Mennonite in a Little Black Dress Read online

  Although I am not an addict, I am indisputably an idiot. Idiocy was nothing new to me. The breaking news on the self-help front was that I was also codependent. Over the years I had heard this term loosely and peripherally in women's magazines and on Oprah. But I had always dismissed it, on the grounds of overwhelming lameness. Now, I suddenly saw, I needed to give this word its due. Being codependent so surprised me that I was forced to consume an entire batch of chocolate-chip cookie dough with a salmon tartine chaser. And that's okay! It seemed clear that since I was now officially codependent, I could benefit from something like a twelve-step program. However, I had only a hazy idea of what a twelve-step program included.

  RHODA. Hi, my name is Rhoda, and I'm codependent.

  ALL. Helloooooo, Rhoda!!!

  RHODA. I love a man who left me for a guy he met on Gay.com. I've wasted most of my adult life caretaking his needs, paying his bills, and trying to meet his inhuman standards of perfection.

  ALL, scattered applause. That's okay!!

  None of the books my friends had given me described the twelve-step process. Since it turned out that I was also a passive-aggressive blamer, I was content to note their omission and move forward, making up my own twelve steps.

  Step One: Admit You Have a Problem

  Nick had baldly announced that he no longer cared what I said or did, and he demonstrated this so often that I was eventually forced to believe him, despite my Herculean effort to convince myself that underneath it all, he would continue to love me if I could just ride this one out. Bob, the lover from Gay.com, would call our house at all hours. Once he called at midnight when Nick and I were asleep. The phone was on my side, and I sleepily picked it up.

  "Hello?"

  "Uh, can I talk to Nick?"

  "This is Bob?"

  "Yeah."

  There it was: confirmation from the man of the hour. The man from Gay.com. In the flesh, ready to whack off, requesting the assistance of my husband. I handed the phone silently to Nick, who had tensed beside me. I rose, collected my tractable cat from the foot of the bed, grabbed my robe, and went downstairs to sob in the guest room. That was the last time we ever retired together to the same bed.

  Step Two: Sit Down at the Computer with

  Wild Medusa Hair

  It's comforting, sort of, that during the marriage, the man made a mighty exertion to love me. Fifteen years is a long haul to be in a relationship when you don't feel good about your partner. And he must have really loved me once. I don't know when he stopped. It's hard to gauge because, even when he did love me, his bipolarity subjected him to fits of manic contempt, during which he'd say things like a child, unfiltered, whatever thoughts crossed his mind. "I don't love you, I hate you!"

  One of the things that always mystified me was Nick's fault-finding, a chronic irascible nagging. He used to nitpick about so many little things, and then apologize, matter-of-factly blaming his overreactions on his bipolarity. He'd explode if I left a pair of earrings overnight on the bathroom counter; he'd rage if I sat down at the computer in the morning without having brushed my hair. We both agreed that these things should not be deal breakers in any relationship, but they galled Nick nonetheless.

  I always assumed that bipolar folks were missing some crucial fuse in their anger-management system-that their inner thermometer was set a shade too high. Two years out from my marriage, I now have a more useful perspective. After Nick left, I eventually began dating a man I liked but didn't love, and I finally have firsthand experience in those little sparks of irritation that ignite impatience. I'd never minded the little things in Nick's behavior; I'd never even noticed them. It was after Nick had left me that I learned the lesson: it's when you don't love somebody that you do notice the little things. Then you mind them. You mind them terribly.

  Step Three: Hide the Bike

  Let's say that you're dating the new guy, and you're about to give your first dinner party together. This man you're dating is a whimsical clutterbug, so you clear the clutter from his table and set it with the best stuff you can find in his antique sideboard. You fold the napkins just so, like elegant pup tents. You arrange a vase of gorgeous yellow forsythia for the sideboard. You bring in candles. Then you go upstairs to change because this man, a serious cook, has already finished the blancmange with honey and goat cheese. When you return, you note that your new guy has placed a miniature plastic bicycle smack in the middle of the tablecloth. Why this is you can't say. The plastic bicycle, about an inch and a half long, looks like a prize from a box of Cracker Jack.

  Now, if you are a nonconfrontational Mennonite woman who has been trained to communicate her needs and requests in terms of covert passive-aggressive questions, you might ask, "Sweetie, what's the story with this little plastic bicycle?" If, on the other hand, you are a Mennonite woman who has been working very hard at trying to be more assertive, you might go a step further: "Mister, I object to this small plastic bicycle, no matter that you received it as a door prize at an office party twelve years ago." It's too bad, though, that whatever you end up saying to the new guy, you're still nowhere near being able to say this: "Mister, I'd like to love you, because you are everything that is good and kind, and you play piano like a dream. But I will date you for a year and then break up with you."

  Step Four: Hide It, I Say!

  If I had loved this fabulous man, would I still have objected to the little bicycle? Probably. But the little bicycle would not have unleashed a tsunami of indignation, nor would it have seemed to affront the very foundations of dining etiquette. Now I know how poor Nick must have felt when I plopped down at the computer at 6:00 a.m., perfectly alert, with a cup of coffee. I had taken the trouble to press a pot of good coffee; I was chipper in the way of annoying morning people-why then would I neglect to brush my own hair? How could I so disrespect the aesthetics of domestic accord? It wasn't that I had tried and failed to brush my hair. It was that Nick had tried and failed to love me.

  Step Five: Get Some Colored Construction Paper

  When Nick left me shortly after the midnight call from Bob, one of the first things I did was call my realtor. I knew I couldn't afford the mortgage payments on my own, and I had to put my house on the market. Agitated but too frozen to cry, I sat numbly in my realtor's conference room, sketching the situation. Annike and I had become personal friends-not intimate, exactly, but our relationship was warmer than a professional acquaintance. Her assistant brought in a tray of ginger tea.

  When I had outlined the trajectory of recent events, Annike spoke slowly, out of the beautiful calm she always seemed to wear like a coat. "Let's not worry about the house for now. We're coming up on the winter months, and no one will be looking for a lake house until spring anyway. Just sit tight. Do you have an attorney?"

  I nodded. I had filed for divorce the day before.

  "What's her name?"

  "Cora Rypma."

  Annike nodded. "You're in good hands."

  "I don't want to screw him," I said, just to clarify. "It's not like-"

  "I understand," Annike said. "Of course not." She took a serene breath. "Rhoda, there's something you need to read." She got up and excused herself. "I'll be back in a minute."

  I was expecting a legal document, or maybe a pamphlet on how not to be a dummy when filing for divorce. Instead, when she came back a few minutes later, she pressed into my hand a paperback book on feng shui.

  I dutifully read and followed the book on feng shui. Why not? It couldn't hurt. If Nick had been there-the old Nick, I mean-I would have read him passages that would have made us both howl. Instead I obediently arranged my rooms according to the book's schema; I divided the lake house into color-coded baguas, each replete with its own cluster of shapes and symbols. It was either rearrange my house or stare in front of the fire with my cat on my lap.

  The feng shui book urged me to scribble little notes to myself on construction paper of various colors. "I surround myself with healing vibrations!" "I no long
er need and now release my love for Nick!" This went on through the weeks following my car accident, when I went rolling through my empty house on my office chair, battered and bruised. "I no longer need, and now release, this writhing mess of scar tissue on my legs!" "I no longer need, and now release, this piercing pain in my clavicle!" It was a long time before I found myself saying, "I no longer need, and now release, this book on feng shui!"

  Step Six: Grade Inflation

  The first Sunday after the accident, my friend Carla called and deadpanned, "Okay, don't go anywhere. I'm driving out there. We'll just sit and grade papers together. You want me to bring you anything from town?"

  "The New York Times. And some purple construction paper."

  Carla brought her knitting and her own grading and sat with me in front of the fire for three hours that afternoon. She made it clear that she would set her work aside if I wanted to talk. But I didn't want to. I wanted to be silent forever. I sat on the couch with my broken bones and my cat and a big stack of papers to grade, and I graded, exactly as if my life hadn't just crashed down on me. But I gave all the papers upbeat grades and positive comments. "Terrific topic sentence! I'm with you!" "Is it just me, or is this the strongest paper you've written?" "You had me at Since the dawn of time!"

  Step Seven: Polish Your Floor with Your Ass

  Because the lake house was forty-five minutes out of town, I didn't get many visits. Curiously, the isolation didn't bother me. For all my adult years I had been Urban Girl, and I was surprised that I wasn't scared out there in the middle of nowhere, in a sizable empty lake house. That year the first snows came heavily, big flakes falling into the lake like words into memory, heavy, irreclaimable. Even when my broken bones had healed enough for me to scooch down the stairs on my bottom, there was something mellow and tranquil about my painstaking movement through the house. I liked the deliberate way I had to negotiate the stairs, concentrating on not breathing too deeply, hunching my shoulder forward so as not to jar the clavicle. Roscoe, my cat, followed me everywhere on silent haunches, as if I needed a witness.

  Step Eight: Make Imprudent Purchases

  Still thinking of the book on feng shui, I burned all of Nick's letters and cards. I deleted all his files from my computer, especially the pictures of male genitals freely posted on Gay.com. Those, dear readers, were not hard to let go. I paged through every old photo album, removing every picture of him. These I hurriedly stuffed into an envelope and sent to a Chicago address before I could change my mind.

  Nick had always been opposed to framed photographs of loved ones as part of home decor, on the grounds that such photos were cheesy, low-rent, and sentimental. The one photo he let me display was a goofy little picture of me and Lola when we were kids. Now I saw a clear way to assert my independence. I wrote to Hannah and my mom, asking for copies of old photos, of family photos.

  Right around this time I had some poems published in Poetry. Unlike most of the fine-arts journals, Poetry actually pays. I knew I should take the money straight to my savings account, or use it for the medical bills that my insurance wouldn't cover. But I didn't do that. Instead I blew up one of the old photos and had it expensively framed. It's an old black-and-white snapshot from 1949 in which my mother and her sisters stand in a long line, dressed in identical Mennonite white blouses and dark skirts, with arms about each other's waists. The seven of them look like typical Loewens, with their round homely faces, their wide smiles as fresh as hoop cheese. They are lined up in order of age. My mother, the youngest, stands to the far left beside a blooming hollyhock.

  In the face of all that Mennonite sobriety, my mother had tied a wee white bow into her hair. None of the older sisters had bows. Just my mother. I studied that photograph for a long time, wondering if the essence of that little bow had come down to me in a genetic form. I inherited a flat ass, big hair, strong bones-why not a yearning to be pretty? The bow delivered an eloquent little argument: there had been a time when appearance was important to my mother. She had once wanted to be jaunty, different, even if only for a day. Over the years I and my siblings had settled into the inevitable acceptance of family roles. Aaron was the Smart One, Caleb the Athletic One, Hannah the Sensible One, and I the Vainglorious One. I was the one who majored in minor things. I was the one who spent time on foolish details. As a girl I had no way of knowing that Flaubert and van der Rohe had already argued what I secretly felt: God was in the details. I'd long acknowledged my debt to Flaubert, but now that wee white bow also suggested a debt to my mother. It was nice to think of her as a pioneer of aesthetics. She was Mennonite, but she was mine.

  Step Nine: Consider the Autoharp

  During those first weeks of crisis, Lola was e-mailing me every day, sometimes twice a day, from her seventeenth-century apartment in Bologna. Since my fingers were about the only part of me that felt fine, I briskly typed the entire narrative of the end of Nick's and my relationship, no detail left behind. My study looked out over a winter waterscape, a peaceful vista. The lake hadn't yet frozen entirely over, and sheets of ice would vanish into steel-gray holes in the middle of the lake. In the twilight the lights from the dam on the far shore would suddenly breathe life into the gathering gloom, and the tiny glowing pinpricks of light grew dear to me. They held a promise of succor and comfort, like Portia's candle in Measure for Measure: "How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world." At twilight I made sure to be in my study, typing to Lola and waiting for the naughty world to shine. Sometimes I whispered out loud, substituting Lola's name for the name of the almighty God, a snippet from the Holy Eucharist, "Almighty Lola, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid."

  And when I had come to the end of everything I had to say about Nick, I asked Lola what she was eating, wearing, reading, singing. "Tell me about your invisible mustache," I urged. Or, "What do you do in Bologna when you're in the mood for pot-stickers?" She answered every question, no matter how dull. She reported on freckles, furniture polish, her husband's sister's dinner parties. She discussed deodorant, ironing boards, and double-sided tape. She described in detail the impact and trajectory of the secondhand autoharp my mother had purchased in 1971. Mom had been disappointed when Hannah and I had categorically refused to learn how to play this autoharp. In 1971 we knew in our bones that the autoharp, along with everything it represented, was the zenith of uncool. My mother strummed it alone and singing, until she retired it to the garage, going back to the piano of our youth. One day Lola tardily surprised my mother by asking for this selfsame autoharp. This was the last time Lola was in California, and my mother had joyfully passed it on to her. Lola took the forgotten autoharp back to Italy, where it seemed a thing of wonder to many an amazed Italian. In these stories and others, Lola's presence was so complete that I could hardly believe she was five thousand miles away. "Hey little Lola, play on your harp!" I sang.

  Step Ten: Branch Out from Borscht

  My local girlfriends, most of them busy professors themselves, showed their support by leaving me treats in my office mailbox when I returned to work. I'd find the pile of grammar exams I'd ordered, but also a container of baba ghanoush. An article on American sexology circa 1912 came right on time, but there on top I'd see a stack of Tupperware bowls, each containing a different homemade soup. I found quirky recipes, bottles of oddly flavored vinegars, selections of Moroccan spices. New bestsellers, old favorites. Tickets for events that did not interest me. Candles in fragrances I would not have chosen. I gratefully read everything, lit everything, attended everything.

  Step Eleven: Reinterpret Student Sympathy

  My students knew about the accident but not about Nick. I had told my girlfriends to wait until I was safely out of town for my sabbatical before they launched the catapult. Yet the students may have sensed there was more going on with me than broken bones, because they reached out in extraordinary kindness. Young women made me loaves enough to feed five thousand; young m
en brought me lattes and poetry. As I would leave my office to begin the slow trek to class, a gracious student would appear at my elbow, ready to take my briefcase and bag. For weeks I drifted about like an unmoored buoy; I couldn't even carry my own purse, let alone a briefcase weighted with books and papers. Strange how those familiar trappings anchor and define us! Because I couldn't raise my right arm, students sprang up to take notes on the board. If I hadn't been too numb to cry, I'd have shed buckets of tears at the hearty outpouring of support. I knew that my students were only being kind to a disabled professor, but their courtesy was easy to interpret as sympathy for heartbreak.

  Step Twelve: Visualize Patty Lee

  Since I had supported Nick financially, he could have sued me for alimony. I don't know whether his sense of fairness stopped him, or whether he just didn't think of the legal possibility. At some level he must have regretted that he wasn't a stable provider, and that he was incapable of showing up for a job that took time away from his heart's true interest. He often made fun of me for doing just that, charging that my Mennonite workhorse habits bespoke both cowardice and a kind of underclass conformity. If I had any balls at all, he charged, I would walk away from academia and become a freelance writer! But beneath his scorn there must have been some degree of guilt, because he would often remind me that although he wasn't bringing money or stability to the relationship, he was bringing just the things I'd never known I needed: genius, insight, a view of the road not taken, a new heart for the people he affectionately called "the bungled and the botched." And it was true: Nick's abiding love for the severely mentally ill, the developmentally delayed, the homeless folks who wore six coats and made a beeline for him in the street, did much to change my worldview. I always admired his commitment to this population, which was another reason I had been okay with my own role as breadwinner. In the early years his caseworker jobs paid even less than I was making as a TA.