Without a Net

by Michelle Tea

  NOBODY’S REALLY RICH IN WORMTOWN. THE ONES WHO THINK they are own used-car lots and outlet-mall stores, but damn, they’re doing better than the rest of the town. And of course there are the petty nobility: the folks who go to the Worcester Club, who showed up on some tag-along to the fuckin’ Mayflower.

  The whitest people in the world live in New England. In the New Haven bus station bathroom, on our way to a gig at Yale to do a performance about class for the rich South Asian kids having a conference about it, I see them for the first time in years—the fine-boned blondes who look like Jill on The Practice, the ones I grew up closer to, big Irish-Polish faces, big hair, first acid-wash and now booty jeans.

  Fumes from Norton, the world’s largest manufacturer of ceramic tile, blew over the school. When the wind blew the right way it stank of garbage or burning tar. Every year a teacher got either breast cancer or alopecia, and we got used to watching their hair drop out bit by bit during class. Worcester is the only place I’ve ever heard of where working-class folks try to afford bottled water and it’s 39¢ a gallon, just for the town. The second girl I kissed, who grew up in Leominster (known for the uranium that leaked into the water), found out she had cervical cancer at thirty, during the mandatory pelvic for egg donation—her first health care in ten years. All the downtown was abandoned: Funland, the toy store with the big rotting clown murals that’d gone bust; Union Station, back when working-class cities had department stores and strollable downtowns, now with trees growing up through the roof. Half-cracked parking lot and thirteen-story high-rises with all the windows busted out.

  My mom had tried to flee Worcester. She made it partway. All the way to two master’s degrees on scholarship, at night, at Anna Maria College and Assumption College, little shit colleges no one had heard of. All the way to getting a Fulbright to Uganda to study then, when the Idi Amin government expelled whites from the country, to London. All the way from being the one girl in her high school class to go to college. Everyone else pregnant, working in the mills, or married. Webster, Massachusetts, in 1956 was a long way from having any respect for nerdy intellectual girls. The only reason she got to go is because a teacher pulled her aside and was shocked that she wasn’t college-bound, called up the registrar at Worcester State, and got her in. She worked at Nectarland Ice Cream parlor and in the office at the textile mill while she was in college, made a couple thou a year after she graduated. But she was a teacher.

  My mama found herself back in Worcester because class is a hard thing to shake unless you’re the strongest and the fastest and jettison everything to survive. And even if you’re willing to strip off your family and your history, you might end up like she did—finally married at thirty-two to an exotic Sri Lankan bumming around Europe, who, it turned out, didn’t have the university education he claimed on forms. My dad used his “more British than the British” accent and lovely manners to scam his way into a series of midlevel administration jobs, only to be fired mysteriously from each one. They moved back to the States, the economy crashed; they moved back to Worcester, where you could buy a house even if you were broke. It was the place my mom had spent all her life trying to flee.

  But she never let me forget that she had almost made it. Halfway. A foot in. Not knowing upper-class people, not liking them, but studying them. Teaching them there is one accent for home and one for being out in the world. Teaching me to be bright and exceptional. I had a job. I was gonna get all that free money, get in to a good school ’cause I was brilliant, and move on up. I was not going to fall. You fall and you get stuck forever, in the pit of nowhere people that don’t matter. But we hate the rich kids; they don’t know anything real, anything about life. We ride shotgun. It’s a mindfuck.

  My light brown skin and green eyes are part of what makes me a good case. My mom works that too. I’m not classified as one of the “minority students.” It’s more like I’m seen by admissions as the kid who is a quarter “something”—a drop for garnish, but not enough to be an “issue.”

  In classes with the blond, pale WASPs only New England can produce, it’s different. It’s about being ugly. I was never called “dothead” or “spook,” but “ugly”: ugly being brown, kinky hair; dark skin; glasses; height; tits and hips and blood in fifth grade; leg and armpit hair thick and curling black. Just ugly. Ugly doesn’t look good in eighties discount-barn clothing, powder blues and pinks, acid wash; ugly doesn’t look good in big hair, hairspray, and bangs. Ugly is too smart, reads all the time, likes school.

  We would drive down 290 to T.J. Maxx, where we would slowly, methodically, go through the whole store. A four-hour job. You look at every piece there ’cause only four will be doable, not trashy looking. The only Brooks Brothers suit on triple discount. Navy blue, black, taupe, nothing too colorful, one pair of outlet shoes. When I’d gone to public school I wore the same shirts from Zayre’s or Caldor everyone else wore.

  Siobhan, my best friend from grades three to five, and I were the two scholarship kids, the first ones. An experiment. Her mom kept her last name and didn’t give a shit. They were French Canadian. Siobhan was dark like me and had her own room in the basement of their tiny tract house out in Quabbin Hills, where every one of the bedrooms had two or three bunk beds for all the new kids who kept coming. Siobhan’s room was Foxfire library books, fantasy board games, and the weeds we dried when we were playing out in the backyard—the yard that was acres of weeds and trees.

  I remember my mother walking through Cambridge on the Saturday trips we would make every six weeks. The routine never varied. We would hit Urban Outfitters in the morning to look at outfits I could never afford to buy, then Bertolucci’s or Uno’s for pizza, then one of Cambridge’s many bookstores to gorge. One book. We’d look, not buy, but we went every six weeks without fail. I remember walking through all the people who were intellectuals, my mother’s dreamy eyes. I remember her stopping outside a fancy boutique window to say, reverently, “The Beaujolais Nouveau has come in,” longing. My parents never would be able to afford Boston. Not without admitting they had the money they had and getting housing in a neighborhood—maybe a little poor, brown around the edges or at the heart—that also reflected who they really were.

  I ALWAYS IMAGINED I WOULD GO TO HARVARD. WALK THOSE brick sidewalks, go to all those bookstores, be with all the truly smart people. “You have to begin thinking how to sell yourself,” the admissions person announced. Cathy and I slouched in our seats. Cathy was Polish. She had wispy blond fine hair permed and banged around her face, skirt a little too tight. A public school kid. After she’d tried to befriend the jock girls and was rebuffed, with a look of resignation she came to sit at our table. She had been popular at her old school, had had a lot of boyfriends. Still did, but also put Sinead pictures up and aggressively clipped Nike ads about motivating young women in sports. We both knew “things to put on applications” were crucial. You start grooming yourself in eighth grade, if not before. You have to be brilliant early or you won’t get in the next brilliant level of classes, won’t be recommended for things, will not get accepted into good schools.

  The track starts in grade school and you can never fall off. Falling off means falling into the pit of normal people, the ones who torment you or the ones like your cousins. Annie and CiCia are cutting hair, dropping out of Framingham State, doing pills and acid and booze and, occasionally, heroin. They are in their mid-thirties and they are not leaving. Decked out in the finest artsy wear Worcester can offer, they are still trapped—by loyalty, by letting their feelings keep them from getting that A. Doesn’t matter if you’re fucked up. Get the union card: the degree.

  But how the fuck do you get the degree? I thought once I got there it would be easy. The other freaks and me, we would all be there. But working-class equals unenlightened, dumb, abused, stuck. Right?

  IT TAKES A MIDDLE-CLASS LIFE TO BELIEVE YOU CAN WRITE FOR A living. It takes parents who will pay your rent, bail you out, buy you nice consumer gear and electronics, a
nd make sure you have groceries, so you can score those connections. My mother tried to give that to me, but she didn’t know quite how. There was a lot of magical thinking going on. You go there and if you’re good, you get it! If you can’t figure it out, well, “I dunno, Leah, how do you expect me to know?” She was small and shabby, shy and fierce. I could see her holes at the end; they hurt. She was not shining and clean and she could not hold on to her pride. She spent too much time trying to hide what she was. Oh, what a strange world she had let me believe in.

  I want to be an activist. How murderously she looked at me when I said that. But she wasn’t quite sure I was wrong, either. My career should be something I loved, something that allowed me to always have health insurance, something that was creative, something that was secure. Plant genetics or nonprofit, maybe; anyway, something with letters after my name. Grad school? Financial aid was taken away in the nineties, no more free money.

  It makes me think a lot about class and activism and how they got me here. I think about the folks who are all creamy over their fantastic activist jobs and the weird promise of being well paid for the revolution. I think about how my mother raised me totally on the myth that I would be the one to get away, that I would scholarship my way outta town and go to Harvard and become a plant geneticist or something, that working-class ticket to ride of “you will never have to hustle again.” And at the same time, saying and modeling the view that the system’s fucked, everything’s fucked, it’s not what it says it is, any of it, so find a safe niche and hide until you can retire. Don’t believe in the possibility of more ’cause you’ll just get screwed.

  It’s a class thing. She knew that the rich kids’ social justice movements would just overwork and underpay her. And she was right. At the same time, she was so focused on passing as “money” that she couldn’t talk about any of this shit up front. I didn’t wanna be cynical like that. Her eyes would narrow, she’d get so mad when I’d tell her I was gonna get some great activist job. And she was right, too. Kind of.

  I ran away ’cause I was an incest orphan and was broke and undocumented. But I ran to the crack of twenty-dollars-an-hour part-time social justice jobs in a country that’s still a welfare state. (I had no idea such things existed. Get paid fourteen dollars an hour doing feminist anti-oppressive anti-psychiatry counseling at a women’s center with paid breaks and sick days? Dawg.)

  And since I hustled in on a useless degree meant for girls with more privilege than me, I do better than the other assholes. I help folks make it through the maze ’cause I was in it. I give out phone numbers for free counseling and rent banks like crack, like candy. I give a shit. And I am still part of a social control system where reporting to Children’s Aid is mandatory, where being too much of a “client” ain’t cool, unless you want to be a “Look! I made it too!” street-kid-to-social-work-lady success story. The nonprofit activist heaven where “underprivileged” kids rise through our anti-oppression gospel, get jobs, are saved. Often, unfortunately, they cannot become just like us, and stay “clients.” A different species. One the jobs depend on. How do “activists” who don’t have a daddy to fund them subsidize our way through life without falling into wage-slaving, working at shit that sucks up our lives? Is it possible to create enough nonprofit jobs to employ all the “at-risk youth” in the world? And is this really as far as we want to go?

  That’s my way. Beauty out of nothing. Twenty dollars in the drawer, friends, and prayer for the hard times.

  I want to tell my mom that there are other options, between beauty and assimilation, failing and being shit. That life don’t give us a lot of choices, but the choices are bigger than she thought. Not ’cause this is a land of opportunity, but because this is a land of hustle, chaos, and a free market that constantly mutates what it allows. I’ll get my words in print, but I won’t always use the right accent to stay there.

  We used to steal bricks out of construction sites when I was a kid. Go out at night and load them up. We made over that back yard to look like something nice, something in Family Circle. I want to tell her: That’s my way. Beauty out of nothing, Ma, with a little more than you had. Twenty dollars in the drawer, friends, and prayer for the hard times. We need a lot of tickets to ride, a lot of chances. I didn’t make it like you thought, but I made it another way. And I’m still exceptional, along with all the others. Beauty and brilliance right here.

  SOMETHING FROM NOTHING

  SHAWNA KENNEY

  NOTHING.

  My sister swears she doesn’t remember a single thing about our childhood. I remember specific details of every photo I see of us, when it was taken and exactly how I felt posing. I have one of me on my second birthday, sitting next to her with my hand on her baby carrier. I’d plopped down beside her on Grandpa’s round rag rug seconds before the shot, feeling quite big-sisterly, like I knew it was forever my job to “betect” her, this little being, from everything.

  There is one of us a couple of years later taking a bath, me smiling coquettishly at the camera, her looking down into the Mr. Bubble–foam, the two of us safe together in the belly of the white ceramic lion-pawed tub-beast. Minutes later Mom would lift us out individually, drying and powdering our little bodies with undivided attention. This was well before we knew the word “project” could mean anything other than something you made with paste and construction paper, or that our kingdom was a place people whispered about and where some cab drivers refused to go. It was in these unhurried moments I felt most loved.

  For fun we bounced between playing “Kathy and Judy”—our favorite game of “betending” to be coffee-slurping, fake-cigarette-smoking, agitated moms with always absent good-for-nothing husbands to complain about—and playing school, fooling around with clay or playing freeze-tag with the neighborhood kids. I don’t tell too many people about the game of “barbecue” I instigated, which involved everyone getting a stick, poking at a pile of old dog poop as if it were meat on a grill, and voilà—a “barbecue.” The game usually ended with us chasing each other around, screaming, “Gonna put it on youuuuuuu!” We had no back yard and had never been to a real barbecue, but Barbecue was our game—a secret the adults could know nothing about. Thanks to my dad’s sense of adventure, we also enjoyed weekend fishing, day trips to local parks, and my favorite—visits to whatever garage he was working at to play “mechanic’s assistant.” Both my sister and I had learned the difference between a wrench and a hammer by age four, and a flathead versus Phillips screwdriver by five. I learned to keep this quiet after one time in second grade when, playing hangman, the kids couldn’t figure out my word. I’ll never forget their looks of suspicion and disgust when I revealed it to be “crankshaft.” I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I knew how to spell it.

  Later we learned that Dad made lopsided, too-loose pigtails when Mom had to be at work early. We learned daddies were strong. I remember my dad lying prostrate with arms outstretched, each of us standing stick-straight in the palm of his hand while he lifted us up into the air. We were wide-eyed and giggly at his Superman-like strength. One year for Christmas, Santa Claus brought us a child-sized wooden table with four matching chairs, from then on referred to as “the little table.” Dad bought Mom a Mr. Coffee, which started an argument about them not being able to afford such a luxury. She demanded that he return it. Words got louder and louder, and my sister and I scooted into the small space under the couch like we did during thunderstorms. The argument ended with our dad throwing one of the new little chairs against the wall, sticks of wooden shrapnel flying everywhere. He brought the coffeemaker back; my parents kissed and made up; but the “little table” remained a three-seater, perfect for me, my sis, and one doll-baby, but forever a reminder of how Superman could change into the Hulk in a heartbeat.

  I was in third grade when I noticed another weakness in my father—what an obstacle words were for him. Studying for a spelling test, I asked him to help, instead of my mom. I took the list and asked him to spell
“elephant.” He used an “f.” I’ll never know if he was pulling my leg, but later when I told my mom in private horror, she laughed and agreed that Dad was “an awful speller.” From then on I noticed that he always did the bills, while Mom was “the letter-writer.” Though only educated to the tenth grade herself, she was always writing a letter to the editor about some injustice or preparing job bids for my father.

  My favorite piece in our old photo albums is a yellowed newspaper clipping of my father and his two brothers in Navy uniforms, with the caption “Kenney Boys Home for Christmas.” It was an allowance made during the war thanks to my mom’s letter-writing campaign to the governor of New York and the president, based on some law forbidding all male members of a family to be away at war at the same time. My father’s handwriting still looks like my childhood scrawls—tiny, illegible hills and valleys of inky, incomplete letters smashed together, perhaps to hide his bad spelling.

  Our white kitchen floors, which smelled of bleach, were “clean enough to eat off of,” my mom always said, and sometimes we did, when we had a full house. I remember thinking that elbow macaroni with tomatoes thrown in was food fit for kings, and that Mom making Popsicles with Kool-Aid in ice-cube trays was a damn genius summer treat. I liked picking at the peeling corners of our cracked linoleum, but my mom yelled at me to stop if she saw me, saying, “That bastard landlord is supposed to fix that soon.” I thought “bastard” was a term of endearment back then, since Gramps sometimes half-yelled, half-laughed, “Get down off the countertops, ya bastards!” while we raided his cupboards with our cousins. We played for hours with the neighborhood kids, all equals in the red brick jungle and patches of grass. The same brick jungle my mom grew up in. Stella, the deaf lady next door who sometimes yelled out the window at us in her low nasal voice for “being too rough,” used to yell at her, too.