Free Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress by Susan Jane Gilman Page A

they’d simply resorted to bullying. “Finish your carrots,” my mother ordered. “Now.”
    Looking down at the congealing, lurid carrot wheels I’d succeeded in pushing around my dinner plate for the past half-hour, I suddenly thought of Miriam, Rochelle, and their
amigas.
    “Li-eeke, I don’t dink so, all riiiight,” I said in my best possible Spanglish.
    “Excuse me?” said my mother, setting down her fork.
    “What? Jew deaf?” I said. “Like, I ain’t gonna be eatin’ no carrots an’ shit, riiiight?” I repeated, this time making a little turkey bob with my head.
    My brother slid off his seat down under the table, and my father removed his glasses and began massaging the bridge of his nose.
    “Oh. Are we back to being Puerto Rican again?” said my mother.
    “Das riiiight,” I said proudly.
    “Well then.” She dropped her napkin crisply down onto her plate. “In that case, let me put it to you this way. Open up a big, fresh mouth to me like that ever again, and I’ll slap you so hard you’ll be prying your teeth out of the floorboards. Is that clear,
amiga?
”
    My eyes filled up wetly and I nodded.
    “
Bueno,
” said my mother.
    I had to give her credit. None of the kids in the neighborhood had anything on my mother.
    Jerome, my friend Annie’s older brother, soon put the kibosh on another one of my ideas.
    “Black and Puerto Rican kids don’t beat us up because we’re un-cool, Susie,” he told me. “They beat us up as historical payback.”
    Even though Jerome was probably all of fifteen, I considered him a grown-up because he had a beard. Whenever I went to Annie’s house, Jerome was skulking around the kitchen in his suede vest, eating organic yogurt and complaining about the Nixon administration. As Annie and I played checkers or Candyland in her bedroom, we’d hear Jerome yelling at the television, “Henry, you goddamn fascist!”
    Jerome had the habit of talking to me and Annie as if we were grown-ups and not in elementary school. Usually when people did this, it was flattering. But with Jerome it was just scary, because he tended to view all grown-ups as either dimwits or criminals. Once, when he overheard me mention to Annie that I liked the song “The Candy Man,” he came storming into the living room yelling, “How can you possibly like that song? Don’t you know Sammy Davis Jr. campaigned for Nixon? Don’t you realize that royalties from that song are supporting an administration that’s engaged in the covert bombing of Cambodia?”
    I was six years old. I had no idea what Cambodia was. I liked the song simply because of its lyrics,
Who can take a rainbow, wrap it in a sigh? Soak it in the sun and make a groovy lemon pie?
    But after Jerome explained it to me, it was fairly impossible to listen to “The Candy Man” ever again without thinking of Henry Kissinger napalming babies.
    Now Jerome leaned back in his chair. “You don’t know a thing about imperialism or slavery, do you?” he said incredulously.
    I did so. “Imperial,” I informed him, was the name of a yo-yo as well as a brand of margarine. As for slavery, I knew all about it from a picture book my parents had given me on Harriet Tubman. Unfortunately, from reading it I’d somehow gotten the impression that the African slaves had been a small, finite group of people—rather like the crew of a shipwreck—whom the heroic and fabulous Harriet Tubman had rescued single-handedly while driving a railroad train and wearing many interesting but not terribly glamorous disguises.
    Jerome looked at me disgustedly. “The slaves were not like the crew on
Gilligan’s Island,
Susie,” he nearly spat. “They were millions of people.” He then cleared away our half-finished game of Chutes and Ladders and spent the next hour educating Annie and me about the full, epic atrocities of slavery and colonialism.
    When he finally finished, he crossed his arms triumphantly. “See,” he said smugly, “that’s