Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

by Susan Jane Gilman

  And I adored him for this. All the girls did. Unlike other little boys, whose primary hobbies seemed to be throwing rocks and plowing into you while pretending to be Speed Racer, Edwid was opposed to any kind of activity that required you to exert yourself. A burgeoning chocoholic like myself, he was only too happy to sit in a lawn chair eating Yodels and making up elaborate stories about what would happen to everybody in the colony, if, say, aliens landed in the Barn and enslaved people based on their outfits.

  Needless to say, the other little boys weren’t quite sure what to make of him. They were only four years old, and yet they knew—just as Edwid himself surely must have known—that one of these things is not like the others.

  Slurping away on Fudgsicles, Edwid and I talked excitedly about how our lives would be transformed by being stars in the movie.

  The only child actress I knew of at the time was the ancient Shirley Temple. Somehow, I had the idea that appearing in Camp meant being the centerpiece of several vigorous song-and-dance numbers: I envisioned myself solemnly descending a staircase in a small white mink cape while a cast of adoring grown-ups fawned around me, singing songs about how wonderful I was until they left me alone in the spotlight for one of my many ballet solos. I would then proceed to perform one perfect arabesque after another, ending each one by flashing a peace sign at the camera just like the Beatles did.

  Edwid saw himself more as a magician. “I’m going to be in a long purple cape and a silver top hat,” he announced. “When I tap the rim of my hat with a magic wand, pet rabbits are going to come running out. Then,” he added, “I’ll lock my sister Cleo in a cello case and make her disappear.” It went without saying, of course, that somehow Cleo would fail to rematerialize at the end of the trick. Through no fault of Edwid’s, she would remain lost forever in a netherworld of incompetent magicians’ assistants.

  At the end of the movie, Edwid and I agreed, we’d both be in a parade, then move to a split-level house in New Jersey with shag carpets and an aquarium and a kitchen stocked only with M&M’s and Bosco.

  The morning that Camp was to begin filming, I woke up so excited, I didn’t want to eat breakfast. But there wasn’t any breakfast to be had—my mother was already down at the lake, watching Alice shoot the first scene.

  “Come take a look, sweetie,” said my dad. “It’s really something.”

  Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that there might actually be other people in the movie besides Edwid and me. Following my father down to the lake, I didn’t know what to expect: perhaps Alice would be seated in a director’s chair while a few colonists milled around in sparkly costumes, awaiting my arrival. Maybe there’d be people practicing tap-dancing, or a collie with a red ribbon around its neck, being groomed to appear as my sidekick.

  What I did not expect to see was twenty-seven hippies cramming themselves into a pink and purple VW Bug.

  They were, from my point of view, practically naked. The men had only cutoff denim shorts, and the women who weren’t actually topless were wearing tiny, macramÉ bikinis crafted by Daisy Loupes, a colonist whom even the others considered, in their words, “far out.” Daisy made her living selling handcrafted bathing suits at music festivals. That people actually paid money for her creations is a testimony to the strength of the hallucinogens of the time. At Silver Lake, the older boys called Daisy’s bathing suits “Bags o’ Boobs” and “Saggy Titty Sacks.” They weren’t being uncharitable.

  In place of everyone’s clothes was psychedelic body art. Explosive flowers and huge Day-Glo orange peace signs were painted on their chests. Hearts framed their belly buttons, smiley faces grinned from their shoulders and knees. Butterflies alighted from their clavicles. One woman had yellow and orange rays of sunshine radiating from her crotch; my friend Annie’s brother, Jerome, whom I already considered a freak because he was a white guy who insisted on wearing his hair in an Afro, was entirely covered in paint. Stripes of color swirled around him like a green and magenta barber pole. The Fleming twins, a pair of teenaged girls who’d baby-sat me once, had the words “Groovy” painted on one leg and “Sock It To Me!” on the other, and “Make Love, Not War” emblazoned across their tummies.

  Each hippie had a number painted on their stomach, too, and as Alice stood behind her tripod, she called out the numbers as if she were operating a deli counter. I noticed that she was counting backward, “Fifteen … Fourteen.…” Whoever’s number was called had to stuff him- or herself into the VW.

  My father led me over to Alice. “You see,” he pointed at her camera, “Alice is going to have of all these people jump out of that tiny car just like clowns in a circus.” He seemed to think I would be entertained by this, though the truth was that clowns—along with puppets, forest fire commercials, and badly drawn coloring books—scared the shit out of me. Hippies, so far, weren’t faring much better.

  “This scene is called ‘Ode to Joy,’” added Alice, not looking up from her viewfinder.

  I had no idea what an “ode” was, but trying to stuff twenty-seven grown-ups into a VW bug didn’t look like joy to me at all. It looked like wishful thinking.

  I watched my friend Abigail’s father, a compact man with giant purple daisies painted on his nipples, crawl under the dashboard in a fetal position, while the Fleming twins wedged in behind the stick shift. “Number Six!” Alice shouted. That was Larry Levy, my friend Lori’s dad. He was six foot two and had hot pink and yellow flowers painted up the trunks of his legs and a peace sign on each cheek. Watching him bend down and try to contort himself into the trunk of the VW was beyond painful; it was practically traumatic. Yet my father was grinning. “Give it up, Levy!” he shouted. “You can’t do it!” Larry turned around, smiled broadly, and gave my father the finger. Then he jumped down into the trunk and pulled the hatch closed behind him with a flourish, and everyone hooted and applauded. My dad put both fingers in his mouth and whistled. It seemed to me like every dog across New York state heard him and promptly commenced yowling.

  “Okay!” shouted Alice, “start cuing the music.” A portable plastic record player had been set up under a tree with the help of half a dozen extension cords, and I watched Alice’s teenaged son, Clifford, slide a copy of Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow out of its sleeve and place it on the turntable.

  A queasiness started to come over me, similar to the one I’d felt each morning before nursery school. I stood there with my father and tried to pretend that all of this was okay—that this was how any other kid from my nursery school would be spending their summer vacation.

  No one paid the least bit of attention to me.

  “Okay, people,” shouted Alice. “It’s 84 degrees out and I don’t want anybody suffocating to death. Once my camera starts rolling, haul your ass out of that car as fast as possible!” Then she shouted, “Clifford! Music!” and the reverberating, psychedelic, maraca-laced opening of the Jefferson Airplane song “She Has Funny Cars” boomed across the lake.

  “Roll ’em!” Alice shouted. The original idea, apparently, had been to have the car “drive” up into the clearing and then have all the hippies emerge, but once everyone was crammed inside, steering the car became physically impossible. “Just get out when I call your number!” yelled Alice. “One!”

  Slowly, the car door opened and Adele Birnbaum, who’d smushed herself in just a minute earlier, emerged. A lightning bolt painted on her stomach hadn’t fully dried; it bled into the purple “1” above her belly button, creating a Rorschachy mess, but Adele just grinned and wiggled and danced right into the camera while the crowd hooted and cheered. “Two!” Alice yelled, and Sidney Birnbaum emerged, dancing the funky chicken with an American flag wrapped around his waist.

  It all went smoothly until Alice got to hippie Number Six. It seems Larry Levy had pulled his back out leaping into the trunk of the VW. Alice had to stop filming while my father and Sidney Birnbaum carefully extracted him from the back of the car and whisked him off to the emergency room
in Brewster. Nobody thought to remove Larry’s body paint beforehand, and I wondered what the nurses would make of it. Oddly, it comforted me to think that Larry’s kids might be even more embarrassed by all this than I was.

  By the time Alice got to filming her thirteenth flower child, most of the real children had lost interest. They’d wandered over to a grove of trees by the lake, where they invented a game in which one person farted into a bag, then everyone else took turns sniffing it. But I had no interest. I went off and sat on a rock by myself. The vague upset I’d felt at the beginning of the shoot had metastasized into a full-blown stomachache.

  “Sweetie, it’s just make-believe,” my mother said gently.

  “I don’t like it,” I said.

  “Why not?” she asked. “They’re just having fun. They’re playing—like you do.”

  For some reason, hearing this only bothered me more. Grown-ups weren’t supposed to play. They were supposed to be stodgy and boring. More importantly, they were supposed to be stodgy and boring while paying attention to you while you played. They weren’t supposed to be dancing the funky chicken while you went off and farted into a bag. It started to dawn on me then why hippies really frightened me: they were competition. Their face paint, their bubble-blowing, their naive and garish clothing—they wanted kids’ stuff for themselves. They wanted to be silly and irresponsible, twirling around in the grass. But then what did that leave for us real kids to do? And if grown-ups were busy being flower children, who’d be left to be the grown-ups?

  I made a great show of turning my back to my mother, though I was flooded with gratitude that she and my father had opted not to pop out of the VW themselves. “I just don’t like it,” I said. “That’s all.”

  Kneeling beside me, my mother gently brushed a piece of hair from my eyes. “Alice says she’s going to film you and Edward dancing together by the lake tomorrow.”

  This news had its desired effect. I was a sucker for vainglory. “Really? I’ll get to dance?” I said.

  Suddenly, I imagined Edwid in a sequined top hat and tails—not unlike his magician’s costume—twirling me around in the sand and lifting me gracefully in the air in a diaphanous gown. The hippies might “do their thing,” but Edwid and I would waltz along the water’s edge, looking preternaturally glamorous and beautiful.

  The next morning, my mother woke me up in the dark. “Okay, movie star, let’s get going,” she sighed. “Why Alice has to do this at sunrise is beyond me.”

  While it clearly wasn’t my mother’s idea of a good time, I liked being the first people awake in the colony. It felt to me like we’d won some sort of contest.

  I pulled on my tutu and skibbled out onto the patio as the first blush of sun seeped over the hills. Outside, it was chilly—colder than I’d imagined—but the sky was streaked with gold and shell pink, and the air was sweet with morning fog. I’d never seen a morning look so magical: no garbage trucks, no sirens, just wet leaves and a few ambivalent sparrows. When my mother and I arrived at the lake, Edwid’s mom, Carly, was already there. Carly must have been close to 250 pounds, yet her weight seemed a necessity given the size and volume of her personality. With her booming opinions and a laugh that could shake fruit off a tree, she was a one-woman piece of agitprop theater, a force of nature in plus-sized bell-bottoms and paisley caftans. She carried Edwid slung over her shoulder like a small bag of laundry; he was still in his Snoopy pajamas, wheezing, spittle-lipped, crusty-nosed, half-asleep.

  Before I could ask about his magician’s costume, a car pulled up, and Alice climbed out, followed by Clifford, who unloaded what seemed to be a great avalanche of equipment. Though it was five-thirty in the morning, I was impressed to see that Alice was already dressed in a lime green maxi-dress with a matching turban and full makeup. Her jaw was going frantically.

  “Okay, people,” she said, snapping her gum, “let’s set up down by the beach as quickly as possible. We’re racing the sun here. Saul? Where’s Saul?”

  Suddenly, I saw Saul Shapiro rounding the bend in his pajamas. Saul was my friend Wendy’s father, and he was easily the largest man in the colony—he even made Larry Levy (now Larry Levy of back-brace-emergency-room fame) look somehow insubstantial. He was barrel-chested, with enormous hands and feet and a corona of thick white hair. His baritone made anything he said—whether it was “Get that gerbil out of the laundry hamper” or “Iris dear, hand me a pretzel”—sound like the song “Some Enchanted Evening.” Occasionally mistaken for Walter Cronkite, Saul had special license plates on his car, because, my mother said, when he wasn’t lying on the beach in plaid bathing trunks, he was actually a prominent New York state assemblyman—whatever that was. All I knew was that he was Goliath. He terrified me.

  Now, Goliath was wearing a peppermint-striped nightshirt and a matching, tasseled cap. I thought he’d also been too sleepy to get dressed, but Alice explained that Saul was going to be in the movie with us. The scene, titled “Ode to Innocence,” would consist of this: Edwid and I would dance around the beach at dawn, chasing a butterfly, while Saul stood amid us in his nightshirt and nightcap, playing a flute.

  Obviously, not quite what I’d imagined. But okay.

  Soon, however, we had a butterfly problem. Butterflies, it turned out, could be real divas on a movie set. Unlike the rest of the cast, they could not be ordered to show up. They had to be coaxed; they had to be courted. Barring that, they had to be caught. While Alice set up her tripod, Clifford was dispatched to the marshes with a butterfly net and an old gefilte fish jar. After ten minutes of watching him swing away blindly, Edwid fell back asleep and Alice wondered aloud if she could spray-paint a moth. But then, Clifford’s luck changed. He came upon not one, but two monarch butterflies—in flagrante, no less—and easily nudged them into the gefilte fish jar. We were in business.

  Saul took his position at the end of the lake with a tiny plastic flute that looked doubly preposterous in his oversized hands. Carly plopped Edwid down on the sand, “Edwid, enough with the sleeping,” she said loudly, pinching his cheeks until Edwid yelled, “Maaa! All right already!” and stood up unassisted.

  My mother knelt down and combed my hair and fluffed out the tulle of my skirt. I felt regal and prim, very nearly perfect. Then she and Carly retreated to the stone terrace overlooking the beach, where Alice had set up her camera. “Everybody ready?” Alice called from behind the viewfinder. Saul, Edwid, and I all nodded. Then she straightened up, clearly displeased. “Um, could we lose the tutu and the pj’s?” she said.

  I looked at my mother.

  “No tutu, Alice?” she said.

  “Ellie, Ellie, Ellie!” Alice cried. “This is the ‘Ode to Innocence,’ not the ‘Ode to Las Vegas’ and ‘Ode to Corporate America.’ I want children—naked children—children like cherubs, dancing around the Pied Piper at sunrise, chasing a butterfly. This is not a place for sequins. This is not a place for trademark cartoon puppies printed on a pair of synthetic pajamas. This is about nature.”

  Hearing this, Carly shouted over to Edwid. “Hear that, Edwid? This is about nature. Take off your pajamas!”

  My mother looked at me, unsure of how to proceed. “Susie, Alice would like you to dance without your tutu,” she said carefully. “Do you want to do that?”

  “What’s a cherub?” asked Edwid.

  “Who cares what a cherub is?” boomed Carly. “It’s a pagan symbol appropriated by Christians for their paintings of the afterlife.”

  “No it’s not. It’s a naked angel,” said Clifford.

  “I don’t want to take off my pajamas,” said Edwid. “It’s cold out.”

  “Oh, Mr. Yitzkowitz, it’s not that bad,” Saul chuckled avuncularly.

  “Easy for you to say,” said Edwid. “You’re wearing a nightshirt and a stupid hat.”

  “Edwid!” shouted Carly. “Don’t talk fresh to Saul. He’s a Socialist.” She turned to Alice. “I don’t know why he’s being difficult. Once, when he was two, he took off all his clothin
g in the middle of Gimbel’s department store.”

  “They’re also called ‘seraphim,’” said Clifford to no one in particular.

  “Do I get to be an angel?” I asked my mother. I had to admit, this sounded pretty good to me, though I wasn’t crazy about the “naked” part. Every day, I changed in and out of my bathing suit on the beach—all the little kids did in full view of everyone—but I wasn’t a toddler, like my brother, who ran around naked all day long, and good luck getting him into a diaper and a onesy for a trip to the Dairy Queen. Being naked in a movie did seem slightly embarrassing, but maybe not if I was a cherub …

  “The sun’s rising, folks,” said Alice. “Are we here to create art, or are we here to discuss the epistemology of cherubs and complain?”

  “Edwid, stop being such a prima donna and take off your clothes,” said Carly.

  “Well, Suze?” said my mother.

  Edwid shrugged, so I did the same. Frankly, I didn’t know what else to do. The general consensus was that shrugs meant “yes,” so quickly, our mothers helped us out of our clothes. The truth was, Edwid and I mooned each other regularly—our friend Freddy Connors had invented a game called “Butt In Your Face,” which was a big hit on the ice cream line—but standing naked when it was officially sanctioned somehow made us very shy. We avoided eye contact with each other.

  “Oh, that’s beautiful!” said Alice, ducking back behind her camera. As soon as she said, “Roll ’em!” I decided I changed my mind. I wanted my clothes back on. Now. But Saul was playing “Green-sleeves” on the flute and strolling toward us, and Alice was saying, “That’s it. Great. Now, Susie and Edwid, dance around Saul.”