Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read online

And since it was freezing, and dancing was preferable to just standing there, Edwid and I just threw ourselves into it, breaking out our best dance moves from our own, personal repertoire.

  “Stop! Cut!” Alice yelled. “Ellen,” she called to my mother, “what’s Susie doing down there on one leg? What’s wrong with her hand?”

  “Oh,” said my mother. “She’s performing an arabesque and flashing a peace sign. It’s a little ballet thing she likes to do.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” said Alice. “Little Susie Gilman!” she shouted down from the terrace. “Enough with the arabesques and the peace signs. And Edwid, what’s with the shimmying?”

  What Alice had forgotten is that Edwid and I hadn’t been raised on Julie Andrews musicals. We’d had our diapers changed to Otis Redding. We’d learned to walk listening to Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” and Tina Turner’s “River Deep—Mountain High.” In the bathtub, we regularly sang along to the entire soundtrack of Yellow Submarine. When ordered to dance, Edwid had launched into his version of the pony mixed with go-go moves he’d seen on the Sunday morning kiddie show Wonderama. This, apparently, was not what Alice had had in mind.

  “Forget the dancing, you two,” she ordered. “Just skip. Skip joyously around Saul.”

  “Like this!” Carly shouted. She lifted up the hem of her caftan and mimed skipping joyously across the terrace. Even Alice looked a bit stunned at the sight. She turned back to the camera. “Skip,” she said.

  Saul resumed playing his flute and Edwid and I skipped around him furiously, in great, spastic movements with big, imbecilic smiles plastered on our faces that we hoped approximated joyousness. We twirled and flailed, pretending to conduct an enormous, invisible orchestra with our entire bodies. We leaped. We pranced. We waltzed. We sashayed. Neither of us had any idea what the fuck we were doing.

  “Beautiful, beautiful!” said Alice. “You’re children! You’re innocent! You’re natural! Keep skipping!” She cued Clifford to release the butterflies. One of them had clearly been asphyxiated in the gefilte fish jar—it wafted down pitifully like a dry leaf—but the other fluttered about wanly, and we chased it with exaggerated dedication, our gusto fueled, mostly, by the fact that we were freezing.

  “Skip! Chase the butterfly!” Alice chanted.

  We skipped and chased, skipped and chased, and then suddenly, Alice yelled, “Cut! It’s a wrap!” and Saul pulled off his nightcap and wiped his forehead with it, and my mother came down and pulled me quickly into my tutu, and Edwid was buttoned back into his pajamas and flung over Carly’s shoulder. Clifford was collapsing all of Alice’s equipment and carrying it back up the hill to the car, and Alice was muttering “Where the hell did I put my thermos? I need coffee now,” and then she was off, and I heard her car sputtering as it started, the tires crunching over gravel, and Saul was waving goodbye to us, and the gate was swinging closed with a tlink! behind him and then, that was it. It was all over.

  One butterfly had vanished, the other lay dead on the sand, sacrificed to art, to the “Ode to Innocence.” The sun glinted over the horizon. The lake was glassy and eerily still, as if we had never existed, as if it had been preserved in time long before humans started prancing about with their Super-8 cameras. My mother and I stood alone on the beach.

  “Well,” she sighed, “I guess that’s one for the history books. Shall we get you back into bed?”

  That afternoon, Edwid and I didn’t say anything to the other kids on the ice cream line about our less-than-stellar movie debut, and they didn’t mention it either, which was all just as well. The new point of interest was Terry, the substitute ice cream man filling in for Jack, the octogenarian regular, who was away on vacation in the Adirondacks. Terry was a college kid. To make a tedious job interesting, he’d made up scatological and sexual nicknames for all of the frozen novelties, which he shared with us in a conspiratorial whisper. If we asked him for a “Chip Candy Crunch,” Terry would wink, “Oh, you mean a Chip Candy Crotch?” sending us into convulsions. Nobody cared about some movie called Camp when you could listen to Terry saying, “Here you go. Two Dixie Cunts and a Poopsicle.”

  In fact, Edwid and I never spoke about Camp, period, even when it was aired for the entire colony at the Barn, three weeks later, as part of the annual “End of Summer” banquet held the Saturday night before Labor Day. We sat on the wooden picnic benches beside our parents, quietly clutching our Styrofoam cups full of Very Berry Hi-C, watching the shaky camera work of the opening shot, in which a disembodied hand spray-painted the word “Camp” on a woman’s bare midriff to the trippy sound of the Byrds’ song, “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

  We watched the jiggly, lint-ridden frames panning over the lake to the pink and purple VW bug. Applause and hoots sounded from both the audience on film and the audience in the Barn, which was essentially one and the same, as each hippie-clown emerged again from the tiny car (the biggest cheers erupted when Larry Levy emerged, strung awkwardly between the shoulders of my father and Sidney Birnbaum). Then came scenes I hadn’t seen before: My mother and a guy named Morris, dressed in evening clothes, having a fancy candlelit dinner on a wooden raft in the middle of the lake, while being waited upon by a swimmer … the Fleming twins singing Dylan’s anti-Vietnam song, “Masters of War” accompanied by Clifford on his vibraphone in a rowboat … some “avant-garde” scene in which finger puppets alternated between reading aloud sections of the Warren Report and poetry by Kahlil Gibran … halfway through this mess came Edwid and me, dancing frantically on the beach around Saul, who was occasionally decapitated by the camera angles. I was sure everyone would burst out laughing at the sight of us, but instead of snickers, there was an almost universal “Aaaaawwwww” throughout the Barn as assorted mothers gushed: “Oh, that’s little Susie and Edwid! Aren’t they cute!”

  Before I could drink in this wave of admiration, however, the camera cut away again to a playground in Brewster, filled not with children, but with more hippies from the colony. The heading “Ode to Innocence” filled the screen for a moment, graffitied on a piece of fluorescent poster board, and then the camera zoomed back to the playground, where it showed a montage of grown-ups running into a sprinkler one by one, then piling onto a carousel loaded down with an assortment of pinwheels, umbrellas, flowers, balloons, and peace signs. Clearly, this was more the spirit of innocence that Alice had been looking to capture: the rest of Camp followed the hippies playing on seesaws and pushing each other on the swings for what seemed like a good fifteen minutes.

  The final shot, however, did feature two children again—Daisy Loupes’s twins, Sasha and Eli, aged three, walking naked, hand-in-hand, down one of the colony’s dirt roads. On Sasha’s tush was painted the word “THE” and on Eli’s the word “END.” Upon seeing this, the entire Barn went nuts—clearly, the colonists found this supremely cuter than anything else—and I was suddenly indignant that such a plum role hadn’t been awarded to me instead. Why hadn’t I been filmed with the movie’s closing credits painted across my ass?

  For one frantic moment, I tried to edit the scenes in my head, refilming myself so that my dancing was more memorable, so that I didn’t look nearly as silly as I had, so that I’d switched places with Sasha. I even considered telling people that it was really me and Edwid, not the Loupeses, in the final scene.

  But the lights came on, and as the adults all went about congratulating each other on their performances, some kids in the balcony began chanting “Nudie Boy! Nudie Girl!” and throwing balled-up paper cups over the railing. Whether they meant to hit me and Edwid or Sasha and Eli really didn’t matter. Because only then did I remember where I was: I was in a barn full of Socialists. A freak among freaks.

  For years after the dubious premier of Camp, I practically got a migraine just thinking about it. It was an independent film that I could only hope would remain forever independent of such things as an audience and a projector. Ironically, I later became incensed not by the fact that my parents had been hippies, but tha
t they had not been hippies enough: “You put me in some nudie Granola-head home movie, but didn’t take me to Woodstock?” I once shouted at my mother. “It was 1969. Silver Lake was only an hour away from Yasgur’s farm. What were you thinking?” It seemed galling to me that if I was going to have to be preserved for all time dancing naked on a beach while a state assemblyman played “Greensleeves” on a flute, at least I could’ve also gotten to say, Well guess what, man? I saw Pete Townsend bash his foot through an amplifier.

  Sometimes, I wondered why I cooperated. Okay, I was four—generally not an age noted for its impulse control or savvy business sense. But I could have lain down on the sand and shrieked my head off like I did at my nursery school. Little kids think nothing of throwing a fit at the foot of an escalator, or ruining an entire day at the zoo over a forbidden hot dog, or whining loudly, “I’m bored. Can we go home?” during a funeral. They’re experts at defiance. Why hadn’t I exercised this age-given gift?

  For a time, I even wondered if Alice cast me and Edward in Camp because I was a pudgy girlie-girl and, for all intents and purposes, so was Edwid. Could she have sensed that we wouldn’t be the type of kids to object—we were already at a disadvantage—that we’d be hungrier, more vulnerable, more eager to please?

  Only years later, I’d meet a girl named Dyanne, whose Tennessee mother insisted on dressing her and her two sisters up in identical sailor suits and pulling them through the town in a wagon decorated to look like a boat for the annual Fourth of July parade, during which time they were all bidden to sing interminable and quasi-patriotic “boat songs” like “Sailing, Sailing, Over the Bounding Main” and “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat” even though they’d grown up landlocked. I would date a Robert Redford look-alike when I was sixteen, whose mother used to dress up as “Mrs. Pumpkin” for Halloween and insist that he be photographed with her in a vegetable patch for her Christmas newsletter. How humiliating! There would be other boys whose mothers would be only too happy to pull out family albums to show me snapshots of their little darlings caught for eternity picking their noses and peeing in the dog’s dish—one, even, dressed up like a girl by his older sister and installed at a tea party. I would meet girls who were forced as children to sing “Sheep May Safely Graze” in church while actually dressed up as sheep. Who were carted out to dance the tarantella for relatives. Who were encouraged to recite abominable rhyming poems written by their mother entitled, “Reflections on a Menopausal Picnic.” Girls who were paraded about in ludicrous Easter bonnets, who were photographed sitting on the toilet wearing only Mickey Mouse sunglasses and a feather boa, who were ordered to play the ukulele for neighbors, who were preserved in both film and memory in the shipwreck of school talent shows. I would come to realize that for everyone, childhood means having limited power, at best, in the face of adults’ pathetic and misguided ideas about how children should behave. It means being hamstrung between the desire to please and desire, period. Welcome to the world.

  But back in New York, in the days immediately following our return from Silver Lake, I thought about none of this. Thanks to my own gnatlike attention span, I quickly became consumed by such new, all-important projects as rearranging my crayons, lobbying for a mink coat, and figuring out how to clip rhinestone earrings to my hair without ripping it out of my head. Forgetting the shame of my movie debut, I took away from it only one lasting impression: if I was truly going to be a star, it would simply not be enough to perform. Oh, no. I would have to direct as well. Thanks to Alice Furnald, I added that to my list.

  Chapter 2

  A Girl’s Guide to Bragging and Lying

  THE DAY I STARTED kindergarten I made a jarring discovery: all the other girls, it seemed, wanted to be just as fabulous as I did.

  The first morning of school, after the critical business of nap blankets was settled, our teacher, Mrs. Mutnick, had our class sit in a circle on the rag rug by the piano.

  “Now, we’re all going to say our names and what each of us wants to be when we grow up,” she said brightly. “For example, my name is Mrs. Mutnick, and when I grow up, I want to be a kindergarten teacher.”

  “But you are a kindergarten teacher,” said Gregory Dupree.

  Mrs. Mutnick gave a fluttery little laugh, a sort of falsetto hiccup. “Oh, dears, I’m saying it as an example,” she explained, “so that you’ll understand how to answer, you see? Now Gregory, you try.”

  Gregory thought a minute. “My name is Gregory Jackson Dupree,” he said. “And when I grow up, I want to be a member of the Black Panthers.”

  Mrs. Mutnick removed her large tortoiseshell glasses, then put them back on again. “I see,” she said. Her eyes darted quickly around the circle until they landed on redheaded Brian McConnell, who was already in the process of chewing the hat off a Fisher-Price policeman. “Brian,” she smiled encouragingly. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  Brian chewed thoughtfully. “I want to be a Black Panther, too,” he said.

  “Me too!” shouted Timothy Wang.

  “Okay, class,” Mrs. Mutnick inhaled. Obviously, the discussion wasn’t headed in the direction she wanted.

  “What I’d like to know is what kind of job you’d like to have,” she said. “For example, do you want to be a mailman? Do you want to be the president?”

  “Richard Nixon? Yech. Who wants to be him?” said Christopher Kleinhaus. Christopher was taller and heftier than everyone else in the class because he’d already been left back twice. God only knew what you needed to do to flunk kindergarten.

  Mrs. Mutnick shot him a look that communicated she was running out of patience. “Do you want to be an artist? Do you want to be an astronaut?” she prodded.

  I understood what she was asking, and my hand shot up. Usually, I found the question highly irritating. Adults who asked what you wanted to be always assumed children had nothing better to do than think about being grown-ups. The fact was, we had far more interesting things to concern ourselves with. Such as, for example, seeing what happened when you emptied an entire bowl of M&M’s into your grandmother‘s silk evening bag, then set it on top of a radiator while you ate them.

  But earlier that morning, Mrs. Mutnick had let me select a pink circle from the “Shapes and Colors” box to decorate my cubby. I felt a rare impulse to make her life easier.

  “Mrs. Mutnick, my name is Susie Gilman,” I said proudly, “and when I grow up, I want to be a ballerina, and a model, and a movie star, and a director, and a stewardess.” Then I leaned back with a sort or “tah-dah!” look on my face that would eventually endear me to my fellow classmates almost as much as my ass-kissing.

  Predictably, Mrs. Mutnick beamed. “Well,” she said, giving her little, startled laugh, “you certainly are ambitious. You want to be all sorts of things, don’t you?” She turned to the girl sitting next to me. “Carmen, what about you? What do you want to be?”

  Carmen pressed her finger to her chin. “Hmmmmm. I want to be … let’s see … a singer … and a fashion designer … and a trapeze artist … and a bride.”

  Mrs. Mutnick smiled indulgently, and I wanted to hit Carmen. Not only was she clearly copying me, but her answers were generally better than mine.

  “Sara, what about you?”

  “I want to be a ballerina, too, and a bride, too, but also a princess, a nurse, a gymnast, and a drum majorette,” said Sara.

  This time, I couldn’t contain myself. “Oh, me too! I also want to be a princess and a nurse. I forgot to say!”

  Carmen nodded furiously in agreement. “And I forgot drum majorette,” she said. “I’m also going to be that.”

  Each time one of the girls said something new, we all shouted out and added it to our lists. Predictably, when we said things like “hairdresser” and “ice skater,” some of the boys made barfing sounds. When they, in turn, said they wanted to grow up to be things like helicopter commandos and dump truck operators, we responded, in kind, with a collective “Eeeeewww.”

  What
strikes me now, of course, was how stereotypical our choices were. Born just as the women’s movement was catching fire, my classmates and I were being raised by mothers who would be the first on line to buy copies of Free to Be … You and Me and multiracial, anatomically correct baby dolls. And yet not a single girl longed to be a mathematician or a pulmonary cardiologist. When I first informed my grandparents that I wanted to be “an actress, a model, and a stewardess,” they chuckled delightedly. Susie wants to be a stewardess! Isn’t that adorable?

  I’m sorry, but a stewardess? Let a little boy pledge allegiance to the service industry and see if his relatives find it endearing. The fact was, I had no idea what a stewardess actually did. I didn’t even realize they got to travel. I’m sure if someone had said to me, “Little girl, how’d you like to grow up to push a cart full of drinks up and down the aisle of an airplane while people bitch at you about needing more pillows?” I would have thought they were insane.

  What it really boiled down to, I realize now, was the “-ess” in the word “stewardess.” Somehow, my five-year-old brain had grasped the idea that “-ess” was the culmination of all things feminine and highly desirable. It was a suffix that separated the girls from the boys in the best of all possible ways. Princess, goddess, actress, countess. What was there not to love? A flight attendant, feh. But a stewardess? “-Ess” made any profession sound glamorous. A laundress, a sorceress, an adulteress. To this day, I’m convinced that, if someone had only been enterprising enough to call female MDs “doctresses” and female scientists “nuclear biologesses,” I would have been equally enthusiastic about becoming those, too.

  No matter. After my classmates and I recited our career litanies about a zillion times each, they began to lose their luster. They didn’t sound like lists of possibilities anymore so much as lists of chores. Plus, since we all wanted to be everything, it was getting pretty hard to distinguish ourselves from one another, which was the whole point of our ambitions in the first place.