Jonathan Franzen - The Discomfort Zone

“Earl, I didn’t touch it!”

“You did! Again!”

“I didn’t think I even moved it, I just looked at it, I didn’t mean to change it.”

“Again! You monkeyed with it again! I had it set where I wanted it. And you moved it down to seventy!”

“Well, if I did somehow change it, I’m sure I didn’t mean to. You’d be hot, too, if you worked all day in the kitchen.”

“All I ask at the end of a long day at work is that the temperature be set in the Comfort Zone.”

“Earl, it is so hot in the kitchen. You don’t know, because you’re never in here, but it is so hot.”

“The low end of the Comfort Zone! Not even the middle! The low end! It is not too much to ask!”

And I wonder why “cartoonish” remains such a pejorative. It took me half my life to achieve seeing my parents as cartoons. And to become more perfectly a cartoon myself: what a victory that would be.

My father eventually applied technology to the problem of temperature. He bought a space heater to put behind his chair in the dining room, where he was bothered in winter by drafts from the bay window behind him. Like so many of his appliance purchases, the heater was a pathetically cheap little thing, a wattage hog with a stertorous fan and a grinning orange mouth which dimmed the lights and drowned out conversation and produced a burning smell every time it cycled on. When I was in high school, he bought a quieter, more expensive model. One evening my mother and I started reminiscing about the old model, caricaturing my father’s temperature sensitivities, doing cartoons of the little heater’s faults, the smoke and the buzzing, and my father got mad and left the table. He thought we were ganging up on him. He thought I was being cruel, and I was, but I was also forgiving him.

WE MET ONSundays at five-thirty. We chose partners and blindfolded them and led them down empty corridors at break-neck speeds, as an experiment in trust. We made collages about protecting the environment. We did skits about navigating the emotional crises of seventh and eighth grade. We sang along while advisors played songs by Cat Stevens. We wrote haikus on the theme of friendship and read them aloud:

A friend stands by you

Even when you’re in trouble

So it’s not so bad.

A friend is a person

You think you can depend on

And usually trust.

My own contribution to this exercise—

You get a haircut

Ordinary people laugh

Do friends? No, they don’t.

— referred to certain realities at my junior high, not in the group. People in the group, even the people I didn’t consider friends, weren’t allowed to laugh at you that way. This was one reason I’d joined in the first place.

The group was called Fellowship — no definite article, no modifier — and it was sponsored by the First Congregational Church, with some help from the Evangelical United Church of Christ down the street. Most of the kids in seventh- and eighth-grade Fellowship had come up together through Sunday school at First Congregational and knew each other in almost cousinlike ways. We’d seen each other in miniature sport coats and clip-on ties or in plaid jumpers with velveteen bows, and we’d spent long minutes sitting in pews and staring at each other’s defenseless parents while they worshipped, and one morning in the church basement, during a spirited singing of “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” we’d all watched a little girl in white tights wet herself dramatically. Having been through these experiences together, we’d moved on into Fellowship with minimal social trauma.

The trouble began in ninth grade. Ninth-graders had their own separate Fellowship group, as if in recognition of the particular toxicity of ninth-grade adolescence, and the first few ninth-grade meetings, in September 1973, attracted rafts of newcomers who looked cooler and tougher and more experienced than most of us Congregational kids. There were girls with mouth-watering names like Julie Wolfrum and Brenda Pahmeier. There were guys with incipient beards and foot-long hair. There was a statuesque blond girl who incessantly practiced the guitar part to “The Needle and the Damage Done.” All these kids raised their hands when our advisors asked who was planning to participate in the group’s first weekend country retreat, in October.

I raised my hand, too. I was a Fellowship veteran and I liked retreats. But I was small and squeaky and a lot more articulate than I was mature, and from this stressful vantage the upcoming retreat looked less like a Fellowship event than like the kind of party I was ordinarily not invited to.

Luckily, my parents were out of the country. They were in the middle of their second trip to Europe, letting themselves be entertained by their Austrian business friends, at Austrian expense. I was spending the last three weeks of October as the ward of various neighbors, and it fell to one of them, Celeste Schwilck, to drive me down to First Congregational late on a Friday afternoon. In the passenger seat of the Schwilcks’ burgundy Oldsmobile, I opened a letter that my mother had sent to me from London. The letter began with the word “Dearest,” which my mother never seemed to realize was a more invasive and less endearing word than “Dear.” Even if I’d been inclined to miss her, which I wasn’t, the “Dearest” would have reminded me why I shouldn’t. I put the letter, unread, into a paper bag with the dinner that Mrs. Schwilck had made me.

I was wearing my jeans and desert boots and wind-breaker, my antianxiety ensemble. In the church parking lot, thirty-five kids in denim were throwing Frisbees and tuning guitars, smoking cigarettes, swapping desserts, and jockeying for rides in cars driven by the more glamorous young advisors. We were going to Shannondale, a camp in the Ozarks three hours south of St. Louis. For a ride this long, it was imperative to avoid the car of Social Death, which was typically filled with girls in shapeless slacks and boys whose sense of humor was substandard. I had nothing against these kids except a desperate fear of being taken for one of them. I dropped my bags on a pile of luggage and ran to secure a place in a safe car with a mustached seminarian and some smart, quiet Congregationalists who liked to play Ghost.

It was the season in Missouri when dusk crept up on you. Returning for my bags, I couldn’t find my dinner. Car doors were slamming, engines starting. I ran around canvassing the people who hadn’t left yet. Had anybody seen my paper bag? Five minutes into the retreat, I was already losing my cool. And this wasn’t even the worst of it, because it was possible that, even now, in one of the glamorous cars, somebody was reading my mother’s letter . I felt like an Air Force officer who’d let a nuclear warhead go missing.

I ran back to my chosen car and reported, with ornate self-disgust, that I’d lost my dinner. But the mustached seminarian almost welcomed my loss. He said that each person in the car could give me a small piece of dinner, and nobody would be hungry, and everybody would be fed. In the gathering dark, as we drove south out of the city, girls kept handing me food. I could feel their fingers as I took it.

On my only Boy Scout weekend, two years earlier, the leaders of the Bison Patrol had left us Tenderfeet to pitch our tents in steady rain. The leaders hung out with their friends in better-organized patrols who had brought along steaks and sodas and paraffin fire starters and great quantities of dry, seasoned firewood. When we young Bisons stopped by to warm ourselves, our leaders ordered us back to our sodden campsite. Late in the evening, the Scoutmaster consoled us with Silly Sally jokes that the older Scouts didn’t want to listen to anymore. (“One time when Silly Sally was in the woods, an old man said to her, ‘Silly Sally, I want you to take off all your clothes!’ and Silly Sally said, ‘Why, that’s silly, because I’m sure they won’t fit you!’”) I came home from the weekend wet, hungry, tired, dirty, and furious. My father, hating all things military, was happy to excuse me from the Scouts, but he insisted that I participate in some activity, and my mother suggested Fellowship.