Mennonite in a Little Black Dress Read online

  But my folks themselves were unafraid. They moved confidently through the world, taking risks, opening their home to strangers, traveling like fearless cosmopolites. My father's leadership position in the global Mennonite church required a lot of traveling, and my mother happily trailed along. When my father retired, the travel habit stuck-flourished, even, as they began to sign up for monthlong tours with other Mennonite couples.

  Geography was important in our family, as demonstrated by the persistence of the tin garbage pail with the state capitals. Yet it wasn't just geographic knowledge that my parents wanted us to have; it was knowledge of the international scene. In an ironic twist, two of the most conservative Mennonite parents took a sharp stand against monologism. An Americentric worldview, they believed, was incompatible with Christian values on the grounds that God loved all nations equally. My folks insisted that we study and travel abroad. They have done extensive globetrotting on every continent except Antarctica, which is probably on their list. They even know and love the Chaco. Considering that both my grandmothers had a third-grade education and never left the village until they emigrated to rural Ontario, it's funny to get postcards from Kinshasa, or Istanbul, or Hyderabad, from a mom like mine: "We saw a spider big as a teapot! Dad doesn't like yoghurt. There are unattended cows walking down the street. Love, Mom." From Calcutta: "They cremate their dead here by burning old rubber tires. I guess they are out of wood. It stinks to high heaven. Love, Mom."

  I thought of my parents' fearlessness as we pulled into the parking lot of a Denny's. After a five-hundred-mile day, we had two more hours to drive to Bend. It felt good to stretch our legs under the restaurant table. And I must say that it felt good to be checked out by a couple of guys sitting right across from us. They were maybe half my age, but they were cute.

  The server, who had already deposited my father's patty melt and my mother's breaded chicken cutlet, approached with my salad just as my father began to pray-out loud, in a clear audible voice, thanking God for the patty melt, the cutlet, the salad. Then he prayed for his pastor, for the state governor, for the president. He prayed for the couple who had just adopted three siblings, and for the people of Iraq. He prayed for traveling mercies. In his sober voice he noted that we would embrace whatever circumstances God saw fit to bestow, and he petitioned God for the grace and the wisdom to learn the lessons that our journey had to teach.

  I prayed to Pharaoh until I was six. Having learned in Sunday school that the Egyptians worshipped their kings as gods, I wanted to hedge my bets. But I always respectfully addressed the sovereign Yahweh before I spoke to Pharaoh-I thought there was one Pharaoh, mighty and eternal-because the Ten Commandments specified, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." The Mennonite God thus received my A-list requests, such as intercession from wolves, disembodied red eyes, vampires, and volcanoes. Pharaoh received my secondary and tertiary requests, like my earnest plea to be spared raisins and the Chaco.

  It had been at least thirty years since I'd believed in the power of prayer as anything other than a way to practice gratitude and ameliorate self-pity. Curiously, although I married an atheist, and although I had spent sixteen years pursuing the very secular path of higher education, I had not rejected the idea of God. But during that time my faith had changed dramatically as I had learned more about context of the church and more about religious belief outside Christianity. A little knowledge goes a long way!

  The Mennonites have a prickly history with the idea of education. There's an old Low German proverb that I have always savored, in part because everything is funnier somehow in Low German, in part because it seems personally directed at me: Ji jileada, ji vikjeada (the more educated a person is, the more warped). That knowledge would compromise faith is one of those delightfully old-fashioned beliefs that makes us chuckle today, as when we learn that the uterus was once thought to drift about the body, occasionally lodging in neck or elbow. Mennonites often connect their mistrust of education to the passage in the gospel of Mark in which Jesus observes that it is hard for those who trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God. The Mennonite idea is that people who privilege money and knowledge will think they have all the answers, and if they think they have all the answers, they won't be interested in seeking God. I can't speak for rich people, but in my experience higher education does not produce people who think they have all the answers, unless you count my brother Aaron. Higher education does just the opposite; it teaches us that we don't have all the answers. Socrates summed it up very well: "I know only that I know nothing at all." So unfortunately the Mennonites have it back-assward on this one. Which is something they'd no doubt have figured out if they'd gone to college like normal folks.

  A hundred years ago, while still in Ukraine, the Mennonites proudly pointed to their communal literacy, contrasting their disciplined public school system with the illiterate squalor in which their Russian neighbors lived. But the Mennonites made sure not to be too literate. They had firm ideas about when to pull out: Boys typically completed high school; girls stopped at grade three. It was enough to be able to figure numbers and read the Bible. Any more education and you might start asking questions that could weaken your faith and take you away from God.

  My grandparents' generation of Mennonites was united in its hostility to higher education. Once when I was traveling in Ukraine with a group of older Mennonites, I made friends with a fellow traveler, a stoop-shouldered slip of a widow who had escaped Stalinist Russia by "attaching herself" to a German officer during the occupation. Even at age eighty-four, with decades of prosperity and a happy marriage behind her, Marta refused to discuss the sexual relationship that had saved her life. When I asked her about her German benefactor, all she said was that the attachment had resulted in emigration papers for herself and her four sisters.

  Marta was a tiny thing-the top of her silvery head came up to my waist-but she was filled with the spirit to see her old stomping ground, and I found it delightful to adjust my steps to her slower pace. For most of the trip we talked about Marta: her past, her losses, her understanding of the political events in the years after the Russian Revolution. As a girl she had actually seen the infamous anarchist Nestor Makhno. I felt blessed that I had found a traveling companion who remembered the events of the Maknovshchina firsthand. Easy friendships often spring up among travelers, and soon Marta was confiding more than the facts of her story to me. Our intimacy was helped along by difficult physical circumstances, since she had to rely on me for assistance over uneven steps and open trenches and such. She was light as a leaf, and I often picked her up and lifted her over rough patches. Rural Ukraine, with its rank privies, is challenging even for sturdy travelers, let alone for frail octogenarians who lack the lower-body strength to pee standing up. No wonder we became close so quickly.

  Toward the end of our time together, Marta and I were on deck aboard the Glushkov, sailing toward Yalta and the Sea of Azov. Leaving behind Sevastopol and the Mennonite settlements of her youth, we stood watching the sun set on the Black Sea. It must have suddenly occurred to Marta that she knew very little about the woman who had been at her elbow for the last three weeks. Until that moment Marta hadn't asked me much about my own situation; she knew only that I was Mennonite and that I was Si Janzen's daughter. That had been good enough for her. "My dear," she said, her small hands holding the ship rail, "how is it that a young woman like you comes to be traveling with us old folks to the old places?"

  "I wanted to know more about my history," I said.

  "How do you fill your days when you aren't traveling?" she asked. "What is it you do, if you don't have a family of your own?"

  Ah, sweet woman, I didn't want to disappoint her! If she found out I was a scholar, would she shake her head in sorrow and say Ji jileada, ji vikjeada? Would she cease telling me her stories and dismiss me as worldly? For many Mennonites of her generation, getting a Ph.D. was practically sinning against God. But now she had asked point-blank, and I had to 'fess up
to the book-learnin'.

  I said soberly, "I'm a teacher, Marta. I teach in a college." She turned to face the Sea of Azov, and in the gathering twilight I thought I could see disappointment settling her lips into a frown. She looked out at the water without saying anything. Finally she turned to me, reached up, and patted my shoulder. "That's okay," she reassured me in German. "You're a good person anyway."

  Obviously my own parents did not share Marta's bias against higher education. Both my mother and my father have graduate degrees. But they prayerfully chose to study in areas that would not take them afield of their faith. Nursing seems quite consonant with Jesus's biblical ministry to heal the sick, and theology bases its entire raison d'être on the supposition that God exists and cares about what happens to his creation. My parents must have been concerned when I picked an academic field that invited, even demanded, philosophical questioning.

  Among my many rebellious behaviors is my refusal to ask God for stuff, especially before meals, especially out loud. Requests for divine intervention usually strike me as jejune and quixotic. Why should God grant one request when another supplicant is asking for the opposite? Why should one believer have the hubris to think her needs deserve special attention in the global schema? I do like the idea of prayer as a way to foreground one's blessings. It unselfs the self, as the theologian Eugene Peterson would say. It's when people start expecting divine intervention that I get nervous, because that's when they start hearing the voice of God telling them, for instance, to go kill a bunch of people in Iraq.

  But there was my father seated in front of me at a booth in Denny's, big hands folded, handsome head bowed. Not only did he pray as if God was listening; he prayed as if God might be standing right there, waiting with a salad, like the server. When you're with your parents, old habits die hard. In spite of my embarrassment that the server was trying to contain her amusement, and in spite of the fact that the cute guys who'd been checking me out were now clearly horrified, I bowed my head and shut my eyes. Fearless.

  FOUR

  Wounding Words

  Aunt Rhoda," said Allie, "do you want to come play Super Scrabble with us?"

  "You bet," I said.

  My sister and I had not yet had a moment to ourselves. We were very close, however, and it was easy to communicate in indirect glances and oblique smiles. We were each other's port-in-the-holiday-storm. I had been on the West Coast for several weeks now, and Hannah would demand a detailed account of what it was like to be plunged back into the Mennonite mainstream. She and I were both waiting for a time when we could grab a cocktail and debrief. Right before my parents and I had arrived, she and her husband, Phil, had been hosting Phil's sister Yvonne, and I was anxious to hear the news on that front.

  Hannah's husband was fabulous. Among Phil's many excellent qualities was the expression of zero interest in leaving his wife for a guy he had met on Gay.com. Yet he did have a fatal flaw. Phil's special bugaboo, his personal kryptonite, was his sister Yvonne. Specifically, he had a problem with Yvonne's hair. This criticism we understood to include an implied catalog of behaviors, incursions, and habits that offended him. He returned again and again to the fact that Yvonne's hair looked not unlike a glossy, nest-shaped wig, and that she, his own flesh and blood, ought to know better. He did have a bird's-eye view of the Nest, as he was fully six foot six, a vantage point from which the Nest would have been nigh impossible to ignore. It sat smartly on her head, like the tall black hats worn by beefeaters at Buckingham Palace. Sometimes after Yvonne's visit, Phil found himself humming the changing-of-the-guard song from the The Wizard of Oz.

  Even from a lateral view the Nest could make you forget what you were saying. Once in grad school, an angry feminist who called herself Lilith but whose real name was Barb attended a swim party in an itsy-bitsy swimsuit. There was a general sense that she had done this on purpose, to make everyone else uncomfortable. From the bikini bottom exploded an epic, wiry bush. This was pubic hair on a Richter scale, hair gone wild, hair raised by wolves. It was hair that had taken over her entire southern region, like kudzu. At that swim party every person present had spent a pained evening with eyes cemented at least five feet above the ground, so as to avoid the magnetic vista of Barb's, I mean Lilith's, frenzied pubes. Trying not to stare at Yvonne's hair was a lot like that.

  The Nest, I hasten to add, was premakeover, predivorce. In all fairness to Yvonne, Hannah noted, she did look a lot better now that she was not using as much product. Hannah was always urging Phil to cut Yvonne some slack. Any woman would have found it challenging to keep abreast of bicoastal hair trends, living there in a small Wisconsin mobile home park with a whimsical sidewalk sign that said, WELCOME TO ALL GOD'S CRITTERS!

  Many years earlier Yvonne had rejected college in favor of a career with Mary Kay Cosmetics. As a dynamic Independent Sales Director, she proudly drove a pale pink Cadillac that said in modest pink cursive on the rear window, MARY KAY. She was always bringing Hannah and me free samples. "Missy," she'd say in her shoot-from-the-hip voice, "I tell it like it is, and you got some Martha Stewart circles under your eyes, like you just spent four months in jail. Let's cover that mess up! Here's a good concealer. Take it like you own it!"

  Yvonne had divorced Stan, her husband of twenty-one years, two years earlier. Whether or not it was true, Hannah and I had always thought-ah, the tragic irony!-that Stan was gay, in a beer-for-breakfast kind of way. Stan had a tiny long-legged Chihuahua named Ms. Ginger that he took everywhere with him. The first time I met Stan, he and Yvonne were arriving at my sister's place in Bend after a long car trip from Wisconsin. Stan and Yvonne sprang energetically from the cab of Stan's truck. They hugged it out with their hosts, shook my hand, and then turned to the task uppermost on their minds: peeing Ms. Ginger after the long trip. Stan was a heavyset fellow in a plaid flannel shirt, belly slung low over his belt. He scooted the trembling Chihuahua onto my sister's lawn. Then his voice lifted a full octave as he admonished Ms. Ginger to do her miniature business on the lawn: "Who's gonna pee-pee! Who's gonna pee-pee! Time to make pee-pees! Make me some pee-pees!"

  It must have been hard to be married to a gay-seeming fellow who pluralized urine in a falsetto, Hannah and I agreed, so we nobly tried not to discuss Yvonne's hair. Hannah had seen to it that I had plenty of opportunities to observe Yvonne in action. I had often been invited along on Phil's family outings, had tagged along on Phil's family holidays, and had met all four of Yvonne's boyfriends since the divorce. Nick had always opted out of these visits. He had no desire to while away the evening hours with Yvonne, who, he maintained, never said a single thing that hadn't already appeared as a phrase on Wheel of Fortune. Although Yvonne's company was less than stimulating, I figured I needed to show my sister some loyalty and moral support. As soon as Hannah would tell me that Yvonne was going to be present, I would see it as my sisterly duty to scout for a cheap airline ticket. "You've got to come," Hannah pleaded. "The new boyfriend sells cold cuts!"

  These were the best cold cuts. Todd, the boyfriend, was very proud of the cold cuts' quality. His cold cuts were sold at the finest grocery establishments. During the three-day weekend that I was privileged to eat these cold cuts every day, I exerted myself to get Todd to use the possessive form of cold cuts: he'd add an extra tz sound, like the German z. "My cold cutzes freshness is unrivaled," he'd say. "I mean, this is some fresh meat. Try the pimento loaf."

  During the weekend of the cold cutzes reign up at Phil and Hannah's cabin at Tahoe, Yvonne revealed her follicle situation to me. Phil and Todd were off enjoying the cold cutzes flavor on the lake below. Yvonne and Hannah and I were sitting on the deck with magazines and iced tea; it was about noon. No alcohol was involved. We were all wearing shorts, dressed for a hike we planned on taking later that afternoon. Yvonne was wearing a T-shirt that said, ASK ME HOW TO COVER YOUR BLEMISH! Mine said, I AM THE GRAMMARIAN ABOUT WHOM YOUR MOTHER WARNED YOU. Hannah was wearing a nice periwinkle blouse, very ladylike.

  Five min
utes earlier Yvonne had suggested that Hannah and I try her full-coverage foundation to even out our color-"Ladies, you gals got the full-blown German complexion, let me tell it to you straight! When I was a kid, I had a pet rat that had eyes just the color of your skin! No offense!"-but since that comment, the three of us had lapsed into pleasant silence, paging through our magazines. To my astonishment Yvonne suddenly stood up, unzipped her shorts, hooked a thumb in her panties, and revealed a patch so hirsute it could have kept a family of five warm through a long Arctic winter. "I just want you to see what I'm dealing with here," she said. "Have you ever seen a thang like that?"

  Phil nodded when I later reported on the unexpected appearance of the Thang. I felt like someone who had documented a fabled entity, such as the Sasquatch.

  Hannah said, "I'd heard about it, but that was the first time I saw it in full bush. Was it just me, or could you detect the shape of the Virgin Mary?"

  I nodded. "If Our Lady of Mercy can appear in a water stain on an underpass, she can surely appear in your sister-in-law's underpants."

  "That's nothing," Phil said. "The Thang is old news. We've been hearing about the Thang for years. How about this? She told us Todd gave her a dildo for Christmas."

  "I'd rather receive a dildo than cold cuts," I said, "especially if the cold cutzes additives involve the taste of liquid smoke."