Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (3 page)

“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 clothing 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.”

And since it was freezing, and dancing was preferable to just standing there, Edwid and I just threw ourselves into it, breaking out our best dance moves from our own, personal repertoire.

“Stop! Cut!” Alice yelled. “Ellen,” she called to my mother, “what’s Susie doing down there on one leg? What’s wrong with her hand?”

“Oh,” said my mother. “She’s performing an arabesque and flashing a peace sign. It’s a little ballet thing she likes to do.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” said Alice. “Little Susie Gilman!” she shouted down from the terrace. “Enough with the arabesques and the peace signs. And Edwid, what’s with the shimmying?”

What Alice had forgotten is that Edwid and I hadn’t been raised on Julie Andrews musicals. We’d had our diapers changed to Otis Redding. We’d learned to walk listening to Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” and Tina Turner’s “River Deep—Mountain High.” In the bathtub, we regularly sang along to the entire soundtrack of
Yellow Submarine.
When ordered to dance, Edwid had launched into his version of the pony mixed with go-go moves he’d seen on the Sunday morning kiddie show
Wonderama.
This, apparently, was not what Alice had had in mind.

“Forget the dancing, you two,” she ordered. “Just skip. Skip joyously around Saul.”

“Like this!” Carly shouted. She lifted up the hem of her caftan and mimed skipping joyously across the terrace. Even Alice looked a bit stunned at the sight. She turned back to the camera. “Skip,” she said.

Saul resumed playing his flute and Edwid and I skipped around him furiously, in great, spastic movements with big, imbecilic smiles plastered on our faces that we hoped approximated joyousness. We twirled and flailed, pretending to conduct an enormous, invisible orchestra with our entire bodies. We leaped. We pranced. We waltzed. We sashayed. Neither of us had any idea what the fuck we were doing.

“Beautiful, beautiful!” said Alice. “You’re children! You’re innocent! You’re natural! Keep skipping!” She cued Clifford to release the butterflies. One of them had clearly been asphyxiated in the gefilte fish jar—it wafted down pitifully like a dry leaf—but the other fluttered about wanly, and we chased it with exaggerated dedication, our gusto fueled, mostly, by the fact that we were freezing.

“Skip! Chase the butterfly!” Alice chanted.

We skipped and chased, skipped and chased, and then suddenly, Alice yelled, “Cut! It’s a wrap!” and Saul pulled off his nightcap and wiped his forehead with it, and my mother came down and pulled me quickly into my tutu, and Edwid was buttoned back into his pajamas and flung over Carly’s shoulder. Clifford was collapsing all of Alice’s equipment and carrying it back up the hill to the car, and Alice was muttering “Where the hell did I put my thermos? I need coffee
now,
” and then she was off, and I heard her car sputtering as it started, the tires crunching over gravel, and Saul was waving goodbye to us, and the gate was swinging closed with a
tlink!
behind him and then, that was it. It was all over.

One butterfly had vanished, the other lay dead on the sand, sacrificed to art, to the “Ode to Innocence.” The sun glinted over the horizon. The lake was glassy and eerily still, as if we had never existed, as if it had been preserved in time long before humans started prancing about with their Super-8 cameras. My mother and I stood alone on the beach.

“Well,” she sighed, “I guess that’s one for the history books. Shall we get you back into bed?”

That afternoon, Edwid and I didn’t say anything to the other kids on the ice cream line about our less-than-stellar movie debut, and they didn’t mention it either, which was all just as well. The new point of interest was Terry, the substitute ice cream man filling in for Jack, the octogenarian regular, who was away on vacation in the Adirondacks. Terry was a college kid. To make a tedious job interesting, he’d made up scatological and sexual nicknames for all of the frozen novelties, which he shared with us in a conspiratorial whisper. If we asked him for a “Chip Candy Crunch,” Terry would wink, “Oh, you mean a Chip Candy
Crotch?
” sending us into convulsions. Nobody cared about some movie called
Camp
when you could listen to Terry saying, “Here you go. Two Dixie
Cunts
and a
Poop
sicle.”

In fact, Edwid and I never spoke about
Camp,
period, even when it was aired for the entire colony at the Barn, three weeks later, as part of the annual “End of Summer” banquet held the Saturday night before Labor Day. We sat on the wooden picnic benches beside our parents, quietly clutching our Styrofoam cups full of Very Berry Hi-C, watching the shaky camera work of the opening shot, in which a disembodied hand spray-painted the word “Camp” on a woman’s bare midriff to the trippy sound of the Byrds’ song, “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

We watched the jiggly, lint-ridden frames panning over the lake to the pink and purple VW bug. Applause and hoots sounded from both the audience on film and the audience in the Barn, which was essentially one and the same, as each hippie-clown emerged again from the tiny car (the biggest cheers erupted when Larry Levy emerged, strung awkwardly between the shoulders of my father and Sidney Birnbaum). Then came scenes I hadn’t seen before: My mother and a guy named Morris, dressed in evening clothes, having a fancy candlelit dinner on a wooden raft in the middle of the lake, while being waited upon by a swimmer … the Fleming twins singing Dylan’s anti-Vietnam song, “Masters of War” accompanied by Clifford on his vibraphone in a rowboat … some “avant-garde” scene in which finger puppets alternated between reading aloud sections of the Warren Report and poetry by Kahlil Gibran … halfway through this mess came Edwid and me, dancing frantically on the beach around Saul, who was occasionally decapitated by the camera angles. I was sure everyone would burst out laughing at the sight of us, but instead of snickers, there was an almost universal “Aaaaawwwww” throughout the Barn as assorted mothers gushed: “Oh, that’s little Susie and Edwid! Aren’t they cute!”