Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (9 page)

“So the girls who poked me at the movies and the older boys who threaten John do so because we’re all human?”

“Of course,” said my father. “Only humans do crazy stupid shit like that. The day a cow or a Chihuahua hits you in the ass with an umbrella or threatens you with an ice pick, you let me know.”

That spring, a brand-new playground opened near 100th Street in Central Park. Soft wooden jungle gyms were linked by rope ladders and jute bridges that led to malleable plastic slides. Fat, cushy tire swings hung from redwood frames, and every single structure was set in an enormous sandbox, so that you could swing, dangle, slide, jump, and fall wherever you wanted to and still keep your teeth in your head. It seemed to have been designed precisely as an antidote to the cement proving grounds of our own backyard.

The day it opened, a whole group of kids from our building went there with our parents. We’d never seen anything like it before—it was a paradise for little maniacs like us—and every other kid living in a two-mile radius of West 100th Street seemed to be there, too. It was the newest, best thing in the neighborhood, and a sign that maybe we mattered.

One Saturday afternoon, when the playground was filled to bursting, all the tire swings were occupied. There was no time limit, of course, to how long you could be on the swings, and since they didn’t require anyone to push you, kids could conceivably hang out on them for hours, converting them into make-believe spaceships or private camper vans—which is exactly what I planned to do, actually, as soon as I got hold of one myself. I waited for what seemed like hours, but no one got off. It was almost summer, and as the heat prickled and burned at the back of my neck, I began roasting with impatience.

Finally, a group of three big girls abandoned the tire to my left. They were older than me by at least three years, and they had that tough, hard-baked look of the kids who lived even farther north than I did—it was the look of the hard-core projects, the look of danger, hunger, suspicion. For a moment, my instincts told me not to get on the swing just yet, but I climbed on greedily anyway.

I’d barely begun to spin around, when the three girls returned. “Hey girl,” the biggest one said. “You’re on our swing.”

I clutched the chains that suspended the rubber tire from the redwood frame and looked at her. My instincts also told me to get up quickly and relinquish the tire, but the rest of me was hot and cranky, and told me to ignore my instincts. Hadn’t these same instincts instructed me to do nothing in the past when Christopher Kleinhaus yelled “Boys against girls” in the schoolyard? Hadn’t they told me to do nothing when the two girls at the Olympia poked me with their umbrellas? I decided then and there that I was sick of doing nothing. I was sick of trying to love everybody instead of just slugging it out with the rest of humanity.

Looking the biggest girl fiercely in the eye, I said, “It’s not your swing. The park is for everyone.”

Only a child of hippies, I realize now, could ever imagine these might actually qualify as “fightin’ words.”

Hearing this, the girls looked at me incredulously. “Ho, snap,” one of them laughed—though whether this was at my audacity or stupidity was unclear.

“Look, I’ll tell you again,” the biggest girl said. “Get off of our swing.”

I inhaled as deeply as I could. I was suddenly aware only of my own pulse, pounding in my ears. “It’s my turn now.” I tried not to betray the tremor in my voice. “This park is for sharing. You can have it back when I’m done.”

The girl cocked her head. As if cued, her two friends moved into position alongside her, polishing their fists. “Girl. I’m telling you. One last time. GET. OFF. OUR. SWING.”

“NO. I WON’T!” I shouted, emboldened by my own, righteous bravado. “MAKE ME.” Remembering the protocol from the schoolyard, I then added, “BITCH!”

Throughout our childhoods, my mother had always taught me and John to be grateful for even the very smallest things in life. In one swift moment, I was grateful for perhaps the very smallest of them all: sand. Millions of grains of it. Because that was what quickly came between me and the concrete as the oldest, biggest girl batted me off the tire swing with a single motion, then straddled me and began pounding me methodically into the ground. I assumed her friends were kicking and punching me from both sides, but I couldn’t be sure. It was such a blatantly unbalanced fight—I was so clearly a nonopponent—that they could’ve decided it wasn’t worth the effort and simply whipped out a nail file and a compact mirror and sat on the edge of the tire swing primping while they waited for their friend to finish me off.

Oh, I
did
fight back. I flailed my hands spastically and shrieked “Stooo-ooop it!” in a shrill and girlish whine. I swatted blindly, wind-milling at the air. Pinned beneath her legs, my own kicked at nothing but sand. I did get in a couple of slaps before I felt a blow or two on the side of my torso, a kick on the side of my thigh, then a wallop to my face, followed by a meaty, metallic taste in my mouth and a hot wetness around my nose. Then the girl climbed off me with the same easy swagger you’d use to climb off a mechanical rocking horse outside Woolworth’s. She brushed off her hands with expert efficiency, then calmly resumed her place on the swing. The other two girls took their original places beside her, and in a moment, they were spinning around and laughing as if nothing had happened.

I just lay stretched out in the sand, listening to the rasp of my own breath and waiting for the internal pounding of my pulse to subside. Then, slowly, I sat up, clutching my bloody nose. I scanned around the benches for my parents and saw my father talking to Michelle’s mother, not fifteen yards away. He glanced in my direction, but I couldn’t tell whether he’d seen me or not.

Once I discovered that no major damage had, in fact, been done, I struggled to my feet. I was perfectly fine, but sand-covered and dazed. I made a beeline for my father.

“Daddy!” I sobbed. “I got into a fight.”

“I know,” he said, handing me his handkerchief. “I saw you.”

“You saw me?” I cried. “Why didn’t you come?”

“Sweetie,” my father said. “You took on three girls. They were older than you. They were bigger than you. And they were clearly looking for a fight. You had no backup. And you had never thrown a punch in your life. About the only thing you
did
do right was not have your daddy come running to your rescue.” He smiled and mussed my hair. “Besides, I didn’t want to hurt your pride, now did I?”

“My pride?” I thought. “What about my nose?”

“Hey. If you want to play tough,” he said, “those are the rules.”

My nostrils felt jewel-encrusted. My head throbbed, but not so much from being hammered repeatedly against the sand as from the shock and adrenaline.

“How are you?” my father said after a moment.

I sniffled tearfully and shrugged. Right before the other girl had thrown her first punch, I’d felt a momentous bolt of confidence. But now I just felt foolish and embarrassed and despicable. I had misjudged everything. There was so much about the world that I did not understand. Rivulets of my own blood were starting to congeal on the back of my hand. They turned my skin from maroon to deep brown, and in the mid-afternoon sun, they glistened darkly.

Chapter 4

Christmas Trees, Jews, and Virgins

KARL MARX ONCE SAID
that religion was the opiate of the people. What he hadn’t counted on was that this observation actually made religion more attractive to my grandmother, who had no use for God, but thought the world of opiates. Thanks to Communism, my grandmother discovered religion could be worthwhile, provided you regarded it as one giant bartending opportunity.

By the time my brother and I were born, heresy had become a family tradition. Our mother—who also loved a good party almost as much as she hated dogma—raised us as pagans, really: we had chocolate bunnies, Christmas trees, and menorahs without ever once having to attend Sunday school or nod off during a sermon. It was an “all gain, no pain” approach to religion, and as you might imagine, it was just fine by us.

Certainly, it had never been in the plans to send me to Presbyterian school. But one summer, our local school board must have smoked a kilo of Peruvian hash because it was suddenly decided that my public elementary school—renowned for its academic traditions—would really do much better as an experimental “open corridor program.”

“Like, why should a school have
walls,
man?” a board member explained, raking his hands through his hair. Ray described himself an “education activist,” but really, he looked more like a guy you’d find at a Rainbow Gathering inhaling nitrous oxide from a canister of Reddi-wip. “Schools are like prisons, man. They kill children’s natural instincts. I mean, leave kids alone, let them do their own thing, and they’ll learn from each other.”

Even
I
knew Ray was an idiot. Having experienced my classmates’ natural instincts, killing them off as quickly as possible was just fine by me. And sure, I was an enthusiastic learner, but who were we kidding? If left to my own devices, all I would do all day was color.

Which is exactly what I did. Thanks to the educational free-for-all known as the “open corridor program,” I spent all of first grade drawing pictures of fashion models and anthropomorphized bunnies. Around me, my thirty-one other classmates “did their own thing,” too. They hit each other over the head with plastic buckets. They built huge towers of blocks, then shrieked “Geronimo” and plowed into them with a Big Wheel. They ate library paste. They played “How Loud Can I Yell in Your Ear Until You Go Deaf?” Luis Morales and Barry Brenig discovered that if you held a G.I. Joe under the lamp in the reading alcove long enough, you could melt his head and accidentally set off the fire alarm.

“This isn’t education. It’s anarchy,” my mother said. “I’m taking you out of there.”

The next September, I was enrolled in a tiny private school run by the Second Presbyterian Church of New York. I was one of its few scholarship children, its charity cases. As my mother explained, it wasn’t like we had a lot of options. “It’s either the Presbyterians or the lunatics,” was how I believe she put it.

Located in a small warren of rooms adjoining the church, the school felt like an antique jewelry box. My teacher, Mrs. Tumbridge, spoke with a British accent. “Everybody, this is Susan,” she informed the class in a high, chipper soprano, sounding as if she might have just come in from a fox hunt in the Yorkshire dales. “Let’s give her a warm welcome, shall we?”

The boys sort of grunted. The girls chewed on their pencils and stared. Most of them were wearing the school uniform—a stiff navy blue blazer with the gold school emblem stitched over the heart like a shield.

The solemnity of the school made me feel studious and anointed. As I sat down and arranged my new school supplies symmetrically on my desk, I imagined a documentary being filmed of my life for some fascinated and adoring future audience: “
Susie Gilman is arranging her school supplies symmetrically on her desk,
” the narrator intoned. “
It is here, in this tiny Presbyterian school, that she will first exhibit the signs of genius that will catapult her, one day, to greatness.
”

What I hadn’t counted on in this documentary were three girls, Courtney, Samantha, and Jennifer, sidling over to my desk at lunch.

“Hi, Susan!” grinned Samantha. Samantha, I’d noticed, loved horses. She kept a picture of one in the corner of her desk and wore little gold horse barrettes in her hair. She also wore patent leather Mary Janes to school—the kind I was allowed to wear for special occasions only.

“Hi, Samantha!” I smiled back.

For some reason, this made them giggle.

“Susan, we were just wondering,” said Jennifer thoughtfully. Casually, she picked up the end of the fringed suede belt I was wearing and stroked it with exaggerated affection. “Where did you
ever
get this
amazing
pink belt?”

I beamed. Recently, I’d begun developing my own personal style, predicated largely on the belief that if one floral pattern was good, three were even better. For my first day at school, I’d worn hot pink bell-bottoms, an eye-blindingly flowered shirt, and my long, fringed, rose-colored belt. The idea was to play up any resemblance I had to Laurie Partridge.

The pink belt had been given to me by my baby-sitter, Gina Gold. Gina wore hand-crocheted vests and bangle bracelets like the black girls, and her room was covered with pictures of David Cassidy, Bobby Sherman, and Tony DeFranco. I wanted to be just like her, and whenever she gave me the clothes she’d outgrown, they automatically became my favorite things to wear. It was like getting cast-offs from Cher.

“This belt was a hand-me-down from my baby-sitter,” I said to the girls.

As soon as I said this, their faces illuminated like flashbulbs, exploding with bright malice and gleeful disbelief.

“A hand-me-down!” Courtney cried. “Eeeeeeeeewwwwww!”

“You wear other people’s old, rejected clothing?” exclaimed Samantha.

“Ohmygod,” laughed Jennifer. “That is sooooooo gross! It’s like you’re wearing
garbage!
”

Never mind our classroom’s proximity to a church. Never mind the lessons on dinosaurs, Pueblo Indians, and phonics that Mrs. Turnbridge imparted to us each day. One of the first things I learned at my new school was that boys might be fighters, but girls could be terrorists.

Girls could pinpoint a weakness in another girl, then torture her for it, stealthily and psychologically.
Everybody give Gabriella the silent treatment today… Now, let’s all pretend to like Charlotte and make her think she’s really popular, but then, once she thinks we’re her friends, we’ll tell her she can’t come to Serena’s birthday party.
Girls plotted. Girls made a group project out of inflicting misery.

Arriving at school the following week, I found anonymous notes folded up into puffy rectangles and left on my chair.

Ten reasons why we hate Susan.

Nicknames for Susan: Fatso. Super-Fatso. Fat-head. Fatgirl. Add yours here ——.