Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “Mommy!” I shouted, running over to give her a voluminous hug.

  To my horror, Mrs. Mutnick rushed over to her at the exact same moment.

  “Oh, Ellen, congratulations!” she said, clasping both my mother’s hands in her own and shaking them vigorously. “I’m so surprised to see you. They let you out of the hospital so early!”

  My mother looked confused.

  “Your new baby,” prompted Mrs. Mutnick, smiling. Then she looked down at the stroller. My brother was sitting in it in his red pom-pom hat, chewing on the end of a drool-covered pretzel.

  “He’s right here,” said my mother, pointing to John. “Though, Greta, he’s not that new anymore.”

  “But Sapphire said you’d given birth to a baby girl over the weekend.”

  “Sapphire?” said my mother. “Who’s Sapphire?”

  They both looked at me and I suddenly realized it would be a very good idea to develop an interest in the chalk tray right about then.

  “Oh dear,” sighed Mrs. Mutnick. She leaned against the door frame and massaged the bridge of her nose beneath her glasses. “I’m guessing there’s no house in Passaic?”

  My mother shook her head.

  “And she didn’t dance in the Nutcracker Suite ballet this weekend, either.”

  With this, my mother threw her head back and laughed and shook her head. Tears came to her eyes, and she wiped them on the back of her glove.

  “Just out of curiosity, Greta, what did she say her new baby sister’s name was?”

  Then they both said in unison, “Sylvia Goldia.”

  “Mm hm,” said my mother, eyeing me dryly.

  “Actually,” said Mrs. Mutnick, “at this age, making up stories and names for themselves is fairly common. Until recently, I’d be suspect about a name like ‘Sapphire.’ But this year alone, I’ve got a ‘Sunshine’ in one of my classes, and a ‘Stokely,’ and a ‘Rainbow,’ and a ‘Che.’ Ruth Lowey has two ‘Arethas’ and a ‘Moonbeam.’”

  “Well, my kid does have a vivid imagination,” said my mother.

  Mrs. Mutnick chuckled and shook her head. “No shrinking violet, your daughter.”

  For a moment I assumed I was off the hook; it was usually a good sign when grown-ups talked about you in the third person bemusedly. But the next thing I knew, the other kids had all gone home, and my mother had taken me out of my winter coat, and she and Mrs. Mutnick were sitting me down at the table—one on either side of me, stuffed into those Lilliputian kiddie chairs—and they were reading me a book. It was illustrated with woodcuts, and it was titled “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

  You all know the story.

  When the boy was finally devoured by wolves, my mother shut the book and asked, “So, Susie, do you understand why it’s bad to tell lies?”

  I nodded. “Because you don’t want to get eaten by wolves?”

  My mother looked at Mrs. Mutnick.

  “Good enough,” she sighed.

  The next day, newly chastened, I came to school as Susie again, and raised my hand for Show ‘n’ Tell. Mrs. Mutnick called on me proudly. “Susie has something very important to tell the class, don’t you, Susie?”

  “Uh-huh,” I nodded. I stood up. “Last night my mother was hit by a truck.”

  This time, Mrs. Mutnick didn’t wait for the end of the day. She telephoned my mother, and during Juice and Cookie Time, they sat down with me again.

  I believe it was Freud who once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, hoping to get different results. But then, Freud never had to deal with raising a five-year-old. Out came “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” again, and again we had the discussion roughly entitled “Why It Is Bad to Lie.”

  Somewhere along the line, my mother had the insight that I was lying not to be difficult, but to be special. And since appealing to my sense of morality was obviously a lost cause, she decided to appeal to my vanity instead.

  When we got home from school, she said, “Why don’t we try to come up with the most interesting true thing for you to share? That way, you can show everybody at school how smart you are.”

  Then we looked at the maracas I had originally planned to bring in. They’d been crafted from coconut shells with the word “Havana” painted on them in black.

  “Oh, there’s a story behind these,” said my mother. “Do you know where Havana is?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s in Cuba, in the Caribbean Sea,” said my mother, pulling an atlas off the shelf. She showed me a picture of an island shaped like a newt. “This is where your grandparents had their honeymoon many years ago. And a lot of big things have happened in Cuba since then.”

  The next day, I trooped into kindergarten armed with my maracas. I noticed Mrs. Mutnick seemed hesitant to call on me for Show ‘n’ Tell, but when she did, I stood up and said, “Today, I’m going to tell about something true. Today I’m going to tell you about the Cuban Revolution.” Then I held up my maracas and shook them for effect.

  “Cuba is an island south of the United States. It has palm trees and beaches,” I said. “When my grandma and grandpa first got married, they went there on their honeymoon. But then, things changed in Cuba. The country had a revolution. What’s a revolution? Sometimes, my mommy says, it’s when people in a country don’t like the way the country is. Sometimes lots of people are poor, and only a few people are rich. Or sometimes—”

  I looked up and noticed that Mrs. Mutnick was looking intently at Mrs. Flores, who was staring at me with a kind of disbelieving fascination. I had never seen her look that way before. She tilted her head slightly toward the door. “Susie, do you mind waiting a minute?” Mrs. Mutnick said. “Mrs. Flores and I think Mr. Alvarado might like to hear this.”

  Mr. Alvarado was our principal. Of course, I had no way of knowing that both he and Mrs. Flores had been born in Havana. After a minute, Mrs. Flores returned to the room with Mr. Alvarado following behind her. They both squeezed down into the tiny kindergarten chairs with the rest of the class, looking no longer scary, but suddenly miniaturized and silly. Mr. Alvarado smiled at me expectantly. I looked at Mrs. Mutnick, who was beaming. I had everyone’s attention. Everybody was focused on me. Not because of my costumes, or who I was pretending to be, but because of what I had to say. It was my moment. Finally, I was a stewardess. I was a prima ballerina. I was Batgirl.

  Yet I was not destined to become any of these things.

  Perhaps I was simply a typical five-year-old, compelled to do exactly what I’d repeatedly been instructed not to do. Or perhaps, I was exhibiting the first signs of what I would, in fact, one day really grow up to be. Because my mother had told me the history of Cuba as accurately as she could. She’d pulled out our World Book Encyclopedia and a few old, cracked copies of Time magazine. She’d gone over the history with me. I’d gotten the facts, I knew the truth.

  And yet, I couldn’t help myself. The impulse to embellish, to put my own fantastical little spin on things, was simply too strong. “The Cuban Revolution was led by a man named Fidel Astro,” I announced. “He was named after the dog on the Jetsons.”

  Chapter 3

  White Like Me

  AS WITH MOST EVERYTHING ELSE in life, I first decided I wanted to be Puerto Rican based on the clothes.

  One Sunday when I was six, I spotted two older girls from my school, Carmella and Lisa, standing on the steps of the church across the street from my building. They were wearing white party dresses that looked like spun sugar and tiny crowns made of seed pearls. Most unbelievably, they each had on a real lace veil. Seeing them dressed like that made me spastic with envy.

  “Mom! Look at Carmella and Lisa!” I shouted, bouncing up and down and pointing. “Can I be that? Can I? Oh please Oh please Oh please?”

  My mother laughed. “You want to be a Puerto Rican girl in a communion dress?” she said. “Honey, we’re not even Catholic.”

  Until that moment, I’d thought being Puerto Rican simply meant y
ou spoke Spanish and were allowed to get your ears pierced. But now, child genius that I was, I saw that it also meant you got to parade around on the steps of the Church of the Holy Name dressed like a miniature bride. A whole new vista of desire opened before me, and immediately, I set about campaigning to become Hispanic.

  Fishing a doily and a tiny, beaded basket out of my closet, I stuck them on my head and promenaded around our apartment, enunciating loudly, “Uno, dos, tres. Cuatro, cinco, seis. Leche.” Counting to six and saying the word “milk” was just about the extent of the Spanish I’d picked up around the neighborhood, but it seemed to me like a good start.

  “Blanco!” I shouted, pirouetting around the kitchen. “Mira. Dos frittatas pro favor. Adios. Muchachas.”

  Sitting at the table, my father glanced at my mother.

  “Our child now wants to be Puerto Rican,” she informed him. “God knows where she got the idea that it’s optional.”

  My father chuckled. “Hey, Susanita,” he called to me. “Is that what we should call you from now on? Susanita?”

  “Please,” my mother said tightly, my disgraceful kindergarten career still fresh in her memory. “Don’t encourage her.” Then she set down her wooden spoon on the countertop and looked at me.

  “Speak all the Spanish you want!” she shouted. “But for the last time: You’re not getting a communion outfit.”

  Years later, when I went to college, I dated a guy from Maine who told me that the first black people he’d ever seen were Gordon and Susan on Sesame Street. This both amazed and appalled me. Growing up in my neighborhood meant that I spent much of my time confronting racial issues, thinking about racial issues, and completely misunderstanding racial issues.

  With its rubble-strewn lots and highly interactive junkie population, the Upper West Side of the early 1970s was what was optimistically known as “a transitional neighborhood.” Its butchered sidewalks were spangled with broken glass, and rows of vacant lots were boarded up using doors salvaged from demolished tenements.

  Broadway—the main thoroughfare—was lined with pawn shops, check-cashing services, Off-Track Betting parlors, Chicken De-Lite takeaways, and furniture discounters that sold sofas on layaway. Many of the signs were in Spanish, including the marquee of the Edison porno theater, which led several local boys to believe that speaking Spanish was a prerequisite for getting laid.

  In this neighborhood, it was simply a given that everyone came in different colors. The kids in our high-rise apartment building were black, white, Hispanic, Asian, interracial, tri-racial, you name it—though when we played together, the main thing on our minds, of course, was the same thing that was on the minds of most kids in America: namely, what we could get away with without getting caught by the grown-ups.

  Behind our building was a long walled-in area euphemistically called “the backyard.” Devoid of any plant life, it was a wet dream for cosmetic dentists and personal injury lawyers. Virtually every surface was concrete, except for the jungle gym, which was made from cast iron and about as safe and appealing to play on as a giant perforated skillet.

  My playmates and I ran around this yard like the Rainbow Coalition on amphetamines. We zoomed about playing freeze tag, then “Hot Peas and Butter,” then “Red Light Green Light,” then staged kamikaze jumps off the monkey bars, then got into elaborate pile-up crashes on our assorted tricycles, bicycles, and Big Wheels, then held competitions seeing who could leap off the highest section of the concrete retaining wall without knocking out a tooth.

  No one had to tell us that our skin might be different colors, but underneath we were all the same. Given the amount of blood we spilled in that backyard every day, we saw this firsthand.

  Still, our parents weren’t taking any chances. Flush with the activism of the 1960s, they were determined to raise us free from all prejudice—a goal which they seemed to attempt primarily through the strategic use of T-shirts, lunchboxes, and sing-alongs. Every kid’s Fisher-Price phonograph had “Free to Be … You and Me” spinning around on its turntable. For our birthdays, we received black Raggedy Ann dolls and consciousness-raising children’s books with titles like The World Is a Rainbow or Che Guevara: An I Can Read Book!

  On television, we watched animated versions of the Harlem Globetrotters and the Jackson 5 every Saturday morning, as well as the cartoon Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, which, just like Josie and the Pussycats, ended each week with the characters playing in a rock band and singing snappy songs about loving each other and getting along. The head shop on 94th Street sold “Black Is Beautiful” T-shirts, peace sign necklaces, and buttons that read “America: Let’s Get It Together” that showed a map of the U.S. constructed from profiles of people of different races. Every day, we jumped rope and played freeze tag to the funky Top 10 hits that emanated from transistor radios on stoops throughout the neighborhood. The scorching anthem of “Brother Louie”: She was black as the ni-ight/Louie was whiter than white… Sly and the Family Stone singing “I-hi-hi love everyday people…”

  On weekends, we were trotted over to the Goddard-Riverside Community Center for special multicultural “family events,” where a white woman named Minna Bromberg had us sing Swahili folk songs and drink unfiltered apple juice. Minna was a pale woman with cheekbones like paper cutters and blue-black hair pulled back so tightly it virtually improvised a face-lift. Although she dressed in tie-dye and armloads of hammered brass jewelry, she was really far too high-strung to be a hippie. “Goddamn it,” she’d mutter as she scrambled amid the onslaught of hysterical, folksinging six-year-olds. “Where the hell are those peace posters? Could we please have a little more quiet in here, please?”

  Other weekends, my friends and I sat squirming and poking each other as we watched multiethnic “Shadow Box” puppet shows, listened to Hopi storytellers, and clapped in time as a bearded banjo player named Satchel led us in one interminable round after another of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

  “Remember, children,” Satchel instructed cheerily at the end of each concert, “when you look at people, don’t see the color of their skin. Only the content of their character.” He always said this extra slowly and loudly for emphasis, as if we were not actually children but mildly retarded beagles.

  To my playmates and me, this was perplexing. That everyone was equal was obvious to us. As far as we were concerned, the only legitimate reason to ever discriminate against anyone was if they happened to be your little brother or sister. In that case, it was perfectly acceptable to relegate them to the role of “deaf-mute orphan” and “houseplant” whenever you made up games.

  But how weren’t we supposed to see another person’s skin? As kids, we noticed everything.

  We knew, for example, that only Tabitha Cohen could roll her eyes back and fake a truly convincing epileptic seizure. Gregory Dupree was double-jointed and could dislocate his own thumb. Ricardo had a scar like a piece of dental floss from his wrist to his elbow from the time he ran through a plate glass window. Chieko ate strange and frightening seaweed for lunch. Peter could play “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” with armpit farts. Karis had a special condition that made her eyebrows fall off.

  In the backyard one day, Michelle, Adam, Juan, and I tried to figure out how, exactly, to be color-blind.

  “Okay, look at me,” said Adam, balancing precariously on the rim of the jungle gym. His skin was the golden brown of pancake syrup, and the rest of us squinted at him, trying to make him appear translucent. “Do you still see it?”

  “Mm-hm,” we nodded.

  “Still black,” said Juan.

  “Try me!” I volunteered. Adam, Michelle, and Juan screwed up their faces and squinted at me fiercely.

  “Still white!” they chorused.

  William, Adam’s fifteen-year-old brother, sauntered over to us, followed by his friend Georges.

  “Ay, Adam. What’s up? Skins,” William said, slapping Adam’s hand, then running his palm smoothly across it. He walked around the
jungle gym and “gave skin” to Juan, Michelle, and me, too, which made all of us feel enormously grown-up and privileged and worshipful and cool. “You all okay over here?” William asked.

  “Uh-huh,” nodded Adam. Then he squinted up at him, practicing.

  “We’re trying to be color-blind!” I explained.

  “Huh?” said William.

  “Satchel the Banjo Player said we should all be color-blind,” Adam said.

  “He said we shouldn’t see people’s skin,” I said. “So we’re trying not to.”

  “So far, it isn’t really working,” Michelle said.

  “Yeah,” said Juan, squinting up at the sky and lolling his head back and forth like Stevie Wonder. “So far, everyone’s just a little fuzzy.”

  William and Georges looked at each other.

  “Ho, shit, man,” Georges said, shaking his head. He exhaled with a whistle, then threw his basketball against the wall and caught it on the rebound.

  “Color-blind? Are you kidding me?” William hooted. “You’re supposed to pretend you don’t see who people are? You supposed to act handicapped? Shit. That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

  He leaned down and draped his arms around me and Michelle conspiratorily.

  “Look. Let me tell you something,” he said gently, squeezing our forearms in a brotherly fashion. “Every day of my life, I know that I’m black. And Georges here, he knows he’s Puerto Rican. And both of us, we know that you two are white. And you should, too. In this world, everyone’s gotta know who they are and where they come from. Understand? Don’t let anybody tell you it’s not important. Because it is.”