Devil in the Details

by Jennifer Traig

  Scent

  The well-put-together lady knows that a fresh scent is the best calling card there is. But it’s not enough to smell clean – you have to be clean! Really, really, really clean! That’s where the topical anti-bacterials come in. Back in the old days, the germ-conscious girl was stuck smelling like 409. But now topical anti-bacterials are available in a whole range of scents. Gardenia, citrus, cinnamon – it’s your choice!

  Hair

  Sigh. What girl doesn’t hate her hair? The flyaways, the split ends, the cowlicks, the incitement to licentiousness, the patches picked bald…Hair is sex and touching and death. Cover it. Just cover it.

  Scars and Scabs

  If you’re washing fifty, a hundred times a day, cracking and bleeding are just a fact of life. But it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Think of your battle wounds as Good Hygiene Medals of Honor you wear right on your skin. And a scab, a scab is just a ruby you grow yourself. The best part: it will give you something to pick at when you don’t have any eyelashes left!

  Skin

  Feeling a little chapped but worried your whole family will die if you use a commercial moisturizer? Not to worry – there’s an alternative. Just reach for a nice, hygienic, hermetically sealed bottle of salad oil. It’s the moisturizer the biblical matriarchs used! Anoint yourself, for you are the chosen, it’s you it’s you please don’t let them die. Now, doesn’t that feel better?

  ∨ Devil in the Details ∧

  Orange Girl

  Sometime during my junior year of high school I turned orange. I was not the first student to do so – there had been some other examples, all involving mishaps with that early generation of sunless self-tanners – but I was the first one to achieve a full-body neon effect. Everything but my eyes, teeth, and hair took on the jaundiced hue of a wilting tiger lily. In short order I had a new nickname, “Orange Girl,” and an appointment with my pediatrician.

  The examination was brief. “She’s orange, all right,” the doctor agreed. A few questions later he ascertained what was wrong. I’d been eating little besides carrots and cantaloupe. The overdose of carotene had resulted in carotenosis, a relatively harmless condition in which the skin turns a deep yellowish orange. As far as pigmentation goes, it turns out the you-are-what-you-eat axiom is pretty literal. It’s a diet of shrimp that makes flamingos pink, of reddish crustaceans that makes salmon salmon. I wasn’t too happy with my current predicament – I looked bad in orange – but I was excited about the possibilities. Green really brought out my eyes. I wondered what a lot of broccoli could do for me. Or plums. I looked good in plum. In the meantime, the doctor suggested I find something else to eat and sent me home.

  This wasn’t the outcome my family had been hoping for. After a couple years of relatively normal eating habits, I had gone off the rails again and now I was driving everyone nuts. I had adopted a typical anorexic ploy: wolf down the non-caloric foods, then, when it came time to eat the deadly lasagne, the unthinkable potatoes au gratin, plead fullness. “No macaroni for me, thanks,” I demurred, patting my stomach. “After all those capers, I couldn’t eat another bite!”

  My meals came to consist mostly of garnish. I attacked anything wearing a frilly toothpick with a gusto that revolted my dining companions. My family learned to look away as I gnawed melon down to the rind, salted and peppered the decorative lettuce leaf, and nearly frenched the ornamental orange slices. “I don’t know what you’re doing to that pepperoncini, but I think you should send it some flowers tomorrow,” my sister muttered. Pickles, parsley, cocktail onions – this was my diet. I could make an entire dinner out of bar fruit.

  It was the carrots with ketchup and mustard that really did Vicky in. She watched with distaste as I ate them every afternoon.

  “They’re nature’s french fries,” I told her.

  “My ass they are,” she returned. “For once can’t you fix yourself a snack that doesn’t look like it’s been fished out of the compost pile? Try aiming a little higher up the food chain, retard. People aren’t supposed to eat this way.” She must have been delighted when my complexion conspired to prove her right.

  Not that it did her much good. My family had expected I would leave the doctor’s office with a stern rebuke and, if things went really well, a prescription for tranquilizers that I might agree to share with my more pharmaceutically adventurous kin. My mother frowned when I bounded out into the waiting room without so much as a pamphlet.

  “Did he weigh you?” she demanded, folding her arms across her chest and tapping her foot aggressively. “Did you tell him what you’ve been eating? Did you tell him you haven’t had a period in a year and a half and I don’t have a grandchild to show for it?”

  “Yes, yes, and yes,” I lied, snapping a piece of sugarless gum. “He says I’m normal.”

  My mother rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, I’m onto you. You may have fooled him, but I know you’re not right.”

  She had a point. I was orange. Of course something was wrong. I was marked with highlighter, like an important passage in an abnormal-psych textbook, like a glaring accusation of bad parenting. I was a neon beacon of teen dysfunction. On the plus side, it was unlikely I’d accidentally get shot by a hunter.

  The other plus was that I was a shoo-in for school mascot. Our school colors were orange and white. At football games our bleachers looked like a front porch on November first, a sea of smashed pumpkin. I never learned who was to blame for this lapse of taste. Perhaps a previous class had been allowed to vote on it. How they must have laughed when they sentenced us to wear colors that would make us look like pimply Muppets for all eternity.

  Or perhaps a cruel principal was responsible. Only a sadistic madman could have chosen hues guaranteed to flatter exactly no one’s complexion. At our school, every day was Salloween.

  It was a color combination that aroused nausea and dread but not spirit. Well, nausea and dread have their uses. This was something of which the school’s planners had been well aware. Designed by a Foucauldian architect to discourage vandalism, the campus resembled nothing so much as a prison. It did not have a single window or skylight. It was less a campus than a compound, with high sandstone walls and retractable iron gates that stood at the ready should a total lockdown ever be required. In my junior year a classmate flipped out and killed three people in the countryside. At the sentencing the district attorney warned him that he didn’t know what he was in for: “Prison is nothing like Woodland High.” Was he nuts? Prison was exactly like Woodland High. The inmates even wore the same color. Fifteen years later, when the town finally got big enough to require a second high school, they went ahead and built it right next to the jail.

  In 1973 the campus had been considered the height of modern architecture and served as the setting for a TV movie about high school football called Blood Sport. It starred Gary Busey and Larry Hagman and, to my everlasting delight, my algebra teacher. The film was about a quarterback who was torn between his father and his coach, and the prisonlike structure of the school underscored the movie’s rock-and-a-hard-place message. Curiously, the only other movie filmed in my hometown also had a prison setting. It was called The Stunt Man and featured Peter O’Toole and Barbara Hershey. We went down to watch the filming at the old jailhouse. I believe Mr. O’Toole was already on the wagon at that point, but we were inclined to believe the worst when we saw him weaving out of his trailer while Barbara held him up. “She’s Jewish,” my mother stage-whispered to me. “That’s probably why she’s sober.”

  I knew how she felt. I, too, was soberly shouldering a staggering burden, but instead of an Oscar-nominated actor it was nameless dread. It was just normal teenage angst – oh, and some fairly serious brain dysfunction – but I wore it badly. I was convinced that I’d stumbled into the wrong life, and maybe I had. I was a neurotic Jewish kid. I was supposed to be off at some forward-thinking East Coast boarding school experimenting with lesbianism and casual drug use. Instead I was at Hillbilly High, an agricultu
ral voc-ed school meant to prepare kids to take over their parents’ farms.

  And for this, it was very good. The school was not without its merits and strong suits. But the closest thing my parents had to a farm was a browning front lawn. I didn’t belong there. This was a school that didn’t teach Latin, Creative Writing, or AP anything, but did offer Advanced Gunsmithing and Animal Husbandry. In May it was not uncommon to see a girl in taffeta and heels using the gun rack to hoist herself into her prom date’s monster truck. Future Farmers of America was by far the largest club on campus, and hay-baling competitions and pig-kissing contests were normal school events. One morning between classes I found my best friend clutching her abdomen and trying to suppress a gag reflex. “The Ag kids were castrating sheep in homeroom,” she explained, her eyes watering. “I know you won’t believe me, but I swear they did it with their teeth.”

  No wonder I was unhappy. There was college to look forward to, but if my teachers were any indication, adulthood was no party. Oh, sure, most of my instructors were serious, well-adjusted educators who presented their subjects with enthusiasm, who took us out for sodas after school, and who really cared about their students’ welfare. But there was also a fair share of alcoholics, fading beauties, and other bitter malcontents. Our female teachers tended to begin class with the warning “I’ve got cramps like you wouldn’t believe, so if you kids are smart you won’t mess with me today.”

  Looking back on it now, I can’t believe I didn’t have more fun. Sheep and prison bars – this was rich stuff. But I lacked the exotic sexual proclivities or sense of humor that would have made my high school experience a good time. All I had was a bad attitude and an eating disorder.

  That, and a very full schedule. I was extremely busy trying to get into a good college. Warned that good grades from my high school wouldn’t mean much, I was desperate to pad my resume with activities. I joined every club I could. French Club? Oui! Student Council? Aye! Literary Club, Service Club, Honor Society, Scholarship Foundation – I joined any group that didn’t require interaction with livestock or my sister. I went to Mecha meetings until I was gently reminded that the club was actually for Chicano students. Well, fine, I’d stop coming, but would they mind if I put it on my CV anyway? Multicultural candidates really had an edge.

  I have never been an easy person, but I can say with confidence that at no point in my life was I as all-around unpleasant as I was my junior year. With the exception of a few close and patient friends, the only people who would put up with me were the ones trying to pad their own college applications. We didn’t want someone to hang out with – we wanted someone to delegate to. Constantly dispensing World’s Finest fund-raising chocolate bars, we were a league of human vending machines, cold and efficient. My sister could barely contain her scorn reading the chilly inscriptions they wrote in my yearbook. “Listen to this one,” she snorted. “It’s like a letter of recommendation. “Jenny: You have many wonderful talents and I hope you’ll make the most of them. You are thorough and responsible. Thanks for always being there when I needed a’” – Vicky paused, convulsed with laughter – “ ‘a Secretary⁄Treasurer.””

  In what anyone could have interpreted as a cry for help, I even joined the Drama Club. I can’t imagine what possessed me to join these ranks. I didn’t sing, dance, or act, and I couldn’t have thought it was actually going to help me get into college. Maybe I was working out some hostility toward my family by forcing them to come to show after agonizing show, including one production of South Pacific that was so bad even the cast referred to it as “South Pathetic.”

  I stank up the stage pretty good all on my own. Mousy and shy, I was always cast against type as an adenoidal moll. My family visibly winced listening to me practice my lines. “Shuuwah, honey,” I brayed. “I can get yuh the infahmation. But it’ll cost yuh!” My costumes were invariably skimpy and tight, a real liability when we had to wear them to school to promote the show. The worst was from the ‘Bushel and a Peck’ number in Guys and Dolls. I had to spend an entire school day in a halter top, obscenely tight cutoffs with a heart patch on the rear, fishnet stockings, and black high heels. My mother eyed me warily as I tottered off to class. “You know, I saw the film version, and I don’t remember the role of ‘Barnyard Slut,”’ she said, rolling her irises all the way back.

  Four-inch heels aside, I was clearly unstable, and my stint in the Drama Club prompted my parents to look into getting me some help. Washing and praying were fine, but acting and singing – that was too much. They made some calls. I eavesdropped nervously. Was this the incident that would finally land me in therapy? Should I start working on a tearful first-visit monologue?

  In the end, my parents made an appointment with a dietician instead. That was even better: it meant I was troubled and thin. Secretly I was pleased; secretly I’d been disappointed when my orange skin had failed to result in a hospital stay. I was being taken seriously. Now there were specialists. Now it was official.

  I saw the dietician two or three times and enjoyed the visits enormously. Her office had fun-house mirrors that let you see yourself fat and thin. There were plastic foods to show reasonable portion sizes and latex models of orange, glistening fat. It was all very interesting, and best of all, I got to spend an hour talking about the most fascinating thing in the world, my eating habits.

  They were very bad, it turned out. The dietitian did her best to put a scare in me. I was jeopardizing my health. I would develop anemia, osteoporosis, and possibly organ failure. I was already orange, and things were only going to get worse. I had to stop this nonsense.

  I ate up the attention, but I had no intention of changing my habits or of admitting there was a problem. I wasn’t trying to lose weight, I offered coyly. I just didn’t have time to eat, what with all my rehearsals, you know, life on the wicked stage. The dietitian gave me a withering look that suggested I wasn’t as good an actress as I thought I was and resignedly sent me on my way.

  Shortly thereafter my mother decided to take her own show on the road. It was just a brief trip back East to help move her elderly aunts, but it couldn’t have come at a better time. With my mother gone, I could take my eating disorder in the exciting new direction I’d been contemplating for a while. Well, it wasn’t so new. It was the exact same thing I’d done four years earlier. Once again, I was becoming increasingly bothered by the idea of contamination. There was so much unkosher food in the house. How could I be sure it wasn’t creeping into my meals? I could not, and I was going to have to do something about it. This was crazy, of course, but in my defense I would like to point out that my sister had a lifelong history of tainting others’ food, a hobby her future career as a waitress would give her plenty of opportunities to indulge. Though it’s strictly an after-hours, avocational hobby now, she has, in the distant past, served up plenty of sneezers. She once dealt with a difficult vegan patron by surreptitiously stirring his beer with bacon. In high school she worked at a pizza parlor, where she hid pepperoni in the pies ordered by a snotty vegetarian classmate. I have seen her serve her own friends salsa seasoned with cigarette ash and cookies she licked simply because she was bored. Sometimes she just can’t help herself.

  With a sister who couldn’t be trusted and parents who were finally, if temporarily, busy elsewhere, I decided to limit my diet to hermetically sealed processed-cheese singles and a low-calorie bread whose chief ingredient was wood pulp. Of course, neither one of these items was actually kosher or, for that matter, actually food, but for some reason they satisfied my concerns.

  My sister, meanwhile, was marking my mother’s absence the way normal teenagers do, toasting it with a few wine coolers. The night before my mother was due to come home, my father got a 2:00 a.m. call asking him to come down to the police station to pick up his drunk, sticky daughter. Apparently a cop had found Vicky and a friend lying on a curb outside a party, and he’d been unimpressed when they introduced themselves as Vicky Bartles and Lori Jaymes.

&n
bsp; Vicky and I had visited no end of humiliations on our parents, but ‘juvy’ was a new one. Our parents had forbidden a host of things they were sure would lead right to delinquency – pierced ears, camping, beef jerky – and now their efforts had come to naught. Their daughter had a rap sheet. In the end, Vicky’s minor infraction would be erased after a court appearance and a couple visits with a juvenile officer, but at the time we were fairly convinced she was one kegger away from an orange jumpsuit herself. We pictured ourselves visiting her in the Big House. “We would have brought you a carton of cigarettes, but we think it’s better you learn to fend for yourself,” we would say. “If you want a smoke, you’ll have to earn it giving lap dances to the guards like the other girls do.”

  My father informed my mother of my sister’s misadventure on the way home from the airport. My mother nodded, came in the house, and put on the bathrobe she would wear for the next week, refusing to speak to anyone but Saint Jude. Between the drinking and the sleepwear, it was as if my family had been replaced by a road company of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

  Well, at least it took the heat off me. I had a lot going on and was pleased that I would be left unmolested. Goodness knows I had enough to do. Besides all my extracurricular activities, I had returned to some old hobbies: fervent praying, repetitive washing, and writing theological manifestos. I couldn’t help myself. I began to pray more and more, spending a minimum of two hours a day perched under a yarmulke on a makeshift pew, rocking and whispering the half-cocked devotions I’d composed myself. “Please help me to be a better person. Please save the Ethiopians from starving. Please forgive me for wearing Daisy Dukes to school,” I implored. If I felt I hadn’t said my prayers in the right order or with the proper thoughts in mind, I would have to repeat them. When I finished with that, I filled my diary with strange, keening entries: “How amazing is it that the Jewish people have survived? Jenny, when you are feeling down, remember this!!!!!!!!”