Devil in the Details (20 page)

Once, when I was thirteen, I woke up and I couldn’t smile. This
is not allegory. I woke up one day and found that half of my face
was paralyzed. It was the strangest thing. The right side curved up
in a grin when I asked it to, but the left wouldn’t move. At first
my parents thought I was faking. Several lopsided grins later they
were convinced, if amused. “Oh, do it again,” they urged. “Hoo.
That is one funny expression.”

After I indulged their requests to demonstrate my frown and my
surprised look, they took me to a doctor. It turned out to be
nothing too serious; I had Bell’s palsy was all. It’s a fairly
benign paralysis of the facial nerves caused, in my case, by a
cold. A month or so later it went away on its own and I could smile
again, if you gave me something to smile about. But it was weird
and unsettling while it lasted. Roseanne Barr had the same thing
when she was a child, and it inspired her Jewish family to convert
temporarily to Mormonism. I could see how it could scare you into
doing something like that. I could see how disease could shake your
faith.

We were at war, my body and I, and all these years later we
still haven’t signed a truce. Perhaps it’s because my body failed
me so spectacularly so many times before, when the connections in
my brain went haywire, when my face froze, when my bones poked out
and my skin turned funny colors. The scrupulosity and anorexia
eventually went away, but the profound hypochondria remained. I
call my father every week with new diagnoses: I am pretty sure
there are blood clots in my legs; I think my pancreas has stopped
working; this mole is suspicious; these crow’s feet are cancerous.
It is a fact that I got my father to spend an entire Thanksgiving
weekend on the phone with the Centers for Disease Control when I
became convinced that I had contracted German measles and then
passed it on to a pregnant friend (it was a rash). My brain works
more or less as it’s supposed to these days, but this part, the
psychosomatic part, never got fixed.

But I am trying. I am trying very hard to trust my body, even
when it twitches and throbs, when it develops new and unflattering
properties like skin tags and varicose veins.

I am trying. And I believe I have a good plan. Nothing, I think,
would restore my faith like some plastic work. Cosmetics weren’t
the answer, but I’m hopeful that cosmetic surgery might be. I’ve
been browsing, window-shopping, testing the waters with my HMO.

It’s a good idea, I think. And when I gaze upon creation through
doe-like eyes, offering praise through full, shapely lips, I know
my faith will be restored. It will be complete. It will be
perfect.

∨
Devil in the Details
∧

S
ometime during my
junior year of high school I turned orange. I was not the first
student to do so – there had been some other examples, all
involving mishaps with that early generation of sunless
self-tanners – but I was the first one to achieve a full-body neon
effect. Everything but my eyes, teeth, and hair took on the
jaundiced hue of a wilting tiger lily. In short order I had a new
nickname, “Orange Girl,” and an appointment with my
pediatrician.

The examination was brief. “She’s orange, all right,” the doctor
agreed. A few questions later he ascertained what was wrong. I’d
been eating little besides carrots and cantaloupe. The overdose of
carotene had resulted in carotenosis, a relatively harmless
condition in which the skin turns a deep yellowish orange. As far
as pigmentation goes, it turns out the you-are-what-you-eat axiom
is pretty literal. It’s a diet of shrimp that makes flamingos pink,
of reddish crustaceans that makes salmon salmon. I wasn’t too happy
with my current predicament – I looked bad in orange – but I was
excited about the possibilities. Green really brought out my eyes.
I wondered what a lot of broccoli could do for me. Or plums. I
looked good in plum. In the meantime, the doctor suggested I find
something else to eat and sent me home.

This wasn’t the outcome my family had been hoping for. After a
couple years of relatively normal eating habits, I had gone off the
rails again and now I was driving everyone nuts. I had adopted a
typical anorexic ploy: wolf down the non-caloric foods, then, when
it came time to eat the deadly lasagne, the unthinkable potatoes au
gratin, plead fullness. “No macaroni for me, thanks,” I demurred,
patting my stomach. “After all those capers, I couldn’t eat another
bite!”

My meals came to consist mostly of garnish. I attacked anything
wearing a frilly toothpick with a gusto that revolted my dining
companions. My family learned to look away as I gnawed melon down
to the rind, salted and peppered the decorative lettuce leaf, and
nearly frenched the ornamental orange slices. “I don’t know what
you’re doing to that pepperoncini, but I think you should send it
some flowers tomorrow,” my sister muttered. Pickles, parsley,
cocktail onions – this was my diet. I could make an entire dinner
out of bar fruit.

It was the carrots with ketchup and mustard that really did
Vicky in. She watched with distaste as I ate them every
afternoon.

“They’re nature’s french fries,” I told her.

“My ass they are,” she returned. “For once can’t you fix
yourself a snack that doesn’t look like it’s been fished out of the
compost pile? Try aiming a little higher up the food chain, retard.
People aren’t supposed to eat this way.” She must have been
delighted when my complexion conspired to prove her right.

Not that it did her much good. My family had expected I would
leave the doctor’s office with a stern rebuke and, if things went
really well, a prescription for tranquilizers that I might agree to
share with my more pharmaceutically adventurous kin. My mother
frowned when I bounded out into the waiting room without so much as
a pamphlet.

“Did he weigh you?” she demanded, folding her arms across her
chest and tapping her foot aggressively. “Did you tell him what
you’ve been eating? Did you tell him you haven’t had a period in a
year and a half and I don’t have a grandchild to show for it?”

“Yes, yes, and yes,” I lied, snapping a piece of sugarless gum.
“He says I’m normal.”

My mother rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, I’m onto you. You may
have fooled him, but I know you’re not right.”

She had a point. I was orange. Of course something was wrong. I
was marked with highlighter, like an important passage in an
abnormal-psych textbook, like a glaring accusation of bad
parenting. I was a neon beacon of teen dysfunction. On the plus
side, it was unlikely I’d accidentally get shot by a hunter.

The other plus was that I was a shoo-in for school mascot. Our
school colors were orange and white. At football games our
bleachers looked like a front porch on November first, a sea of
smashed pumpkin. I never learned who was to blame for this lapse of
taste. Perhaps a previous class had been allowed to vote on it. How
they must have laughed when they sentenced us to wear colors that
would make us look like pimply Muppets for all eternity.

Or perhaps a cruel principal was responsible. Only a sadistic
madman could have chosen hues guaranteed to flatter exactly no
one’s complexion. At our school, every day was Salloween.

It was a color combination that aroused nausea and dread but not
spirit. Well, nausea and dread have their uses. This was something
of which the school’s planners had been well aware. Designed by a
Foucauldian architect to discourage vandalism, the campus resembled
nothing so much as a prison. It did not have a single window or
skylight. It was less a campus than a compound, with high sandstone
walls and retractable iron gates that stood at the ready should a
total lockdown ever be required. In my junior year a classmate
flipped out and killed three people in the countryside. At the
sentencing the district attorney warned him that he didn’t know
what he was in for: “Prison is nothing like Woodland High.” Was he
nuts? Prison was
exactly
like Woodland High. The inmates
even wore the same color. Fifteen years later, when the town
finally got big enough to require a second high school, they went
ahead and built it right next to the jail.

In 1973 the campus had been considered the height of modern
architecture and served as the setting for a TV movie about high
school football called
Blood Sport
. It starred Gary Busey
and Larry Hagman and, to my everlasting delight, my algebra
teacher. The film was about a quarterback who was torn between his
father and his coach, and the prisonlike structure of the school
underscored the movie’s rock-and-a-hard-place message. Curiously,
the only other movie filmed in my hometown also had a prison
setting. It was called
The Stunt Man
and featured Peter
O’Toole and Barbara Hershey. We went down to watch the filming at
the old jailhouse. I believe Mr. O’Toole was already on the wagon
at that point, but we were inclined to believe the worst when we
saw him weaving out of his trailer while Barbara held him up.
“She’s Jewish,” my mother stage-whispered to me. “That’s probably
why she’s sober.”

I knew how she felt. I, too, was soberly shouldering a
staggering burden, but instead of an Oscar-nominated actor it was
nameless dread. It was just normal teenage angst – oh, and some
fairly serious brain dysfunction – but I wore it badly. I was
convinced that I’d stumbled into the wrong life, and maybe I had. I
was a neurotic Jewish kid. I was supposed to be off at some
forward-thinking East Coast boarding school experimenting with
lesbianism and casual drug use. Instead I was at Hillbilly High, an
agricultural voc-ed school meant to prepare kids to take over their
parents’ farms.

And for this, it was very good. The school was not without its
merits and strong suits. But the closest thing my parents had to a
farm was a browning front lawn. I didn’t belong there. This was a
school that didn’t teach Latin, Creative Writing, or AP anything,
but did offer Advanced Gunsmithing and Animal Husbandry. In May it
was not uncommon to see a girl in taffeta and heels using the gun
rack to hoist herself into her prom date’s monster truck. Future
Farmers of America was by far the largest club on campus, and
hay-baling competitions and pig-kissing contests were normal school
events. One morning between classes I found my best friend
clutching her abdomen and trying to suppress a gag reflex. “The Ag
kids were castrating sheep in homeroom,” she explained, her eyes
watering. “I know you won’t believe me, but I swear they did it
with their teeth.”

No wonder I was unhappy. There was college to look forward to,
but if my teachers were any indication, adulthood was no party. Oh,
sure, most of my instructors were serious, well-adjusted educators
who presented their subjects with enthusiasm, who took us out for
sodas after school, and who really cared about their students’
welfare. But there was also a fair share of alcoholics, fading
beauties, and other bitter malcontents. Our female teachers tended
to begin class with the warning “I’ve got cramps like you wouldn’t
believe, so if you kids are smart you won’t mess with me
today.”

Looking back on it now, I can’t believe I didn’t have more fun.
Sheep and prison bars – this was rich stuff. But I lacked the
exotic sexual proclivities or sense of humor that would have made
my high school experience a good time. All I had was a bad attitude
and an eating disorder.

That, and a very full schedule. I was extremely busy trying to
get into a good college. Warned that good grades from my high
school wouldn’t mean much, I was desperate to pad my resume with
activities. I joined every club I could. French Club? Oui! Student
Council? Aye! Literary Club, Service Club, Honor Society,
Scholarship Foundation – I joined any group that didn’t require
interaction with livestock or my sister. I went to Mecha meetings
until I was gently reminded that the club was actually for Chicano
students. Well, fine, I’d stop coming, but would they mind if I put
it on my CV anyway? Multicultural candidates really had an
edge.