Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (4 page)

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 that 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.

And so we began not only ratcheting up our visions, but transforming ourselves. “Okay,” we’d say feverishly, before embarking on a routine game of “House” or “Space Ship.” “Pretend I’m a princess, and my name is Melanie, and I have long red hair and green eyes and I’m wearing a silver miniskirt and a fur coat and I have a magic ring that makes people freeze whenever I yell ‘Freeze.’”

The boys, I happened to notice, didn’t do nearly so much elaborating. They tended to declare that they were Batman or Wilt Chamberlain and that was it. They didn’t feel compelled to give themselves a total makeover in the process. They never said, “Okay, pretend I’m an astronaut, and my name is Chad, and I have brown hair and blue eyes, and I’m wearing a tuxedo shirt …” Well, not the straight little boys, anyway.

Early on, somehow, we girls came to think of ourselves as malleable, as rough drafts, as “before” pictures, eager for and requiring an “after.”

Even our own imaginations weren’t enough sometimes to satisfy our aspirations. We soon began staking out starring roles for ourselves in an even more fantastic world.

As the children of liberals, television for me and my friends was largely contraband. At my house, for example, my brother and I weren’t allowed to watch the news because my parents didn’t want us traumatized by footage from the Vietnam War. At Michelle’s house, we weren’t allowed to watch the
The Flintstones
or
I Dream of Jeannie
because her mother said they were sexist. At the Richmonds’, any situation comedy in which black people were servants was strictly off-limits. At Annie’s house, her teenaged brother Jerome refused to let us watch
The Brady Bunch
because he said it was “a case study in capitalist oppression.”
The whole family is dependent upon one proletariat worker,
he explained,
and what does Alice get for her labor? Nothing. She only gets to date another proletariat, Sam the butcher, who can’t even spend the night with her. It’s the bourgeoisie controlling the means of production.