Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Memoir) (2010) (6 page)

But even a picture of demons at work among manioc roots could not arrest the nausea. Caleb, chewing banana with his mouth not entirely closed, hollered, "Mom! Rhoda's gonna barf again!" He prodded my arm with his banana.

"I'll say a state capital for every raisin," said Aaron smugly. "Concord. Tallahassee. Boise. Juneau."

"She's holding her mouth!" Then, confidentially to me: "Lookee here." Caleb held up one of the long strings that sometimes attach between the banana peel and the flesh. "Lookit, it's coming out of my eye. Lookit, it's the white thing in your eye when you wake up."

"You're the white thing in your eye, moron!" replied Aaron. "Bet you don't know the capital of Vermont. This raisin is the capital of Vermont. Watch this," Aaron said, shoving Montpelier into one nostril.

Not to be outdone, Caleb shoved the moist banana string into
his
nostril. "Lookit, lookit, lookit."

"That's lame," said Aaron scornfully. "That's just a thing on a banana.
This
is Montpelier!" He retrieved Montpelier with one sticky finger and wiped it on Caleb.

"B.T.!" shouted Caleb joyfully, flicking Montpelier back at Aaron. He missed. Montpelier got stuck in Hannah's white-blonde hair. "Booger territory! Hannah-fofannah, you got a
booger
in your hair!" She began to cry.

"We don't use those words in this family, young man!" barked my father over his shoulder. "Mary, what's going on back there?"

She turned and looked inquiringly at Aaron, the oldest.

"Caleb's saying bad words, Hannah's crying 'cause there's a raisin in her hair, and Rhoda needs to puke."

My mother unexpectedly focused on the raisin. "How did that raisin get in her hair?"

"Caleb put it there."

Mom got stern. "Caleb, you eat that raisin right now. We don't waste raisins in
this
family."

"But-"

"Not a peep, young man. You. Eat. That. Raisin."

Caleb sulkily ate the raisin that had been in his brother's nose, but he made powerful retching noises that helped me along.

"Si, pull over. Rhoda needs to throw up."

The van wasn't air-conditioned, yet it did offer a surprise amenity. Mom had outfitted a plywood bed with a homemade red canvas mattress patterned with white stars. It had matching pillows, and the four of us squeezed on that bed in a damp nest, reading, across the long hot miles of dry chaparral through Nevada and Utah. Sometimes Mom let me and Hannah sleep in the van all by ourselves at night, instead of in the farty tent, which smelled of mold and breath in addition to brothers who cut the cheese. This tent offered no guarantee against mosquitoes. (Creatures of the night freely came and went via the many holes in the tent's screen "windows.")

One night we were slapping and scratching through a particularly buggy bout in one of the more humid states. Outsize mosquitoes hung in the air like smoke from an unseen fire, and we had already done our best with hats, long sleeves, insect repellent, and a campfire. But still they came, still they swarmed, like something out of Hitchcock. Mom finally broke down and walked over to the campground's convenience store for a yard bomb, in spite of my father's protest that yard bombs cost good money. When she came back, she doused the area good and proper, and for a while we played Authors in peace.

That night Hannah and I begged to sleep in the van. It was not until we were tucked in for the night that we heard it: the high, tight frenzy of a legion of mosquitoes inside the van with us. I turned on the flashlight to initiate the smackdown.

"Girls!" warned my dad from the tent. "Go to sleep!"

We'd already found and swatted several big lacy mosquitoes before Dad's second shout, so I knew I had to do something drastic. Wrapping the tent bag turbanwise around my forehead, I sprinted out of the vehicle, scooped up the yard bomb, and slammed myself back inside of ten seconds.

"Girls! Don't make me come over there!"

"We're going to sleep!" I shouted.

But before we did, I unleashed the remains of that yard bomb inside the van. With closed windows. Hannah coughed and sputtered, inhaling the damp droplets of poison. "I can't breathe," she whispered.

"Me neither," I whispered back, "but we'll get used to it. No mosquito would dare attack us after
that
!"

In the morning when Mom came to wake us, she drew back coughing and waving her arms. The toxic cloud of fumes lifted as the outside air rushed in, sweet and fresh. We gulped it gratefully. "Oh Rhoda! What did you
do
?"

"Yard bomb," I gasped.

"You could have killed yourselves! Why, why, did you do this?!" She was practically sobbing. Hannah had gotten up dizzily and was sitting down again, head between her legs.

"There were lots of mosquitoes in the van," I said. "I didn't want to chance it."

When my mother reminded me of this story on our own car trip thirty years later, I chuckled at my early determination to avoid predation at all costs. But the story seemed a pretty good analogue for Hannah's and my Childhood of Fear. Why we were always so afraid I cannot say; we weren't abused, attacked, or violated in any way. On the contrary: as Mennonites, we lived remarkably sheltered lives. No radio, no eight-track tapes, no unsupervised TV, no toys that smelled of worldly values. A yo-yo, okay. A crate that your neighbor's refrigerator came in, knock yourself out. A Slinky, sure. Badminton, by all means. But a big fat no to the following: Barbie's House of Dreams (too adult? too containing-a-bed-onwhich-Barbie-might-seduce-the-other-Barbie?); Lite-Brite (too electric and therefore too vainglorious?); Edible Creepy-Crawlers made from a kit (too satanic?). Even our friends were prescreened for bad influences.

Did the degree to which we were sheltered occasion the fear that Hannah and I both felt with the onset of adolescence? Ah, those were the days when we saw a predator in every man who approached us! Somewhere, somehow, the Mennonite culture had taught us that all non-Mennonite men were would-be rapists. Thus whenever we stepped outside the protective shield of our Mennonite community, we moved in a terrifyingly unfamiliar world. Scared of school events, horrified by what would happen if I let my guard down to have a beer, terrified whenever a boy asked me out, I was as skittery as one of those squirrels that freeze as your vehicle approaches. Even when your gay husband rolls down the window and shouts, "Make your move, junior!" these squirrels seem profoundly indecisive. I always felt bad for those squirrels. I too had faced doom. And, like the squirrels, I had closed my eyes and hoped the doom would just go away.

Hannah and I inferred that non-Mennonites were capable of anything. The world seemed especially hospitable to serial killers in unmarked white vans. For instance, when Hannah and I walked to the Thrifty Drug Store for contraband Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers, we'd always rehearse a Plan A and a Plan B for what we'd do if a serial killer offered us a ride or attempted to thrust us into his unmarked white van. I am happy to report that this never happened to us. However, because our adolescence coincided with the last years before political correctness, we did hear some graphic things about our anatomy. I, who still thought that you could get pregnant from kissing, spent many an evening puzzling over the possible meaning of
titfuck
.

This fear lingered into my adult years. Once in grad school I returned to my apartment to find a note taped to the front door. In scary printed capital letters it read

FOR ALL THE DONUTS YOU CAN SCARF

COME TO MY PLACE FRI 7:00 PM,

I WANT TO GET TO KNOW YOU RODA.

JIMMY

Jimmy was a sad guy I had met once while doing laundry, and as a dating overture, this gesture strikes me as funny after a distance of twenty-three years. But back then I experienced a complex response whose crescendos came rolling like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's stages of grief and dying. First there was revulsion: Scarf?
Scarf?!?
Next, confusion: What kind of a person eats donuts on a Friday night? Then fear: Why does this Jimmy know where I live? And, finally, panic: Do I
look
like a scarfer of donuts? Ohmygod, does this outfit make me look like Agnes Ollenburger, the biggie Mennonite of our youth who had liposuction on her upper arms and then asked the church for forgiveness?

Jimmy was clearly a serial killer or a pervert. That Friday night I went to the library as usual, but I propped the note in a prominent position on my coffee table for police use, in case my body showed up dismembered in a dumpster.

Now at forty-three, on the long drive up to Bend with both my parents, I sat quietly contorted in the crowded backseat, remembering the car trips of my youth, remembering fear like a high-pitched cloud of mosquitoes. And I couldn't think of anything that explained why Hannah and I had always been so afraid. Sure, Mennonite culture mistrusted public images of sex; that was a given. On the few occasions when we kids were allowed to watch TV, a parent had to be present. My father monitored the proceedings like a stern prison guard. If any character on any television show, married or single, made a move toward an on-screen kiss, there was Dad, wielding the remote like a Taser. Quick to change the channel, he'd sometimes mutter in dark disapproval, "Smut!" Sex, it was clear, was a sinful scourge.

But my folks themselves were unafraid. They moved confidently through the world, taking risks, opening their home to strangers, traveling like fearless cosmopolites. My father's leadership position in the global Mennonite church required a lot of traveling, and my mother happily trailed along. When my father retired, the travel habit stuck-flourished, even, as they began to sign up for monthlong tours with other Mennonite couples.

Geography was important in our family, as demonstrated by the persistence of the tin garbage pail with the state capitals. Yet it wasn't just geographic knowledge that my parents wanted us to have; it was knowledge of the international scene. In an ironic twist, two of the most conservative Mennonite parents took a sharp stand against monologism. An Americentric worldview, they believed, was incompatible with Christian values on the grounds that God loved all nations equally. My folks insisted that we study and travel abroad. They have done extensive globetrotting on every continent except Antarctica, which is probably on their list. They even know and love the Chaco. Considering that both my grandmothers had a third-grade education and never left the village until they emigrated to rural Ontario, it's funny to get postcards from Kinshasa, or Istanbul, or Hyderabad, from a mom like mine: "We saw a spider big as a teapot! Dad doesn't like yoghurt. There are unattended cows walking down the street. Love, Mom." From Calcutta: "They cremate their dead here by burning old rubber tires. I guess they are out of wood. It stinks to high heaven. Love, Mom."

I thought of my parents' fearlessness as we pulled into the parking lot of a Denny's. After a five-hundred-mile day, we had two more hours to drive to Bend. It felt good to stretch our legs under the restaurant table. And I must say that it felt good to be checked out by a couple of guys sitting right across from us. They were maybe half my age, but they were cute.

The server, who had already deposited my father's patty melt and my mother's breaded chicken cutlet, approached with my salad just as my father began to pray-out loud, in a clear audible voice, thanking God for the patty melt, the cutlet, the salad. Then he prayed for his pastor, for the state governor, for the president. He prayed for the couple who had just adopted three siblings, and for the people of Iraq. He prayed for traveling mercies. In his sober voice he noted that we would embrace whatever circumstances God saw fit to bestow, and he petitioned God for the grace and the wisdom to learn the lessons that our journey had to teach.

I prayed to Pharaoh until I was six. Having learned in Sunday school that the Egyptians worshipped their kings as gods, I wanted to hedge my bets. But I always respectfully addressed the sovereign Yahweh before I spoke to Pharaoh-I thought there was one Pharaoh, mighty and eternal-because the Ten Commandments specified, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." The Mennonite God thus received my A-list requests, such as intercession from wolves, disembodied red eyes, vampires, and volcanoes. Pharaoh received my secondary and tertiary requests, like my earnest plea to be spared raisins and the Chaco.

It had been at least thirty years since I'd believed in the power of prayer as anything other than a way to practice gratitude and ameliorate self-pity. Curiously, although I married an atheist, and although I had spent sixteen years pursuing the very secular path of higher education, I had not rejected the idea of God. But during that time my faith had changed dramatically as I had learned more about context of the church and more about religious belief outside Christianity. A little knowledge goes a long way!

The Mennonites have a prickly history with the idea of education. There's an old Low German proverb that I have always savored, in part because everything is funnier somehow in Low German, in part because it seems personally directed at me:
Ji jileada, ji vikjeada
(the more educated a person is, the more warped). That knowledge would compromise faith is one of those delightfully old-fashioned beliefs that makes us chuckle today, as when we learn that the uterus was once thought to drift about the body, occasionally lodging in neck or elbow. Mennonites often connect their mistrust of education to the passage in the gospel of Mark in which Jesus observes that it is hard for those who trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God. The Mennonite idea is that people who privilege money and knowledge will think they have all the answers, and if they think they have all the answers, they won't be interested in seeking God. I can't speak for rich people, but in my experience higher education does not produce people who think they have all the answers, unless you count my brother Aaron. Higher education does just the opposite; it teaches us that we
don't
have all the answers. Socrates summed it up very well: "I know only that I know nothing at all." So unfortunately the Mennonites have it back-assward on this one. Which is something they'd no doubt have figured out if they'd gone to college like normal folks.