Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read Online Free Page A

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