Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Memoir) (2010) (10 page)

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 stories 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.

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?"