Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Memoir) (2010) (19 page)

I used to think that virtuous people, for instance nuns, or even my mother, existed as a kind of Darwinian opposite to pederasts and serial killers. I suspected nuns were the recipients of a genetic gift basket featuring predetermined goodness, in the same way that some folks seem blessed with a natural aptitude for drawing in charcoal. Then, in addition to the genetic gift basket, the stars aligned in a confluence of beatitude, causing environmental forces to help out. Would my mother have been so nice if she hadn't been reared in a simple community, innocent and underexposed? God knows nuns couldn't have many distractions in a convent, where soothing rituals purged the world of temptation.

But I have come to believe that virtue isn't a condition of character. It's an elected action. It's a choice we keep making, over and over, hoping that someday we'll create a habit so strong it will carry us through our bouts of pettiness and meanness. Until recently I dismissed Niccolò Machiavelli's brutish philosophy that the ends justify the means, but lately I've begun to question that. If in the service of choosing virtuous behavior we need to practice some odd belief, where's the harm? Don't we all have our weird little rehearsals and rituals? Sure, from a ratiocinative point of view, the invention of angels on the wall seems an unlikely way to achieve virtue in praxis. Or take the case of the nuns. Insisting that you are the bride of Christ is pretty wacky, in my opinion. So is the bizarre corollary, giving up sex on purpose. Yet these choices, odd as they are, harm nobody. It seems to me that there are many paths to virtue, many ways of creating the patterns of behavior that result in habitual resistance to human badness.

And let's just hypothesize: what if there are angels on the wall? To be sure, neither you nor I have seen them. But does that negate their existence? I can imagine a counterargument that might retort, "Well, neither have we seen zombies, and most of us are pretty sure that the utter absence of documentation regarding the undead makes a persuasive case that zombies do not exist." True. Yet I'd like to assert an important distinction between angels and zombies. (Hopefully I am not the first to do so!) The existence of angels adverts to the person of Jesus Christ, a real, living, breathing historical figure; whereas the existence of zombies does not attach to any real historical figure, unless you count Calvin Coolidge.

At this stage of my life, I am willing to accept not only that there are many paths to virtue, but that our experiences on these varied paths might be real. We can't measure the existence of supernatural beings any more than we can control our partners. And anyhow, I don't want to measure supernatural beings or control my partner. What I want to measure, what I can control, is my own response to life's challenges. If my husband needs to dump me, fine. Let him. This is why I say: Let husbands ditch their wives for guys named Bob. Let Bob dump our husbands for reasons we still haven't heard. Let the angels promenade upon our walls. Let them sound the trump in public, crying, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord."

ELEVEN

O
ne afternoon before I left for the Mennonite left coast, I was simultaneously cooking and talking long-distance to my friend Alba. Ready to sauté some shallots, I added a
Schulps
of olive oil to a skillet. Since the broken clavicle prevented me from clamping the phone under my chin like a normal long-distance cook, I had to pour with the right hand and hold the phone with the left. Thus when I reached over to replace the bottle of olive oil among its fellows, the difficulty of holding the phone shorted my reach. I had to replace the olive oil with the front facing sideways. "Hang on a second," I said automatically to Alba, as I set the phone down to straighten out the cattywampus bottle.

Then I realized what I was doing. Personally, I didn't care whether the front of the bottle was ninety degrees skewed. It was Nick who would have cared. And Nick wasn't there. I experimentally turned the bottle sideways again, to see how it felt to defy my husband's rage for order. Then I stared at the sideways bottle in brief but silent agitation.
I'll be damned
, I thought. I couldn't do it! Fifteen years cannot be rotated a quarter-turn to the left, just like that. I righted the bottle one more time. It was an eye-opening moment. For the first time I saw how very far I had been willing to go to accommodate Nick's anxiety. Since I liked things tidy, I'd always told myself we were in accord, we were thinking as one. But the nitpicky perfection he demanded was not what I would have aspired to. Whether Nick had been projecting his artistic eye on the minutiae of his environment or simply assuaging his anxiety by controlling me, all I now felt was a bemused sense of wonder at my need to accommodate. I had work to do, so much was clear.

As soon as my friends learned that Nick had ditched me for a guy on Gay.com, the self-help books started pouring in. Some provided wise counsel. Some offered strong therapy. Some triggered new insights. And then there was
The Language of Letting Go.
This book was organized into daily meditations, directed to persons recovering from situations of codependency or addiction. This author was all about affirmation, eager to include everyone in her program of self-acceptance and positive change. Her desire to be inclusive and upbeat emerged in passages that I might paraphrase like this: "Sometimes, we feel confused and broken. Sometimes, we have a hard time leaving relationships that are hurtful. Sometimes, we do the hurting. Sometimes, we do the leaving. Sometimes, we are left. Sometimes, we leave and feel bad about it. Sometimes, we leave and feel good about it. And that's okay!" No matter what the list of our putative faults and self-destructive behaviors, the conclusion would always be some form of "And that's okay!" I imagined this advice uttered in the poignant, sincere tone of Barbara Walters. I loved this book very hard and tried to apply its many useful lessons to my life.

Although I am not an addict, I am indisputably an idiot. Idiocy was nothing new to me. The breaking news on the self-help front was that I was also codependent. Over the years I had heard this term loosely and peripherally in women's magazines and on
Oprah
. But I had always dismissed it, on the grounds of overwhelming lameness. Now, I suddenly saw, I needed to give this word its due. Being codependent so surprised me that I was forced to consume an entire batch of chocolate-chip cookie dough with a salmon tartine chaser. And that's okay! It seemed clear that since I was now officially codependent, I could benefit from something like a twelve-step program. However, I had only a hazy idea of what a twelve-step program included.

RHODA. Hi, my name is Rhoda, and I'm codependent.

ALL. Helloooooo, Rhoda!!!

RHODA. I love a man who left me for a guy he met on Gay.com. I've wasted most of my adult life caretaking his needs, paying his bills, and trying to meet his inhuman standards of perfection.

ALL,
scattered applause.
That's okay!!

None of the books my friends had given me described the twelve-step process. Since it turned out that I was also a passive-aggressive blamer, I was content to note their omission and move forward, making up my own twelve steps.

Step One: Admit You Have a Problem

Nick had baldly announced that he no longer cared what I said or did, and he demonstrated this so often that I was eventually forced to believe him, despite my Herculean effort to convince myself that underneath it all, he would continue to love me if I could just ride this one out. Bob, the lover from Gay.com, would call our house at all hours. Once he called at midnight when Nick and I were asleep. The phone was on my side, and I sleepily picked it up.

"Hello?"

"Uh, can I talk to Nick?"

"This is Bob?"

"Yeah."

There it was: confirmation from the man of the hour. The man from Gay.com. In the flesh, ready to whack off, requesting the assistance of my husband. I handed the phone silently to Nick, who had tensed beside me. I rose, collected my tractable cat from the foot of the bed, grabbed my robe, and went downstairs to sob in the guest room. That was the last time we ever retired together to the same bed.

Step Two: Sit Down at the Computer with

Wild Medusa Hair

It's comforting, sort of, that during the marriage, the man made a mighty exertion to love me. Fifteen years is a long haul to be in a relationship when you don't feel good about your partner. And he must have really loved me once. I don't know when he stopped. It's hard to gauge because, even when he did love me, his bipolarity subjected him to fits of manic contempt, during which he'd say things like a child, unfiltered, whatever thoughts crossed his mind. "I don't love you, I hate you!"

One of the things that always mystified me was Nick's fault-finding, a chronic irascible nagging. He used to nitpick about so many little things, and then apologize, matter-of-factly blaming his overreactions on his bipolarity. He'd explode if I left a pair of earrings overnight on the bathroom counter; he'd rage if I sat down at the computer in the morning without having brushed my hair. We both agreed that these things should not be deal breakers in any relationship, but they galled Nick nonetheless.

I always assumed that bipolar folks were missing some crucial fuse in their anger-management system-that their inner thermometer was set a shade too high. Two years out from my marriage, I now have a more useful perspective. After Nick left, I eventually began dating a man I liked but didn't love, and I finally have firsthand experience in those little sparks of irritation that ignite impatience. I'd never minded the little things in Nick's behavior; I'd never even noticed them. It was after Nick had left me that I learned the lesson: it's when you don't love somebody that you do notice the little things. Then you mind them. You mind them terribly.

Step Three: Hide the Bike

Let's say that you're dating the new guy, and you're about to give your first dinner party together. This man you're dating is a whimsical clutterbug, so you clear the clutter from his table and set it with the best stuff you can find in his antique sideboard. You fold the napkins just so, like elegant pup tents. You arrange a vase of gorgeous yellow forsythia for the sideboard. You bring in candles. Then you go upstairs to change because this man, a serious cook, has already finished the blancmange with honey and goat cheese. When you return, you note that your new guy has placed a miniature plastic bicycle smack in the middle of the tablecloth. Why this is you can't say. The plastic bicycle, about an inch and a half long, looks like a prize from a box of Cracker Jack.

Now, if you are a nonconfrontational Mennonite woman who has been trained to communicate her needs and requests in terms of covert passive-aggressive questions, you might ask, "Sweetie, what's the story with this little plastic bicycle?" If, on the other hand, you are a Mennonite woman who has been working very hard at trying to be more assertive, you might go a step further: "Mister, I object to this small plastic bicycle, no matter that you received it as a door prize at an office party twelve years ago." It's too bad, though, that whatever you end up saying to the new guy, you're still nowhere near being able to say this: "Mister, I'd like to love you, because you are everything that is good and kind, and you play piano like a dream. But I will date you for a year and then break up with you."

Step Four: Hide It, I Say!

If I had loved this fabulous man, would I still have objected to the little bicycle? Probably. But the little bicycle would not have unleashed a tsunami of indignation, nor would it have seemed to affront the very foundations of dining etiquette. Now I know how poor Nick must have felt when I plopped down at the computer at 6:00 a.m., perfectly alert, with a cup of coffee. I had taken the trouble to press a pot of good coffee; I was chipper in the way of annoying morning people-why then would I neglect to brush my own hair? How could I so disrespect the aesthetics of domestic accord? It wasn't that I had tried and failed to brush my hair. It was that Nick had tried and failed to love me.

Step Five: Get Some Colored Construction Paper

When Nick left me shortly after the midnight call from Bob, one of the first things I did was call my realtor. I knew I couldn't afford the mortgage payments on my own, and I had to put my house on the market. Agitated but too frozen to cry, I sat numbly in my realtor's conference room, sketching the situation. Annike and I had become personal friends-not intimate, exactly, but our relationship was warmer than a professional acquaintance. Her assistant brought in a tray of ginger tea.

When I had outlined the trajectory of recent events, Annike spoke slowly, out of the beautiful calm she always seemed to wear like a coat. "Let's not worry about the house for now. We're coming up on the winter months, and no one will be looking for a lake house until spring anyway. Just sit tight. Do you have an attorney?"

I nodded. I had filed for divorce the day before.

"What's her name?"

"Cora Rypma."

Annike nodded. "You're in good hands."

"I don't want to screw him," I said, just to clarify. "It's not like-"

"I understand," Annike said. "Of course not." She took a serene breath. "Rhoda, there's something you need to read." She got up and excused herself. "I'll be back in a minute."

I was expecting a legal document, or maybe a pamphlet on how not to be a dummy when filing for divorce. Instead, when she came back a few minutes later, she pressed into my hand a paperback book on feng shui.

I dutifully read and followed the book on feng shui. Why not? It couldn't hurt. If Nick had been there-the old Nick, I mean-I would have read him passages that would have made us both howl. Instead I obediently arranged my rooms according to the book's schema; I divided the lake house into color-coded
baguas,
each replete with its own cluster of shapes and symbols. It was either rearrange my house or stare in front of the fire with my cat on my lap.

The feng shui book urged me to scribble little notes to myself on construction paper of various colors. "I surround myself with healing vibrations!" "I no longer need and now release my love for Nick!" This went on through the weeks following my car accident, when I went rolling through my empty house on my office chair, battered and bruised. "I no longer need, and now release, this writhing mess of scar tissue on my legs!" "I no longer need, and now release, this piercing pain in my clavicle!" It was a long time before I found myself saying, "I no longer need, and now release, this book on feng shui!"

Step Six: Grade Inflation

The first Sunday after the accident, my friend Carla called and deadpanned, "Okay, don't go anywhere. I'm driving out there. We'll just sit and grade papers together. You want me to bring you anything from town?"

"The
New York Times.
And some purple construction paper."

Carla brought her knitting and her own grading and sat with me in front of the fire for three hours that afternoon. She made it clear that she would set her work aside if I wanted to talk. But I didn't want to. I wanted to be silent forever. I sat on the couch with my broken bones and my cat and a big stack of papers to grade, and I graded, exactly as if my life hadn't just crashed down on me. But I gave all the papers upbeat grades and positive comments. "Terrific topic sentence! I'm with you!" "Is it just me, or is this the strongest paper you've written?" "You had me at
Since the dawn of time
!"

Step Seven: Polish Your Floor with Your Ass

Because the lake house was forty-five minutes out of town, I didn't get many visits. Curiously, the isolation didn't bother me. For all my adult years I had been Urban Girl, and I was surprised that I wasn't scared out there in the middle of nowhere, in a sizable empty lake house. That year the first snows came heavily, big flakes falling into the lake like words into memory, heavy, irreclaimable. Even when my broken bones had healed enough for me to scooch down the stairs on my bottom, there was something mellow and tranquil about my painstaking movement through the house. I liked the deliberate way I had to negotiate the stairs, concentrating on not breathing too deeply, hunching my shoulder forward so as not to jar the clavicle. Roscoe, my cat, followed me everywhere on silent haunches, as if I needed a witness.