During my scrupulous periods the Three Weeks were both exquisitely satisfying and impossible. I loved the additional restrictions, the new list of pleasures denied, but the ban on washing, oh, the ban on washing. Washing normally occupied a good two hours of my day. Forced to give up my favorite hobby, I was bored witless. I also stank. I am not an active person, but nine days without a bath will sour the cream of any couch potato. I would later learn that my observance was a little overzealous – the ban on shaving applies only to men, and the ban on washing is observed largely in the breach – but at the time I could do nothing but stew in my own natural juices.
It was in this matted and fragrant condition that I celebrated my late-July birthday. When my family sang the ‘Happy Birthday’ variant, “You look like a monkey, and you smell like one, too,” they weren’t teasing so much as reporting the sad truth. It’s a horrible time for any observant Jew to have a birthday, but for a scrupulous one, it’s particularly unpleasant. I took all the Three Weeks customs to the extreme. My zealous unhappiness is well-documented in all my teenage birthday photos, year after year the same picture: a greasy me, grimacing in front of a cake I’m going to make an excuse not to eat, topped by candles I’m going to fake an asthma attack not to blow out. Out of frame is the odd assortment of gifts I’ve requested. Because I can’t accept clothes or music, I will get Jewish encyclopedias, playing cards, stationery, and novelty Band-Aids.
When I turned eighteen my birthday fell on Tisha b’Av itself. Normally I was not permitted to observe it, but as I was now an adult responsible for screwing up my own life, my parents let me fast. “Me, I’d be out buying lotto tickets and porn, but if you want to celebrate your eighteenth birthday working up a good faint, knock yourself out,” my mother said, returning the cake mix to the pantry.
The number eighteen is hugely significant in Judaism, and if I’d been a counter I probably would have spent all day trying to determine the auspiciousness of this coincidence. But since I was a washer, I had nothing at all to do. It is amazing how much free time you have when you’re not permitted to eat or groom. After spending a few hours trying to catalog the family snapshots, I grew bored and wandered next door to see our only Jewish neighbors. Their teenage niece was visiting from Tel Aviv. It was 110 degrees, and she was in the backyard, splashing in the pool. I was covered wrist to ankle in corduroy. Michal took one look at me and rolled her eyes. “Come in,” she offered. “You will be really more comfortable in the waters.”
I explained that I couldn’t because it was Tisha b’Av. “I know what is Tisha b’Av,” she replied, giving me a withering look that suggested it was people like me who’d driven her from Israel to California in the first place. “You speak Hebrew? You know what is meshuga?”
She was the only person I’d met who’d actually heard of this holiday and even she thought I was nuts. I suppose I should have been offended, but I was charmed. Here was that Israeli candor I’d heard so much about. It was as refreshing and tart as a glass of lemonade. Who needed a dip in the pool when the conversation was this bracing?
I smiled at her dumbly, like a dog that wags its tail when you curse it in a dulcet tone. Michal swam over to the edge. “Well, then, I think we must to go inside, before you fall from the heat weakness.” She sighed, lifting herself out of the pool. “I know something we can do that is okay with Torah and not too boring.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon poring over back issues of the Hebrew equivalent of Cosmo. Oh, sure, with all the cleavage and sex tips, it was not the most appropriate reading material for the blackest day of Jewish history. Under other circumstances I might have balked, but I was afraid to argue with Michal. Besides, it was a wonderful opportunity to expand my knowledge of the holy tongue. We leafed through page by page, lying on our stomachs in the dark, cool guest room, discussing the pictures while she translated the articles for me. “This one is about a woman who, em, I’m not sure how you say, she is not liking the size of her chests.”
I learned all kinds of important words that day, the Hebrew terms for exfoliate, mousse, cellulite, and chafing. And while I picked up plenty of important information about dressing to suit your body type, the most significant lesson I learned was a sociological one. I’d expected Israel to be populated by tanner but equally religious clones of myself. Michal’s magazines revealed that it was populated by Miss Teen Universe hopefuls. These weren’t the people of the book, but of the Redbook. I should have been disappointed, shocked, but instead I was exhilarated. It had never occurred to me that you could have both faith and flesh, that, like the pool, you could be both deep and shallow at once.
In a strange way, it was an appropriate lesson. Fast days have different jobs. Yom Kippur is meant to take one out of one’s body. But Tisha b’Av is meant to place one firmly in it, as hot and dirty and weak as it may be. I don’t think it was just coincidence that a few weeks later I began to trade ascetic for aesthetic, doing things I hadn’t done since the anorexia and scrupulosity first hit: conditioning my hair, wearing perfume, eating an eclair. A few weeks after that I would start college and begin, for the first time in years, to live a normal life.
My brain was finally doing what it was supposed to. It would be quite some time before my hair would, too.
FALL
Fall may be the best time of the year for Jews. The cool, dry weather is easy on frizz, and it’s high season for the only competitive sport we care for, shopping wholesale. With all the High Holidays, there are plenty of occasions to model our fall fashions, and on one of them we’re actually commanded to wear new clothes. My family usually managed a trip to Loehmann’s, but the rest of our High Holiday observance tended to be rather erratic. For instance, we normally failed to go to synagogue. When we did go, we spent most of the service commenting on others’ outfits. “Check out the lady in the back,” we whispered. “Can she really think it’s a good idea to wear patterned hose on the day we’re asked to account for our sins?” In this, if in nothing else, we marked the holiday as we’re intended to. If Jews weren’t supposed to spend the High Holidays criticizing one another’s clothes we would have been born Mormons.
We usually managed a festive dinner, even when it wasn’t entirely appropriate. On more than one Yom Kippur, we marked the occasion by having a big dinner out. On more than one Yom Kippur, the menu included pork. Our other customs were similarly off, informed less by religious sensibility than an interfaith multicultural flair for entertaining. Once, my mother brought home a Rosh Hashana piñata. “It’s festive,” she explained. “And we might feel like hitting something later.” My father’s family, Russian by way of Shanghai, contributed piroshki and red envelopes of lucky New Year money. I was in college before I learned this was a Chinese custom and not a Jewish one.
To my friends, it was all foreign anyway. “Happy Rosh Mañana!” they wished me. There were too many holidays, all with funny names; who could keep them straight? They could never remember which was the festive new-year one and which was the somber fasting one. “Have a super-fun holiday,” they urged me the day before Yom Kippur. “Don’t eat too much of that kegel!” One year, while I was home fasting, a friend dropped by bearing a steaming white box. “It’s a Yom Kippur pizza,” he explained. “I don’t know how your people celebrate, but this is what my folk always eat on holidays.” Apparently his folk weren’t concerned with cholesterol or kashrut; it was a sausage-pepperoni combo.
My friends were confused by the whole High Holiday production, but they understood one thing: I got to stay home from school, and this was to be envied. Every fall my classmates pelted me with questions about conversion. “What if you’ve already been circumcised?” they asked. “Are you good to go?”
I answered their questions politely, but inside I scoffed at their ignorance. They had no idea. My days off were hard-won in annual pitched battles with my parents. The outcome was always the same: I was permitted Yom Kippur and one day of Rosh Hashana, but I was nuts if I thought I was ge
tting off for Sukkot. “Suck what?” my family asked. “You made that one up.”
I knew better than to ask for Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. Even I thought they sounded fake. But they’re holy days all. Be they Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox, practicing Jews take these days off, but my parents refused to believe me. Every year, they made me spend those days fuming in a classroom. I was furious, but I could hardly blame them. Right or wrong, I always argued my point with equal fervor. I had insisted just as stridently that I needed to procure some hyssop to cleanse the ritual impurity I had incurred by swimming in a public pool. How were they to distinguish between two practices that looked equally crazy? I was going to school, and that was that.
Going to class on holidays was an agonizing ordeal. Every word I had to write, every number I had to calculate – each violation of the holy day was torturous, a bamboo shoot under a nail. But I was determined to get at least partial credit for observing the holiday, and that meant doing the absolute minimum of schoolwork. The point was to do as little as I possibly could without earning detention, where, I was sure, I would be required to violate the holiday in some other way, cleaning blackboards or helping the loadies heat their freebase. When I had to write, I used short words and abbreviations; one less letter meant one less sin. I pretended not to know answers, feigned hand cramps and headaches, anything to avoid participation. For an unrepentant know-it-all like me, playing dumb was abject misery. Ultimately, though, it was a very satisfying arrangement, one that killed two birds with one stone: by shirking the work, I managed to both avoid violating the holiday and punish myself for coming to school in the first place. Asked to diagram an independent clause on the board, I puzzled my classmates and embarrassed myself with a succinct gem like “I no good now; food make sick.” It was thirty-three letters shorter than “I am nauseous today; the Russian fish pastries did not agree with me.”
It didn’t seem fair. Here, finally, were holidays that weren’t competing with more exciting Christian festivals and still my interfaith family was getting in the way. School was the least of it.
My parents and my sister all have birthdays that fall within a three-week period in midautumn; invariably, they are on the High Holidays. My sister’s sixteenth birthday landed square on Yom Kippur. I had hoped to spend the evening at synagogue, fasting, light as an angel in a white dress, swaying with shut eyes as the plaintive melody of the Kol Nidre transported me to a higher dimension. Instead I had to accompany the rest of the family to the restaurant my sister chose, a sprawling, kitsch-laden, brass-fixtured establishment named Bobby McGee’s. It was favored by prom-goers and young singles, who loved its Top-40 DJ and menu of pizzajitas and deep-fried finger foods. The restaurant’s signature was the commemorative keepsake ceramic cups its cocktails came in. You could drink your piña colada out of a lady’s boot, a bathtub, or, best of all, a toilet.
I spent the entire night sulking in a drop-waisted dress six years too young for me and picking at my steamed vegetable plate. “What’s the matter, Jen?” my family inquired, shouting over the “woo-hoos!” of our fellow diners. “Buck up. Come on. Have another toilet full of virgin strawberry daiquiri.”
I wanted to go off to the bathroom to fume in peace or maybe to pray in a stall, but that meant crossing the Saturday Night Fever-style neon checkerboard dance floor. It was crowded with singles in synthetic fibers who wouldn’t move out of the way for a seventeen-year-old girl in enormous glasses dressed like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I remained at the table, gripping my toilet and thinking such horrible thoughts that I would have plenty to atone for the next morning.
That was the last Yom Kippur I would spend with my family for fifteen years. Between the disinterest and the pork, I thought I was better off celebrating the High Holidays alone. We would resolve the Christmas conflict and the Passover problems, but the crutches that got us through those times – a.m. drinking and bitter sarcasm – felt out of place on the holiest of days. My parents would call me to wish me a goot yontiff, and I would keep my distance, and this seemed to work out very well for everyone.
But fifteen years have passed since my religiosity made my family want to smother me, fifteen years since their flippancy made me want to stone them. Now even my father fasts on Yom Kippur, though he insists he does it only for the weight-loss benefits. Ever so slowly, we are inching toward a détente.
The High Holidays are about tradition, but they’re also about reconciliation. I’ve reconciled to my interfaith lot, even grown to appreciate it. It was in this spirit of reconciliation that I recently invited my parents to join me for our first Rosh Hashana together in many years. The theme was perfect, reflecting my Jewish heritage, my rural upbringing, and my shikse roots: Rosh HaShania, a tribute to country-western darling Shania Twain. Over Little Debbies and cheap red wine, we wished for a good and sweet new year. It was.
INTERSTITIAL
CULTURALLY INAPPROPRIATE GIFTS I HAVE RECEIVED FROM SANTA CLAUS
Two albums of Hasidic folk songs
The collected works of Isaac Bashevis Singer
The collected works of Saul Bellow
The collected works of Chaim Potok
Jewish engagement calendar (yearly, 1981-1992)
Coffee-table book on Jewish art
Anthology of Jewish poetry
Menorah and handmade candles
Mezuzah
Hanukkah-themed socks
∨ Devil in the Details ∧
All Is Vanity
When I was four and my sister was three, our parents enrolled us in the Lutheran preschool favored by our neighbors. Normally I get nervous when I am surrounded by autoharp-playing Christians, but we liked it there. It was a cheerful place run by friendly, affectionate grandmothers. If our parents were worried about us picking up any Protestant traits like, say, a work ethic, their fears were put to rest when we failed to complete any assignments besides Snack and Nap. The scant religious instruction they offered was of a non-sectarian feel-good stripe, a Care Bear belief system that taught us to share and recycle.
It was there that I learned to pray. Prayer was like a phone call to heaven, our teachers told us. You could say thanks, or you could ask for something very important, like peace and happiness. We knelt in a circle and one by one we said our prayers out loud. Some children prayed for an end to hunger. Others prayed for all the sick babies in the world. I prayed for make-up.
Had I been pressed, I might have explained that I simply wanted to make the world a more beautiful place. What I really wanted was a little sparkle. At four, it was already very apparent to me that I had the kind of features that required some extra help. Four was an awkward age for me. I hadn’t quite worked out a wardrobe strategy and I’d been given a regrettable short haircut that frequently got me mistaken for a boy. Nothing would put a stop to that quicker than a nice smart lipstick, I thought.
Prayer was the only way I was going to get it. My mother refused to buy me make-up, a position I found completely unreasonable. Why shouldn’t a preschooler wear a little lip color and mascara? I was just trying to work with what I had.
My mother had been intractable, but now here was this wonderful thing called prayer. Here was a force that could overrule her. I began making fervent entreaties each night before bed. “When I wake up please let there be rose frost lipstick, powder blusher, and cream eye shadow in sea foam green on my bedside table,” I prayed. “If it will make it easier for You I can mark the pages in the Avon catalog. Thank You very much.”
Three weeks later my mother produced a yellow plastic compact shaped like a baby chick, which opened to reveal a mirror and a tin of solid perfume. I was captivated. Sure, it wasn’t really make-up. It was colorless and did nothing for my thin upper lip or patchy eyebrows. I didn’t care. It smelled wonderful. It was good enough.
And it had come to me through prayer, thereby forever cementing the link between cosmology and cosmetology in my brain. From that moment on, like many women of deep faith �
� Tammy Faye Baker, Mary Kay Ash, Anita Bryant – I believed a spiritual life demanded the liberal and constant use of cosmetics and accessories. I worshipped all the trappings of womanhood: jewelry, make-up, purses, and panty hose. These things were holy. They were prim and pure. They were also immensely satisfying to my obsessive-compulsive mind. The way I saw it, they kept your hands and mind busy, giving you something to retouch, smooth, adjust, and pluck out of crevices. Sure, it was compulsive behavior, but it was compulsive behavior that paid off in the form of a more attractive self.
My other compulsive habits did not necessarily do this. I had some grooming compulsions, but they did not leave me looking particularly well-groomed. There was, for instance, the trichotillomania, the urge to pull out hair. Of all obsessive-compulsives, trichotillomaniacs are the easiest to spot, because they’re the ones without any eyebrows. My case was mild and occasional, but every once in a while, I was overwhelmed. Hairs demanded to be pulled, skin to be picked. A little bare patch here, an infected sore there – it was nothing you’d notice, not if properly concealed with the foundation and hairpieces I begged my mother to buy.
Devil in the Details Page 13