THE SPARKLING LITTLE GIRLS OF CHILDHOOD
THE SPARKLING LITTLE GIRLS OF CHILDHOOD
By
David Gottfried
Readers! You are hereby granted another reprieve from my torrent of grim and grubby diatribes reeking of dialectical materialism. I once again have sprinkled fairy dust upon the white pages of my notebook and soon you will see pretty girls and lemon meringue pies and every color except black and white:
I can still hear the sounds of the little girls in my elementary school. Their voices tinkled and tweeted and hit the high notes like little birdies brushing up against the highest branches of a tree in early Spring, making the ice crackle and crumple and fall to water.
There was Mary Mc Morris, who when asked by our teacher how much homework she accomplished during her week-long absence from school due to illness, merrily chirped, “I did not do any work at all, Mrs. Mc Namarra, because my doctor insists that when I get sick I am not do any work at all but should just watch lots of television.”
I would never dare speak to Mrs. Mc Namarra that way. None of the boys in the class would dare speak so boldly and forthrightly. But for the girls it was a different matter. They were presumed to be good, and we boys were presumed guilty, and so the girls could say what they thought, and do what they wanted to do, without compunction.
And who is to say that this basic prejudice of female goodness was not completely correct. President Harry Truman felt that women were basically better and more morally upright, and so, wedded to this contention, he permitted his wife and Mother-in-Law to treat him more like a butler than the President of the United States.
I suppose ultimately it all comes down to looks. Little girls simply look like such little fairies that one cannot begin to suspect them of any evil. Of course, nowadays no one has any regard for the way one dresses, and I suppose that little girls would be perfectly content to galivant around their schools in dirty jeans or sloppy soccer shorts, but in my days little girls looked like inverted ice cream cones: They had narrow little shoulders and nice fluffy dresses that widened and widened the further down you got until, at the point of the fluffy, frilly hem, they were just a glorious mound of vanilla. They played with dolls, were scrupulously neat, and never played ball. They would, however, play jump rope or any number of safe, repetitive physical games which always required that they chant. Their chants were nonsense chants, about going to the Fish market on Friday or any number of quotidian phenomena, and they had nothing to do with the physical game they were playing, but they were said, each and every time the game was played, with rhythmic regularity and certainty. This is a representative sampling of their liturgy:
Czechoslovakia Boomsie boom
Yugoslavia Boomsie boom
We got the music of the hands, one, two, three,
We got the music of the hands, wee.
(Repeat for up to one hour)
These chants were absolutely essential to the goody two shoes goodness of the fine cherubic little girls. By chanting the same chant, again and again, they evinced their submission to a regime, a rule, a reign of cutesy behavior. When they chanted, their voices had a bit of a whine, combined with a streak of sissified submissiveness, that seemed to say that they had to say this chant, their chant was as inexorable as the opening of their vaginas and the bearing of children.
Of course, their voices were not always joyously extolling their submission to a regime of chants and rules and spelling bees. And when they were confronted with what they perceived as a transgression against some special, holy rule, their voices became sharp and snide and decidedly didactic as they told you exactly what you did that was wrong and how you must amend your misdeeds at once – or else I’m telling Mrs. Mc Nammara. When the little girlies reprimanded your unconscionable behavior, their criticism inevitably began with this phrase, “You’re not supposed to ....” For these girls there was a proper way for everything, and once a certain manner of doing something was decreed as proper by our teacher, standing in front of the room with her wise and aged double chin commended by a very expensive necklace which vouchsafed for the moral integrity of her remarks, all other ways of doing something were deemed improper. So if it were proper to tuck one’s undershirt into one’s underpants (And beware of the underpants monster), all other modes of donning one’s Klein’s basement shlock shop attire were strictly forbidden. If it was proper to eat chocolate milk with pretzels and regular milk with chocolate cookies, then it had to be the height of bad taste to consume regular milk with pretzels. Everything, we were assured, had to be done just so, like a barbie doll squeezing into a very tiny dress.
And so the girls would be very upset if my white shirts had a stain, the defacing of the field of whiteness upon my torso as jarring as the marring of the pristine arctic territories by oil exploration. They loved all things white and nice and as sweet as little kittens, and the theme song of their lives seemed to be “Edelweiss,” from “The Sound of Music,” and their patron Saint was Julie Andrews.
Their whiteness and creaminess were most readily apparent when one studied their legs. They all wore long white socks that came absolutely up to the knee. They were quite compulsive about bringing the socks all the way up, and if there were a shortage of elasticity in their socks, they would use rubber bands to keep them standing high. Above their socks, one only saw a pretty white and pinkish field of thigh and knee which had all the lovely succulence of a creamsicle, an ice cream treat of cream and orange ice. If one ventured farther, one of course reached the pinnacle, which was of course the land of the panties, where, we were given to understood, our ice cream treat might be topped off by a maraschino cherry.
They were, quite plainly, a succession of deserts, dressing in the reds and pinks of Strawberry Short Cake, and the Yellows of Lemon Meringue Pie, and the Green of Pistachio Ice Cream. I think they quite consciously carried the custom on into womanhood because when I walk through the perfume and make up section of a department store, my senses are disjointed and confused and I not only want to smell but also want to munch: All the sweet pastels and citrus smells suggest that I am in an ice cream shop and that sorbets and ice cream sundaes are on the menu. Their lipsticks seem poised to become cherry popsicles, and the big metallic cans of hair spray are there to combine the components of a milk shake. It’s a miracle I wasn’t hospitalized for imbibing half the contents of my Aunt’s beauty salon when I was a toddler.
My conception of girls as deserts may seem a tad immature, and I vividly recall an English professor knocking novelists who didn’t take the boxers and the panties off and treat us to the main event. So let me mention my first sexual, or quasi sexual memory, of little girls.
When I was four or five, My Mother and I had a brief vacation in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, the citadel of Kennedyism. At the time, JFK was President and royal king. During the vacation, I grabbed a little girl, kissed her, savored her taste as if she were a living ginger snap, and yelled, on the Hyannis port Streets, “This is what John F. Kennedy is doing to his wife.”
After my Father died (or was murdered), I began to envy and hate girls.
Girls thought the world of themselves. I remember a classmate, in the Second Grade, who said that on the previous night she had been to a Beatles concert, fainted and that Paul Mc Cartney drove her home all the way from Midtown Manhattan to parochial Brooklyn. For some reason, I believed her.
I always seemed to believe that women had all sorts of fanciful and fictional powers. When I was in the first grade, and we were given an IQ test, I somehow subscribed to the delusion that the girl in front of me had to know the answer to everything so I copied what she did. I scored 106 and my Mother, consequently, never thought I’d amount to anything academically. (Years later, my IQ was scored as hovering between 147 and 151 – and this was on the Wechsler scale where one standard deviation equals only 15 points -- while on a dose of Thorazine that was so high that I had lost the ability to read. )
And then, in the third grade, I encountered the aforementioned little Christian princess Mary Mc Morris. I was floored by her sheer guts. While boys always seemed to have to apologize to their dowager elementary school teachers, little girls were given free rein to be as petty as they wished. (I remember a teacher who, grooming her students to be bitchy queens, said that every person of substance ought to have a pet peeve, or something that was such a rude and ghastly affront to her dignity, that she simply couldn’t stand the damn thing, no matter how trivial it might be).
Mary had all the chutzpah of an aging Jewish lady in Miami sporting leathery skin, a Mink coat, and perpetually demanding that the air conditioner run full blast so she could wear her mink coat at all times.
Soon after being cowed by Mary’s brazen confidence, I opted to stand up to her. I had to. I had to because I knew she was against me and my people, the Jewish people.
She was known as the third grade’s expert on Ancient Egypt. She knew the names of all sorts of ancient Egyptian Pharaohs and gods and customs, and she was regularly extolled for being such an Egyptologist. I knew that we Jews had been slaves in Egypt so I reasoned that her affinity for Egypt was symptomatic of her hatred of the Jews. And then, one day, I learned that her Mother was even worse. One day, Mary’s mother came to school and told us that she was more modern than Mary as she preferred to study contemporary Egypt. And contemporary Egypt was ruled by patently anti-Jewish Nassar. I was dumbstruck and indignant.
I started to hang round Mary a lot. At first gingerly, but then more aggressively, I made my presence known with humor, with affected insouciance that said if she were a princess I was a prince and I assailed her with gentle gibes at the purported grandeur of her genteel and Christian world.
Although she was enamored of all things Egyptian, she was firmly encamped in the Christian, and more specifically Lutheran world. Her family was upper middle class, very well educated and unlike so many educated people today, saturated with post Modernism, the progeny of Friederich Nietzsche and a sarcastic appraisal of everything the West once held as dear, she was a throwback to teacups and colonies and crisp English accents decrying the pagan ways of savages in India. Although she may have been Irish, she and her family seemed to waltz through our neighborhood with the urbanity and exemplary etiquette of the man whom Julie Andrews worked for in the movie “Mary Poppins.” When her father did something as mundane as buying boxer shorts in a thrift shop, he strode through the store like a rich Londoner surveying the finest threads in a Regent’s Street clothier. Her aforementioned Mother, who like Mary also had a fetish for Egypt, might have been another Gertrude Bell, an Englishwoman who built the State of Iraq -- a mere instrumentality of Great Britain --- out of the carcass of what had been the Ottoman Empire.
I felt inferior to her. First, because I was a boy, and at that time in my life I felt that women ruled the world. Second, because I was a Jew and almost the antithesis of a lordly English gentleman who sprinkled his speech with puns and jokes so esoteric and erudite one could not understand a damn thing he was saying (And this induced me to speak in a sometimes insufferable, snotty, verbose, pseudo intellectual manner)
Perceiving myself a weak and wavering Jew foredoomed to defeat, I had to stab -- anyplace, anything, whether it be a sofa covered in red velvet or a red velvet dress covering a woman’s body -- that world of Protestant priggishness and propriety.
So while I walked with her by her Lutheran Church (At the time, I did not know that the Lutheran Church was affiliated with Germany), I referred to her Church as her “churchy worchy.”
Mary was irate and inconsolable. I may have only referred to her church as a churchy worchy, but that frail, gilded girl -- all young princesses were raised to be absurdly sensitive and hence ready to be toppled over by the merest zephyr -- had railed like a protestant martyr laid across the medieval rack of the Catholic inquisition. She screamed and cried like debutantes may have carried on in the 1930’s, as they competed for the role of Scarlett Ohara in “Gone With the Wind.”
I felt like more of a man. Indeed, I felt a bit like a Rhett Butler kind of a guy, a man whose eyes could bore through ladies’ dresses to reveal the frilly foolishness of their underthings.
Having exposed her in her delicious underclothes, we became friendly. It didn’t take long for us to see that we both possessed a sure and certain star quality. With her love of Ancient Egypt, and melodramatic heart forever beholden to dying with Asps, she was Elizabeth Taylor in “Anthony and Cleopatra.” With my ability to imitate the Beatles and the Stones, I was Richard Burton who was of course another cool dude of the Sixties with an English accent. In the third, fourth and fifth grades we seemed to star together in “Anthony and Cleopatra,” “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf” and the “VIPS.” And we were the most neurotic and sparklingly interesting elementary school couple and perfect counterpart to the mush and sappiness of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.
Our Hollywood destiny came more sharply into focus one Saturday afternoon at the local Movie theatre. Mary had gone with her friends, and I had gone with my friends and neither of us knew that we were both in the same theatre.
At the close of the first and unmemorable movie, our respective friends left. For reasons that I don’t recall, I decided not to leave. Soon I saw Mary there. And then we found out that in minutes another film would be shown, “To Sir with Love.”
In retrospect, the film seems quite harmless. However, at the time it was considered dangerously provocative for nine-year olds. Our eyes and ears were glued to film.
It was obvious, at the very outset, that this was a film that was all about Britain. As such, it was infinitely fascinating as the Beatles, James Bond, the Rolling Stones and the Man From Uncle all had English affiliations and the Kennedys spoke beautifully which was another way of being English even if they did not have British accents.
We drunk up every last ounce of that movie, tried to import the beats of the opening song into the rhythm of the way we walked, studied the inflection and whine of their voices so we could speak in world weary cockney English, and supped on their cynicism and satire so we could harpoon our neighbors and expose them all as blubbering baboons. Our Anglophilia was so severe we would have thought fish n chips were divine dainties available only to those who had cried upon hearing a crestfallen rendition of “The Lady of Shallot.”
We did not know anything, but in our dreams we knew everything: we divined Sir Lancelot and Camelot and the second coming of the Kennedy’s in the person of Bobby and everything was beautiful and terrifying.
By seeing this movie, we ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, or so it seemed. Mary, that exceedingly precocious girl whose IQ was 140 (I managed to get a peak of the teacher’s examination results) seemed a tad emotionally mature as well as intellectually fast. A sultry and unmistakably dirty look alit across her blonde and angelic face (We all knew that angels could be devils. After all, at the time, “Dark Shadows,” the daytime soap opera for the new fangled hippies, featured a witch with gorgeous blonde locks, just like Mary’s, who was named Angelique.)
I think I, at the tender age of nine, knew instantaneously that she wanted sex. I already knew quite a bit about sex as my disturbed Freudian Mother, and my equally disturbed Freudian doctor, told me that men put their penises into women’s vaginas and thereby made babies. However, my penis did not seem up to the task at it was soft (I did not know that penises had to get hard first and so I thought I had an inferior prick) and besides, I wasn’t interested in having a goddamn baby to take care of. I was afraid.
If I would not romance a girl, I could of course satirize her. And in the Fifth Grade, I had a teacher who gave my satire severity and savoir faire. She made me feel as witty as Gore Vidal sardonically spitting on the American debacle in Vietnam.
Every week she gave us ten new vocabulary words. Most of the words were new to me. They were fancy shmancy five-dollar words that only guys like James Bond or Bobby Kennedy knew. Almost none of them had fewer than three syllables. One of the first words we were given was “malicious.”
This word thrust me on a rocket ship to the moon. There was a very spoiled, bright and special girl in our class, who was a lot like Mary Mc Morris, who hailed from Minnesota and was forever extolling the virtues of her home state. As if I had found the key to making the kryptonite extolled in my comic books, the words “malicious,” “Minnesota” and “maniac” all converged in my brain. I could not restrain myself and shouted, “Janet Carlson is the malicious, Minnesota, maniac.”
Janet promptly burst into tears.
Soon, I had a slew of alliterations for all sorts of things. Our Mayor was John Lindsay, and he was said to be a very stylish and stunning man, and I learned that lesbians also were very stylish, and I learned that my Mother, who seemed to be in the closet, was on Librium. And soon I spouted: Liberal Lindsay likes Librium-loving left wing liberated lesbians.