Devil in the Details (2 page)

This probably wasn’t a concern in normal Jewish homes, I
realized, even observant ones, but I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t
know any better. I knew nothing. I did not know, for instance, that
girls weren’t required to wear yarmulkes. I agonized over the
issue. Should I wear a yarmulke all the time, even to school? I
really thought I should, but I just wasn’t brave enough. A fedora,
yes; but a yarmulke was too much.

After several weeks of debate I decided I really only needed to
cover my head when I prayed. The thing was, I couldn’t stop
praying. Since I rarely had a hat with me, I grabbed whatever was
near: napkins, paper towels, Kleenex. Mostly I just used my hand.
My fingers kept flying up to hover over my head while I quickly
muttered a self-composed blessing. I pretended I was waving, or
swatting, or scratching. This was not as effective a ruse as I
imagined, and I ended up looking not only crazy but infested.

My head was certainly buzzing. It was a beehive, a switchboard
with a hundred extensions lighting up at once. The only thing that
quieted my brain was prayer. I wished it were something else.
Prayer was dull and time-consuming. If only I found relief in more
entertaining activities, like watching television or styling
hair.

Instead, I had prayer. Soon my day was dominated by lengthy
devotional sessions, conducted every morning, afternoon, and
evening. I knew Jews were supposed to pray three times a day, but I
didn’t know the actual prayers, so I composed my own. First was ten
minutes of chanting for a dozen missing children whose names I’d
memorized after seeing them on the news. Next was extended pleading
on behalf of all Americans held hostage abroad. After that I
apologized for everything I had done wrong or would do wrong. Then
I prayed for my family, begging forgiveness for their excessive
pork consumption, and finished up by praying I wouldn’t die
alone.

On Saturday the prayers were doubled and tripled. Because there
wasn’t a synagogue service within walking distance, I conducted my
own. Because I did not know what a service consisted of, I made one
up. From nine o’clock until half past noon I sat primly in my room,
reading my Bible and my
Junior Jewish Encyclopedia
, line by
line, not moving to a new line until I was sure I’d understood the
last one completely. When that portion of the service was
concluded, I read the ‘Torah Thoughts’ feature in the Jewish
newspaper, followed by the wedding announcements. Then I got on my
knees and did back exercises. I was fairly certain this wasn’t part
of the traditional Shabbat service, but I thought it was a nice
closer. Sound body equals sound mind and sound spirit.

Sabbath observance had come as an afterthought. I was already
observing the minutiae of jubilee year agricultural laws; I figured
I probably should be keeping Shabbat, too, whatever that entailed.
I had only the slimmest grasp of what was and wasn’t permitted. The
Torah forbids spinning, threshing, and sowing, and though I had
some new hobbies, they didn’t include these activities. My
questions were far more practical. Was it okay to go to the
bathroom? Was it okay to
wipe?
This wasn’t the sort of thing
you could ask your rabbi.

To be on the safe side, I decided, I would do as little as
possible. Was reading magazines okay? Better not. Climbing stairs?
Oh, why ask for trouble? Activity after activity fell away. When
there was nothing left I decided it wasn’t enough to just observe
Shabbat; I needed to observe it retroactively. I was horrified that
I hadn’t kept the Sabbath day holy up until now. According to the
Torah the penalty for forgetting the Sabbath day was death. By age
twelve, I figured, I’d violated it about ten thousand times, and
now it was time to make things right. I would go through everything
I owned, determine what had been purchased or made or washed on a
Saturday, and get rid of it.

This process was made much easier thanks to an earlier
compulsion. For the previous two years I’d had a mandatory bedtime
ritual – I had to type one line describing something I’d done that
day, in all caps, punctuated by twelve exclamation points. This
document now proved incredibly useful, because if I’d
“
WATCHED BEST EVER EPISODE OF MANIMAL
TONIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!
” – Friday night – I could figure that
the entry that came next – “
GOT AWESOME LACOSTE SHIRT
AT MARSHALL’S TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!!
” – was from Saturday and
that the shirt was now tainted, ill-gotten, and had to go.

This amounted to a mammoth pile of stuff. I couldn’t keep it
with the rest of my things, as the Shabbat-violating profanity of
it all was contagious and could infect everything. It had to be
quarantined, banished. For years I’d been using the cupboard under
my bathroom sink as a graveyard for failed experiments, moldering
jars of homemade bubble bath and Frankensteinian combinations of
soap, and this seemed as good a place as any to hide it all. I
turned the cupboard into a musty Gehenna of hair ribbons, socks,
stationery supplies, and clothes.

But I quickly outgrew it. There was so much to hide. Before long
I’d established lots of little burial sites, hiding spots, dumping
grounds, where I could excrete my unwanted things and kick sand
over them.

I could not throw these things away. There was an urge to
quarantine, but there was an equally strong urge to hoard, save,
store away. Newspapers were the worst. It’s a classic OCD
compulsion, so widespread and primal I often wonder what
obsessive-compulsives hoarded before the invention of the printing
press. Did they fill their homes with parchment? Were stone tablets
stacked up to their ceilings? Did their families beg them to throw
out the scrolls, at least the ones they’d already read?

We’re lucky now; newspapers are fairly compact. I was even
luckier, because I didn’t have to save the whole paper, just little
bits of it. I had noticed that some religious people dropped vowels
when they wrote certain words, like G –
d
and L –
rd
,
because these words were sacred and couldn’t be thrown away. I had
to clip them out, them and all their synonyms. I was left with
hundreds of tiny scraps, hundreds of
Holy Fathers
and
Blessed Kings
. When I couldn’t figure out what to do with
them I started tucking them into books, hiding them in the pages of
the dictionary and the encyclopedia. Every time someone looked up a
word a shower of holy confetti would fall out. “Wonder how those
got there,” I would murmur, hoping no one saw me as I gathered up
the scraps and kissed them to erase the insult of being on the
ground.

It was around this time that my family began to notice I was
acting funny. I’d managed to hide it for the first few months. The
haphazard kashrut and lengthy prayer sessions had passed
unremarked. But the hand gestures, paper hats, and floor kissing
had become impossible to ignore. The washing, too, had become a
problem. Given the amount of pork we kept in the house it was a
safe assumption that every surface was liberally basted with pig
fat. I felt compelled to wash my hands upwards of fifty times a
day. Getting clean enough to eat was an elaborate and
time-consuming process I had to begin a good half hour before
dinner. The meal was invariably delayed, but if I touched anything
I would have to start all over again, so I wandered around the
house with my hands held up in front of myself like a surgeon until
it was time to sit down.

“All scrubbed in for your big casserolectomy, Dr. Traig?” my
mother asked.

“Just doing some isometric hand exercises here,” I lied. “Every
girl wants shapely wrists and well-toned fingers.”

But the gloves, it seemed, were off. My family had politely
ignored my behavior for the first few months, but now they were
relentless. They began confronting me, and I began lying.

“Is there a reason your napkin is full of meatballs?” my mother
wanted to know.

“Can you tell me why there’s an altar of pinecones in the
backyard?”

“Would you know anything about the bleach spots on the
upholstery?”

I lied more than I ever had in my life. I lied, and lied and
lied. Sure, not lying was one of the Ten Commandments, and not
eating meatballs wasn’t even in the top two hundred, but lying
seemed preferable.

I had to lie. My new habits were secret. I was open and honest
about my other neuroses, my hypochondria and my fear that the dog
could read my thoughts, but I knew this new business was something
that had to stay hidden. This was impossibly weird. This wasn’t a
kooky affectation, like, oh, vegetarianism. This was something they
locked you up for.

Unlike Jewish law, getting locked up was something I knew about.
By age twelve I’d spent more time on a psych ward than is probably
healthy for a preteen. Three years earlier, my favorite babysitter
had started acting strangely, doing odd little things like refusing
to eat and passing out and threatening to hurt herself, and now she
was hospitalized fairly regularly. The hospital was only a block
from our house, and I was permitted to visit her, on the locked
ward, whenever she was there.

This may not have been the healthiest environment for a
grade-schooler. But I liked it. As far as I was concerned it was a
magic forest of secondhand smoke and Thorazine, quiet and peaceful,
where I could pass a happy hour watching soap operas in the lounge
with the other patients. The meds made them glazed and sluggish,
but they were all very nice.

“You want a cigarette, sweetheart?” they offered. “You want some
of this hard candy? Listen to me, I’m going to tell you something
very important, because you’re a nice little girl. Jesus is coming,
and when he does, the aliens are going to start eating people, but
don’t worry, I’ll tell them to just leave you alone.”

I’d spent so much time there, had shared their snacks and
magazines. Maybe I’d caught something. Maybe I was just like them.
Or maybe, and this was even scarier, maybe I was perfectly sane.
Maybe the troubling thoughts weren’t coming from my own
malfunctioning brain but from heaven. Maybe I was a prophet, sent
to teach the people of earth to wash their hands properly. Maybe
that was what was coming next. Maybe tomorrow I would wake up and
feel compelled to wear a sandwich board and hand out leaflets, to
yell crazy exhortations through a bullhorn.

“Sons of Adam, use the hand soap, the liquid kind! The bar stuff
just makes you dirtier!”

“Daughters of Eve, use a paper towel to turn off the faucet!
Otherwise you’ll just pick up the dirty germs you were trying to
wash off in the first place!”

It was too horrible to contemplate. In the meantime I would just
keep wearing paper towels and lying. I figured I’d go on living the
rest of my life this way, maybe find a job sterilizing headsets and
eventually settle down with someone who found my affectations
charming.

But my family kept asking questions, and finally, after months
of washing, it was time to come clean. There followed a series of
many teary scenes in which I confessed to everything. The stash of
first fruits, the disposable yarmulkes, the urge to lick the
parquet flooring – I accounted for it all. But the explanations I
offered, now true, were no less crazy than the lies I’d been
telling the past few months. My family was bewildered.

“Let me get this straight,” my father puzzled. “You’re telling
me you’re acting this way because
the Torah commands you to?
That’s the reason? Are you sure you’re not sniffing paint? You sure
you’re not just drunk?” My parents knew how to deal with grain
alcohol. But what were they to do with grain offerings?

Still, they tried. They read some articles, asked some
questions. They tried to learn the lingo my new lifestyle would
require, words like
parve, milchig
, and
treyf
. My
mother mastered these in no time but continued to insist on calling
Shabbat the Sabbath, which I didn’t like at all. It sounded so
Puritan, so seventeenth-century, and I worried that next she’d be
calling me Goody Traig.

As it was, she liked to pretend I was Howard Hughes. “Those
toenails are coming in nicely, How,” she trilled. “Soon they’ll be
long enough to clack against the linoleum and we’ll be able to hear
you coming. Now stay right there, I’m going to go clean the canned
fruit with Handi Wipes and fix you a snack.”

I didn’t care for the flip tone, but if that was the trade-off,
that was fine. If the price of getting to act crazy was having my
family think I actually was crazy, that was okay, so long as I
didn’t have to stop washing furniture and binding sheaves. It was
so liberating, not having to hide and lie and pretend any longer.
My family continued to badger and restrict me, but now I could
argue with them openly. It was almost fun, almost funny.

“Why won’t you wear the new dress we bought for you?” my father
wanted to know.

“Because it is written: Thou shalt not garb thyself in robes of
hybrid fibers.”

“I think mayhap thou hast misunderstood,” my father returned.
“Now rise up, return to thy quarters, and garb thyself as thine
elders commandest thee, or thou will lose thy Bible-reading
privileges.”

Still, they let a lot of things go. It wasn’t so much that they
approved, or even accepted it, but they were amused. I was wearing
paper hats and talking to the bookcases. It was sad and annoying,
but it was also fairly entertaining, and we didn’t have cable. I
had become the Jenny Show, a kooky sitcom, wacky high jinks
twenty-four hours a day. Sure, I mostly aired repeats, but I was
the only thing on.

But it was always the same rerun, and things quickly got out of
hand. It’s a short journey from giving up bacon to deciding you
shouldn’t bite your nails because the protein that composes them
might have come from pork. The washing became incessant, the
prayers never-ending. Things seemed okay for a month or two.