Now all I had to do was immerse myself three times while a witness ensured that I did it properly. This was handled with as much discretion and sensitivity as possible, but still, no amount of discretion can undo the fact that you’re being evaluated while bobbing around naked, like a clumsy Olympic synchronized swimmer who’s lost both her suit and the rest of her team. I wanted to die.
Well, at least I wasn’t a boy. The conversion for boys requires a scalpel. Even if you’re already circumcised, you still have to whip it out in front of the rabbi for a ritual bloodletting. And you have to go through the mikvah ordeal, too.
So I got off relatively easy. And now it was almost done. I was almost Jewish. All that was left were a few formalities, like choosing a Jewish name. Though I’d spent the past year obsessing over the most minute details, I gave almost no thought to this one, opting for the name I’d randomly been assigned in Hebrew class six years earlier: Zeva. I liked it because it sounded exotic and chic and reminded me of Zena jeans, which were popular at the time. I later learned it was an unfortunate choice, the Israeli equivalent of Gertrude. It’s also an exact homonym of the Hebrew term for genital discharge. An unfortunate choice.
Whatever. All I had to do now was appear before a bet din, a Jewish religious court, whose members would quiz me on my commitment to and knowledge of Judaism. They could ask me anything. I was prepared to answer questions about everything from the finer points of temple incense regulations to the minutiae of tithing, but I still worried about flunking. What if they asked about the sex laws? I thought that inappropriate study matter for a girl of my age and had neglected them almost entirely. Or what if they’d been talking to my parents? What if they went off-field and asked me how I could reconcile my behavior of late with the commandment to honor my mother and father?
In the end they asked me to name the matriarchs and sent me on my way. It had taken a year to become a Jew, and now, in three minutes, it was done.
It felt strangely anti-climactic, such a brief end to a long, tough year. It wasn’t like getting a nose job or a tattoo. It didn’t make me see myself differently. I’d always known I was Jewish. Now it was just official.
In any case, the real climax would be the bat mitzvah, now just a month away. Traditionally the bat mitzvah is held on the Saturday closest to the thirteenth birthday, but my birthday was in July, which is just too hot for an outdoor catered affair. We pushed it to September, when the only open Saturday was the Shabbat of Sukkot.
This was good and bad. The upside was that there would be a sukkah in the synagogue backyard. I knew it would probably just be a lean-to decorated with overripe fruit and an entourage of insects, but my delusions of grandeur allowed me to imagine it as a charming hut in which I might play milkmaid, like Marie Antoinette in her Petit Trianon.
The downside was that in choosing this Shabbat I had earned myself a real challenge of a haftorah, the portion of the Prophets traditionally read by the bar or bat mitzvah child. One of the longest and darkest portions, about the apocalyptic war between the mysterious Gog and Magog, it is baffling and opaque. The only thing that comes through clearly is a doomsday sentiment. It features waste places and pestilence, creeping things and earthquakes, fire and brimstone. It’s the liturgical equivalent of I Spit on Your Grave. The melody is just as difficult as the content, marked by the rarest and most challenging of tropes. Besides having to repeat the tongue twister ‘Gog and Magog’ over and over, I would be required to perform vocal gymnastics that are normally the province of castrati.
Well, at least I didn’t have to worry about my voice cracking; at least I wasn’t a boy. Still, I wasn’t the man for the job. I cannot sing at all. My voice comes from my mother’s side, a long line of tin-eared tone-deaf caterwaulers. A few years ago, at my cousin’s wedding reception, my kin decided to see whose voice was the worst of all. The ensuing karaoke competition proved so excruciating that four squad cars were dispatched to shut it down. Four. With sirens.
I had reason to worry, but I hoped the backup singers might make up for my musical shortcomings. If not, surely the sound technicians could smooth out my rough edges. My mother snorted when I asked where the madrigal chorus would sit.
“Ha,” she said. “If you want I’ll hand out kazoos, but that’s all the musical accompaniment you’re going to get. Well, unless we have beans for breakfast.”
All that work becoming a Jew, only to be rewarded with so little fanfare. Over the next few weeks my parents dashed hope after hope. The omelet station was out. There would be no Tiffany mezuzahs as favors for the guests. I could forget about the amuse-bouches. “This is going to be a country bat mitzvah,” my mother warned me, “and if you push me I guarantee I’ll back a pig on a spit right up to the synagogue. So be happy with what you get.”
What I would get was a hot and cold buffet, an oversized challah, and mini bagels. There would be no champagne fountain, no sorbet course, and I would have to make the desserts myself. Instead of tails, the servers would be wearing clever T-shirts that made it look as though they were wearing tuxedos. Well, that was kind of cool. I could be happy with that.
The only thing left to do was write my speech. This was the part I’d been dreading and the part everyone else was looking forward to, for its potential comic value. Laugh with me or laugh at me – it was sure to be good. My parents wanted me to deliver twenty minutes of stand-up. “You can do it in a televangelist voice. You can punctuate everything with ‘A-yesss!’ and ‘Can I get a witness?’ It’ll be a riot.” My parents are lovely people but they had no idea what would cause a middle-schooler a lifetime of ostracization. They had also tried to get me to do this when I’d run for student council.
I wanted to skip the speech entirely. Although I enjoyed pontificating, I preferred small crowds. Public speaking had never been my strong suit, and for the talent portion of my parochial pageant, I wanted to do something else. Couldn’t I do a little dance number instead? Couldn’t I just twirl a baton?
I put off writing the speech until the last possible moment. At the rehearsal, four days before the ceremony, I still hadn’t written a word. A synagogue member took pity on me and dictated a speech on the spot. I wrote it down, giving little thought to what it actually meant. It was five minutes long, and it mentioned Torah several times. It also struck me as perhaps a little political, but I didn’t really understand it, and in any case I thought it would make me sound smart. It would do.
The night before the ceremony my father had the foresight to ask to see my speech. That no one had worried about this before was a gross oversight. I’d spent the better part of the last year obsessed with ritual purity and burnt offerings. Giving me a podium was a terrible idea. I could have incited the crowd to stone the caterer.
The speech was short, about three paragraphs. My father read it in a minute and a half. “Bring me a pen,” he commanded when he had finished, his teeth gritted, his forehead a dark knot.
Ten minutes later he’d calmed down enough to discuss the issue. “‘Kill all the infidels’ is not an appropriate topic for a bat mitzvah speech,” he said calmly. “The idea here is to thank your family and teachers, to tell everyone what you’ve learned, and to butter up the guests in anticipation of large savings bonds. Issuing a fatwa will not accomplish these ends. Now, I’m going to write you another speech, and you are going to read it, and if it goes over especially well we can split the take.”
The next morning there were two more fights. Because it was Shabbat, I couldn’t shower. Because the previous two days had been the first two days of Sukkot, I now hadn’t showered for three. My mother was beside herself. “Your relatives didn’t fly all the way across the country to see you with your hair looking like that,” she insisted. “Well, I didn’t spend a whole year learning Torah to violate it today,” I returned. “Besides, the yarmulke will cover the really matted spot.” In the end we agreed to a wet combing and a ‘French shower,’ a liberal dousing in cologne.
Next was a
skirmish over the pictures. I didn’t want to have my picture taken on Shabbat. But my parents’ argument that it wasn’t too late to call the whole thing off so I could spend the day thinking about how ungrateful I’d been was a convincing one. I agreed to pose for five quick pictures, looking aside in all of them while I mentally chanted, “I’m not here, I’m not here, I’m not here.”
The rest of the day was a blur. I was too busy and excited to notice that instead of the linen-draped bamboo seats I had requested there were metal folding chairs; instead of rare orchids, carnations. What did that matter when there were so many people bearing presents? It was a fine day. My friends were all there, trussed into dresses and tights. Over lunch they performed a guttural and somewhat unflattering replay of my haftorah, kugel flying out of their mouths with each “chhhhh,” but I knew they were impressed.
Afterward, they came to my house to work on the leftover lemon bars and brownies. Apparently the euphoria of the day got to me, and by late afternoon, when a friend produced her camera and asked me to pose, I was loose enough to submit to the photo session that I had stridently objected to that morning. I hadn’t remembered this at all until I came across the photos recently, but there’s me in a polo dress, a giant Star of David around my neck, pirouetting in the backyard, hugging trees, lying on the lawn with my chin propped against my hands as I looked dreamily off into the distance on My Special Day.
I had decided to forgo the traditional Saturday-night bat mitzvah dance when my parents informed me they would fly in neither Jean-Pierre Rampal nor the brilliant studio musicians responsible for Hooked on the Classics. Instead, the evening’s festivities consisted of sitting around the living room opening presents while my friends watched. Because none of them were Jewish, they constituted an extremely appreciative audience. I basked in their envy. They would have to get married or pregnant to get presents like these.
It was a respectable haul. I got some pens, of course, gift certificates and jewelry boxes, and coffee table books on subjects like the Library of Congress and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Because the ‘70s had just ended, I also got several copies of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and several more of its sequel. I can’t imagine why so many people thought it was a good idea to give a recovering religious fanatic a book subtitled ‘The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah.’ What were they thinking? Inside one copy, a friend of my parents had even scrawled, “I hope this changes your life like it changed mine.”
I hoped it wouldn’t. By this point I’d had enough change, enough conversions and transformations. In the past year I’d gone from ostensibly gentile to unimpeachably Jewish, from child to teen, from sane to crazy and back again. The mutations had all been so public, too, all requiring witnesses, an audience, an intervention. Today was just the last in what had already been a yearlong festival of very public transitions. Can I get a witness, indeed. I’d had plenty.
This, I suppose, is what puberty is. What was happening to me was just an exaggerated version of what happens to every kid: look, she got her boobies. Every society does this, marching you out right at the moment you want to hide in a dark closet and molt. I would say it doesn’t make any sense, but in fact it’s inspired – it inculcates a sense of shame that will keep you in line for years to come. And making sure these events occur publicly, in front of witnesses, is a good way to ensure you won’t turn and start hitting anyone.
Including gifts is a good idea, too. Yes, there had been a lot of change, and on Monday there would be even more. Half of this crap had to go back. Who would buy a thirteen-year-old a travel iron?
But it had been a good day. By ten o’clock that night we were wiped out. We waved goodbye to our guests and stumbled to our beds, leaving the piles of torn gift wrap on the floor, the dirty cups and crumpled napkins on the counter. The dishes and thank-you notes could wait. It had been a very full day, a very good one.
As I drifted off to sleep I replayed all the high points. It really had been quite lovely. It had been great. But man, if we just could have had a cheese course – it would have been perfect.
INTERSTITIAL
GLOBAL EVENTS FOR WHICH I CONSIDERED MYSELF RESPONSIBLE (A PARTIAL LISTING )
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
The Soviet boycott of the 1984 Olympics
The Falklands War
The crash of the space shuttle Challenger
Ethiopian famine
Bhopal
Chernobyl
Three Mile Island
Mount Saint Helens
New Coke
The assassination of Anwar Sadat
The assassination of Swedish premier Olaf Palme
The assassination of all three Gandhis
The Iran hostage crisis
All North American kidnappings, 1982-87
The hole in the ozone layer
The arrest and conviction of Jonathan Pollard
The cancellation of The Merv Griffin show
Apartheid
Red Sox loss of the World Series, 1986
∨ Devil in the Details ∧
Idle Hands
The summer I turned twelve the country was seized by E.T. mania. Everywhere you looked, there was that lovable alien, on soda cans, on tote bags, on T-shirts urging you to phone home. I saw the movie once and liked it fine, but for me the summer was defined by another blockbuster altogether. It was a rumination, a mental image that ran over and over in my head. This happened every summer. I just get antsy when I have too much free time. Come June, images would start looping endlessly in my brain, an unspooling reel of torturous what-ifs. In 1982, while the rest of the country was watching E.T., I was watching myself stab my mother.
I didn’t want to. I enjoyed my mother’s company and spent most of my day following her around the house. But the image wouldn’t go away. A local kid had recently done that very thing, and that made it a million times worse. That he’d actually gone and done it – stabbed his own mother! – sent me right to the edge. Now we knew it was possible, and if it was possible, what would stop me?
I couldn’t tell anyone about this. It was just too awful. My previous summer ruminations had been bad – I’d worried about becoming addicted to Carmex, about being abducted by bank-robbing guerrillas who would force me to get a traumatic yet flattering haircut – but they had never been about hurting someone else. This was so much worse. It was going to be a long summer, I could tell already. I’d embarked on a new eating disorder, but it wasn’t enough to distract me from thoughts of violence, and every time my mother asked me to chop the salad vegetables I nearly burst into tears.
Finally, after noticing me looking at her funny for a few days, my mother announced it was time I learned to knit. I was delighted. This was a fantastic idea. Knitting would give my hands something to do besides knife family members. Of course, it would provide me with another, pointier weapon, but we didn’t worry too much about that.
And we didn’t have to. As soon as I picked up the needles and yarn, I felt peaceful and calm. It was such a relief, the needles clicking a soothing tattoo, the skeins unwinding like woolly Valium. Knitting instantly provided the same sense of serenity I could otherwise achieve only by pulling out clumps of hair. The two activities are so closely linked for me that I can’t believe they’re not etymologically related, the Latin trichos, hair, a near homonym of the French tricot, knit. As long as I was yanking on some fibers, be they worsted-weight wool or my own arm hair, I felt placid and safe.
This, too, happened every summer. There was an agonizing week of ruminating, an intervention by my mother, and then three months of crafting. This year it was knitting, last year cross-stitch, and patchwork the year before that. Weaving, batiking, silk-screening, smocking: I learned to do it all. By the time I left for college I was quite sure that if I ever got stranded on a desert island, within six months I would not only be alive, I would have launched my own line of handcrafted garments fashioned from the island’s meager resources.
I am in
most areas a completely incompetent person, but in this one department I know what I’m doing. I can craft anything. My friends marvel at my savant-like expertise. They have come to believe, because I have lied to them, that my mother raised me as a seamstress apprentice, forcing me to work in exchange for my keep and tutelage. My training, I tell them, was as rigorous as that of a young Jedi knight or, more accurately, a Karafte Kid. The first few years were spent doing exercises that seemed to benefit my mother more than me: organizing her thread spools, balancing her checkbook, washing her car, and the like. When I complained, she answered in cryptic Pat Morita fashion: “Cleaning out garage might teach student to shut mouth.” Finally she deemed me ready for actual craft work and let me crochet her dishrags.
This isn’t quite true, but then again, it’s not all that far off. Ever since I could remember, my sister and I understood that the hot months would be spent in our mother’s version of summer school. From June to September we would be inculcated with her passion for all things crafty. We might not share her religion, but we would worship her false deities.
While our friends took dance lessons and karate, my sister and I were shuttled to embroidery classes and quilt conventions. These were supplemented with plenty of at-home tutorials. In our free time we memorized patchwork patterns and knitting stitches. “Quick! Name it!” our mother would quiz us, pointing to quilt blocks with their names like yoga poses: flying geese, bear’s claw, Jacob’s ladder, drunkard’s path. “What’s the difference between a rice stitch and a moss stitch?” she demanded. “How do you make a braided cable?” She taught us to read color wheels, and in the morning she would shake us awake with swatches in hand. “Quick! Which is the blue-based red and which is the yellow-based? Think! Think!”
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