Devil in the Details (9 page)

One afternoon a classmate of Vicky’s rang the doorbell and
politely asked if she could break our Parker Brothers Ouija board
in half. Their teacher, she said, had told her to. Of course he
had. It probably goes without saying that anyone who chooses to
teach at a fundamentalist Christian school has a mission, or at the
very least a bit of an agenda. My father would return from open
house night rumpled and weary. “How’d it go?” my mother would
ask.

“Well, it would have been nice if her teacher hadn’t leveled
both
barrels of his evangelical fury at me,” he would say
with a sigh. “But it went fine.”

Sure, most of Vicky’s teachers were normal, and some were
pleasant; there was one we liked so much she babysat when our
parents went out of town. But others were
strict
. The school
had a complex discipline system based on color-coded demerits
handed out for various offenses; three demerits and you earned a
paddling. It was kind of like skeeball, only instead of stuffed
animals and ashtrays, you traded your tickets in for a really bad
day.

The worst part was that demerits were given out for the
strangest things, like for going to the bathroom. This made no
sense to me at all. As long as you actually did it
in the
bathroom
– an achievement my classmates did not always manage –
there should be, I thought, no punishment. But Vicky’s teachers
disagreed. Perhaps the school’s rule makers had confused
eschatology and scatology. They certainly had some odd regulations
on bathroom trips. One year Vicky had a particularly strict teacher
who would not permit any bathroom visits during class at all. Most
schools have rules governing bathroom use, but it’s rare that they
require frequent parent-teacher conferences to iron out. Kids began
bringing in doctors’ notes.

Vicky was not spared. She had never been bathroom shy, but the
no-excuses policy just did her in. She started having panic
attacks. She would try to get a day’s worth of business done in the
morning, making her late for school almost every day. The day after
Taco Night, she would just have to stay home.

It wasn’t a bad school. It was just bad for Vicky, a
free-spirited girl from an already complicated religious
background.

It was a lot to absorb. She pretended none of this bothered her,
but clearly it was sinking in. Suddenly dinner was interrupted by
announcements that we were all headed for the fiery underworld.
“Three Jews and a Catholic,” she muttered darkly, shaking her head
as she looked around the table. “I wouldn’t want to be sitting next
to us when the Rapture comes.” She began using phrases like
‘everlasting torment’ and ‘lake of fire.’

Vicky became convinced that that was exactly where she was
headed. One afternoon she confessed her worries to her best friend.
“I’m afraid I’m going to go to hell,” she whispered. “You are,” her
friend whispered back. “If you want to be friends with me forever,
even after we die, you have to accept Jesus as your personal
savior.” That was it. Vicky got down on her knees right there on
the pink wall-to-wall, next to the canopy bed, and solemnly
accepted Jesus. That Strawberry Shortcake and My Pretty Pony had
served as the witnesses in no way undermined the seriousness of the
occasion.

Vicky didn’t mean it, didn’t really believe it, and still
thought of herself as Jewish, but she was scared and she figured it
couldn’t hurt. At some point she even tried to take it back, but it
was too late. Baptist school had changed her. Vicky was becoming
someone we didn’t know. It wasn’t that she was proselytizing; she
didn’t really buy into the Gospel, and even if she had, my father
would have put a stop to that right quick. It was the fact that she
went bat-shit crazy every afternoon. During the school day she had
to hold everything in – well, literally, but emotionally, too.
There could be no tantrums, no outbursts, no eye rolls or heavy
sighs. Forced to find a way to sublimate frustration and anger,
Vicky began clenching her butt as hard as she could. Once she
clenched so forcefully that she flushed bright red; the teacher,
convinced that Vicky had a fever, sent her home.

It was all she could do to hold it together every day until
three o’clock. As soon as she got back to the house, Vicky became a
flying monkey, charging from room to room, inhaling sugar, turning
on all the radios, all the TVs, as if she were trying to flush out
everything she’d absorbed at school. No, she didn’t want me to read
to her from the Bible, she’d had quite enough of that all day. She
wanted Foreigner, Journey,
General Hospital
, Pop-Tarts. She
needed these things. They were what made her different from her
classmates, what made her normal. The rest of them weren’t
permitted junk food or television or pop music. Guns were fine, but
Guns n’ Roses was a problem.

When Vicky asked to listen to a Walkman during the school’s
mandatory fund-raising jogathon, she was subjected to a thorough
interrogation. What, exactly, was on the tape? Vicky answered
truthfully: “Come on, Eileen.” Perhaps Vicky’s delivery of the line
didn’t emphasize the comma. Concerned, the teacher asked her to
recite the lyrics. Vicky obliged, and that was the end of that.
There would be no coming on Eileen at the Baptist school jogathon,
that was for sure.

Still, the school wasn’t completely culturally deprived. They
had their own songs, and though grating, they were awfully catchy.
They were much more infectious than the religious songs we learned
at Hebrew school. There are no pop hooks in tongue-tripping dirges
like ‘Gesher Tzar M’od’ and ‘Oseh Shalom.’ But ‘Jesus Loves Me’,
‘Father Abraham,’ and ‘Arky Arky’ – those just get your feet
tapping.

There were songs, and on rainy days there were movies, too.

At my school, we saw Disney classics and cartoons, but Vicky’s
classmates got more esoteric features like
Years of the
Beast
and
Kevin Can Wait
. Vicky’s favorite was called
Super Christian
. It was about a guy who behaved like a jerk
all week, only to transform himself into a perfect Christian every
Sunday. The point, I suppose, was that one is supposed to behave in
a Christian manner every day, but Vicky just liked seeing the guy
be a jerk. “The light’s not going to get any greener!” he screamed,
getting impatient in traffic. This film was popular with all the
students and eventually led to a sequel,
Super Christian II
.
The franchise ended there, before the fundamentalist equivalent of
Richard Pryor or Ewoks or Mr. T could come along and ruin it with
Super Christian III
.

Sometimes, however, the movies were gruesome morality plays that
gave Vicky nightmares. The subject might be a cheerleader who
thought it would be fun to try marijuana, or an honor student who
became obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons. The protagonists
varied, but their fate was always the same: they got into trouble,
they didn’t accept Jesus, and they suffered eternal damnation as a
result. The worst of the lot was called
The Young Hunter
. It
told the story of an ill-fated hunting trip taken by a born-again
young man and his atheist father. The father refuses to accept
Jesus, and you can just see the hunting accident coming a mile off.
But in a terrible twist, it’s his beloved dog that gets killed
instead, and in the bloodiest way possible. The old man eventually
gets saved and then he dies anyway.

It was a nice uplifting message and it stayed with you. Vicky
could not get it out of her head, and that, I suppose, was the
point. The Baptist school practiced an old-fashioned pedagogy that
relied on indelible impressions and rote learning. Students were
required to memorize more pages than a soap cast. Every night Vicky
sweated over the Bible verses she would have to recite by heart the
next day. Walking by her room you were assaulted by odd snatches
and scriptural outbursts. “Did you just call me the Whore of
Babylon?” my mother asked. “Did you instruct the dog to rise up and
anoint himself?” my father wondered. “He’s licking his balls, so
you got your wish.”

Over time it became clear that Vicky had talent. She could
retain and deliver a line like ‘Strong meat belongeth to them that
are of full age’ (Hebrews 5:14) with moving emotional subtlety.
Soon her teachers were tapping her to compete in Bible bees and
bowls. Though reluctant at first, Vicky eventually agreed. It meant
she got to miss school. It also meant she had to spend the day with
the parochial school community’s strangest of the strange. Picture
the kids you see competing in the national spelling bee. Now
picture them blazing with evangelical righteousness, dressed in
ill-fitting polyester suits with crosses resting on their ties, in
wrap dresses and suntan pantyhose and sandals. Add some foaming
stage mothers winging overhead and you’ve just about got it.

Still, it meant she got to miss school. She was good, too. Vicky
quickly advanced from local competitions to the statewides. My
family marveled. We didn’t know what to make of it. We never
thought we’d have occasion to use the phrase “preachin’ prodigy,”
and we certainly never thought we’d be using it to describe someone
with whom we shared blood. Then Vicky was asked to represent the
evolutionist side in a highly revisionist reenactment of the Scopes
Monkey Trial, and that pretty much put an end to the whole
thing.

The debate was doomed from the beginning. Vicky realized she was
in trouble when she wasn’t allowed to make her own points, even
salient ones like ‘No duh.” Instead she had to read from a scripted
selection of feeble arguments. “You say you believe the world was
created in seven days,” Vicky read. “But you also believe that
Jesus loves everyone. That can’t possibly be true. How could Jesus
love a non-believing sinner – like
me?
” Vicky could really
sell a line, but these were beyond her. What was the point? The fix
was in. Even if the creationist side had been represented by a
monkey – a monkey with a vestigial tail and human grandchildren –
it would have won handily. As the debate limped toward its lame
conclusion, Vicky grew more and more apathetic. “We are told, “And
it was good,”’ she said resignedly. “But is this world really good,
filled as it is with non-believing sinners like m – Oh, forget it,
you know what I mean.”

Vicky was discouraged, and my father was furious. Shortly after
that my parents pulled her out of the Baptist school. The evolution
business was just the last straw in a pile that had been growing
for years. My father had been ambivalent from the beginning. I
understood how he felt. My mother was fine, and my blond sister
passed, but no one has ever mistaken my father or me for an
Anglican. Obviously Jewish, he and I always dreaded Vicky’s school
events, half-expecting someone to wrestle us to the ground and
anoint us with baptismal water, or to corner us and try to tell us
the Good News. As the extracurricular activities increased, he’d
grown more and more uneasy. The odd Christmas pageant he could
handle, but a Bible bowl was too much. It was as foreign to him as
child beauty pageants and ice hockey. No member of our family had
ever been involved in such a thing.

But curfew-breaking and sassy back talk – that was familiar
territory. Vicky was launched back into public school just in time
for adolescence, and in no time she’d transformed herself into a
surly kohl-rimmed smart-ass who cut bullet holes in her Esprit
sweatshirts and spattered her tightly pegged jeans with bleach.
Where did she pick this stuff up? It’s not as if we had MTV. Once
again, she’d become someone we didn’t know. Personally I wasn’t so
crazy about the new Vicky, and the feeling appeared to be mutual.
For the next six years she would speak no more than fifty words a
day to me, all of them prefaced by “Hey, dipshit.”

It has always seemed strange to me that so few siblings in the
Bible get along. The first death in the whole Bible is a
fratricide. There’s Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and
Esau, Rachel and Leah, Joseph and the other eleven, all of whom
make the Haywards look spectacularly well-adjusted. They make the
Jacksons
look spectacularly well-adjusted. Biblical family
reunions require flocks of she-goats and wrestling matches; they
end in false accusations and hard truces made over fathers’ graves.
The best you can hope for is the family diplomacy employed by
Abraham and Lot: you go right, and I’ll go left.

During our respective Bible binges Vicky and I had proven
ourselves fairly incapable of interpreting Scripture sensibly, but
this lesson we understood. This lesson we could apply. I went
right, and she went left. If we were pointing in different
directions, we reasoned, we were less likely to step on each
other’s toes. Each fall, we claimed our separate activities. “You
can have stupid nerdy Book Club and stupid nerdy Service Club and
stupid nerdy Computer Club,” Vicky conceded. “Art is mine. Not so
much as a stick figure from you; it’s mine. We can both have French
Club, but at French Club events,
tu ne me connais pas, tu
comprends?
”

J’ai compris
. I went
à droit
, she went
à
gauche
. Sometimes we crossed paths. We’d be at the same dance,
me primly manning the refreshment booth, and I’d look up to see her
slow-dancing, sticking her tongue out at me over her date’s
shoulder. At rallies I’d see her across the gym, sitting with her
friends, throwing things at the cheerleaders. After school, picking
up litter with the Green Teens, I’d glimpse her zooming by in a
friend’s car, the stereo cranked so loud it rattled my teeth. There
goes my wild sister, I would think, and then I’d go wash my hands
fifty times and pray for her soul.

I figured she could use a good word, not really having a faith
of her own. Because she was taller and blonder, people always
assumed she was the Christian kid in our interfaith family, like
our parents each got one to raise in their respective faith, like
they each chose the one who most looked the part. “No,” I would
correct them. “She’s a
heathen
. She doesn’t practice any
religion at all.”