I ran through the yard and into the house. Al Ada's spotless house gleamed. A patch of sunlight from the porch window came through the door to the living room and fell onto the hardwood floor and woven rug. I smelled coffee and baloney.
“It's my birthday,” I said to the woman with the baby, who was putting soup in a bowl to feed him.
She looked at me for a moment in silence, and then turned away.
“Today's my birthday,” I said to the woman next to her.
She turned away and pretended she hadn't heard, looking embarrassed.
“It's my birthday,” I said to my friend Ruth's mother, who was pouring coffee.
“How old are you?” she asked in an uninterested voice.
“Nine,” I said, but she had already turned to talk to someone else. Women turned their reproachful eyes on me, and I wondered what was wrong with telling people it was my birthday.
My face hot, I turned and went back out to the shed. Olin Clara was helping to put plates of bread, baloney, pickles, butter, and bowls of peanut butter onto the long tables. She was slim and short, with a sprightly spring to her walk. And she stopped, looked at me, and said, “Happy Birthday! Aren't you turning nine today?”
I nodded and picked up two plates of baloney and followed her to the table. I looked at the back of her white organdy cape with the two neat pleats and wondered why everyone was not as kind as Olin Clara.
A few days later, a birthday card came in the mail for me. In it was a bookmark that Olin Clara had made. She had drawn morning glories in a vine around the border and had written “Happy Birthday, Saloma” in the middle, in her beautiful handwriting. She used clear contact paper to cover the bookmark. I was touched to know Clara had made it for me and awed that she could make something so beautiful.
I hung the bookmark on the corner shelf in my bedroom that held the pretty dishes I had gotten for my birthdays.
The Sunday afternoon after church on my ninth birthday, as I was popping corn, Mem asked, “Lomie, how would you like to go and help Olin Clara with her cleaning next Saturday?”
Mem had a soft expression in her light blue eyes. I was surprised about what she had just said, and also by the way she was looking at me. I didn't know what to say.
“Olin Clara asked me today if I could spare you, and I said yes. She is particular and you would have to do a good job, but I think you can do it.”
“Do you think so? Why didn't she ask one of the older girls in the community?”
“I think she asked you because she wanted you,” Mem said.
The next Saturday, I started out on the mile-long walk to Olin Clara's house. The shadows were still long, and the dew sparkled on the tips of the blades of grass, points of light under the morning sun. Red-winged blackbirds sang in the fields along the way. I wondered how they could make the sound of chirping and ringing at the same time. I spotted a redheaded woodpecker on a large beech tree in the woods. The sun shone on his bright red head and his black and white wing feathers as he hammered away at the hole in the beech tree, so fast his head was a blur. I stood still and watched him until he flew in his distinctive dips into the woods and out of sight.
When I walked past the Gingerich farm, I waved to Sara Mae, who was hanging out clothes. She and I were almost twins. She was born the day before me, at the same place where I was born. There was an Amish woman who used to be a midwife, who had people come to her house to have babies. Mem and Ada had ended up there together, each bearing a baby daughter. I was Mem's third child, and Sara Mae was Ada's fourth child. Ada had seventeen children altogether in subsequent years, and Mem had seven.
After I waved to Sara Mae, I kept walking up the strip of narrow paved road, up the last hill to Olin Clara's house. Her garden was on the hillside below the house, with vegetables coming up in different shades of green, bordered by flowers of all colors. Next to the garden was a bird feeder attracting chickadees, nuthatches, titmice, and goldfinches.
In front of Clara's house was the biggest maple tree I had ever seen, with its gnarled branches reaching out like twisted arms, spreading their leaves out across the yard. Four of us once tried holding hands around it and we couldn't reach all the way around.
As I walked up the sidewalk leading to the kitchen door, a tabby cat walked up and meowed and rubbed against my leg. As I petted her, she arched her back against my hand. I knocked at the door. The smell of freshly baked cookies and pies wafted through the screen door.
Clara said, “Come in, Salomi,” in a pleasant voice. She was the only person who called me that, combining my Amish name with my English one. I decided I liked it.
I stepped into the kitchen, and Clara pulled out a kitchen chair and said, “Have a seat. I'm sure you are tired after your walk. Do you like butterscotch chip cookies? Can I get you something to drink? I have lemonade or milk.”
“Oh, I came to do work; you don't need to feed me first thing,” I said.
She nodded her head and said, “Just sit down,” as she patted the back of the chair. I did. The cookies were warm, sweet, and crumbly. I finished the glass of milk and got up to wash my glass and plate at the kitchen sink with the chrome faucet. It felt like magic to be able to get hot or cold water just by turning one of the knobs.
I continued to go to Olin Clara's house on Saturdays for several years. I learned her methods of baking pies and cookies, and I learned through her appreciation of my mother's homemade bread that Mem made the best bread in the community. I had assumed every mem in the community made bread like hers, but once when I brought a fresh loaf to Clara, she praised Mem's bread so highly and in such a sincere way that I began to realize Mem's bread was indeed a specialty. That day when I got home and told Mem how much Clara liked her bread, her face turned pink, and she said, “Oh, she is just saying that to make you feel good.” But I could tell she was pleased as she tried to suppress a smile.
Mem did not often get compliments from other Amish people. First of all, compliments were not given as freely as in mainstream American culture, because the belief in the community is that people should be humble. But Mem's situation was more complicated than that. I came to understand later that somehow she was a threat to many other women in the community, especially the bishop's wife. They did not want Mem, who was married to “Sim” after all, to be better respected than they were. Olin Clara did not seem to be motivated by these same sentiments. Later in life, she became Mem's one true friend in the church district, after my sisters and I had all left the community.
When I was done with eighth grade, I began cleaning the homes of “English” people, and I drifted away from Olin Clara, though I always knew she was there. And so, as I struggled with whether or not to join church, I hoped Olin Clara would grasp how difficult my life had become. I wanted to believe that I could be a better person if my life were more bearable. I only dimly understood that Olin Clara could never do what I wished for. She would be ostracized in the community for undermining my parents and the church. She had smiled at me one Sunday and asked me if I was planning on joining church. I said I didn't know yet. She said, “I hope you do.” I felt that she genuinely wanted me to be a fellow church member with her, and it made me feel welcome. Because she was really the only person I wanted to please, I thought about doing it for her. Then I felt guilty, because I knew I should be doing it for my own good, and in the name of Jesus. While I think on some level I understood my resistance, it was not until much later that I understood the nature of this struggle. I wanted to walk a spiritual path that allowed for asking fundamental questions, and I did not want to be instructed on what to believe, especially in matters of the soul. At the time I only knew what I didn't want, but I had not yet figured out what I did want. The people pressuring me, such as Brother Joe, took advantage of my ambivalence.
We visited Joe and Emma one day soon after their first baby was born. I was quieter than usual that day, observing what was happening around me. Joe and Emma seemed so happy together, living in th
e basement of Emma's brother Melvin and his family's house. I wondered if Joe still called folks who lived in basements “groundhogs.” Then I realized I was jealous of him. He had made a new life for himself, and now he didn't have to put up with Datt. With their sweet little baby, Lester, it seemed to me that Joe and Emma had it all. I put my face next to Lester's and breathed his warm, clean baby scent.
“Just remember, he is not yours,” Joe said. He and I were alone in the kitchen for a few moments with the baby, while the others had gone outside to look at the garden.
I smiled at Lester and said, “Okay, I'll keep that in mind.”
“Is it any better at home?”
I shrugged, knowing better than to answer that.
He sent me a look from under his drooping eyelids. This was the look he would give when he wanted to convey that we were best friends, and I was supposed to forget all he had done in the past. “Are you going to join church this summer?”
“I am thinking about it.”
“I think that would really help.”
I didn't know what to say. I wondered if Mem or Datt had asked him to talk to me. I shrugged again. “Maybe it would help. But what if it doesn't?”
“Then at least you would be doing the right thing,” Joe said, and then he went outside.
I sighed and turned, blocking the sunlight from the window so that it wouldn't fall on the baby's face. As I watched Joe walking towards the others, I pondered something I'd just seen in his pantry. When I was putting away leftovers from the meal, I saw a bottle of Black Velvet high up on a shelf. I knew this was Joe's favorite brand of whiskey, because he used to keep a bottle of it hidden in the haymow when he was still living at home. If he really believed it was the right thing for me to join church, then why wasn't he adhering to the rules that forbade church members to drink alcohol? Maybe, I thought, life wasn't as perfect for him as it appeared.
I BASICALLY KNEW, in the end, that I didn't have a choice. If I didn't join church that summer, it would have to be the next. In the meantime, people in the community would become more distrustful of me. So, when the morning came to start taking instructions for baptism, I prepared to join church with four other young people. Our first formal instructions began one bright and sunny May morning.
I got to the Gingeriches in time to see Sara Mae and her sister, Elizabeth, finish pinning their capes into place. Both of them were also joining. Then we walked to John Detweilers' for the church service. We waited until after the elders left to go into the house. Then Noah Wengerd, Bishop Dan's son, rose to follow the ministers, and we girls followed him to an upstairs bedroom where the elders had gathered. We sat down on the bench that faced the elders, while each of them took turns talking to us. The ministers quoted many verses from the Bible in High German. We sat and listened. When the bishop asked us to promise to obey the rules of the church, we took turns giving our prescribed yeses. Eventually Bishop Dan asked us to rejoin the service. The ministers stayed for their normal closed-door session during the first part of every church service.
After three weeks of this, I realized that “instruction” just meant that we got our own personal preaching session. There was not going to be any question-and-answer time. I kept my silence and tried to accept what they were saying. We continued to follow this pattern through the summer.
At home, Datt and I had one conflict after another. I had hoped that once I started joining church, he would stop giving me such a hard time, but I was wrong.
Datt didn't like how late the young people's gatherings, or “singings,” started. He kept nagging me to go earlier. I would argue, “But Datt, what am I supposed to do, get there at eight when the singing doesn't start until ten?” As usual, he couldn't be reasoned with. He kept saying that the singings didn't start so late in his day, and on and on. Instead of repeating, “But Datt, I can't help that things have changed,” I began to hire the taxi driver for the time Datt wanted me to go. Then I had the driver drop me off at a place close to the singing location. I'd take a walk on the country roads until the singing started.
On one such evening, as I was walking along, enjoying the cool breeze after a hot day of sitting in church, I imagined I was someone else—someone new, who I didn't even know. I tried to walk like an English girl, taking little dainty steps, swishing my skirt, imagining my hair hanging loose to my waist.
Sarah and Susan often mimicked the way I walked. According to them, I always held one arm still and swung the other like a pendulum, and placed my feet heavily on the ground. I knew they were exaggerating my walk when they mocked me, but it had the effect they wanted: I became self-conscious. So, when others mentioned my manner of walking, I took their comments as criticism.
That night, when I turned around to walk back to the singing, still feeling like the “English” girl I wanted to be, I saw two girls a half mile down the road. I walked towards them. When I came close enough to recognize them, I wished I could hide. They were two of my second cousins, Saloma and Lydia, with whom I had never gotten along. As they neared, I remembered a day when I was perhaps seven years old and Mem and I had gone to a quilting at Saloma's mem's house.
Back then, going anywhere with Mem was a treat. On that day, she had driven our old gelding, Don, to the quilting, and he had plodded along, safe and steady, the way he always did. When we got there, I sought out the girls who were my age. I tagged along with them, playing house, kickball, and going for cart-and-pony rides. Then I noticed that whenever I'd look up from playing, the other girls were running off to the barn or to one of the sheds, and I had to go and find them.
After three or four times of doing this, Saloma picked up a red scooter that had been lying beside the driveway and said, “Lomie, look, can you do this?” She used one foot to scoot along.
I said, “Yes,” and she handed me the scooter. When I had barely pushed off on the scooter, I heard bare feet stampeding towards the barn. I looked back, dropped the scooter, and caught up to the girls. They walked in front of the stalls, saying, “That's your horse, that is so-and-so's horse,” and so on until they stood in front of Don. Saloma said, “Lomie, this is your family's horse.”
“How did you know? I asked.
“Because it has such big feet,” she scoffed. She and the other girls giggled into their hands. I stood staring at Don's feet while the girls moved away. I knew that Mem and Datt didn't have a real “buggy” horse, but it had never occurred to me to be self-conscious about the size of our horse's feet. I had far more difficult things to worry about.
I didn't run after the girls after that. I didn't care what they did.
Now, seeing Saloma and Lydia approach, I wished I had continued to walk in the other direction. I didn't like Lydia's mousy-looking face with its constant snooty expression. And Saloma could still make me feel inferior, even though we were nineteen, not seven.
When we met, Saloma and Lydia said hello, and I was polite in return. Saloma said, “I was wondering what you were doing on this road.”
“How could you tell it was me? I didn't know who you were until just a little way back.”
“I could tell who you were by the way you walk,” Saloma said.
“Oh.” I wished I could have kept the surprise out of my voice. To myself I said, So much for walking like someone else, never mind being someone else.
AFTER I STARTED LEAVING for the singings earlier, Datt started telling me I shouldn't dance at the singings if I planned to be baptized. I didn't think he could control that, because Amish young folks had always danced until they got married. Since it wasn't against the church rules, I wasn't going to give it up. It was one of the few things I enjoyed doing. So I ignored him and continued to dance at the singings.
One Sunday during our instruction, Bishop Dan said, “There is a brother in the church who has brought before us the fact that one of you young people continues to dance at the singings. If that person can promise that this will stop, then we can continue.” Then he looked at me and wait
ed.
I looked up. “Me?” I asked. I looked at Noah and Sara Mae, the two people who had always preceded me in answering the obedient “yes” to any promises the preachers asked us to make on our conduct as future members of the church. This was the first time Bishop Dan had singled anyone out all summer.
Bishop Dan shuffled his feet nervously and said, “Yes, well, ah, all of you should make the same promise, so Noah, why don't you start?”
There were the five expected yeses. Then Dan continued on. I didn't hear anything he was saying. I was thinking how much I hated Datt. I ground my teeth. I knew that Datt had used the church and Bishop Dan to get his way. I wished I hadn't been blindsided, so that I could think before I made such a promise—because I knew I had to honor it. What, I wondered, would have happened if I had said no? For the next several weeks when I went to the singings, I refrained from dancing. I found it very tempting to join in when I watched the others dancing, but I had made a promise and I felt I had to honor it.
One of Bishop Dan's daughters got married that summer. Out in the barn the night of the wedding, people danced. Noah and all his brothers and sisters danced, along with the other young folks. I joined in too, once I realized I wasn't expected to honor the promise I had made. Dan had probably made us promise to get Datt off his back, and then had forgotten all about it. I thought Bishop Dan was a hypocrite and a coward after that.
I wondered if I should stop taking instructions for baptism. I knew young people who had started and then quit after one or two weeks, because they had decided they weren't ready. That was okay with the community if the person wasn't already nineteen and if it wasn't halfway through the summer. I would be criticized unmercifully if I quit now.
Why I Left the Amish Page 15