Jonathan Franzen - The Discomfort Zone

There ensued an hour-long excruciation in which, one by one, we addressed the three miscreants and told them how we felt. Girls rubbed ashes into denim and fidgeted with their Winston hard packs. Kids broke out in sobs at the thought of the group’s being disbanded. Outside, crunching around on gravel, were the parents who’d driven down to give us rides home, but it was Fellowship procedure to confront crises without delay, and so we kept sitting there. Hellman and Yanczer and Magner alternately apologized and lashed out at us: What about forgiveness? Hadn’t we ever broken rules ourselves?

I found the whole scene confusing. Hellman’s confession had stamped her, in my mind, as a scary outcast stoner, the kind of marginal person I was afraid of and disdained at school, and yet she was acting as if she’d die if she couldn’t come to Fellowship. I liked the group, too, or at least I had until this morning; but I certainly couldn’t see myself dying without it. Hellman seemed to be having a more central and authentic Fellowship experience than the rules-abiding members she’d betrayed. Here was Mutton talking about how brave she was! When my turn came to speak, I said I was afraid my parents wouldn’t let me go to Fellowship anymore, because they were so anti-drug, but I didn’t think that anybody should be suspended.

It was past noon when we emerged from the community center, blinking in the strong light. The banished thieves were down by the picnic tables, tossing a Nerf football and laughing. We had decided to give Hellman and Yanczer and Magner a second chance, but the really important thing, Mutton said, was to go straight home and tell our parents what had happened. Each one of us had to take full responsibility for the group.

This was probably hardest for Hellman, who loved Fellowship in proportion to her father’s unkindness to her at home, and for Yanczer. When Yanczer’s mother was given the news, she threatened to call the police unless Yanczer went to her junior-high principal and narked out the friend who supplied her with drugs; this friend was Magner. It was a week of gruesome scenes, and yet somehow all three kids dragged themselves to Fellowship the following Sunday.

Only I still had a problem. The problem was my parents. Of the many things I was afraid of in those days — spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls, the high dive — I was probably most afraid of my parents. My father had almost never spanked me, but his anger had been Jehovan when he did. My mother possessed claws with which, when I was three or four years old and neighbor kids had filled my hair with Vaseline to achieve a kind of Baby Greaser effect, she’d repeatedly attacked my scalp between dousings of scalding-hot water. Her opinions were even sharper than her claws. You just didn’t want to mess with her. I never would have dared, for example, to take advantage of her absence from the country and break her rules and wear jeans to school, because what if she found out?

Had I been able to talk to my parents right away, the retreat’s momentum might have carried me. But they were still in Europe, and I daily became more convinced that they would forbid me to go to Fellowship — not only this, but they would yell at me, and not only this, but they would force me to hate the group — until I landed in a state of full-bore dread, as if I were the one who’d broken the rules. Before long, I was more afraid of confessing to the group’s collective crime than I’d ever been of anything.

In Paris, my mother had her hair done at Elizabeth Arden and chatted with the widow of Pie Traynor, the Hall of Fame third baseman. In Madrid, she ate suckling pig at Casa Botín among crowds of Americans whose ugliness depressed her, but then she ran into the married couple who owned the hardware store in Webster Groves and who were also on vacation, and she felt better. The twenty-eighth of October she spent with my father in a first-class train compartment, traveling to Lisbon, and noted in her travel diary: Nice 29th anniversary — being together all day . In Lisbon, she received an airmail letter in which I didn’t say a word about the Fellowship retreat.

My brother Bob and I were waiting at the airport in St. Louis on Halloween. Coming off the plane, my parents looked amazingly fit and cosmopolitan and lovable. I found myself smiling uncontrollably. This was supposed to have been the evening for my confession, but it seemed potentially awkward to involve Bob in it, and not until he’d returned to his apartment in the city did I understand how much harder it would be to face my parents without him. Since Bob usually came to dinner on Sunday nights, and since Sunday was only four days away, I decided to delay my disclosure until he came back. Hadn’t I already delayed two weeks?

On Sunday morning, my mother mentioned that Bob had other plans and wasn’t coming to dinner.

I considered never saying anything at all. But I didn’t see how I could go back and face the group. The anguish in Shannondale had had the mysterious effect of making me feel more intimately committed to Fellowship, rather than less, as if we were all now bound together by shame, the way strangers who’d slept together might wake up feeling compassion for each other’s embarrassment and fall in love on that basis. To my surprise, I found that I, too, like Hellman, loved the group.

At dinner that afternoon, I sat between my parents and didn’t eat.

“Do you not feel well?” my mother finally said.

“I’m supposed to tell you about something that happened at Fellowship,” I said, keeping my eyes on my plate. “On the retreat. Six kids on the retreat — smuiked some duip.”

“Did what?”

“‘Duip’? What?”

“Smuiked marijuana,” I said.

My mother frowned. “Who was it? Any of your friends?”

“No, mostly new kids.”

“Oh, uh-huh.”

And this was the extent of their response: inattention and approval. I felt too elated to stop and wonder why. It was possible that bad stuff had happened with my brothers and drugs in the sixties, stuff beside which my own secondhand offenses might have seemed ridiculously unworrisome to my parents. But nobody had told me anything. After dinner, buoyant with relief, I floated into Fellowship and learned that I’d been given the lead in the three-act farce Mumbo-Jumbo that was going to be the group’s big winter money-maker. Hellman was playing a demure young woman who turns out to be a strangler; Magner was playing the evil swami Omahandra; and I was the callow, bossy, anxious college student Dick.

THE MAN WHOtrained Mutton as a therapist, George Benson, was Fellowship’s hidden theoretician. In his book Then Joy Breaks Through (Seabury Press, 1972), Benson ridiculed the notion that spiritual rebirth was “simply a beautiful miracle for righteous people.” He insisted that “personal growth” was the “only frame of reference from which Christian faith makes sense in our modern world.” To survive in an age of anxiety and skepticism, Christianity had to reclaim the radicalism of Jesus’ ministry, and the central message of the Gospels, in Benson’s reading of them, was the importance of honesty and confrontation and struggle. Jesus’ relationship with Peter in particular looked a lot like the psychoanalytic relationship:

Insight is not good enough. The assurances of others are not good enough. Acceptance within a continuing relationship which denies reassurance (it’s usually false anyway) and thereby brings the sufferer to an awareness of his need to evaluate and accept himself — this brings change.