Mennonite in a Little Black Dress Page 9

  Once I looked up from a soft trance of nothingness to see Lavinia watching me. Her hair was as severely pulled back as mine, and her dark skirt suit invited no approach. She looked positively presidential. Yet she seemed to hesitate a moment before crossing the deep-pile carpet on silent heels. Leaning in slightly over my desk, she asked in a low voice, "Are you okay?"

  Ah, I had heard this before. I had already worried that my unhappiness was starting to show on my face, which seemed to be getting bigger and harsher, like a man's portmanteau. "Is my work slipping?"

  "No. It's just that-I wondered if-are you sure you're okay-at home?"

  My eyes swam with sudden tears, which I promptly blinked back. I told Lavinia that I was fine, and she nodded approvingly and disappeared down the long hall whose doors I had never opened.

  At this juncture it would not be unreasonable for you to ask, "Why didn't you just leave, you chowderhead?" This is the logical question of well-adjusted folks everywhere as they contemplate stories about women in abusive relationships. Why didn't she just leave? It takes two to tango, my friend! One guy to dish it out and one dumb bunny to take it! I don't know how other survivors of abusive relationships have answered that question, but answer it they must, if only to themselves. My own answer turns on a profound naïveté, one that reveals a pathetic level of simplicity and underexposure. I didn't leave then because it never occurred to me to leave.

  The only marriage I had ever seen up close and personal was my parents'. They didn't argue or fight-or, if they did, they certainly didn't do it in front of us kids. I know now that there were a couple of times when my mother almost left my father, but when I was growing up, the idea of divorce seemed as otherworldly as rock and roll, or eating in restaurants. It was something other people did.

  It wasn't long after Lavinia's discreet query that I broke down and called my sister. Nick had been drinking and offering to kill me and then himself. He always seemed vaguely surprised that I would express no interest in such a proposal. At that time he had never laid a violent hand on me, and I had never been scared that he would. Once, years later in L.A., he did pull over and shove me forcibly out of a car, and once I had to call the cops on him, but not because I was frightened he would hurt me. Still, I'd been pretty shaken by the reckless driving and the cyclone of broken furniture in our tiny rented coach house. He wasn't just breaking one thing anymore, such as a window or a fan; he was taking down whole rooms, complete sets of dishes.

  The evening before I called Hannah, my car had broken down in an iffy part of town. The breakdown came after I had worked all morning at my teaching job and all afternoon at the law firm. I'd stopped to pick up some groceries, my car wouldn't turn over, and some guys with bottles in paper bags were hey-babying me. I didn't have towing insurance, and cell phones, given our budget, had not even been an option. When I finally managed to find a pay phone in the parking lot of a seedy convenience store, Nick flatly refused to come get me.

  "Deal with it," he said curtly.

  "But there are some gross guys drinking out of a paper bag-"

  "I'm sure one of them would be delighted to help you."

  "For heaven's sake, Nick. We both know you're going to come get me."

  "Hear what I'm saying," he said slowly, as if speaking to an imbecile. "I. Don't. Care. What. Happens. To. You. Anymore."

  He eventually did come to get me, but his last assertion took hold. It took hold because it was true.

  The next day I deliberately drank cup after cup of caffeinated coffee to steel myself while I waited for the clock to hit 11:00 a.m., which was 9:00 a.m. in Sacramento, where Hannah and Phil then lived. It seems curious to me now that in the midst of all that marital drama I never once thought of calling my sister before 9:00 a.m. It was as if I had internalized the protocols that so rigidly govern a law office.

  Hannah asked me a series of matter-of-fact questions. She expressed no surprise whatsoever at my husband's indifference or misbehavior, though this was the first time she was hearing about it as anything other than an amusing anecdote.

  "Well," she said practically, "we need to get you out of there. That's the first thing. Do you have enough money to fly here?"

  "My cat," I said vaguely. "My computer, my books, my clothes."

  "Right. Okay. I'm going to send Phil to come get you. He'll fly out the day after tomorrow; that'll give you a chance to close your bank accounts and pack. He'll be there on Friday. Tomorrow you give your notice at the law firm and the conservatory."

  "Two weeks' notice," I said helplessly.

  "That doesn't matter, honey." Hannah said, all brisk tenderness. "You just tell them you've had a family emergency. Put yourself on autopilot like a big German robot, and go."

  And so it was that I drove numbly across the country with my sister's new husband, a man I barely knew, a man who was willing to do this hard thing for a wife he adored. Through snow and ice Phil drove me, a few domestic items strapped in tarps to the roof of my Camry, backseat full of my cat and a pungent litterbox. Poor Phil! He is not fond of cats. What a trooper he was to keep up a steady stream of chatter as this cat, who was not blessed with traveling skills, crapped nervously in the backseat.

  God bless that man, and my sister for sending him to me. Phil knew perfectly well how frozen and unhappy I was, but he asked me no probing questions. Instead he told me long exhaustive stories, stories with no finish in sight. One story, about a guy who had sustained a serious hiking injury somewhere beyond the pale of civilization, went on and on, prolix, a story that unwound its details and characters as we drove through Kansas, Colorado, Utah. I think I was still hearing about that guy by the time we got snowed in in Nevada. I've never been so grateful for anything in my life as Phil's extremely detailed account of that man's broken bones and his changed life thereafter.

  All that was more than a decade ago. My marriage, too, had a lingering finish. Since the Chicago debacle, Nick and I had gotten back together, split up, gotten back together, split up, reunited, divorced, and remarried. (I'm not saying I'm not an idiot. In fact-let me be clear-I am saying I'm an idiot. But you kinda had to be there. Have I mentioned how charming Nick can be? How persuasive, how penitent?) Our finish was so lingering that when Nick finally left, I was almost relieved at the emphatic turbulence of it, at the finality of Bob and his cock and Gay.com.

  Subsequent marital turbulence notwithstanding, the week that I spent at the side of my new brother had its own lingering effect. I have forever after invested Phil with a funny dear heroism. What more incontrovertible evidence of love could a woman ask for than to suggest that her man drop whatever he's doing, fly to the Midwest in a February ice storm, and rescue her sad-sack sister from an imbroglio of bad judgment and denial? Even now I marvel at that bedrock of love and loyalty between my sister and Phil.

  My own friends often cited Nick's and my relationship as evidence of a marriage that worked, even though he made no secret of his depression, temper, or colorful language. What my friends saw was a cleverly designed wall like the trapeze structure I was expecting to find in Hannah and Phil's vacation photos-fierce yet fun, real but fake. They saw what Nick was always careful to show in public: our camaraderie, our simpatico mind-set, our adroit badinage. We talked alike; we walked fast; we dressed well; we had the same urban gloss. We knew what each other was thinking. This kind of intimacy is tasty in academic circles.

  Moreover, so many of my friends would note Nick's effortless style and then complain that their guy wore Humpty-Dumpty pants and/or had been hanging on to the same droopy briefs since 1976. Another thing my friends didn't know was that my own chic wardrobe was a cinematic production directed by my husband. Nick dictated every detail, down to earrings and color/quantity of eyeliner. It's not that I didn't have opinions and tastes of my own. It's just that Nick cared so much more about what I looked like than I did. I had thought I cared a lot. But he cared even more. It was easier in the end to accommodate his preferences.

  (
I'll have my readers know that I have typed the bulk of this manuscript in a hideous red fur robe. Red fur! And I picked it! Sort of. What I mean is, my mother made it, and I'm wearing it. Why, I can't say. But, dammit, it's a tardy assertion of my individuation!)

  In spite of Nick's depression, or because of it, he and I managed to achieve a working intimacy. Yet the friends who admired our marriage rarely saw Nick at home, Nick suicidal, Nick raging at the world, Nick slurring from too much vodka. They never saw him pulling apart the petals of an electric fan with his bare hands. (He loves me . . . he loves me not . . .)

  The thing is, with Phil and Hannah, everything is real.

  Nothing says real, see, like five days with a cryogenically twisted sister and a crapping cat.

  On the other hand, nothing said "I'm pushing reality a bit too far" like the framed montage of Phil on the trapeze at Club Med, proudly displayed in Phil and Hannah's stairwell. I had always associated Phil with the dark dignity of suit and briefcase. His political position as councilman somehow rendered his hijinx on the trapeze all the more improbable. When Hannah had described his latest achievement, I had expected something more along the lines of those rocklike indoor climbing structures you see in malls. In the photos Phil was doing things that made me queasy. I had to give it up for any man who would

  • consider the flying trapeze an inviting possibility for recreative memory-making;

  • rise at 6:00 a.m. to practice death-defying jumps, while regular vacationers were starting their day the usual way, with margaritas at 10:00 a.m.;

  • commit himself to permanent visual record in nothing but skintight cobalt spandex pants.

  I was smiling at the pictures when Hannah came looking for me.

  "Are those the tops of palm trees?" I asked incredulously.

  She nodded.

  I pointed to a man whose forearms Phil was clasping as he dangled upside-down by his knees. "Who's that guy?"

  "That's the trapeze instructor. Raptor."

  "Raptor? Boo," I said. "I don't think so. Raptor made that up."

  Let me make it clear that while I respect the right of all individuals to reinvent their identities according to the tacit promise of the American Dream, I have nonetheless always found it pretentious when people abandon their birth names, as when a low-level art gallery employee named Maureen gradually begins calling herself Char, or when your sister's college roommate announces that we are no longer to call her by her given name (Sarah Hostetler); instead we are to call her Lettuce. On this topic, I also want to mention that I had a boyfriend in college whose roommate legally changed his name from plain old Billy Smigs to Alistair John William Smythe III. Really. Alistair John William Smythe III, as if the name came with a tweed jacket and a pipe. Of course this effort to procure dignity immediately backfired. Poor Smegma (as his many detractors then called him) was mocked for the rest of his college career. On the other hand, the tightly knit group of feminists surrounding Sarah Hostetler did obligingly agree to call her Lettuce.

  "Funny story," Hannah said. "We had breakfast with Raptor on our last day there, and Phil asked him how he had come to get such a plum job at Club Med. Raptor said that about five hundred trapeze artists had shown up for the interview, so he knew that he'd have to come up with something that would make him truly memorable."

  "Can you imagine if you were on that hiring committee?" I asked. "You'd have to keep those margaritas coming to get me to sit through five hundred trapeze acts."

  "Well, but no. That's not what they did. Raptor walked into a room that had ten or twelve Club Med executives sitting at one long table. They told him that he had two minutes to impress them-'Okay, go,' just like that."

  "So what did he do?"

  "He imitated a raptor."

  "A velociraptor?"

  Hannah made like a vulture and/or a lizard, cawing and dipping her neck, a passable imitation of one of our American icons, the predacious carnivore from Jurassic Park. "He said that ever since then, they'd called him Raptor."

  I was willing to admit I'd made a mistake. "Impressive. Bravo for the man recently known as Raptor."

  The Club Med's style of interviewing was striking, and I wondered if there were some possibilities here for academia. For every assistant professorship, there are often five hundred qualified applicants. Currently the protocol is to cull the top vitaes, and to solicit dissertation chapters with their accompanying letters of recommendation. We eliminate the obvious duds at the annual Modern Language Association meetings, whose interviews constitute round one. Round two consists of an invitation to three of the most promising scholars for a grueling campus visit in which candidates must strut their stuff in a three-step, two-day interview designed to bring tears to the eyes of the cockiest applicant. First, candidates must present their scholarly research at a question-and-answer forum. They are also required to lecture to a roomful of strange students, engaging them in a dynamic conversation about a literary text they may never have taught before, demonstrating their sophisticated pedagogy in discussion management, all while the hiring committee scribbles notes in the back. Finally, and here's the kicker, candidates attend at least two lunches and two dinners with potential colleagues. At these festive events the members of the hiring department frequently attempt sly yet legal strategies to fish for information about the candidates' marital status and sexual orientation. (Sidebar: Hey! It might be amusing to hand this job to my sister-in-law Staci!)

  It seemed to me, though, that Club Med was onto something. Perhaps we needed to rethink those agonizing campus visits. Maybe what we needed instead was to sit back and invite those Ph.D.s to a two-minute demonstration of a memorable skill or behavior. If I personally ever went back on the job market, I could dazzle the hiring committee by draping my own leg around my neck. Revolting, true. Off-topic, sure. But memorable, given the fact that I am forty-three.

  I had another question for my sister. "What was Raptor's real name?"

  "Stuart."

  "He doesn't look like a Stuart."

  "Some people don't," said Hannah keenly.

  "Phil looks like a Phil," I pointed out.

  "I would think twice about dating a guy named Stuart," Hannah admitted.

  This seemed reasonable, as the only Stuart I knew liked to wear a long-sleeved aubergine T-shirt that said in pink cursive THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE. "What other names would you have a hard time dating?"

  "Dennis," she said decisively.

  "Good one."

  Our cousin Dennis collected salt and pepper shakers in the shape of sporty-fresh woodland creatures. Also he displayed them prominently in a custom-built cabinet in his dining room. He had a pair of pert whimsical ceramic skunks that had often figured in our musings on the extended Loewen family.

  "You?"

  "The obvious answer is Bob," I said. Hannah waved her hand in priestly absolution. "Naturally. Bob would be problematic. As would Nick."

  By now we were standing in Hannah's spacious closet. She and I were drinking tea, doing a little holiday cleaning. My motto, like Nick's, was IF YOU HAVEN'T WORN IT IN A YEAR, THROW IT OUT! Hannah interpreted this motto as "If you haven't worn it in a year, put it back in the closet and save it for your nine-year-old daughter's adult years, a mere decade away!"

  Considering whether or not we would date nonexistent suitors took us straight through the long wall of jackets and tops. By the time we hit the skirts, we had rejected all of the following hypothetical romantic partners.

  • Men named Dwayne or Bruce

  • Men who have the high strange laugh of a distant loon

  • Men who expect us to put them through grad school and then who as soon as they graduate with their law and/or medical degree demand a divorce and/or embark on a madcap romp through the gay personals

  • Men who are so nervous that on the first date they have written down on three-by-five-inch index cards conversational overtures such as "Do you like your classes?" after which these men tuck said ca
rds into the glove compartment, presumably to serve a function of social lubricity later in the date; but because your legs are so long, they accidentally knock open the glove compartment, scattering the index cards over the car mat, where you can't help but read them, appalled

  • Men who are easily fifty-five years old when you are eighteen, which is just plain creepy, especially coupled with the fact that these fifty-five-year-old men are in attendance four out of five nights at the restaurant where you are hostessing

  • Men who hang out in bars and/or lounges called the Pepper-mill, Beethoven's, Nibblers, Parrots, and Crackers; and although your sister informs you that the place you misremembered as Parrots was really named Crackers, Parrots is a bad title nonetheless, and if this restaurant exists somewhere in America's heartland, as it surely must, then you categorically refuse to date any man who darkens its doubtless faux teak doors

  • Men with a certain dance move involving a single knee, repeatedly raised, and a sidebar finger-snap, not unlike the character of Betty or Veronica in the high heyday of Archie cartoons, with said dance move not appearing to be retro but rather serious there on the dance floor at Crackers, with the Schmitter also shakin' his thang, but a little less goofily, trying to impress your sister who has flown in from Florida for Thanksgiving, and both guys obviously congratulating themselves that they have scored a date with blonde sisters.

  "Our dating history would make my friend Carla cry," I said. "She thinks I'm too choosy when it comes to men. I'll tell you what takes the cake, though," I said. "This happened to Lola before she moved to Italy. She was living in San Francisco after her divorce, and she met this guy she was on the fence about, but he kept talking about his cooking. He said he wanted to make her a gourmet meal."