Devil in the Details (15 page)

On the other hand, the regulations regarding toxic materials
were much more lax in the ‘70
s
, and we got to work
with substances whose fumes left us pleasantly high. Our favorite
was a strange and fairly pointless bubble-making kit you could find
in the children’s section of any craft store. You squeezed a blob
of malleable plastic from a tube and placed it at the end of a
straw, which you blew through, transforming the blob into a bubble
colored like a gasoline rainbow. This, in fact, is exactly what it
smelled like. It was completely absorbing, between the fumes and
the paraphernalia, and became very popular among the children of
the ‘70
s
, preparing some of us for future careers as
crackheads.

The brain damage sustained from using these materials may
explain the crafty atrocities my sister and I created in the
‘80
s
. We put our background in classical needlework
to good use Beadazzling our acid-washed jean jackets. We beaded
armloads of Madonna wanna-be bracelets and spattered our clothes
with Jackson Pollack-style squiggles in neon fabric paint. We
stenciled carefully cut-up sweatshirts with new-wave slogans that
urged passersby to “Chill Out!” or warned them we were “Bitchen and
Bewitchen.”

The crafts at Hebrew school just couldn’t compete. There, our
craft supplies were limited to burlap and glue. These two materials
were the sole components of almost everything we made, from
scratchy pageant costumes to charmless rustic wall hangings. On a
good day, we might make clumsy havdalah candles or faded sukkah
garlands, but these never managed to sustain my interest. They were
dusty and colorless, lacking the spangly appeal of the things I
made at home. I was, however, quite taken with the sixth-grade
sugar cube Masada. I’m not sure whose idea it was to teach us this
important history lesson by having us fashion the mountaintop
bulwark out of coffee accompaniments, but the upshot was that we
ended up snacking on the Jewish people’s most tragic martyr site.
That the cubes were coated in white glue deterred us not one bit.
“It just makes it easier to eat two or three at a time,” we
enthused.

But if there was supposed to be some sort of lesson, it didn’t
stick. I never learned to associate craft with creed, mosaic with
Mosaic. I just wasn’t interested in crocheting prayer book cozies
or tallis bags. I’m not sure why. The only working artist I knew,
my cousin, made religious art. She was Isaac Bashevis Singer’s
illustrator and she painted lots of shtetl scenes, portraits of
women lighting Shabbat candles and men donning tefillin. I was
suitably impressed but felt no need to create ritual art of my own.
In part, I was afraid I would do it wrong, breaking some unknown
law by gluing pom-pom trim on a challah cover. But mostly I just
wasn’t all that compelled. I liked making things I could wear. If
there were some religious paraphernalia that would go well with my
red denim mini, I would have made scores. But there wasn’t.

Religious as I was, my projects were always secular; my sister’s
were always profane. At one point it became her habit to paint
obscenities in tidy cursive at the bottom of teacups she fashioned
so carefully in ceramics class. You’d finish your Earl Grey only to
find a polite request to go screw yourself. The saucer announced,
“Suck it.”

That was just fine with our mother. The main thing was that we
were productive. Create, create, create. Every summer we filled the
house with our crafty detritus, our braided rugs and hand-loomed
pot holders, our colorful accessories spun from recycled rags. A
pyramid of creations grew and grew on the designated arts and
crafts table, or, as our mother called it, the “arts and craps
table,” because there was always so much shit on it.

“It looks like Colonial Williamsburg in here,” our father would
mutter, coming home from work and finding nowhere to place his
briefcase but on a stack of hand-painted trivets.

He did not share our enthusiasm. Although he has a fine eye and
a sure hand – I once came across a sketch of a crumpled napkin he’d
drawn on a place mat while we waited for our food and was amazed by
its sensitive detail – his interests lie elsewhere. He expresses
himself creatively by rewiring the hi-fi components and packing the
trunk for family trips.

Our father had reason to be wary of our crafts. He was often the
victim of our artistic endeavors, the recipient of our misguided
creations. For his birthday one year I made him a puffy pipe holder
from quilt batting, cardboard, and calico. The end result was a
cute ‘n’ cozy country craft that somehow managed to emasculate
pipe-smoking, the most manly hobby in the world. My sister made him
a hand-shaped ashtray whose fingers promptly broke off, leaving
only the middle finger extended and whole. He was delighted, and it
remained on the coffee table for weeks, offending all visitors,
until it was finally relegated to a new home under the kitchen
sink.

Although my father is such a conservative dresser he won’t even
wear jeans, we were undaunted. We provided him with a loud,
ill-fitting wardrobe every year, subjecting him to garish ties,
flamboyant hats, belly-baring vests that had turned out too short,
floppy sweaters that had turned out too long. Sometimes the
tastelessness was by accident and sometimes it was by design. It is
a fact that my mother once spent months embroidering his surgical
scrubs with a colorful R. Crumb – inspired panel that proudly
proclaimed him ‘
BORN TO BOOGIE
’ in big puffy
letters. Even his own mother betrayed him, making him yarmulkes
from crushed velvet and gold trim that resembled nothing so much as
Victorian lamp shades.

Though he hates clutter, he is a sweet and sentimental man who
never throws away anything his children have made for him. This is
baggage for life, and we keep giving him more. As recently as last
year, I made him a ‘fruit case’: a hand-painted wooden box, lined
in purple fun fur, designed to protect the pears he complains
always get smashed when they go on picnics.

From time to time he tried to get us to tone things down, to
slow the pace of production. When I was about five he became
alarmed by the amount of fabric in the house – you could open a
closet and be faced with a solid wall of gabardine – and asked my
mother not to buy any more until she could make a dent in her back
stock. She tried, but she couldn’t always control herself. One of
my earliest memories is of a trip my mother and sister and I made
to San Francisco while my father was at a conference. We spent the
entire day driving from one fabric store to the next. In between,
my mother dashed into shops to buy us bribes – a doughnut, an
ice-cream cone, a candy bar – quizzing us before she handed them
over: “What are you going to tell Daddy we did today?’ ‘We went to
the museum’. ‘Very good. Have a cruller.” By the end of the day I
was covered in eczema and vomiting into paper bags. This was the
day we learned I was allergic to chocolate, and the day I learned
to associate crafting with sweetness and excess.

We knew no restraints. Every summer witnessed a bumper crop of
whatever craft had captivated us that particular year, our
creations filling the house like so much zucchini. In 1981 we got
caught in a cross-stitch frenzy and covered all available surfaces
with our tiny x’s. Another year it was needlepoint, and we churned
out a variety of accoutrements, stitching over plastic canvas that
could easily be made into cigarette cases, Bible covers, or, as we
favored, simple wall hangings. Borrowing the popular catchphrase of
the day, we needlepointed ‘Love is…’ canvases for everyone we knew.
‘Love is Grandparents’ went over big, but ‘Love is the Pool Guy’
was met with bewilderment. Our efforts were further compromised by
the fact that it was tricky to needle out legible letters and the
recipients often couldn’t read the mangled messages. ‘Low is the
Hoonet’? the Hoovers asked. ‘Lay us the Hooker’?

We just didn’t know when to stop, and our mother egged us on.
“Don’t let good taste hold you back,” she urged. She always
encouraged us toward the unsavory and the insipid, favoring fartsy
over artsy. She herself once made my father an anatomically correct
flasher doll from pantyhose stuffed with quilt batting, complete
with a Brillo-topped crotch and a tiny trench coat. More recently
she made a quilt that featured a little cabin amid some trees. When
I remarked that it looked like Ted Kaczynski’s shack, she was
delighted and immediately embroidered ‘
KEEP OUT. FBI, THIS
MEANS YOU
’ on the cabin’s front door.

We remain her proteges. We both went on to quasi careers in
crafts, me writing craft books, my sister selling ceramics. Because
I write for children, I try to keep it clean, but my sister has no
such compunctions. She puts her art school education to good use
making the line of ‘Shitbucket’ teacups she feels compelled to
produce. They sell remarkably well, but even if they didn’t, she’d
have to make them anyway. We were raised to believe that nothing is
more important than giving outlet to our crassest artistic
impulses. It informs everything we do. Even at her day job as a
waitress, Vicky used to express herself much as she does with her
ceramics, scrawling “Have a nice day, jerkoff!” inside customers’
takeout containers. Well, we all have our missions.

In the Bible the big craftsman is Bezalel, whose name means
“resting in the shade of the Divine,” a fitting appellation for one
so cool. I’ve always admired him, with his competence and easy
assurance. We never hear about his self-doubts. “Are the acacia and
gold leaf working together here?” “Do the purple and blue clash?”
“Am I really good enough?” Moses asks that question all the time,
but Bezalel just gets down to work. He’s charged with the most
important commission in human history and he just plows ahead,
making the Ark of the Covenant as though he’s assembling an
entertainment center from IKEA, no sweat. By way of explanation we
are told, simply, that he is “wise-hearted.”

I’m just wise-assed. This is what happens when you learn to
cross-stitch by making samplers that read “If Jackasses Could Fly,
This Place Would Be an Airport.” I never learned to play it
straight. It’s rare that I craft ritual objects, but when I do,
they tend to be kitschy commentaries on the form, items like a Dr.
Dre’dl or a Neil Tzedakah box.

For the most part I just don’t make them at all. For me,
crafting
is
the ritual. It’s as comforting as reciting
psalms, a meditative practice akin to prayer. It controls my tics
and hushes my ruminations. It’s secular but spiritual. I never feel
as peaceful as I do when I’m elbow-deep in a project. And on those
summer days, sitting on the air-conditioning vent while I needled
out chestnuts like “We Don’t Swim in Your Toilet…” I felt as
contented as I ever could. Not like I was resting in the shade of
the Divine, maybe, but pretty cool nonetheless.

∨
Devil in the Details
∧

F
or the better part
of my childhood, my Catholic mother was charged with my Jewish
education. She was armed only with an LP of
Fiddler on the
Roof
and a copy of
How to Be a Jewish Mother
a friend
had given her as a joke. As a result, my early religious
instruction consisted mostly of heavy sighs and gestures directed
at the ceiling. “Such children I have,” my mother prayed, lifting
an open palm skyward. “Oy vey. The questions they ask.” Our
questions were mostly about the holidays. The holidays are the
sticking point of the interfaith family, the time at which
differences are most noticeable and worrisome. We weren’t
particularly concerned about our immortal souls, but we did want to
know if there would be presents and candy and a day off from
school. My mother was straightforward and honest, answering our
theological questions with admirable frankness: No, Santa Claus
didn’t exist. The Easter Bunny was a fraud. And yes, the Tooth
Fairy was totally, totally gay. A few years ago I found the stash
of baby teeth and letters we’d exchanged for half-dollars over the
years. Following my mother’s instructions, we’d addressed our
letters “Dear Bruce.”