Devil in the Details (8 page)

Several years later both books would prove instructive and
useful, giving me an endless list of things to fear and obey. What
if my parents got divorced? What if my mother grew jealous and
popped pills when I started getting better roles than she? Was that
spot on the wall a mark of the plague, and if it was, where could I
find a high priest to exorcise the malignancy?

My parents should have hidden the Bible as soon as the
scrupulosity surfaced. It was the only handbook to religious
practice I had, and the idea that it might require context or
interpretation was beyond me. I was completely irony- and
allegory-proof. I read
Animal Farm
around the same time and
found it to be a perfectly charming story about some naughty
pets.

But the Bible, the Bible satisfied my every scrupulous pang.
Sex, death, and impurity are the greatest hits on the OCD jukebox,
and they are in heavy rotation in the Old Testament. Leviticus
alone provides some amazing material. There’s an entire chapter on
discharges
. Here it is, all laid out, everything thou hast
been worrying over: swarming things and carcasses, leprosy and
tetter, blood and sores and seed. Thou must not touch these things!
The Bible says! And if thou dost, if thou accidentally dost, there
are purification rituals that must be carried out with exacting
care. It’s all there, all laid out.

But it was so hard to follow. There were so many laws, and they
were so weird. The sex laws alone. My high school was full of
harlots. Would I be required to stone them? And what was I to do
with this: “And whoever sits on anything on which he who has the
discharge has sat shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in
water, and be unclean until the evening.”

Suddenly I would have to determine who had sat at my desk before
me, and whether or not he had had the discharge recently. Great.
That was just what I wanted to spend my time thinking about. The
Levitical regulations regarding bodily fluids are a rich vein
indeed, and they troubled me greatly. Because I couldn’t be sure
what was issuing forth from people in the privacy of their pants, I
regarded everyone past puberty as ritually impure. Everything they
touched was tainted, and keeping track of it all was a full-time
job. It was bad enough if they’d just touched something with their
hands. But if they’d touched it with their backsides – if they’d
sat on it – it was irretrievably fouled.

At school I only had so much control, but at home I could keep a
mental inventory of all the chairs and cross them off as others sat
on them. After a while I would sit only on the living room couch –
reserved for company, it was the least-used piece of furniture in
the house – and my special prayer chair, a torturously
uncomfortable contraption of white wire grids that left a
window-pane pattern on the backs of my thighs. From there I moved
to the floor, which was fine until my parents got sick of tripping
over me.

Later I would learn that few of these laws actually apply
anymore; they mostly deal with ritual impurity that was an issue
only in Temple times. But I didn’t know that then. I took
everything dangerously literally. My parents worried, with good
reason, that I would try to make burnt offerings in the backyard. I
wished
. The Bible was written for a different time, one in
which there were far better accessories. I just couldn’t get my
hands on the materials I needed. Sure, I could try to purify
vessels in the Jacuzzi, but it just wasn’t the same. I could try to
expiate sin by painting the cat’s forehead with ketchup, but what
good would that do? I needed frankincense and handmaidens,
shewbreads, goats, and first-born males.

But all that insanity was still a few years off that Sunday
afternoon I first stumbled onto these highly educational texts.
That day I was less taken by the signs and wonders than by the sex
and weirdness. Like Eve, I was eager to share my newfound wisdom
with a helpmeet.

“Listen to this,” I said excitedly, holding up the books for my
sister to see.

Vicky lay on our parents’ bed, idly ripping the stitching out of
the bedspread. She was staring glassy-eyed at
Fight Back! With
David Horowitz
, the consumer justice show we watched when
nothing else was on. “No way,” she answered.

“Listen, it’s interesting.”

“No. You can read to me from that other book, if there’s bad
parts in it, but no Bible.”

I shrugged and went back to my reading. We were completely
different people, had nothing in common but a crush on Andy Gibb.
It had always been that way. Only fourteen months apart, we are
almost Irish twins, but we could not be less alike. I’m a
dark-haired, pale-skinned Eastern European gnome, a short and fuzzy
troll doll strangers sometimes rub for luck. My sister is a blond,
a full head taller, with the capacity to tan. Except for bad
manners and laziness, we don’t have a single common feature. My
hair is curly and my teeth, straight; my sister’s, the opposite.
Pore size, problem areas, general disposition – we share none of
these. Vicky lets it all hang out. I tuck it in, straighten it, pin
it back. I am anal-retentive; she is – “
not
anal-expulsive,” she finishes. Anal-repulsive, maybe.

We don’t look alike, don’t even see alike. The first time we
went to the ophthalmologist, he couldn’t get over it. “Do these
children have different fathers?” he inquired. Though I am
nearsighted and Vicky, far-, neither one of us had any trouble
making out the horrified and offended look on our mother’s
face.

By the time we were in school our differences had multiplied and
magnified. I’d taken to school right away, had loved the stacks of
fresh newsprint to scrawl on, the tiny cartons of room-temperature
milk, the minions to boss around. Vicky’s adjustment was rockier.
It just wasn’t what she expected. First of all, there was no TV.
She had to wear underwear, pants, and shoes, and the dog couldn’t
come with her. Vicky had spent the previous four years of her life
in her bathing suit, asking strangers if they had any gum and
eating breath mints we found in the gutter. She wasn’t prepared for
this new world of rules and math, of cubbies and structured
time.

She responded with nosebleeds. They came out of nowhere, these
daily torrents of blood. “Have you been rooting around in there?”
my mother demanded, inspecting Vicky’s fingernails for evidence.
But she hadn’t. This was just a spontaneous bodily reaction to
kindergarten. Some kids wet their pants; Vicky hemorrhaged. It was
disturbing, but it wasn’t particularly dangerous, and after a while
we got used to her coming home with blood spattered down her front
and purple crust around her nostrils.

One morning she got a nosebleed that was worse than usual. I
knew this because I could hear her calling for me through the
partition that divided our classrooms. A few minutes later the
teacher’s aide carried her into my class, cradled in her arms like
a three-foot-tall baby, feet dangling, head back with bloody
tissues wadded to her nose, yellow hair spilling down. “She kept
asking for you,” the aide explained. “We didn’t know what to
do.”

I didn’t know, either. I was six. I couldn’t fix this. And I was
mortified. This was more embarrassing than the time my mother
dropped a tray of cupcakes facedown in the parking lot and then
picked out the gravel and served them to my classmates anyway. This
was more embarrassing than the time the dog followed us to school,
which hadn’t actually been embarrassing at all, had actually been
kind of exciting and had afforded me a certain popularity for the
rest of the day. “He just loves me
so much
,” I told my
classmates when we spotted him through the classroom window,
darting across the empty playground, a brown, panting blur. “He
follows me everywhere. It’s embarrassing, but what can you do?”

But a leaking sister, this was just bad. I ignored her for a
full minute, hoping the aide would carry her back out before my
classmates noticed what was going on. But she just stood there.
Finally I went over and patted Vicky on the head. That seemed to
satisfy all parties, and they left.

Shortly after that the nosebleeds stopped. Vicky adjusted, made
lots of friends, got used to the whole routine, and did just fine
for a couple years. Then she found herself in a class taught by a
true moron. It’s not unusual to see someone taking off her shoes to
count to sixteen in an elementary school classroom, but when it’s
the teacher, there’s cause for alarm. This woman’s idea of social
studies was to tell the kids about the previous night’s date. For
history, she recounted
Happy Days
plot lines. Art was pinto
beans glued to a paper towel. She may have had a teaching
credential, but she sure didn’t have a lot of imagination.

When Vicky brought home a spelling test on which no word had
more than two letters, and a couple had just one, my mother hit the
roof. Vicky had spelled both
a
and
I
correctly, but
my mother was still furious. “What’s wrong with this woman?” she
demanded. “The dog has tougher assignments in obedience school, and
all he has to learn is to not mount his classmates. This is a giant
leap backwards. If we let her stay in this class, in two weeks
she’ll forget how to speak and start making on the carpets.”

A few days later Vicky was enrolled in a fundamentalist Baptist
school. By this time my parents had made some odd choices,
endorsing an all-salami diet for the cat and chandeliers for the
bathrooms, but this was surely the strangest decision they ever
made. Things were already complicated enough, what with the
Catholicism and the Judaism. Handing Vicky over to the Baptists
introduced a whole new level of crazy. The Catholics and the Jews
have plenty of rules, but at least they both let you drink.
Besides, it was unfair. Vicky wasn’t the idiot; the teacher was.
Send the teacher to Baptist school, to military school, to
obedience school, but let Vicky stay put.

Well, it was done. And it wasn’t like there were a lot of
choices. Once my parents vetoed public school, it was either the
Baptists, the Catholics, or the truly wacked-out Evangelicals. No
matter what, Vicky was going to be wearing a plaid skirt and
spending a lot of time in chapel. At least the Baptists were good
for a rigorous education, and unlike most of the other schools in
town, it would not include extracurricular tutorials in holding
your smoke. And maybe the religious component wouldn’t be that
weird. Because our Israeli neighbors sent their kids there, there
were actually more Jewish kids at the Baptist school than at mine.
When Vicky left, I became the only one.

I was appalled by the whole thing, but Vicky herself didn’t seem
too distressed. Perhaps her month with the half-wit teacher had
left her too inarticulate to protest or perhaps she didn’t really
care either way. It wasn’t so bad; she had some neighbor friends at
the school, and there was pizza on Fridays. There was also corporal
punishment and a daily volley of brimstone, but you got used to
that.

And so began the family’s immersion in a whole new world. It was
a world of needlepoint Bible cozies and prayer breakfasts, of
gospel concerts and speaking in tongues. Our Judeo-Catholic
background had left us entirely unprepared for it. Weeping statues
and heavily fortified wine with lunch – these things were familiar
to us; but not letting the kids trick-or-treat on Halloween – what
was up with that?

Suddenly we were shopping for school supplies in stores with
names like Psalmost Perfect and Kings ‘n’ Things. Suddenly my
parents were attending PTA meetings that featured lectures on
satanic cults and AC⁄DC albums played backward. My mother
inevitably came home sighing and shaking her head. “What a load of
crap,” she would announce, throwing her purse down on the kitchen
counter. “Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think that Acey Deucey
business is music, but it’s not devil worship, either. If you ask
me, Neil Diamond is the one they should be worrying about. How else
can you explain his tremendous success?”

They were strange, these other parents, and the children were
uniformly weird, too. When Vicky started bringing her new
classmates home we didn’t know what to make of them. We’d never met
kids like these. They were hippie Jesus freaks, born-again foster
kids, scary backwoods children who spent their weekends burning
tires and shooting rats. One girl’s mother insisted the family’s
cats and chickens had mated. “The kitties got feathers,” she swore.
“It’s the damnedest thing you ever seen.”

Sometimes the children were cruel, and sometimes they were just
lame. They were more or less like normal kids, I guess, but what
made them so frightening was their conviction that Jesus was on
their side. They weren’t peeing on your bike because they were
mean, but because Jesus told them to. They weren’t eating their own
snot because they were nuts, but because it made the devil cry. Oh,
they were fun, all right. Instead of house or cops and robbers,
these kids wanted to play Christians and Romans, apostles and
proselytes. Even during normal play, Jesus would make strange,
unexpected appearances, showing up, say, to battle Catwoman or to
capture the flag.

They just had completely different references than we did. Their
parents wouldn’t let them watch movies or listen to the radio or
read Judy Blume. Some of the girls weren’t even allowed to cut
their hair or wear pants. Many could, however, dress like hookers.
We gaped in slack-jawed amazement at their tube tops, tight skirts,
and spike heels. “Bible belt and shoes to match,” my mother
muttered. By fourth grade even my sister was tottering around in
four-inch platform wedges and sheer blouses. Vicky wasn’t permitted
make-up, but her classmates, denied everything else, had full reign
at the cosmetic counter. They came to class made up like baby
prostitutes, the dainty crosses around their necks getting tangled
in their heavily padded bras. Years later, after she was back in
public school, Vicky would accompany her one remaining Baptist
school friend to an out-of-town baptism that she likened to an
evangelical wet T-shirt contest. “Why is Jesus only appearing to
the stacked teenagers in white tank tops?” Vicky wanted to know,
but there was no answer.