Devil in the Details (24 page)

I’m not sure why I bothered. Allowing myself to be photographed
in Paris was masochistic enough. These are some of the most
unattractive pictures ever taken of me. I am not particularly
photogenic, but these were astounding, so bad and so funny that I
felt I could not keep them to myself; when school started in the
fall, I would present them to my French class. “
Regardez-moi la.
J’apparait comme une banane corrompue, a fourrure et
desséchée
.” There I am, sallow and pale, my dull, frizzy hair
tamped down into a dowdy French braid (we were in France, after
all), my eyes fluttering half-shut above a grim smile or a frown.
There’s my scary body, a twisting mobile of bones anchored by
gunboat feet in protruding K-Swiss. The overall effect was
clownish, Sideshow Bob in white jeans and a hair bow. “We’re real
glad we flew five thousand miles to get this wonderful picture of
you beaming with contentment,” Dad would say as he snapped the
photo. “We’re real glad we spent six thousand dollars to make you
so happy.”

But there were moments. There was the ten-dollar melon. Eating
in France had been very, very difficult. Lunch was okay; there were
salads, cold things, vegetable things that suited me well enough.
But dinner was tough. I would have to slog my way through three
full courses, each more contaminated than the last. I would finally
find something I could eat, and it would arrive at the table
garnished with a bug that had died en route from the kitchen. I
would start to cry and out came the pills, then the liqueur,
proffered by a solicitous proprietor; and then the pill and the
alcohol would begin a little two-part harmony, and I would start to
feel well enough to inspect my
macedoine de fruits
for blood
spots.

The night of the melon we’d gone to a special, fancy restaurant.
I was not pleased, as special and fancy usually meant pork in every
course. I scanned the appetizer menu for the smallest, simplest
thing. There it was, in tidy French cursive, in brown ink: a melon.
Sixty francs. This seemed a little high, but perhaps it was a very
special melon.

“You just ordered a ten-dollar melon,” my father said as soon as
the waitress walked away. My hand flew to my mouth and I felt guilt
heat my face. I was, at this point, a very expensive child, what
with the therapy and the drugs and the truckloads of paper towels,
but these were incidentals, incurred but not intended. I did not
ask for a car, did not demand expensive clothes or plead for
electronics, did not request something indulgent simply because I
wanted it. This I never did.

But then it came, and my gosh. What a perfect melon. It was
small and cold, with smooth skin, striped dark green and light,
like silk upholstery, and creamy orange flesh. I tasted it in my
eyeballs. My gums sang for this melon. This melon could be prime
minister. It could read minds, calm children, train pets, raise the
dead. This was an extraordinary melon.

It was glorious. Normally I would not permit my family to come
near my food, as they tended to contaminate it, but the melon made
me generous. “Try it,” I urged.

“That’s a damn good melon,” they agreed. “That melon is worth
ten dollars, all right.”

And so went the rest of our stay. There was my hand in a closing
train door, and then the next day there were berries, perfect
berries that made no demands and kept me perfectly happy for
fifteen minutes. Then the French-English dictionary intentionally
dropped on my foot, and then a movie, a really funny movie. There
was the outburst, and then the pills. Things went this way and
that, and then we were home.

Looking back on it now, I can’t believe my parents put me on the
plane in the first place. I was barely ambulatory and nearly
catatonic. I was also extraordinarily unpleasant to be around.
That’s one thing when you’re at home, but quite another when you’re
paying several hundred dollars a day to be somewhere else. None of
us had all that much fun, and I’m sure my parents regretted their
decision every time they had to pull me, chapped and barefoot, out
of a fountain. But it ended up being the best thing they could have
done. OCD is a disease of pathways. By taking me away, my parents
plucked me out of the grooves I’d worn smooth with repeated
rituals, compulsions, obsessions, and prayers. They took away my
hiding places and touchstones.

When we got home I’d been up for thirty-six hours. I was
exhausted and ambivalent and unsure of what to do next. Should I
just go to sleep, or should I bathe, pray, vacuum and dust, then
spend a couple hours checking all my books for unkosher food
stains? I’d left a mantle; should I pick it up again? Reluctant but
resigned, I decided yes, yes I should. It was such a comfortable
mantle, such a flattering hair shirt, and I didn’t have anything
else to wear.

My mother found me in my bathroom, holding my nightgown by the
hem to form an apron filled with water. I think I was worried an
insect had touched it while I was gone.

“Don’t,” she said softly.

I thought for a minute, letting the water flow over the hem and
all over the sink top. I knew she was right; this wasn’t going to
get me anywhere. But it had simply never occurred to me that I
could do anything else.

Having an obsessive-compulsive impulse is like standing on
red-hot coals. Every cell in your body is screaming for you to jump
off. To keep standing there is so hard. It’s just so hard. Leaning
over the sink that night, I suddenly understood that that’s what I
had to do. I had to stand on the coals and take a tiny step
forward. I had to feel the impulse and move past it. I got it, all
of a sudden, just like that.

Maybe going away had given me some distance from my disease.
Maybe, as I would soon write in my college application essays,
the trip to Europe had changed me forever
. Or maybe the
years of checking sockets had paid off. Here, finally, was my
lightbulb moment. I understood how I would get better. It was a
fire walk, a circus feat, a high-wire balancing act of a thousand
tiny steps. It would take ages, but all I had to do right now was
turn off the faucet. Then tomorrow I would inch forward some
more.

But right now, it was just the faucet, a simple twist to the
right. “Okay,” I told my mother, and turned the water off. I pulled
the nightgown over my head. “Okay.” I was so tired. I wadded the
soggy flannel into a ball and offered it up. I was a tightrope
walker charging forward, a flying Wallenda in damp underwear.

“For me?” my mother asked, holding the dripping gift at arm’s
length. “You shouldn’t have.”

“
De rien
,” I answered. Then I shuffled to my bed, where I
slept, and slept, and slept.

∨
Devil in the Details
∧

O
r maybe it was going
to be harder than turning off a stupid faucet. Gah.

I was still a mess. The only difference was that I knew it. But
that’s something. If I wasn’t on the road to recovery, at least I
had a map.

My parents thought the road might be better traversed in a car.
Shortly after we got back from Europe, they started badgering me
about getting my driver’s license. Driving would foster
self-reliance and independence. It would also provide the means to
run away, and should I be so inclined, my parents let me know they
wouldn’t try to hide the keys. I wasn’t tempted. They’d tried to
make me get my license a year earlier and it had not gone well at
all.

Driving was not the first thing I was ever bad at. By age
sixteen, I had proved myself inept at ballet, singing, and every
sport except tetherball. I couldn’t make gravy or plot a sine
curve. But I had never failed at any task so spectacularly as when
I tried to learn to drive. The fact that this was an activity that
involved heavy machinery scared me to death. I mean, I couldn’t
pirouette, but you can’t do much damage with a toe shoe.

If I had my way I would never have to drive at all. My plan was
to make a lot of money doing something I was actually good at – the
tetherball, maybe – and hire a chauffeur. Driving just didn’t
interest me at all. The only places I ever wanted to go were to the
supermarket and the synagogue, and it wasn’t like I was embarrassed
to have my mother drive me there. The older married couples who
made up the rest of the congregation didn’t seem to think I was
uncool just because my mom was my ride. No, I didn’t need to learn
to drive. I was fine.

My parents, however, had other ideas. “If you need to go out and
pick up some more S.O.S. pads you can find your own damn ride,” my
mother sighed, putting her feet up on the coffee table and shaking
open the newspaper. “I’ve shuttled you around enough today.”

Our town was small but spread out, and you needed a car to get
pretty much anywhere. By my sophomore year my parents were nearing
their threshold. And even I could see that there would be some
advantages to having a license. It would make getting to school
much easier, for one. We lived too far away to walk, but my parents
wouldn’t drive me unless it was storming, and even then it had to
be so bad that there was a very real possibility of being hit by
lightning. Riding my bike was out of the question. Nothing was
lamer than riding your bike to school. It would be better to arrive
in a stroller. That was just as lame but not nearly as much
work.

For a while I pedaled halfway there, hid my bike in my best
friend’s shrubs, and then walked the rest of the way with her. But
this got to be too much of a production, and finally my parents
started paying the student body president, who lived across the
street, to drive me. The problem with that was that we had to leave
at 6:00 a.m. We were in student government together and had a
mandatory zero-period leadership class. I’d had quite enough of
that. She couldn’t resign, but I could, and I was looking to quit
as soon as I found another ride.

So when my mother marched me down to the DMV the very day I was
old enough to get my learner’s permit, I dutifully complied. It was
probably a bad sign that I had to cheat to pass the eye test. My
mother thought I was faking when I struggled to make out the
letters on the bigger rows, but I really couldn’t see. Apparently
my vision had gone to hell and I’d just been too busy inspecting
the upholstery to notice. This explained why I wasn’t doing so well
in trigonometry, where I couldn’t see the board, but not why I felt
compelled to inspect that upholstery in the first place.

Well, at least I’d see the contaminants more clearly now. I was
getting glasses, yet one more accessory to transform me from nerd
into full-blown social outcast. What was the point of driving if I
would have to wear glasses to do it? I was better off on my
bike.

Once I had my permit and my corrective lenses I was ready for
what my school called driver training and I called the most
unpleasant experience of my life. Driver training is just an awful
concept. It’s
The Breakfast Club
crossed with
Speed
.
Your life is in the hands of three people picked at random, with
nothing to protect you but the passenger-side brake. Worse, you’re
unlikely to have a single shared interest. Personally, I like to
have a little something in common with people when I’m going to be
stuck in a car with them for four hours. I’d also like a little
background. Are these the sort of people who drink gin for
breakfast? Are they despondent over a recent breakup? Any past
history of seizures? These are the sorts of things I want to
know.

To be fair, my fellow trainees had more to fear from me than I
did from them. At fifteen, they were all expert drivers, all of
them capable of hot-wiring a Corvette or subbing for a
demolition-driving brother should he become incapacitated after
taking a round without a helmet. My only previous driving
experience had been in a go-cart. It wasn’t even a real go-cart. It
was on a motorized track. You just sat in it and pretended to
drive. I hadn’t liked that one bit because I thought it made me
look silly. Now, behind the wheel of a real car for the very first
time, I felt the same way. I lurched through the town like a sitcom
teen, my classmates providing the laugh track.

My mother was furious when I told her the teacher couldn’t
believe my parents had never let me drive before. “What do you
mean, we should have been letting you drive?” she fumed. “It’s
illegal! The school told you I should have been letting you drive?
Should I also be teaching you to shoot up and sniff glue?”

Four lessons later, I flunked driver training, surprising
exactly no one.

Still stung by the teacher’s reproach, my parents decided to
continue my driving lessons themselves, in spite of the fact that
we didn’t have the specially equipped car or, for that matter, a
beginner-friendly car of any kind. All three were stick-shift
imports whose sensitive circuitry and hard-to-replace parts
suggested they’d been designed to spite me and all the other stupid
American teenagers. There was my father’s sports car, which I was
only allowed to ride in if I promised not to touch anything or to
sweat on the upholstery. Out of the question. Then there was the
battered VW Beetle my parents had bought on their honeymoon, now
abandoned on the sidewalk in front of the house. Barely running,
its sole responsibility now was to drive down the neighbors’
property values. It was so dinged and dusty that my father’s nurses
had decorated it with surgical dressing and Band-Aids. Inside, the
upholstery had dried and cracked into shards that poked your
thighs, exposing tufts of horsehair and rusty springs. The
condition they were in closely resembled that of the passenger seat
in a friend’s van we referred to as “the angry chair,” because its
errant springs had given more than one rider anal cysts. The
unlucky shotgun passenger was forced to ride on his knees, facing
in, with his backside resting on the dashboard.