Devil in the Details (21 page)

I have never been an easy person, but I can say with confidence
that at no point in my life was I as all-around unpleasant as I was
my junior year. With the exception of a few close and patient
friends, the only people who would put up with me were the ones
trying to pad their own college applications. We didn’t want
someone to hang out with – we wanted someone to delegate to.
Constantly dispensing World’s Finest fund-raising chocolate bars,
we were a league of human vending machines, cold and efficient. My
sister could barely contain her scorn reading the chilly
inscriptions they wrote in my yearbook. “Listen to this one,” she
snorted. “It’s like a letter of recommendation. “Jenny: You have
many wonderful talents and I hope you’ll make the most of them. You
are thorough and responsible. Thanks for always being there when I
needed a’” – Vicky paused, convulsed with laughter – “ ‘a
Secretary⁄Treasurer.””

In what anyone could have interpreted as a cry for help, I even
joined the Drama Club. I can’t imagine what possessed me to join
these ranks. I didn’t sing, dance, or act, and I couldn’t have
thought it was actually going to help me get into college. Maybe I
was working out some hostility toward my family by forcing them to
come to show after agonizing show, including one production of
South Pacific
that was so bad even the cast referred to it
as “South Pathetic.”

I stank up the stage pretty good all on my own. Mousy and shy, I
was always cast against type as an adenoidal moll. My family
visibly winced listening to me practice my lines. “Shuuwah, honey,”
I brayed. “I can get yuh the infahmation. But it’ll cost yuh!” My
costumes were invariably skimpy and tight, a real liability when we
had to wear them to school to promote the show. The worst was from
the ‘Bushel and a Peck’ number in
Guys and Dolls
. I had to
spend an entire school day in a halter top, obscenely tight cutoffs
with a heart patch on the rear, fishnet stockings, and black high
heels. My mother eyed me warily as I tottered off to class. “You
know, I saw the film version, and I don’t remember the role of
‘Barnyard Slut,”’ she said, rolling her irises all the way
back.

Four-inch heels aside, I was clearly unstable, and my stint in
the Drama Club prompted my parents to look into getting me some
help. Washing and praying were fine, but acting and singing – that
was too much. They made some calls. I eavesdropped nervously. Was
this the incident that would finally land me in therapy? Should I
start working on a tearful first-visit monologue?

In the end, my parents made an appointment with a dietician
instead. That was even better: it meant I was troubled
and
thin. Secretly I was pleased; secretly I’d been disappointed when
my orange skin had failed to result in a hospital stay. I was being
taken seriously. Now there were specialists. Now it was
official.

I saw the dietician two or three times and enjoyed the visits
enormously. Her office had fun-house mirrors that let you see
yourself fat and thin. There were plastic foods to show reasonable
portion sizes and latex models of orange, glistening fat. It was
all very interesting, and best of all, I got to spend an hour
talking about the most fascinating thing in the world, my eating
habits.

They were very bad, it turned out. The dietitian did her best to
put a scare in me. I was jeopardizing my health. I would develop
anemia, osteoporosis, and possibly organ failure. I was already
orange, and things were only going to get worse. I had to stop this
nonsense.

I ate up the attention, but I had no intention of changing my
habits or of admitting there was a problem. I wasn’t trying to lose
weight, I offered coyly. I just didn’t have time to eat, what with
all my rehearsals, you know, life on the wicked stage. The
dietitian gave me a withering look that suggested I wasn’t as good
an actress as I thought I was and resignedly sent me on my way.

Shortly thereafter my mother decided to take her own show on the
road. It was just a brief trip back East to help move her elderly
aunts, but it couldn’t have come at a better time. With my mother
gone, I could take my eating disorder in the exciting new direction
I’d been contemplating for a while. Well, it wasn’t so new. It was
the exact same thing I’d done four years earlier. Once again, I was
becoming increasingly bothered by the idea of contamination. There
was so much unkosher food in the house. How could I be sure it
wasn’t creeping into my meals? I could not, and I was going to have
to do something about it. This was crazy, of course, but in my
defense I would like to point out that my sister had a lifelong
history of tainting others’ food, a hobby her future career as a
waitress would give her plenty of opportunities to indulge. Though
it’s strictly an after-hours, avocational hobby now, she has, in
the distant past, served up plenty of sneezers. She once dealt with
a difficult vegan patron by surreptitiously stirring his beer with
bacon. In high school she worked at a pizza parlor, where she hid
pepperoni in the pies ordered by a snotty vegetarian classmate. I
have seen her serve her own friends salsa seasoned with cigarette
ash and cookies she licked simply because she was bored. Sometimes
she just can’t help herself.

With a sister who couldn’t be trusted and parents who were
finally, if temporarily, busy elsewhere, I decided to limit my diet
to hermetically sealed processed-cheese singles and a low-calorie
bread whose chief ingredient was wood pulp. Of course, neither one
of these items was actually kosher or, for that matter, actually
food, but for some reason they satisfied my concerns.

My sister, meanwhile, was marking my mother’s absence the way
normal teenagers do, toasting it with a few wine coolers. The night
before my mother was due to come home, my father got a 2:00 a.m.
call asking him to come down to the police station to pick up his
drunk, sticky daughter. Apparently a cop had found Vicky and a
friend lying on a curb outside a party, and he’d been unimpressed
when they introduced themselves as Vicky Bartles and Lori
Jaymes.

Vicky and I had visited no end of humiliations on our parents,
but ‘juvy’ was a new one. Our parents had forbidden a host of
things they were sure would lead right to delinquency – pierced
ears, camping, beef jerky – and now their efforts had come to
naught. Their daughter had a rap sheet. In the end, Vicky’s minor
infraction would be erased after a court appearance and a couple
visits with a juvenile officer, but at the time we were fairly
convinced she was one kegger away from an orange jumpsuit herself.
We pictured ourselves visiting her in the Big House. “We would have
brought you a carton of cigarettes, but we think it’s better you
learn to fend for yourself,” we would say. “If you want a smoke,
you’ll have to earn it giving lap dances to the guards like the
other girls do.”

My father informed my mother of my sister’s misadventure on the
way home from the airport. My mother nodded, came in the house, and
put on the bathrobe she would wear for the next week, refusing to
speak to anyone but Saint Jude. Between the drinking and the
sleepwear, it was as if my family had been replaced by a road
company of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
.

Well, at least it took the heat off me. I had a lot going on and
was pleased that I would be left unmolested. Goodness knows I had
enough to do. Besides all my extracurricular activities, I had
returned to some old hobbies: fervent praying, repetitive washing,
and writing theological manifestos. I couldn’t help myself. I began
to pray more and more, spending a minimum of two hours a day
perched under a yarmulke on a makeshift pew, rocking and whispering
the half-cocked devotions I’d composed myself. “Please help me to
be a better person. Please save the Ethiopians from starving.
Please forgive me for wearing Daisy Dukes to school,” I implored.
If I felt I hadn’t said my prayers in the right order or with the
proper thoughts in mind, I would have to repeat them. When I
finished with that, I filled my diary with strange, keening
entries: “How amazing is it that the Jewish people have survived?
Jenny, when you are feeling down, remember this!!!!!!!!”

I was up writing, cleaning, and praying until midnight, then
rose at dawn to begin the three hours of writing, cleaning, and
praying I had to do before school. In my free time, I rewashed
clean dishes. It was a full and exciting life.

By Passover, it was clear that the problems I’d had earlier were
back in a big way. I was hip-deep in a full-blown flare-up, and
this time it was much worse. My previous experiences with
scrupulosity had been mostly compulsive – I washed, I performed odd
rituals – but not particularly obsessive. Except for my annual
summer flare-up, I hadn’t been plagued by ruminations, the
disturbing thoughts that can consume OCD sufferers. This time,
however, ruminations hijacked my life.

What would happen was this: I would be struck by a pressing
theological question, like “Is it okay to sit at my assigned desk
when there’s a strong possibility it was contaminated by the skank
who occupies it during second period?” I would have to resolve the
question before I did anything else, like move or speak. It was a
neurotic’s version of freeze tag. If I messed up and, say,
scratched my nose before I’d resolved my theological quandary, I
would have to think the whole question through again, until I
resolved it without interruption. At that point I would invariably
be struck by another pressing question: “Is it okay to watch this
educational film strip or is
The Miracle of Digestion
in
fact a graven image?”

Before long I developed the stuttering walk that’s so typical of
OCD sufferers. Some can’t walk contiguously because they’re afraid
of stepping on cracks or crosses or blood. I couldn’t walk because
I would become paralyzed by a theological question that had to be
resolved before I put left foot in front of right. It could take me
half an hour to cross the quad. Conversation became impossible. I
would break off in the middle of sentences, knit my brow, and set
my mind to the question at hand: “Is cologne kosher, and if it’s
not, is it okay to talk to someone who’s wearing so much Love’s
Baby Soft I can taste it?”

Unable to focus in class, I would wander out, only to be found
rocking and muttering in the outdoor amphitheater. Being in Drama
Club was finally coming in handy. When questioned, I could simply
explain that I was ‘getting in character’. “You see, Mr. Davis, I’m
playing a hooker who’s trying to ‘kick.’ I was just out here trying
to imagine what it must be like to have the DTs.” Then I would
begin contemplating the next quandary: “Does the Torah say it’s
okay to portray a hooker, and is a heart of gold a mitigating
factor?”

This behavior wasn’t going to help me get into a good college, I
realized, but I couldn’t help it. Besides, what did college matter
when we were all going to die, when everything was contaminated and
dirty with death? This had suddenly become a real preoccupation,
the taint of corpses. The Torah has a lot to say about it. A dead
body is impure, imparting a contamination that’s contagious, that
infects not just the person who touches it, but all that that
person then touches. It’s a mess, and getting yourself purified is
a complicated procedure that takes lots of time, high priests,
livestock, and herbs.

This turns out to be another one of those things that was really
only an issue in Temple times, but I didn’t know that. And in my
case the impurity was a legitimate concern. Most teenage girls
don’t have all that many run-ins with dead bodies, but I was the
daughter of a surgeon. My father was contaminated all the time, and
he brought contamination home with him. It infected the chairs and
the doorknobs, the dishes and the floors. It was everywhere.

Even independent of my father, I had run-ins of my own. I was
taking Anatomy, and sometimes there were body parts. They were
usually animal, which was bad enough, but sometimes they were
human, which was unthinkable. One day a friend placed a human skull
on my binder. It was just a harmless joke, but as far as I was
concerned she might as well have taken a giant dump on it or
sprinkled it with anthrax. This was the worst possible
contamination and there was no help for it. I could not throw the
binder away, as it contained all the notes I would need to pass the
stupid class, but I couldn’t let the impurity stand. I agonized for
days. In the end I wiped the binder down with bleach and 409 a few
hundred times, then placed it on the guest bed in my room. The bed,
in turn, absorbed the impurity, and in my mind it hung on to it
long after I’d passed my final and thrown the binder away. The
taboo against touching that bed remained so deeply entrenched that
it was as though someone had died on the bed itself, and almost
twenty years later I still can’t bring myself to sleep in it.

Everywhere I looked, there was dirt and death, contamination and
sin and wrongness. By May I was vibrating, a quivering mass of
misfiring neurons. I couldn’t sit still; I couldn’t walk; I
couldn’t sustain a single activity for more than a few seconds. I
couldn’t do my homework or pay attention in class. And I was
starting to look very, very weird. My skin had returned to its
normal freakishly pale tone, but everything else had gone wonky.
I’d given up all grooming products on the assumption that they were
unkosher. “Unless you plan to eat the stick of deodorant, it’s
probably okay to use it,” my father argued, but I was unconvinced.
OCD is hell on the complexion, what with all the washing, and
without the benefit of balms and emollients my lips split and bled,
my hands cracked and wept, my hair frizzed. A Jewish girl just
can’t go without conditioner; “Thou shalt use a heat pack weekly”
is the unspoken eleventh commandment. Without styling tools my
already pneumatic mall hair quickly degenerated into a shaggy,
damaged Jewfro, carrying enough static electricity to power a
waffle iron.