Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (8 page)

Remember, this was pre-MTV. This was long before white suburban kids started going around in baggy jeans with their underwear hanging out, rapping about being gangstas and givin’ a shout-out to their peeps. But already, we felt the irresistible tug: any white kid with kinky hair coaxed it into a “Jewfro,” then walked around with a pick stuck in it like a trophy. White teenaged girls started wearing T-shirts reading “Black Is Beautiful.” My friend Amy’s older brother hung out only with “the brothers,” dated only black and Hispanic girls, and spoke Spanish on the basketball court. All of us imitated the clothes, the speech, the walk of our black and Puerto Rican peers.
Yo, gimme some skin. Cool man, that’s cool, baby. Hey, blood, quÉ pasa?

All of us, essentially, were now campaigning for that communion dress.

“You know,” my white friend Michelle told me one day while we were sitting on the monkey bars. “Nobody knows this,” she whispered, “but, my mom’s mom
was really Puerto Rican
”

“Nuh-uh,” I said, seized with equal amounts of jealousy and skepticism.

“Uh-huh,” she nodded.

Michelle herself had hair as light as sunflower oil and eyes the color of a chlorinated pool. If she could be one-quarter Puerto Rican, well then, I decided, I could do even better.

“Well, do you want to hear a secret that you can’t tell anybody?” I said. Glancing around to make sure no one was watching, I cupped my hands tightly around Michelle’s tiny pink ear, and whispered, “
My great-grandfather was black
”

A girl in our building named Miriam was the first white girl to actually join one of the neighborhood’s Puerto Rican girl gangs. One day, Miriam was attending St. Hilda’s and St. Hughes in a pleated pinafore and writing book reports on
The Red Pony.
The next day, she was cutting school, donning platform shoes and a pink lamÉ halter top, calling herself Mira, and beating up white girls on Amsterdam Avenue with her “amigas.” The adults in our building were all horrified—hadn’t Miriam sung “What’s Going On” once at folk mass? Weren’t both her parents Freudian psychoanalysts? We kids, however, were all very impressed.

We also found it sort of funny—not
funny ha-ha
but
funny strange:
Miriam’s mother had always encouraged her to play with children of different colors. So now that she was, what was the problem?

The next week, my friend Audrey’s older sister, Rochelle, joined a gang of Puerto Rican girls, too. Instead of going to Hebrew school one afternoon, she plucked out all her eyebrows, painted them back on with liquid eyeliner, then went to smoke cigarettes in full makeup with three girls in the park, who later that day beat up Tara Eisner, one of Rochelle’s Hebrew school classmates, because, Rochelle said, “Like, I didn’t like her face, okay?”

Hoping to catch a glimpse of the new, improved, Hispanic Rochelle, I went out of my way to play at Audrey’s house. My efforts paid off when Rochelle stormed through the door while we were sitting at the kitchen table cutting out Sonny and Cher paper dolls. “Ay. Audrey. Jew see my Marlboros?” Rochelle said.

Since Rochelle couldn’t speak Spanish like a Puerto Rican, she tried to speak English like one, parroting the accent and English-as-a-second-language speech patterns, then punctuating them with ghettoish, serpentine head bobs and finger snaps. This kind of speech was known as “Spanglish,” and lots of white kids in the neighborhood were starting to adopt it. In reality, of course, it was as contrived and offensive as a Frito Bandito cartoon, but we were too dumb to know that.

Flinging her keys down on the kitchen counter, Rochelle dumped the contents of her crotchet shoulder bag out onto the table. She was wearing enormous hoop earrings made from silver wire, and her skintight Danskin blouse looked more like a bathing suit top. Silver bangles jangled along her forearms as she sifted frantically through the contents of her bag. I noticed a tall, cool Puerto Rican boy waiting for her by the entrance to the kitchen. He leaned languidly against the door frame, working a piece of gum slowly around in his mouth, his eyes following Rochelle as she stormed about, pulling open the utility drawers by the sink. He seemed to have all the time in the world.

“So, li-eeke, I told my muth-thuh, like, riiight?” Rochelle said, clearly for her new boyfriend’s benefit and not ours. “Like, I ain’t goin’ to no bat mitzvah class an’ shit no more, riiiight? Li-eeke, fuck Hebrew school, man.”

That evening, when I reported this to my mother, she laughed. “Serves Sheila right,” she said.

Sheila Abromowitz was Rochelle’s mother. She and my mother had had a huge argument the year before, when both of them spent the day volunteering at my kindergarten. That day, all of us kids were supposed to make our own books, which meant, essentially, that we scribble-scrabbled wildly over a bunch of folded-up papers, then tried to invent some story for the mothers to write down.

When my mother got to Gregory Dupree, he pointed to his picture and said, “Okay, please write, ‘This boy ain’t got no shoes.’”

“All right,” smiled my mother. “But Gregory, let’s phrase it correctly. Let’s write ‘This boy doesn’t have any shoes.’”

No sooner did my mother begin to transcribe Gregory’s story in her decorative serif print than Sheila asked if she could have a word with my mother in the hallway.

The door had barely clinked shut behind them when Sheila said, “How dare you alter that boy’s original words?”

“Sheila,” said my mother. “The whole purpose of this is to teach the children grammar.”

“Gregory is expressing himself using his own culturally indigenous, Afro-American speech patterns,” Sheila said acidly. “What you call ‘grammar’ is just a white, cultural conceit.”

“Oh you think so?” said my mother. She set her hands on her hips, then took aim. “Well let me tell you what I think is a white, cultural conceit: a white woman holding a black child to a standard of English that she’d never allow her own children to use.”

My mother turned around and twisted open the door. “The day that Harvard University accepts students who express themselves exclusively in ‘indigenous Afro-American speech patterns,’ you let me know, Sheila. Until then, I’m teaching Gregory the kind of ‘cultural conceits’ that’ll actually give him some power in this world.”

“Sheila Abromowitz ought to be slow-roasted on an open spit,” my mother fumed to me on the way home from school. “
Indigenous Afro-American speech patterns.
What a load of racist, liberal bullshit. It’s just an excuse, you know, to keep black children disenfranchised.”

I nodded in agreement. I had no idea what “disenfranchised” was, but my mother sounded exactly right to me. Just a few weeks before, my brother and I had come up with our own language. We called it “Farty Fartese,” and it essentially mimicked Pig Latin, except that it inserted the word “fart” between the word and the “ay” sound.
I-fart-hay. Ow-fart-hay are-fart-ay ou-fart-yay?
As soon as my mother heard it, she said, “Okay, that’s enough. I don’t want to hear that annoying and stupid talk in this house, again. Understood?”

It seemed to me that if John and I couldn’t use our own special language, Gregory Dupree shouldn’t get to use his either. Besides, Gregory and I had a huge crush on each other. I wanted him to go to Harvard—whatever that was—and do the best and win at everything because we’d agreed to get married as soon as we both turned seven.

Now, Sheila Abromowitz’s eldest daughter appeared to have adopted the indigenous cultural speech patterns of a bunch of delinquent Puerto Rican girls.

“Ah, yes,” smiled my mother. “Payback is sweet.”

However, she didn’t seem to think it was nearly so sweet later that night at dinner, when I was dawdling over my carrots, and she pointed to my plate. Getting John and me to eat anything resembling a vegetable was a major source of contention in our household, and the level of difficulty had only increased over time.

At first, my parents had tried employing the artificial, suspicious enthusiasm of gum surgeons, game show hosts, and incompetent clowns: “
Hey, kids, let’s all eat three forkfuls of yummy broccoli on the count of three. Mmmm. Isn’t this FUN?
”

When this eventually proved useless, they tried out-and-out bribery: “Eat three pieces of celery and I’ll pay you a quarter,” my father said wearily.

Now they’d simply resorted to bullying. “Finish your carrots,” my mother ordered. “Now.”

Looking down at the congealing, lurid carrot wheels I’d succeeded in pushing around my dinner plate for the past half-hour, I suddenly thought of Miriam, Rochelle, and their
amigas.

“Li-eeke, I don’t dink so, all riiiight,” I said in my best possible Spanglish.

“Excuse me?” said my mother, setting down her fork.

“What? Jew deaf?” I said. “Like, I ain’t gonna be eatin’ no carrots an’ shit, riiiight?” I repeated, this time making a little turkey bob with my head.

My brother slid off his seat down under the table, and my father removed his glasses and began massaging the bridge of his nose.

“Oh. Are we back to being Puerto Rican again?” said my mother.

“Das riiiight,” I said proudly.

“Well then.” She dropped her napkin crisply down onto her plate. “In that case, let me put it to you this way. Open up a big, fresh mouth to me like that ever again, and I’ll slap you so hard you’ll be prying your teeth out of the floorboards. Is that clear,
amiga?
”

My eyes filled up wetly and I nodded.

“
Bueno,
” said my mother.

I had to give her credit. None of the kids in the neighborhood had anything on my mother.

Jerome, my friend Annie’s older brother, soon put the kibosh on another one of my ideas.

“Black and Puerto Rican kids don’t beat us up because we’re un-cool, Susie,” he told me. “They beat us up as historical payback.”

Even though Jerome was probably all of fifteen, I considered him a grown-up because he had a beard. Whenever I went to Annie’s house, Jerome was skulking around the kitchen in his suede vest, eating organic yogurt and complaining about the Nixon administration. As Annie and I played checkers or Candyland in her bedroom, we’d hear Jerome yelling at the television, “Henry, you goddamn fascist!”

Jerome had the habit of talking to me and Annie as if we were grown-ups and not in elementary school. Usually when people did this, it was flattering. But with Jerome it was just scary, because he tended to view all grown-ups as either dimwits or criminals. Once, when he overheard me mention to Annie that I liked the song “The Candy Man,” he came storming into the living room yelling, “How can you possibly like that song? Don’t you know Sammy Davis Jr. campaigned for Nixon? Don’t you realize that royalties from that song are supporting an administration that’s engaged in the covert bombing of Cambodia?”

I was six years old. I had no idea what Cambodia was. I liked the song simply because of its lyrics,
Who can take a rainbow, wrap it in a sigh? Soak it in the sun and make a groovy lemon pie?

But after Jerome explained it to me, it was fairly impossible to listen to “The Candy Man” ever again without thinking of Henry Kissinger napalming babies.

Now Jerome leaned back in his chair. “You don’t know a thing about imperialism or slavery, do you?” he said incredulously.

I did so. “Imperial,” I informed him, was the name of a yo-yo as well as a brand of margarine. As for slavery, I knew all about it from a picture book my parents had given me on Harriet Tubman. Unfortunately, from reading it I’d somehow gotten the impression that the African slaves had been a small, finite group of people—rather like the crew of a shipwreck—whom the heroic and fabulous Harriet Tubman had rescued single-handedly while driving a railroad train and wearing many interesting but not terribly glamorous disguises.

Jerome looked at me disgustedly. “The slaves were not like the crew on
Gilligan’s Island,
Susie,” he nearly spat. “They were millions of people.” He then cleared away our half-finished game of Chutes and Ladders and spent the next hour educating Annie and me about the full, epic atrocities of slavery and colonialism.

When he finally finished, he crossed his arms triumphantly. “See,” he said smugly, “that’s the
real
reason why black and Spanish kids beat us up. They’re pissed off. We white people are the biggest assholes in history.”

I suppose he thought he was enlightening us, but all he really managed to do was to give me a massive stomachache. If I’d wanted to be black or Hispanic before, by now I was pretty much ready to tear off my skin, then run away from it as quickly as possible yelling, “I call ‘Not it’!”

“Dad, did we own slaves?” I asked my father that evening.

“Did we own what?” he said.

“Jerome said that over a hundred years ago, white people owned black people as slaves. Did we?”

My father shook his head. “A hundred years ago, our ancestors were living in Russia, eating rancid potatoes, and getting chased by Cossacks.”

“Oh, that’s good,” I said. “What a relief.”

“Why? What did Jerome tell you?”

“He said that the black and Puerto Rican kids on the street beat up white kids as historical payback.”

My father sighed and shook his head. “Sweetie. The reason that black and Puerto Rican kids on the street beat up white kids is because you’re all kids on the street. And that’s what kids on streets do.”

He folded his newspaper and tossed it aside. “Listen, when I was growing up, the Italians would beat the shit out of the Poles, then the Poles would beat the shit out of the Irish, and then the Irish would beat the shit out of the Jews.” He said this almost nostalgically. “In fact, if there weren’t any Jews around, the Irish just beat the shit out of each other. That’s street life. Come to think of it, that’s history. Someone’s always beating the shit out of someone else. It’s not right, but it happens.”

“But what about slavery?” I said. Personally, it seemed to me that if someone had made me be a slave, I’d want to beat the shit out of them, too.

“What about it?” said my dad. “Black people have absolutely no reason to like or trust white people. That’s a fact.
That’s
historical payback. But the world is full of horror and cruelty and distrust. The Irish were starved and treated like dogs by the British for eight hundred years. The Armenians were slaughtered by the Turks. The Jews … Loads of people can make the case. If you start thinking that the kids in this neighborhood are beating the shit out of you
only
because they’re black or Puerto Rican,
that’s
when you have a problem,” said my dad. “Because then you’re not seeing them as human beings. You think that they behave the way they do because of their group, not because of their humanity.”