leader of its kind. The trump shall sound! It shall rouse us to action! I could not believe that my own mother had produced such a remarkable acoustic effect. In public.

  Mom always reminded me of the virtuous woman in Proverbs 31, the one whose worth is far above rubies. She had other things in common with that woman, too. "The Virtuous Woman," I remarked, thinking of Proverbs, "girdeth her loins with strength."

  "I wouldn't talk," my mother said ominously. "You're half Canadian, you know." Then she added one more junior fart, as if for emphasis. She always gets the last word.

  The Kohl's incident seemed curiously linked to my mother's interactions with frail bewigged Mrs. Leona Wiebe. Mom's stoicism regarding the body and all its functions was really almost Christian in its ideation of openness and transparency. What the rest of us considered malfunctions of the body-death, disease, crippling intestinal turbulence-she rather interpreted as functions of a normal body. She talked about death as she spoke about life, matter-of-factly, with that benign enthusiasm so out of place in this world. She had announced to Mrs. Leona Wiebe that in the hospital the latter had looked just awful. "Not long for this world" were her exact words. That would be among the last things I'd say on a visit to an invalid, yet from my mother's mouth these words seemed oddly comforting, as if there were indeed a time for all things under the sun. Likewise, the failure to excuse oneself for explosive gas is, to most Americans anyway, a shocking breach of etiquette. But in my mother this behavior adverted to an acknowledgment that the manners we seek are not necessarily the manners we have. There was a refreshing honesty about that . . . though I swear on a stack of corduroy Bibles that no matter how much I like the woman, I will not be emulating her behavior in Kohl's.

  I spent some time reflecting on what it would mean to be a virtuous woman in this day and age. My mother, bless her, didn't really count; she was a virtuous woman from another age. Mary Loewen Janzen would have given the angelic nineteenth-century Marmee from Little Women a run for her money. Both Marmee and my mother healed the sick, clothed the poor, and took jam to the indisposed. Both offered free babysitting for struggling young mothers. Both called on their medical knowledge to minister and heal. Both went around in a shawl and a big cartwheel hat, if you count Friday mornings, when my mother volunteered as a docent at the Meux Home Museum. Both sewed, and sang, and served the Lord. Perhaps prim corseted Marmee did not pass whipcrack gas, or freeze a seeing-eye dog in its tracks, but in many respects she and my mother were similarly virtuous.

  I suppose a sensible way to gauge virtue is to examine how the virtuous behave when things disappoint them. I'm sure my mother wishes-prays!-that I had a spiritual home in a church, even a non-Mennonite church. I'm thinking that she might even prefer a charismatic, tongue-talkin', faith-healin' gospel church to none at all. But, like Marmee, she has always backed her daughters up, always supported us, always welcomed us into her home with open arms, no matter what choices we've made. And we've made some strange choices, Hannah and I. That steadfast acceptance does seem to hark back to former centuries, at least to the hagiographic literature thereof.

  What about virtue in the twenty-first century, however? I wondered if virtue, like virginity, no longer even existed in the conceptual realm. In the Western world, virginity has gone the way of butter churns and lard sandwiches. That is, virginity still technically exists in the form of folks who have not initiated sexual activity. But the old definition of virgin as a pure young woman, unsullied by knowledge of sex, is no longer with us. I may have been the last virgin. Nowadays even folks who are not sexuall
y active know about sex. Virginity is therefore a changed creature altogether. Virtue is like that. Knowing what we know about human nature, would we even want to return to those days when we believed morality was simple, when goodness was something you learned at Marmee's knee?

  Consider how impossible it is, for example, to aspire to the role of virtuous woman when professional commitments dramatically interfere with jam delivery to oldsters. Consider what happens when scholarship and education expose many of the assumptions of organized religion as intellectually untenable. Belief in literal angels, for instance, is something I am not prepared to endorse. Yet I cannot deny the genuine warmth my mother seems to radiate-indeed, that all these Mennonites seem to radiate. It's clear that this Mennonite community is the real deal. They really do try to practice what they preach.

  It has been many years since I absented myself from the Mennonite church. I made lifestyle choices that would have been insupportable for this conservative community. Lord, if they had a problem with Mrs. Ollenburger's liposuction, imagine what they would have said about my marrying an atheist! Moreover, in addition to my marital defiance, there was the shocking fact that in my early twenties I declared myself free of body-related shame. This declaration translated to studded black minis, enormous hair, fuchsia lipstick, and preposterously high Manolos. I once wore such an ensemble to accept a senior award at a Mennonite college. It seemed an eloquent gesture at the time.

  When I was a young woman, the Mennonites would have recoiled with fear and loathing before the thought of a female pastor, and even now I know of a Mennonite provost who very recently had to be "persuaded" to hire a female theologian as part of an academic faculty. There were those, like my father, who believed that the church would move forward in time. But in my opinion the Mennonite church was already a good fifty years behind the civil rights movement, and I wasn't in the mood to wait around. Nor could I stomach the Mennonite position on homosexuality ("Hate the sin, love the sinner!") or abortion ("Judge the mother, love the baby!").