Devil in the Details (14 page)

The night before the ceremony my father had the foresight to ask
to see my speech. That no one had worried about this before was a
gross oversight. I’d spent the better part of the last year
obsessed with ritual purity and burnt offerings. Giving me a podium
was a terrible idea. I could have incited the crowd to stone the
caterer.

The speech was short, about three paragraphs. My father read it
in a minute and a half. “Bring me a pen,” he commanded when he had
finished, his teeth gritted, his forehead a dark knot.

Ten minutes later he’d calmed down enough to discuss the issue.
“‘Kill all the infidels’ is not an appropriate topic for a bat
mitzvah speech,” he said calmly. “The idea here is to thank your
family and teachers, to tell everyone what you’ve learned, and to
butter up the guests in anticipation of large savings bonds.
Issuing a fatwa will not accomplish these ends. Now, I’m going to
write you another speech, and you are going to read it, and if it
goes over especially well we can split the take.”

The next morning there were two more fights. Because it was
Shabbat, I couldn’t shower. Because the previous two days had been
the first two days of Sukkot, I now hadn’t showered for three. My
mother was beside herself. “Your relatives didn’t fly all the way
across the country to see you with your hair looking like that,”
she insisted. “Well, I didn’t spend a whole year learning Torah to
violate it today,” I returned. “Besides, the yarmulke will cover
the really matted spot.” In the end we agreed to a wet combing and
a ‘French shower,’ a liberal dousing in cologne.

Next was a skirmish over the pictures. I didn’t want to have my
picture taken on Shabbat. But my parents’ argument that it wasn’t
too late to call the whole thing off so I could spend the day
thinking about how ungrateful I’d been was a convincing one. I
agreed to pose for five quick pictures, looking aside in all of
them while I mentally chanted, “I’m not here, I’m not here, I’m not
here.”

The rest of the day was a blur. I was too busy and excited to
notice that instead of the linen-draped bamboo seats I had
requested there were metal folding chairs; instead of rare orchids,
carnations. What did that matter when there were so many people
bearing presents? It was a fine day. My friends were all there,
trussed into dresses and tights. Over lunch they performed a
guttural and somewhat unflattering replay of my haftorah, kugel
flying out of their mouths with each “
chhhhh
,” but I knew
they were impressed.

Afterward, they came to my house to work on the leftover lemon
bars and brownies. Apparently the euphoria of the day got to me,
and by late afternoon, when a friend produced her camera and asked
me to pose, I was loose enough to submit to the photo session that
I had stridently objected to that morning. I hadn’t remembered this
at all until I came across the photos recently, but there’s me in a
polo dress, a giant Star of David around my neck, pirouetting in
the backyard, hugging trees, lying on the lawn with my chin propped
against my hands as I looked dreamily off into the distance on My
Special Day.

I had decided to forgo the traditional Saturday-night bat
mitzvah dance when my parents informed me they would fly in neither
Jean-Pierre Rampal nor the brilliant studio musicians responsible
for
Hooked on the Classics
. Instead, the evening’s
festivities consisted of sitting around the living room opening
presents while my friends watched. Because none of them were
Jewish, they constituted an extremely appreciative audience. I
basked in their envy. They would have to get married or pregnant to
get presents like these.

It was a respectable haul. I got some pens, of course, gift
certificates and jewelry boxes, and coffee table books on subjects
like the Library of Congress and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Because the
‘70
s
had just ended, I also got several copies
of
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
and several more of its sequel. I
can’t imagine why so many people thought it was a good idea to give
a recovering religious fanatic a book subtitled ‘The Adventures of
a Reluctant Messiah.’ What were they thinking? Inside one copy, a
friend of my parents had even scrawled, “I hope this changes your
life like it changed mine.”

I hoped it wouldn’t. By this point I’d had enough change, enough
conversions and transformations. In the past year I’d gone from
ostensibly gentile to unimpeachably Jewish, from child to teen,
from sane to crazy and back again. The mutations had all been so
public, too, all requiring witnesses, an audience, an intervention.
Today was just the last in what had already been a yearlong
festival of very public transitions. Can I get a witness, indeed.
I’d had plenty.

This, I suppose, is what puberty is. What was happening to me
was just an exaggerated version of what happens to every kid: look,
she got her boobies. Every society does this, marching you out
right at the moment you want to hide in a dark closet and molt. I
would say it doesn’t make any sense, but in fact it’s inspired – it
inculcates a sense of shame that will keep you in line for years to
come. And making sure these events occur publicly, in front of
witnesses, is a good way to ensure you won’t turn and start hitting
anyone.

Including gifts is a good idea, too. Yes, there had been a lot
of change, and on Monday there would be even more. Half of this
crap had to go back. Who would buy a thirteen-year-old a travel
iron?

But it had been a good day. By ten o’clock that night we were
wiped out. We waved goodbye to our guests and stumbled to our beds,
leaving the piles of torn gift wrap on the floor, the dirty cups
and crumpled napkins on the counter. The dishes and thank-you notes
could wait. It had been a very full day, a very good one.

As I drifted off to sleep I replayed all the high points. It
really had been quite lovely. It had been great. But man, if we
just could have had a cheese course – it would have been
perfect
.

∨
Devil in the Details
∧

T
he summer I turned
twelve the country was seized by
E.T
. mania. Everywhere you
looked, there was that lovable alien, on soda cans, on tote bags,
on T-shirts urging you to phone home. I saw the movie once and
liked it fine, but for me the summer was defined by another
blockbuster altogether. It was a rumination, a mental image that
ran over and over in my head. This happened every summer. I just
get antsy when I have too much free time. Come June, images would
start looping endlessly in my brain, an unspooling reel of
torturous what-ifs. In 1982, while the rest of the country was
watching
E.T
., I was watching myself stab my mother.

I didn’t want to. I enjoyed my mother’s company and spent most
of my day following her around the house. But the image wouldn’t go
away. A local kid had recently done that very thing, and that made
it a million times worse. That he’d actually gone and done it –
stabbed his own mother! – sent me right to the edge. Now we knew it
was possible, and if it was possible, what would stop me?

I couldn’t tell anyone about this. It was just too awful. My
previous summer ruminations had been bad – I’d worried about
becoming addicted to Carmex, about being abducted by bank-robbing
guerrillas who would force me to get a traumatic yet flattering
haircut – but they had never been about hurting someone else. This
was so much worse. It was going to be a long summer, I could tell
already. I’d embarked on a new eating disorder, but it wasn’t
enough to distract me from thoughts of violence, and every time my
mother asked me to chop the salad vegetables I nearly burst into
tears.

Finally, after noticing me looking at her funny for a few days,
my mother announced it was time I learned to knit. I was delighted.
This was a fantastic idea. Knitting would give my hands something
to do besides knife family members. Of course, it would provide me
with another, pointier weapon, but we didn’t worry too much about
that.

And we didn’t have to. As soon as I picked up the needles and
yarn, I felt peaceful and calm. It was such a relief, the needles
clicking a soothing tattoo, the skeins unwinding like woolly
Valium. Knitting instantly provided the same sense of serenity I
could otherwise achieve only by pulling out clumps of hair. The two
activities are so closely linked for me that I can’t believe
they’re not etymologically related, the Latin
trichos
, hair,
a near homonym of the French
tricot
, knit. As long as I was
yanking on some fibers, be they worsted-weight wool or my own arm
hair, I felt placid and safe.

This, too, happened every summer. There was an agonizing week of
ruminating, an intervention by my mother, and then three months of
crafting. This year it was knitting, last year cross-stitch, and
patchwork the year before that. Weaving, batiking, silk-screening,
smocking: I learned to do it all. By the time I left for college I
was quite sure that if I ever got stranded on a desert island,
within six months I would not only be alive, I would have launched
my own line of handcrafted garments fashioned from the island’s
meager resources.

I am in most areas a completely incompetent person, but in this
one department I know what I’m doing. I can craft anything. My
friends marvel at my savant-like expertise. They have come to
believe, because I have lied to them, that my mother raised me as a
seamstress apprentice, forcing me to work in exchange for my keep
and tutelage. My training, I tell them, was as rigorous as that of
a young Jedi knight or, more accurately, a Karafte Kid. The first
few years were spent doing exercises that seemed to benefit my
mother more than me: organizing her thread spools, balancing her
checkbook, washing her car, and the like. When I complained, she
answered in cryptic Pat Morita fashion: “Cleaning out garage might
teach student to shut mouth.” Finally she deemed me ready for
actual craft work and let me crochet her dishrags.

This isn’t quite true, but then again, it’s not all that far
off. Ever since I could remember, my sister and I understood that
the hot months would be spent in our mother’s version of summer
school. From June to September we would be inculcated with her
passion for all things crafty. We might not share her religion, but
we would worship her false deities.

While our friends took dance lessons and karate, my sister and I
were shuttled to embroidery classes and quilt conventions. These
were supplemented with plenty of at-home tutorials. In our free
time we memorized patchwork patterns and knitting stitches. “Quick!
Name it!” our mother would quiz us, pointing to quilt blocks with
their names like yoga poses: flying geese, bear’s claw, Jacob’s
ladder, drunkard’s path. “What’s the difference between a rice
stitch and a moss stitch?” she demanded. “How do you make a braided
cable?” She taught us to read color wheels, and in the morning she
would shake us awake with swatches in hand. “Quick! Which is the
blue-based red and which is the yellow-based? Think!
Think!
”

She was very serious about form and technique. Oh, sometimes we
used kits, and sometimes we did lazy amateur crafts, making Shrinky
Dinks and oven-baked stained glass panels, but mostly we learned to
make things from scratch. “Machine-quilted,” she would sniff,
examining pieces that failed to pass her muster at quilt shows. We
learned to look down our noses at un-lined home tailoring and
acrylic blends. In all other areas she believed in taking the easy
route, but she insisted that craft work and pudding-making be done
the hard way. No shortcuts. Except for the soap operas and
swearing, we might as well have been Amish. We spent our days
working on swatches and samplers, practicing needlework’s most
archaic forms. Cross-stitch was just an entree. We learned bargello
and candlewicking, crewel and tatting. Had we also been given
pianoforte lessons, and been born about two hundred years earlier,
we would have been quite the marriageable young ladies.

As it was we were kind of dorks, but that suited me fine. I was
just relieved we weren’t being forced to play outside. I knew kids
whose mothers locked them out of the house on the grounds that
fresh air was good for you. Surely these mothers hadn’t gotten a
lungful of the pesticide-rich oven-hot ether that hung over our
California farm town. In summer, the temperature normally hovered
around 110, and the air was as fresh and healthy as that at a
Soviet smog inspection station.

But inside it was cool and pleasant, and the worst thing our
mother subjected us to was macrame. Seventies crafting was fairly
dismal, it’s true. We latch-hooked wall hangings in yellows and
browns using kits depicting the popular figures of the day – the
Bionic Man, the Fonz, the Waltons. We fashioned clunky pottery
whose leaded glazes gave us headaches. In the kitchen, we crafted
our own granola bars and yogurt. What child wants to play with
yogurt?