Mennonite in a Little Black Dress Page 20

  She nodded and smiled, eyes heavy. From that one low-key question about Soren, I learned exactly how I really felt about dating a young Mennonite guy. He was funny and sexy, but there was no way I'd be able to bring him to dinner with anyone. I just couldn't do it. And anyway I wanted Eva all to myself. We'd reached the stage at which sitting around and discussing theology was more interesting than sitting around and discussing men.

  It was funny that her daughters vibrated with simmering energy while she herself seemed so tranquil of spirit. Eva left Matea and Hazel largely alone. They tore through the house in April dressed in Christmas garland and tinfoil; they grooved to the beat of a Mennonite mandolin; they sang songs from the Opera of Life ("Lalalala, I cut this worm in HALF, lala! There's a HAIR on my toothbrush, lalalalala!"). Eva usually remained in the background, watching but not interrupting. So many parents feel that they must respond to every single word out of their children's mouths, even when the children are merely giving voice to unfiltered interior monologue. Eva's willingness to let her daughters play on their own seemed refreshingly like trust. She didn't neglect them or avoid them, by any means. They delighted her. But she exercised faith in the process of just being. My other friends had polyglot kids, equestrian kids, classical guitar kids. Eva's kids just ran around and did stuff.

  Eva had phoned me to come over for grilled veggies and chicken. When I got there around 6:00 p.m., Matea was studiously avoiding me, using her arms and legs to act out all the letters of the alphabet. She was wearing a pink floral bikini. "When I told her you were coming over for dinner, she went and put on that swimsuit," Eva remarked.

  "Gotcha. Hey, Matty," I called, sticking my head into the living room. "Groovy bikini!"

  My compliment was what Matea had been waiting for. She felt affirmed, validated somehow. It is one of the mysteries of childhood that the opinions of people we barely know are of paramount importance. I've always loved the way children confide secrets to strangers or anxiously await a stranger's verdict on a pink bikini. After I had given the bikini the thumbs-up, Matty went and changed back into the outfit she'd been wearing earlier: jeans, a tutu, and a burnoose.

  At dinner Eva and her husband, Jonathan, and I were discussing a spy-fiction class that Jonathan was putting together for his high school curriculum. Suddenly I felt a tug on my sleeve. I looked down. Little Hazel, four years old, amber eyes snapping sparks of pride, had some urgent news to share. "Rhoda! Rhoda!"

  "What can I do for you, Hazel?"

  She was throbbing with energy, her straight bob snapping her chin like a crisp red flag. "Rhoda!" She looked me in the eye and announced, "I wouldn't DREAM of pooping in my pants!"

  "Neither would I," I said. Hazel's announcement struck me as something my mother might be tempted to confide at a dinner party, so I was unperturbed.

  "I wouldn't poop in my pants," said Eva conversationally. She didn't even blink. She just helped herself to more zucchini.

  "That makes it unanimous, then," said Jonathan. "There is nobody present who would DREAM of pooping in their pants."

  Little Hazel nodded triumphantly and vanished into the living room, where she told her sister that her pants were free and clear of poop, now and forevermore.

  That night I watched Eva and Jonathan put the girls to bed. This process involved two stories, two songs, and elaborate combinations of kisses among siblings, parents, and stuffed animals. As Eva and Jonathan harmonized a made-up song in the darkened bedroom, I found myself blinking back tears. It wasn't because this was a scene I would never know. I had no regrets on that front; I had made my decision, and I was at peace with it. It was more because I suddenly felt destiny as a mighty and perplexing force, an inexorable current that sweeps us off into new channels. Here was Eva, who could have made such different choices with her education and career path. Here was I, with my decades of restless travel, my brilliant but tortured ex-husband. And how sad it suddenly seemed to be buffeted by the powerful currents to which we had yielded our lives. So many years had passed. My childhood, my early friendships, my long marriage, all seemed to hang from an invisible thread, like the papery wasps' nest outside my study window. I had watched the lake winds swinging and tipping it, expecting it to go down, but it never did. Memory swayed like that nest-hidden but present, fragile yet strong, attached by an unseen force to perpetual motion.

  I sometimes ask my college students if they think it's possible for a thirty-plus adult to experience saltatory ideological change. I tell them that I'm not talking about the kind of gradual mellowing that results from age. Nor do I mean the kind of abrupt character fissure that opens in the wake of trauma or suffering. Rather, I want to know what they think about the possibility of a profound, lasting change that emerges from an act of deliberated, conscious self-determination. I want to know if they think we can change our core assumptions about what we believe. About how we believe.

  Yes, say my students, absolutely! Of course we can change! And then I marvel at their hope. My students carry optimism around in their backpacks like bright bottles of designer water.

  Can a skeptic ever be anything but a skeptic? Can a loner ever come to cherish groupthink? It was sobering to think that Eva's and my lives, so similar in potential and core interests, had taken such different turns, and that the only place they could ever intersect would be in the liminal space of childhood, or in the theoretical no-man's-land of alterity. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Eva in my world, Eva in a sexy-serious dress at an art opening, Eva laughing off some biting remark of Nick's that had landed and stung, like a black fly. The image didn't compute. Eva favored sensible shoes and a hankie. Eva would have never, not for one minute, put up with Nick's temper. The very picture of mental health and self-respecting balance, Eva would have told Nick in the first month of marriage, "If you can't make some changes in how you manage your illness, I'll be making some changes in how I manage this commitment."

  But, then, Eva would have never fallen for Nick in the first place. His wracked misery, his anger at God, his creative brooding, were in some ways attractive to me. These qualities orbited me, too, like shadowy moons around Jupiter. Nick's dark distress mimicked my own perpetual waffling: my questions about organized religion, my chronic doubts, my cynical shrug when husbands left their wives for men they had met on Gay.com. I believed both the worst and the best about human nature. Reading the Edenic myth literally, my parents thought that God created us, and that we subsequently fell from grace. I believed that the fall from grace was a metaphor for how we inevitably fall short of our potential. And if we had been created, hadn't we also created God?

  My mother and I were going to spend the day with the Mennonite Senior Professionals, a group of retired scholars, ministers, and sundry educated oldsters. They met twice a month for a gentle intellectual stretch. On the day in question my father couldn't attend, so my mother had asked me to accompany her. This was an all-day gig, a day trip to local valley farms, to learn about Mennonite agrarian history. Some of the Professionals were my old college teachers, and I remembered most of them as very conservative. For the occasion I had selected plain brown pants, Diesel sneakers, and a high-necked top.

  "It's supposed to cool off later, so I can understand why you don't want to wear shorts today," my mother was saying. "But you didn't even at the barbecue last night. Staci and Deena were wearing shorts."

  "Mom, I'm forty-four, for heaven's sake. There comes a time when you just resign yourself to not wearing shorts."

  "I'm seventy, and I wear shorts in the garden."

  "There comes a time, and then it goes away, and then it comes back," I amended politely. "But I haven't reached that third phase yet."

  "You have good healthy legs."

  "Not anymore," I said firmly. "People don't want to see a mess of scars."

  "Nonsense," said this Mennonite matriarch. "I like to see a healthy pair of legs in shorts."

  Mom's new sartorial pronouncements were a little surprising for a Me
nnonite. For example, she had recently suggested that the business world would be a better place if stockbrokers and executives would all agree to wear tank tops to work. Her pro-shorts stance was similarly surprising, given that I had not been allowed to wear jeans in my youth, on account of the fact that jeans belonged in the barn and God would not have been glorified. I'd have guessed that a glory-seeking God would have preferred the jeans to the shorts. At least the jeans covered blemishes. Cellulite, veins, and scars surely offered God limited glory at best. But, hey, who was I to predict the wardrobe preferences of the Almighty? It was a crapshoot as far I was concerned. God might even fancy a skort. I usually left speculation of this sort to folks like my mother, who seemed to know.

  Now Mom frowned at my pants, which I had also worn to the barbecue the night before. "I think everybody wants to see your legs. I know I do. Yesterday it hit ninety. I got hot just looking at you."

  I pulled up a pant leg. With the scars and the luminous goose-flesh, prickly and translucent, my shin was not a pretty sight. Added to that, I'd been living a scholar's life in a northern clime for seven years, and my shin was the color of new-driven snow-no, of reconstituted nonfat milk powder. For my morning runs I covered up in my karate pants. I couldn't bring myself to wear shorts, even on the track.

  "Why all of a sudden do you want to hide your legs?" Mom pressed. "It doesn't make sense. Is it the scars? You wear your pants low, just like all the teenagers."

  "That's different."

  "No, it isn't," she insisted. "When we went on the church hayride, and we were sitting on those low hay bales, your jeans were cut down so far that I could see your panties."

  "Good god," I said, suddenly queasy. "Do you think Elsie-Lynn and Walter could see my panties?" Elsie-Lynn and Walter had been sitting on the hay bale right behind mine.

  She nodded peacefully. "They were bright orange and pink. The panties, not Elsie-Lynn and Walter."

  Oh! The tardy humiliation! "I once wrote Walter a term paper on the Münstereich! I would so much rather show him my legs than my underwear! I bet they're both going to be there today, judging me for my inappropriate panties!"

  "Don't get so worked up. When you get to be our age," said my mother, on behalf of Elsie-Lynn and Walter Hoeffer, "virtually everything is more interesting than the color of your underpants. Walter and Elsie-Lynn have grandkids. They've seen it all before."

  Arriving a full fifteen minutes early for Mennonite Agrarian History Day, Mom and I were nevertheless the last ones on the bus. I scanned the silvery waves and gray beards; Mennonite punctuality was a testament to our German heritage.

  Making our way to the back of the crowded bus, I experienced a pleasurable flutter, sort of, that I would be sitting opposite Abe and Arlene Kroeker. My mother automatically ceded me the aisle seat, since I needed the legroom. Thus I found myself sitting less than twelve inches away from Abe Kroeker. Abe Kroeker was the father of a boy I dated briefly in high school.

  I'm going to take a risk and really put myself out there. Here is my confession. For the last twenty-five years my single most frequently occurring dream has been a feeble nightmare about my classmate Karl Kroeker. The nightmarish aspect never varies its stone-cold panic: Oh nooooo, my name is Mrs. Kroeker! Oh crap, I'm dating Karl Kroeker! Dammit, I'm walking up the aisle and the groom is-wait! No! Karl Kroeker! I'd like to make it clear that in real life Karl Kroeker and I never slept together; never shared adult joys or sorrows; never exchanged information vis-à-vis goals, ideologies, friends, or extracurricular activities. I'm not sure we even had a conversation. Once we inexpertly made out on a school bus.

  Therefore it is mystifying that for years Karl Kroeker has belabored my dreams. I see Karl Kroeker as a nagging message from the unconscious realm. Like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, Karl Kroeker will not be ignored. However, it's not as if I dream of Karl Kroeker every single night. It's not as if dreaming of Karl Kroeker makes me wet the bed or anything like that! I mean, I'm not weird! I assure you that I dream of Karl Kroeker only often enough to make me glad that Karl and I don't know each other as adults.

  I always wake in a cold sweat, mentally kicking and screaming from the cosmic compulsion that is forcing me to wed the second son of Abe and Arlene Kroeker. This is compounded by the strange fact that if I could handpick two people I would really cherish as in-laws, it would be Abe and Arlene. I've always loved them.

  I'm no psychotherapist, but I have always assumed that for whatever mysterious reason, Karl Kroeker represents the sum total of my Mennonite experience, the essence of Mennonite manhood. He's the ur-Mennonite who personifies why I cannot appreciate "liturgical movement." He's the Abromtje, the frosty heart of the melon-supposed to be a treasure, but for some reason a little creepy, like a tumor that grows hair and teeth. Most girls think they've turned a corner when they get their period. With me it was when I started dreaming about Karl Kroeker. This happened long before I made out with him on the school bus. Although I was in junior high when the nightmares began, I recognized that they signaled some important change in my psyche, some rupture with tradition. My nightmares were telling me to run screaming from the Chaco.

  This whole thing is very odd, because Karl Kroeker may be (after me) the Mennonite Least Likely to Evangelize the Chaco. Karl Kroeker has made choices that have taken him far afield of the Mennonites. Now a successful cardiologist in Boston, Karl mainstreamed even earlier than I. While the rest of us Mennonite kids, shyly garbed in homemade clothes, were high school wall-flowers, savvy Karl Kroeker was a letterman, a tennis star, and president of the student body. Therefore Karl Kroeker is not an appropriate portent of doom. In real life, at least to hear Abe and Arlene tell it, Karl is smart, kind, humorous, attractive, and affluent.

  So it was in a state of heightened alert that I settled down next to Abe and Arlene, who gave me detailed updates about Karl and his brothers. Karl, I learned, had married an Armenian with a close-knit family in Des Moines. This news unaccountably cheered me. Petty, I hoped that Karl's Armenian wife had to wax her upper lip or, like Yvonne, had to prioritize the management of a hirsute bikini region.

  Abe Kroeker was a history professor whose august education often propelled him outside Mennonite circles. As a girl I had found this most impressive. Abe, like my father, was now retired. He seemed to have mellowed a teensy bit, and he even manifested a restrained expression of pride when Arlene was telling stories about their successful sons. Whenever I saw him and Arlene together in public, they replicated the marriage dynamic so often seen in our circles. As with my own parents, he was stern and taciturn; she, gregarious and warm.

  Five years earlier, Arlene had heard of my interest in Mennonite history and had thoughtfully presented me with three special tulip bulbs, descendants of the same tulips cultivated by Menno Simons, the sixteenth-century father of the Mennonite faith. I told her that when I had moved to the lake house, I had dug up those Mennonite bulbs to take with me. She nodded soberly, as if I could have done no less.

  The big bus had a bathroom. My elderly compatriots didn't use it. Mennonites don't want other Mennonites to see them walking down an aisle to pee, but I was too much my mother's daughter to mind. On my way back from the bathroom, I swayed as the bus driver took a sharp curve. The motion lurched me violently toward Abe. I fell into my own seat, just managing to snap my torso back from full contact. Abe didn't miss a beat. He spread his arms wide and teased, "Well, come on!" as if I were deliberately throwing myself at him. Arlene loved this. She clapped delightedly and made little jokes for the rest of the day about her husband's magnetic personality.

  Here's the thing. I don't know if it was because of the strange connection with my dreamscape, but in that moment when Abe Kroeker's seventy-something eyes were twinkling at me, I suddenly experienced a powerful attraction. In fact, in a self-fulfilling prophesy, I did want to throw myself into his arms. Yikes. I even considered the thought that all this time I had been attracted to the father, not the son. Was it just me,
or was there something deeply compelling about a scalpy Mennonite septuagenarian in comfy shoes and a sweater vest?

  The last stop of the day was at an herb farm run by an ex-hippy farmer. She knew and understood Mennonite culture, having fled the community decades earlier. As part of her introduction to the majesty of herbs, she passed out the kind of rhythm instruments you play in kindergarten: sticks, tambourines, little clusters of jingle bells. Then she invited all the Senior Professionals to play them while she strummed a folksy song about the healing properties of sage and thyme. My mother, looking accidentally stylish in embroidered jeans and snakeskin jacket, sashayed her hips and smacked the bejeezus out of that tambourine. (One of our family's unsolved mysteries was Mom's gravitational pull toward animal prints. Perhaps this fondness resulted from a recessed gene. Once she made me a dress from fabric printed with realistic giraffes, lions, and antelope running and pausing on the high open grasslands. Mom knew too little of fashion to associate animal motifs with a bold sensibility, so it was delicious to see her appear in something as chic as a snakeskin jacket.)

  All around me these beautiful people were good-naturedly shaking fistfuls of little jingle bells and whacking sticks, an ancient but enthusiastic percussion band. They knew the humor, of course-Mennonites don't do movement-but they had all reached the stage in their lives where God had relaxed enough to take a few jingle bells. I saw old Herman Froese, a retired organist, stomping his leg to the downbeat. There was sweet Doreen Hiebert swaying with Arthur's arms around her. Arlene Kroeker was singing along in her melodious alto, en pointe with a musical triangle, while Abe held several foolish bags from the gift shop. He wore the look of an owlish scholar who wants to purchase neither rosemary sachets nor clove tea, but who has done so because he loves his wife of fifty years.

  From the valley came the scent of lavender. When I was little, my Sunday-school teacher Mrs. Lorenz, the same who had offered us cookies spotted with raisins, had once given me a prize for memorizing the Sermon on the Mount. The prize was probably something she had regifted, considering that I was only eight and it was clearly an object intended for a grown woman.