Devil in the Details (17 page)

The next day we reeled from the sulfite headaches, but what
could we do? We were lucky to get what we got. There weren’t more
than ten Jewish families in our hometown, so there was almost
nothing available. We had to drive to the next town over just to
get matzo. Our local supermarket tried, though, bless their hearts,
running an ad for Passover specials that featured clip art of a
glass of wine, a loaf of bread, and a cross. They got the artwork
wrong, but at least the timing was right. The Hanukkah specials
were offered a full two weeks after Hanukkah ended and consisted,
inexplicably, of egg noodles and ‘Congratulations on Your Bar
Mitzvah’ cards.

Between the bad food and the approaching bikini season, Passover
was prime time for my bi-annual flare-up of anorexia. On the
alternate years, the scrupulosity kicked in. Passover is high
season for the disorder. It’s the only holiday that actually
demands a comprehensive hosing-down of the house and all its
contents, a requirement that flipped all my scrupulous switches.
Even sane people go nuts on Passover. The holiday compels perfectly
normal adults to board the pets, bleach the phones, and cover all
the countertops with foil. On Passover, everyone’s kitchen looks
like a bad sci-fi movie set. The scrupulous take the process into
another realm altogether. No amount of foil or cleaning will
suffice. For the scrupulous, it’s Passoverandoverandoveragain.

To make matters worse, there’s no room for error as there is
with other commandments. You’re not to mix meat and milk, you’re to
take every precaution, but if there’s the slightest contamination,
it’s still kosher. Not so with Passover. Any amount of leaven
renders everything it touches unfit. Leaven is a huge category to
begin with, consisting not just of bread and baked goods but of all
legumes, all grains, and all their derivatives, including wonderful
additives like MSG. There is leaven in ketchup, in salsa, in soda,
powdered sugar, pickles, shampoo. I often think how much easier our
lives might be if, in their haste to leave Egypt, the Israelites
had skipped the unleavened loaves altogether and had just packed,
say, some underripe fruit. If we were to observe Passover with
limits on produce instead of leaven, it would be a much simpler
affair. Fruit is large, easy to spot, and doesn’t produce crumbs.
For a week we’d have to have honey instead of jam with our peanut
butter. Big deal.

But leaven, leaven is hard. And I made it much harder. In my
bursts of scrupulosity I extrapolated leaven to include not just
food but words and pictures. The issue of
Woman’s Day
with
the cake on the cover had to be sealed away with the rest of the
contraband under the bathroom sink. If I accidentally glanced at
the still life of bread and grapes, I had to go wash and chant and
pray.

Books were out; two or three pages in, a character would have
lunch, the word
sandwich
would get on my hands, and I’d be
contaminated. TV was impossible, with all the ads for tacos and
snack cakes. It would have been an unbearably boring time if I
hadn’t been so busy flushing my mouth out and inspecting the dog’s
fur for crumbs.

Perhaps it would have been easier if I’d had any idea what I was
doing. Mr. Stein and I hadn’t covered the holidays yet. My
knowledge of Passover customs was limited to what I’d picked up
from a few half-baked seders and the annual hippie Passover potluck
in the nearby college town, attended mostly by bearded grad
students wearing T-shirts proclaiming “I’m a
real
man now
that I’ve got matzo balls.” Educational, but not in the way one
might hope.

I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I didn’t know you were
actually supposed to have a seder on both the first and second
nights until I was twelve. I was horrified. My family only did the
one. And so began my custom of conducting the second seder secretly
in my room, in the dark, while the rest of the family was
downstairs watching TV. It was lonely and weird, with me reading
all the responses and pantomiming the food, but it was oddly
satisfying, too. My family wasn’t there to mess things up, and with
the beginnings of a bowel impaction rumbling in my colon, the
invisible food was a relief.

It was a shadowy phantom service that in its strange, bleak way
perfectly embodied the subdued mood of the season, the gathering
darkness of a profound depression that waited for me, a ways off
but already inevitable. It grew closer and closer as I bent over my
Haggadah, an ancient battered relic illustrated with stark
Munch-style woodcuts of the Angel of Death and suffering Egyptians.
Years before, the dog had gotten ahold of it and his bite marks
only added to the gruesome specter. It was perfect. Hours later,
after I finally finished and went to bed, I dreamed of dog-faced
pharaohs chasing me with enema hoses, as my hands framed an
O-shaped silent scream. “Let my people go,” I tried to yell, but
nothing, nothing would come out.

Summer may be the simplest time of the year for an interfaith
family, simply because there are so few holidays to cause conflict.
For a family with an obsessive-compulsive child, however, it’s
ninety days of unremitting hell. Your kid is home twenty-four hours
a day, with nothing to distract her but her own wacked-out
preoccupations.

In our house, of course, we had all the handicrafts. This turned
out to be a trade-off. It helped keep my obsessions and compulsions
in check, but not my bad taste. Every summer I produced a series of
terrifically unappealing knitted vests and neckties that were no
less annoying than constant washing and reassurance-seeking.
Perhaps my mother should have encouraged me to take up smoking
instead.

Whatever my new hobby, it would all grind to a halt in early
July, with the arrival of the Three Weeks. The Three Weeks is a
period of mourning for the destruction of the Temple during which
anything of interest is prohibited. Knitting, shopping, interior
decorating – all of these things are out. It is forbidden to get a
haircut or blow out candles, to dance or play music, to sew or
shave or wear new clothes. During the last nine days there are even
more restrictions: no eating meat, no drinking wine, no swimming,
washing, laundering, or bathing. On the last day, the fast of Tisha
b’Av, the prohibitions increase: one may not eat or drink, nor,
more strangely, may one wear leather or moisturize. Given the
prohibitions on booze and hygiene, it goes without saying that
there is also no fooling around.

As fun as the Three Weeks are, it’s hard to believe they’re not
more widely observed. Most Jews haven’t even heard of them. My
interfaith family certainly hadn’t, and they didn’t quite know what
to make of it when I first introduced the concept. “Let me get this
straight,” my mother puzzled. “For the next three weeks you’re not
going to rearrange my furniture, play your klezmer tape, or shave
your armpits?” I was shocked when she announced that was just fine
with her. My family had learned to question and then forbid
anything I insisted was a commandment, but they let this one go.
I’d made up some weird stuff, sure, but even I wasn’t this
arbitrarily masochistic. In any case, it seemed like an even trade.
My family would have to put up with my BO and the scratch marks my
stubble left on the leather couch, but they would finally get a
turn in the shower.

During my scrupulous periods the Three Weeks were both
exquisitely satisfying and impossible. I loved the additional
restrictions, the new list of pleasures denied, but the ban on
washing, oh, the ban on washing. Washing normally occupied a good
two hours of my day. Forced to give up my favorite hobby, I was
bored witless. I also stank. I am not an active person, but nine
days without a bath will sour the cream of any couch potato. I
would later learn that my observance was a little overzealous – the
ban on shaving applies only to men, and the ban on washing is
observed largely in the breach – but at the time I could do nothing
but stew in my own natural juices.

It was in this matted and fragrant condition that I celebrated
my late-July birthday. When my family sang the ‘Happy Birthday’
variant, “You look like a monkey, and you smell like one, too,”
they weren’t teasing so much as reporting the sad truth. It’s a
horrible time for any observant Jew to have a birthday, but for a
scrupulous one, it’s particularly unpleasant. I took all the Three
Weeks customs to the extreme. My zealous unhappiness is
well-documented in all my teenage birthday photos, year after year
the same picture: a greasy me, grimacing in front of a cake I’m
going to make an excuse not to eat, topped by candles I’m going to
fake an asthma attack not to blow out. Out of frame is the odd
assortment of gifts I’ve requested. Because I can’t accept clothes
or music, I will get Jewish encyclopedias, playing cards,
stationery, and novelty Band-Aids.

When I turned eighteen my birthday fell on Tisha b’Av itself.
Normally I was not permitted to observe it, but as I was now an
adult responsible for screwing up my own life, my parents let me
fast. “Me, I’d be out buying lotto tickets and porn, but if you
want to celebrate your eighteenth birthday working up a good faint,
knock yourself out,” my mother said, returning the cake mix to the
pantry.

The number eighteen is hugely significant in Judaism, and if I’d
been a counter I probably would have spent all day trying to
determine the auspiciousness of this coincidence. But since I was a
washer, I had nothing at all to do. It is amazing how much free
time you have when you’re not permitted to eat or groom. After
spending a few hours trying to catalog the family snapshots, I grew
bored and wandered next door to see our only Jewish neighbors.
Their teenage niece was visiting from Tel Aviv. It was 110 degrees,
and she was in the backyard, splashing in the pool. I was covered
wrist to ankle in corduroy. Michal took one look at me and rolled
her eyes. “Come in,” she offered. “You will be really more
comfortable in the waters.”

I explained that I couldn’t because it was Tisha b’Av. “I know
what is Tisha b’Av,” she replied, giving me a withering look that
suggested it was people like me who’d driven her from Israel to
California in the first place. “You speak Hebrew? You know what is
meshuga?
”

She was the only person I’d met who’d actually heard of this
holiday and even she thought I was nuts. I suppose I should have
been offended, but I was charmed. Here was that Israeli candor I’d
heard so much about. It was as refreshing and tart as a glass of
lemonade. Who needed a dip in the pool when the conversation was
this bracing?

I smiled at her dumbly, like a dog that wags its tail when you
curse it in a dulcet tone. Michal swam over to the edge. “Well,
then, I think we must to go inside, before you fall from the heat
weakness.” She sighed, lifting herself out of the pool. “I know
something we can do that is okay with Torah and not too
boring.”

We spent the rest of the afternoon poring over back issues of
the Hebrew equivalent of
Cosmo
. Oh, sure, with all the
cleavage and sex tips, it was not the most appropriate reading
material for the blackest day of Jewish history. Under other
circumstances I might have balked, but I was afraid to argue with
Michal. Besides, it was a wonderful opportunity to expand my
knowledge of the holy tongue. We leafed through page by page, lying
on our stomachs in the dark, cool guest room, discussing the
pictures while she translated the articles for me. “This one is
about a woman who, em, I’m not sure how you say, she is not liking
the size of her chests.”

I learned all kinds of important words that day, the Hebrew
terms for
exfoliate, mousse, cellulite
, and
chafing
.
And while I picked up plenty of important information about
dressing to suit your body type, the most significant lesson I
learned was a sociological one. I’d expected Israel to be populated
by tanner but equally religious clones of myself. Michal’s
magazines revealed that it was populated by Miss Teen Universe
hopefuls. These weren’t the people of the book, but of the
Redbook
. I should have been disappointed, shocked, but
instead I was exhilarated. It had never occurred to me that you
could have both faith and flesh, that, like the pool, you could be
both deep and shallow at once.

In a strange way, it was an appropriate lesson. Fast days have
different jobs. Yom Kippur is meant to take one out of one’s body.
But Tisha b’Av is meant to place one firmly in it, as hot and dirty
and weak as it may be. I don’t think it was just coincidence that a
few weeks later I began to trade ascetic for aesthetic, doing
things I hadn’t done since the anorexia and scrupulosity first hit:
conditioning my hair, wearing perfume, eating an eclair. A few
weeks after that I would start college and begin, for the first
time in years, to live a normal life.

My brain was finally doing what it was supposed to. It would be
quite some time before my hair would, too.

Fall may be the best time of the year for Jews. The cool, dry
weather is easy on frizz, and it’s high season for the only
competitive sport we care for, shopping wholesale. With all the
High Holidays, there are plenty of occasions to model our fall
fashions, and on one of them we’re actually
commanded
to
wear new clothes. My family usually managed a trip to Loehmann’s,
but the rest of our High Holiday observance tended to be rather
erratic. For instance, we normally failed to go to synagogue. When
we did go, we spent most of the service commenting on others’
outfits. “Check out the lady in the back,” we whispered. “Can she
really think it’s a good idea to wear patterned hose on the day
we’re asked to account for our sins?” In this, if in nothing else,
we marked the holiday as we’re intended to. If Jews weren’t
supposed to spend the High Holidays criticizing one another’s
clothes we would have been born Mormons.