Growing up Plain: Witty and Confessional Memories from the Adolescence of a "Plain" Mennonite Girl

Chapter 1 -- Envying Gloria

There was some trouble with being plain.

When my mother first put up my long hair in a bun, to go under a covering, I imagined that now I would look like Betty Keener, an older girl I admired who came to the mission sometimes to help out.

(I was about eleven.)

I went outside and walked up and down the sidewalk a little, feeling important. But when I looked in the mirror my hair wasn't like Betty's. No amount of dreaming was going to make me somebody else.

I wasn't going to look like Gloria, either.

My best friend, Gloria, and I got baptized together, the same day, at the mission where my father was the preacher. So now we wore coverings. But she was allowed to wear her hair sticking out/.

My mother said hair was supposed to be long and pretty much covered up. Some of my aunts (we saw the aunts about once a year, at reunions) probably thought my covering wasn't big enough. Aunt Mary Louise's came the whole way front to her hairline, practically. I didn't feel so plain at reunions.

Certainly nobody back home in Steelton could have thought I was too worldly.

We lived at the Mennonite mission on the West Side in Steelton, Pennsylvania. Part of the big old building had once been a store, but now it was made into a chapel, with benches and a pulpit. The storefront windows were still there, and the creaky wood floors. Along the wall on the women's side (men and women didn't sit together in church) was a door that opened right into our kitchen.

I was embarrassed about the linoleum in our living room. It was good for mop rides, at least. We did eventually get new linoleum, but is new linoleum much better than old linoleum in your living room?/

The mission had apartments and an attic and a big cellar (good for roller skating) and lots of bathrooms. But only one with a tub. We had to hare it with Mr. and Mrs. Shrauder (elderly town people, not Mennonites) in the second floor apartment, and the mission sisters who lived on the third floor. Once Mrs. Shrauder got so disgusted because somebody had used her towel (probably by mistake).

Another Steelton person, old Mary Hollenbaugh, didn't live with us, but she'd come Sunday afternoons-- just turn the doorknob and push open the door and walk in. She'd sit in our rocking chair for a long while and not say much. Click her false teeth and grumble a little, maybe say she was constipated. Once my brother hid the bid tape recorder behind the rocking chair, ahead of time, and after she left we tried to listen to the recording. But it was mostly just the squeaks from the rocking chair.

We played a trick on Skeechball too, one time; Skeechball was the town kid who bullied everybody. My brother tied long thin pieces of wire (the wire was so thin you could hardly see it) onto the arms of our floppy clown doll. Then he took it upstairs to my father's study with the long front windows that stuck out high over the sidewalk, and he lowered the doll over a windowsill and down onto the pavement. When we saw Skeechball coming, my brother pulled on the wires to make the doll dance. Didn't Skeechball's eyes just about bulge! We thought we even scared him some.

Across the street from us was a beer joint and a big outdoor skating rink, also the firehouse. One year Betty Klinger down the street was queen of the firemen's convention. (My brother was friends with her brother, Chester, who had an actual pet monkey.) She rode atop the back of a car in the firemen's parade. Our house was near the end of the parade route, and going past us she could hardly wave or smile anymore, she was so tired. But her gown was gorgeous. She was gorgeous.

(How I loved the finery! Whenever I heard the honking horns that meant a wedding I would race to the window. The car with the tin cans and streamers would be flying past, and I'd catch a glimpse of the bride scrunched up against the groom in the back seat and floating in all her incredible dreamy finery.)

All day long, in the summers, old men loafed on the benches outside the firehouse. My mother didn't see how men could just sit around all day; they had to be doing something questionable. She told my brothers to stay away.

Sometimes there were carnivals at the skating rink. We were allowed to go over and buy a hot dog, but we had to come home to eat it. We'd sit behind the darkened church windows and watch the Ferris wheel and bingo games. We wondered why bingo was wrong if the money went for the firehouse or a church, and my parents said bingo was unnecessary. You could just put the money in the offering.

Of course we stayed out of the beer joint. It was dark in there and mysterious. We children would sit on our front steps and smell the odors. We didn't know what beer smelled like; we smelled the French fries.

I don't think there were a whole lot of people wanting to join our church and become Mennonites. We didn't get much acquainted with the old couple who lived next door, but once when Mrs. Wrightstone was on her porch some of us children sang to her from inside our house, "Ye Must Be Born Again." [continued]