Devil in the Details (7 page)

They were. Hence, wedding number three. Twenty-five years later,
both the priest and my parents’ marriage are still standing; my
parents’ relationship, it seems, was the more chronic
condition.

My father hadn’t wanted to make a tsimmes of it, and arranged
for the ceremony to take place while my sister and I were in
school, not even telling us about it until it was done. This was a
serious affront. I was seven at the time, and my parents knew my
sole aspiration in life was to be a flower girl. I was annoyed that
I’d been left out, and angry that my mother had forgone
accessories. She’d worn a suit, a
suit
, to her previous two
weddings and now she’d gone and wasted a third opportunity. I
thought the occasion called for leg-o’-mutton sleeves, a tiara, a
twenty-foot train. “What do you mean, you didn’t wear a veil?” I
demanded. “And where was your bouquet? Geez, what a crappy
wedding.” But there was cake and punch and a little dinner party,
to mark my parents’ third wedding and my mother’s return to her
faith.

When my mother started going to church, my sister and I did,
too. This wasn’t an attempt to convert us; she simply couldn’t find
a babysitter. She actively discouraged us from participating,
growing alarmed when we picked up a hymnal. “Here,” she said,
fishing a horoscope guide out of her purse. “Read this instead.”
Still, it made my father uncomfortable, and he finally asked her to
stop bringing us. He needn’t have worried. The only aspect of
church that piqued my interest was the kneeler, that ingenious red
vinyl-padded shelf that flipped down from its nook, allowing you to
genuflect in comfort. Man, was that great. I wanted one for home.
It would be perfect for watching TV on the rug right up close, as I
preferred, or for inspecting the welcome mat for dead bugs.

And it would have made a nice addition to our interfaith home, I
thought, with its multi-denominational decor. On the refrigerator
door there was a picture of Jesus made out of what appeared to be
fruit leather, held up by a magnet from the Jewish Federation. On
the mantel, a menorah next to a frond left over from last year’s
Palm Sunday. The front door sported a mezuzah and a Christmas
wreath no one had bothered to take down yet. Oh, we tried to keep
things separate and compartmentalized. My mothers’ prayer cards and
rosaries were tucked away here; my yarmulkes and prayer books
stored safely away from the rest of it, there. But there was still
so much cross-contamination. It was all a big jumble.

The anti-Semitic sixth-grade classmate who worried that my
Jewishness was contagious was partly right, it turns out. We do rub
off on one another. We absorb one another’s credos, customs, cuss
words. I’d say we bring out the best in one another, but it’s more
like we borrow the worst. My father swears like a true Catholic,
invoking the names of all the saints and apostles, while my mother
spits her epithets out in Yiddish.

I’m their child in every way. Though it’s true that I’ve never
felt anything but Jewish, I have plenty of habits that betray my
half-breed origins. It’s a fact that I drink Mountain Dew with
breakfast. I watch Chris Farley movies. I can’t stand lox or
white-fish salad. I buy the wrong mustard and I smear mayonnaise on
just about everything, even french fries. But I hasten to point out
that this is a habit I picked up from my father, a man whose
favorite snack is a mayonnaise sandwich. On
white
bread.

When I was thirteen I underwent a conversion to make my
Jewishness official. But it didn’t really convert anything, didn’t
erase my goyish affections or my gentile ties. It just made me a
religious Jew who has a nun for a cousin and a Catholic lay lector
for a mother.

We rub off on one another. No amount of washing would undo it,
no amount of vacuuming would set things straight. Our home was a
hodgepodge, a halfway house, and I sometimes felt I was being held
there until I was socialized enough to assimilate in the real
world. I thought I never would. That’s normally the great fear with
intermarriage – assimilation into the mainstream, loss of the
outside culture – but as I grew older, crazier, and more religious,
I felt as though I didn’t blend in anywhere. I was just so weird. I
didn’t even fit in my own family.

This was largely my doing. If there was disharmony in our
interfaith home, I’m the one who caused it. I was behind the Easter
Dinner Fiasco of 1982, the Passover Tableware Crisis of 1986, the
Shabbat Refrigerator Light Bulb Feud of 1988. My parents had done
everything right, ruling the house by dictatorship, a method that
works so well for much of the Third World. It didn’t work for me.
Every day, I was stirring up insurgencies, issuing fatwas,
declaring holy war on the whole damn family.

The problem, besides my raging mental illness, was that I felt
cheated. As a child my favorite book was
All-of-a-Kind
Family
. I loved those girls in their identical pinafores,
helping their mother make honey cake and challah. It galled me that
we were nothing like them. It was bad enough that our outfits
didn’t match. Having religions that didn’t match was just too much.
They were the all of a kind family; all we were was kind of a
family. Sure, we shared genes, a last name, and substandard table
manners, but other than that, what bound us together?

It’s a strange thing, not sharing a faith with your mother, a
person with whom you otherwise share so much. It made discipline
difficult. What can your parents threaten you with if you don’t
share the same cosmology? After flirting with monsters and the
bogeyman, my mother finally settled on Patty Hearst and the
Symbionese Liberation Army. Until I was ten years old I was
terrified that if I misbehaved, the SLA would swoop in and force me
to accessorize with heavy artillery and olive drab, which did
nothing for my complexion. On the other hand, at least the SLA
family members all shared a common belief. At least they dressed
alike.

But us, we were a mess, my father and sister and I subscribing
to three different strains of Judaism and my mother subscribing to
a different faith entirely. The best sport of any of us, she
probably had it hardest of all. We supported her religious practice
only when it involved tasty snacks for the rest of us.

It’s hard. Tell it, Cher. We didn’t move from town to town, and
we didn’t feel unwelcome, like we couldn’t hang around. But boy, we
had our moments. I made sure of that.

I imagine it’s not always so difficult; my scrupulosity must
have made a challenging situation completely intolerable. I know
plenty of well-adjusted, happy people who are half-Jewish, just
like me. Or not so like. For all we have in common, we have more
that differs. That’s the thing about these mergers. It’s a strange
math, the equation differing from family to family, from child to
child, the outcome wildly dissimilar each time. Even in my own
family, the sum varies, the parts adding up differently. I ended up
an observant Jew, and my sister is a non-practicing agnostic; my
mother, devoutly Catholic; my father, baffled by all three of
us.

Over the years we’ve figured a way to make things work. Mostly
this involves keeping our mouths shut. We do not discuss our
respective religions. Others are fair game, and we sure do enjoy a
good Pentecostal joke. But Judaism and Catholicism are off-limits.
We don’t discuss the pope or abortion or the spread of
ultra-Orthodoxy. Yeast infections are a perfectly acceptable topic
for mealtime conversation at our house, but heaven help you if you
bring up Saint Paul.

We all have our touchy subjects. Mine is my interfaith
background. Though I’m unimpeachably Jewish now, there are still
things I can’t do, people I can’t marry, royal titles I can’t hold.
The Hebrew term for someone like me is
ger
, meaning convert,
or, literally, stranger. It’s an unappealing word, a mongrel growl.
Couldn’t they have come up with a better term for us? Why not
something cool and futuristic, like shapeshifter, or something
glamorous, like Mrs. Eddie Fisher?

Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. As Cher sings, you can’t run
away from what you are. Over the years, I’ve stopped trying. I have
come to accept the law and my lot. I don’t really want to be king,
and I don’t want a different family, either. Sure, we don’t share a
faith, but we do share the things that really matter. We all enjoy
pancakes, off-color jokes, and schadenfreude. When we get together,
there’s no fighting over what to watch: we all love
Cops
.
And when the shirtless, inebriated perp wets himself, we share a
smile and a knowing look that says yes, yes, deep down we’re not so
different.

Deep down, we’re not. And if I could dicker with my birthright,
I’d probably do something about my hair first. Oh, the hair. Geez,
Cher. You don’t know how good you have it.

∨
Devil in the Details
∧

M
y childhood was
reasonably happy, but it wasn’t very exciting. Oh, sure, there was
the religious mania, but on the whole that was pretty dull; I never
managed to make any bushes burn or seas part. Like Bilaam’s, my
sister’s ass could speak, but that was hardly a miracle. We had no
signs and no wonders. But we could turn anything into whine. “This
town sucks,” I announced, surveying the lack of major retail
outlets. “Our dumb pets don’t know any tricks,” my sister declared
when they failed to amuse us. “There’s nothing on TV,” we moaned,
“and we’ve never been so bored in our lives.”

Vicky and I were completely incapable of entertaining ourselves,
and our parents weren’t much help. It’s not that we didn’t have
ideas. We knew exactly what items would keep us happy and
interested, but our parents rejected them all. A circus-trained
primate, a backyard water slide, a child-sized Mercedes – the
answer was always no. They refused to get cable even when I
threatened to call Child Protective Services. “Nice try, pussycat,
but subjecting you to UHF stations doesn’t constitute child abuse,”
my mother said. “Now, if we were forcing you to watch PBS I’d say
you had a point.”

Ours was a hardscrabble youth of syndicated reruns and gardening
shows, and my sister and I frequently endured long stretches of
tooth-gnashing boredom. Sundays were the worst. In our house,
Sunday was known as the Bored’s Day. The rest of the week we could
scrape together a few playmates or victims, but on Sunday there was
nothing to do and no one to do it to. Every Sunday morning all our
friends were carted away by the Bible Bus, a merrily painted
wagonette that cruised the town snatching up children and hauling
them off to church for a day of sing-alongs and Noah’s Ark puppet
shows. Hours later they would return, flush-faced and sky-high on
doughnuts and punch. By then it would be too late to play, and they
would stagger up to their front doors laughing at their churchy
little inside jokes. What was so funny about Nimrod? Why did they
crack up anytime someone said ‘Enos’? “It’s a Sunday school thing,”
our friends said, wiping hysterical tears away. “You really had to
be there.”

Sundays were awful. The long day stretched out before us with
nothing to watch but golf and Mexican variety shows, nothing to do
but comb our parents’ room for entertainment. One Sunday afternoon,
after I’d mined their closets, carpets, and waste-bins without
turning up anything of interest, I turned to their bookshelf. Two
volumes caught my eye: the Bible and
Haywire
, Brooke
Hayward’s account of her Hollywood family’s descent into ruin. That
neither one was appropriate reading matter for a nine-year-old
didn’t occur to me. Heaven and hell, I thought. This should be
fun.

I spent the rest of the afternoon flipping between the two. Each
book made a big impression, but unfortunately not a distinct one.
Because I read them simultaneously, they remain inextricably linked
for me and I tend to confuse the characters. Was King Saul the
emotionally absent workaholic who left his family for Slim Hawks?
Was Margaret Sullavan the young princess who found Moses in the
rushes? I picture Noah and his family in designer bathing suits,
hand in hand on a California beach, and I sometimes find myself
wondering what chapter of Kings Peter Fonda appears in.

Well, both books make good reading, that’s for sure. And on that
first day I cracked their respective spines, I beheld all that was
contained therein and lo, I judged it good. So
this
was what
all the fuss was about. I read about Adam and Eve, and Leland and
Pamela, and felt like I, too, had tasted the fruit of knowledge.
Who knew it would be so juicy? Divorce, suicide, fratricide,
nervous breakdowns, booze – this was spectacularly educational
reading.