Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

by Susan Jane Gilman

  Pamela laughed nervously. “Oh, of course!” she whispered. “How foolish. Sorry.”

  “My name is Rufus,” Rufus said dourly. “And when I look at the Maharishi, I think he needs a haircut.”

  This elicited a couple of hoots from the circle. “I look at the Maharishi, and I think he’s a fag!” the boy in the rugby shirt shouted.

  “Bruno, we’ll have none of that,” said Agatha.

  “What’s a fag?” said the littlest boy in the group, who couldn’t have been more than four.

  Francesca set down her Barbie and looked at him with exasperation. “I told you, Percy!” she yelled. “It’s the name of an evil king.”

  “What? No, it’s not!” said Bruno.

  Agatha stood up. “Okay, people,” she exclaimed, “Why don’t we move on to something else.”

  The little boy in the cowboy outfit suddenly raised his hand and started waving it frantically. “Agatha! Agatha! Can I just say one thing? One thing quickly?”

  “Yes, Harold?”

  “Did you know,” the boy said earnestly, twisting the fringe on his cowboy vest around one of his knuckles, “that if you’re Scandinavian, and you marry a woman who’s Nigerian, and you have sexual intercourse with her and make children, you’re increasing the gene pool?”

  Nobody knew what the hell to do with this. For a moment, all the air seemed to go out of the room.

  “I see,” exhaled Agatha. “Well. That’s interesting. Thank you for sharing that with us, Harold.”

  “You know, Agatha,” Pamela said softly, “I think it’s time for the group Christmas meditation now, don’t you?”

  “Yes! Everybody stand up and gather around the Christmas tree,” Agatha said. “For the next ten minutes, we’re going to march around the tree with our eyes closed, meditating together.”

  John looked at me, panicked. There’d been nothing on the invitation about this. It was like being told to participate in a collective nose-picking. To the other kids’ credit, they seemed as repulsed by the idea as we were.

  “That’s moronic!” Bruno announced loudly. “I’m not doing it, and you can’t make me.”

  “You said we’d get candy,” whined Francesca.

  “If we walk around with our eyes closed, we’ll all bang into the Christmas tree,” Rufus said.

  “Nobody’s going to bang into a Christmas tree,” said Agatha. “We’re all going to hold hands.”

  “Yeeccch. No way am I holding hands with girls!”

  “Then hold hands with two boys,” Agatha suggested.

  “Yeah, then you’ll be a homo like the Maharishi!” sang Bruno.

  “Bruno!” Pamela shouted. Suddenly, the room went still. Nobody had heard Pamela raise her voice before, and the shrillness of it seemed to bounce off the bare walls and hang in the air. Pamela looked horrified and clamped both her palms over her mouth. But the rest of us were sort of impressed, actually.

  “Bruno,” Agatha said sharply, “we don’t speak that way about his holiness. Nor about anyone else. There will be no name-calling, do you hear me? Now,” she glared, “if you don’t meditate, you don’t get any candy.”

  Transcendence we couldn’t understand, but bribery we certainly could. Grudgingly, we all joined hands and began trudging slowly around the artificial tree with our eyes closed. There was no way I could concentrate on my mantra even if I’d wanted to. I kept worrying that I’d trip over the rug or that someone would photograph me in this humiliating situation. I opened my eyes a moment to see if everybody else had their eyes closed.

  “Hey! No peeking!” Bruno shouted at me.

  Floorboards squeaked beneath the carpet, and I could hear Rufus wheezing. Outside, somebody passed by with a transistor radio. A snippet of KC and the Sunshine Band came through the window— Do a little dance, make a little love, get down to—then a police siren tore by.

  I don’t know who belched first, but I guessed it was Bruno. It was a long, guttural, repulsive belch that growled up two octaves, then climaxed gaseously. A few kids started giggling.

  “Bruno,” I heard Agatha say sternly.

  “What? I didn’t do anything. Sheesh.”

  A moment later, there was another burp. A few more kids giggled, and a higher-pitched farting noise followed that sounded like helium being slowly let out of a balloon.

  “Children—” Agatha started, but she was interrupted by two more laborious farts and a belch. “Children,” she said again, but by this time, a veritable orchestra of farts and belches had started from different locations around the room, punctuated by giggling. The more people giggled, the more brazen the farters and belchers became, and the harder everyone laughed. The circle quickly fell apart, and when I opened my eyes, I saw everyone else had opened theirs, too, including Agatha and Pamela, who looked a little deflated.

  “Can we eat now?” said Francesca. “You said we could have candy.”

  “CAN-DEE, CAN-DEE!” shouted my brother. It was his first public act of misbehavior and, for some reason, it made me enormously proud of him. “CAN-DEE!”

  “CAN-DEE!” seconded Bruno delightedly, and then, in a moment, he and my brother were leading the entire room in a chant, “CAN-DEE! CAN-DEE! WE WANT CAN-DEE!”

  “Now hold on—” said Agatha.

  “CAN-DEE! CAN-DEE! WE WANT CAN-DEE!”

  Agatha pulled off her Santa hat, sighed, and threw it on the chair. She motioned to Pamela to bring in the trays. “Fine. Whatever,” she said. “I didn’t sign up for this.” She turned and walked out of the room.

  Pamela took the trays down from the shelves and we fell upon them greedily, grabbing at anything. But in a moment, we discovered that the snacks weren’t candy at all, but some kind of freakish, prefabricated health food. There were fig bars that looked like clumps of tar. Congealed-looking dates hairy with coconut shreds. Sesame seed bricks that some miscreant had wrapped in cellophane with the word “treat” stamped on them, as if that was enough to compensate for the fact that the product had, essentially, the consistency and appeal of sawdust.

  “Oh. Gross!” yelled the twins. All around me, kids were making gagging noises and spitting the snacks out into their hands. “Yuck!” “Ewww.” “Dis-gust-o-mundo.”

  “What the fuck is this?” shouted Bruno. “DOG SHIT?”

  “All right. That’s it,” said Agatha, stalking back into the room furiously. Tucked under her arm was a Kleenex box that had been outfitted in gold foil paper. “You’re all out of here,” she said to us. “Now.”

  “Agatha,” said Pamela. “Think of the Maharishi.”

  “I called a car service. The drivers should be here in five minutes. Here are their allowances.” Agatha thrust the Kleenex box into Pamela’s chest. “Bugs Bunny Superstar starts at Loew’s Cinema at 2:15. You drop them off, you get them seated, I call their parents.”

  “Yeee Haaa! We’re going to the movies!” shouted Bruno.

  “MOO-VEE! MOO-VEE!” shouted my brother, who had clearly found his calling as an instigator. “LET’S SEE DA MOO-VEE!”

  All of us started squealing and cheering. We helped ourselves into our coats and mittens in record time, and fifteen minutes later, we were all squirming around excitedly in the front two rows of Loew’s Cinema. With our allowances, we each bought an industrial-sized box of Milk Duds, a trough of Dr Pepper, and enough popcorn to fill up a snare drum. It was a rainy afternoon—the theater was packed to the point of violating city fire ordinances—and we hooted and elbowed each other and threw popcorn in the air like confetti and hyper-reacted to the Looney Toon characters along with the six zillion other shrieking Upper West Side kids crammed into the theater. Midway through the movie, I became aware of the heat seeping through my shoes, and the smell of artificial butter wafting in from the lobby in waves. Finally, I realized, happily, I was participating in something normal and all-American. As the sugar and cartoon stimulation began to caramelize my brain, I slid back in my seat, feeling sated and stupefied.

  The
next day, Lincoln Anderson stopped in front of my desk on his way to the pencil sharpener. “Uh, hey, um. I think I saw you yesterday,” he said sheepishly.

  You might as well have punctured my stomach repeatedly with a staple gun. Lincoln had seen me in the Transcendental Meditation Center. With all those psychotic kids and those sickly Maharishi yahoos and the plastic Christmas tree. It was the most terrible of all possible scenarios.

  “Were you at the movies on 83rd Street?” he said.

  “Bugs Bunny Superstar?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I saw you. I was in the back. It was a good movie, I thought.”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “It was a really good movie,” was all I could think to add.

  “Bugs Bunny. He’s okay,” Lincoln said.

  Then he headed off to the pencil sharpener.

  That was it—the only one-on-one conversation we would have during our entire elementary school career. But I would remember it. I wasn’t under any illusions that Lincoln suddenly liked me. I didn’t replay the conversation over and over in my head, according it meaning and significance that never existed. Oh no. That stupidity would come later in life, with other boys. But at that moment in fifth grade, it simply thrilled me to think of Lincoln Anderson sitting in Loew’s 83 rd Street Cinema and spotting me across the mayhem of the crowded theater. I was not, after all, invisible. And sometimes, when I found myself feeling particularly wretched, or chubby, or unlikable, I thought about him stopping to talk to me about Bugs Bunny Superstar, his notebook held purposefully at his side, his red-gold hair winking in the fluorescent lights of the classroom, and the small, simple memory of it would bring me something like peace.

  It was almost, you could say, like a mantra.

  PART II

  Not Just Horny, But Obnoxious, Too

  Chapter 6

  Mick Jagger Wants Me

  PUBERTY IS A LITTLE LIKE Chinese Water Torture. One day, a hair grows, and you have to call an Emergency Session in the bathroom with your best friend. After you’ve been assured you’re normal, nothing happens for a while. But then another hair grows. Then you get a pimple. Then another. Then you look in the mirror, and you notice the contours of your body are changing subtly, like a shoreline. Eventually, you’re smoking pot and hating your parents and writing things in your diary like, “I am SOOOO depressed. NOBODY likes me,” and measuring your sex life in terms of bases, but by this time, at least, you’ve mastered the fine art of shaving your armpits.

  That is, unless you were like me. Absolutely nothing occurred for years, and then—Wham! My hormones hit like a long-overdue locomotive.

  The only clue I might’ve had that they were coming was that, the summer before my sophomore year in high school, I’d decided nothing would be more mortifying than to spend it with my parents.

  That June, I landed my first job ever as a live-in mother’s helper on Long Island. A “mother’s helper,” I quickly learned, earns about as much as a migrant worker for doing stuff like changing diapers, vacuuming sand off the living room sofa, and fishing plastic Star Wars action figurines out of the toilet. But no matter: paid a whopping $40 a week for twelve-hours days with no day off, I considered myself a lucky and independent woman.

  And so there I was in the summer of 1979: with thumb-tack-sized breasts and a night brace, longing to be kissed. I could barely operate an electric can opener, and yet I pretended to be capable of caring for both a three-year-old and a newborn. The misguided family who’d employed me were the Maysleses. The father, David, was a well-known documentary producer who’d made, among other things, Gimme Shelter, a film about the Rolling Stones that famously captured on tape the murder at Altamont.

  Toward the end of the summer, Gimme Shelter was having its television premiere, and the Maysleses gave me the evening off so that I could go watch the movie with Vanessa, a friend I’d made who lived next door.

  That evening, Vanessa and I sat around her house in damp Speedo bathing suits, eating the official snack foods of puberty: Nacho Cheese Doritos and Tab. Vanessa had an old, portable black and white RCA television that had a wire hanger for an antenna. It took a while to manipulate the reception. “If this fucking thing takes one more minute,” she hollered, “I’m throwing it in the goddamn swimming pool.” Having been schooled privately in both New York and Europe, Vanessa had developed an impressive mastery of profanity, which I’d made up my mind to emulate almost immediately.

  Eventually, we got the picture clear and settled in. The opening credits rolled.

  Strangely, about ten minutes into the film, my skin started to tingle. Vanessa, who usually talked through anything, stared at the screen in silence. Mick Jagger was singing. Neither of us had ever seen him before. He was swaggering, almost tongue-kissing the microphone, and his eyes were half closed. He was serpentine, sensual, yet just girlish enough not to be scary. He looked like he could put you in his mouth and melt you.

  “Ohmygod,” I whispered.

  Vanessa looked at me.

  I looked at her.

  We didn’t say anything and stared back at Mick, whirling about the stage.

  Then we both moaned.

  From that day on, no one could hold a rational conversation with us. All we talked about was the Rolling Stones, and we didn’t so much talk as shriek. We prefaced just about everything we said with a hyperventilating, “Ohmygod” and ended everything as if it was followed!!! by!!! triple!!! exclamation points!!! The adults around us felt compelled to roll their eyes and inform us that our behavior was “really adolescent”—which only further encouraged us. After all: Who the fuck cared what adults thought? If adults were so smart and hip, we reasoned, they would have found some way to avoid growing up and turning into adults.

  Then Labor Day rolled around, and Vanessa got sent back to boarding school, while I had to return home to Manhattan and those two genetic albatrosses known as my parents.

  Back in New York, I decided that the only way to survive such humiliation was to pretend that my parents simply didn’t exist— well, at least as soon as they forked over my allowance each week. I also proceeded to build a shrine in my bedroom.

  I bought Rolling Stones records, Rolling Stones posters, Rolling Stones buttons, Rolling Stones books. When I trooped home carrying a Rolling Stones mural—a blow-up of the cover from their album Black and Blue, six feet long and three feet high—and secured it to the wall with industrial-sized two-sided tape because I swore I would never, ever want to stop looking at it for as long as I lived, my parents stopped coming into my bedroom.

  Had there been an Internet in those days, I probably would’ve rotted to death in front of the monitor, clicking obsessively from one Rolling Stones chat room to another. But instead, poor, pre—digital age moi, I had to scavenge whatever “Stones fixes” I could find from magazines. This wasn’t easy. Insipid fanzines like 16 and TeenBeat, were ga-ga over teddy bears like Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson. Where, I wanted to know, were magazines for fifteen-year-old girls in love with British bisexual cokeheads, thank you? It was an outrage. I was an invisible, oppressed demographic. I had to make do with Rolling Stone and People magazine, scouring them for so much as a paragraph about Mick, or even his bitchy ex-wife, Bianca.

  Alcoholics hate to drink alone. When my infatuation became so all-consuming that I almost couldn’t take it, I called up Michelle, my oldest and best friend, who lived in the same apartment building as I did.

  After calling an “emergency sleepover,” I stayed up all night playing Rolling Stones music for her, showing her photographs of the band from their album covers, desperately trying to get her to see the world through my eyes, to hear it as I did: Listen to “Ruby Tuesday” I begged, playing it not once, not twice, but three times in a row. “Tell me he isn’t singing about us. I mean, ‘Don’t question why she needs to be so free.’ Michelle, is that not us? And Ohmygod, okay, you have GOT to hear ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ …”

  The next day, I took Michelle downtown to Po
sterMat on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, a rock ‘n’ roll novelty store that sold stash boxes, rainbow-colored hash pipes, incense, T-shirt iron-ons, and little calling cards with phrases like “Methinks thou art a shit-head” engraved on them in elegant script, which we thought were really outrageous and funny.

  There, in the back of PosterMat, past the lava lamps and concert jerseys, I’d discovered a treasure trove of drool-a-bilia. Hung on clacking, metal display sheaves were six different Rolling Stones posters! You could stand there, just stand there, and turn back and forth between them, staring for hours: Mick in black and white, wearing a “Palace Laundry” shirt. The Stones all together in a field with “Rolling Stones” written in lolling, psychedelic script. Keith with his guitar. Mick in heavy eyeliner. Glorious image upon glorious image—they were beautiful—it was almost too much to take. Looking at them left me flushed and breathless, desire boiling off my skin like a vapor.

  The posters were what finally did it for Michelle. By the time we left the store, she, too, was a fanatic.

  After that, the two of us went about constructing our own little meta-reality, in which the Rolling Stones replaced the sun at the center of the solar system. We talked about the Stones as if they were our intimate friends, fantasizing and worrying about them endlessly.

  “Oh, Michelle, do you think Mick is lonely?” I said one night, as we were listening to Some Girls for the fourteenth time in a row on her Panasonic portable record player.

  “Lonely?” she looked at me and snorted. “Girl, this dude has more women than any other guy on the planet. No, I don’t think Mick is lonely.”

  “But c’mon,” I said, picking up the album cover and pointing. “Think about it: His last hit was ‘Miss You.’ What if underneath all his fame, he’s really pining away for intimacy, and that song is, like, his plea for help? Wouldn’t that be terrible? Could you imagine him, lonely?”

  Michelle set down her cigarette. She’d started smoking—for effect, of course. “Shit. Maybe you’re right. Maybe he’s really, really depressed. That’s a horrible thought…”