Mennonite in a Little Black Dress Read online

  "Okay, maybe so," Phil conceded. "But which gift would you rather discuss, in detail, with your older brother?"

  "Which gift would you rather announce in front of your nine-year-old niece not ten minutes after having gotten off the plane at the airport?" said Hannah, clearly on board with her husband on this one.

  "Cold cuts, like dildos, bring a welcome element of surprise to any family gathering," I asserted.

  "Of course Allie was all ears. 'Momma,' she goes, 'what's a dildo?'"

  "What'd you say?"

  "Yvonne cut in and fielded that one," said Phil. "She said it was a kind of Christmas candy."

  Now I couldn't wait to tell my sister that our mutual sister-in-law Staci had questioned me about my divorce and financial status during Christmas Eve dinner. In return Hannah would soon confide that Yvonne's newest boyfriend, although endowed with a magnificent eight-inch penis, was neither a gifted nor attentive lover. Hannah and I were looking forward to a compatible talkfest during which we would wonder aloud which was weirder, the fact that Yvonne would continue to date a man who in five months had not managed to give her an orgasm, or the fact that Yvonne had placidly whispered this information to Hannah less than sixty seconds into her annual Christmas visit.

  This wasn't your ordinary Scrabble. It offered a jumbo board, quadruple word scores, and two hundred tiles, thereby guaranteeing that any game would continue unabated for at least three hours. Super Scrabble demanded a serious commitment to yuletide family fun. Added to that, my mother, alert but slow, expressed painful hesitations whenever it was her turn.

  While waiting out one of Mom's turns, Hannah told us the story of how at Allie's school the principal, April Silty, had gone to a conference titled "Mean Girls."

  "Mean Girls?" I interrupted. "The title of the conference was Mean Girls?"

  "Oh, this gets better," Hannah said.

  The subject of this conference was preteen cliquishness. The conference must have been very stimulating, because April Silty returned from it on fire to share what she had learned. April Silty visited the classrooms at St. Veronica's Elementary one by one, conducting the same demonstration in each homeroom.

  "I'm going to show you something with the assistance of a little object lesson," April Silty told the class. She held in her hand a piece of blank paper. "Okay, somebody shout out something mean that you might say to another girl."

  "You stink?" offered Allie's friend Ruby, brave pioneer that she was.

  "Yes!" April Silty crumpled up a corner of the piece of paper. "Another insult!"

  "You're fat!"

  "You have bad breath!"

  "There's something on your pants!"

  "Your momma wears a fleece vest!"

  The insults were flying thick and fast now, and with each one, April Silty crumpled up the piece of paper a little bit more, until it disappeared entirely into her fist.

  Thus far the tacit lesson was Insults Can Make You Crumple Inside, not to mention a bonus lesson thrown in for free: Fleece Vests Are Sooooooo Yesterday. But April Silty's piece of paper was slated to make a reappearance.

  She made a dramatic show of uncrumpling the paper. Clearly the ur-lesson now was Hey, Insults Stay with You. "See," said April Silty, trying to pat the creases out of the piece of paper. "I can't get it smooth again once it has been crumpled up, no matter how hard I try. Girls, words are just like this piece of paper. They. Can. Wound."

  April Silty finished up her object lesson with the sober injunction that all little girls should watch what kind of words came out of their mouths. She said that if somebody said something mean, the insulted party should instantly come back with "W. W.!" W. W. stood for Wounding Word.

  "Now that is some spectacular shit," I told my sister. "Oops, I didn't mean to say that in front of you, Al."

  "That's okay," my niece said. "My friend Ruby says shit all the time."

  "I suppose shit could itself be a Wounding Word, depending on the context. But in this case, it was not intended to wound. If I wounded you," I told Allie magnanimously, "then I'm sorry."

  "I'm not wounded," Al reported. "But I wish Momma would take her turn. This game is kind of sloooooooooooooow."

  "Would you accept the word retard?" said Hannah. "It's not much, but at least I get my D on a triple."

  "I accept retard," said my mother. "It's a common word. It's much better than lionhairs."

  "Lionhairs was a great word. I would have gotten 118 points!" said Hannah.

  "Not to split lionhairs," I said, "but you are a cheater, pure and simple. Under what circumstances would you even use the word lionhairs?"

  "At our African camp we often have a problem with lionhairs on the chaise lounge," said Hannah defensively.

  "Lions are lounging on your lawn furniture, and the only things you're worried about are the lionhairs? Me, I'd be thinking about the lionteeth and the lionhunger."

  "Perhaps I am a retard," said Hannah, trying to sneak her newest word onto the board.

  "Retard is not in the dictionary. Also it's a Wounding Word."

  "You let Mom get away with stomalotion. And boner," Hannah protested.

  "What's wrong with boner?" my mother asked. "That's a perfectly good word. Somebody made a boner."

  "Indeed somebody did make a boner," said my sister, frowning at me.

  My mother appeared to be using boner as a synonym for goof-up. I made a mental note to check the etymology. Was there a time when a boner had been a mere boo-boo? If so, when had it become a stiffy? I had plenty of time to consider the lexical shift because my mother was agonizing over her word.

  "Mom," I said finally. "Why don't you make ahoy? You get your H on a quadruple, plus a triple-word score."

  The suggestion summoned to my mother's mind a felicitous recollection of bygone sing-alongs. She burst into one of the songs of yesteryear.

  I was drifting along on life's pitiless sea

  When the angry waves threatened my ruin to be.

  When away at my side

  There I dimly descried

  A stately old vessel and loudly I cried,

  SHIP AHOY! SHIP AHOY!

  (and loudly I cried SHIP AHOY!)

  When her robust soprano paused for breath, I asked, "Is there a religious surprise in this song?"

  She nodded eagerly, continuing:

  'Twas the old ship of Zion thus moving along;

  All aboard her seemed happy; I heard their glad song-

  "Go on," I said. Any hymn figuring salvation as a mysterious pirate vessel deserved to be heard. No matter that the hymn had declined in popularity since its heyday in 1938.

  "I can't remember the rest of it," she admitted. To make up for the memory lapse, she sang the first part again, only a little louder.

  "I want to switch games," said Allie. "Let's play Made for Trade."

  My sister and I studiously did not look at each other. Made for Trade was possibly the worst board game of all time, and it had only recently appeared in my sister's household, a Christmas gift from Oma and Opa. It featured a boring historical premise and colonial cardboard figurines significantly too large for the tiny squares.

  But of course we busted the game out. There isn't a lot we wouldn't do for Al.

  "You can tax any player the object of your choice," Al told me, when I passed an orange spot with tiny illegible font. I put on my reading glasses and frowned at it. "Aunt Rhoda, you have to pick an Event Card," Al said helpfully.

  "Okay. You're going down, Oma," I said to my mother, who shrieked dramatically. "Ebenezer Brown hereby taxes you your spinning wheel for five shillings." Then I dutifully drew an Event Card and read aloud:

  Is the severe summer drought the result of personal and communal sin? A fast day has been declared. Go directly to the Meeting House, listen to a sermon on sinfulness, and pray for God's mercy in the form of rain. Do not pay the usual tithe.

  "Huh?" I said. "Is it just me, or is this Event Card advising us to retaliate against God?"

&n
bsp; "No," said my mother. "The blame falls on the congregation, not on God."

  "But it sounds as if we're going to withhold our tithe because God has inflicted a drought on us."

  "We deserved the drought," said my mother.

  "Because we were sinful," Al piped in.

  "No, we were not sinful. That is, maybe we did some bad things," said my sister emphatically, frowning at Allie, "but we were just doing the best we could according to our nature. God is a loving God. He does not punish his people with drought."

  "At school he does," said Allie. Phil and Hannah were sending Allie to a private Catholic school because the local public school was so crappy. "At school God punishes everybody."

  "In this house God punishes nobody," said Hannah. "The world has seen enough Christian guilt, wrath, and vengeance to last a lifetime."

  "'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,'" quoted my mother.

  "Momma," said Al, "is it okay to pray for mercy in the form of rain?"

  "I guess," Hannah conceded. She and Phil were ideologically opposed to all religious institutions, and they knew they were skating a fine line with the whole private-Catholic-school thing. Hannah had often declared that a background in Bible lore had been useful in her own education and cultural training. Still, it was a tough call. In the private Catholic school, the value of the Bible lore would be compromised by Catholic guilt and shame about the body. The public school, on the other hand, would inflict bad math, obsolescent history books, and Mean Girls. Al's enrollment at St. Veronica's had not been a shoe-in, but Phil and Hannah had decided that Christian guilt was better than bad math.

  "Well then," Allie went on, reasonably, "could I pray for God's mercy in the form of chocolate?"

  "There's chocolate in the pantry, Al. You don't need to ask God for it. Just ask me," said Hannah.

  My mother felt this was an excellent opportunity to advance Allie's theological training. "Sometimes God works through other people and things, such as pantries."

  I raised my eyebrows, but she went on, "God provides blessings, such as chocolate, through your mama and her pantry. But it's still God who's doing the providing."

  "Your turn, Allie," I said. When she frowned meditatively over her Event Card, I briskly tapped my right hand on my left palm, like an old-fashioned schoolmarm with a ruler. "Chop-chop!"

  "Aunt Rhoda, you're a big dork."

  "Wounding Word," I said.

  Playing the colonial game with its posset cups and spinning wheels naturally invited a discussion of how our lives would have been different three hundred years earlier. Hannah pointed out that because of our Mennonite training, we'd have a much easier time of it than most American women. "For Mom it would be completely familiar, really. That's how she grew up, as if it were three hundred years ago."

  "Three hundred years!" my mother exclaimed. "No, it wasn't as bad as that! We had an orchard!"

  We chose to ignore this.

  "In school we're talking about Albuquerque," said Allie. "It was settled by the Spanish, but it didn't become a town until 1706. That was exactly three hundred years ago. The governor got permission from Spain to call it a town by saying it already had a church and some buildings, but it didn't. It was more like a little village in the middle of the desert. People needed medicine there, Oma. Sometimes they died of cholera, so you could be a nurse in Albuquerque and teach everybody how not to get sick."

  "The four of us could handle colonial Albuquerque, no problem," agreed Hannah. "We can butcher, make soap, candles, quilts, bread, you name it. I took Spanish in college."

  "I can count to twenty," said Allie. "But I can't butcher. Gross. You have to do the butchering, Momma."

  "You'll get used to it," Hannah returned. "It's no grosser, really, than trimming the fat off a roast."

  "Also gross." So far the Mennonite love of cookery had not manifested in Allie, who consented to help in the kitchen only when bribed.

  "Seriously," said Hannah, "would you go back in time if you could?"

  "Can I change the course of history?" I asked. "Can I teach girls to read and tell people about germs?"

  "No," Hannah decided. "You can go back in time, but you have to go knowing what you know now, and you have to keep it to yourself and just live your colonial life." We had a split vote. Hannah and Al declined not to go back in time, while my mother and I agreed that it would be pleasurable, amusing, and instructive, as long as we could come back.

  I couldn't help wondering then if I would go back fifteen years. Would I, to save myself a marriage shadowed by suicide, grief, and despair? Fifteen years earlier, one Saturday afternoon had sealed my fate. I ran into Nick on the top floor of the university library, a space unofficially designated for intellectuals with odd sideburns and thrift store sweaters. The peculiar odor of that top floor motivated my studies like nothing else. It stank deliciously of nineteenth-century bindings and old periodicals. Slumped into the carrels were the überdorks who barricaded themselves behind stacks of books like children with cereal boxes. Occasionally you'd see a loner coming or going in retro polyester duds, arms full of laptop and books stacked right up to the chin. I liked the churchy silence up there, and all the bookish smells. And I liked the way that the intellectuals left you alone behind your own towers. It made me feel like one of those ancient monks in silent but busy fellowship, feather quills scratching the vellum of a sacramentary.

  Recognizing Nick from an undergraduate Italian class I was auditing, I suddenly understood that if he was here among the hard-core scholars, he could not possibly be the undergraduate I had mistaken him for. Because of his long hair and boyish charm, I had assumed he was in his early twenties. I now saw that he wasn't when he stopped by my carrel; there was a confidence and a history in the way he nodded at me.

  The polo-player logo on his otherwise impeccable Ralph Lauren shirt had been carefully mutilated. Little threads stuck out every which way. "What happened to that?" I asked, pointing at the logo.

  "I picked it apart. I'll be goddamned if I'm going to be a free billboard for Ralph Lifshitz and his fantasies about a Waspy Nantucket."

  "Then why buy the shirt?"

  "Well, look at it." He grinned. "It's a great shirt."

  "Shhhhhhh!" came the testy reprimand from a nearby carrel. A man in a floral print dress and Doc Martens was glaring.

  "Take a study break," Nick ordered. "Let's go get some lunch. We can practice the congiuntivo for the midterm."

  That was it for me. I was in, all the way in, even before I noticed that Nick was reading Nietzsche, even before he suggested we go see the Noam Chomsky documentary playing that night in Santa Monica. If I had known then what I know now, I could have just smiled and said, "No, I've gotta finish this. Catch up with you later." How much hurt that would have saved me, how many Wounding Words!

  In those first years of marriage, we practically lived at the West Hollywood YMCA. That facility provided the perfect antidote to our rigorous academic work. Having spent my youth being picked last for teams, and having extracted two years' worth of PE excuses from a single tonsillectomy, I came tardily to the sports arena. It wasn't until I was in my late teens, when my brother Caleb patiently taught me to play racquetball, that I realized I was coordinated enough to participate in athletic endeavors. But I tried to make up for it by becoming a competitive asshole. Nick, also a competitive asshole, used to smoke me at the sport. You know how some athletically gifted men enjoy playing with their wives and express pride when the wives manage to scrape up eight points or so? Nick wasn't like that. He played with deadly fury, hitting the ball so hard it sometimes stung the racquet clean out of my grip.

  But I loved it. I loved the suspension of idea-driven dialogue. We said as little as possible to each other on the court: "Hindrance." "Cheater." "Game point." There were pros who played the Y, and whenever they'd roll through, we'd sign up for lessons. One of our local members, a woman named Lila Korndahl, was even better than the pro women who offered the occasional se
minar. Lila Korndahl was an unprepossessing fifty-three-year-old housewife with frizzy problem hair and thick ankles, but she was universally revered at the West Hollywood Y. Sometimes a hapless visitor would fall for Lila's husband's oh-so-casual offer: "Hey, buddy, waddaya say we bring in our wives, play doubles for, say, fifty bucks?"

  Lila Korndahl taught me a skill set that infuriated Nick. Lila was the master of placement, the queen of the drop shot. With a flick of her wrist, she could tap a screaming ball into the corner, where it would yawn and fall asleep, straight down, gentle as a Milk Dud. These drop shots were so widely associated with Lila Korndahl that to be defeated by a slow drop was to be korned. Sometimes you'd hear rueful shouts from a neighboring court: "Oh! Serve me up summa that steamin' creamed korn!" "Ohhhh! Korn on the cob!"

  On the few occasions when I did win against Nick, my triumphs invariably turned on successful drop shots that seemed to freeze in midair, or to brush the wall four inches above the floor before piddling to a full stop below. These shots drove Nick insane. He loved goading me into the strongest, fastest rallies that I was capable of. I am taller and stronger than most women, and I could really hammer that ball. But my control, unlike Nick's, was poor, and my serve uneven. My racquetball philosophy was simple: to kill the ball or die trying. All I wanted was to beat my cocky husband. Amused at my determination, Nick would offer to spot me five points. This affront made me fight even harder. He'd bait me with a back wall rally, the ball coming so fast you couldn't really see it; you'd have to hit blindly, instinctively, in a kind of white heat. Then, just when I'd be lost in the pace, he'd suddenly change it up with a lob or a trick shot. If I ever managed to korn the man, he took it personally. Cookin' with korn was his territory.

  In fifteen years of marriage I never managed to skunk him 15-1. When I did win, it was always close, and it came down to a breathless grunting fight for the final points. Nick must have missed the day the PE teacher taught good sportsmanship when he was growing up. He'd stalk off the court, enraged, or, worse, he'd destroy his racquet by beating it on the wall. He'd break into a long rich string of obscenities: "Damn queen-of-korn fuckbag korncunt kernels of douchecob, cocksucking shower of golden korn from my ASS!" Sometimes we got asked to leave.