Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

by Susan Jane Gilman

  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.

  Annie’s mother, however, actively encouraged us to watch The Partridge Family, because, she said, it taught little girls that women didn’t need men in order to raise a family. My mother, however, objected to The Partridge Family solely on the basis of its music.

  By the time everybody finished weighing in, my friends and I were basically left to watch Romper Room and, a few years later, the Watergate Hearings—both of which struck us as entertainment for idiots.

  Yet somehow, we managed to sneak in an impressive amount of off-limits viewing. And whenever we did, we scrambled to touch the TV screen as soon as the opening credits for a particular show came on.

  “I call I’m Ginger!” we’d yell, lunging at the television, trying to be the first one to press her palm over the seductive cathode-ray smile of Tina Louise before the picture flashed to the infinitely duller Professor and Mary Anne. The rule was: whoever touched a character first got to “be” her for the duration of the show.

  “I call I’m Marcia!” we’d shriek, vying to tag the upper-left-hand corner of The Brady Bunch grid first, leaving the losers to fight over insipid Cindy and consolation prize Jan. We’d compete to be Marilyn on The Munsters, Penny on Lost in Space, Laurie on The Partridge Family. Cartoons were equally fair game: we “called” Melodie, Daphne, Betty, Valerie, Veronica, Wonder Woman, Trixie, and Judy on the Jetsons.

  For me, however, one character was the apotheosis of all that I admired and ever hoped to be.

  By day, Barbara Gordon was the brainy, Jackie Kennedy–esque daughter of Gotham’s police commissioner. And yet, with one flick of a switch, her vanity table rotated around and she was transformed into Batgirl, as pornographic a crime fighter as could be seen on prime time, with stiletto heels, a peek-a-boo black mask, and sparkly latex bodysuit that made her look as if she’d been dipped in liquid rubber.

  For Batgirl’s big “fight move,” Batman and Robin would lift her off the ground like two chorus boys and Wham! Bap! Batgirl would kittenishly swing her pointed, dominatrix boots right into the jaw of an oncoming henchman. Unlike the ditzy molls cowering in the corner, Batgirl leapt into the fray and held her own. And, once the battle was over, and the Riddler and his sidekicks were left drowning in their own vat of pancake batter or whatever, Batgirl whirled around and vanished, leaving Batman and Robin awestruck in her wake:

  “Batman, who do you think she really is?”

  “We’ll never know, Robin. I believe we’ll never know.”

  They’d never see her, but we—the audience—would, riding her electric purple Batcycle into the sunset with the wind in her hair while a groovy, Muzaky chorus sang: Batgirrrrrl, Batgirl! Yeah, whose baby are you?

  Pretending to be her made me almost dizzy with yearning.

  There were only two small problems:

  She was fictional, of course.

  And—she didn’t wear a tutu.

  Out of all the girls in kindergarten, Audrey Abromowitz became my closest friend. Audrey was a red-haired drooler who lived in a grubby red-brick apartment building across the street from our grubby gray one. She and I were obsessed with ballerinas. All the other aspirations on our lists were really just filler. When it came right down to it, both of us would happily forfeit the chance to cure cancer or to save the planet from a nuclear holocaust if it meant we’d be assured an opportunity to prance around in a tutu.

  Frustrated by our inability to stand out in school in any way, we longed to up the ante somehow. We wanted to establish ourselves as the real ballerinas of K-5—the genuine article among pretenders—even though, of course, neither one of us had ever taken a dance class in our lives, and I was pudgy, and Audrey was bowlegged. But we were at that stage in life where we truly believed that what you wore was infinitely more important than what you actually did. And so, one day, we decided to wear our tutus to school.

  My new tutu, campaigned for vigorously and received on my birthday, was a frothy white satin confection that I topped off with a gold cardboard crown and three appalling rhinestone necklaces given to me by my grandmother. Audrey’s tutu had a pale blue bodice covered with satin roses, and it came with a tiny satin cape that tied around her shoulders with a ribbon. When we paraded into kindergarten dressed in this finery, Christopher Kleinhaus immediately began making elaborate throw-up noises. The other girls looked on with a mixture of admiration and envy—or, it occurs to me only now, possibly disgust.

  “Oh, how delightful!” Mrs. Mutnick exclaimed.

  Over our heads, our bedraggled mothers looked at her apologetically.

  “It was this or nothing,” said Audrey’s mother helplessly.

  “Trust me,” my mother sighed, rolling her eyes, “It’s better than the alternative. Last year, she lay down in front of the door to her nursery school and screamed.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Mrs. Mutnick. “They both look adorable, and it’s not hurting anybody.”

  Our teacher’s aide, Mrs. Flores, begged to differ, however.

  Our tutus, it turned out, were a bitch to take off whenever we needed to pee—which we needed to do almost constantly. Audrey and I were probably the two most frequent pee-ers in the entire New York City Public School System. Between us, we had a bladder the size of a Froot Loop. Whenever one of us had to pee, Mrs. Flores would have to walk us down the hall to the girls’ room, where she had to help us wriggle out of our crackling, sequin-crusted leotards, then roll down our pilled and staticky tights, then wait outside the door while we “made,” then help us again, squirming and distracted, first back into the tights, and then back into the skin of our leotard, making sure to ease the tutu gently over the bodice so as not to rip the tulle and incite hysteria.

  And no sooner had she finished doing this for one of us, when, back inside the classroom, the other would invariably tug on the hem of her skirt, and whisper softly, “Mrs. Flores, I have to go, too.”

  In our defense, Mrs. Flores was an unpleasant woman. Like all teacher’s aides, she was overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated, yet she took out her frustrations not
on the administration but on us kids. She made no attempt to disguise her loathing of us, and she tended to communicate mostly through scowls, except on the occasions when Mrs. Mutnick left the classroom for a few minutes, in which case she berated us openly. Her favorite threats seemed to involve us spending a lot of quality time with the devil.

  “If you don’t sit still,” she hissed, “you play with the devil!” If we picked our noses, she informed us, we’d be playing with the devil, too. Ditto for getting off our nap blankets before “sleep time” was over.

  For some reason, though, we took Mrs. Flores in stride. After all, she was a fabulist preoccupied with punishment—which was pretty much what we five-year-olds were. In the schoolyard, we constantly invented dire consequences for ourselves—”Step on a crack, break your mother’s back”—and that sort of thing. Because of Mrs. Flores’s fire-and-brimstone disciplinary tactics, we tended to regard her affectionately as one of our own.

  “Look, Mrs. Flores,” we’d call out cheerfully after spilling finger paint all over the piano bench. “We’re playing with the devil!”

  I’m sure Mrs. Flores complained to Mrs. Mutnick about our ballerina costumes. But Mrs. Mutnick loved the idea of free expression almost as much as she hated conflict. As far as I knew, she never sent any notes home demanding civilian clothes for school. And so, after two weeks of Audrey and me flouncing around in our satin and tulle, Mrs. Flores took matters into her own hands.

  “Boys and girls,” she announced at snack time, “today, everyone has to wait for milk and cookies because Susie and Audrey have to go to the little girl’s room again, and as we all see, they’re dressed in their tutus.”

  Clearly, it was her goal to shame us—if not to generate an all-out Christians-to-the-lions scenario in which our cookie-starved peers ripped us and our sequins to shreds.

  But what Mrs. Flores hadn’t counted on was that, once they saw the special attention Audrey and I were getting, a lot of the other little girls decided they wanted to wear tutus to school, too. The next day, Mary Berns arrived in a fire-engine-red number, while Claudia Ramirez and Iyala Lev arrived in pale pink versions of my tutu. Carmen trooped in wearing a gold-sequined leotard with a white tutu, and Jocanda Johnson came dressed in a dark-rose-colored tutu that her mother had sewn based on a photo from Life magazine. By mid-November, half the girls in our class had horned in on the action. We were a legion of ballerinas, and from then on, we spent virtually our entire time in kindergarten waiting to pee.

  Of course, once tutus became practically the school uniform, I had to find yet another new way to distinguish myself. Being part of “team ballerina” was all fine and good, but it was nothing compared to getting singled out as a prima donna.

  Happily, I found another spotlight soon enough, and quite by accident.

  Show ‘n’ Tell in our classroom was your basic mundane parade of rubber bugs, paperweights, food stamps, and snow globes. Once, Christopher Kleinhaus brought in a bong, which was immediately snatched out of his hands and transported, along with Christopher, to the principal’s office—none of us had any idea what had happened—What did he say he brought in? A gong? A bog? Another time, Jocanda Johnson stood up and sang a song she’d sung at her church. Her voice was better than the teacher’s—she sounded like a record—and it was such a grown-up and powerful sound that I forgot to be jealous and just sat there, rapt, wanting her to sing it over and over again. But unless a kid came in with some kind of head wound, Show ‘n’ Tell was usually of little interest to any of us. The only truly attentive person was Mrs. Mutnick; the rest of us either squirmed around impatiently or boned up on our napping skills.

  One day, I planned to show a pair of souvenir maracas my grandparents had bought on their honeymoon. Yet when my turn came, I discovered I’d left them at home. Determined not to give up my slot, I informed Mrs. Mutnick that I had something to “tell” instead.

  I hadn’t planned anything. I just stood up before my classmates. “Tomorrow, my parents are changing my name to ‘Rhinestone,’” I announced.

  For some reason, this caught people’s attention. Mrs. Mutnick adjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose. “Really!” she exclaimed. “You’re going to be called ‘Rhinestone Gilman’?”

  I’d never liked “Susan” because wherever I went, there were always at least two other girls with the same name. Only one of us ever got to be just “Susan”—the other two were inevitably relegated to using our initials—we became “Susan K.” and “Susan G.,” auxiliary Susans, backup singer Susans, second- and third-runner-up Susans. “Rhinestone,” on the other hand, was sparkly and, I was quite certain, original. But hearing it said aloud with my last name attached, it suddenly sounded a lot stupider than I’d imagined. Rhinestone Gilman?

  “No, wait, I mean ‘Sapphire,’” I said quickly. “They’re changing my name to Sapphire. Sapphire Gilman.” Yes, that was much better. Plus, I got to keep my initials.

  “Isn’t that interesting!” said Mrs. Mutnick. “Are you going to court to change it legally?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. “My mommy and daddy are just going to call me that from now on,” I explained. “I asked them, and they said yes.”

  (Part of this was not exactly a lie. I had recently asked my mother if she’d call me another name I liked a lot—Beulah. “What, are you kidding? You want the name of a black maid on a racist TV show?” she said. “Not a chance.”)

  “Well, I think that’s very good of your parents,” said Mrs. Mutnick. “It’s important to let children have a say in defining themselves, isn’t it, class?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Would you like us to call you ‘Sapphire’ from now on, too?” Mrs. Mutnick asked me.

  I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Flooded with gratitude, I nodded vigorously.

  “Well then, Sapphire,” Mrs. Mutnick said kindly, “thank you for sharing today. You can sit down now.”

  That was the moment it dawned on me that the real purpose of Show ‘n’ Tell was not to show off Frisbees or spoon collections, but to provide me, personally, with a forum for passing off all of my wildest fantasies as bona fide truths.

  The next day, when Mrs. Mutnick asked who had anything for Show ‘n’ Tell, my hand went up again.

  “Yes, Sapphire?” she said.

  “Today I have something else to tell,” I said. “My family and I are moving to Passaic.”

  Earlier that year, my aunt and uncle had moved to Passaic, New Jersey, and I was completely enraptured by it. All the houses on their street were identical, with tiny, scalloped awnings over the windows and pastel aluminum siding. In their bathroom, they had a toilet seat covered in pink faux fur, a pearly pink plastic shower curtain, and an enormous box of pink rosebud soaps that dissolved like chalk in your hands whenever you used them. We’d been out to visit them twice so far, and I’d spent the entire time in the bathroom, washing and rewashing my hands, then peeking out the frosted glass window to look at their next door neighbor’s raised swimming pool. In Passaic, nobody’s white mother wore kente cloth and big purple sunglasses she’d bought at the local head shop. Nobody’s father walked around in a “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” cartoon T-shirt and clogs.

  “Really,” said Mrs. Mutnick. “When are you moving?”

  “I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Maybe next year. For my birthday. We’re going to have a pink bathroom and a swimming pool,” I added. “And a pink fake fur toilet seat cover.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Mutnick. “Won’t that be lovely.”

  The next day for Show ‘n’ Tell, I informed my classmates that I would be dancing that weekend in the Nutcracker Suite ballet at Lincoln Center.

  “What a coincidence!” Mrs. Mutnick exclaimed. “So are Lucille Suggs and David Gonzales in Mrs. Lowey’s third grade class! Are you in the Jacques D’Amboise program, too?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. As luck would have it, the famous choreographer Jacques D’Amboise
had just started a pilot program to bring ballet to inner city schools; from it, a handful of children were recruited to dance “backup” in some productions with the New York City Ballet. Although I’d planned to tell the class that I was going to be dancing the starring role of Clara, it suddenly seemed like a better idea to agree with my teacher.

  “Mmm-hhmmm,” I said.

  “Well, that’s just wonderful,” said Mrs. Mutnick. She turned to the rest of the children. “Maybe on Monday Sapphire will tell us all what it was like to dance at Lincoln Center. Won’t that be nice?”

  But by Monday morning, I’d clear forgotten my whopping lies of the previous week and had even better things to share.

  “This weekend,” I announced, “my mommy had another baby.”

  “Oh, my! I had no idea!” said Mrs. Mutnick, clasping her hands together. Even Mrs. Flores’s face took the shape of something less than an all-out grimace. “A new baby? Sapphire, that’s wonderful!”

  “It’s a girl,” I told her. “A girl like me.” In real life, my parents had ignored my wishes and coughed up a boy instead, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t correct the situation with a little creativity of my own. “Her name is Sylvia Goldia. Sylvia Goldia Gilman.”

  Saying this, I could almost see my beautiful new sister for real. She was named Sylvia Goldia after my two favorite crayon colors, and she wasn’t a toddler like my brother, but practically my age already, capable of playing “Super Star Girl” in which I was a super hero named “Super Star Girl” and she was a pet dog who didn’t say very much unless I told her to.

  “I got to pick out her name,” I added proudly.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Mutnick smiled. “I somehow suspected that.”

  My life, from then on, was a dream. I danced around the playhouse with my friends, instructing them in proper ballet technique, which they now looked to me for, seeing as I had appeared at Lincoln Center. Everybody called me Sapphire and inquired thoughtfully about my new baby sister. Carmen and Sarah even decided they should make a card for her drawn entirely in silver and gold crayon. “Welcome Sylvia Goldia!!!!” it read. I promised both of them that they could come visit me in Passaic when we moved, and that we’d all play in the swimming pool together, then wash our hands with pink soap. Everything was going perfectly for me—I was even contemplating what to say next for Show ‘n’ Tell—that I’d be spending Christmas in Hawaii? That I was going to appear as a guest star on Captain Kangaroo? That my little brother had to be put up for adoption now that there were two girls in the house?—when, suddenly, my mother walked through the door. It was two o’clock. I’d completely forgotten: time to go home.