The thing was, I wasn’t so bad if someone else was in the car. It was when I was alone, when there were no witnesses to verify that the curb had attacked me, that I got in trouble. When there was no one to distract me, my compulsions had full reign. Obsessive-compulsives vary in their habits, some of us praying and others pulling hair, but we all do the exact same thing when we get in a car: we circle endlessly, convinced that we ran someone over without noticing and then heading back to check. A normal person would know for sure if they’d committed a hit-and-run, but not me. “I don’t remember goring that little girl at the stoplight, but I don’t know, I can be forgetful that way,” I would think. “Better go back and make sure.” So I would circle back, and this time there would be an old man there, and half a block later I’d get to wondering if I’d hit him, and round and round we’d go. I could circle the block forever, in circuits that both mimicked and reinforced my neural loops. I was literally driving myself crazy. I was also in danger of being arrested for violating the anti-cruising ordinance.
Driving overwhelmed me. There were too many things competing for my attention. Besides fending off ruminations and looking for the bodies I couldn’t remember hitting, there were a million other little things. I couldn’t filter out the unimportant data. The song on the radio, the texture of the upholstery, the temperature inside the car, the state of my hair – all of these things were making equal demands on my attention. To have to deal with stop signs and other cars on top of everything else, and a clutch and a gearshift on top of that, was just too much.
The anorexia and scrupulosity allowed me at least the illusion of control, but in the car I had none. I’d felt that way before. Many years earlier we’d gone out for a Sunday morning drive in our egg-colored Corolla. A drunk plowed into us, scrambling it. Miraculously we were all fine, but the car was totaled. “Who the hell is drunk by eight a.m. on a Sunday morning?” my father wanted to know. No one in our family, certainly. The Jews didn’t know how to party and the Catholics had the decency to wait until after mass.
I’d hated that feeling, of spinning helplessly in a vehicle I couldn’t control. I felt that way every time I got behind the wheel now, spinning and spinning, my brain churning, the car circling the block yet one more time. I hated every errand I had to run, every trip to the post office or the library, and was amazed every time I arrived home intact. I never felt comfortable, and when I went off to college I was relieved that my parents gave me a computer instead of a convertible.
Over the next few years, I got better. The OCD subsided and I found I didn’t mind driving as much. It helped that by then the family car was an automatic. My driving became automatic as well, and I was finally able to do everything I was supposed to without thinking too hard about it.
I don’t drive very often now, but when I do, I do it fine. Over the years I have become perfectly competent, the only person I know with a spotless record. I’ve never gotten a ticket, not even for parking, though this may have something to do with the fact that I rarely drive and never park on the street.
When I did lose my license it was for fainting. I was on public transportation at the time, and woke up to find that the bus had stopped for a medical emergency. “Great,” I said to the friend who was with me. “Now I’m going to be late for work.”
“Really late,” my friend answered, pointing out that the emergency was me. This explained why I was lying on the floor. Apparently I’d passed out. It was a simple orthostatic faint; Yom Kippur had been the day before and I hadn’t gotten fully rehydrated yet. But I went to the doctor just to make sure nothing was wrong. She informed me that by law she had to report my episode to the DMV and that I wouldn’t be driving for a good long while.
I rarely drove, but this galled me. Losing my license for passing out? I had friends who’d kept their licenses after committing far worse infractions. It didn’t seem fair. I knew someone who’d been apprehended driving drunk with a trunk full of stolen merchandise and gotten off with a warning. But I forget to drink enough water one time and I can’t drive for a year? You couldn’t lose your license for drinking, it seemed, but not drinking was another story.
In the end it worked out just fine. A year later I petitioned to have my license reinstated and got it back without too much trouble. I got a new picture, too, and it’s the best picture I’ve ever taken. You should see it. I look like a model.
Now I’m legally clear to drive whenever I like. For the most part, however, I continue to live car-free, relying on public transportation and a network of indulgent driving friends. The qualities that made me a bad driver make me an excellent passenger, and I never have to look too far for a ride. I take care of all the details: picking a good radio station, modulating the heater or air conditioner, offering snacks and interesting banter. “Is everyone comfortable?” I ask. “Is everyone happy?” Then I angle back the seat, roll up the windows, and bask in the knowledge that this is one thing I’m really good at.
INTERSTITIAL
HELP JENNY GET TO HOMEROOM: A MAZE
Head toward locker to retrieve calculus book. En route, accidentally brush against classmate. Pause. Is this classmate ritually unclean? What do you know about this classmate? Recall that she was sporting prominent hickeys earlier this year. Unclean. Head to girls’ room to wash.
Wash hands for a count of one hundred and eighty Mississippis. On the way out, accidentally touch the door handle. Go back inside and wash three minutes more.
Proceed to locker. Realize you forgot paper towels you’ll need to touch locker with. Return to girls’ room.
Oh, look, there’s Stacy Hibbs. You heard she’ll do anything for a six pack. Look at how she’s dressed it’s probably true. Stop thinking bad things. Stop thinking bad things. Is this gossip? Mental gossip? Thinking awful things like this? It probably is. It is. You are going straight to hell. Okay. You have to do a good deed to make up for this. Here’s what you’ll do: you’ll stay in the girls’ room until someone comes in, then you will pay this person a compliment. It has to be a sincere compliment or it will be a lie. If you lie, you will have to pay two sincere compliments to make up for the lie plus one compliment for the bad thought in the first place. Three is a good number. Yes. Let’s just make it three and then you can go back to your locker.
Head toward locker again. En route, make eye contact with Social Studies teacher. Wait. Was eye contact appropriately friendly and respectful? Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it somehow conveyed disrespect for your elders. Spend five minutes contemplating whether or not you should go find said teacher and make some other friendly and respectful gesture to compensate for possibly sinful look you gave her earlier.
What’s that you just stepped on? Is that blood? Is that blood? It’s hard to say – an old brownish stain – but it could be blood. Go find a hose and wash your shoes.
Arrive at locker. Open locker using paper towel. Retrieve calculus book and place in backpack, being careful not to let it touch your lunch, because who knows where that book has been. Approach trash can to dispose of towel. While throwing it away, accidentally touch the part of the towel that touched the locker handle. Return to girls’ room to wash.
The bell rang five minutes ago. You are so late. Tardiness is a sin, it’s a sin, and you’ll never be able to wash it off.
∨ Devil in the Details ∧
Shalom Bayit
So my family was having its first real Shabbat dinner and this was not how it was supposed to go at all. For starters, my father was supposed to be wearing pants. This was my very special Shabbat dinner and here he was wearing swim trunks. Though I’d laid white dresses on their beds, my mother had opted for sweats and my sister for obscenely tight ankle-zip jeans and a hot pink tank top. Because it was a special occasion, she’d accessorized with large rhinestone hoops, fingerless gloves, and, on her shoulder, a chip the size of a small microwave.
This was not how it was supposed to go at all. We were supposed to be wearing matching formalwear
and shy, beatific smiles. I had it all planned out. My mother and sister and I would light the Shabbat candles, and then my parents would recite the traditional blessing of the children. I didn’t know the Hebrew formula, but I figured we could just make something up. “Hava nagila shalom aleichem tova feldshuh,” our parents would chant solemnly, laying their hands on our heads. They would shut their eyes in concentration, and their voices would build to a fervent wail. “May you rise up like the bread of the earth. May your lives be as sweet as fruit of the vine, blessed fruit of our loins.”
Then my father would make the blessings over the wine and the challah, and we’d sit down to the delicious kosher meal I’d spent all day preparing. There would be course after course and the dinner would last late into the night. When we could finally eat no more, we’d put down our forks and join hands to sing the blessing after meals and a few of our favorite Hebrew folk songs. By now we would all be tired, but we’d be having too much fun to stop. “Just one more song, Papa,” we’d plead, “and then we’ll go to bed.” My father would pretend to be stern, shaking his head, but then he would chuckle and nod and lead us all in “Tzur Mishelo.”
Instead he was distractedly humming the theme to Dirty Harry. The lugubrious tune suited the doleful, uneasy mood of the dinner. We’d gotten off to a bad start when I’d insisted on making kiddush, the blessing over the wine. My warbly, halting Hebrew and fervent delivery had embarrassed everyone, including me. Then came the food, each dish more weirdly inedible than the last. It was hard not to view these concoctions as open expressions of high-fiber hostility. Oh, I’d tried to make something nice. I’d combed through cookbooks for days, looking for recipes that were both low-calorie and contaminant-free. In the end I’d settled on coleslaw dressed in apple cider vinegar and Sweet’n Low; V-8 gazpacho; quiche made from skim milk, egg whites, and Mrs. Dash; and a salad of dried fruit. What the menu lacked in flavor it made up in laxative properties. These dishes had the volatility of Semtex. Had I simply handed my family boxes of Feen-a-Mint, I could have achieved the same result with far less work. It was terrible.
I tried to make conversation, tried to put a positive spin on things. “I bet you didn’t know there’s more fat in the gazpacho than in the quiche,” I chirped. “I read today that fresh apples can give you cancer, so it’s a good thing we’re having dried.” Unable to say anything nice, my family said nothing at all. Now we sat uncomfortably, shooting one another loaded looks as we absently played with our food, bulldozing our prunes into the quivery, anemic quiche.
By 6:45 my sister was clearing her plate. “Can I go now?” she demanded. “You said all I had to do was show up for Jenny’s stupid dinner. You didn’t say anything about hanging around all night.” When my parents didn’t offer a protest she snatched the car keys and charged out the door. My father wandered off to watch Washington Week in Review, my mother went to her sewing room, and I retreated to the living room to stretch out on the Oriental rug and pitch a fit.
The dinner had been my therapist’s idea. She’d thought it would be good for me to include my family in my religious activities. This was part of my rehabilitation plan. We had a plan. I was seventeen now, and all parties agreed it was finally time to get my craziness under control, while my parents could still make me and before I would face long prison terms should my compulsions run afoul of the law. So now there was a plan, with professionals, medication, contracted behavior, and consequences.
The rehabilitation process would be guided by the Jewish principle of shalom bayit – “peace in the home.” The idea was that I would modify my religious practice to keep my family happy, and they would try to accept a ritual or two in return. I’d retained enough bat mitzvah Hebrew to understand that the phrase also meant “goodbye, home,” and the threat was implicit. If I didn’t shape up, I would be shipped out.
I knew it wouldn’t take much. My mother liked to leave out brochures from military schools, convents, and wilderness challenge programs to remind me how thin the ice beneath my feet actually was. My family had had it with me. All teenagers are problematic, but I was problematic in a spectacularly tedious way. Binge drinking, promiscuity, delinquency, paint huffing – all of these things have their fun moments for the family that has to deal with them. My sister’s occasional partying was a good time for us all. She was a fun drunk, and in that lovely twilight between getting caught and getting grounded, she was oblivious and effusive, working the room like a cabaret singer. “Oh, hel-looooo, everyone. What a good-looking crowd. Anyone here from Sacramento?”
But a religious compulsion was as dull as it was annoying. It didn’t even give my parents the satisfaction of righteous indignation. I was holier than thou. That was the whole point. And a Jewish religious compulsion was worst of all. Truth be told, they rather enjoyed our Jesus-freak acquaintances, with their colorful stories and lively turns of phrase. They were fun company, quick to offer pamphlets that were useful for jotting down phone numbers or wrapping your gum in. All I could provide was dour approbation and anti-bacterial Handi Wipes.
But now we had a counselor and a therapeutic plan to make me better. The first step would be to distinguish normal Jewish practice from crazy compulsive behavior. Because the therapist was not Jewish, she suggested we consult a rabbi as well. It would be his job to draw the line between the weird religious behavior I made up and the weird religious behavior Judaism actually requires.
By now our synagogue had hired a new rabbi, so we made an appointment to meet him and explain our situation. I’d liked the previous rabbi very much, but she knew better than to trust me. This new one, however, was a blank slate. Perhaps he would recognize that I was not, as everyone said, completely off my nut, that I was just especially devoted. I had hopes.
It took him about five minutes to figure out I was crazy. He was a reasonably patient man, but he soon learned to set his jaw and rub his brow when he saw me coming. This would be a challenge, teaching me to be a normal Jew. My religious observance was just off. Because I’d been practicing mostly in isolation, my practice was like that of a long-lost tribe, like those Chinese or Indian Jews who avoided pork and wore funny hats but didn’t remember why. It looked familiar, but it wasn’t quite right. I prayed three times a day but said strange prayers I made up myself. I separated milk and meat not just in the kitchen, but in the bathroom as well. Sometimes I wore yarmulkes, and sometimes I wore Kleenex.
Over the next few months the rabbi tried to set me straight. I had no obligation to pray three times a day, he told me, but if I was going to do it, I might as well do it right. He taught me the proper prayers and made me cut the calisthenics portion of my service. While it was customary to keep separate plates for meat and milk, he explained, to keep separate toothbrushes, trash cans, and toilets was not. I had no obligation to cover my head, but if I insisted, a lace doily would be more appropriate than a paper towel. I did not always believe him and sometimes continued to insist on doing things my way, but mostly I deferred.
The rest of it we worked out in counseling. Because OCD hadn’t yet been recognized as a fairly straightforward chemical disorder, my treatment included family therapy sessions and a fair amount of blaming my parents. Every few weeks, my family would come to my appointment, sitting stone-faced and sullen on the leather couches while I fired accusations at them. “Maybe I wash my hands so much because you spanked me that one time,” I suggested. “Maybe I don’t eat because Vicky used to spit in my food. Maybe I pray all the time because you wouldn’t let us get cable and I have nothing better to do.”
It was like trying to make a cat feel guilty. They had nothing to feel sorry about, except maybe the part about the cable – that really wasn’t fair. But other than that they’d been great. Psychiatry may not yet have known that my family wasn’t to blame, but my family sure did. As far as they were concerned, family therapy was a colossal waste of time and money, not to mention a huge embarrassment. “There’s nothing wrong with counseling,” we said, but of cou
rse there was. Counseling was for crazy people. Wasn’t that the whole idea?
That we were seeing a therapist in my father’s own practice, a colleague, just made it that much more uncomfortable. To make matters worse, Psychiatry and OB⁄GYN shared an office. Either way, if anyone saw us all trooping in, it was clear that the Traigs were in trouble. We would have been better off working out our family hostilities with hunting accidents, like our neighbors did. “Shalom bayit,” said through gritted teeth, became the family mantra.
This kind of therapy shouldn’t have worked but it did. I don’t know. I was starting to get a little better. By October I could sit on the recliner without lining it with paper towels first. I could read the newspaper without cutting it into ribbons, could watch a movie without praying, could eat without plastic bags on my hands. In my naked, wobbly way, I was getting on track. I remember spending this year feeling like an infant, like a stroke victim learning to walk and eat and breathe again. I had to learn to do everything over. How did you sit down to a meal without inspecting the dishes first? How did you walk without pausing to contemplate your sins? How did you sit without rocking? How did you hold a conversation without trying to anoint your companion’s forehead?
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