Mennonite in a Little Black Dress Read online

  One day he pitched a hissy on the court, shouting and swearing, ending on a typical note: "You play like a korncob CUNT!" As he shouted this final imprecation, he threw his racquet across the court with all his might and stalked off to the men's locker room. I had been telling myself that this behavior, while childish, was funny, especially since I knew that he would tender an endearing apology within the hour. He'd be sorry and chuckling by the time we hit the coed Jacuzzi. Lighten up, I'd tell myself; his strings of insults, all twisted like strands of DNA, were amusing in their spicy furor. But that day, gathering up Nick's abandoned things and my own equipment from the bench outside the court, I ran into my friend Cameron, who was waiting with her partner for the court. By the way she looked at me, wide-eyed and full of sympathy, I could tell that she had heard everything. And I could tell that it wasn't funny.

  "Cam!" I said breezily. "What's up?"

  "Oh, Rhoda," she exclaimed. "Are you okay?"

  Now, playing silly games in my sister's kitchen, I thought of how often over the years I had shrugged off Wounding Words. April Silty had a point. Curiously, though, I didn't get any pleasure out of imagining what it would have been like to refuse Nick's invitation to lunch that day in the library fifteen years ago.

  I think maybe I'd still nod and smile and have lunch with him. I think maybe I'd still go to the Noam Chomsky documentary later that evening. And maybe I'd even marry him a couple of weeks later. Is it ever really a waste of time to love someone, truly and deeply, with everything you have?

  FIVE

  A Lingering Finish

  Hannah was no stranger to romance gone awry. For the first part of Nick's and my marriage, she was still with her first fiancé, Josh. I could go on at length about that guy, but instead I will sum him up with one sentence that sketches his character with an almost Zen-like simplicity: Josh asked Hannah to put him through law school, and then on the very day he graduated, he dumped her. Everyone in my family had tried and failed to like Josh. He was the kind of guy who had what Henry James called a "moist moral surface." When he subjected my sister to so much grief and pain, I gritted my already gritty teeth.

  Hannah-cautious, coolheaded Hannah-had surprised us all by doing something much more like me than like her: she turned around and married her boss, Phil, immediately, less than three months after Josh had left her. She became, briefly, a Tasmanian devil of love. (When I tasmaniated on the first date with Nick and married him six weeks later, my family was predictably disapproving. Yet they were not surprised. Getting engaged on the first date was exactly the kind of birdwitted, addlepated thing I would do. But not Hannah. And to her boss! The inappropriateness of it took our breath away.)

  Everyone privately thought that Hannah's new marriage to her boss would bring nothing but more heartache. For starters, there was the obvious charge of the rebound relationship. Then there was the eighteen-year age difference. Hannah was twenty-six at the time and-have I mentioned this?-scary beautiful. Let's face it: there is nothing odd when a little girl has eyes the lustral blue of the Aegean, or when the same little girl has a silky curtain of white-blonde hair that recalls angels and innocence and unicorns; but when a woman retains these natural attributes at thirty-eight, you begin to suspect a pact with the devil.

  Yet Hannah never really seemed to value her good looks; it was I who was desperate to be pretty. In those severe Mennonite skirts, I fixed with longing on the crotch-skimming pastels of my classmates, who according to instinct and custom gave a wide berth to all Children of the Corn. My mother braided my hair so tightly that my eyebrows buckled. This conferred on me a look of wholesome mental illness, like Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest.

  Also, because I grew tall so fast, my mother resourcefully sewed strips of contrasting fabric to the bottom of my pants. Hippies were doing this, and many a groovy ribbon enlivened 1960s jeans. However, the Mennonite God circa 1970 had not yet made up his mind about jeans. Jeans belonged in the barn, and moreover on boys. I wasn't allowed to wear them. The pants that came to me from the Seminary Clothes Closet for Sacrificial Missionary Families Who Served the Lord with Joy and Gladness were 100 percent polyester, with a humiliating elastic waist, and a crease stitched down the front of the leg, as if I were in early training to drive a Winnebago back and forth across America's heartland. It was to these pants that my mother attached contrasting strips of polyester, lopping off four or five inches of the pant leg, and then inserting the Strip of Shame. When I'd grow another two inches in as many months, she'd insert another strip of contrasting fabric into the same pants. No wonder I was desperate to be pretty as a child! I still maintain that under those circumstances it would have been surprising had I not initiated elaborate blood pacts with God, offering my firstborn, like the miller's daughter in "Rumpelstiltskin," if only God would make me beautiful when I grew up.

  Hannah was born with a mature sobriety that I have never achieved. Somehow she ingested the Serenity Prayer of St. Francis with her mother's milk. This is why she seems the elder of us two, even though she is five years younger. Except for my hasty, tumultuous marriage to Nick, every one of my major life decisions has been prescreened by Hannah. I'd be a dummy not to notice how much wiser she is than I. Torn between grad programs at Yale, UCLA, and Berkeley? Ask Hannah. What appetizer to serve with Indian-glazed salmon? Ask Hannah. How to allocate my TIAACREF investment? Ask Hannah. At first you think that her special gift is her beauty, but then you realize, no, it's something older and more dignified, something about pure math and practical balance. She's like one of those alpine pools you discover when hiking the Blüemlisalp in Switzerland-clear, profound, refreshing, exactly what you had in mind. Hannah just seems to make sense of things.

  Not that she's arrogant or aggressive. Indeed, the opposite is true. She was so shy as a child that once at the family dinner table she leaned over to whisper in my mother's ear, "Pass the salt." From childhood shyness to adult serenity the transition seemed swift and inevitable. Lest you think that I'm exaggerating out of writerly hyperbole, I'm not the only one who confers on her this oracular status. My whole family turns to her in a crisis. She's the legally appointed power-of-attorney, the executrix of wills, the designated caretaker in case of parental deaths, the one who can be counted on to coordinate a family trip to Alaska. When she was fifteen, she spent a year in Germany, attending a German high school and living with a host family. My mother shook her head with amazement when she came back with most of the spending money she had departed with. Freak.

  And Hannah is placid as a snail. Once I asked my mother if she could remember a time when Hannah and I had fought or argued. "Why, no!" said my mother, much struck. "You girls were always together, thick as thieves. It was the boys who fought. Once Caleb whacked Aaron in the head with a stick."

  So. At twenty-six, five foot nine, and slender, Hannah was the kind of woman who stopped traffic. Protectively outraged, we thought that her middle-aged boss was trying to hustle a trophy wife, swooping in even before her divorce had gone through.

  That is, we thought so until we met him, which wasn't until both Hannah and Phil had quit their jobs and drifted around Europe for a couple of months. With my usual extravagance, I decided within ten minutes that this man really cherished her, and that he would have loved her even if toads jumped out of her mouth, like the witch-sister in the Grimms' fairy tale. And you know what? My hunch was spot-on. Phil and Hannah have been married for eleven years, and they have an amazing thing going.

  Sometimes you can just feel a person's decency, in the same way that sometimes you can intuit a lack of it. Phil had the air of a man who is fully, attentively engaged; Josh, Hannah's first fiancé, had the air of a man trying not to look at his watch. Phil consistently interested himself in the lives of others; Josh talked about himself. Phil looked at my sister with tenderness and humor; Josh looked at her as if she were an especially persistent gnat.

  Shortly after Phil and Hannah married, Hannah made one of the most generous gestures
I've ever seen. She sent Phil to rescue me when I was at an all-time low, the lowest I've ever been-lower even than I was at that moment, standing on her stair in middle-aged catastrophe. Now, at forty-three, losing a husband to a guy named Bob, with all the other concomitant losses, was, all things considered, livable. But back in 1996, I had hit rock-bottom, with nowhere to go.

  I had taken a year's leave from my doctoral program because Nick had been accepted into a grad program in political theory at the University of Chicago. We moved from Los Angeles to Chicago, where I got a part-time job teaching at a music conservatory, and a full-time job as a receptionist at the starchy law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, & Flom.

  Nick, who has a master's degree in clinical psychology, was going through a phase in which he categorically refused to take meds for his bipolar disorder. "There's nothing wrong with me," he'd say scornfully. "Bipolarity is a natural condition, not a disease. Why should I take medication for a condition that makes me smarter, more creative, and more aware? If my moods make you uncomfortable, you take the medication."

  "But so is cancer a natural condition," I'd object, "and people have no trouble at all taking medication for that."

  "They would if there were a negative stigma attached to it. They would if taking medication compromised their status as sane, functional citizens. Tell you what. I'll start taking medication for my bipolarity when the rest of the world starts taking medication for its stupidity," he said. And that was that.

  Stupid, Nick wasn't. I have to admit that Nick is among the smartest men I've ever known. When I was a young adult, smart was more important to me than nice. Go figure. Any intellectual tap-dance would impress the bejeezus out of me. I was especially starstruck with academic achievement, pathetically overinvested in the uphill trail to building an identity as a scholar. There was a time in my life-sadly, not so long ago-when quickness of mind seemed more important than kindness.

  For those first months in Chicago, Nick wrote brilliant elliptical papers that I would furbish up so that they read coherently. Sometimes, though, Nick's writing was so impenetrable that I'd have to ask him to explain what he meant, and he'd be off on one of his furious discursive tirades, angrily citing Durkheim, Nietzsche, Foucault, Gramsci, Hegel. As a humanities grad student, of course I'd read many of the big names in the Western canon, but Nick had read theory and philosophy I'd come across only in footnotes. You'd think that a man tortured by a relentless onslaught of ideas would seek refuge in academia, which has historically functioned as a safe haven for freethinking mavericks. Strangely, Nick voiced nothing but contempt for the ivory tower, perhaps because he himself had never struggled to connect with people, as so many academics have. He thought that in general scholars were mediocre thinkers with limited social skills and a profound need for external validation. (I know I am!)

  At that point we had been married five years. Nick's mood instabilities had been difficult but manageable, with no lasting consequences. But this shift was different. Cycling into a manic period, Nick began to sidestep his seminars, despite exceptional feedback on his academic work. He didn't go to school. He went shopping.

  Chicago, dear reader, is a luscious place if you have a distinct sense of style (just as Los Angeles is the perfect place if you want to copy someone else's style). Nick, distinct to his toes, encountered no obstacles whatsoever between his style and my credit cards. I had been raised on the notion that when a man cleaves unto a wife, he shall become one with her credit. It had never occurred to me to construct a marriage any other way.

  One day Nick came home with a pair of Yohji Yamamoto gloves that had cost $385. This was in 1996, mind you. Granted, these gloves were wondrously conceived: over an interior pebbled leather glove, a leather mitt unzipped and folded back into a gauntlet of sorts. It was just the kind of witty sartorial gesture that a dandified socialite might affect, very Oscar Wilde, if Oscar Wilde would have ditched the lily and firmed up the tummy and got full-sleeve tatts designed by the famed Los Angeles artist Bob Roberts. Nick wasn't a dandified socialite, though. He was a grad student. We were supposed to be living on the ten bucks an hour I was making as a receptionist at the law firm.

  "They're great gloves," I remember saying slowly. "But Nick, they cost three hundred eighty-five dollars. That's more than half a month's rent."

  "You don't get it, babe," said Nick. "I will be wearing these gloves for the rest of my life. They are a bargain at three hundred eighty-five dollars!"

  That was just the beginning. Soon I longed for the days when he had merely been spending $385 on a pair of gloves. As Nick's mood spiraled down into the blackest depression, he began drinking heavily, destroying furniture, fouling our compatibility with cruelties he couldn't take back. Like many women, I can take a hearty string of expletives, but Nick really knew how to go for the jugular. He had a knack for it. I didn't mind the broken fans, the amputated chairs, the shattered glass, the holes in the wall. I minded the hurtful things he said to me.

  Perhaps because I am a writer, or perhaps because I mean what I say, I attributed the same intentionality of expression to Nick. I thought that at some level he must have meant the terrible things he said. He reserved the right to retract or dismiss things he had said previously, and that was hard for me. He thought I was a small-minded literalist to put so much weight on the spoken word-typical of a German background, he teased. Whenever I was coldly logical, verbally precise, or mindlessly conformist, he'd do his impression of a Nazi, squaring his shoulders, extending his right hand in stiff salute.

  I have no way of knowing if I am an oversensitive princess. Maybe I am. Maybe I should have had the wisdom and the self-esteem to shrug and say, "Sticks and stones, mister!" But since I'm now revealing deeply personal things, I might as well confess the kinds of comments that hurt me the most. Here are five that rankled:

  1. There was no intellectual insight behind my good memory.

  2. There was no creative spark beyond my scholarly vocabulary.

  3. There was no original taste beneath my aesthetic copycatting.

  4. I was fat; I didn't know how to dress myself.

  5. My parents had created a toxic environment of religious judgment, which I had been stupid enough to believe was love.

  Over the first five years I gradually convinced myself that remarks like these were a reflection of the bipolarity. Nasty insults would shoot up like geysers, but underneath, I told myself, Nick loved me. He was with me, wasn't he? That meant he loved me, didn't it?

  As Nick's depression escalated that winter, my gently irrelevant solution to this problem was to stay out of his way. I began volunteering to work twelve-hour shifts at the law firm, which offered the twin rewards of overtime and cab fare if I worked past 10:00 p.m. I loved this job and its big stiff silence. It was the only job I've ever had in which nothing whatsoever was expected of me. Doing nothing, attracting no attention, achieving a kind of gracious invisibility, were the principal conditions of employment. "The previous receptionist," said Lavinia, my interviewer, "sometimes lacquered her nails at this desk"-she thwapped the gorgeous mahogany desk at which I was to sit-"Ms. Janzen, I trust that you can resist the temptation to lacquer your nails at this desk?"

  "I can."

  "Ms. Janzen, yours will be the first face that clients see. Do you think you can consistently cultivate an image appropriate to this firm?"

  "I do."

  "We will contact you within forty-eight to seventy-two hours."

  Within forty-eight to seventy-two hours, I began my sojourn at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom. I smiled a half smile, I murmured a low-pitched hello, I wore pearls, I pinned my hair back in a discreet chignon. For twelve hours I sat at my handsome desk in a skyscraper on Wacker Drive, in a reception area positively austere in its formality. Even the potted plants stood up straight, groomed and smooth. The carpet was thick as a biscuit, and I barely heard the muffled steps of attorneys and their clients, coming and going with due discretion. Twenty-one sto
ries below, the river lay like a dropped ribbon of ice. From the window I could see only gray skies and the tops of other skyscrapers. Sometimes I thought my headset was the only thing keeping me tethered to the world, that without it I'd drift off and up into all that gray.

  As a low-level employee, I probably never would have attracted my boss's notice again, but Lavinia learned that I was a grammarian in a doctoral program, and that I could reliably settle the usage disputes that sometimes flared up in the proofers' room. Later she became even more charitable toward me when she realized that I had a background in European languages and could assist international callers. One day she asked me if there was anything she could do to make my work easier. Easier! I asked for a typing tutorial on my computer. The next day it was in place, and in a few weeks I could really spank those keys. Denial tip: when you are trying very hard not to think about your life, consider the select pleasure of typing the same sentence three hundred times in a row, with gathering, clattering speed.

  As Nick fell apart, I fell into what felt like a deep-freeze. When I wasn't in the coldly elegant law office, I wanted to be. I thought about it on the train; I thought about it when I was teaching; I thought about it when I paused on the front step of Nick's and my coach house. I'd always stop on that step to take a deep breath, dreading what I would find behind the door. The law office was my safe zone, my precious nullity. Slowly my wardrobe darkened. I wore navy with navy. The chignon tightened. I began to wear hairspray, to like the bite and scrape of bobby pins. Arriving at dawn and departing long past rush hour, I shadowed in and out of my skyscraper, tied but floating, a spectral semblance of what had once existed, like the ghost of Christmas past.