Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read online

What is there to say about losing your virginity that hasn’t been said a zillion times before? Probably nothing. Assembling a bookshelf from IKEA requires greater dexterity. From everything friends had told me, I was expecting obliterating pain, and when this didn’t happen, the relief I felt was as good as pleasure. Jake was probably as skilled and valiant as any nineteen-year-old lover could be, but to tell you the truth, I wasn’t paying much attention. I was too busy thinking about how cool it was that he’d lit candles beforehand and put on Ravel’s Bolero—just like in the movie “10” with Bo Derek! This is it, I kept thinking. I’m losing my virginity. Then I’d look at Jake’s Indian bedspread, at his muscular shoulders, at his art history books, and the illuminated dials blinking on his stereo and think: Okay, now remember every single detail of this night, because you’re losing your virginity. What was I planning to do? Tell my grandchildren about it one day? Apparently so.

  I’m losing my virginity! I thought ecstatically.

  I’m losing my virginity!

  “Do you like this?” Jake asked at one point. “You seem a little distracted.”

  “What? Yeah. No. Great. Whatever,” I said.

  I’m losing my virginity!

  Had I been doing this in an ancient culture, I thought, I might have been considered ruined for the gods. I might have been forced to become a concubine. I might have been stoned to death, or banished from my village, or sent off to a nunnery. Why, I might have been deemed unmarriageable, or cursed for bringing shame upon my family. I’d be branded a fallen woman, a harlot, a Jezebel.

  Wow, I thought excitedly. Wait till I tell my friends about this.

  It was close to midnight on Valentine’s Day, and I was crossing a threshold, permanently altering my status in the world: just as my friend Jill was doing at that very moment, just as billions of lovers had done before and would certainly do again. This was the moment that all my speculating and desire had come down to. It was, in its way, poignant and beautiful, but it was also really no big deal.

  Maybe that was the reason that sex received so much hype, it occurred to me later. It was actually one of the simplest acts to perform. As I myself had proven, any idiot could do it. It was the easiest club in the world to get into, but you never knew it until you became a member yourself. And so, people tried to make it elite. My friends and I had yearned to be in it, and in the end, we lost our virginity more for each other and ourselves than for any of the boys we were actually with. We lost our virginity for the glamorous creatures, we hoped to become, for the privileges we imagined we’d enjoy, for the experiences we longed to understand and master.

  “Are you all right?” Jake whispered when it was over.

  “Yeah. Absolutely. Great,” I said, smiling at him in the candlelight. Though what I really wanted to say to him, of course, was, “Hey, now that it’s over, mind if I borrow your phone?”

  Chapter 8

  My Brilliant Career

  IT’S A TRIBUTE to my father that he never took much of what I said as a teenager to heart, but saw it instead as an endless source of entertainment for him and his friends. My senior year of high school, I came up with a brilliant career plan. It was so brilliant, in fact, that I believed it required me to leave school early and go downtown to his office to tell him about it.

  Instead of becoming something dreary like a federal prosecutor or a brain surgeon, I announced, I was going to become a belly-dancing astrologer. My days would be spent alternately reading people’s horoscopes and delivering Bellygrams. Bellygrams, along with strip-a-grams and singing gorillas, were at that moment one of the newer and more imaginative ways to humiliate your loved ones on special occasions.

  “Think of it,” I said. “I’ll be my own boss. I’ll never get bored. And I’ll get to subvert the patriarchy.”

  “Subvert the patriarchy” was a term I’d recently picked up from one of the many feminist texts I’d been reading. As far as I could tell, it meant any activity that disrupted men’s business-as-usual.

  By delivering Bellygrams, I imagined, I’d be called upon to regularly surprise corporate CEOs for their birthdays. By interrupting their meetings with shareholders, climbing on top of conference tables, and gyrating wildly, I figured I’d be disrupting business-as-usual every day—in a gold lame bikini, no less. Plus, I’d acquire killer abs, free up my afternoons to do people’s astrology charts, and possibly arrange to sleep late. What more could anyone possibly want from a career?

  “See, Dad?” I said. “I’ve got it all figured out.”

  Earlier that month, my father had shelled out roughly three million dollars in application fees for various colleges I’d applied to. Nevertheless, as soon as I finished explaining my plans to him, he declared them “ingenious.”

  “And the fact that you’ve never taken a single belly-dancing class in your life should in no way stop you,” he proclaimed, pounding his desktop with conviction. “You go full speed ahead.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Absolutely,” my father enthused. “I mean, who needs another doctor or scientist or do-gooder in this world? I say, bring on the dancing girls. In fact,” he said, “it’s such a good idea, I think we have to share it with your Uncle Arthur.”

  He reached over, pressed a speed-dial number, then said, “Arthur? You ready for something? Listen to my kid’s latest career plan.” Then he motioned for me to talk into the speakerphone. When I finished, he said, “Isn’t that great, Arthur? Isn’t that just too much?”

  “Oh, it’s too much, all right,” said Arthur’s disembodied voice. “A feminist belly-dancing singing telegram with a side business in the occult. Who could want more for their daughter?”

  “I mean, you can’t make this stuff up, can you Arth?” my father said.

  “No,” Arthur said, “you certainly can’t.”

  “Hey,” I said, frowning. “You two aren’t just humoring me, are you?”

  “Of course not,” said Arthur. “What makes you say that?”

  “We’re just being supportive,” said my father. “In fact, you know who else I think would be really supportive? Your Uncle Fred. Let’s call him next.”

  My father, I realize now, was only too used to my histrionics and politics. In first grade, when Christopher Kleinhaus led the boys in a rousing chorus of “Boys Rule, Girls Drool” I’d come up with the witty rejoinder, “Girls Smart, Boys Fart,” which I’d proceeded to chant around the house for weeks afterward. In grade school, annoyed that history only seemed to be about men, I made a point of reading hundreds of biographies of famous women, then sprinkled my dinnertime conversation with statements like, “Well, Phillis Wheatley, the black American poet, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor, probably didn’t eat their vegetables either.”

  To me, it was always a foregone conclusion that girls were at least as good as boys. How could we not be? For starters, we were prettier. And we had better clothes.

  My parents, to their credit, encouraged me. In an act of supreme masochism, they even bought me the single of Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman,” knowing full well I’d play it no less than eighty-seven times in a row on my portable record player. And when I had to get glasses in sixth grade, they consoled me by saying I looked exactly like “a miniature Gloria Steinem,” even though, as we were all well aware, my resemblance was actually a lot closer to R2-D2.

  Once I reached high school, however, my father seemed to regard my feminism with a growing sense of bemusement. Whenever I sat at the dinner table, reading aloud from Ms. magazine and informing him that he and my brother were patriarchal oppressors, a big grin would seep onto his face.

  “What? What’s so funny?” I’d say.

  “Nothing,” he’d chuckle.

  “Well, good,” I’d say, “because there’s nothing funny about clitoridectomies and workplace discrimination, you know.”

  “I’m not saying there is,” said my father. “I just think it’s cute how you call me a patriarchal oppressor, then fifteen
minutes later, you hit me up for money so you can go to the movies.”

  Though I hated to admit it, he did have a point. I’d been so busy studying how oppressed I was that I’d somehow never gotten around to liberating myself from my five-dollar-a-week allowance.

  Granted, to save for college, I’d spent summers working as a mother’s helper, providing unsuspecting families with my imaginative idea of child care. And during the school year, I juggled babysitting gigs, where, for a whopping 75 cents an hour, I rummaged through people’s record collections and cleaned them out of Diet Pepsi and Triscuits. But now, I realized, it was time to get a real job. A job that paid me with a check, not laundry quarters. A job that gave me a modicum of independence, dignity, and, most of all, feminist credibility.

  Since the McDonald’s and Burger King in my neighborhood pretty much doubled as outpatient facilities, I applied to work at Haagen-Dazs.

  “Why do you want to work at Haagen-Dazs?” the bored-looking manager asked, reading off a laminated script.

  I considered responding: To overthrow the patriarchy, of course. But instead I answered, “Because I totally love Haagen-Dazs.”

  I said this hoping to demonstrate my expertise and enthusiasm for the product. Instead, I ended up giving him the distinct impression that I’d spend every spare moment on the job drinking chocolate milkshakes in the supply closet—which was exactly what I’d been planning on doing, actually.

  Blacklisted by Haagen-Dazs, I proceeded to have several equally fruitless interviews at David’s Cookies, Yogurt, Yogurt!, and a place called the Nut Hutch until finally landing an after-school job at a gourmet coffee bar called Shuggie’s. By that time I’d wised up and told the owner that, while I, personally, would sooner drink lighter fluid, I had no political objections to serving coffee to other people.

  Shuggie’s was one of several food outlets inside the atrium of a midtown office building. Decorated from floor to ceiling in bone-white ceramic tile, it had about as much ambience as a giant urinal. Nevertheless, it did a brisk business selling specialty coffees, baked goods, and something called “gourmet minute-meals” to legions of frazzled and churlish office workers.

  My job was to stand behind the counter—a space just slightly narrower than an economy class airplane seat—and fill orders at a breakneck pace alongside a crew of other servers. Until then, the totality of my food service experience had consisted of making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for screaming toddlers. At first, I worried I was under-qualified, but it soon became clear that most people in the throes of caffeine withdrawal are pretty much indistinguishable from three-year-olds. Certainly, they have the same pathetic lack of patience, manners, and reading skills. At Shuggie’s, a huge illustrated sign above the counter read:

  WHAT IS A MINUTE-MEAL? 1 HOMEMADE SANDWICH + 1 SIDE SALAD + 1 BROWNIE.

  In case you missed this, smaller replicas of the sign flanked the two pillars at the entrance and were laminated onto the counter. Yet nine times out of ten, customers barged in, planted themselves directly underneath the sign, squinted up at it, then said after a moment, “So, like, what exactly is a minute-meal?”

  My first day on the job, I punched in my time card and tied on my apron with a flourish of pride. Ironically, while I’d always felt contempt for uniforms, just seeing a classmate in a paper hat had never failed to impress me. Occasionally, I’d run into kids from Stuyvesant at their after-school jobs at Papaya King or Blimpie’s. Standing behind counters in their regulation outfits, they never looked like the goof-offs who sat in the back row in trigonometry amusing themselves by clipping ballpoint pens to their lips. Rather, they seemed suddenly transformed into authority figures, into fine young men and women capable of shouldering great responsibilities and making fresh sandwiches.

  Now, I thought triumphantly, I, too, was a member of this elite workforce. I was competent, payable, charged with duties that extended far beyond the menial demands of my high school. I was Working Woman: Hear me roar.

  “Okay, any moron can do this job,” said Mercedes, the aspiring dancer-actress who’d been assigned to show me the ropes. “The only skills you might ever need are crowd control and anger management.”

  As Mercedes showed me how to refill a napkin dispenser, she said, “When people wait on an ice cream line, they’re waiting for a treat. So they’re happy, they’re thinking, what flavor should I get? They don’t mind the anticipation. But a coffee line is for drug addicts. And drug addicts are assholes.”

  She motioned toward a pudgy man with a tweed blazer and a salt-and-pepper beard who’d just bellied up to the counter.

  “Take this piece of work. Thinks he’s King Henry the Eighth. He’s here all the time. Observe.” Mercedes slapped down her dishrag and sidled over to the register.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “This is what I want,” the man bellowed, not looking at her, but past her. “I want a large coffee with lots of half-and-half. But heat the half-and-half separately, will you, in that microwave over there? Set it for five seconds, then stir it, then heat it for another five seconds. Otherwise, the cream clumps. Last time someone did it for me here, they did it wrong and the cream was like cottage cheese. It was disgusting. Who puts cottage cheese in coffee? So heat the cream. Then add it to the coffee. And then, before you put on the lid, add one packet of Equal.”

  Mercedes looked at him. “So, like, wait,” she deadpanned. “You said you wanted coffee?”

  Potty-mouthed, sarcastic, and embroiled in petty melodramas, my fellow co-workers could not possibly have been more appealing. In addition to Mercedes, there was Alicia, a bass player who went to an “alternative high school” and wore so much black eyeliner she appeared to have been beaten-up permanently. Alicia worked quickly and sullenly, murmuring under her breath, “I swear to fucking God, if that guy asks me one more time what a minute-meal is, he’s going to learn how to use it as a rectal suppository.”

  Timothy, the fourth horseman of our little Apocalypse, was studying to become a hair stylist. “Tah-dah,” he announced the first day he walked in. Snapping his fingers as if they were castanets, he pivoted around to model his newly peroxided hair and matching goatee. “So what do you think? Am I a California cabana boy or simply an albino Vincent Price?” Then he froze and gasped in mock horror. “Oh my god,” he cried. “Could I possibly be more gay?”

  “Timothy, this is Susie,” Mercedes said, introducing us.

  Timothy proffered his hand disdainfully. “Timothy Cashmere,” he announced. “The bold and the beautiful.”

  “Susie Gilman,” I replied. “The subtle and chaste.”

  “Oh,” Timothy grinned wickedly. “I like you.”

  Surrounded by such madcap cohorts made me feel like we weren’t working so much as performing. In the caste system of midtown Manhattan office buildings, of course, we were practically Untouchables—second only to janitors and bike messengers, really. And yet, we remained convinced that we were actually vastly superior to everyone else. With their asphyxiating neckties, constricting panty hose, and pasty, haggard faces, our customers clearly held dull corporate jobs that wore away at their soul like iron filings. So okay, we might have been mopping floors and spilling coffee on them for minimum wage. But ultimately, we were headed someplace far bigger and more spectacular than theirs—to college, to beauty school, to the Broadway stage. Their jobs were like terminal illnesses. Ours, we bragged to one another, were merely temporary.

  My first week, I almost couldn’t wait to get to Shuggie’s. I loved telling my friends after school, “Sorry. Gotta run. My shift starts in twenty minutes.” How grown-up did that sound? To boys I had crushes on, I casually let it drop where I worked. “It’s right near Grand Central Station,” I said offhandedly. “Stop by and I’ll hook you up with a killer brownie.”

  Once I was on the job itself, I was swept up by the newness of it. The chronic, frenzied thrum behind the counter energized me, and the smell of freshly brewed coffee and baked goods almost
gave me a contact high. A vast menagerie of humanity paraded in and out all afternoon, and I watched it with immense interest. The gum-cracking secretaries who gossiped about their love lives and manicures. The disheveled old woman who wandered from table to table pressing expired grocery coupons into the hands of bewildered strangers. The hordes of Japanese tourists who seemed delighted by the Lilliputian size of our minute-meals. The high-strung, chain-smoking security guard who regularly came in bug-eyed and beat jazz riffs on the countertop. The only people utterly lacking in visual interest were my bosses. Louie and Ida Shuggie were a paunchy, middle-aged couple who had been together so long that they’d started to look alike. Their faces were two collapsed puff pastries decorated with bifocals.

  While everyone else ran around like maniacs, Louie Shuggie sat at a table in the corner sipping an extra-large cafÉ mocha and breathing through his mouth with audible pfuffing sounds. Once in a while, apropos of nothing, he’d glance at the mermaid tattoed on his forearm, as if to make sure it was still there, before calling out, “Did anyone check the coffee levels?” But otherwise, his one talent was to wait until the 3:30 P.M. coffee rush—when we had customers lined up out the door and the kitchen took on the feel of a sauna—to grab one of us by the wrist, hand us his empty cup, and mew, like a baby, “A little more mocha, please?”

  While Ida didn’t seem terribly inclined to help out either, she hovered over us like a gargoyle, calling into question every Styrofoam cup and plastic fork we discarded.

  “What’s wrong with these coffee stirrers?” she’d say, picking wooden sticks out of the trash.

  “Mercedes used them to unclog the drain.”

  “So?” Ida said. “Rinse them off. It’s not like wood grows on trees, you know.”

  Years of chain-smoking had left Ida’s voice froggy, giving it a gruff, reptilian quality that carried over to her entire personality. “Who left this dishrag on top of the microwave? Get it out of here,” was pretty much her standard greeting. As a feminist, I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, seeing as we were both sisters in a Male Chauvinist World. But the truth was, except for Louie himself, I was hard pressed to find a more charmless person.