Read Online The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen - Free Book Online Page B

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 themselvesbe 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