Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (15 page)

“No-ho-ho. Please?” she begged, hoisting the tray aloft so no one could get at it. “These are for later? First, we’re going to play some games?”

There was a collective groan from the group.

“Okay everybody,” Agatha clapped her hands together. “Let’s all sit on the floor.” Seeing as there were still only two armchairs in the room, this was not hard to get people to do. Once we were all settled, Agatha crossed her legs and looked around at us radiantly. “Now,” she said, “I want everyone to say their name and then”—she made a gesture like she was plucking inspiration from thin air—“I want everyone to share their feelings about the Maharishi.”

“Oh, let me begin,” Pamela said excitedly. In her breathy voice, she said, “My name is Pamela? And when I look at the Maharishi?” she smiled gooily, “I see a man of peace and tranquillity and truth? Then she turned to the twin girls seated on her right. “Isabella, Francesca, what do you two see?”

Twisting shyly away, Isabella just shrugged. Francesca ignored the question and concentrated on walking her butchered Barbie along the patterns in the rug.

“I see,” Pamela frowned. “Rufus, what about you?” She looked to the blond boy holding the yo-yo.

“I thought we were supposed to say our own names,” he said petulantly.

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.