Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Memoir) (2010) by Rhoda Janzen

mother shook her head with amazement when she came back with most of the spending money she had departed with. Freak.
    And Hannah is placid as a snail. Once I asked my mother if she could remember a time when Hannah and I had fought or argued. "Why, no!" said my mother, much struck. "You girls were always together, thick as thieves. It was the boys who fought. Once Caleb whacked Aaron in the head with a stick."
    So. At twenty-six, five foot nine, and slender, Hannah was the kind of woman who stopped traffic. Protectively outraged, we thought that her middle-aged boss was trying to hustle a trophy wife, swooping in even before her divorce had gone through.
    That is, we thought so until we met him, which wasn't until both Hannah and Phil had quit their jobs and drifted around Europe for a couple of months. With my usual extravagance, I decided within ten minutes that this man really cherished her, and that he would have loved her even if toads jumped out of her mouth, like the witch-sister in the Grimms' fairy tale. And you know what? My hunch was spot-on. Phil and Hannah have been married for eleven years, and they have an amazing thing going.
    Sometimes you can just feel a person's decency, in the same way that sometimes you can intuit a lack of it. Phil had the air of a man who is fully, attentively engaged; Josh, Hannah's first fiancé, had the air of a man trying not to look at his watch. Phil consistently interested himself in the lives of others; Josh talked about himself. Phil looked at my sister with tenderness and humor; Josh looked at her as if she were an especially persistent gnat.
    Shortly after Phil and Hannah married, Hannah made one of the most generous gestures I've ever seen. She sent Phil to rescue me when I was at an all-time low, the lowest I've ever been-lower even than I was at that moment, standing on her stair in middle-aged catastrophe. Now, at forty-three, losing a husband to a guy named Bob, with all the other concomitant losses, was, all things considered, livable. But back in 1996, I had hit rock-bottom, with nowhere to go.
    I had taken a year's leave from my doctoral program because Nick had been accepted into a grad program in political theory at the University of Chicago. We moved from Los Angeles to Chicago, where I got a part-time job teaching at a music conservatory, and a full-time job as a receptionist at the starchy law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, & Flom.
    Nick, who has a master's degree in clinical psychology, was going through a phase in which he categorically refused to take meds for his bipolar disorder. "There's nothing wrong with me," he'd say scornfully. "Bipolarity is a natural condition, not a disease. Why should I take medication for a condition that makes me smarter, more creative, and more aware? If my moods make you uncomfortable, you take the medication."
    "But so is cancer a natural condition," I'd object, "and people have no trouble at all taking medication for that ."
    "They would if there were a negative stigma attached to it. They would if taking medication compromised their status as sane, functional citizens. Tell you what. I'll start taking medication for my bipolarity when the rest of the world starts taking medication for its stupidity," he said. And that was that .
    Stupid, Nick wasn't. I have to admit that Nick is among the smartest men I've ever known. When I was a young adult, smart was more important to me than nice . Go figure. Any intellectual tap-dance would impress the bejeezus out of me. I was especially starstruck with academic achievement, pathetically overinvested in the uphill trail to building an identity as a scholar. There was a time in my life-sadly, not so long ago-when quickness of mind seemed more important than kindness.
    For those first months in Chicago, Nick wrote brilliant elliptical papers that I would furbish up so that they read coherently. Sometimes, though, Nick's writing was so impenetrable that I'd have to ask him to explain