My middle school was built on a rocky, grassy hill. I mean, it’s not “my” middle school, so much as the place I graduated from. A long time ago. Still it stands, stubbornly. On ugly, awkward ground.
It was recently featured in a magazine as “The most socioeconomically diverse middle school in the state.” Yeah, our town has both urban poor and rural poor, city projects and country trailers. New money and old money. Not to mention every artificial flavor of middle class.
We all look down on each other, but we can’t articulate why. We’re a French farce by way of Russian aristocracy drama and English comedy of manners. Most of us can’t place ourselves into the upstairs/downstairs caste system. Not neatly.
But what’s weird is that the article depicted this as inherently good, instead of what it is: Awkward, but neutral. Weirder still, the writers framed it as MORALLY good. How? It’s not something to be proud of, that we’re the children of doctors and the children of custodians who work at the same hospital. Not to mention the children of parents who wish they had the practical intelligence to work as custodians. Custodians are solidly working class, with economically valuable skills. It’s only the truly upper class that views custodians as poor, for the former have no knowledge of what poverty looks like up close.
Poverty smells so much worse than custodian’s ammonia.
The parents who have no ambition beyond welfare are largely excluded from the narrative, I find. “Poor” is sanitized, even glamorized. It’s as if poor women are all hardworking domestic servants, Cinderellas but one shoe away from meeting the prince. So goes the modern fairy tale.
There’s no room for women like my mother, who are happy to snort cheap coke and eat off of government checks. The Right demonizes these women, while The Left pretends they don’t exist. To both sides, Diana is at best inconvenient.
She IS inconvenient, and hard to live with in every sense. But she changed my cartoon bedsheets. She herself is not a cartoon.
Anyway, the magazine sang the school’s praises. As if straddling and blending classes were an accomplishment we kids ourselves achieved. As if we weren’t all victims and benefactors of a rare, random zip code.
I blame no one, in specific. It’s not your fault that none of you knew quite what to do with me.
I was called the Goddess of The Ghetto. There’s a picture of me in an expensive prom gown, standing outside the lower income housing wherein I was raised. I stand out while also disappearing. Like a chameleon with a sharp outline. A queen of dirt and orange brick. You know the brick that haunts the projects.
I bring my daughter, on Halloween, to houses I’d played in on childhood Saturdays. With mere dollars in my bank account, I can draw your backyard pool from memory. I remember the pebbles, the chlorine, the stairs.
Several maids recognize me, as my daughter opens her hungry Halloween pillow bag. Several dads do too, for more sinister reasons. Possibly more sinister. It’s possible I’m projecting.
Still, some of the parents are genuinely kind. They offer my daughter candy, bound in shrink wrap with prominent brand name glowing. And that’s all they offer her. No condescension, no faux-wisdom. Certainly nothing darker than milk chocolate.
My dad’s girlfriend used to bake brownies for the trick-or-treaters. The children and their parents would make a dramatic deal of rejecting her wares, for “safety.” As if my almost-stepmother were a poisonous witch. The drama of the eighties demanded we pretend to mistrust our neighbors.
And now, these decades later, my daughter and I walk home. We return to our shack that’s nestled between mansions, which in any other town would look like a regular house. How lucky for us that we’re special: Magazines don’t lie.
My daughter shares with me the surplus candy that she doesn’t want. The chocolate tastes the same as it did when I was a child. I’m wearing the same plastic cat ears my mom bought me at the supermarket for 3.99. A good investment, in retrospect. I wish journalists would interview people like me, before they lecture the world about how lucky I am.
