Mennonite in a Little Black Dress Read online

  "This chicken sandwich, which cost one dollar, is preferable to the Wendy's chicken sandwich I had yesterday, which cost $2.34," said my father. "You want to try it?"

  "I'm not really a chicken-patty kinda gal," I said.

  "When we get back to the car, we can have the last of that cranberry bread," said my mother. "And there's still some coffee in the thermos from yesterday."

  This remark was problematic on a variety of levels.

  "Mom," I said, pointing to the cup of decaf that was at that moment steaming in her hand, "why wouldn't you drink this coffee with the cranberry bread?"

  "This coffee might be gone by then, because I'm drinking it with my McSandwich."

  "Then why don't you just get a refill on your way out?"

  "They charge for refills!" interrupted my father, sensing an opening. "Even on the senior discount!"

  "But . . . since you made the coffee in the thermos yesterday morning, won't it be completely cold by now?"

  "Oh, well, room temperature. And it's wet! We could drink it if we were desperate. We could drink it if we had car trouble and had to wait by the side of the road."

  "How true," I said helplessly.

  We can all agree that a snort of day-old coffee will go a long way toward improving our mood in the case of automotive duress.

  "See there?" my father said, nodding at the McDonald's menu. "Says there that you could have had a Ranch Snack Wrap for $1.29!"

  How different road trips were with my father than with my mother! Both were refreshing in their way, but the trip with my father as driver unfolded in mile after mile of soothing silence. Dad didn't converse, didn't listen to the radio, didn't enjoy the music that my mother urged him to play every so often. Mom always fortified the Camry with a spiritually edifying variety of CDs, including one by my parents' neighbor Chet Wiens and his Mustard Seed Praise Quartet. There was also a new release by my cousin's daughter Starla, who had carved out for herself a career in opera, but who had recently begun rendering perfervid coloratura show tunes à la Ethel Merman. And there were some instrumental CDs too, particularly one that featured some worshipful stylings upon the pan flute.

  But it was one thing at a time for Si Janzen. He wasn't what you'd call a multitasker. He liked to concentrate on driving. Sustained conversation, the kind that involved the exchange of abstract ideas, occurred only during brief rest stops and visits to fast-food establishments, and even then it was sort of frowned on. During the actual drive he might utter relevant, specific commentary on the passing landscape. These comments emerged as part of a topically appropriate metanarrative. "I see some sheep," he'd announce. Or, "There's a big jobber of a Winnebago." Personally, I have always found these remarks rather challenging to respond to, as they seem both to invite dialogue yet simultaneously forbid elaboration. However, over the course of a forty-five-year marriage, my mother had mastered the art of replying to my father's cryptic overtures. She always gave him her full attention, even if he had interrupted her crossword puzzle or Sudoku. To "I see some sheep," she might look up and answer brightly, "Sheep dip!" To "There's a big jobber of a Winnebago," she might reply, "Big gas guzzler!"

  Dad always declined our offers to pitch in with the driving. Other drivers made him nervous, especially my mother.

  He had a point there. When it was just my mother and I in the car alone together, I preferred to drive, and god knows I'm not a great driver. But I'm better than she is. Fortunately she never asserts an intention to take the wheel. A couple of weeks prior to our trip up to Bend, the two of us had made a three-day trip to Arizona, to visit some of her Bible-college friends who were going to be in Flagstaff to spend time with their daughter Frieda. Because these were Mennonite friends, I knew them too, of course. In fact I had known Frieda long ago, when I had dated her older brother, back when I was in Bible school. (Sidebar: Reinhold and I dated for a whole year without figuring out how to kiss with tongue. It's not that we were bad at French-kissing; it's that we didn't do it at all. We didn't know about it, see.)

  When I heard that Frieda, Reinhold's likable baby sister, now lived in the desert on the outskirts of Flagstaff, I expressed surprise. "Is there a big Mennonite community down there?" I asked.

  "No," said my father. He liked conversations about the whereabouts of Mennonites. "Frieda has had health issues, and her health requires her to live in a warm dry climate."

  My mother chimed in, "Allergies, Si. And chronic fatigue syndrome."

  "Ohhhh," I said knowingly. I assumed that chronic fatigue syndrome was code for serious depression, and I wondered if Frieda hadn't just needed to ditch the Mennonites for a while. Been there.

  "No, she's really ill," Mom said. "She almost died."

  "Well, in that case, it's great that a change of climate has helped," I said. "It has helped, hasn't it?"

  "It has," my father amended soberly. "Frieda lives in a small condo about thirty minutes away from the city."

  "All alone?"

  "There is a fellow, a friend, who visits her from time to time," said my father in his best preacher's voice. He added, "And they relate to one another, there in the desert."

  On the drive to Arizona, Mom and I exchanged many reminiscences about the family car trips we had taken in my youth. I can't speak for my brothers, but Hannah and I dreaded these trips, due to our father's inflexibility and the suspension of creature comforts. It's hard for me to believe that my father willingly agreed to camping vacations, given how miserable they made him. They were leisurely but urgent; aimless yet planned. My father forced us to hit the road every day by 6:00 a.m., not to arrive at a specific destination, but to experience the bucolic pleasures of driving in the cool of the day.

  Perhaps the big draw of camping was that it saved money. To this day I am unclear about whether we couldn't afford real vacations, or whether the cheaper car trip was simply a matter of principle. Whatever the cause, the result was the same: a family of six, two Coleman ice chests, an ancient pump stove, and a tin garbage pail that featured an educational map of the United States-so that we could practice capital cities along the way-all stuffed into a white Volkswagen van.

  A typical morning involved rising in the thin light of predawn, stumbling out of our crowded tent to a distant biffy, and drinking lukewarm instant cocoa out of a Styrofoam cup. Because the cocoa was lukewarm, the powder wouldn't wholly dissolve; it rose in lumps to the surface. These were discrete, aggressive lumps, not to be mistaken for the miniature marshmallows, which offered their own chunky texture in the sediment at the bottom.

  Hannah and I shivered in the damp while my father yelled at my brothers, whose duty it was to help him disassemble the tent, because they were boys. My brothers worked silently, using the claw end of a hammer to pry up the tent stakes while my father struggled with the collapse of the tent poles. In all my growing-up years I never heard either of my parents take the Lord's name in vain, or utter a single foul four-letter word. However, during tenting season I flinched at such fierce imprecations as "GolDARN it!" and "DagNABBIT!" During the tent dismantle, I often took Hannah by the hand and led her some distance away. My father's simmering impatience made her cry.

  Since we'd hit the road after the cocoa but before the breakfast, Mom would wait until the sun was up to unfurl the Pandora's icebox of odors. In the space of the cramped van, those odors assumed a pungency that was the inevitable prelude to carsickness. For breakfast there'd be stale Schnetke, bruised bananas, and tepid milk in oft-used Styrofoam cups, rinsed out by me and Hannah as the tent came down. Mom stretched the milk by mixing it with nonfat milk powder and water. This made us gag, but we each were required to down a full cup. Nor were we allowed to pick out the raisins in the Schnetke, on the grounds that Jesus did not sufficiently appreciate finicky children. We would jolly well eat what we were served. We would approach the throne of God with a clear conscience and a heart of gratitude. Starving children on the Chaco wanted those raisins!

  I was terrified that God would
call me to become a missionary to the Chaco. The Chaco was an arid stretch of high-altitude land in South America that defied profitable farming. The Mennonites of my youth had reached enthusiastic consensus concerning the Chaco, with its many indigenous non-Christian peoples: it was ripe for mission work. I'm still not sure of what goes on on the Chaco, but as a child I suspected that it involved proliferating weevils and manioc root. From many Sunday-night-church slide presentations, I learned that a missionary organization called Word Made Flesh often summoned Mennonite missionaries to plant churches on the Chaco. When I saw the slides, I privately concluded that what the Chaco needed was not church planting, but a better selection of fruits and vegetables. Forget church planting; just get busy with watermelons. A juicy sweet watermelon could kick the ass of any manioc root. Probably!

  When Word Made Flesh kids appeared in Sunday school, on leave from their vital church-planting work on the Chaco, these missionary children were humorless, pious, and pale. The girls wore their aprons to church. And their conversation was full of references to demons, which didn't surprise me a bit. Where else would you expect demons to hang out but on the Chaco, shriveling the manioc crop?

  If any of us kids expressed a lack of gratitude for anything that came out of the icebox, Mom was quick on the draw with the Chaco, pulling it out fast, like a gunslinger in the Old West. Starving children on the Chaco would fight for the pleasure of sipping powdery blue milk out of a Styrofoam cup! I inferred that Styrofoam cups were rare on the Chaco, whereupon that place of blight and godlessness rose a little higher in my estimation.

  But even a picture of demons at work among manioc roots could not arrest the nausea. Caleb, chewing banana with his mouth not entirely closed, hollered, "Mom! Rhoda's gonna barf again!" He prodded my arm with his banana.

  "I'll say a state capital for every raisin," said Aaron smugly. "Concord. Tallahassee. Boise. Juneau."

  "She's holding her mouth!" Then, confidentially to me: "Lookee here." Caleb held up one of the long strings that sometimes attach between the banana peel and the flesh. "Lookit, it's coming out of my eye. Lookit, it's the white thing in your eye when you wake up."

  "You're the white thing in your eye, moron!" replied Aaron. "Bet you don't know the capital of Vermont. This raisin is the capital of Vermont. Watch this," Aaron said, shoving Montpelier into one nostril.

  Not to be outdone, Caleb shoved the moist banana string into his nostril. "Lookit, lookit, lookit."

  "That's lame," said Aaron scornfully. "That's just a thing on a banana. This is Montpelier!" He retrieved Montpelier with one sticky finger and wiped it on Caleb.

  "B.T.!" shouted Caleb joyfully, flicking Montpelier back at Aaron. He missed. Montpelier got stuck in Hannah's white-blonde hair. "Booger territory! Hannah-fofannah, you got a booger in your hair!" She began to cry.

  "We don't use those words in this family, young man!" barked my father over his shoulder. "Mary, what's going on back there?"

  She turned and looked inquiringly at Aaron, the oldest.

  "Caleb's saying bad words, Hannah's crying 'cause there's a raisin in her hair, and Rhoda needs to puke."

  My mother unexpectedly focused on the raisin. "How did that raisin get in her hair?"

  "Caleb put it there."

  Mom got stern. "Caleb, you eat that raisin right now. We don't waste raisins in this family."

  "But-"

  "Not a peep, young man. You. Eat. That. Raisin."

  Caleb sulkily ate the raisin that had been in his brother's nose, but he made powerful retching noises that helped me along.

  "Si, pull over. Rhoda needs to throw up."

  The van wasn't air-conditioned, yet it did offer a surprise amenity. Mom had outfitted a plywood bed with a homemade red canvas mattress patterned with white stars. It had matching pillows, and the four of us squeezed on that bed in a damp nest, reading, across the long hot miles of dry chaparral through Nevada and Utah. Sometimes Mom let me and Hannah sleep in the van all by ourselves at night, instead of in the farty tent, which smelled of mold and breath in addition to brothers who cut the cheese. This tent offered no guarantee against mosquitoes. (Creatures of the night freely came and went via the many holes in the tent's screen "windows.")

  One night we were slapping and scratching through a particularly buggy bout in one of the more humid states. Outsize mosquitoes hung in the air like smoke from an unseen fire, and we had already done our best with hats, long sleeves, insect repellent, and a campfire. But still they came, still they swarmed, like something out of Hitchcock. Mom finally broke down and walked over to the campground's convenience store for a yard bomb, in spite of my father's protest that yard bombs cost good money. When she came back, she doused the area good and proper, and for a while we played Authors in peace.

  That night Hannah and I begged to sleep in the van. It was not until we were tucked in for the night that we heard it: the high, tight frenzy of a legion of mosquitoes inside the van with us. I turned on the flashlight to initiate the smackdown.

  "Girls!" warned my dad from the tent. "Go to sleep!"

  We'd already found and swatted several big lacy mosquitoes before Dad's second shout, so I knew I had to do something drastic. Wrapping the tent bag turbanwise around my forehead, I sprinted out of the vehicle, scooped up the yard bomb, and slammed myself back inside of ten seconds.

  "Girls! Don't make me come over there!"

  "We're going to sleep!" I shouted.

  But before we did, I unleashed the remains of that yard bomb inside the van. With closed windows. Hannah coughed and sputtered, inhaling the damp droplets of poison. "I can't breathe," she whispered.

  "Me neither," I whispered back, "but we'll get used to it. No mosquito would dare attack us after that!"

  In the morning when Mom came to wake us, she drew back coughing and waving her arms. The toxic cloud of fumes lifted as the outside air rushed in, sweet and fresh. We gulped it gratefully. "Oh Rhoda! What did you do?"

  "Yard bomb," I gasped.

  "You could have killed yourselves! Why, why, did you do this?!" She was practically sobbing. Hannah had gotten up dizzily and was sitting down again, head between her legs.

  "There were lots of mosquitoes in the van," I said. "I didn't want to chance it."

  When my mother reminded me of this story on our own car trip thirty years later, I chuckled at my early determination to avoid predation at all costs. But the story seemed a pretty good analogue for Hannah's and my Childhood of Fear. Why we were always so afraid I cannot say; we weren't abused, attacked, or violated in any way. On the contrary: as Mennonites, we lived remarkably sheltered lives. No radio, no eight-track tapes, no unsupervised TV, no toys that smelled of worldly values. A yo-yo, okay. A crate that your neighbor's refrigerator came in, knock yourself out. A Slinky, sure. Badminton, by all means. But a big fat no to the following: Barbie's House of Dreams (too adult? too containing-a-bed-onwhich-Barbie-might-seduce-the-other-Barbie?); Lite-Brite (too electric and therefore too vainglorious?); Edible Creepy-Crawlers made from a kit (too satanic?). Even our friends were prescreened for bad influences.

  Did the degree to which we were sheltered occasion the fear that Hannah and I both felt with the onset of adolescence? Ah, those were the days when we saw a predator in every man who approached us! Somewhere, somehow, the Mennonite culture had taught us that all non-Mennonite men were would-be rapists. Thus whenever we stepped outside the protective shield of our Mennonite community, we moved in a terrifyingly unfamiliar world. Scared of school events, horrified by what would happen if I let my guard down to have a beer, terrified whenever a boy asked me out, I was as skittery as one of those squirrels that freeze as your vehicle approaches. Even when your gay husband rolls down the window and shouts, "Make your move, junior!" these squirrels seem profoundly indecisive. I always felt bad for those squirrels. I too had faced doom. And, like the squirrels, I had closed my eyes and hoped the doom would just go away.

  Hannah and I inferred that non-Mennonites w
ere capable of anything. The world seemed especially hospitable to serial killers in unmarked white vans. For instance, when Hannah and I walked to the Thrifty Drug Store for contraband Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers, we'd always rehearse a Plan A and a Plan B for what we'd do if a serial killer offered us a ride or attempted to thrust us into his unmarked white van. I am happy to report that this never happened to us. However, because our adolescence coincided with the last years before political correctness, we did hear some graphic things about our anatomy. I, who still thought that you could get pregnant from kissing, spent many an evening puzzling over the possible meaning of titfuck.

  This fear lingered into my adult years. Once in grad school I returned to my apartment to find a note taped to the front door. In scary printed capital letters it read

  FOR ALL THE DONUTS YOU CAN SCARF

  COME TO MY PLACE FRI 7:00 PM,

  I WANT TO GET TO KNOW YOU RODA.

  JIMMY

  Jimmy was a sad guy I had met once while doing laundry, and as a dating overture, this gesture strikes me as funny after a distance of twenty-three years. But back then I experienced a complex response whose crescendos came rolling like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's stages of grief and dying. First there was revulsion: Scarf? Scarf?!? Next, confusion: What kind of a person eats donuts on a Friday night? Then fear: Why does this Jimmy know where I live? And, finally, panic: Do I look like a scarfer of donuts? Ohmygod, does this outfit make me look like Agnes Ollenburger, the biggie Mennonite of our youth who had liposuction on her upper arms and then asked the church for forgiveness?

  Jimmy was clearly a serial killer or a pervert. That Friday night I went to the library as usual, but I propped the note in a prominent position on my coffee table for police use, in case my body showed up dismembered in a dumpster.

  Now at forty-three, on the long drive up to Bend with both my parents, I sat quietly contorted in the crowded backseat, remembering the car trips of my youth, remembering fear like a high-pitched cloud of mosquitoes. And I couldn't think of anything that explained why Hannah and I had always been so afraid. Sure, Mennonite culture mistrusted public images of sex; that was a given. On the few occasions when we kids were allowed to watch TV, a parent had to be present. My father monitored the proceedings like a stern prison guard. If any character on any television show, married or single, made a move toward an on-screen kiss, there was Dad, wielding the remote like a Taser. Quick to change the channel, he'd sometimes mutter in dark disapproval, "Smut!" Sex, it was clear, was a sinful scourge.