Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Memoir) (2010) (12 page)

More women should have two comfy chairs and a tea table in their closet. We settled down for a break in the arduous process of making pronouncements on the currency, fit, and fabric of the many items in Hannah's wardrobe.

"Well," said Hannah late in the afternoon, folding the last of the garments for Goodwill, "I'm going to have a whole lot more room in my closet."

I nodded. "You got that right. It's all about being able to let go of the past."

SIX

A
lthough the thermos was invented in 1892 by Sir James Dewar and fully operational forty-five years before my mother's childhood, in 1942 her schoolmates never brought anything to drink. To my mother's one-room Mennonite schoolhouse, the idea of a perpetually hot beverage would have seemed futuristic and otherworldly, even if the Mennonites could have kept abreast of important cultural innovations such as the thermos. When Mennonite children were thirsty, they drank out of a bucket of water, from a long-handled
Schleif
. The bucket was drawn up on a rope from a well in the schoolhouse yard.

"Once there was a dead rat in the well," my mother told me conversationally over breakfast. I had been in the act of raising a spoonful of homemade granola to my lips. "My brother Franz brought the dead rat up in the water bucket."

I set my granola down. "What'd he do with it?"

"Some of the boys buried it in the woods. It stank something awful-that sickish-sweet smell of decaying flesh, ugh. And, oh, did it ever make the water rank! We had to drink with our noses pinched shut, like this."

"Lemme get this straight," I said. "You drank the rat water anyway?"

"We were thirsty," she explained. "But we never got the plague!"

Until that moment my father, who was gravely buttering toast, had not participated in the conversation. Now he made a contribution: "In my school, we did not drink from a communal
Schleif
. I brought milk in a jar."

"Gross," I said. "Warm milk in a jar?"

"It was cool milk. The milk stayed cool."

"How could the milk have stayed cool? I thought you didn't have a refrigerator."

"We did not have an icebox. If we wanted to cool something off, we'd pour it into a jar, screw the lid on tight, tie twine around the jar, and lower it down into the well forty or fifty feet. It stayed cool down there."

"Were you embarrassed to bring a jar of milk in your lunch?"

"Nothing embarrassing in that! Why should I have been embarrassed about milk in my lunch? "

"What kinds of lunches did your mothers pack for you?" I asked.

"Lard sandwiches," said my mother. "I didn't like it when the lard looked pink. But it tasted okay with salt. Salt brings out the flavor of lard."

"Peanut butter sandwiches," said my father. "Every day, two peanut butter sandwiches. Occasionally, for a treat, there was a sardine sandwich."

"And you're telling me that a sardine sandwich was not embarrassing?"

"Lard was embarrassing," said my mother.

"That's a given," I agreed. "But sardines?"

"No, I was proud of the sardines. They were delicious," Dad answered reminiscently. "Why don't we ever have sardines?" he asked my mother. "I even gave my friends a taste of my sardine sandwiches. There was a young fellow, name of Fritz Vanderkamp, and we used to tease him about his strange lunches. His mother would send along an unusual sandwich. It was bread on top"-he began chuckling at the memory-"and a pancake on the bottom. He would eat it like this." Dad cupped his hands furtively around an imaginary half-pancake sandwich, hiding it from prying eyes.

Mom and I laughed heartily, as much at my father's merriment as at the partial pancake sandwich. Ah, does it ever change, the Sturm und Drang of embarrassing lunches? My heart went out to poor humiliated Fritz Vanderkamp, who may or may not still be alive. If he is, I hope that he can now contemplate a pancake without shame.

Hannah and I have often thought that it would be pleasurable to revisit the very Mennonite foods that used to shame us as we tried to conceal them in the cafeterias of our youth. After considerable reflection, we came up with a list of Shame-Based Foods, which I urge the reader to imagine tucked into Shame-Based Lunchpails, dooming the transporter whereof to social ostracism at Easterby Elementary School. Well, but wait. That is not quite true. Hannah says that by the time she reached her third or fourth lunchpail, our mother had
accidentally
purchased for her a nonembarrassing Holly Hobbie lunchbox. Knowing that this serendipitous outcome would, like Halley's comet, occur once every seventy-six years, Hannah clung to her Holly Hobbie lunchbox well into junior high.

I had blazed the trail with long-suffering complaints about my own lunchpail. Most children at Easterby Elementary School carried brightly patterned tin boxes, Aquaman and Underdog and so on. The lunchbox that would have set
my
metaphoric pants on fire was Josie and the Pussycats. It is extremely unlikely that a Josie and the Pussycats lunchbox could have rescued me from the pit of uncoolness into which I had already sunk, but at age eight I begged to differ. I figured that Josie and the Pussycats would magically make up for the knee-length homemade skirts or the blonde tails braided with neurotic precision, like Heidi on crack.

However, Mennonite circumstances beyond my control required me to carry a mature navy vinyl bag on a long strap. It was obviously designed for adults, and I have since wondered if it wasn't a diaper bag. (There was a family precedent: for picnics and the rare Disneyland outing, my mother loaded up a plump gray diaper bag with moist tuna sandwiches.) The memory of my mature navy diaper bag goes a long way toward explaining my interest in Prada today.

Our mother wrapped most luncheon foodstuffs in gently used-nay, preowned-wax paper. She eschewed the plastic sandwich bag on grounds of cost. When we complained that the other kids made fun of us, the cheerful parental rejoinder was "When the seventeen of us were your age, my mother packed our sandwiches into two tin Roger's Golden Syrup buckets! At least you have wax paper!"

So here, in order of least to most embarrassing, are the top five Shame-Based Foods for Mennonite youth lunches:

5.
Warmer Kartoffelsalat
(Hot Potato Salad)

This tangy potato salad, although delicious, had two significant strikes against it. The first strike was that it had cooled and congealed by the time we opened our Shame-Based Margarine Containers to eat it. The second strike, and this was somehow more critical, was that we were unable to consume
Warmer Kartoffelsalat
without thinking of our mother's merry little ditty:

Auf den Hügel

da steht ein Soldat.

Er macht in den Hosen

Kartoffelsalat!

(On the hillside

stood a soldier.

In his pants he made

potato salad!)

The reader might well inquire why a pacifist Mennonite family was singing songs about soldiers. Further, and perhaps this is more pressing, the reader might justly inquire why this soldier was making potato salad in his pants. Hannah and I certainly discussed it at length as we compiled our list of Shame-Based Foods. Hannah thought she remembered other verses that suggested that perhaps the soldier had seen a bear; maybe the poor fellow was a-feared, thus soiling himself. So I called my mother from Bend, Oregon, to ask why the soldier had lost control of his bowels. Was he ill? Was he traumatized? Did he have regrets? My mother disclaimed all causal knowledge. "It's just a little soldier standing on a hill making potato salad in his pants," she explained. "Does there have to be more?"

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," I said.

"You're not going to put the
Kartoffelsalat
into your book, are you?"

"It is my opinion that the
Kartoffelsalat
deserves a wider audience. Hide it under a bush, oh no! I'm gonna let it shine! Maybe I'll use it for my epigraph."

"Okay," she said, resigned. "But I want to make it clear that I didn't
write
it. I just
quoted
it."

"Duly noted," I said.

That night as I prepared for bed, I intoned "Auf den Hügel da steht ein Soldat" like a mantra. It was oddly soothing. I found that when uttered out loud, at night, as I brushed my teeth at the sink, the soldier poem assumed the clarity of a haiku, a lucid distillation of the world's mystery. After I had said it five or six times, it began to gather the heft of an orphic utterance, like the prophecies of Nostradamus at his brass bowl in 1555. This soldier may be someone we know
right now
, and he may have already begun the hillside ascent. He shall rise. He shall stand. And his bowels shall move. It's just a matter of time. Who knows why the soldier stands and craps his pants? Not I. Not you. Certainly not he. What can we say but that we like this soldier's attitude? This is one enlightened soldier. See him shrug with gentlemanly insouciance there on the hilltop, as if to say, Eh! My pants may be full, but my heart is warm!

4. Damp Persimmon Cookies with a Raisin-Walnut Motif

In recent decades our mother has often understandably boasted that she never gave any of us the grail-like supermarket snacks that glowed in the unattainable lunches of our peers: Ho-Hos, Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Little Debbie pudding-filled pies, crackers and Cheez Whiz in cunning sealed packages. There was one snack that looked deliciously intriguing, but I never did get the opportunity to try it, and now I feel the thrill window has closed. The treat in question was a stiff plastic finger containing four orangey-cheesy crackers and a square dab of hydrogenated sugary peanut butter. Cheese-'n'-peanut butter-what's not to love? I used to long to trade for one of those packets. But trading wasn't an option. I had nothing the other kids wanted.

Everything that went into our mouths was homemade and chemical-free. However, the Shame-Based Lunches' putative nutritional strength was a distant consideration from our mother's number one criterion in preparing school lunches. This was cost. My mother thriftily made persimmon cookies from the bruised culls sold half-off at the Japanese fruit stand. The cookies, spicy and moist and possibly succulent to adults, were the ultimate anticookie to us children, we who pined for store-bought treats.

3.
Platz

Platz
consists of a kneaded egg dough topped with sweetened fruit, in this case the stunted, picked-at-by-birds cherry-plums from the backyard. Hannah and I executed a triple responsibility with regard to the cherry-plums: we had to pick them, pit them, and then prepare the
Platz
topping-three labor-intensive steps to produce a result of which we wanted no part. We did not like
Platz
for the same reasons that we objected to the moist persimmon cookies, but adding to our general disfavor was the fact that when unwrapped from preowned wax paper,
Platz
emitted an embarrassing yeasty odor that made the other kids glance at us headlong and scoot away. This yeast smell was the product of the
Platz
's final layer, a sandy-crumbed streusel, sticky as well as odorous.

2. The
Cotletten
-and-Ketchup Sandwich

As the penultimately embarrassing Shame-Based Food,
Cotletten
were bad enough served hot in a cream gravy besprinkled with minced onion.
Cotletten
are Mennonite meatballs. What makes them Mennonite is the addition of many, many saltine crackers, bagged in a preowned plastic bread wrapper and decimated with a rolling pin. If you add an entire carton of saltines to two pounds of fatty ground beef, throw in an egg or two and some condensed milk to moisten the whole, you will have enough meatballs for a week's worth of appetizing cold lunches. Cold
Cotletten
are hard to describe. Each pungent saltball assumes a jellied viscosity, heavy as a puck. The addition of ketchup is an intriguing choice. It gives homemade bread a moist pink pliancy, not unlike damp Kleenex.

1. Borscht

There was really no contest here. Honors for Most Embarrassing Shame-Based Food went hands-down to Borscht, which is the hearty winter soup of the Russian steppes. Our people borrowed it from the Russians during the long Mennonite occupation of Ukraine. Borscht has a distinctive ruby color, a stain to anything it touches. This distinctive color comes from beets. The soup also has a distinctive smell, a noxious blast of savage fart. This fart smell comes from cabbage. As if that isn't appetizing enough, Borscht is served with vinegar and a dollop of sour cream. The vinegar curdles the cream so that the whole thing looks and smells like milk gone bad. Yet there is more. The bottom note, the lingering afterwhiff, presents with an intensity reminiscent of our friend the soldier's lumpy
Hosen
.

Borscht is the Mennonite catnip. It makes our eyes roll back in our head a little. If you meet someone who has a Mennonite name, let's say the new research librarian at your college, the encounter might go like this:

YOU. So you're a Wiebe! May I ask if you're Mennonite?

MR. WIEBE. Yes, on my father's side. We're the Wiebes in Manitoba. I knew some Mennonite Janzens when I went to school in Minnesota. Are those your folks?

YOU. No, mine come from Ukraine via Ontario. I'll have to have you and your wife over for some Borscht sometime.

MR. WIEBE,
trembling.
Borscht? Really?

YOU,
modestly.
Oh, I can get the ole kettle boiling!

MR. WIEBE,
salivating now, with a wild look in his eye.
Do you make the kind with beets in it?

It's important to note that at some point in the last century, Mennonite hausfraus began to substitute Campbell's Tomato Soup for beets. But we purists still prefer the beets. It's the difference between Cracker Barrel and a nice Vermont cheddar. What I'm saying is, there's a place in Mennonite hearts for unlovable foods: beets, braised cabbage, lard. We even do a whimsical little thing with headcheese.