It was going to be a long year. I was getting better, but for every three taps forward, there were two taps and a shoulder tic back, especially where socialization was concerned. On my own, I was okay, or getting there, but put me in a group and I was weird, weird, weird.
At the time I was tutoring a popular classmate who’d suffered some minor brain damage when she fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a tree. Now she was having trouble with basic math and vocabulary, and it was my job to make sure she could add in time for the SATs. Misty struggled with two plus two, but her social skills were completely intact. I marveled at her ability to flirt and charm, skills that I lacked utterly. Being in the in-crowd, or being in any crowd at all – it was just beyond me. But Misty had it down. When she talked to you, you felt as though you were the most special person in the world. When you talked to me, you felt as though you were competing with the mental transistor feed that held most of my attention. If she plucked a loose thread off your sweater, as I often felt compelled to, you felt lucky she noticed. With me you just felt scared that I might proceed to strip-mine your cardigan for hairs and other impurities.
Even though there was a shaved patch underneath the picture hat Misty somehow managed to pull off, she seemed to be doing so much better than I was. Even with her cane and limp, she was still the most popular girl in school. She was the one with brain damage, but I was the one who couldn’t go to a party without my own roll of paper towels and can opener. I was the one who couldn’t take PE because aerobics posed too many moral dilemmas.
This was not the senior year I’d imagined. I’d planned to be the president of every club and the star of every musical. I knew that MVP was probably out of reach, since I didn’t play any sports, but I thought an award for ‘Most Spirited’ was a strong possibility. “Most Likely to Succeed’ was a lock. I’d have a boyfriend and we’d be voted ‘Cutest Couple.” We would also receive individual awards for ‘Best Smile’ and ‘Prettiest Eyes,’ as well as ‘Best Diction’ and ‘Cleanest Shoes.’
This would be the year I reaped the rewards for serving dutifully on every committee, decorating the gym for every stupid dance and rally for the past three years. Come spring, my picture would be on every page of the yearbook. There would be candids of me playfully soaping cars at fund-raising car washes, rehearsing my big solo, studying thoughtfully on the quad. It would be so over the top that I’d be embarrassed, and would grow bashful and shy when asked to sign it. “I don’t know why they put so many pictures of me in here,” I’d say, uncapping my ballpoint. “I feel like the school mascot. Which, in a way, I guess I am.”
When the yearbook finally came out in May it was testament to my utter lameness. My sole candid showed me playing with stuffed animals at a toy drive I’d organized, holding an oversized teddy bear aloft with a tight smile on my face. The ‘Sad Toys for Sad Tots’ campaign was my one success that year. I’d quit Student Council and Drama Club to devote myself entirely to charity drives and a series of ill-conceived volunteer schemes. The two most notable flops had been my ‘Third World Luncheon’ fund-raiser, at which I charged five dollars for bread and water, or would have, had even one person attended; and my “D-D-D-Don’t Drink and Drive!” rap song, broadcast over the PA system to the entire student body. I’d recorded it without a microphone into a Fisher-Price cassette deck, and the poor sound quality was the only thing that kept me from having to drop out of school the next day. It was so scratchy and quiet you couldn’t tell it was me, or that I was saying, “…And th-th-th-that ain’t cool!”
But there were steps forward. There were signs that I was getting better. I could wear leather shoes without feeling compelled to avoid dairy afterward. I could take out the trash without changing into a plastic smock first. I could watch television. I could get through a book.
By early winter my parents trusted me enough to leave me alone with my sister for a week. I don’t know which one of us was more nervous. I was afraid my sister was going to host nightly keggers. My sister was afraid I was going to fumigate. “No parties. No steam-cleaning,” my parents said, throwing their suitcases into the car. “You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.”
The first day of their trip I came home from school to find the bloated body of the family dog floating facedown in the pool. We were off to quite a start. I’d spent the past five years flipping out every time I’d found a dead bug in the water. To find a fur-bearing member of the family was too much.
But I didn’t lose it, not completely. I ruminated for fifteen minutes or so, wondering if it was worse to do nothing or to jump in and attempt mouth-to-mouth, thereby contaminating myself. My sister decided for me. “He’s been dead for hours, and you’re wearing wool,” she said. It couldn’t be helped. The dog was epileptic, and we figured he’d probably fallen in the pool during a seizure.
I missed him terribly, but his death did make things a little simpler, as many of my compulsions had revolved around his care. Of course, I could never go in the pool again now, but that was fine, too, as many of my other compulsions revolved around fishing things out. Vicky called someone to come get the body, and a few more people to come over for refreshments, and I retreated to my room to pray and write some lists.
And so went the rest of the week, my sister hosting nightly get-togethers while I cleaned my desk accessories. I felt a little uneasy, but when I came downstairs to get the bleach I was perfectly polite to everyone. If nothing else, the week had proved that I could, finally, act somewhat normal in mixed company for whole minutes at a time.
Now that I could be around other people without trying to wash their feet, my therapist thought it was time for me to start socializing with people my age again. Up until now my social contact had been limited mostly to the hour I spent each week at synagogue, sharing pleasantries with the older married couples who were the only other regulars. That was fine with me. They were warm and congenial, and they shared my interest in butter cookies, dried apricots, and yarn. We had plenty to talk about.
But now my therapist thought it was time for me to be among peers. We would start small, with a Jewish youth group. The synagogue youth group proved very small indeed, both in size and in age level. Apparently I was the only person over age eleven who was still the least bit interested in religion. Everyone else had bailed as soon as the bar mitzvahs were over, having realized that never again would they get gift certificates and savings bonds for going to temple. Undeterred, I continued to attend, spending every Sunday night eating graham crackers with sixth-graders while we discussed Jewish themes in the works of Judy Blume.
I have always been terribly immature, but even I knew I was too old for this. I was short, but I couldn’t pass for a preteen and I looked freakishly out of place. In the pageant, they had to obscure my face. I played the rear end of a dancing golden calf. The head was ten.
Eventually we managed to find another Jewish youth group several counties over. It was a branch of a stridently Zionist organization whose sole purpose was to encourage emigration to Israel. I dutifully went to meetings, driving three hours for hourlong gatherings at which we learned about the Balfour Declaration and ate falafel. The other kids were mostly the American-born children of Israelis, who were skilled at tanning and making fun of their parents’ accents. I liked them quite a bit but was afraid we didn’t have much in common, as I was only interested in emigrating to Israel if the Messiah was my travel agent. I mean, I wanted to go to the Promised Land, but there was no way I was going to leave my farm town just to end up on a kibbutz.
Also, they camped. They were always holding forest Shabba-tons and redwoods retreats. I didn’t understand that at all. The way I saw it, after spending forty years in the wilderness, Jews had pretty much done their time. Why should we get sunburned and bug-bitten now?
“Fresh air and open sky,” my mother said, tossing my jeans into a duffel bag, when the youth group announced the next Shabbat on the Swamp. “It will do you good, and do me even better. I need a co
uple days off.”
I wasn’t so sure. Shalom bayit was supposed to be our guiding principle. “Shalom house,” not “shalom tent.” Not “shalom sleeping bag.” But there would be kosher hot dogs, and my parents had been adamant, so I acquiesced.
This was maybe a bad idea. This was maybe a little more than I could handle at this point. It had only been a couple months since I’d stopped wearing surgical masks around the house. I ended up spending the better part of the weekend rocking back and forth by the campfire, ruminating on Talmudic matters and keeping a close eye on the embers. I left my post only to pester the youth group leader with obscure theological inquiries.
I tended to do this whenever I encountered an adult who seemed at all knowledgeable about Judaism. There was my rabbi, but I’d worn him out already. So now I kept lists of things to ask and would let fly with a litany of inquiries whenever I encountered a potential resource. There was just so much I needed to know, now that I was trying to live a normal Jewish life. But because my knowledge of Judaism came from a half-baked assortment of dubious sources, my questions did, too. They had the logic of a sentence translated from English to Spanish and back again. All I’d wanted to know was which prayers to say before bed and which ones to say before eating, but the words came out funny and convoluted, like I’d asked “How does it say the traditional prayer of the hour to be put to bed?” or “Does it has to say you a benediction on the water?” They were words, but they didn’t necessarily make any sense. I didn’t have any context, didn’t know how to phrase things correctly.
When the youth group leader told us we should feel free to ask him questions, I don’t think mine were what he had in mind. “I don’t think you understand,” he told me. “I’m a Near East Studies grad student, not a rabbi. I can answer any questions you may have about Moshe Dayan, but I’m afraid I just don’t know if dirt is kosher.”
Everyone was friendly and kind, but it was still more than I could handle. I could act normal for a few hours at a stretch but two whole days was just too much. I came home exhausted and spent, feeling just as burned as the charcoal briquette I smelled like. I was getting better, but there were still some things, like peeing outside, that I just wasn’t ready for.
Well, at least it had been nice to spend a couple days around people who looked like me. My school consisted almost entirely of blonds and Latinos, and I often felt like a small Semitic alien, like an ALF puppet who’d accidentally wandered onto the set of a Mexican soap opera. Years later, when I was at Brandeis, it would be the first time I lived among people who looked just like me. Everyone was five feet tall with glasses and curly brown hair. It was unsettling, and for the first time in my life I considered dating outside my faith.
But in high school my looks were just one more way I was different from everyone else. I had no peers. What teenager spends her free time reading psalms and sterilizing salad tongs? These are activities you do alone. There are no washing societies, no burnt-offering clubs. My rabbi had told me there were other kids like me, but I was pretty sure he was lying. I knew I was the weirdest kid in the world. It was obvious.
I was weird not just because I was crazy, but because I was religious at all. For my friends, it would all amount to the same thing anyway. Orthodox Judaism was just as foreign to them as OCD was. It was just too hard to explain why I couldn’t go out Friday night, why I couldn’t go to McDonald’s, why I would not be wearing the new off-the-shoulder look. It was easier just to lie: I was grounded, I was dieting, I had acne on my upper back.
Why would they understand? Even to Jews, I looked crazy. I knew so few, and the handful I met didn’t seem to share my fascination with the minutiae of usury laws. I was speechless when my parents finally dug up someone who did. The college-age daughter of some family friends had become Orthodox, and my parents asked her to come talk to me.
“You can ask me anything,” she said over Baskin-Robbins cones she assured me were kosher, but for once I was too overwhelmed to form a question. She was the first Orthodox person I’d ever met and I was fascinated by her. So this was what an Orthodox girl looked like. I scrutinized her every aspect. “Orthodox shoes,” I thought, examining her sandals. “Orthodox watch, Orthodox cardigan, Orthodox barrette.” What amazed me most was that she looked completely normal. I’d expected someone from another planet entirely, with accessories I’d never seen before, things with foreign names like yechsmatas and tchabainiks. But she looked just like me, only taller and with better hair. She was a revelation, living proof that I could be both sane and practicing, and that I would look better without bangs.
I could ask her anything? I wanted to ask if I could come live with her. I longed to be her ward, but I doubted that college dorms smiled on sophomores taking in seventeen-year-old adoptees. Besides, I didn’t think I could handle the coed bathrooms.
In the meantime I was supposed to be spending more time with my school friends. I liked them, but seeing them was still a lot of work, as it required me to act normal for long stretches of time. I was trying, though. I was trying so hard. I even tried to put a positive spin on the fact that I was completely incapable of attending my own prom, the strapless gown and the sheer hose being just unthinkable, not to mention the champagne and the boy with his needs. It was out of the question. But stay home and sulk? Not me! I was trying, trying, trying. “I know Kevin wants to go with me, but I think it would be hypocritical for me to go, since I think proms are so lame,” I told my friends. “Let’s all boycott and I’ll host an anti-prom dinner party instead. We’ll call it a ‘Morp’ and we’ll wear ‘creative formal’ and drink sparkling cider.”
This, too, had been my therapist’s idea. It wasn’t quite the social event of the season. The guests included the drum major, an Amway representative, and the only girl at school who was in my height percentile, just out of a wheelchair after the procedure that would make her several inches taller. They were my friends and I certainly liked them, but there was little chance any of us was going to be crowned prom queen.
Because I’d learned nothing at all from the apocalyptically fibrous Shabbat dinner I’d made my family several months earlier, I served the exact same thing with exponentially worse results. I don’t know if it was the underdone quiche or the haphazardly prepared gazpacho, but something made me and several unlucky guests catastrophically sick. We hadn’t even gotten to our dried fruit before they began folding over in their seats. “Cramps,” they exhaled painfully, before leaping over one another to get to the bathroom.
This was not what I’d planned for the entertainment portion of the evening. I’d optimistically rented Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, the feel-good romp in which Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt triumph over disapproval and dance, but there was no point in watching it now. We’d just have to keep pausing it while guests scurried off to answer the colonic demands of the offending microbe. And thus we got to spend our prom night like the rest of our classmates, bent over a toilet.
So in my own strange way I was fitting in. And while I was treated to many reruns of the meal, as it came up and out again and again, it was not, otherwise, a repeat of that first Shabbat dinner I’d served months before. Things had changed. Here one of my worst obsessive fears had come true: I had served my friends contaminated food. The world didn’t end, and afterward, I didn’t feel compelled to pull out my hair and then burn it as a restitution offering. I actually felt pretty good. Oh, sure, I was nauseous and crampy, but as we sat there together clutching our abdomens, I felt, for the first time in a long while, as if I was part of something.
Judaism is always calling for the separation of kinds: meat from milk, male from female, linen from wool, this seed from that, and this may have been a lesson I learned too well. I could dissect and detach anything. It was the blending that I had trouble with. It was the integration I couldn’t do. When I found myself in big Jewish communities, at Brandeis or in Israel, I became less religious, stopped going to shul, spent Saturdays by myself in bed, reading
tabloids and eating Danish. I was so used to practicing by myself that it would take me a long time to learn to practice in a community.
Shalom can mean goodbye, but it can also mean hello; bayit can also mean community. That’s what I’d been struggling to get. That’s what this year had been, really, a process of learning to integrate, to come into line with normal Jewish practice, so I could pass for normal, stay in school, rejoin society at large. By June, I wasn’t completely socially normal, but I was getting close. I could attend my graduation. Afterward, my parents had a party, and I could eat the food even though it was in communal dishes. I could shake the guests’ hands without a napkin in my palm.
I was, in fact, getting downright grabby. As I neared sanity my family was horrified to discover that the by-product of my rehabilitation was the open expression of affection and sincerity. I’d always had a smart mouth, but now, suddenly, I was given to saying things like, “You know, Vicky, it’s okay to feel.” We’d be in the middle of dinner and out of nowhere I’d announce, “I can hear my heart beating. Isn’t that an amazing thing? All on its own, it’s just beating, keeping me alive. The human body is truly a wondrous thing. I just wanted to share that thought with you.” At the mall, I’d accost my sister over the sale rack with a mock pouty face, demanding a hug. “I don’t mind if you want to wash my sneakers or sanitize my purse,” she hissed, “but there’s no way in hell I’m letting you snuggle.”
So this is what a year of therapy had bought us. I was functional but incredibly annoying. Well, at least the timing was good. In three months I would leave for nearby UC Berkeley, and my family couldn’t wait.
Personally I was a little nervous about it. I spent all summer preparing myself, agonizing over which habits I could take with me and which ones would have to stay home. I would have two roommates, who, I imagined, would be put off by someone who spent three hours a day rocking on a chair in the center of the room, whispering prayers. While they might not mind if I sanitized my room keys, they probably wouldn’t like it if I did the same to theirs. They wouldn’t know what to make of my unusual headwear, my cleaning products, my need to keep things off the floor.
Devil in the Details Page 20