Several years later both books would prove instructive and useful, giving me an endless list of things to fear and obey. What if my parents got divorced? What if my mother grew jealous and popped pills when I started getting better roles than she? Was that spot on the wall a mark of the plague, and if it was, where could I find a high priest to exorcise the malignancy?
My parents should have hidden the Bible as soon as the scrupulosity surfaced. It was the only handbook to religious practice I had, and the idea that it might require context or interpretation was beyond me. I was completely irony- and allegory-proof. I read Animal Farm around the same time and found it to be a perfectly charming story about some naughty pets.
But the Bible, the Bible satisfied my every scrupulous pang. Sex, death, and impurity are the greatest hits on the OCD jukebox, and they are in heavy rotation in the Old Testament. Leviticus alone provides some amazing material. There’s an entire chapter on discharges. Here it is, all laid out, everything thou hast been worrying over: swarming things and carcasses, leprosy and tetter, blood and sores and seed. Thou must not touch these things! The Bible says! And if thou dost, if thou accidentally dost, there are purification rituals that must be carried out with exacting care. It’s all there, all laid out.
But it was so hard to follow. There were so many laws, and they were so weird. The sex laws alone. My high school was full of harlots. Would I be required to stone them? And what was I to do with this: “And whoever sits on anything on which he who has the discharge has sat shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the evening.”
Suddenly I would have to determine who had sat at my desk before me, and whether or not he had had the discharge recently. Great. That was just what I wanted to spend my time thinking about. The Levitical regulations regarding bodily fluids are a rich vein indeed, and they troubled me greatly. Because I couldn’t be sure what was issuing forth from people in the privacy of their pants, I regarded everyone past puberty as ritually impure. Everything they touched was tainted, and keeping track of it all was a full-time job. It was bad enough if they’d just touched something with their hands. But if they’d touched it with their backsides – if they’d sat on it – it was irretrievably fouled.
At school I only had so much control, but at home I could keep a mental inventory of all the chairs and cross them off as others sat on them. After a while I would sit only on the living room couch – reserved for company, it was the least-used piece of furniture in the house – and my special prayer chair, a torturously uncomfortable contraption of white wire grids that left a window-pane pattern on the backs of my thighs. From there I moved to the floor, which was fine until my parents got sick of tripping over me.
Later I would learn that few of these laws actually apply anymore; they mostly deal with ritual impurity that was an issue only in Temple times. But I didn’t know that then. I took everything dangerously literally. My parents worried, with good reason, that I would try to make burnt offerings in the backyard. I wished. The Bible was written for a different time, one in which there were far better accessories. I just couldn’t get my hands on the materials I needed. Sure, I could try to purify vessels in the Jacuzzi, but it just wasn’t the same. I could try to expiate sin by painting the cat’s forehead with ketchup, but what good would that do? I needed frankincense and handmaidens, shewbreads, goats, and first-born males.
But all that insanity was still a few years off that Sunday afternoon I first stumbled onto these highly educational texts. That day I was less taken by the signs and wonders than by the sex and weirdness. Like Eve, I was eager to share my newfound wisdom with a helpmeet.
“Listen to this,” I said excitedly, holding up the books for my sister to see.
Vicky lay on our parents’ bed, idly ripping the stitching out of the bedspread. She was staring glassy-eyed at Fight Back! With David Horowitz, the consumer justice show we watched when nothing else was on. “No way,” she answered.
“Listen, it’s interesting.”
“No. You can read to me from that other book, if there’s bad parts in it, but no Bible.”
I shrugged and went back to my reading. We were completely different people, had nothing in common but a crush on Andy Gibb. It had always been that way. Only fourteen months apart, we are almost Irish twins, but we could not be less alike. I’m a dark-haired, pale-skinned Eastern European gnome, a short and fuzzy troll doll strangers sometimes rub for luck. My sister is a blond, a full head taller, with the capacity to tan. Except for bad manners and laziness, we don’t have a single common feature. My hair is curly and my teeth, straight; my sister’s, the opposite. Pore size, problem areas, general disposition – we share none of these. Vicky lets it all hang out. I tuck it in, straighten it, pin it back. I am anal-retentive; she is – “not anal-expulsive,” she finishes. Anal-repulsive, maybe.
We don’t look alike, don’t even see alike. The first time we went to the ophthalmologist, he couldn’t get over it. “Do these children have different fathers?” he inquired. Though I am nearsighted and Vicky, far-, neither one of us had any trouble making out the horrified and offended look on our mother’s face.
By the time we were in school our differences had multiplied and magnified. I’d taken to school right away, had loved the stacks of fresh newsprint to scrawl on, the tiny cartons of room-temperature milk, the minions to boss around. Vicky’s adjustment was rockier. It just wasn’t what she expected. First of all, there was no TV. She had to wear underwear, pants, and shoes, and the dog couldn’t come with her. Vicky had spent the previous four years of her life in her bathing suit, asking strangers if they had any gum and eating breath mints we found in the gutter. She wasn’t prepared for this new world of rules and math, of cubbies and structured time.
She responded with nosebleeds. They came out of nowhere, these daily torrents of blood. “Have you been rooting around in there?” my mother demanded, inspecting Vicky’s fingernails for evidence. But she hadn’t. This was just a spontaneous bodily reaction to kindergarten. Some kids wet their pants; Vicky hemorrhaged. It was disturbing, but it wasn’t particularly dangerous, and after a while we got used to her coming home with blood spattered down her front and purple crust around her nostrils.
One morning she got a nosebleed that was worse than usual. I knew this because I could hear her calling for me through the partition that divided our classrooms. A few minutes later the teacher’s aide carried her into my class, cradled in her arms like a three-foot-tall baby, feet dangling, head back with bloody tissues wadded to her nose, yellow hair spilling down. “She kept asking for you,” the aide explained. “We didn’t know what to do.”
I didn’t know, either. I was six. I couldn’t fix this. And I was mortified. This was more embarrassing than the time my mother dropped a tray of cupcakes facedown in the parking lot and then picked out the gravel and served them to my classmates anyway. This was more embarrassing than the time the dog followed us to school, which hadn’t actually been embarrassing at all, had actually been kind of exciting and had afforded me a certain popularity for the rest of the day. “He just loves me so much,” I told my classmates when we spotted him through the classroom window, darting across the empty playground, a brown, panting blur. “He follows me everywhere. It’s embarrassing, but what can you do?”
But a leaking sister, this was just bad. I ignored her for a full minute, hoping the aide would carry her back out before my classmates noticed what was going on. But she just stood there. Finally I went over and patted Vicky on the head. That seemed to satisfy all parties, and they left.
Shortly after that the nosebleeds stopped. Vicky adjusted, made lots of friends, got used to the whole routine, and did just fine for a couple years. Then she found herself in a class taught by a true moron. It’s not unusual to see someone taking off her shoes to count to sixteen in an elementary school classroom, but when it’s the teacher, there’s cause for alarm. This woman’s idea of social studies was to tell t
he kids about the previous night’s date. For history, she recounted Happy Days plot lines. Art was pinto beans glued to a paper towel. She may have had a teaching credential, but she sure didn’t have a lot of imagination.
When Vicky brought home a spelling test on which no word had more than two letters, and a couple had just one, my mother hit the roof. Vicky had spelled both a and I correctly, but my mother was still furious. “What’s wrong with this woman?” she demanded. “The dog has tougher assignments in obedience school, and all he has to learn is to not mount his classmates. This is a giant leap backwards. If we let her stay in this class, in two weeks she’ll forget how to speak and start making on the carpets.”
A few days later Vicky was enrolled in a fundamentalist Baptist school. By this time my parents had made some odd choices, endorsing an all-salami diet for the cat and chandeliers for the bathrooms, but this was surely the strangest decision they ever made. Things were already complicated enough, what with the Catholicism and the Judaism. Handing Vicky over to the Baptists introduced a whole new level of crazy. The Catholics and the Jews have plenty of rules, but at least they both let you drink. Besides, it was unfair. Vicky wasn’t the idiot; the teacher was. Send the teacher to Baptist school, to military school, to obedience school, but let Vicky stay put.
Well, it was done. And it wasn’t like there were a lot of choices. Once my parents vetoed public school, it was either the Baptists, the Catholics, or the truly wacked-out Evangelicals. No matter what, Vicky was going to be wearing a plaid skirt and spending a lot of time in chapel. At least the Baptists were good for a rigorous education, and unlike most of the other schools in town, it would not include extracurricular tutorials in holding your smoke. And maybe the religious component wouldn’t be that weird. Because our Israeli neighbors sent their kids there, there were actually more Jewish kids at the Baptist school than at mine. When Vicky left, I became the only one.
I was appalled by the whole thing, but Vicky herself didn’t seem too distressed. Perhaps her month with the half-wit teacher had left her too inarticulate to protest or perhaps she didn’t really care either way. It wasn’t so bad; she had some neighbor friends at the school, and there was pizza on Fridays. There was also corporal punishment and a daily volley of brimstone, but you got used to that.
And so began the family’s immersion in a whole new world. It was a world of needlepoint Bible cozies and prayer breakfasts, of gospel concerts and speaking in tongues. Our Judeo-Catholic background had left us entirely unprepared for it. Weeping statues and heavily fortified wine with lunch – these things were familiar to us; but not letting the kids trick-or-treat on Halloween – what was up with that?
Suddenly we were shopping for school supplies in stores with names like Psalmost Perfect and Kings ‘n’ Things. Suddenly my parents were attending PTA meetings that featured lectures on satanic cults and AC⁄DC albums played backward. My mother inevitably came home sighing and shaking her head. “What a load of crap,” she would announce, throwing her purse down on the kitchen counter. “Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think that Acey Deucey business is music, but it’s not devil worship, either. If you ask me, Neil Diamond is the one they should be worrying about. How else can you explain his tremendous success?”
They were strange, these other parents, and the children were uniformly weird, too. When Vicky started bringing her new classmates home we didn’t know what to make of them. We’d never met kids like these. They were hippie Jesus freaks, born-again foster kids, scary backwoods children who spent their weekends burning tires and shooting rats. One girl’s mother insisted the family’s cats and chickens had mated. “The kitties got feathers,” she swore. “It’s the damnedest thing you ever seen.”
Sometimes the children were cruel, and sometimes they were just lame. They were more or less like normal kids, I guess, but what made them so frightening was their conviction that Jesus was on their side. They weren’t peeing on your bike because they were mean, but because Jesus told them to. They weren’t eating their own snot because they were nuts, but because it made the devil cry. Oh, they were fun, all right. Instead of house or cops and robbers, these kids wanted to play Christians and Romans, apostles and proselytes. Even during normal play, Jesus would make strange, unexpected appearances, showing up, say, to battle Catwoman or to capture the flag.
They just had completely different references than we did. Their parents wouldn’t let them watch movies or listen to the radio or read Judy Blume. Some of the girls weren’t even allowed to cut their hair or wear pants. Many could, however, dress like hookers. We gaped in slack-jawed amazement at their tube tops, tight skirts, and spike heels. “Bible belt and shoes to match,” my mother muttered. By fourth grade even my sister was tottering around in four-inch platform wedges and sheer blouses. Vicky wasn’t permitted make-up, but her classmates, denied everything else, had full reign at the cosmetic counter. They came to class made up like baby prostitutes, the dainty crosses around their necks getting tangled in their heavily padded bras. Years later, after she was back in public school, Vicky would accompany her one remaining Baptist school friend to an out-of-town baptism that she likened to an evangelical wet T-shirt contest. “Why is Jesus only appearing to the stacked teenagers in white tank tops?” Vicky wanted to know, but there was no answer.
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 whis
pered. “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.
Devil in the Details Page 6