Raised a "good plain girl" in a Mennonite family in 1970s America, Rhoda Janzen coveted and eventually acquired her own secret weapon against conformity ? a black strapless bra. But before long her secret was out?
I grew up in a conservative Protestant community called the Mennonites. We were so conservative that to my sheltered Mennonite eyes all other churches seemed dens of worldly iniquity and permissiveness. Many Mennonite children were home-schooled, or went to private Mennonite schools, so that children would learn proper Christian values. However, my parents sent us to public school in North Dakota, where the difference between us and Most Kids was glaringly obvious. For other girls, being a Christian meant wearing a cute dress on Sundays. For me it meant no dancing, no radio, no slang, no fashion ? in short, no exposure to a world from which my community was anxious to cut itself off.
The Mennonite idea was to demonstrate a commitment to Christ by stepping away from popular culture. This would give us the freedom to take up more important concerns, such as peace and social justice. But as a young girl I was not interested in peace and social justice. What I wanted was freedom to interact with peers. Jesus was all very well, but could He bring me boys, magazines, and frilly lingerie?
Mennonites, unlike Mormons, don't wear undergarments designed to confer a special holy feeling. There's no online Mennonite outlet from which we order our modest underduds. But as soon as I turned 10, I was introduced to a hideous, wide-strapped, no-stretch bra that crushed my fantasies of young ladyhood. "A bra should be a wholesome thing," said my mother. "Good plain girls wear good plain bras." As for me and my bra, we would serve the Lord.
Then I started babysitting. True, sometimes the parents paid in potatoes. But more often than not they paid in dollars and cents. Which could be hidden and tirelessly counted. One of the first things I spent my hard-earned babysitting dollars on was a black strapless bra. More public forms of adornment ? make-up, mini-skirts, groovy platforms ? were naturally out of the picture altogether. I knew there was no way I would ever be able to dress and look like the cute girls at school, with their sparkly barrettes and shiny Max Factor Kissing Potion. So I directed my fashion fantasies inward, beneath my outer presentation.
Who would know that I was wearing a strapless bra? It would be a secret between me and my Maker. And, anyhow, I privately suspected that God was just not that into bras. Why would God, who must be busy with more pressing issues, care whether my bra was strapping or strapless? I could not see anything sinful per se about straplessness, so I began an aggressive savings plan. Screw tithing. I wanted that bra.
I'm talking about the 1970s, when women did not willingly let their bra straps show. My mother had forbidden me to wear any top open-necked enough to merit a strapless bra, but still the idea of straplessness was dear to my heart. Straplessness represented loveliness, fashion, independence ? normality, social skills, a bright romantic future.
Such a powerful bra would have to be black. Once, as a fifth-grader at Heartland Christian Camp, I had caught a glimpse of my cabin leader undressing in her sleeping bag. She was a high school girl, with breasts and everything. And I'm sure she meant to set us campers a pious example, which is why she was changing her clothes inside her sleeping bag. But still I glimpsed the straps of her bra. Black. Black, I tell you! Until that moment I had been unaware that bras came in black. Black straps were so decadent, so slutty, so delicious, that from that point forward I focused all my mental energies on urging my breasts along the path of robust development, so that someday I, too, could wear a black bra.
One summer Sunday after church we were all invited over to swim at the Wielands'. Gerhard, the oldest Wieland boy, politely showed me to his parents' bedroom to change. I donned my ultra-modest navy swimsuit and went out to the pool through his parents' glass patio door. My brothers were changing in Gerhard's room, so Gerhard came into his parents' room to change after I had finished. When he saw a big-cupped black bra sitting there, he never for a moment thought it could be mine. Rather, he was mortified that his mother had forgotten to put away something as embarrassingly personal as her brassiere. Hoping I hadn't seen it, he whisked my bra into his mother's underwear drawer.
Poor Gerhard could not be blamed for this mistake. He assumed me to be the flat-chested tape measure of a girl I had reliably been for the previous 13 years. Gerhard, gay as a blade, later insisted he had never, ever, looked at my chest. I believed him.
After swimming, we all scampered home in our damp suits, carrying our clothes. I didn't miss my black strapless bra until my mother received a distraught call from Mrs Wieland.
Confronted with an obscene interloper in her lingerie drawer, Mrs Wieland had reached a swift and inevitable conclusion. Her son and I must have been fooling around in her bedroom ? oh, the sin! The disrespect!
What puzzles me still is this: if Gerhard and I had been fooling around in his parents' bedroom, when everybody was home, and when everybody was shouting from the pool for us to come play Marco Polo, why would we have chosen to thrust my offending bra among Mrs Wieland's innocent white articles? Yet Mrs Wieland was convinced that the presence of this bra confirmed tomfoolery of the worst sort. Perhaps she interpreted the bra as a cry for help, as when criminals leave clues because they secretly want to be caught.
The blackness of the bra and the sheer size of the thing conspired to make me seem guiltier than Gerhard. The breasts had sprouted overnight. Who could blame Mrs Wieland for feeling blindsided? Undoubtedly she, like Gerhard, had considered me a skinny solitary annoyance, like a lone Tinker Toy after the game has been put away. A big black strapless bra seemed tacit confirmation of a wicked new direction. Clearly it was I who had tempted poor gay Gerhard from the path of virtue. To have grown such breasts in the first place seemed conclusive evidence of premeditated badness. And Mrs Wieland was taking it personally.
Gerhard would remain in the closet for several decades. He was no help. All he could do was insist that he had thought it had been his mother's bra. This outraged Mrs Wieland further. And she could not bring herself to believe that Gerhard was sincerely indifferent to brassieres of any stripe. I still remember him saying earnestly, if ironically, "I don't care about bras, Mom! Honestly! Cross-my-heart!"
My parents did not punish me for this incident. My mother believed that Gerhard had offered me no torso-groping insult there in the privacy of his mother's bedroom. She must have intuited that Gerhard swung the other way ? hell, everybody knew it, except Mrs Wieland. But I did have to write Mrs Wieland a note of apology. "She thinks I'm a Jezebel," I said.
"If the bra fits, wear it!" my mother said firmly. She couldn't resist adding, "And if you hadn't spent your perfectly good babysitting money on something so frivolous, none of this would have happened! It's a slippery slope when you start dressing like a worldly girl. Be ye in the world but not of the world."
I sighed. "What should I say in the note?" "Tell her that you're sorry that your carelessness caused so much heartache and grief," my mother said. "Go ahead and take full responsibility for her heartache and grief. But don't mention the bra specifically. It'll just set her going again."
I wrote obediently. You write a lot of notes growing up Mennonite. And though I took full responsibility for Mrs Wieland's heartache and grief, my wrongly accused bra eventually got its karmic reward.
A couple of years later I was at an Easter service at our church. Mrs Wieland had the highest, most piercing soprano in the choir. The title of the Easter cantata that our church sang every year was Paid in Full, a symbolic nod to salvific redemption. At this time I had not yet made up my mind how I felt about Christ's divinity, but I was pretty sure I hated Paid in Full. On and on the cantata dragged, gathering sombre poignance in minor chords. Suddenly, during a hushed organ interlude, a full bar too soon, Mrs Wieland delivered a premature yet mighty soprano bark. Everyone at the Butler Mennonite Brethren Church instantly sat up straighter. Gone was the feeling of hushed celebration. All around us sober Mennonites were trying not to laugh.
My sister and I swayed with gusts of swallowed giggles until, tears coursing down our cheeks, we made a break for the ladies' lounge. We knew we'd get punished later, and we were. But there was one beautiful moment when my poor innocent black strapless bra, so wrongly accused, had been exonerated, exculpated, paid in full.
Rhoda Janzen is a poet and author. Her memoir Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Atlantic, �8.99) is out on 1 January
To read all the articles in this series, go to guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/series/once-upon-a-life
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