Devil in the Details

by Jennifer Traig

  I was up writing, cleaning, and praying until midnight, then rose at dawn to begin the three hours of writing, cleaning, and praying I had to do before school. In my free time, I rewashed clean dishes. It was a full and exciting life.

  By Passover, it was clear that the problems I’d had earlier were back in a big way. I was hip-deep in a full-blown flare-up, and this time it was much worse. My previous experiences with scrupulosity had been mostly compulsive – I washed, I performed odd rituals – but not particularly obsessive. Except for my annual summer flare-up, I hadn’t been plagued by ruminations, the disturbing thoughts that can consume OCD sufferers. This time, however, ruminations hijacked my life.

  What would happen was this: I would be struck by a pressing theological question, like “Is it okay to sit at my assigned desk when there’s a strong possibility it was contaminated by the skank who occupies it during second period?” I would have to resolve the question before I did anything else, like move or speak. It was a neurotic’s version of freeze tag. If I messed up and, say, scratched my nose before I’d resolved my theological quandary, I would have to think the whole question through again, until I resolved it without interruption. At that point I would invariably be struck by another pressing question: “Is it okay to watch this educational film strip or is The Miracle of Digestion in fact a graven image?”

  Before long I developed the stuttering walk that’s so typical of OCD sufferers. Some can’t walk contiguously because they’re afraid of stepping on cracks or crosses or blood. I couldn’t walk because I would become paralyzed by a theological question that had to be resolved before I put left foot in front of right. It could take me half an hour to cross the quad. Conversation became impossible. I would break off in the middle of sentences, knit my brow, and set my mind to the question at hand: “Is cologne kosher, and if it’s not, is it okay to talk to someone who’s wearing so much Love’s Baby Soft I can taste it?”

  Unable to focus in class, I would wander out, only to be found rocking and muttering in the outdoor amphitheater. Being in Drama Club was finally coming in handy. When questioned, I could simply explain that I was ‘getting in character’. “You see, Mr. Davis, I’m playing a hooker who’s trying to ‘kick.’ I was just out here trying to imagine what it must be like to have the DTs.” Then I would begin contemplating the next quandary: “Does the Torah say it’s okay to portray a hooker, and is a heart of gold a mitigating factor?”

  This behavior wasn’t going to help me get into a good college, I realized, but I couldn’t help it. Besides, what did college matter when we were all going to die, when everything was contaminated and dirty with death? This had suddenly become a real preoccupation, the taint of corpses. The Torah has a lot to say about it. A dead body is impure, imparting a contamination that’s contagious, that infects not just the person who touches it, but all that that person then touches. It’s a mess, and getting yourself purified is a complicated procedure that takes lots of time, high priests, livestock, and herbs.

  This turns out to be another one of those things that was really only an issue in Temple times, but I didn’t know that. And in my case the impurity was a legitimate concern. Most teenage girls don’t have all that many run-ins with dead bodies, but I was the daughter of a surgeon. My father was contaminated all the time, and he brought contamination home with him. It infected the chairs and the doorknobs, the dishes and the floors. It was everywhere.

  Even independent of my father, I had run-ins of my own. I was taking Anatomy, and sometimes there were body parts. They were usually animal, which was bad enough, but sometimes they were human, which was unthinkable. One day a friend placed a human skull on my binder. It was just a harmless joke, but as far as I was concerned she might as well have taken a giant dump on it or sprinkled it with anthrax. This was the worst possible contamination and there was no help for it. I could not throw the binder away, as it contained all the notes I would need to pass the stupid class, but I couldn’t let the impurity stand. I agonized for days. In the end I wiped the binder down with bleach and 409 a few hundred times, then placed it on the guest bed in my room. The bed, in turn, absorbed the impurity, and in my mind it hung on to it long after I’d passed my final and thrown the binder away. The taboo against touching that bed remained so deeply entrenched that it was as though someone had died on the bed itself, and almost twenty years later I still can’t bring myself to sleep in it.

  Everywhere I looked, there was dirt and death, contamination and sin and wrongness. By May I was vibrating, a quivering mass of misfiring neurons. I couldn’t sit still; I couldn’t walk; I couldn’t sustain a single activity for more than a few seconds. I couldn’t do my homework or pay attention in class. And I was starting to look very, very weird. My skin had returned to its normal freakishly pale tone, but everything else had gone wonky. I’d given up all grooming products on the assumption that they were unkosher. “Unless you plan to eat the stick of deodorant, it’s probably okay to use it,” my father argued, but I was unconvinced. OCD is hell on the complexion, what with all the washing, and without the benefit of balms and emollients my lips split and bled, my hands cracked and wept, my hair frizzed. A Jewish girl just can’t go without conditioner; “Thou shalt use a heat pack weekly” is the unspoken eleventh commandment. Without styling tools my already pneumatic mall hair quickly degenerated into a shaggy, damaged Jewfro, carrying enough static electricity to power a waffle iron.

  When I lost my glasses, a stylish and expensive pair I’d picked out before I went daft, I felt obliged to punish myself by replacing them with the most age-inappropriate pair I could find. They were enormous, covering a full half of my face, with peach Lucite frames. I believe they were from the Sophia Loren collection; only Sophia could have pulled them off. With my hair, I ended up looking like Gene Shalit.

  To make matters worse, I’d decided most of my wardrobe was impure. If it had been washed on Shabbat, it was out. If it had touched something that had been washed on Shabbat, it was out. If it had been touched by an insect, worn to a place where someone or something had died, including an insect, or worn during the commission of what I would now consider a sin, it was out. It was also out if it was made from more than one fiber. The Torah bans garments made from a mix of linen and wool, and I extrapolated this to include any fiber combination. Call it crazy, but I still think it’s a good idea to ban poly blends.

  In the end I was left with a uniform consisting of some military-style pants that had fit when I was twenty pounds heavier and an enormous man’s plaid flannel shirt. It was a strange choice on all counts. Religiously, it didn’t make sense; Orthodox girls don’t wear men’s clothes. And stylewise, it was a disaster. Ten years later it might have been considered grunge, but at the time I just looked like a nearsighted Jewish chola. I so closely resembled the Mexican gang members at our high school that my friends dubbed me “La Sad Girl.”

  But even gang members had the sense to strip down to undershirts in the heat. I remained swathed in head-to-toe flannel. One sweltering afternoon my mother and I sat watching a talk show whose topic was ‘My Teen Dresses Too Sexy’. “Take notes, Jenny,” my mother suggested. “Don’t those girls look nice and cool? I like the one in the red vinyl number with the cut-outs over the chest and fanny. You’d look good in something like that.”

  It was around this time that I became a real social liability. Sure, my parents could try to bring me to the neighbors’ house for a dinner party, but there was a pretty good chance that halfway through the meal they would find me in the front yard, using the garden hose to wash an invisible contaminant off my feet. You never knew what I was going to do, and you could be sure I was going to wear something that would require extensive explanations. “It’s quite a look, isn’t it, this military getup?” my mother would offer. “It’s Jenny’s costume for the school play. She’s playing a Vietnamese commando, and they’ve got her in character ‘round the clock. It’s a ‘method’ thing. Now, come on, My Le, let’s get you
out of the Taylors’ flower bed and into some dry socks.”

  After a month or so of this, my parents decided the school year was over for me. School was almost out, anyway, and there was no point in taking finals. Unless I was asked to answer an essay question about, say, the Torah’s position on fungal infections, there was no way I was going to pass. My teachers were very nice about the whole thing. Frankly, I think they were relieved to have me out of the classroom. Between the hooker costumes, the fund-raising chocolate, and the muttering, I’d been a distraction all year.

  It was early June and my summer had begun. I wasn’t happy about the incompletes, but the unstructured time, the endless hours to spend as I liked, that was wonderful. I woke up the first morning and smiled at the reflection of Gene Shalit in the mirror. I was free. I could do whatever I wanted. It was a beautiful day and I was going to get right out there and enjoy it, just as soon as I finished inspecting this toothbrush.

  INTERSTITIAL

  SAMPLE SAT QUESTIONS FOR OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE LEARNERS

  1. SUN: BURN::

  A. DOORKNOB: DISEASE

  B. LIGHT SWITCH: FIRE

  C. EVEN NUMBERS: DEATH

  D. You see? There’s a pattern. I’m not making this up. You see? You see?

  2. The cheese’s pungent________ permeated the kitchen.

  A. Effluvia

  B. Sometimes I wrap things in plastic and hide them.

  C. Pusillanimity

  D. Feculence

  3. Solve for x.

  x(3x) + 2(2(4-x)) = 20

  A. x = 1

  B. x = 2

  C. x = a cross. Answering this question is tantamount to converting to Christianity. Leave blank. Don’t even circle the C. Just move on to the next question.

  D. x = 4

  4. James has three sisters and two oranges. One sister is twice as hungry as the other two, and each orange has sixteen sections. How many times must James tap the fruit to make sure his sisters don’t die? Show your work.

  A. 3 (once for each sister)

  B. 9 (three times for each sister)

  C. 18 (three times for each sister, times two for each orange)

  D. 90 (three times for each sister, times two for each orange, repeated until taps are performed with perfect concentration, a feat finally achieved on the fifth attempt)

  ∨ Devil in the Details ∧

  Sacre Bleu

  Like many girls who don’t get asked out in high school, I spent my teenage years believing I was a displaced European. It was so obvious I’d been born in the wrong country, what with my having such sophisticated Continental sensibilities and all. As soon as I was old enough, I told myself and anyone who would listen, I was moving to a country where my unconventional looks, difficult charms, and erratic hygiene would be appreciated.

  That country was France. I always felt I’d been cheated of the French citizenship that was rightfully mine, a birthright sold for a mess of potage. My father’s parents had met and married in France, had gone to school and given birth to their first child there, had planned to make it their home forever, and then had the good sense to get out. France has always had its anti-Semitic elements, and by the late 1930s it was about as Jew friendly as a Klan pig roast. They moved to a French colony in Shanghai. Even French Jews, it turns out, have a thing for Chinese food.

  There, they saddled their children with French names and educations in anticipation of a speedy return. The plan was to go back to Paris as soon as the war was over and Hermes was open again. My grandparents were lawyers, and while their French citizenship qualified them to judge all the world’s citizens, their French law degrees permitted them to practice law only in France. Where else could they live?

  California, it turns out. A brief stopover on the way back to Paris turned into a permanent stay. The decision was made as soon as they changed the family name from Treguboff to the Americanized Traig, which, when said with a French accent, is exactly the sound one makes when clearing one’s sinuses. Their children adopted American nicknames, lost their accents, and stopped ironing their jeans. By the time I was born, the only French affectations the family retained were a postprandial salad course and a fondness for scarves.

  Instead of being raised on goat cheese, I was raised on a goat farm. Instead of Gaul, gall. Oh, it just wasn’t fair. Still, I tried. I might not have the French citizenship but, sacre bleu, I would have the superciliousness. I adopted a superior attitude as soon as I was old enough to look down my nose at the other toddlers. I was a shamelessly affected child, given to uttering phrases like “Oh, Papa, do please read me The Little Prince – en francais.” He indulged me, but my mother only sighed and shook her head when I asked her to replace the Pop-Tart in my lunch with a fruit and cheese course. “You keep this up, mademoiselle, and I’m pulling you out of ballet and signing you up for Four-H.”

  I kept it up. I wore berets. I played soccer. By age nine, I was trying to teach myself French from a 1950s Berlitz, useful for phrases like “This sedan rides as smoothly as a couch,” but not much else. Even my grandfather – a man who wore ascots – thought I was taking it too far. “You are learning Fransh?” he demanded in the melodic Continental accent I so envied. “But thees ees ridiculeux! Look at thees village you leeve in! They barely speak English, never mind Fransh. A course in l’agronomie will be so much more useful to you here.”

  He was probably right. By the time I was in high school it was clear that the only people who would listen to me were the exchange students, and, like everything else in my life thus far, they disappointed me. I had been hoping for a dashing Jewish Rothschild to swoop into my homeroom and propose to me on the spot. “Never in my life have I met a girl so fastidious, so pure, so charmante,” he would declare, taking my chapped hand in his. “Now, come with me, my little Hebrew flower. I’m taking you back to the garden where you belong.”

  Mais non. Instead of Alain Delon and Catherine Deneuve we got a cavalcade of misfits as pimply and badly dressed as we were. Europe was clearly exporting its least attractive adolescents to my high school. I began to suspect they were not being exchanged but exiled, for not being pretty enough to live in their native countries. They were being sent to America to mate with more appropriate partners, like the poor souls with cystic acne and self-inflicted haircuts who made up much of our student body.

  Still, there were a few lookers who managed to slip through. We swooned over Guy, the fey French flight attendant who’d somehow landed in our town. Bored and lonely, with nothing better to do than hang out with high school kids, Guy sometimes modeled in our teen fashion shows, captivating us all with his husky accent and Gallic cheekbones. The boys fell for Solange, the nubile jeunefille who spent summers with some family friends. Solange spoke not a word of English and had to be forcibly restrained from walking down the street topless. At fourteen, she was already on the pill. We gaped, chuckled, shook our heads: Oh, those French. They are such sluts. What can you do?

  Even in my scrupulous periods, I remained a devoted Francophile. Oh, sure, I knew the French were a bunch of libidinous heathens. My cousin had shared his French dorm-mate’s description of a date: “She was a peeg. She bite my derriere. But what could she do? I was seeting on her face!” I knew. But they were so charming I couldn’t hold it against them. I might have felt differently if I’d ever actually been there. The closest I’d come to France was Canada, which is France with better manners and worse clothes, France as performed in Branson, Missouri. It doesn’t count.

  The summer I turned seventeen I would finally get to see the real thing. My family was going to Paris. What was making this possible was the bottle of pills in my father’s breast pocket. They were tiny, no bigger than a teen bride’s diamond, but they could keep me quiet for six hours at a stretch. This was our passport. This would keep me docile and compliant in the face of bloody saucissons and medieval bathrooms, oyster bars and leering, unwashed men, and, worse than all these, the horrors continually invented in my own brain.<
br />
  In college I would pay good money for any pill that could do that, but at the time I wasn’t having it, not at all. After years of full-blown crazy-making and an extraordinary end-of-junior-year meltdown I was finally in therapy, lots of it, and though I liked talking about myself for hours on end, I was not happy about the pharmaceutical component.

  “Drugs,” my parents had insisted at my intake session. “Let’s get her on drugs. Freudian, Jungian, we don’t care what you are as long as you believe in Percodan, Ativan, or Vicodin. Just give her some meds.”

  I was vehemently against this plan. OCD and anorexia revolve around controlling the body and what goes into it, and this control was not something I was eager to relinquish. Frizzy hair and orange skin aside, my body was the one thing I had achieved a measure of control over. But one little pill could have me flinging off my underwear to join Solange sunbathing on the lawn, waving at the cars that slowed as they passed. No, thanks.

  I was appalled. Nancy Reagan was still in the White House, and her big red No was tattooed on my brain. No, no, of course no. Though I went to school with lots of drug dealers’ kids, who crowded their friends into the bathroom stalls between classes, snorting and cackling, I’d never actually been offered a mind-altering substance before. I had been preparing for this moment all my life. I had rehearsed the lines I would say, from the self-righteous, “Drugs aren’t cool!” to the stealth denial, “No, thanks, man, I’m already too baked.” I just couldn’t believe I was going to have to say them to my parents.