Devil in the Details (26 page)

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Devil in the Details
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S
o my family was
having its first real Shabbat dinner and this was not how it was
supposed to go at all. For starters, my father was supposed to be
wearing pants. This was my very special Shabbat dinner and here he
was wearing swim trunks. Though I’d laid white dresses on their
beds, my mother had opted for sweats and my sister for obscenely
tight ankle-zip jeans and a hot pink tank top. Because it was a
special occasion, she’d accessorized with large rhinestone hoops,
fingerless gloves, and, on her shoulder, a chip the size of a small
microwave.

This was not how it was supposed to go at all. We were supposed
to be wearing matching formalwear and shy, beatific smiles. I had
it all planned out. My mother and sister and I would light the
Shabbat candles, and then my parents would recite the traditional
blessing of the children. I didn’t know the Hebrew formula, but I
figured we could just make something up. “
Hava nagila shalom
aleichem tova feldshuh
,” our parents would chant solemnly,
laying their hands on our heads. They would shut their eyes in
concentration, and their voices would build to a fervent wail. “May
you rise up like the bread of the earth. May your lives be as sweet
as fruit of the vine, blessed fruit of our loins.”

Then my father would make the blessings over the wine and the
challah, and we’d sit down to the delicious kosher meal I’d spent
all day preparing. There would be course after course and the
dinner would last late into the night. When we could finally eat no
more, we’d put down our forks and join hands to sing the blessing
after meals and a few of our favorite Hebrew folk songs. By now we
would all be tired, but we’d be having too much fun to stop. “Just
one more song, Papa,” we’d plead, “and then we’ll go to bed.” My
father would pretend to be stern, shaking his head, but then he
would chuckle and nod and lead us all in “Tzur Mishelo.”

Instead he was distractedly humming the theme to
Dirty
Harry
. The lugubrious tune suited the doleful, uneasy mood of
the dinner. We’d gotten off to a bad start when I’d insisted on
making kiddush, the blessing over the wine. My warbly, halting
Hebrew and fervent delivery had embarrassed everyone, including me.
Then came the food, each dish more weirdly inedible than the last.
It was hard not to view these concoctions as open expressions of
high-fiber hostility. Oh, I’d tried to make something nice. I’d
combed through cookbooks for days, looking for recipes that were
both low-calorie and contaminant-free. In the end I’d settled on
coleslaw dressed in apple cider vinegar and Sweet’n Low; V-8
gazpacho; quiche made from skim milk, egg whites, and Mrs. Dash;
and a salad of dried fruit. What the menu lacked in flavor it made
up in laxative properties. These dishes had the volatility of
Semtex. Had I simply handed my family boxes of Feen-a-Mint, I could
have achieved the same result with far less work. It was
terrible.

I tried to make conversation, tried to put a positive spin on
things. “I bet you didn’t know there’s more fat in the gazpacho
than in the quiche,” I chirped. “I read today that fresh apples can
give you cancer, so it’s a good thing we’re having dried.” Unable
to say anything nice, my family said nothing at all. Now we sat
uncomfortably, shooting one another loaded looks as we absently
played with our food, bulldozing our prunes into the quivery,
anemic quiche.

By 6:45 my sister was clearing her plate. “Can I go now?” she
demanded. “You said all I had to do was show up for Jenny’s stupid
dinner. You didn’t say anything about hanging around all night.”
When my parents didn’t offer a protest she snatched the car keys
and charged out the door. My father wandered off to watch
Washington Week in Review
, my mother went to her sewing
room, and I retreated to the living room to stretch out on the
Oriental rug and pitch a fit.

The dinner had been my therapist’s idea. She’d thought it would
be good for me to include my family in my religious activities.
This was part of my rehabilitation plan. We had
a plan
. I
was seventeen now, and all parties agreed it was finally time to
get my craziness under control, while my parents could still make
me and before I would face long prison terms should my compulsions
run afoul of the law. So now there was a plan, with professionals,
medication, contracted behavior, and consequences.

The rehabilitation process would be guided by the Jewish
principle of
shalom bayit
– “peace in the home.” The
idea was that I would modify my religious practice to keep my
family happy, and they would try to accept a ritual or two in
return. I’d retained enough bat mitzvah Hebrew to understand that
the phrase also meant “goodbye, home,” and the threat was implicit.
If I didn’t shape up, I would be shipped out.

I knew it wouldn’t take much. My mother liked to leave out
brochures from military schools, convents, and wilderness challenge
programs to remind me how thin the ice beneath my feet actually
was. My family had had it with me. All teenagers are problematic,
but I was problematic in a spectacularly tedious way. Binge
drinking, promiscuity, delinquency, paint huffing – all of these
things have their fun moments for the family that has to deal with
them. My sister’s occasional partying was a good time for us all.
She was a fun drunk, and in that lovely twilight between getting
caught and getting grounded, she was oblivious and effusive,
working the room like a cabaret singer. “Oh,
hel-looooo
,
everyone. What a good-looking crowd. Anyone here from
Sacramento?”

But a religious compulsion was as dull as it was annoying. It
didn’t even give my parents the satisfaction of righteous
indignation.
I
was holier than
thou
. That was the
whole point. And a Jewish religious compulsion was worst of all.
Truth be told, they rather enjoyed our Jesus-freak acquaintances,
with their colorful stories and lively turns of phrase. They were
fun company, quick to offer pamphlets that were useful for jotting
down phone numbers or wrapping your gum in. All I could provide was
dour approbation and anti-bacterial Handi Wipes.

But now we had a counselor and a therapeutic plan to make me
better. The first step would be to distinguish normal Jewish
practice from crazy compulsive behavior. Because the therapist was
not Jewish, she suggested we consult a rabbi as well. It would be
his job to draw the line between the weird religious behavior I
made up and the weird religious behavior Judaism actually
requires.

By now our synagogue had hired a new rabbi, so we made an
appointment to meet him and explain our situation. I’d liked the
previous rabbi very much, but she knew better than to trust me.
This new one, however, was a blank slate. Perhaps he would
recognize that I was not, as everyone said, completely off my nut,
that I was just especially devoted. I had hopes.

It took him about five minutes to figure out I was crazy. He was
a reasonably patient man, but he soon learned to set his jaw and
rub his brow when he saw me coming. This would be a challenge,
teaching me to be a normal Jew. My religious observance was just
off
. Because I’d been practicing mostly in isolation, my
practice was like that of a long-lost tribe, like those Chinese or
Indian Jews who avoided pork and wore funny hats but didn’t
remember why. It looked familiar, but it wasn’t quite right. I
prayed three times a day but said strange prayers I made up myself.
I separated milk and meat not just in the kitchen, but in the
bathroom as well. Sometimes I wore yarmulkes, and sometimes I wore
Kleenex.

Over the next few months the rabbi tried to set me straight. I
had no obligation to pray three times a day, he told me, but if I
was going to do it, I might as well do it right. He taught me the
proper prayers and made me cut the calisthenics portion of my
service. While it was customary to keep separate plates for meat
and milk, he explained, to keep separate toothbrushes, trash cans,
and toilets was not. I had no obligation to cover my head, but if I
insisted, a lace doily would be more appropriate than a paper
towel. I did not always believe him and sometimes continued to
insist on doing things my way, but mostly I deferred.

The rest of it we worked out in counseling. Because OCD hadn’t
yet been recognized as a fairly straightforward chemical disorder,
my treatment included family therapy sessions and a fair amount of
blaming my parents. Every few weeks, my family would come to my
appointment, sitting stone-faced and sullen on the leather couches
while I fired accusations at them. “Maybe I wash my hands so much
because you spanked me that one time,” I suggested. “Maybe I don’t
eat because Vicky used to spit in my food. Maybe I pray all the
time because you wouldn’t let us get cable and I have nothing
better to do.”

It was like trying to make a cat feel guilty. They had nothing
to feel sorry about, except maybe the part about the cable – that
really wasn’t fair. But other than that they’d been great.
Psychiatry may not yet have known that my family wasn’t to blame,
but my family sure did. As far as they were concerned, family
therapy was a colossal waste of time and money, not to mention a
huge embarrassment. “There’s nothing wrong with counseling,” we
said, but of course there was. Counseling was for crazy people.
Wasn’t that the whole idea?

That we were seeing a therapist in my father’s own practice, a
colleague, just made it that much more uncomfortable. To make
matters worse, Psychiatry and OB⁄GYN shared an office. Either way,
if anyone saw us all trooping in, it was clear that the Traigs were
in trouble
. We would have been better off working out our
family hostilities with hunting accidents, like our neighbors did.
“Shalom bayit,” said through gritted teeth, became the family
mantra.

This kind of therapy shouldn’t have worked but it did. I don’t
know. I was starting to get a little better. By October I could sit
on the recliner without lining it with paper towels first. I could
read the newspaper without cutting it into ribbons, could watch a
movie without praying, could eat without plastic bags on my hands.
In my naked, wobbly way, I was getting on track. I remember
spending this year feeling like an infant, like a stroke victim
learning to walk and eat and breathe again. I had to learn to do
everything over. How did you sit down to a meal without inspecting
the dishes first? How did you walk without pausing to contemplate
your sins? How did you sit without rocking? How did you hold a
conversation without trying to anoint your companion’s
forehead?