Without a Net

by Michelle Tea

  THERE ARE HOLES IN MY MANDARIN DOG BISCUIT

  SHELL FEIJO

  THE STRETCH OF MY FAVORITE SHIRT AS I PULLED IT OVER MY STILL-DAMP hair helped ease me into the day ahead. Going to school had never been easy and middle school at MLK had proved to be no exception. The teasing had begun almost as soon as I climbed onto the bus for the first time. Words like “greasy,” “dirty,” “smelly,” “pizza face,” “poor,” “trash,” “welfare case,” and so on engulfed me on a daily basis. But, I had found friends and muddled through, making jokes at my own expense until the teasing subsided. After all, the rest of the kids on the bus weren’t much different. They were probably just using me to get the focus off of their own clothes, smells, lives.

  Anyway, I smiled that morning getting dressed—I always felt good when the red-and-white-striped T-shirt that I loved fell snug against my chest. As I turned to leave, my mother reached out and grabbed my shoulder, saying, “You aren’t wearing that, there’s a hole in it.”

  I pulled away. “Everything I have has something wrong with it. This is my favorite.”

  “I don’t give a shit. You are not wearing a shirt with a hole in it.”

  I started to cry. I ran back to my room, grabbed a dirty sweatshirt, and yanked it on, tears streaking down my face. I ran down the six flights of stairs and out into the sweet stench of a Berkeley morning, hoping I wouldn’t miss the bus and have to walk.

  I thought about the hole in the shirt a lot that day, as though I were wishing the shirt back into its pre-hole existence, the worn-in comfort that it had had the day we bought it at the thrift store. I felt empty without the T-shirt holding me tight, cold without its striped warmth. When I wore it I imagined there was no pain, no queasiness, no hunger. But soon the shirt was forgotten; more pressing issues were at hand.

  Rushing home after school, my stomach would groan and shift, crying out with after-school hunger pangs and butterflies of hope that my mother would not be home when I got there. I climbed the stairs, silently praying that when I rounded the dark hallway I would see the outline of a note, taped glistening to the door. When it was there, it meant going in and sighing with relief, making a baked potato when we had a bag, or getting a cup of the sugarless cheap drink that nobody else’s mom made them drink. My mom had to be the hippie welfare mom, no Kool-Aid or Skippy peanut butter here. Only chunks of natural peanuts in a layer of oil, and pure, juice-flavored water. Some days, I would rush home and in note-inspired bliss I would wander the apartment, imagining that my mom would never come home, never yell again, never hit, never cry, never stare at me with the hurt of her whole life transferring to me, through me. Other days, the hunger would be too much, and I would search the kitchen, thinking maybe I had missed some small piece of cheese, or a leftover piece of chicken in the fridge. Never had anything been overlooked, but there was always the box on top of the fridge.

  No matter how much we struggled to stretch the food stamps or the social security check my mom got for being legally blind, mentally ill, and unemployed, the dog always had bones.

  It never failed that no matter how poor we were, how much we struggled to stretch the food stamps or the social security check my mom got for being legally blind, mentally ill, and unemployed, the dog, the beautiful Doberman my mom had gotten for protection, always had bones. Purina dog biscuits, at that.

  The first time, I tried them at my mother’s demand. She said there was nothing for dinner that night, and that dog biscuits were really made out of “people food.”

  “Really,” she said, “they have more nutrients than anything I would cook. If you are that hungry, eat one.” Dog biscuits taste like crunchy box. No flavor, just crunch, and a mealiness that makes you feel full even when you have tasted nothing of any substance. I guess they must taste different to dogs. But, they weren’t so bad. They weren’t like rancid meat or anything, more like a really healthy granola bar from the overpriced natural food co-op around the corner.

  The taste of the dog biscuits was better than the acid pinch of memory that comes to me as a mandarin orange. Mandarin oranges and I go way back. Back to the couple of months we lived in Albany, in the rented house with the fat tree in the yard. The house with roaches crawling under the kitchen sink and over the walls when the dark descended at night. The house where the electricity got shut off. The house where my mom and her latest boyfriend smoked and snorted, stayed in bed all day and yelled all night. The house where a sleepover turned into torture, all on account of those damn mandarin oranges.

  MY BEST FRIEND, NIKKI, HAD COME ON THE BART TRAIN ALONE, all the way from Concord. We had overnight plans of giggling and reading together, snacking and sipping ice-cold Coke late into the night, covering up the glare of low-battery-flickering flashlights with torn blankets and just the right angle of bodily shield. Nikki was the only friend I would ever invite over, the only one who could be trusted with my secrets, the only one I had ever known with secrets of her own. The night of the mandarin oranges is the last night I remember us together. Maybe she was scared to come back. Maybe my secrets had proved to be too deep.

  We were hungry and there was nothing to eat. I don’t mean that there was only peanut butter and jelly, or milk instead of juice; I don’t mean that there was nothing we liked. I mean there was nothing there. I walked down the hall apprehensively, the familiar butterflies grinding against my stomach, and knocked quietly on my mom’s bedroom door. She answered in her nightgown. I told her we were hungry and asked if she had any money for us to go to the store.

  Clutching the five-dollar bill with delight, I chased after Nikki, screaming that I would catch her as we approached the nearby Lucky’s. We slowed to a fast walk, sweat pooling with kid-funk on us as we laughed and entered the shiny mecca of food. We struggled past the potato-chip aisle and stole peeks at the bakery cookies. We had my mom’s last five, and a TV dinner apiece was what we were allowed to get. I chose the veal parmigiana, a 99-cent favorite, and Nikki picked the Salisbury steak meal. We held hands and waited to check out in the express lane.

  I know I had the five. I had been holding it so tight I could still feel its crinkle, its damp presence in my palm. The checker glared at me and said, “Do you have the money or not?” I started to panic and could feel tears welling up. Nikki tried to help, and took off through the store’s aisles, scanning for the wrinkled bill. After an eternity standing there and the realization that the money was gone, I asked the checker to hold the dinners while we searched on the street. We walked back and forth in a crisscross pattern, without saying a word. I was supposed to bring back the change—the three dollars left over—and dinner for Nikki and me.

  Finally, we gave up. It was very dark and my tears had turned to sobbing. Nikki let me lean on her and we slowly edged home, so different from the girls who had bounded toward the store. I turned the knob slowly and tried to sneak in. My mom was waiting. She was mad. “Where have you been? It’s been over an hour.”

  I started to tell her that I was sorry. I wanted her to know that I really didn’t mean to lose the money. I said, “Mom, I don’t know what happened. I was holding the money real tight but when I went to pay, it was gone.” Whack! She slapped me hard, and turned to Nikki. “What did you two buy?”

  “Nothing,” Nikki said. “We picked frozen dinners and then the money was gone.” My mom took my arm and dragged me into the kitchen. “Well,” she said, “now you are going to eat what I fix. The last of my cigarette money.” She mumbled for a while, slamming empty cabinets and cursing. Nikki stood transfixed, wedged into the corner of the kitchen, staring at my mom.

  “Come here,” my mom said. “Get in line.”

  Nikki stood behind me and my mom opened a large can, placing it in front of me with one fork. “Take turns eating one bite at a time, and finish the whole thing. This is your dinner.” I tried to swallow, but the tanginess stung my tongue and the crying had made my throat tighten. I didn’t even feel hungry anymore. I started to spit and my mom yelled, �
��Oh, no, you wanted dinner, you lost the last of my money, you are going to eat.” Nikki stepped in front of me and grabbed the fork, taking a huge bite. The liquid sprayed, making my face sticky, and Nikki reached for another section of orange. I think she was trying to save me from eating it. My mom pushed her out of the way and told me to eat up.

  I tried again, and this time the force of the fork plunged against my gag reflex, and I threw up everywhere. My mom paused. For a moment, I thought she was going to make me eat it. Instead, she said, “You girls have had dinner. Now clean this shit up and get to bed.”

  We cleaned late into the night and fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. We never did play that night, tell stories, or giggle. We fell asleep listening to the sounds of each other’s growling bellies, and woke to my mom thanking her boyfriend for a bag of food. We ate cereal that morning, and cold milk. No one ever mentioned the canned mandarin oranges.

  LOCKED IN MY MIND IS A MIST OF CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES LIKE this one. They run together—food, clothes, pets, houses, fights, family—intertwined with one another, flowing and stopping as they wish, resisting separation into neat categories. These childhood experiences all revolve around money, and the lack thereof. As I reflect on them now, twenty years later, they boil down to one memory, an amalgam that reminds me, that speaks to me, that scares me: There are holes in my mandarin dog biscuit.

  ON EXCESS

  CHLOE CALDWELL

  HAVING EXTRA TOILET PAPER INSTANTLY MAKES ME FEEL LIKE I AM ON vacation in Hawaii. I’ve never been on vacation in Hawaii, but you understand what I mean. Extra toilet paper is relaxing and clear and luminous, like I imagine Hawaii to be.

  Having toilet paper is the opposite of shaking out your vagina and hoping for the best, or walking like a penguin to the kitchen to see if there are paper towels (there aren’t, of course there aren’t), or using napkins stolen from a bagel you got to-go three weeks ago.

  Having toilet paper is not having to use the scratchy cardboard toilet paper roll to wipe yourself, because that’s better than using nothing, or is it?

  The bathroom in our house growing up did not have a closet. No cabinet holding boxes of name-brand tampons and towels and lotions. I didn’t care, it was the toilet paper I coveted. I wanted to use a whole handful, all at once.

  THE VACATIONS WE TOOK WHEN I WAS A KID CONSISTED OF CAMPING with little cereal boxes. We went to Assateague Island and I returned covered in angry mosquito bites. The other kids in my class came back tan from The Bahamas with heads full of braids tied with hot-pink and turquoise beads. I didn’t know what “The Bahamas” were but I knew we wouldn’t be going there. My friends would send me postcards with photos of beaches on them. Wish you were here!

  Neither of my parents had college degrees. My father was a carpenter, buying tools on credit cards from Sears, running his own business before his knees got bad in 1997 and he opened a musical instrument store. We didn’t have health insurance until my mom went to work at a Head Start preschool for low-income families.

  My parents didn’t have money but they were not stupid and knew there were ways of providing education and teaching creativity to their kids—you don’t need money to walk in the woods, swim in a creek, pick flowers, or read. I feel eternally grateful for this and realize it’s why I became a writer; money wasn’t my ultimate goal because I knew you could be fulfilled without it. I am thankful I had nothing because I appreciate everything. I am easily pleased; there is no room to be high maintenance or scrutinize a gift from someone, I am grateful to get anything new, always.

  MY MOST FINANCIALLY DIRE YEAR WAS AT AGE TWENTY-SIX. I spent the year without a debit or credit card, only using cash. I cashed my checks from Powell’s Books, about $300 every two weeks, at the Fred Meyer grocery store. Then I’d go to the Whole Foods lunch counter where you could put fancy salads into brown boxes and eat the heavy parts (falafel) while standing in line so the price would come to $4.00 instead of $8.00.

  I bought miniature travel toothpastes and would pay my rent in cash, then try to resist the serious urge to go steal a $20 back from the stack I left on my landlord’s table.

  Friends didn’t always get it.

  “He’s the kind of person,” I remember a friend saying about her ex-boyfriend during that time, “who puts three dollars of gas into his car at a time.”

  “Oh yeah,” I scoffed along with her, though I did that too. I never filled up my car with a full tank until I was thirty. It made me anxious to spend that much money upfront.

  THERE WERE SLIGHTS BY FRIENDS, AND FRIENDS’ PARENTS, WHEN I was growing up, cutting comments I didn’t always understand then but do now. The way they’d describe my house as “cozy.” The way they’d chuckle about our sulfuric tap water. The way buckets were in my room to catch the leaks from the roof. The way our couch had ink and blood stains on the pillows. The way one of my friends told me my neck had dirt on the back of it.

  Some of my closest friends had hot tubs and pool tables and bathrooms in their bedrooms. We’d eat foods we didn’t eat at my house, and I’d pretend I’d had them before: artichoke hearts, poached salmon, asparagus, edamame, oysters, lobster. I’d watch the others eat until I’d seen how it was done, posing as a slow, relaxed eater, the opposite of what I am. I’d mimic their way of pulling off artichoke leaves and opening edamame pods, all while my body was in a state of anxiety of being found out, not passing, being ostracized, ridiculed.

  I always found it uncanny how close the phrase insufficient funds is to insufficient fun.

  HAVING MORE THAN $300 IN MY BANK ACCOUNT GIVES ME THE same feeling of luxury that having extra toilet paper does. I can go to a restaurant and take out my debit card (I can’t afford credit cards), slamming it on the table without scrutinizing the bill and worrying about overdrafting.

  I always found it uncanny how close the phrase insufficient funds is to insufficient fun.

  Just the words “excess” and “extra” light me up like Times Square. I don’t expect extra. I’ve never asked for extra mayo on a sandwich nor have I had extra bottles of wine or beer in my fridge in case friends dropped by. Wine racks are foreign objects to me; I never fathomed the point of owning anything designed especially for having too much at one time.

  This goes for clothing, too. I’ve asked the salespeople if I could wear clothes out of the store. It’s a big hassle, they don’t like it, but sometimes I don’t have a choice.

  I’ve known people with clothing in their closets with the tags still on them. Trusting them is difficult.

  DURING MY TWENTY-SIXTH YEAR, I KNEW I WAS SORT OF MENTALLY unhealthy and bleak, thanks to poverty, so I went to a free clinic for therapy. I saw a woman with blonde hair that always looked recently brushed, and she told me I could come see her once a week for free if her poodle could stay in my session. I said yes.

  Being broke is bartering, taking what you can get, feeling tired all the time, eating a string-cheese while walking around the co-op, hoping no one notices.

  It’s taking what’s available to you.

  I take bread from the bread basket at fancy restaurants, Ziploc bags when I’m baby sitting, stamps from jobs.

  When I was twenty-five, my boyfriend and I were at Whole Foods, procuring picnic foods. On our way out, I spotted the napkins and utensils for the people who are eating at the store. I went to take two of the metal forks, and two knives.

  “Please don’t,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Are you serious?”

  “Are you?”

  I didn’t take the forks, but I was miffed, and from then on the disconnect that already existed between us widened.

  In my early twenties, I had a friend who would steal from the store Rugby on Fifth Avenue. One day my friend Noelle and I offered to go with her, to steal with her.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d rather go alone,” she told us. “I’m trying to look like I have money.”

  HAVING NO MONEY IS HAVING NOTHING WHITE. NO MARSHMALLOW fluff. No white towels. No
beds in hotel rooms with comforters and top sheets (which explains my fetish with them now).

  White shows dirt, and when your belongings get filthy with stains, you hold on to them anyway.

  When I was nineteen I had a twenty-six-year-old boyfriend who bought luxuriously thick toilet paper, twelve-packs at a time. Sometimes I’d go to his place while I knew he was at work so I could shit and use the toilet paper instead of using the thin kind at my own house. I loved taking handfuls of it, more than was necessary.

  “I don’t know where all my toilet paper goes,” he used to say.

  Old habits die hard. Just stole some toilet paper from Rivertown Lodge, (a high-end hotel where we live in Hudson), I texted my boyfriend a few weeks ago.

  Such a you thing to do, he texted back, accepting me as I am.

  FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE, AT AGE THIRTY-ONE, I LIVE alone. When I can’t afford to go on a fancy tropical Instagram-worthy vacation, I buy a twelve-pack of toilet paper. Just like that, I’m on a beach in The Bahamas, hot-pink beads in my hair, sand between my toes, a margarita in my hand.

  THE LOWER-WORKING-CLASS NARRATIVE OF A BLACK CHINESE AMERICAN GIRL

  WENDY THOMPSON

  I MADE MY LIFE FROM SCRATCH. BUILT THIS TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD BODY from nothing. Just two wires and a burnt-out car, two pieces of tarp, and some scrap metal. And with these I built my bones, my skeleton, and my skin. A home to withstand sleet and rain, drunken assaults, and rape. A space to create beauty and dream, to leave a part of myself behind as artifact.