Devil in the Details (22 page)

When I lost my glasses, a stylish and expensive pair I’d picked
out before I went daft, I felt obliged to punish myself by
replacing them with the most age-inappropriate pair I could find.
They were enormous, covering a full half of my face, with peach
Lucite frames. I believe they were from the Sophia Loren
collection; only Sophia could have pulled them off. With my hair, I
ended up looking like Gene Shalit.

To make matters worse, I’d decided most of my wardrobe was
impure. If it had been washed on Shabbat, it was out. If it had
touched something that had been washed on Shabbat, it was out. If
it had been touched by an insect, worn to a place where someone or
something had died, including an insect, or worn during the
commission of what I would now consider a sin, it was out. It was
also out if it was made from more than one fiber. The Torah bans
garments made from a mix of linen and wool, and I extrapolated this
to include any fiber combination. Call it crazy, but I still think
it’s a good idea to ban poly blends.

In the end I was left with a uniform consisting of some
military-style pants that had fit when I was twenty pounds heavier
and an enormous man’s plaid flannel shirt. It was a strange choice
on all counts. Religiously, it didn’t make sense; Orthodox girls
don’t wear men’s clothes. And stylewise, it was a disaster. Ten
years later it might have been considered grunge, but at the time I
just looked like a nearsighted Jewish chola. I so closely resembled
the Mexican gang members at our high school that my friends dubbed
me “La Sad Girl.”

But even gang members had the sense to strip down to undershirts
in the heat. I remained swathed in head-to-toe flannel. One
sweltering afternoon my mother and I sat watching a talk show whose
topic was ‘My Teen Dresses Too Sexy’. “Take notes, Jenny,” my
mother suggested. “Don’t those girls look nice and cool? I like the
one in the red vinyl number with the cut-outs over the chest and
fanny. You’d look good in something like that.”

It was around this time that I became a real social liability.
Sure, my parents could try to bring me to the neighbors’ house for
a dinner party, but there was a pretty good chance that halfway
through the meal they would find me in the front yard, using the
garden hose to wash an invisible contaminant off my feet. You never
knew what I was going to do, and you could be sure I was going to
wear something that would require extensive explanations. “It’s
quite a look, isn’t it, this military getup?” my mother would
offer. “It’s Jenny’s costume for the school play. She’s playing a
Vietnamese commando, and they’ve got her in character ‘round the
clock. It’s a ‘method’ thing. Now, come on, My Le, let’s get you
out of the Taylors’ flower bed and into some dry socks.”

After a month or so of this, my parents decided the school year
was over for me. School was almost out, anyway, and there was no
point in taking finals. Unless I was asked to answer an essay
question about, say, the Torah’s position on fungal infections,
there was no way I was going to pass. My teachers were very nice
about the whole thing. Frankly, I think they were relieved to have
me out of the classroom. Between the hooker costumes, the
fund-raising chocolate, and the muttering, I’d been a distraction
all year.

It was early June and my summer had begun. I wasn’t happy about
the incompletes, but the unstructured time, the endless hours to
spend as I liked, that was wonderful. I woke up the first morning
and smiled at the reflection of Gene Shalit in the mirror. I was
free. I could do whatever I wanted. It was a beautiful day and I
was going to get right out there and enjoy it, just as soon as I
finished inspecting this toothbrush.

∨
Devil in the Details
∧

L
ike many girls who
don’t get asked out in high school, I spent my teenage years
believing I was a displaced European. It was so obvious I’d been
born in the wrong country, what with my having such sophisticated
Continental sensibilities and all. As soon as I was old enough, I
told myself and anyone who would listen, I was moving to a country
where my unconventional looks, difficult charms, and erratic
hygiene would be appreciated.

That country was France. I always felt I’d been cheated of the
French citizenship that was rightfully mine, a birthright sold for
a mess of
potage
. My father’s parents had met and married in
France, had gone to school and given birth to their first child
there, had planned to make it their home forever, and then had the
good sense to get out. France has always had its anti-Semitic
elements, and by the late 1930
s
it was about as Jew
friendly as a Klan pig roast. They moved to a French colony in
Shanghai. Even French Jews, it turns out, have a thing for Chinese
food.

There, they saddled their children with French names and
educations in anticipation of a speedy return. The plan was to go
back to Paris as soon as the war was over and Hermes was open
again. My grandparents were lawyers, and while their French
citizenship qualified them to judge all the world’s citizens, their
French law degrees permitted them to practice law only in France.
Where else could they live?

California, it turns out. A brief stopover on the way back to
Paris turned into a permanent stay. The decision was made as soon
as they changed the family name from Treguboff to the Americanized
Traig, which, when said with a French accent, is exactly the sound
one makes when clearing one’s sinuses. Their children adopted
American nicknames, lost their accents, and stopped ironing their
jeans. By the time I was born, the only French affectations the
family retained were a postprandial salad course and a fondness for
scarves.

Instead of being raised on goat cheese, I was raised on a goat
farm. Instead of Gaul, gall. Oh, it just wasn’t fair. Still, I
tried. I might not have the French citizenship but,
sacre
bleu
, I would have the superciliousness. I adopted a superior
attitude as soon as I was old enough to look down my nose at the
other toddlers. I was a shamelessly affected child, given to
uttering phrases like “Oh, Papa, do please read me
The Little
Prince
–
en francais
.” He indulged me, but my mother
only sighed and shook her head when I asked her to replace the
Pop-Tart in my lunch with a fruit and cheese course. “You keep this
up, mademoiselle, and I’m pulling you out of ballet and signing you
up for Four-H.”

I kept it up. I wore berets. I played soccer. By age nine, I was
trying to teach myself French from a 1950
s
Berlitz,
useful for phrases like “This sedan rides as smoothly as a couch,”
but not much else. Even my grandfather – a man who wore ascots –
thought I was taking it too far. “You are learning Fransh?” he
demanded in the melodic Continental accent I so envied. “But thees
ees ridiculeux! Look at thees
village
you leeve in! They
barely speak English, never mind
Fransh
. A course in
l’agronomie
will be so much more useful to you here.”

He was probably right. By the time I was in high school it was
clear that the only people who would listen to me were the exchange
students, and, like everything else in my life thus far, they
disappointed me. I had been hoping for a dashing Jewish Rothschild
to swoop into my homeroom and propose to me on the spot. “Never in
my life have I met a girl so fastidious, so pure, so
charmante
,” he would declare, taking my chapped hand in his.
“Now, come with me, my little Hebrew flower. I’m taking you back to
the garden where you belong.”

Mais non
. Instead of Alain Delon and Catherine Deneuve we
got a cavalcade of misfits as pimply and badly dressed as we were.
Europe was clearly exporting its least attractive adolescents to my
high school. I began to suspect they were not being exchanged but
exiled, for not being pretty enough to live in their native
countries. They were being sent to America to mate with more
appropriate partners, like the poor souls with cystic acne and
self-inflicted haircuts who made up much of our student body.

Still, there were a few lookers who managed to slip through. We
swooned over Guy, the fey French flight attendant who’d somehow
landed in our town. Bored and lonely, with nothing better to do
than hang out with high school kids, Guy sometimes modeled in our
teen fashion shows, captivating us all with his husky accent and
Gallic cheekbones. The boys fell for Solange, the nubile
jeunefille
who spent summers with some family friends.
Solange spoke not a word of English and had to be forcibly
restrained from walking down the street topless. At fourteen, she
was already on the pill. We gaped, chuckled, shook our heads: Oh,
those French. They are such sluts. What can you do?

Even in my scrupulous periods, I remained a devoted Francophile.
Oh, sure, I knew the French were a bunch of libidinous heathens. My
cousin had shared his French dorm-mate’s description of a date:
“She was a
peeg
. She bite my
derriere
. But what could
she do? I was seeting on her face!” I knew. But they were so
charming I couldn’t hold it against them. I might have felt
differently if I’d ever actually been there. The closest I’d come
to France was Canada, which is France with better manners and worse
clothes, France as performed in Branson, Missouri. It doesn’t
count.

The summer I turned seventeen I would finally get to see the
real thing. My family was going to Paris. What was making this
possible was the bottle of pills in my father’s breast pocket. They
were tiny, no bigger than a teen bride’s diamond, but they could
keep me quiet for six hours at a stretch. This was our passport.
This would keep me docile and compliant in the face of bloody
saucissons
and medieval bathrooms, oyster bars and leering,
unwashed men, and, worse than all these, the horrors continually
invented in my own brain.

In college I would pay good money for any pill that could do
that, but at the time I wasn’t having it, not at all. After years
of full-blown crazy-making and an extraordinary end-of-junior-year
meltdown I was finally in therapy, lots of it, and though I liked
talking about myself for hours on end, I was not happy about the
pharmaceutical component.

“Drugs,” my parents had insisted at my intake session. “Let’s
get her on drugs. Freudian, Jungian, we don’t care what you are as
long as you believe in Percodan, Ativan, or Vicodin. Just give her
some meds.”

I was vehemently against this plan. OCD and anorexia revolve
around controlling the body and what goes into it, and this control
was not something I was eager to relinquish. Frizzy hair and orange
skin aside, my body was the one thing I had achieved a measure of
control over. But one little pill could have me flinging off my
underwear to join Solange sunbathing on the lawn, waving at the
cars that slowed as they passed. No, thanks.

I was appalled. Nancy Reagan was still in the White House, and
her big red
No
was tattooed on my brain. No, no, of course
no. Though I went to school with lots of drug dealers’ kids, who
crowded their friends into the bathroom stalls between classes,
snorting and cackling, I’d never actually been offered a
mind-altering substance before. I had been preparing for this
moment all my life. I had rehearsed the lines I would say, from the
self-righteous, “Drugs aren’t cool!” to the stealth denial, “No,
thanks, man, I’m already too baked.” I just couldn’t believe I was
going to have to say them to my parents.

We battled over the issue for several weeks. In the end we
agreed I would not take medication every day, but only when I was
‘acting up’ – a condition to be determined by my father – at which
point I was taking the pill even if they had to administer it
rectally.

Considering the colonic treatments that used to be prescribed
for OCD, I got off easy with the pills. The mid-eighties were still
the dark ages as far as OCD was concerned. Though I had a textbook
case, I was not told what I had or what caused it. I’m not sure my
therapist even knew. Like many sufferers, I hid it, even from my
shrink; it was just too embarrassing. Better she should think I was
bipolar or borderline or, as one doctor suggested I might be,
schizophrenic. Auditory hallucinations – there’s no shame there.
But washing your hands a hundred times a day is just crazy.