Devil in the Details (18 page)

We usually managed a festive dinner, even when it wasn’t
entirely appropriate. On more than one Yom Kippur, we marked the
occasion by having a big dinner out. On more than one Yom Kippur,
the menu included pork. Our other customs were similarly off,
informed less by religious sensibility than an interfaith
multicultural flair for entertaining. Once, my mother brought home
a Rosh Hashana piñata. “It’s festive,” she explained. “And we might
feel like hitting something later.” My father’s family, Russian by
way of Shanghai, contributed piroshki and red envelopes of lucky
New Year money. I was in college before I learned this was a
Chinese custom and not a Jewish one.

To my friends, it was all foreign anyway. “Happy Rosh Mañana!”
they wished me. There were too many holidays, all with funny names;
who could keep them straight? They could never remember which was
the festive new-year one and which was the somber fasting one.
“Have a super-fun holiday,” they urged me the day before Yom
Kippur. “Don’t eat too much of that kegel!” One year, while I was
home fasting, a friend dropped by bearing a steaming white box.
“It’s a Yom Kippur pizza,” he explained. “I don’t know how your
people celebrate, but this is what my folk always eat on holidays.”
Apparently his folk weren’t concerned with cholesterol or kashrut;
it was a sausage-pepperoni combo.

My friends were confused by the whole High Holiday production,
but they understood one thing: I got to stay home from school, and
this was to be envied. Every fall my classmates pelted me with
questions about conversion. “What if you’ve already been
circumcised?” they asked. “Are you good to go?”

I answered their questions politely, but inside I scoffed at
their ignorance. They had
no idea
. My days off were hard-won
in annual pitched battles with my parents. The outcome was always
the same: I was permitted Yom Kippur and one day of Rosh Hashana,
but I was nuts if I thought I was getting off for Sukkot. “Suck
what?” my family asked. “You made that one up.”

I knew better than to ask for Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah.
Even
I
thought they sounded fake. But they’re holy days all.
Be they Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox, practicing Jews take
these days off, but my parents refused to believe me. Every year,
they made me spend those days fuming in a classroom. I was furious,
but I could hardly blame them. Right or wrong, I always argued my
point with equal fervor. I had insisted just as stridently that I
needed to procure some hyssop to cleanse the ritual impurity I had
incurred by swimming in a public pool. How were they to distinguish
between two practices that looked equally crazy? I was going to
school, and that was that.

Going to class on holidays was an agonizing ordeal. Every word I
had to write, every number I had to calculate – each violation of
the holy day was torturous, a bamboo shoot under a nail. But I was
determined to get at least partial credit for observing the
holiday, and that meant doing the absolute minimum of schoolwork.
The point was to do as little as I possibly could without earning
detention, where, I was sure, I would be required to violate the
holiday in some other way, cleaning blackboards or helping the
loadies heat their freebase. When I had to write, I used short
words and abbreviations; one less letter meant one less sin. I
pretended not to know answers, feigned hand cramps and headaches,
anything to avoid participation. For an unrepentant know-it-all
like me, playing dumb was abject misery. Ultimately, though, it was
a very satisfying arrangement, one that killed two birds with one
stone: by shirking the work, I managed to both avoid violating the
holiday and punish myself for coming to school in the first place.
Asked to diagram an independent clause on the board, I puzzled my
classmates and embarrassed myself with a succinct gem like “I no
good now; food make sick.” It was thirty-three letters shorter than
“I am nauseous today; the Russian fish pastries did not agree with
me.”

It didn’t seem fair. Here, finally, were holidays that weren’t
competing with more exciting Christian festivals and still my
interfaith family was getting in the way. School was the least of
it.

My parents and my sister all have birthdays that fall within a
three-week period in midautumn; invariably, they are on the High
Holidays. My sister’s sixteenth birthday landed square on Yom
Kippur. I had hoped to spend the evening at synagogue, fasting,
light as an angel in a white dress, swaying with shut eyes as the
plaintive melody of the Kol Nidre transported me to a higher
dimension. Instead I had to accompany the rest of the family to the
restaurant my sister chose, a sprawling, kitsch-laden,
brass-fixtured establishment named Bobby McGee’s. It was favored by
prom-goers and young singles, who loved its Top-40 DJ and menu of
pizzajitas and deep-fried finger foods. The restaurant’s signature
was the commemorative keepsake ceramic cups its cocktails came in.
You could drink your piña colada out of a lady’s boot, a bathtub,
or, best of all, a toilet.

I spent the entire night sulking in a drop-waisted dress six
years too young for me and picking at my steamed vegetable plate.
“What’s the matter, Jen?” my family inquired, shouting over the
“woo-hoos!” of our fellow diners. “Buck up. Come on. Have another
toilet full of virgin strawberry daiquiri.”

I wanted to go off to the bathroom to fume in peace or maybe to
pray in a stall, but that meant crossing the
Saturday Night
Fever
-style neon checkerboard dance floor. It was crowded with
singles in synthetic fibers who wouldn’t move out of the way for a
seventeen-year-old girl in enormous glasses dressed like Rebecca of
Sunnybrook Farm. I remained at the table, gripping my toilet and
thinking such horrible thoughts that I would have plenty to atone
for the next morning.

That was the last Yom Kippur I would spend with my family for
fifteen years. Between the disinterest and the pork, I thought I
was better off celebrating the High Holidays alone. We would
resolve the Christmas conflict and the Passover problems, but the
crutches that got us through those times – a.m. drinking and bitter
sarcasm – felt out of place on the holiest of days. My parents
would call me to wish me a
goot yontiff
, and I would keep my
distance, and this seemed to work out very well for everyone.

But fifteen years have passed since my religiosity made my
family want to smother me, fifteen years since their flippancy made
me want to stone them. Now even my father fasts on Yom Kippur,
though he insists he does it only for the weight-loss benefits.
Ever so slowly, we are inching toward a détente.

The High Holidays are about tradition, but they’re also about
reconciliation. I’ve reconciled to my interfaith lot, even grown to
appreciate it. It was in this spirit of reconciliation that I
recently invited my parents to join me for our first Rosh Hashana
together in many years. The theme was perfect, reflecting my Jewish
heritage, my rural upbringing, and my shikse roots: Rosh HaShania,
a tribute to country-western darling Shania Twain. Over Little
Debbies and cheap red wine, we wished for a good and sweet new
year. It was.

∨
Devil in the Details
∧

W
hen I was four and
my sister was three, our parents enrolled us in the Lutheran
preschool favored by our neighbors. Normally I get nervous when I
am surrounded by autoharp-playing Christians, but we liked it
there. It was a cheerful place run by friendly, affectionate
grandmothers. If our parents were worried about us picking up any
Protestant traits like, say, a work ethic, their fears were put to
rest when we failed to complete any assignments besides Snack and
Nap. The scant religious instruction they offered was of a
non-sectarian feel-good stripe, a Care Bear belief system that
taught us to share and recycle.

It was there that I learned to pray. Prayer was like a phone
call to heaven, our teachers told us. You could say thanks, or you
could ask for something very important, like peace and happiness.
We knelt in a circle and one by one we said our prayers out loud.
Some children prayed for an end to hunger. Others prayed for all
the sick babies in the world. I prayed for make-up.

Had I been pressed, I might have explained that I simply wanted
to make the world a more beautiful place. What I really wanted was
a little sparkle. At four, it was already very apparent to me that
I had the kind of features that required some extra help. Four was
an awkward age for me. I hadn’t quite worked out a wardrobe
strategy and I’d been given a regrettable short haircut that
frequently got me mistaken for a boy. Nothing would put a stop to
that quicker than a nice smart lipstick, I thought.

Prayer was the only way I was going to get it. My mother refused
to buy me make-up, a position I found completely unreasonable. Why
shouldn’t a preschooler wear a little lip color and mascara? I was
just trying to work with what I had.

My mother had been intractable, but now here was this wonderful
thing called prayer. Here was a force that could overrule her. I
began making fervent entreaties each night before bed. “When I wake
up please let there be rose frost lipstick, powder blusher, and
cream eye shadow in sea foam green on my bedside table,” I prayed.
“If it will make it easier for You I can mark the pages in the Avon
catalog. Thank You very much.”

Three weeks later my mother produced a yellow plastic compact
shaped like a baby chick, which opened to reveal a mirror and a tin
of solid perfume. I was captivated. Sure, it wasn’t really make-up.
It was colorless and did nothing for my thin upper lip or patchy
eyebrows. I didn’t care. It smelled wonderful. It was good
enough.

And it had come to me through prayer, thereby forever cementing
the link between cosmology and cosmetology in my brain. From that
moment on, like many women of deep faith – Tammy Faye Baker, Mary
Kay Ash, Anita Bryant – I believed a spiritual life demanded the
liberal and constant use of cosmetics and accessories. I worshipped
all the trappings of womanhood: jewelry, make-up, purses, and panty
hose. These things were holy. They were prim and pure. They were
also immensely satisfying to my obsessive-compulsive mind. The way
I saw it, they kept your hands and mind busy, giving you something
to retouch, smooth, adjust, and pluck out of crevices. Sure, it was
compulsive behavior, but it was compulsive behavior that paid off
in the form of a more attractive self.

My other compulsive habits did not necessarily do this. I had
some grooming compulsions, but they did not leave me looking
particularly well-groomed. There was, for instance, the
trichotillomania, the urge to pull out hair. Of all
obsessive-compulsives, trichotillomaniacs are the easiest to spot,
because they’re the ones without any eyebrows. My case was mild and
occasional, but every once in a while, I was overwhelmed. Hairs
demanded to be pulled, skin to be picked. A little bare patch here,
an infected sore there – it was nothing you’d notice, not if
properly concealed with the foundation and hairpieces I begged my
mother to buy.

These were not attractive habits. Less attractive still was the
constant compulsion to pick my nose. I knew how bad it looked, but
I just couldn’t keep my finger out of my nostril. “That’s our
little miner,” my mother commented, when strangers looked on in
horror. “We think she has a real future as a garbage picker. When
she’s old enough we’re going to send her to Rio to teach those
Brazilian street kids a thing or two.”

My mother joked about it, but it bothered her, and she did what
she could to get me to stop. “Digging for gold again, I see,” she
would sigh, driving the car, as I looked out the window and rooted
absently around in a nostril. “Well, you can pan that stream all
you want, but it’s never going to pay off.”

I ignored the flip comments, but the bribe got my attention. If
I could keep my fingers holstered and my nose loaded for a month,
my mother promised, I would get a ring and bracelet set. I was
helpless before shiny, girly trinkets, and my mother won. Soon my
finger was adorned with a tiny faux emerald that I had not, for
once, harvested myself.

My mother had discovered my Achilles’ heel, and it was a strappy
open-toed little number. But I’d sold out too cheap. The ring and
bracelet set was all I was going to get, and after the perfume
compact, the make-up pipeline dried up, too. My mother did,
however, permit me a purse and some low-heeled mules. I took to
shuffling behind her on her errands, stuffing my pocket-book with
anything that was free: brochures on high blood pressure, samples
of hand lotion, Sweet’n Low packets, Kleenex, and aluminum
ashtrays. “It’s like shopping with Great-Aunty Mee-Maw,” my mother
muttered. Hardly, I thought. Great-aunties, at least, were allowed
blush.

I got nothing. I was really hoping for some frilly lingerie.
Here, too, my mother was intractable. Exactly what is so disturbing
about a four-year-old wearing a French-cut matching bra and panty
set? I wanted to know. Once again I was forced to rely on my own
resourcefulness. After I saw a picture of a flapper wearing a
garter, I tried to fashion one for myself by putting a ponytail
elastic around my thigh. It had a one-inch diameter. By the time my
mother noticed what I’d done, my leg was maroon.