Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Memoir) (2010) (3 page)

What I was doing was unusual-unusual, I mean, beyond the fact that there are maybe 16.2 people in the entire world who would like to know more about the sacred dramatic literature of the fifteenth century. (Okay, I admit it: I'm one of them.) Sometimes academics manage to wheedle their best friends into reading their manuscripts and making critical comments. It is not unreasonable that English professors are often targeted for this favor. If you also happen to be a grammarian who creepily knows how to diagram every sentence in the English language, there is an even more urgent demand for your services. I'm the sicko who can explain why a gerundive phrase must attach to a possessive adjective pronoun rather than an object pronoun. True, you wouldn't want me at a party, but if the survival of the human race depended upon the successful parsing of the Constitution, you'd be knockin' on my door, baby.

This time, though, I was doing more than tidying up the grammar as a favor to a colleague. I was being paid to read for logic, clarity, concision, and development. It was a tough gig for three reasons. One, the author was a better researcher than writer. Two, fifteenth-century Italy was four centuries and one continent away from my own area of academic training. Three, my Italian was a little rusty, and all those citations and footnotes were slowing me down a tad.

I wasn't working for glory. I was working for cash. Usually scholars take a less fixed, more interpretive approach to deadlines, preferring to think of them as suggestions, not firm commitments. But with this project I couldn't do that. I had a hard calendar deadline. Luckily my parents had assured me that if I came out to visit them, they would see to it that I had all the time and privacy in the world.

So I was curious to see what oddity or newsy Internet tidbit could justify my father's imperious summons, especially when the man knew I was working-nay, especially when my very presence in his home expressly rested on parental promises to leave me alone and let me work. When I entered my father's study, he was leaning back in his chair, looking highly pleased with himself. "Check this out!" he commanded.

On the computer screen was an e-card, a holiday greeting, themed on the Twelve Days of Christmas. The audio was playing the carol. Twelve drummers marched slowly across the screen. "How about THAT?" demanded my father.

"Hey," I said. "Wow."

"See that?" he said. "That would be your nine lords a-leaping!"

Now came the maids a-milking, along with frisky animated cows.

"Isn't that CUTE?" my mother asked. "They have udders."

"Here come the four birds a-calling. Watch this!" advised my dad.

"Twoooooo French Hens," sang my mother, making a motion that I should join in. She was still holding her arms cocked at the elbow, her hands covered with floury bits of dough. Since she couldn't make the hula motion dear to her heart, she swayed from the waist in happy 2-4 time.

"Good one," Dad said, apparently much satisfied, when the partridge and its fellows had finally scrolled offscreen.

This paternal summons had been occurring every twenty minutes or so. Every time the command sounded, I set aside my pen to go see pictures of raindrops or a snapshot of a baby squirrel nursing among a litter of puppies. And I can't forget Various Birds & Sayings. Would not the Western world get more work done if it took a break for Various Birds & Sayings? For instance, let's say you have a close-up of a mourning dove. The dove is doing nothing urgent, just sitting there on a branch. The photographer has captured the dove in all its splendid nullity. He has framed it in a font calculated to promote introspection:
YOUR LIFE BEGINS WITH THIS MOMENT
. Pure magic!

The next morning was the kicker, the
piqûre
, if you will. My very Mennonite mother and I were standing in line at Circuit City to return a pair of cell phones that were theoretically supposed to propel my parents into the twenty-first century. (My parents had grown up without cultural advantages such as electricity, toilets, coffee, fabric-I could go on here, but you get the gist. Me, aghast: "Do you mean to tell me that even your
underwear
was made out of flour sacks?" Mom: "Oh, some of the flour sacks had a very pretty floral print! Little bluets and pansies! I liked them!")

Unfortunately, my father had selected the cheapest of the cheap cell phones, a choice that had resulted in insurmountable programming difficulties. I'd taken a crack at setting up the phones myself, and even with a pencil eraser, a magnifying glass, and the directions of a chipper phone company employee named Monique, I had to admit defeat. For my mother, it looked as if the promise of long-distance chats with grandchildren was not going to materialize. But she had made her peace with this.

"That's okay," she told me. "Plus if I called Si on a cell phone, he wouldn't pick up anyway." She says these things as if they are perfectly reasonable.

"Would he just ignore a phone ringing in his pants?"

"Well, he doesn't really believe in cell phones," she apologized. For my father, belief in cell phones was somehow optional. It was a deeply subjective matter, like reincarnation. Inviting cell phones into your heart like Jesus was clearly something he was unprepared to do.

So there my mom and I were, in line four days before Christmas. Around us weary consumers clutched their disappointments, but my mother was in her usual cheerful spirits. The presence of strangers less than eight inches away notwithstanding, my mother suddenly said, "If there aren't any single men to date where you are, I know someone for you."

"Who?"

"Your cousin Waldemar. Waldemar is a professor in Nova Scotia," she said earnestly. "And he has a beach house."

I took a measured breath. "Wally is my
first cousin
," I said. "That's both incestuous and illegal."

My mother considered this thoughtfully. "Well," she said, "I think it should be fine since you can't have kids anyway. Maybe you can adopt."

The thought of my cousin Wally and me, two midlife scholars, sitting hand in hand and anxiously waiting to hear the news in an adoption office, was a little overwhelming.

"Waldemar would make a terrific father," pressed my mother. "You should see him with his nieces and nephews."

This was all so rich I had no idea how to reply. Should I go with the fact that as a postmenopausal forty-something, I had long acknowledged my deficiency in not wanting to become a mother? Or how about stressing my mother's charming distance from the law of the land that forbids first cousins to marry? Or how about demanding to know why my mother had zeroed in on Cousin Wally, an accounting professor, when there are so many cousins with whom I actually do have something in common? Or how about the fact that, all things considered, I preferred to find my own dates, thank you very much?

I decided to go with the latter. Now was as good a time as any to mention that although my husband had quite recently ditched me for Bob the Guy from Gay.com, I had already been out on a couple dates. I knew the new guy wasn't going to be the love of my life, but he was sweet.

One of my friends, Carla, who said I could use her real name in this memoir as long as I described her as a svelte redhead, offered to run my love life for five bucks. "What are you looking for in a guy?" she asked, whipping out a little notepad.

"Hmm," I said thoughtfully. "He has to be kind. And culturally literate. And on the path to consciousness . . . reflective, open. No cynics or angry atheists. He has to have a sense of humor. That's important. And he should be tall. And employed at work he loves. And-"

"Whoa, there, Nellie," Carla interrupted. "I'm gonna give you some free advice. You ready for this? How about we
lower the bar
? How about we look for someone who's straight, for starters?"

This guy I had been seeing occasionally might not have been Mr. Right, but he was Mr. Straight.

Mom was disappointed when I told her I had been on a couple of dates with someone, but she took it in stoic stride. "What's your fellow like?"

I was too emotionally battered to utter polite fibs. "Sort of a slacker, really. A relaxed pothead. He wears his pajamas to the grocery store."

"Oh," said my Mennonite mother. Then she nodded supportively. "A relaxed pothead sounds nice."

It made sense, I suppose, that a woman who would promote endogamous marriage would not blink at a pothead. I thought I would try to elicit more information along these lines.

"Maybe my cousin Wally smokes a little weed," I said speculatively (although I would bet my few remaining financial assets that he does not).

"Nooooooooo," said Mom. "Your cousin Waldemar would NEVER do weed! He drives a tractor! In his spare time!"

"How does driving a tractor prevent you from smoking weed?"

By now several people near us in line were obviously eavesdropping. The man standing in front of us was trying not to smile.

"If you drive a tractor in your spare time," my mother said firmly, "it means that you have a strong work ethic, which is probably why Waldemar has had the gumption to earn himself a nice beach house."

"Surely he doesn't drive his tractor on the beach?"

"No! He drives it at Orrin and Maria's, of course! He gives the nieces and nephews rides on the tractor."

"Oh! I thought you meant that he was
working
on the tractor, not entertaining!"

"Waldemar works very hard," Mom said proudly. "You know perfectly well that a tractor can be hard work and fun too. Like marriage."

One of the best things about my mother is that she will follow you anywhere, conversationally speaking. She will answer any question at all, the stranger the better. Naturally, I cannot resist asking her things that no normal person would accept. "Mom," I said, serious as a pulpit, "would you rather marry a pleasant pothead or your first cousin on a tractor? Both are associate professors," I hastened to add.

"You marry your pothead if you like," she said generously, "as long as you wait a while. Let's say two years. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."

"Hey!" I said, indignant. "How do you know the pothead
doesn't
serve the Lord? As a matter of fact, this pothead does serve the Lord! He's more religious than I am!" (I felt safe in asserting this because I had once heard the pothead softly singing "Amazing Grace.")

"I think that the Lord appreciates a man on a tractor more than a man smoking marijuana in his pajamas," Mom said earnestly. "I know I do."

"Okay, okay," I said, as we neared the counter. "I give up. I will marry Cousin Wally. Just as soon as he asks me. You'll be our first houseguest at our beach house in Nova Scotia. But I'm warning you now, there's gonna be a little weed on your pillow. Instead of a mint."

She chuckled comfortably. "That's okay. I don't like mints."

TWO

I
hope it's clear by now that the Mennonites wouldn't want me. The only reason they're nice to me is that my dad is famous, my mom makes great pie, and I babysat their kids when I was twelve. Once in the course of babysitting I got Jamie Isaac, who wore diapers until he was five and who now is a computer analyst with three kids, to eat wet cat food.

Connie Isaac, Jamie's mother, was a Mennonite folksinger who released an album with the winning title
Sing Alleluia!
The Isaacs lived four houses down from us-Mennonites tend to live in clumps-and we were on intimate terms with the lyrics of
Sing Alleluia!
Our parents had naturally forbidden us to listen to the radio or to anything that smelled secular, such as rock and roll, but Connie Isaac's
Sing Alleluia!
passed muster. There was one song that we sang relentlessly. It told the story of a Mennonite farm child, Little Anna Barkman, who couldn't come out and play because she was learning proper Mennonite work habits, counting over grains of red turkey wheat. Connie Isaac had invited her daughter Christie, Jamie's older sister, to sing the role of Little Anna Barkman on the album. In a voice high and clear as an alpine tinkle, young Christie tunefully lisped the chorus.

Red color,

good shape,

heavyweight,

one by one!

Each grain,

my tiny friend!

When two jars are full

my work is done!

Well, I'm here to tell you that in the Janzen household we could not get enough of Christie Isaac singing about her tiny friends, especially after Connie Isaac made her first payment to me for babysitting services rendered.

Connie Isaac paid me in fresh brown
potatoes
.

I think we can all agree that the lives of most twelve-year-olds improve significantly with an incoming flow of brown potatoes. You may not be able to buy that bootleg lip gloss your heart yearns for, but you can prepare tasty potato dishes for the whole family. And cooking is one thing a Mennonite girl knows how to do.

I have been happily and busily cooking since age five, when I served up my first kettle of Borscht, made with boiled lettuce instead of cabbage. (Say what you will, but it is easy to get confused in the face of such look-alike vegetables.) The women in our family are the kinds of cooks whom you can't kerfuffle. You need a dinner for ten an hour from now? No problem. We'll rustle up homemade bread, noodles, gravy, sausage, whatever. Mennonite food has its delicious moments-more on that later-but our true gift lies in the
ease
with which we cook. Some cooks struggle with timing, with menu planning, with missing ingredients. Not us. Our seven side dishes always come up at exactly the same time, and if we have run out of something, which we rarely do, we have improvised a delicious substitution. We're idiot savants when it comes to food preparation. You've heard of those developmentally delayed folks who can shout out what day of the week it was on May 16, 1804? That's us, only we're shouting, "Dinner's ready!"

So I wasn't surprised when Mom stuck her head unceremoniously into the guest bedroom. As I needed a desk tall enough for me to wedge my legs under, I was working at one I had improvised from a narrow side table and two drawers propped under the legs. "Will you make some soup?" asked my mother brightly.

"Right now?"

"Whenever you get a chance. We've decided to celebrate Christmas Eve early this year, since we're leaving on Christmas morning for Hannah's. We're going to open presents at Aaron and Deena's. Caleb had the idea of us all bringing a different kind of soup, so we'll have that and Zwiebach."

I nodded. Soup, okay. It was a good idea, actually. Zwiebach are double-decker buns, tasty and soft. You get a small but select thrill when you pull them apart, as with Oreos. Zwiebach, however, are not filled with anything. You slather them with unsalted butter and homemade rhubarb jam for Vaspa, the Sunday evening meal. Or you serve them with everyday Mennonite soups. The chief pleasure of eating Zwiebach is that the top part of the bun, about the size of a golf ball, sits there like a tempting knob. It says,
Oh, you know you wanna!
It's very tactile.

I have my grandmother's recipe for Zwiebach. I mean I have the actual fifty-year-old piece of paper, written on the back of a
Kalendarblatt
, a leaf from a calendar. As far as I know, this is the one time my mother's mother-whom I call Oma-ever wrote a recipe down. In 1960, when my mother was first married, she wrote from the tiny parsonage in North Dakota to ask her mother in Canada for the recipe. Oma sent the page from the calendar covered in barely legible
Spitzbubben
, the old-style Russian-Mennonite German script from the nineteenth century. Nobody except scholars can read this style of penmanship anymore. Even I couldn't do it without Mom's help. In the recipe Oma's voice comes through, practical and vague, advising her daughter to use whatever she has handy in the larder-butter, or margarine, or even chicken fat. Oma assumed that ingredients would vary according to season and budget. She also assumed that knowledge of the correct quantities would miraculously come to my mother in the night. "Take some milk or some water and warm it and then add it to some flour," she advised helpfully. On the calendar side Oma added a brief personal note: "I don't think Heinrich will be coming home before Christmas."

"I'm going to be making a nice chicken dish for Joel and Erlene Neufeld," my mother told me. "Joel and Erlene just adopted three siblings, and the oldest is five. Poor little things. Their mother abandoned them in a motel. The oldest managed to squeeze through the window to go out and look for food. So Joel and Erlene really have their hands full. You make the soup, and I'll make the chicken dish for Joel and Erlene."

"You want a Menno soup or a worldly soup?"

"Oh, make something we haven't tried!"

In the spirit of filial accommodation, I saved my document to a flash drive and trailed after her to the kitchen.

Together we stood at the sink, washing our hands. She was running her tongue over a tooth she had chipped the week before. "I wasn't even eating nuts," she said. "It just dropped off. Maybe because I grind my teeth in my sleep. Here, feel it."

I obediently reached over to touch my mother's jagged tooth.

My mother unwrapped a Kleenex that she had taken from her pocket. The Kleenex contained half a grayish incisor.

"Please explain to me why you are carrying that around in a Kleenex," I said.

She looked at me, surprised. "It's a bone," she said sunnily. "They can glue it back on."

"Gluing a tooth back on is like trying to reattach a broken fingernail. Just let it go, man."

She was the nurse in the family, the Solomon of all medical disputes. "This tooth still has a lot of use in it. Did I ever tell you about Hilde's tooth?"

"Did it drop out?"

"No. Hilde had a big gap between her two front teeth when we were growing up. She just hated it. She used to cover her mouth when she laughed because she was so ashamed of the space between her teeth."

"I like a smile like that," I said. "Aaron's got a gap-toothed smile, and it looks great on him."

"Hilde's space was much bigger than Aaron's. One day after she got a job she went to the dentist and had a little tooth made, and she put it there. It looked funny."

"You mean she got a bridge, to hide the gap?"

"No, a whole separate little tooth, wedged right in the middle of the other two. But this little tooth was narrower and smaller than a regular tooth."

I savored the idea of a compact go-to fairy tooth tucked between its fellows, just the snug essence of tooth. In Low German there's a funny word for the frosty heart of a watermelon: the
Abromtje
, the Little Abraham. I had always loved that word. It called up the image of a homunculus curled inside the melon, like an exceptionally stern miniature dad in there. My aunt's wee tooth reminded me of the
Abromtje
; it would sit small and spare as a haiku, no more than strictly necessary, packing its little wallop of power. How satisfying if we could all fit our cattywampus spaces with tiny dream teeth! And how satisfying to look in the mirror as my Aunt Hilde must have done sixty years ago, congratulating herself on this fake tooth the size of a Chiclet. She must have thought,
From now on, when people look at me, they won't see my absence, my loss, my lack. They won't see the thing I never had. They'll see space filled with bone. They'll see the story of my teeth. They'll see absence as presence, the hole made whole
.

I was well into chopping my squash. Beside me Mom was cutting up the chicken for the folks who had adopted the three kids from the motel. Suddenly she said, as if musing aloud, "Here's the ulna and the radius."

I suppose the high road here would be to attribute my mother's inappropriate conversational overtures to her career as a nurse. It is a well-known truism that nurses like to talk about pus while offering their children a second helping of mashed potatoes. Once my mother edified us with a lunch story about bathing a morbidly obese patient. Under the patient's tremendous awning of stomach fat, my mother had discovered a half-eaten sandwich, much decomposed. I was eating tuna on rye at the precise moment of narration. The truth is, though, that my mother was like this long before she went back to school. She may have even become a nurse because she had a secret hankering to discuss putrefaction even as she served
Rollkuchen
to distant cousins from Bielefeld.

"Don't say that," I said automatically.

"Why not? This chicken has an ulna."

"Yes, but it's gross to say
ulna
and
radius
when you're cooking."

She considered this before rejecting it altogether: "No it isn't. This chicken has an ulna!"

"That doesn't mean you need to talk about it. Let's institute a don't-ask-don't-tell policy."

"On just the ulna, or the radius too?"

"No Latinate names on any chicken bones. I propose that when you really feel compelled to discuss chicken bones, you say,
Chicken bones
."

"All right," Mom said tractably, "but I'm still going to think of it as the ulna."

"If you insist. I suppose that is your right as a Mennonite and a matriarch."

"Learning bone names is like riding a bike," she said. "Once you know the bones, you can't not know them. But saying
ulna
isn't nearly as bad as eating a side dish of chicken intestines."

This was the kind of semantic leap I had learned to expect. On the subject of chickens in particular, there could be no surprises. This was a woman who had once departed for Hawaii with a frozen fryer in her suitcase, on the theory that the chicken would be thawed by the time her flight landed in Honolulu. If your mother takes frozen uncooked chicken in her suitcase to Hawaii, all bets are off. You just go with the flow. "I suppose that eating a side dish of intestines is preferable to eating them as an entrée," I said cordially, starting on an onion.

"When my friend Chue Lee invited me to her family's Hmong banquet, they served a little side dish of chicken intestines beside every plate. I went over early to help them butcher. Did you know that the Hmong use everything-the feet, the head, the beak, the intestines, everything? They carefully rinse out the intestines to get the fecal matter out-"

I made a noise of protest.

"Sorry. But you wouldn't want to eat chicken intestines that contained feces!"

"We're moving in the wrong direction here," I said, peeling a Granny Smith for my soup.

"The Hmong hide the texture and the taste by adding a bunch of hot chile-pepper spices."

"Did Dad eat his portion of chicken intestines?"

She guffawed. "No. Him? No! I ate his."

"Are you trying to tell me that you
liked
the spicy rinsed intestines?"

"No, but I didn't want Chue Lee to think we weren't enjoying them."

"Would you rather rinse the intestines or eat them?"

She considered. "Rinse them. Although when I was rinsing them, the smell reminded me of our old chicken coop."

She began singing a merry little ditty she had taught us in our youth. The Teutonic charm of this song is that the rhyme scheme creates a momentary anticipation of an off-color word-off-color by 1930s standards, that is. You're supposed to drag out the musical line as long as possible, really flirt with the whole pottymouth thing, and then at the last possible second you substitute the G-rated lyric:

Oh Mistress Bliss

went out to pi- [pick]

some pretty flowers.

And in the grass

she wet her a- [ankle]

way up high!

And in the cart

she let a far- [farmer]

pass her by,

and in the coop

she let a poo- [poor]

old chicken die!

My mother always reduced me to a kind of reluctant speechlessness.

Then without further transition she suggested that since I had my apron on, maybe I wouldn't mind making two more loaves of cranberry-nut bread. I asked if the loaf I had made the day before was already gone. She nodded. "Your father likes it."