Chapter 8 - Monica Lang
On Friday, Lydia ate lunch at her desk as she tried to catch up on the day’s tasks. The book tour had renewed interest in Soleil’s book, which meant the company was getting more calls from customers, distributors and the press. Even with her own book project on the go, Lydia’s involvement with Feminine-ism meant that a lot of the new work fell on her shoulders. With the weekend on the horizon however, there was light at the end of the tunnel.
Another reason she was working through her lunch break was that she was leaving early. Rather than meet for a meal, her next candidate opted for a late afternoon snack, so at 3:00 Lydia was heading downtown to a neat little French café. Adding to her excitement was that she was finally going to be interviewing a woman.
In her research, Lydia had found an article about budget decisions made by social agencies. It highlighted a few religious organizations dealing with the conflicting demands placed by governmental bodies and church groups that funded their work. Lydia had contacted the founder of the women’s drop-in shelter that was mentioned in the article who had agreed to meet for an interview.
Lydia met Monica Lang outside the café. Her hair was a touch greyer and her skin had more wrinkles than Lydia remembered from the profile photo on the shelter’s brochure. Monica wore a little stress in her eyes and walked with a kind of defiant confidence. After introducing themselves, they shared a friendly handshake and headed inside.
After ordering their drinks, they chose a table by a window overlooking the street.
“Before we begin,” Monica said, “I do have one question: Is Westminster the company that published Feminine-ism?”
“Yes,” Lydia answered, unsure if she should be proud or apologetic.
“I see,” said Monica, indicating neither pleasure nor disdain.
“Have you read it?”
“No, one of the volunteers over at the house was reading it, so I skimmed over it during a coffee break. It didn’t exactly look like my type of reading, but I guess I can’t deny its success.”
“I was on the development team for that book,” Lydia said with more pride than she had ever attached to that project.
The waiter arrived with their food and drinks. He was about Lydia’s age and he was wearing a tight t-shirt over his muscular frame. His hair was short but gelled and he had just enough stubble on his face that he managed to pull off the rugged look quite well.
“Can I get you anything else?” he asked after he had removed the last items from his tray.
“We’re fine,” said Monica, rather coldly. When he had gone back to the kitchen she added, “I hope he doesn’t think that pretty boy smile will get him a bigger tip.”
Lydia, who had quite appreciated his charm, didn’t know the correct response, and so she decided to get back to business.
“I just want you to know,” she began, “I do have some questions, and I will be recording this conversation, if you’re okay with that, but this can still be an informal chat.” She said this to put Monica at ease, but also because she was already thinking that Monica would be a great person to write with.
“That’s fine with me. You just need to know I won’t share any private details about my work on the record.”
“Naturally,” Lydia said. “Oh, and about Feminine-ism, let me tell you, the feminist voice didn’t always win over the capitalist male voice when it came to making decisions about content and style.”
“Will that happen this time around as well?” Monica asked.
“First, with the success of that book, I can’t imagine they would interfere with the process as much this time, and second, I am the chair of the development team, so the old obstacles are gone.”
“Like I said,” Monica conceded, “I don’t know much about the book, and I’ve never met the author, and I trust it doesn’t reflect on the quality of your work, but I am always sceptical when the description of an empowered woman has to include the word ‘sexy.’ All that does is hinge female empowerment on what men think of their appearance. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that superficial men don’t like the women in their lives feeling powerful.”
“But don’t you think a woman can feel sexy without having been told so by a man?” If this weren’t true, Lydia would have to reach pretty far back into her past to hold that opinion of herself.
“Feeling sexy is simply the belief that some man, somewhere, for some reason will find you sexy. That alone might not be so bad, but attached to that is the destructive belief that only by someday finding that man can happiness be found.”
That wasn’t an answer to one of Lydia’s questions, but she thought it deserved to be written down.
“So tell me about your women’s shelter,” Lydia said when she had caught up with her note taking. “Where did you come up with the name Vashti’s Palace?”
“How well do you know the Bible?” Monica asked.
“It would be safe to assume I don’t know it at all.”
“Okay, well there’s a story in the Bible about a girl named Esther. In it an old king has grown dissatisfied with his wife, gets rid of her, and marries Esther, a young Jewish woman. Esther uses her position as queen to save the Jewish people from destruction. Traditionally readers have viewed Esther as a woman of faith and courage and they have treated the original Queen, named Vashti, as a disrespectful wife. A modern retelling of this story would probably paint Esther as an opportunistic home-wrecker and Vashti as the discarded first wife.” Lydia chuckled at the irreverent explanation of a Bible story. She couldn’t help but think that Monica was exactly the kind of thinker Westminster was looking for.
Monica continued, “Preachers usually write off the king’s first wife, Vashti, as insubordinate and therefore evil. Why? Because she refused to submit to every demand of her drunken husband. This is a story abused women understand. At first, we on the initial steering committee thought ‘shelter’ sounded too destitute and ‘home’ sounded too permanent, so we looked at this story and thought Vashti was a woman our guests could identify with. Calling it a palace also gives the connotation that our residents are honoured guests, and that’s how we want them to feel.”
The previous three male candidates had failed to convince Lydia that they were what she was looking for. Even though it was still early in the interview, she was already enjoying the discussion. “I read also that you got the start up funding for Vashti’s Palace from your husband’s life insurance settlement. Did you start it up as a tribute to your deceased husband?”
“I don’t know if ‘tribute’ is the right word,” Monica said with a certain amount of disdain.
“How did he die if I may ask?”
“He was in a car crash in Italy,” Monica responded plainly.
“Oh, that’s terrible!” Lydia said. “Were you with him at the time?”
“No,” Monica said, “I was not with him.”
“Where were you when you got the news?” Lydia asked, trying to be sensitive to Monica’s grief, but also slowly piecing together that perhaps grief was not the overriding emotion in Monica’s retelling of this story.
“I was at home, with the understanding that my faithful husband was on a business trip in Boston. The police were kind enough to assure me that his pretty young secretary had survived the crash and would be released from hospital in a few days.”
Lydia didn’t know what to say, but Monica was quite used to the awkwardness caused by this story. “I had always wanted to do charity work but he said it was a waste of time. I wanted to have kids; he said he wasn’t ready. I wanted a small house, but he wanted an investment, a big place where we could host his clients and colleagues and with rooms we could rent out to students. He never hit me, but he controlled my every move and suppressed every dream I ever had. So after I pulled myself back together, I used the settlement to pay down the mortgage and ordered some renovations on the house. The law firm where he worked was quite helpful getting the zoning permits. Unfort
unately, there is no shortage of demand for this type of service, so, shortly after I contacted various agencies in the city, women were coming to stay at the Palace.”
Lydia was still at a loss for words.
“So to answer your earlier question,” Monica continued, “this was not done to honour my husband. In fact, you could say I did this to spite him.”
Lydia wanted to be more careful with her questions, so she was more selective with her words. “I’m guessing that revenge isn’t enough to sustain the work you do. How much does Christianity inspire you from day-to-day?”
“Christianity as a religion does almost nothing for me. When my husband died, my pastor only helped me address my grief, and did nothing to help me deal with my emotional response to the affair. The macho hierarchy of the rest of the world is just as strong in the church as it is anywhere else. But the church was helpful when I was starting up the shelter, so I stayed loyal to them. Then, when the government started to redefine their support for faith-based programming I needed to take a few crosses down from the walls and remove the Bible verses from my letterhead. The church withdrew their funding in response, and that’s when I withdrew my church membership. No church, big or small, has a monopoly on Jesus’ message.”
“Could you summarize that message as you understand it, in your own words?” Lydia asked.
“Jesus came to earth announcing good news. The good news is that God loves us. Some people choose to accept that love, and they reciprocate by loving others. So, if we can do that, if we can love each other, and not just our friends and family, then, in a small way, we can bring heaven to earth. So my volunteers and I try to rescue these women from the hell they’re living in and try to give them some hope.”
Monica’s face revealed a distant kind of smile, as though she were reflecting back on women she had worked with. It was the first time she had smiled throughout the whole visit, but it didn’t last long.
“The trouble,” she continued, “is that the church has such a terrible record of living out that message. Christian countries are violent and oppressive, Christian husbands are suppressive and abusive, and churches are cold, unforgiving places of hypocrisy and judgement. These are people who claim Kingdom values, but, as far as I’m concerned, they are not Kingdom people.”
Lydia still didn’t understand how Monica had been able to reconcile her negative opinion of the church and her adherence to its doctrine. “From what you’re saying, it almost sounds as though the hypocrisy is inescapable. How are your beliefs different from what the institutional church teaches?”
“For me,” she began, “it is important that I pray to a genderless God. Sure, Jesus was a man, but maybe that’s the only way people would listen to him. They don’t listen to women now, why would people in Jesus’ day be any different. I also believe that we need to read the Bible through those eyes. In the story of Adam and Eve, we see that even God saw that the man was pathetic and lonely without the woman, so he created Eve as a help-mate or companion to him. These are words of equality and cooperation, not subjugation. When I was in university I had a roommate, but based on that title, no one would assume that she was subject to me. God wanted us to help each other, and the men of this world seem to have forgotten that.”
Lydia couldn’t write fast enough to keep up and had long since decided she would rely on the tapes to summarize the message later. “So why do you think that the church has failed at living out this message?”
“I think part of the reason is that we have no clear current examples to follow. Even the Bible doesn’t consistently show us what gender equality is supposed to look like. The Bible is one long pattern of God establishing some kind of ideal and the people messing it up.”
Hearing all these different people talk about their conflicting ideas of what the Bible was actually about didn’t do much to convince Lydia of its validity. Somehow Monica picked up on this confusion.
“Am I losing you with all this Bible talk?” she asked.
“No,” Lydia protested. “I guess I just don’t get how this one central document produces such a variety of perspectives.”
“I don’t understand that either,” Monica said, with annoyance in her voice. “It all seems pretty clear to me. The old Jewish religious laws included provisions to protect vulnerable women in the society. When Jesus complimented the women around him for their generosity, their faithfulness and their capacity to understand, he usually followed it up by criticizing the religiosity of the men around him. Even St. Paul wrote that husbands and wives should submit to each other and he encourages women who are leaders in their churches.”
While this rant wasn’t all that interesting to Lydia, it did demonstrate to her that Monica knew her material well and could present it in a dynamic, even controversial, way.
“Even if we ignore two thousand years of church history, the problem doesn’t go away. Every Sunday around the world, male pastors are telling their predominantly female congregations that women should quietly submit to their husbands, let them have the last say in everything, and give them sex whenever they want it.” As Lydia kept writing, Monica continued ranting.
As the interview was drawing to a close, Lydia was mentally contrasting Ms. Lang with the other candidates she had met with. Monica was certainly Lydia’s favourite, but would that choice be as obvious to the Board? No other interviews had been set up, and if these would be the four candidates presented, the decision-making process would begin soon.
“Ms. Lang, I should probably bring things to a close,” Lydia interjected as the rant had drawn to an end, “but I have really enjoyed hearing your perspective on things.”
“So what is the next step in the process?” Monica asked, again showing less enthusiasm than Lydia had hoped.
Monica looked carefully at the documents put before her. Lydia described the non-disclosure agreement and the various details of the sample writing assignment.
“What are you looking for in this sample writing piece?” Monica asked.
“This is mostly used to assess your writing style, but we also use it to get ideas for possible book topics.”
“Okay,” nodded Monica, “I can get that to you in a few days.” She put the paper in her purse and collected her things to go. “Thank you very much for your time.”
The two women shook hands again and Monica headed for the door.
Noticing their imminent departure, the waiter came over to the table with the bill. “How was everything?” he asked, repeating the same eye-catching smile Lydia remembered from earlier.
“It was great,” she said, responding with her own best smile. In truth, the pastries weren’t as sweet as she had hoped, and the coffee was far too bitter, but she couldn’t look into his rich brown eyes and say that. His smile seemed genuine enough that she gave him a big tip anyway. She took a little longer than usual putting the credit card back into her purse, just in case he would say anything to her, but he just walked back into the kitchen.
Stepping out of the café, Lydia looked at her watch. With the traffic at this time of day, she would get back to the office just before five. On a normal week this would be a good reason to go straight home instead, but this was not a normal week. She had a backlog of tasks still from earlier in the week, as well as a few more names of people to call again about interviews. It would be nice to get a few more candidates, but so far none had confirmed and there was only a week until she would need their sample articles.
It wouldn’t be the first time she had a Friday night supper at the office. Maybe the pizza delivery boy would remember her. During the Feminine-ism project busy times, she saw him at least once a week. He didn’t have the same pretty boy smile as the waiter at the café, but the regularity of his visits almost qualified as a relationship.