Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “That was beautiful,” my mother cried. “You were simply wonderful.”

  Gleefully, I hurried upstairs to the library, which had been converted into the girls’ dressing room for the day. The rest of the procession had already arrived there, and I didn’t want to miss my grand entrance. When I walked in, no doubt, the girls would finally cheer, “She did it! She did it after all!” and Courtney would apologize for being so nasty to me.

  When I reached the library, Alice was already standing outside the door dressed in her street clothes, flanked by her family.

  “Great job, Susan,” she said, while behind her, her parents nodded vigorously. Alice’s father was a preacher. When he gave my shoulder a little squeeze, my heart felt like an enormous flower.

  Opening the door, I stepped into the library. All the girls were in various stages of undress. I walked amid the desks slowly, triumphantly, my footsteps ringing against the varnished floorboards. I walked directly over to where Courtney, Serena, and Samantha were changing their clothes and planted myself before them. Then I just stood there, my hands on my hips. The room grew hushed, pregnant with expectation.

  Yet none of them lifted me up on their shoulders and shouted “Three cheers for Susan!” None of them had a change of heart and suddenly felt compelled to invite me to their Christmas party after the pageant. In fact, none of them said anything. They simply looked at me viciously for a moment, then turned away and quickly resumed packing their white angel robes into their dry cleaning bags. The library was strangely quiet. Grabbing their winter coats off the pegs by the doorway, they hurried off. Only Jennifer acknowledged me. As she was halfway out the door with her mother, she glanced back and sniffed, “Well, thank God you didn’t screw that up.”

  Alone in the library, I slowly packed up my angel costume. The silence seemed to reverberate. Carefully, I put on my coat, then went downstairs to where my parents and John were waiting. By then, the church was almost empty. The pageant was over, and the custodian, Mr. Hernandez, was making his way up the aisle with a stepladder, carefully snuffing out each of the dying candles. My family and I stood at the front of the church for a moment, staring up at the Christmas tree sparkling beside the altar. Beneath the cavernous, vaulted ceilings, we formed a tableau, a unique crÉche of sorts: father, mother, brother, sister.

  I didn’t feel as euphoric or as exonerated as I’d expected. Strangely, though, I didn’t feel defeated, either. I was simply too drained. The dorks in the movies: they all made it look so easy. Trying to prove yourself to your classmates was exhausting, and I realized I was tired of doing it. It was time to put my faith elsewhere. I reached up and began unfastening my halo, one bobby pin at a time. “Okay,” I sighed. “I’m ready. Let’s all go home.”

  Chapter 5

  Love and the Maharishi

  EVERY SO OFTEN, when our living situation fell into chaos, my mother would decide that we were in desperate need of a motto. “Remember, children,” she liked to remind us. “Reality is for people with no imagination.”

  John and I tended to dismiss this the same way we dismissed her requests to clean up our rooms and take our feet off the coffee table. But really, we should have paid more attention. Because as our mother became decreasingly enamored with reality, she became increasingly imaginative in her quest for alternatives.

  The week before my tenth birthday, John and I returned home from school to discover she’d signed our entire family up to learn Transcendental Meditation.

  We had no idea what Transcendental Meditation was, but it sounded like something that would only confirm our status as Freaks of the Neighborhood.

  “No! Please!” my brother gasped. He staggered around the kitchen as if he were being mortally wounded. “Don’t make me learn Transcendental Meditation … Anything but that! No! Aaaaahhhhh!” Then he fell to the floor writhing in a fit of mock epilepsy, and we both started to giggle.

  “Oh, stop it,” said our mother. “TM is a relaxation technique, not electroshock therapy.”

  She took a brochure out of her canvas shoulder bag and smoothed it out on the table. “Everyone gets a word called a mantra. You say it over and over again, and it creates a sense of calm. Your father and I are going to learn it this weekend, then you kids will get initiated next Thursday after school.”

  John and I leaned over and studied the brochure. It showed pictures of an Indian man with long, gray hair and a tumbleweed for a beard. He was sitting cross-legged on a rug, fondling a daisy. His face, I noticed, had a peculiar, dopey smile on it, as if he had just finished eating an enormous piece of cake, then gotten clubbed over the head.

  “That’s the Maharishi,” our mother said. “He teaches people to achieve inner peace.”

  Dress him in a Hefty bag, I thought, and he could easily pass for any of the local lunatics who staggered around Amsterdam Avenue singing “Flashlight” and pushing a stolen shopping cart into traffic. In several of the photos, the Maharishi was sitting in a circle with his followers. They were all slightly cadaverous, pale to the brink of translucency: blissed-out albinos in bedsheets. “Transcendental Meditation changed their lives—let it change yours, too!” the caption read.

  “Do we have to do this, Mom?” I said. “It looks creepy.”

  “It’s not creepy,” said our mother. “Lots of respectable people do TM. Merv Griffin does TM. So does Burt Bacharach. Maybe you don’t realize it, but I’m giving you a tool that can help you for the rest of your lives.”

  That past week at school, Mr. Grimaldi, the professional bloodletter known as my gym teacher, had organized a massive game of boys-against-girls dodge ball. Somehow, my classmate Charlotte and I found ourselves the last two girls left in the game. We cowered in the corner while our teammates screamed, “Catch the ball, you morons!” and the boys counted to three, then slammed a barrage of rubber into us with all the force they could summon, breaking Charlotte’s glasses and leaving our thighs imprinted with hot pink grapefruits. My brother, meanwhile, had gotten chased home from school by a gang of older kids with an ice pick who told him, essentially, that his sorry white ass was theirs. As far as I was concerned, the only tools either of us really needed at that moment were blunt instruments.

  The next weekend, however, our parents went to the TM Center to receive $200 worth of enlightenment. Despite our secret fear they’d be brainwashed, they returned home a few hours later laughing breezily and carrying a bagful of bagels. Nothing seemed to have changed until that evening, when, just before dinnertime, our mother lit a stick of cinnamon incense and took the phone off the hook. “Okay, kids, Dad and I are going to meditate!” she sang out. “Please cool it for the next twenty minutes.”

  Then she and my father sat down rigidly on the sofa, side by side, with their eyes closed, while the apartment slowly started to smell like an overcooked muffin. John and I were instructed to stay out of the living room, but since their eyes were shut, we figured, how would they know?

  “Did you see anything strange?” I whispered to my brother, as he tiptoed back into the hallway.

  “Nuh-uh. They’re just sitting there.”

  “Are they breathing?”

  “Dad’s wheezing through his mouth like he always does. Mom looks okay. No blood or drool or anything.” He sounded slightly disappointed.

  Me, I worried—not about my parents’ vital signs, but that somebody might actually discover this latest tableau of Gilman family weirdness. What if our neighbor, Mr. Garcia, came by to borrow our blender while our parents were sitting there like zombies? What if the apartment caught on fire, and the cops wanted to know what our parents had been doing when the blaze broke out, and I’d have to say, “They were meditating, Officer”? Then the newspaper headline would read: BIZARRE PARENTS IN TM TRANCE WHILE BUILDING BURNS. Worse still, what if the girls at school somehow found out? Bad enough that I was chubby, Jewish, and your basic social retard: now I had to have a mantra, too? I might as well just give my class free run of an arsenal.


  But most distressingly, I learned that the TM Center was located on the southeast corner of 72nd Street and West End Avenue—at 277 West End Avenue, to be exact.

  Whenever gays and lesbians say that sexual orientation is something you’re born with—that you “just know” whom you’re attracted to early on—I’ve never doubted it. Because the very first day I walked into second grade, I saw a boy standing alone by the terrarium. He was carefully patting down some soil at the base of a rock with his fingertips. A lock of his wavy, reddish gold hair fell into his eyes. I was seven years old, but romantic longing and vaguely sexual yearning shot through me like mercury. I fell instantly, torturously in love with him.

  Lincoln Anderson was the tallest boy in our class, and the smartest, and one of the best athletes, and probably the shyest, too, though I mistook his aloofness for flinty, masculine cool. Lincoln Anderson. Augh! Just his name alone—a name of great emancipators and Vikings—left me practically asthmatic with desire! Lincoln Anderson. Every time he got up to write on the blackboard. Every time he crumpled up a Ding Dong wrapper and aimed it in the wastepaper basket. Every time he scored a goal in hockey, or presented to the class one of his many masterful social studies reports entitled “Vasco da Gama: Finder of Oceans” or “Autumn Comes Early to the Adirondacks,” I watched him with secret, shining adoration.

  The other girls in my class actively loathed boys. A cherished pastime, in fact, was to shriek “Eeew! I’m contaminated!” anytime they bumped into Ian by the pencil sharpener. Terrified that my crush made me some sort of mutant, I played along with them, doling out “cootie shots” to any poor girl who accidentally brushed against Patrick or Jimmy in the milk line. But once I was alone, sitting in the library during “reading period,” I concocted elaborate fantasies about me and Lincoln that I’d replay lovingly in my head, lingering over the details, altering and embroidering them, stoking my ardor. These daydreams were drawn shamelessly from television, comic books, movies. In them, Lincoln was always Lincoln, but I was somehow a teenaged version of myself—breathtaking and curvaceous, with soft winds blowing perpetually through my hair—as if I’d just stepped blithely off the cover of a Harlequin Romance. My personality was utterly transformed, too, from the one on display in gym class, where I routinely faked a limp in order to get out of kickball.

  One of my favorite daydreams, inspired by The Poseidon Adventure, began with our whole class taking a field trip to Staten Island. It would be a lazy spring morning—everybody would just be milling around the deck feeding peanuts to the gulls. But then, suddenly, a freak tidal wave would wallop the New York harbor, and the Staten Island ferry would capsize. Our teacher and the captain would be knocked unconscious. Amid the flames and roiling waters, it would fall to Lincoln and me alone to save the entire ship.

  Lincoln would say something like: “Susie, take my hand, let me pull you up this escape hatch to safety!” and then I’d respond, “But Lincoln, we must make a human chain, and save the others!”

  Our classmates would all be blubbering or semicomatose—a mass of jelly and grapes, really—but Lincoln and I would remain cool, commanding, laserlike in our intelligence, witty beyond compare, and encyclopedic in our knowledge of maritime engineering.

  Muscular, sensuous, streaked erotically with soot and our clothes ripped dramatically to expose our best body parts, we’d jerry-rig a Morse Code transmitter, send out an SOS, then courageously lead our classmates through a perilous labyrinth of ventilation ducts. Alas, while crawling across a steam pipe dangling above a burning tank of gasoline, Courtney would lose her grip and plunge, horribly, to her death. And I, being a delicate creature of enormous sensitivity, would pause, my lower lip trembling, looking gamine with grief. But Lincoln would grab my hand.

  “Susie, you mustn’t!” he’d shout. “We’ve got to get out of here before the whole ship blows!”

  Just in the nick of time, we’d deliver the rest of our classmates to safety at the exact same moment that our teacher regained consciousness. Aboard the deck of the Coast Guard rescue ship, Lincoln and I would be wrapped in satin bathrobes, hailed as heroes, and surrounded by fawning reporters. Only then would the enormity of our ordeal catch up with me and, going into shock, I’d faint gorgeously in Lincoln’s arms, collapsing like an exquisite, injured swan.

  “Gosh, she’s so beautiful, and she doesn’t even know it,” Lincoln would marvel, gazing adoringly at my unconscious body. “And I couldn’t have done it without her.”

  Okay, now: do I even have to say that in real life, Lincoln completely ignored me?

  Whenever it was my turn to be “milk monitor,” I went out of my way to hand him a little red and white carton of homogenized milk personally.

  “Here, Lincoln,” I’d say breathlessly, holding the milk as if it were a quivering bird, the Hope Diamond of dairy products. “Here’s your milk.”

  “Mffhmph,” Lincoln would mumble. Then he’d toss his head slightly to get his hair out of his eyes and saunter back to his desk. Besides these occasional grunts—which I optimistically translated as “thank you”—Lincoln had only ever said exactly one thing to me: “If you’re such a feminist, why don’t you clean out the gerbil cage?”

  And now, suddenly, miserably, I found myself about to enter his sacred sphere of existence under the most mortifying circumstances imaginable. Because the borough of Manhattan, as I figured it, had approximately two million miles of sidewalks, 300,000 city blocks, and 17 zillion buildings. And yet, out of all the possible spaces for the Transcendental Meditation Center, the Maharishi and his dingbat followers had chosen to set up shop at 277 West End Avenue—the very apartment building where, according to the mimeographed class list on our refrigerator, Lincoln Anderson lived.

  On Thursday of our TM initiation, John and I were both excused from school early for what we begged our mother to describe in her note as simply “medical reasons.” As we rode downtown on the bus, I bit my nails into bloody crescents while my mother chatted cheerfully about how meditation would make us all so much more relaxed. All I could think was that it was 1:30 P.M. If it took thirty minutes to get to the TM Center, I calculated, then another hour and a half to get “initiated,” we’d be leaving the TM Center at exactly the time when Lincoln would be returning home from school.

  If we bumped into him on the street, maybe that would be salvageable. With all the stores and discount supermarkets, there were thousands of reasons we could be in his neighborhood. But what if we collided with him just as we were emerging from the TM Center? The only possible thing I could think of was to pull my coat over my head and stumble out the door like a headless person, hoping he somehow wouldn’t notice.

  The TM Center was in a corner of Lincoln’s lobby by the service elevator, and we slipped in inconspicuously enough. Inside, the reception area was funereal. A gaunt woman in aviator glasses and a stretchy green turtleneck came out from behind a musty curtain. Her long hair was parted severely down the center of her scalp and when she smiled, she looked pained, as if she had a horse’s bridle in her mouth and some unseen hand was yanking at the reins behind her.

  “Ellen, how very good to see you again,” she said. Then she turned to me and John. “I’m Agatha,” she said. “On behalf of the Maharishi, I welcome you.”

  That week, John and I had been told that, in order to “show our dedication to the Maharishi,” the TM Center required us to donate a week’s allowance to him, which only confirmed our suspicions that his holiness wasn’t a guru but a panhandler.

  “Hi,” I said glumly.

  My brother got more to the point. “Does the Maharishi still want my allowance?” he asked.

  Agatha gave a brittle laugh. “Oh. Yes. But it’s not for him. It’s for you” she said. “It’s a sacrifice you’re making for yourself. For self-improvement. And for this reason only, the Maharishi thanks you.”

  John and I looked around, expecting to see the Maharishi emerge from the curtains behind the desk.

  “Oh!” sh
e said, sensing our confusion. “His holiness isn’t here. He’s in India. Now, Ellen,” she said to our mother, with a speed clearly designed to head off any questions John or I might have about where, exactly, our allowances were going if his holiness was in another hemisphere, “do you mind waiting here? We prefer to initiate children alone.”

  Agatha whisked us behind the curtain into a dimly lit room with high ceilings. Thick velvet curtains had been drawn over all the windows, and the room was empty except for a Persian carpet and two threadbare armchairs. On one end was a fireplace with a giant poster of the Maharishi taped above it. The mantel was cluttered with flower arrangements in various stages of decay, bowls of fermenting oranges, and an assortment of steaming incense burners that made the entire room smell like the underside of a throw pillow.

  “Now, sit down and we’ll watch a little movie first,” Agatha said. She used the tone adults use when they haven’t the faintest idea how to relate to children—the vocal equivalent of aspartame. A filmstrip was projected onto the bare wall in front of us: Transcendental Meditation: Pathway to Inner Peace. It consisted of jiggly shots of the Maharishi, sitting cross-legged on the grass somewhere in India, talking about TM. He spoke softly with a mincing accent—it was hard to make out what he was saying—and I found it only slightly more interesting than a filmstrip called Silt I’d been forced to sit through at a recent school assembly. Pieces of lint flickered around the peripheries of each frame, and I wound up paying more attention to these than anything else.

  Afterward, another woman entered the room. She had long, oily hair parted in the middle just like Agatha’s, and a turtleneck that almost looked like a neck brace. Acne was splattered across her chin and her forehead. She reminded me, vaguely, of a baby-sitter we once had who spent the entire evening seeding a nickel bag in the sleeve of our parents’ Magical Mystery Tour album.