Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read Online Free PDF Page A

mother insisted on dressing her and her two sisters up in identical sailor suits and pulling them through the town in a wagon decorated to look like a boat for the annual Fourth of July parade, during which time they were all bidden to sing interminable and quasi-patriotic “boat songs” like “Sailing, Sailing, Over the Bounding Main” and “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat” even though they’d grown up landlocked. I would date a Robert Redford look-alike when I was sixteen, whose mother used to dress up as “Mrs. Pumpkin” for Halloween and insist that he be photographed with her in a vegetable patch for her Christmas newsletter. How humiliating! There would be other boys whose mothers would be only too happy to pull out family albums to show me snapshots of their little darlings caught for eternity picking their noses and peeing in the dog’s dish—one, even, dressed up like a girl by his older sister and installed at a tea party. I would meet girls who were forced as children to sing “Sheep May Safely Graze” in church while actually dressed up as sheep. Who were carted out to dance the tarantella for relatives. Who were encouraged to recite abominable rhyming poems written by their mother entitled, “Reflections on a Menopausal Picnic.” Girls who were paraded about in ludicrous Easter bonnets, who were photographed sitting on the toilet wearing only Mickey Mouse sunglasses and a feather boa, who were ordered to play the ukulele for neighbors, who were preserved in both film and memory in the shipwreck of school talent shows. I would come to realize that for everyone, childhood means having limited power, at best, in the face of adults’ pathetic and misguided ideas about how children should behave. It means being hamstrung between the desire to please and desire, period. Welcome to the world.
    But back in New York, in the days immediately following our return from Silver Lake, I thought about none of this. Thanks to my own gnatlike attention span, I quickly became consumed by such new, all-important projects as rearranging my crayons, lobbying for a mink coat, and figuring out how to clip rhinestone earrings to my hair without ripping it out of my head. Forgetting the shame of my movie debut, I took away from it only one lasting impression: if I was truly going to be a star, it would simply not be enough to perform. Oh, no. I would have to direct as well. Thanks to Alice Furnald, I added that to my list.

Chapter 2
    A Girl’s Guide to Bragging and Lying
    THE DAY I STARTED kindergarten I made a jarring discovery: all the other girls, it seemed, wanted to be just as fabulous as I did.
    The first morning of school, after the critical business of nap blankets was settled, our teacher, Mrs. Mutnick, had our class sit in a circle on the rag rug by the piano.
    “Now, we’re all going to say our names and what each of us wants to be when we grow up,” she said brightly. “For example, my name is Mrs. Mutnick, and when I grow up, I want to be a kindergarten teacher.”
    “But you
are
a kindergarten teacher,” said Gregory Dupree.
    Mrs. Mutnick gave a fluttery little laugh, a sort of falsetto hiccup. “Oh, dears, I’m saying it as an
example,
” she explained, “so that you’ll understand how to answer, you see? Now Gregory, you try.”
    Gregory thought a minute. “My name is Gregory Jackson Dupree,” he said. “And when I grow up, I want to be a member of the Black Panthers.”
    Mrs. Mutnick removed her large tortoiseshell glasses, then put them back on again. “I see,” she said. Her eyes darted quickly around the circle until they landed on redheaded Brian McConnell, who was already in the process of chewing the hat off a Fisher-Price policeman. “Brian,” she smiled encouragingly. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
    Brian chewed thoughtfully. “I want to be a Black Panther, too,” he said.
    “Me too!” shouted Timothy Wang.
    “Okay, class,” Mrs. Mutnick inhaled. Obviously, the