Faith was almost all I had. At the time, the good drugs and really effective therapeutic protocols hadn’t been invented yet. We didn’t have anything. We didn’t even have a diagnosis. But we had rabbis, and so it was that I ended up in a series of synagogue offices, whimpering while my parents reeled off the list of my most recent peccadilloes.
I had expected the rabbis to be impressed with my piety, to collude with me, to tell my parents they were lucky to have such a devout child. Instead they shook their heads and sighed and gently suggested I spend more time with my friends.
This, of course, was exactly what they were supposed to do. Though Jewish literature doesn’t speak of scrupulosity, and these rabbis didn’t either, they clearly knew what I had and what to do. They said, we’ve learned about this. They said we’ve seen this before. In the end their response was the same as the Church’s, the same as the APA’s, the same as my mother’s: to insist, in as reassuring a tone as possible, that I cut the crap.
A standard sermon joke: A synagogue is plagued with mice. The congregation hires exterminator after exterminator, to no avail. The mice keep coming back. Finally the rabbi has an idea. He stays up all night sewing tiny yarmulkes and prayer shawls. He places some cheese on the bimah, and when the mice come to eat it, he bar mitzvahs them. They are never seen in synagogue again.
The process was more or less the same for me. There was some chanting; some words from the rabbi; several years of behavior modification, relapses, therapy, and pharmaceuticals; and then, like the bar mitzvahed mice, my scrupulosity went away. Poof, like magic.
INTERSTITIAL
MUSICAL CHAIRS: A GAME
Everyone loves party games, but the traditional ones are dances with the devil. Piñatas, pin the tail on the donkey – you’re just asking for trouble. Why risk an eye-goring, a concussion, or eternal damnation when you can have just as much fun with this engaging activity? It’s guaranteed safe and guaranteed fun. Best of all, you can play alone. The prize: your physical and spiritual security!
NUMBER OF PLAYERS: 1
OBJECT: Find someplace to sit! With all the chairs in this house, it should be easy, but…
RULES:
Players may not sit in the white chair, the comfortable one across from the TV. Sure, white is the color of purity and holiness, and if the chair were still actually white this might repel sin, but sadly, that’s not the case. The favorite chair of the pets and the site of their frequent self-administered genital baths, it has become gray, shredded, and contaminated beyond repair. Move on!
Players may not sit on either the leather couch or the loveseat. The loveseat is forbidden for the name alone. Loveseat. This is just asking for it. The couch isn’t much better. First of all, it’s leather, and hence steeped in meat and impurity and death. You might be able to sit on it if you hadn’t just consumed dairy, but you have, and you’ve got bigger problems than that, anyway. You’re pretty sure the couch was purchased on Shabbat. Finally, your sister and her friends like to sit there, and let’s be frank: a couple of them are suspected dischargers. That couch is contaminated, all right. Just forget about it.
Players may not sit on the Eames recliner. It is your father’s favorite chair and to sit there would be disrespectful. Furthermore, it is leather (see Rule 2).
Players may not sit on the tweed couch. True, it rarely gets used and is therefore less likely to be contaminated. But it’s a pullout. It’s a pullout, a bed, and it seems possible that overnight guests may have had sex on it. Keep moving.
Players may not sit on any of the beds, because they are beds.
Players may not sit on any of the armchairs, because who knows what they’re stuffed with.
Players may not sit on either the kitchen or dining room chairs. Food gets dropped on the upholstery all the time. To sit on these chairs is to sit on ham.
Players may not sit on any of the desk chairs, because they used to be kitchen chairs.
Players may not sit on the floor, because this prompts your father to yell, “This isn’t Morocco, and in this house we sit on chairs, dammit.” To sit on the floor is to disrespect your parents. Furthermore, as your father points out, “If you’re worried about impurity, the floor is the last place you should be sitting. As far as the pets are concerned, the floor is just one big shag-pile toilet.”
Players may not sit on any of the toilets. This goes without saying. Don’t think about toilets. Don’t think about toilets. Don’t think about toilets. Oh, now you’re going to have to go wash. Game over.
∨ Devil in the Details ∧
Half-Breed
I first learned I was Jewish from the minister’s daughter who lived across the street. At five, she was a year older than I was and had proved to be a reliable source in the past, teaching me both the F-word and its definition. I knew she was telling me the truth. I just didn’t know what it meant. Because she said “You’re a Jewish” in the same tone that she’d told me “You’re a fuck-you” a week earlier, I gathered it was something vaguely bad, but that was all I had to go on.
As I had the previous week, I trotted home and repeated what I’d just heard to my mother. “I swear, I’ve just about had it with that girl,” my mother sighed, jabbing a trowel into a bed of marigolds. “But yes. You’re Jewish.”
I waited for some elaboration.
“You want to know what that means? It means that you’ll never be good at sports and that you’ll score pretty well on a test called the SAT. It means you’ll always choose Tab over beer. It also means that we probably shouldn’t be feeding you pork and teaching you Christmas carols, but what can you do?”
She tousled my hair and returned to her marigolds. “Don’t look so worried. Nothing’s going to change. Not until we have to start waxing that Eastern European mustache.” She smiled optimistically. “Let’s just hope you got my genes in that department.”
My mother went on to explain that, in fact, the minister’s daughter was only half right. I was half Jewish. Like the previous week’s F-word discussion, this explanation began with a man and a woman falling in love and involved the awkward placement of body parts and other things that I wouldn’t understand until I was much, much older. My Catholic RN mother and Jewish MD father had been working at San Francisco General Hospital. In between extracting baby-food jars and produce from the rectums of the sexual revolution’s soldiers, they had managed to meet and eventually marry. It was a romantic beginning, and every time they hear a story about a foreign object lodged in someone’s anus, I imagine they share a secret smile.
My parents have, in fact, been married three times, which is a lot for people who’ve never had their own TV series. The first ceremony was spare and secular, a formality, just the two of them and a judge. The second one, performed a week later, was trickier. At the time, my father was stationed overseas in the air force. It’s difficult enough to find a priest and a rabbi willing to perform a joint interfaith ceremony in America; in Okinawa, in 1968, it was all but impossible. The priest dropped out when my father refused to sign a document promising any male offspring would be left uncircumcised. For my father, not only a Jew but a surgeon, this was unthinkable. Of course he would lop off the foreskin, and his future children would be lucky if he stopped there. He was always taking scalpels to us, removing moles and skin tags and infected toenails. This is how he showed us he loved us. “Just be happy he’s not a gastroenterologist,” my mother says darkly, arching her brows.
With the priest out of the picture, my parents turned their attentions to the rabbi. Initially he refused. My father doesn’t remember what changed his mind; my mother insists it was her charm. Whatever it was, it worked. Thus, wedding number two. This time there were more people – twelve – and a fish platter. Following the ceremony, they sent out an announcement, a black-and-white photo of the two of them looking for all the world like a pair of lost Mod Squad members. There’s my father in a three-piece suit, holding an umbrella over my mother, barefoot in a caftan and grann
y glasses. The caption deadpanned, “On August 30, 1968, Alain Traig and Judith Conroy were married. Wahoo.”
Wahoo. And thus they settled into a comfortable life off-base in the bungalow they shared with a host of geckos and cockroaches. They spent their days treating GIs for the urogenital souvenirs they acquired on shore leave, their nights toasting their union over cocktails and Stan Getz. The evenings were balmy, and as the sun went down, the house filled with the scent of “night soil,” an Okinawan phenomenon caused by the locals’ habit of defecating in the fields.
If my parents had come from two different worlds, they were now in a third so different it made their own religious differences seem negligible. How to communicate with their lunatic Japanese gardener? Left to his own devices he urinated on the lawn and filled the flower bed with wilting stems cut from the neighbor’s yard. The only English he knew was “Habu snake!” a phrase he hissed endlessly, jabbing two fingers in the air in a gesture meant to ward the creature off. It was a useful vocabulary but a very limited one, and my mother’s pleas to stop watering the grass with his own hose went uncomprehended.
Still, their Okinawan neighbors tried to make them feel at home. Plenty of Americans had passed through before, and the locals had become quite familiar with American customs. On October 31 swarms of kids showed up to pound on the door. “American Halloween,” they said. “You give us candy now.” Because their previous American visitors had also taught them the adage “You all look alike,” they kept this up for a couple hours, figuring my parents couldn’t tell one group of twenty kids from the next. By the time my parents got wise my mother was scraping the last butterscotch from the bottom of her purse. My parents shut off the lights and spent the rest of the night hiding in the bedroom, their cigarette embers glowing orange as their ice cubes melted in the humid fall air.
It was a nice life, a tropical calm before the typhoon of family life. They joined the photography club. They shopped for cheap hi-fi equipment and the pirated records that would form the sound track of my childhood, the jacket covers with their mangled English leading me to believe, until I was ten, that the Breatles’ greatest album was Sergeant Peppep’s Loney Heats Cub Banb. On Saturday nights my father donned a ridiculous government-issue white tuxedo that made him look like Cesar Romero and squired my mother to cocktail parties on base. When his duty was up, he promptly threw the suit in the trash, and my parents’ last view of Okinawa, as they drove to the airport, was of their garbageman in tie and tails.
The idyll was over. My parents had dodged disapproval and back talk by eloping, but after returning to the United States, they were fair game. They visited my father’s family first. My grandmother was matter-of-fact and determined to make the best of it. She’d never gotten along with her mother-in-law, she told my mother, and had no intention of putting anyone through that hell herself. My grandfather said nothing at all. Though he eventually became very fond and protective of my mother, he would not address her directly for the first three years and reverted to Russian whenever she was around. “Tell Alain’s lassie her scotch and soda is leaving rings on the coffee table,” my mother imagined he was murmuring. “Tell our daughter-in-law her shoes keep scuffing the floor.”
My mother’s side of the family was a little easier. Oh, sure, there had been some concern when they found out my father wasn’t Catholic. It’s a favorite family story, in fact, and all these years later the punch line “She married a what?” never fails to get a laugh. But once my mother’s relatives got used to the idea, they were fine with it. It could have been worse, they reasoned. He was Jewish, yes, but at least he wasn’t a Yankees fan.
Now, a few years later, my mother and I were sitting in the marigold bed and she was trying to explain what this all meant. “Do you understand?”
Sort of. I was thinking of the song ‘Half-Breed,’ which was very popular at the time. It told the story of a young woman who was ostracized in spite of the fact that she’d gotten the best of two gene pools, the thick straight hair of her Cherokee mother and the fine-boned bearing of her European father. Against a thumping backbeat, she brayed her lament.
So I was a half-breed. “Do you understand, pussycat?” my mother repeated. I shrugged. At the moment all I was thinking was this: I have something in common with Cher.
I didn’t understand what Jewish or Catholic meant, but Cher, I got. Her variety show was a particular favorite of mine. I’d seen her perform this very song and had been impressed by the feathered headdress and beaded cutaway outfit. She’d even had a horse. Did this mean I could expect a future of Bob Mackie gowns, Appaloosa rides, and turquoise jewelry?
“Do I get beads?” I asked.
“What?” my mother looked up. “You mean rosary beads? Oh, no. We’re raising you Jewish.”
So that’s how it was going to be. I might be a half-breed, but there would be no half-creed. This was for the best. There are many things I fault my parents for – oh, how I wish they’d made me start a skin care regime when I was young enough for it to really make a difference – but for this, I am grateful. This they got right. It’s the best solution to the interfaith dilemma: pick one religion and give the kids no say in the matter. Children cannot be trusted to dress or feed themselves; they certainly cannot be entrusted with dogma and doxologies. If I’d been allowed to make such a decision as a youngster we would have practiced a faith that required the liberal application of make-up and banned tooth-brushing.
It was the right choice. I’ve often thought I was born into the wrong family – I cannot, for the life of me, understand how the rest of them live without cable or call waiting – but I’ve never felt anything but Jewish. That day when I was four, the minister’s daughter only put a name to something I already knew I was. I knew I was different, knew the whole church⁄New Testament⁄ communion thing wasn’t for me. I was just too short and my hair was too curly.
“You’re living in a dream world if you think you’ve never been baptized,” my Catholic cousin Peter tells me. “You had too many babysitters and relatives worried about your immortal soul. Do you remember a visit to an indoor ‘swimming pool’ that had high ceilings, wooden benches, and colorful windows? Was the lifeguard a man in a white dress? Was he holding a smoking purse?”
I suppose it’s possible. But if it happened, it didn’t take. I have never felt any pull toward the Catholic Church, never felt stirred by saints or relics. I like those tacky garden statues, and The Thorn Birds, of course, but that’s about it.
I knew I was Jewish even when I was put out by it. And at first, I was, as often as not. My introduction to Jewish practice came shortly after my tête-à-tête with the minister’s daughter and it did not go smoothly. We had gone to San Francisco to visit my grandparents for the High Holidays, and my father had felt compelled to take me to synagogue. Perhaps my grandparents had heard too much Santa talk, or maybe my mother just wanted to get me out of the house for a couple hours. Whatever the reason, my father and I found ourselves in a stadium-sized temple where we had the special seats reserved for non-members who have neither tickets nor a twenty for the usher. From our folding chairs in the three-hundredth row, I could see the antlike figures dotting the stage below. The lush gilt splendor of the venue had led me to expect ballerinas or the Ice Capades. Instead, all the spotlights were on a cabal of wrinkled, bearded, chanting men. It was hot and dark and loud, and my red velvet dress was stiff and itchy. I glanced around for the snack bar, finding only a table of lukewarm herring. Clearly my father had confused his four-year-old daughter with someone else, someone like Henry Kissinger. This was just not my scene.
I fidgeted for fifteen minutes, then broke out into a fullblown howl. Half an hour later we were back at my grandparents’ house, my father sporting bite marks and a fresh bruise on his jaw where my party shoe had nailed him as he carried me out. “Well, that went nicely,” he announced. “I think organized religion can wait a few more years.”
That was just as well. We lived in rural
Northern California, where there was little organized Judaism to speak of. Even if the whole family had been Jewish, we would have had, as our farmer neighbors liked to say, a hard row to hoe. We were so isolated, ringed by backwoods racists whose hobbies included cooking batches of crystal meth and writing pamphlets denying the Holocaust. There were maybe six Jewish families in the whole town, most of them half-and-half like ours. Living next door to an Israeli family, we constituted the Jewish ghetto.
My father had always sworn that he would never live in a town that had more churches than bars. In our town they were in equal and plentiful supply, including several that blurred the line between the two. The church that interested me most met in a converted roller rink. I imagined the services were conducted under strobe lights, the pastor sermonizing over a disco beat: “Repent, you sinners, repent. Reverse skate!”
There were certainly more churches and bars than Jews, and there was no synagogue at all. There was, however, a Hebrew school at the Jewish Community Center one town over, and as soon as I turned six my parents signed me up. I did not particularly like it. The drive, over miles of bumpy country roads through hot, dry farmland, left me carsick, and the school’s unappetizing snacks of stale raisins and off-brand Fig Newtons didn’t help. There was a ditch next to the classrooms where the other kids in the car pool, all boys, could scoop up tadpoles and dead, leathery minnows to hold in their warm palms on the drive home. Week after week we sat plastered to the vinyl upholstery in sweaty shorts as the car slowly filled with the smell of decaying fish carcasses. My sister and I eventually built a game around these rides called Hot Nausea Car, a sort of bingo involving various emetics.
Still, I was drawn in. I felt sick and bored and put-upon, but I also knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I was a Jew, enduring Hebrew school like any other Jew. It felt right. It confirmed my faith in the same way that people who know they’re gay remain gay even if their introduction to ‘the scene’ is The Birdcage.
Devil in the Details Page 4