Devil in the Details (12 page)

Without making a big deal of it, they accommodated me, riding
out my flare-ups of anorexia and scrupulosity, accepting my grab
bag of dietary idiosyncrasies. My mother quickly learned which
margarines were parve, which brownie mixes were acceptable, which
ingredients would make me fling myself down on the floor in a fit.
When I became a vegetarian, she forged an acquaintance with tofu
and seitan. And thus the dust would settle, for a time, until I
relapsed and kicked it up the next time.

It was Atkins that put her over the edge. I still love my fad
diets, and when the Atkins plan became popular a couple years ago I
couldn’t resist. A few weeks into it, I went home for the weekend
with my Ziploc bags of sugar-free chocolate and nuts. I was fixing
myself a snack of cream cheese with ranch dressing when my mother
asked if I’d prefer tortellini or rotelle for dinner. “Oh,
neither,” I answered casually. “I’ve gone low-carb.” My mother
didn’t say anything for a minute. I can’t be sure what she was
thinking, but her expression registered something akin to murderous
disbelief. Had her thoughts been captioned, I imagine they would
have read like this: “I survived your anorexia. I acquiesced when
you decided to keep kosher. I accepted the vegetarianism. I
supported you even when you would eat nothing but dried fruit and
untoasted English muffins. But this is a bridge too far. Pasta is
all I have left. You will eat it, and you will like it’.
‘Tortellini or rotelle?” she repeated, glaring hard. “Tortellini,”
I recovered. “And I’ll make the garlic bread.” It was a nice meal.
The water glasses could have been a little cleaner, but we drank
out of them anyway. No one got sick. No one got fat. No one got
condemned to hell. For dessert, there was ice cream, and we all had
a very nice time.

∨
Devil in the Details
∧

T
here are many things
I like about Judaism. I like that it encourages napping and the
liberal consumption of saturated fats, that it requires you to wear
new clothes on some holidays and to eat cheesecake on others. But
what I like best is that it endorses catered affairs for
middle-schoolers. Judaism is normally a fairly sensible religion,
but bar and bat mitzvahs are just lunacy. At thirteen everyone is
at their worst, as unattractive and vulgar as they’ll ever be. In a
rational society, thirteen-year-olds would be sequestered until
they were properly socialized and good-looking enough to circulate
among the general public. But in Judaism, we declare you an adult,
buy you a suit, then hire a photographer and a DJ to mark the
occasion.

It’s a recipe for disaster. Thirteen-year-olds pick themes like
“Stacy’s
Sex and the City
Soiree.” It’s institutionalized
insanity, and everyone goes along with it. Give out souvenir
sweatshirts embossed with the bat mitzvah girl’s face? Sounds
great! Put the pimply kid with the cracking voice and the
uncontrollable erections on the podium? Yes, please! And why not
record the whole thing for posterity? It’ll be great!

It’s a fabulous idea, the bat mitzvah. I knew by age eleven that
I had to have one. I was motivated partly by a commitment to my
faith and partly by a desire for formalwear. My Hebrew school
friends had started having them, and it looked like a pretty good
deal.

There is a two-year-long period in every Jewish preteen’s life
during which every Saturday morning is spent at a bar or bat
mitzvah. It becomes a routine, giving the identical gift of a
multifunction digital watch each time, evaluating the caterer’s
performance from one week to the next, debating the merits of Dan
Dan the Party Man versus J.P. McGoodtimes. During the ceremony
itself, when you got bored, you’d plan how to outdo them all with
yours.

Because our Jewish community was so small, I had only a six-week
bar mitzvathon, but it was enough to get me thinking. I’d also
heard some stories. My cousins had recently gone to the bar mitzvah
of one very rich and, apparently, racist young man who was carried
into his reception in a paladin resting on the shoulders of four
black men dressed as Nubian slaves. Another acquaintance had
attended a bat mitzvah that featured a performance by actual Solid
Gold Dancers and ice sculptures of the bat mitzvah girl in dance
poses.

My mother warned me not to get ideas. I had ideas. Besides the
bar mitzvahs, I’d been to a few big weddings, and they’d made an
impression. So had several
quinceaneras
, the ceremony
marking a girl’s transition to womanhood, which were common among
the fifteen-year-old Latinas in my hometown.
Quinceaneras
featured scores of attendants, with
damas
in hoop skirts and
chambeldnes
in bolero jackets. We called them Mexican bat
mitzvahs, but they were much more than that. They were like a
religious ceremony, a beauty pageant, and a debutante ball rolled
into one and held together by Aqua Net.

What I had in mind wasn’t so fancy, really. It would be black
tie
optional
. I wanted an hour of cocktails and passed hors
d’oeuvres, followed by a sit-down lunch for three hundred.
Naturally there would be a postprandial cheese course, and some
sort of flaming dessert, if we could find a way to make it
Shabbat-appropriate.

Nothing fancy. As for hair, I was thinking a three-tiered updo
with French braids running up the sides. My dress would be easy.
Any simple gown would do, as long as it had a four-foot train. I
would also need a dozen attendants in periwinkle satin. I realized
that this was not traditional, bridesmaids at bar or bat mitzvahs,
but I thought it was a great idea and was sure to catch on. You
could call them barmaids, or batgirls.

The next day we’d get a big write-up in the society pages.
“Local Girl Becomes a Woman in Front of 300, Earns Jewelry,” it
would say.

Yes, it was going to be perfect. But it wasn’t going to be easy.
There were obstacles. There was the tiny matter of my father
forbidding the whole thing. Bar mitzvahs were fine, but the bats
rankled him. It wasn’t really an anti-feminist impulse. He simply
thought bar mitzvahs were a gender-specific thing that proved
unflattering on the other sex, like sandals on men.

My mother had been dreading the prospect of permitting me a
platform and a budget, but this got her on my side, and after
months of relentless badgering we wore my father down. I was going
to have a bat mitzvah. Shortly after my twelfth birthday we made an
appointment at our synagogue to get the ball rolling, just a
formality, to arrange the date and the religious instruction.

The meeting didn’t go as I’d imagined. I’d expected the rabbi
would ask if I’d chosen a color scheme and a party theme and send
me on my way. She stopped me before I could pull out my fabric
swatches.

“We have a problem,” she announced. “You’re not Jewish.”

Jewishness, it turned out, was passed down matrilineally. Since
my mother wasn’t Jewish, I wasn’t either, despite my distinctly
Semitic short-waistedness. Fortunately my religious status, unlike
my proportions, was fixable. I would simply have to have a
conversion, the rabbi explained. She went on to describe what this
would entail – it turned out to be a fairly complicated procedure
that would have to be coordinated through a more observant
synagogue and that would, at some point, require nudity – but by
then I’d tuned her out to concentrate on a daydream in which I
accepted a standing ovation from my awestruck bat mitzvah
guests.

“So are you up for it?” she asked.

Now the congregants were throwing roses. They were weeping, they
were so moved. If it was going to take a conversion to get me to
this moment, then so be it. I nodded. I was in.

My parents were less enthusiastic. My father was furious; my
mother, hurt. It felt like an indictment of their interfaith union
and, in fact, it was. But we’d already made a deposit for the
caterer, so they acquiesced.

And so began my journey to Jewishness. My guide would be a
kindly grandfather named Mr. Stein, who would serve as conversion
coach and bat mitzvah tutor. I liked him right away. He had a very
soothing presence, with his tidy gray goatee, crocheted yarmulke,
and the enormous glasses that are standard issue for Jews over
seventy. I was also very fond of his wife, a small, round,
affectionate woman who was perpetually short of breath, with fluffy
hair the color of circus peanuts. They were like Bubbe and Zayde,
like fairy jewparents, sent to teach me how to live a proper Jewish
life.