Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Memoir) (2010) (15 page)

There was a sudden heavy silence. I looked up from my batter, surprised: my brother and Gabe were bristling with palpable disapproval.

"You think a woman should keep her own name when the Bible clearly tells us that the man is to be the head of the house?" asked Gabe gravely.

"Ohhhh," I said. "Gotcha." Until that moment I had had no idea that he was so parochial.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Gabe demanded, angry. Caleb just sat there and frowned at his coffee.

"Nothing," I said, trying to be nice. "In academia women don't take their husbands' names very often anymore, that's all."

"Why not?"

"It's a little old-fashioned. The idea is that the woman's heritage and background are just as important as the man's. Many women see taking a man's name as a gesture of symbolic oppression. It's like saying to the woman, 'Who you are as a person isn't as important as who I am.'"

"Gabe. Maybe we should go," said Caleb, not looking at me.

"Did
you
take your husband's name?" Gabe was upset. He was taking this personally.

"I didn't," I admitted.

"How did he feel about that?"

"The issue never even came up. Nick always assumed I would keep my name."

"I suppose you think the
Word of God
is a little old-fashioned too?" Gabe shot back.

"You know what, Gabe? Don't even go there. She does think so. Let's get outa here," said Caleb.

After they were gone, I asked my mother, "Don't you think it's weird that the boys are so much more conservative than you and Dad?"

"Oh, they'll mellow over time," said Mom. "When you're young, faith is often a matter of rules. What you should do and shouldn't do, that kind of thing. But as you get older, you realize that faith is really a matter of relationship-with God, with the people around you, with the members of your community."

"Do you have a problem with the fact that I never took Nick's name?"

She chuckled. "You're old enough to make your own decisions."

"Would you have taken Rob Franz's name if you had been Franny?"

"I wouldn't have married Rob Franz at all," she said decisively. "That one is a shiftless underachiever. You watch. He'll quit his job and expect Franny to support him. Poor little Franny. She was so cute as a girl. She played the clarinet."

Aaron is a year older than I. We should have been fratty, since we went to the same school, had the same teachers, read the same books. I should have had crushes on his friends, but his friends were severe science types, like him. His crowd hung out in Mr. Handwerker's homeroom, where there was a darkroom for printing black-and-white artistic images of garden slugs-pardon me, of
Arion distincti
-that might win a prize at the Fresno Fair! Aaron and his friends wore their T-shirts tucked into their pants, and wherever one met these boys, they smelled of chemical developer, stop bath, or formaldehyde.

Among Aaron's friends there was one boy who wasn't as bad as the others. Wyatt Reed had floppy brown hair and a quiet smile, and he ate lunch not in Mr. Handwerker's homeroom, but on the lawn in front of the library, like a normal person. One summer he invited me and Aaron to Vacation Bible School at his church. Wyatt was not Mennonite; thus my mother thoroughly checked out Wyatt, his Presbyterian church, and his family, before giving us the thumbs-up. VBS didn't interest me in the slightest, but I was enjoying the way Wyatt's soft stutter became more pronounced when he spoke to me.

Theretofore I had conveniently managed flulike symptoms whenever Vacation Bible School rolled around at our own church, so this was my first venture. Vacation Bible School is like a religious-themed camp, but it takes place at your local church rather than at a piney lodge. Your parents drop you off for two hours, not two weeks. VBS shares some of the camp features: artificially induced rivalries, rowdy Christian songs about Father Abraham, and tearful altar calls. But VBS lacks somewhat in the areas of canoes, campfires, and sleeping bags.

At this VBS the Christian youths were divided into two competitive groups. Wyatt's and my group was called the Clouds. Aaron's group was called the Tornadoes. Why we were represented by inclement weather remains a mystery to this day. But if the Lord had portentously whispered, "Red sky at morning, sailors take warning!" I would have heeded the message, because Wyatt Reed was really almost cute when he stuttered. It was probably his mother who made him tuck his T-shirt into his pants.

The adult leaders, two Athletes for Christ from Virginia, fluffed the rivalry between the Clouds and the Tornadoes by every means possible. We were urged to run relays, chant slogans, and devise secret passwords. In crisp formation we performed a secret salute. Although at the time I was unfamiliar with the mannered architecture of the Third Reich, this VBS had a Riefenstahl quality that was kind of creepy. Clearly these Athletes for Christ had an aesthetic vision for their youth. And they exhorted us to make posters.

I spent a pleasurable afternoon working on mine. It was akin to pop art, very groovy, with bluish clouds scattered like grazing sheep. I edged each of the clouds with metallic silver paint. In block letters the caption read A SILVER LINING IN EVERY CLOUD. "I like the s-s-s-s-silver lining," Wyatt said.

That night when the Clouds' Athlete for Christ got up to lead the salute and display the posters, I experienced an abrupt shift in my worldview. Some bottom dropped out in my core filiation. When the Athlete for Christ placed my poster up on the easel there in front of the church social hall, I suddenly saw my poster in a new light. Even as my fellow Clouds were whooping and clapping and stomping, even as the Athlete for Christ was shaking his clasped hands above his head like a champion, the last of my enthusiasm drained away, and I became an empty cloud. There on a folding metal chair next to Wyatt Reed, at thirteen, with my bangs stiffly sprayed, I smelled groupthink for the first time. Sheeplike clouds? Silver lining? My poster
made no sense
. And if my poster made no sense, what of the rivalry it symbolized? What of the whole Vacation Bible School? What of religion itself? Clouds, tornadoes, sins awhirl before some imagined but necessary altar-a Perfect Storm of jingoism! It was at that moment that I first grasped what Tennessee Williams meant when he mocked the tiny spasm of man. Gentle Wyatt Reed, trying shyly to touch my hand, fell into insignificance. Across the aisle on the Tornado side Aaron was raising his arms in ritual salute for Jesus. He was my brother, moving his hands, lifting his voice, a stranger.

That night as the closing cheers receded, I ran to the ladies' lounge to be alone with my troubling new discovery. I lingered there, slowly brushing out my hair, counting out a hundred strokes. I perched on the edge of the couch that nursing mothers used. In the mirror I saw my good-girl self, my clean dress, my tidy macramé purse, my white leather-bound KJV Bible. That image was no longer right. I had to wipe that look of polite accommodation from my face; I had to run away. I had to rethink every single thing that I had been taught. So I sprinted from the ladies' lounge, as from a thought too scary to think. And I collided abruptly with one of the Athletes for Christ. The hall was shadowy, and I hadn't seen him.

"Sorry!" I gasped, embarrassed.

"No problem." He backed away but stood looking down at me. This Athlete for Christ seemed off somehow. There was something wrong. It was as if he'd been
waiting
for me. "I was looking for you, actually."

Ah, he had intuited my sudden crisis of faith, my dark night of the soul! I was about to get called on the Christian carpet! I looked up at him and said, "Um." He moved a fraction closer. "I've been thinking. Would you like a visit some night? A visit from your Uncle Rodge?"

I stared as I digested his meaning. It took a moment to sink in, but then I turned and ran back down the hall to the foyer. Aaron was looking for me. "Where were you?" he complained. "Wyatt's mom has been waiting for ten minutes."

I followed my brother to Mrs. Reed's car, where I slid into the far corner of the backseat, holding myself rigidly away from Wyatt. Puzzled but polite, he withdrew into silence. "Did you have fun tonight?" asked Mrs. Reed.

"It was so cool," Aaron said. "The Tornadoes got the most points because I memorized Ezekiel 37. That's the one about dry bones. It has twenty-eight verses. I memorized all of them."

Mrs. Reed began to sing "Dem Bones." Aaron joined in, looking back over his shoulder to see why I wasn't singing along. Never before had a view of a crowded church parking lot been so absorbing. Never before had the cloud of witnesses seemed a rattling congregation of bones. Aaron's voice had already changed. His bass musically descended, a stairway going down, way down, beneath Mrs. Reed's soprano, as if these lyrics and this song could get to the bottom of everything I knew. "Hear the word of the Lord!"

With Aaron I knew I would never be close, but there was a moment in my adolescence when I thought that Caleb and I might become friends. Caleb was fifteen months younger than I. Despite his status as goofy kid brother, he was tall and cleanly coordinated at an early age. It must have pained him to see my clumsiness, because one day he offered to teach me how to play racquetball. Racquetball is a relatively easy game to pick up. You can go from zero to sixty in a couple of days. But what you need to imagine here is gangliness so inept, cerebral, and all-consuming that I had never successfully hit a ball of any kind-not with bat, nor stick, nor racquet. In my generation Mennonite parents did not encourage athletics for girls, and I had gotten used to the public shame of PE.

The very notion of trying to learn a sport had left me with a nervous sour feeling, as when one crosses Kierkegaardian dread with a trip to the dentist. Plus Caleb and I had no relationship whatsoever. He was science; I was English. He killed toads; I made pie. He got in trouble for sabotaging Donny Dorko's pants at Heartland Christian Camp; I got in trouble for spending my babysitting money on a black strapless bra.

I was skittery, therefore, when I first followed Caleb onto the racquetball court. I expected a hortatory condescension the likes of which Aaron delivered. But no. From the first moment when Caleb showed me how to shake hands with the racquet, he was the soul of kindness. Tender and patient, he made it his business to show me what I could do. What astonished me even more than my emerging ability to hit the ball was his generosity. It's not just that he was nice to me when I needed nice. It was that he freely gave some mysterious ingredient that created confidence. He was a brilliant instructor, perhaps the best I've ever had. Over my many years in school I've been exposed to some wonderful mentors, intellectuals at the top of their game, professors and Pulitzer Prize winners who challenged me. But Caleb would be the only one to call forth an excited faith in my own ability. He didn't make me think I was a better player than I was. He made me
love
the player that I already was. What a gift that was.

The moment we left the racquetball court, Caleb reverted to nose picker/sci-fi reader. But on court I adored him. Huge and stable as an Alp, he stood motionless in the center, reaching out a long arm to flick the ball with precision. "Yo," he'd say. "This one's gonna go in the front left corner. See what happens when I hold my racquet at this angle? Now you try." Caleb went on to become an award-winning science teacher, then an assessment director of science in secondary education. He makes a great living telling teachers how to be better teachers. Those afternoons on the racquetball court, long ago when he was still goofy and I was still scared, go a long way toward explaining his professional success.

Once when I was in town for the Fourth of July, my mother and I went to see Caleb and Staci's new swimming pool. It was a superdeluxe pool, with levels and lights and fountains and waterfalls and alcoves, the kind of pool that said, "Mennonite-who, me?" All the grandkids were splashing and shrieking inside it. This pool was a splendid homage to American excess. In every way it was the opposite of what my siblings and I had grown up with-namely, a sprinkler that raised a feeble mist from a sun-scalded hose. When my mother saw the Gatsbyesque scope of this pool, she grabbed my elbow and said, "Oh my! That looks expensive!"

Staci telegraphed for help, so Hannah said, "Didn't you ever learn how to swim, Mom?" This question forestalled any discussion of Christian stewardship for a good half hour. But Mom came right back trotting down that road to Rome: "That diving platform sure looks like it cost a pretty penny!"

I jumped in this time. "Speaking of pennies, do you remember when you bribed me a dime to jump off the high dive at the community pool?"

"You jumped off the high dive for a dime?" said Al, joining us, still in her underwater goggles. She held her thumb and forefinger to her forehead in the shape of a capital
L
. "Looooooser!"

Mennonite privation isn't what it used to be. My generation of Mennonites has made it different, as when my brothers find ways of giving their children what we were denied. I considered all this when I once again returned to the taboo of Mennonite dance. Having bid farewell to Hannah and Phil, I was back in California, and my parents and I were going to a dance recital.

Mennonite high schools still forbid dancing. Mennonite high school teachers are still often forced to sign contracts, pledging that they will neither drink nor dance nor have premarital sex while employed at a Mennonite institution. But some of the solid die-hard Mennonites are now letting their children dance anyway. Some of them even seem to be
encouraging
dance. My pretty niece Phoebe, my brother Aaron's daughter, trains seven days a week in tap, jazz, ballet, and hip-hop. At fourteen, she is already beginning to star in community productions-
The Nutcracker, Pinocchio
. Dance training like hers doesn't come cheap, and I knew that Aaron must find it hard to finance on his teacher's salary.

When we arrived, Aaron's wife, Deena, graciously insisted that I take her own seat. "He's right down there in the VIP seats up front," she said, pointing.