The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen Page A

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.
    â€œDo you not feel well?” my mother finally said.
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œDid what?”
    â€œâ€˜Duip’? What?”
    â€œSmuiked marijuana,” I said.
    My mother frowned. “Who was it? Any of your friends?”
    â€œNo, mostly new kids.”
    â€œOh, 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.
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    THE MAN WHO trained 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, wasthe importance of honesty and confrontation and struggle. Jesus’ relationship with Peter in particular looked a lot like the psychoanalytic relationship:
    Insight