Devil in the Details

by Jennifer Traig

  Still, the school wasn’t completely culturally deprived. They had their own songs, and though grating, they were awfully catchy. They were much more infectious than the religious songs we learned at Hebrew school. There are no pop hooks in tongue-tripping dirges like ‘Gesher Tzar M’od’ and ‘Oseh Shalom.’ But ‘Jesus Loves Me’, ‘Father Abraham,’ and ‘Arky Arky’ – those just get your feet tapping.

  There were songs, and on rainy days there were movies, too.

  At my school, we saw Disney classics and cartoons, but Vicky’s classmates got more esoteric features like Years of the Beast and Kevin Can Wait. Vicky’s favorite was called Super Christian. It was about a guy who behaved like a jerk all week, only to transform himself into a perfect Christian every Sunday. The point, I suppose, was that one is supposed to behave in a Christian manner every day, but Vicky just liked seeing the guy be a jerk. “The light’s not going to get any greener!” he screamed, getting impatient in traffic. This film was popular with all the students and eventually led to a sequel, Super Christian II. The franchise ended there, before the fundamentalist equivalent of Richard Pryor or Ewoks or Mr. T could come along and ruin it with Super Christian III.

  Sometimes, however, the movies were gruesome morality plays that gave Vicky nightmares. The subject might be a cheerleader who thought it would be fun to try marijuana, or an honor student who became obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons. The protagonists varied, but their fate was always the same: they got into trouble, they didn’t accept Jesus, and they suffered eternal damnation as a result. The worst of the lot was called The Young Hunter. It told the story of an ill-fated hunting trip taken by a born-again young man and his atheist father. The father refuses to accept Jesus, and you can just see the hunting accident coming a mile off. But in a terrible twist, it’s his beloved dog that gets killed instead, and in the bloodiest way possible. The old man eventually gets saved and then he dies anyway.

  It was a nice uplifting message and it stayed with you. Vicky could not get it out of her head, and that, I suppose, was the point. The Baptist school practiced an old-fashioned pedagogy that relied on indelible impressions and rote learning. Students were required to memorize more pages than a soap cast. Every night Vicky sweated over the Bible verses she would have to recite by heart the next day. Walking by her room you were assaulted by odd snatches and scriptural outbursts. “Did you just call me the Whore of Babylon?” my mother asked. “Did you instruct the dog to rise up and anoint himself?” my father wondered. “He’s licking his balls, so you got your wish.”

  Over time it became clear that Vicky had talent. She could retain and deliver a line like ‘Strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age’ (Hebrews 5:14) with moving emotional subtlety. Soon her teachers were tapping her to compete in Bible bees and bowls. Though reluctant at first, Vicky eventually agreed. It meant she got to miss school. It also meant she had to spend the day with the parochial school community’s strangest of the strange. Picture the kids you see competing in the national spelling bee. Now picture them blazing with evangelical righteousness, dressed in ill-fitting polyester suits with crosses resting on their ties, in wrap dresses and suntan pantyhose and sandals. Add some foaming stage mothers winging overhead and you’ve just about got it.

  Still, it meant she got to miss school. She was good, too. Vicky quickly advanced from local competitions to the statewides. My family marveled. We didn’t know what to make of it. We never thought we’d have occasion to use the phrase “preachin’ prodigy,” and we certainly never thought we’d be using it to describe someone with whom we shared blood. Then Vicky was asked to represent the evolutionist side in a highly revisionist reenactment of the Scopes Monkey Trial, and that pretty much put an end to the whole thing.

  The debate was doomed from the beginning. Vicky realized she was in trouble when she wasn’t allowed to make her own points, even salient ones like ‘No duh.” Instead she had to read from a scripted selection of feeble arguments. “You say you believe the world was created in seven days,” Vicky read. “But you also believe that Jesus loves everyone. That can’t possibly be true. How could Jesus love a non-believing sinner – like me?” Vicky could really sell a line, but these were beyond her. What was the point? The fix was in. Even if the creationist side had been represented by a monkey – a monkey with a vestigial tail and human grandchildren – it would have won handily. As the debate limped toward its lame conclusion, Vicky grew more and more apathetic. “We are told, “And it was good,”’ she said resignedly. “But is this world really good, filled as it is with non-believing sinners like m – Oh, forget it, you know what I mean.”

  Vicky was discouraged, and my father was furious. Shortly after that my parents pulled her out of the Baptist school. The evolution business was just the last straw in a pile that had been growing for years. My father had been ambivalent from the beginning. I understood how he felt. My mother was fine, and my blond sister passed, but no one has ever mistaken my father or me for an Anglican. Obviously Jewish, he and I always dreaded Vicky’s school events, half-expecting someone to wrestle us to the ground and anoint us with baptismal water, or to corner us and try to tell us the Good News. As the extracurricular activities increased, he’d grown more and more uneasy. The odd Christmas pageant he could handle, but a Bible bowl was too much. It was as foreign to him as child beauty pageants and ice hockey. No member of our family had ever been involved in such a thing.

  But curfew-breaking and sassy back talk – that was familiar territory. Vicky was launched back into public school just in time for adolescence, and in no time she’d transformed herself into a surly kohl-rimmed smart-ass who cut bullet holes in her Esprit sweatshirts and spattered her tightly pegged jeans with bleach. Where did she pick this stuff up? It’s not as if we had MTV. Once again, she’d become someone we didn’t know. Personally I wasn’t so crazy about the new Vicky, and the feeling appeared to be mutual. For the next six years she would speak no more than fifty words a day to me, all of them prefaced by “Hey, dipshit.”

  It has always seemed strange to me that so few siblings in the Bible get along. The first death in the whole Bible is a fratricide. There’s Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Rachel and Leah, Joseph and the other eleven, all of whom make the Haywards look spectacularly well-adjusted. They make the Jacksons look spectacularly well-adjusted. Biblical family reunions require flocks of she-goats and wrestling matches; they end in false accusations and hard truces made over fathers’ graves. The best you can hope for is the family diplomacy employed by Abraham and Lot: you go right, and I’ll go left.

  During our respective Bible binges Vicky and I had proven ourselves fairly incapable of interpreting Scripture sensibly, but this lesson we understood. This lesson we could apply. I went right, and she went left. If we were pointing in different directions, we reasoned, we were less likely to step on each other’s toes. Each fall, we claimed our separate activities. “You can have stupid nerdy Book Club and stupid nerdy Service Club and stupid nerdy Computer Club,” Vicky conceded. “Art is mine. Not so much as a stick figure from you; it’s mine. We can both have French Club, but at French Club events, tu ne me connais pas, tu comprends?”

  J’ai compris. I went à droit, she went à gauche. Sometimes we crossed paths. We’d be at the same dance, me primly manning the refreshment booth, and I’d look up to see her slow-dancing, sticking her tongue out at me over her date’s shoulder. At rallies I’d see her across the gym, sitting with her friends, throwing things at the cheerleaders. After school, picking up litter with the Green Teens, I’d glimpse her zooming by in a friend’s car, the stereo cranked so loud it rattled my teeth. There goes my wild sister, I would think, and then I’d go wash my hands fifty times and pray for her soul.

  I figured she could use a good word, not really having a faith of her own. Because she was taller and blonder, people always assumed she was the Christian kid in our interfaith family, like our parents each got one to raise in their respect
ive faith, like they each chose the one who most looked the part. “No,” I would correct them. “She’s a heathen. She doesn’t practice any religion at all.”

  It’s the pets who got raised in different faith. The dog got to be Jewish, because he always vomited pork. The cat was christened a Catholic when she refused to work on Sundays. They kept their distance from each other, but when it came right down to it, they got along fine.

  INTERSTITIAL

  MY SISTER’S ROOM IS THE GATEWAY TO DEATH: A TWO-COLUMN PROOF

  Given: Let A = Victoria Traig’s room and B = the dark under-world

  Prove: A is the gateway to B

  A → B

  Statements Reasons

  S1. My sister is pork. R1. You are what you eat (common knowledge).

  S2. Fig. A is contaminated with porkiness. R2. A vessel absorbs the impurity of its contents (Talmud).

  S3. If I enter Fig. A, I, too, will be contaminated by porkiness. R3. An unclean room renders the occupant unclean (Leviticus).

  S4. If I enter Fig. A, I will be committing a sin. R4. It is an abomination to touch swine (Leviticus).

  S5. If I enter Fig. A, I will die (Fig B). R5. Sin begets death (Proverbs).

  Q.E.D.

  ∨ Devil in the Details ∧

  Forbidden Fruit

  My sister couldn’t understand why I was screaming at her. Until I collapsed on the floor in histrionics, we’d been having a perfectly nice day. We had spent the morning working on our tans and the afternoon watching soap operas in the quiet air-conditioned house. And now I was rolling around on the yellow linoleum in my bathing suit, howling inconsolably.

  “You just can’t do that to a person,” I wailed. “It’s not right.” Vicky had instructed me to open my mouth and shut my eyes. I don’t know why I’d complied. For my sister, the lines between food, not-food, and potential biohazard were hazy and blurred. What other people wouldn’t handle without gloves and tongs, she would happily put in her mouth or yours. As a young child she’d been fond of found candy, thirdhand chewing gum, and commercial adhesives. I had seen her spit out well-chewed bananas and then eat the masticated wad. On more than one occasion she’d dipped my toothbrush in the toilet and breaded it with cat litter. Now she was older and much more decorous, but when she got bored there was no telling. I knew better than to trust her, but this time she had seemed earnest.

  It was a frozen grape. Vicky had just figured out that if you stuck grapes in the freezer, you ended up with tiny, green, grape-flavored Popsicles. It was a treat, a surprise, just for me.

  Here was the problem: the grape had four calories, and I hadn’t budgeted for that. I had, in fact, indulged in a stick of sugar-free gum (three calories) because I thought I was going to come in under my calorie quota for the day. So now I was screaming, and my sister was backing away and scowling, and my whole life was ruined because now I was going to be fat.

  Sure, I spit it out, but still. I’d probably absorbed some of the calories.

  “Jeez.” Vicky rolled her eyes. “It’s just a grape.” She retrieved it from the fluffy bramble of dust it had landed on and blew off the lint and cat hair. Glaring, she popped it into her mouth and stomped off to watch the rest of General Hospital, I continued writhing on the floor until I’d calmed down enough to consult a back issue of Glamour to see how many calories you could burn by flailing.

  “Ith delithuth,” Vicky shouted from the living room. “You don’t know what you’re mithing.”

  That’s where she was wrong. I knew exactly what I was mithing. That was the part I enjoyed. Missing things, doing without, documenting everything I did and didn’t eat – these were my new hobbies. This had started four months earlier, at the end of sixth grade. I’d gone on a diet, and it had quickly mutated from healthy positive lifestyle change into crazy obsessive freak show.

  At first it had seemed like a great idea. I certainly had weight to lose. I had always been a pudgy kid, allergic to physical exertion of any kind, drawn to eclectic foodstuffs like cake mix and brown sugar eaten straight from the box. I was not big on restraint. I had realized early on that I was the Rhoda, not the Mary. I was never going to be the belle of the ball, so I might as well dump the whole bowl of chips in my lap and have a nice snack.

  Every once in a while I would catch a glimpse of myself and decide I had to do something. My class picture would show a plurality of chins, or my pants wouldn’t button, and I would embark on a diet. These were always tremendously unsuccessful. What were you supposed to eat when you were on a diet? I didn’t know. Health food, maybe? This was the 70s, and health food was big. Because saturated fats and tropical oils hadn’t become bogeymen yet, it was still pretty tasty. Yogurt was still full-fat, granola still loaded with hydrogenated oils and corn syrup. I could do without all the carob and wheat germ, but the rest of it suited me just fine.

  It did not, however, help me lose weight, but that was fine, too. Losing weight wasn’t the point. I was really only dieting for the material. I loved discussing food and weight loss with my mother’s friends. It gave me an opportunity to talk like Erma Bombeck, whom I very much admired. “Tell me about it.” I nodded knowingly, age nine. “I even look at a Danish, I bloat up like Shelley Winters.”

  By the time I was eleven I was what department stores delicately term ‘Pretty Plus’ and what my sister called “Fatty, fatty, two-by-four.” She couldn’t help herself. She tried out several nicknames before settling on Sister Infinity Fats. I don’t know if this was an oblique reference to my burgeoning interest in religion or to my burgeoning obliques, but it stuck.

  I didn’t get it. It didn’t even make sense. How was it funny? Even my parents thought it was hysterical. They told Vicky to lay off, but they were too amused to ban its use outright. I would occasionally catch them muttering the phrase under their breath and laughing. Sister Infinity Fats, hoo wee, that’s rich.

  In any case, it was true. I was chunky. I was wearing my hair long and straight at the time, and with my berets, I looked remarkably like Sam Kinison. Because I’d gotten too big for almost all my clothes, I was dressing like him, too. By sixth grade the only pants that fit were a pair of pleated gabardine slacks a teenage babysitter had handed down. I wore them every day, rolled up because I would not permit my mother to hem them, as I perceived this as some sort of defeat. Fat was one thing, but short and fat was too much.

  After a few weeks of this my mother took me shopping for some Pretty Plus honest-to-goodness fat-girl clothes. That bothered me, of course, but not enough to give up my daily snack of butter.

  Then, several months later, I started losing weight. It wasn’t as if I planned it. I think I’d caught a late-spring flu. I hadn’t been able to eat much for a few days, and when it was over, I was surprised to find that my pleated gabardine pants were looser. Huh. I’d lost a couple pounds. Goodness knows I’ll never be able to get off to a start like this again, I thought; might as well keep going.

  By the beginning of June it was an all-out diet. Summer vacation had begun, and I had lots of time to transform my little lark into a full-blown clinical disorder, a consuming obsession, ha ha. Soon my entire day revolved around eating. There was nothing but food, waiting for food, reading and writing and thinking about food. I spent hours planning my meals, leafing through magazines and calorie counters to come up with new dietetic treats. Why have toast (170 calories) when you could enjoy a toasted rice cake (40 calories)? Why drink a fattening milkshake (300 calories) when there was diet Dr Pepper, skim milk, and crushed ice (30 calories)? Why not subsist on raw zucchini sticks and mustard? Why not have gum for breakfast?

  It was extraordinarily boring, this new hobby. I spent the better part of my day draped faceup over the Eames ottoman, counting the minutes until my next scheduled feeding, spinning in the hopes that nausea would make me less hungry. When mealtime finally arrived I stretched it out as long as possible, consuming my grapefruit and egg whites nibble by nibble, chewing each bite twenty times. Afterward I do
cumented what I’d eaten, tabulating the damage with the aid of a calorie counter. Then it was time to start planning for the next meal, and the process began all over again. If I had any free time, I spent it reading cookbooks, drooling over the porny full-color photos of Lady Baltimore cakes and snicker doodles.

  Somehow I managed to squeeze an exercise regime into this jam-packed fun-filled schedule. Once or twice a day, I speed walked at a nearby park with my mother and her friends. Speed walking has never been a cool activity, but at the time it was entirely foreign. It was still an exhibition sport, and we were very much on exhibit. Cars slowed to stare at us as we whipped around the track, arms pumping, gluteals so rigid it looked as though we were using them to hold our house keys.

  No one knew what to make of it, but everyone felt compelled to comment. “Hey,” the neighborhood kids kept telling me. “Saw you, uh, walking in the park with your mom. Looking good there.”

  Yes. It was lame. Had I spent the summer eating my own psoriatic skin flakes, I wouldn’t have been less cool. I didn’t care. I liked spending time with my mother and her two walking partners, a perky nurse and a feisty German GI bride who gave great diet advice in a heavy accent. “You know vat you shoot make?” she confided. “De zoup vit de tomato juice und de cabbage. You veel loff it, I’m tellink you. Und it kips you regular. It fills you up, und den it blasts right out! You vill lose de veight like crazy. Just make sure you stay close to de potty, and don’t vear vhite shorts.”

  And thus my twelfth summer ticked by, lap by lap, calorie by calorie, minute by minute. So this was adolescence. Judy Blume books had led me to expect a whirl of babysitting engagements and light petting with long-lashed boys, not calorie counting and constipation, but who cared. It worked. By the end of July I was thin. I was scrawny.