My salvation was unexpected, but had I remembered my studies better, I might have hoped for or even tried to engineer precisely the circumstances that turned my fate around. It came the same way it does for so many no-human female primates in my predicament: through the attentions of an alpha male. At a “class cocktail party” hosted by the “class mom,” I got into a vaguely flirtatious conversation with the father of a boy in my son’s class. He was polite, clever, and slightly rakish, unusual among the straitlaced Upper East Side finance guys I was still trying to get used to. He was easy to talk to, and since my husband had stayed home with our son and the moms were busy talking to each other in a clump I had no hope of breaking into, he and I chatted. Unbeknownst to me, I later learned, he was the scion of some sort of Manhattan banking empire, the son of a powerful and wealthy matriarch like Flo, and so, very “top tier” in the school and our class. The next day at drop-off he suggested, in front of a group of moms, that our boys should play. “How about this Friday?” he asked, and I agreed.
“How did you do that?” one of the friendlier moms asked in a whisper, her eyes wide as he headed off. “I’ve been trying to get him to make a playdate for weeks and he won’t! Even though my parents knew his parents when they all lived in Westchester.” I shrugged and suggested that next time, she might try having a glass of wine with him.
From that day forward the playdate tide turned dramatically. My son had a regular weekly playdate with the alpha’s son, which paved the way for playdates with the kids who were friends with his kid, and whose parents—rich and powerful like he was—were friends with him. When these people saw me engaged in friendly conversation with Alpha Dad in the hallway, they took note, it seemed: their body language and newly friendly smiles suggested that they felt I had been vetted and approved. Talking to me, they could now rest assured, wasn’t necessarily going to pull their own rank down or be a total waste of time. And the more these parents acknowledged and returned my hellos in the halls, the harder it was for them to ignore my emails and playdate pleas.
When I stood back from it, the playdate hierarchy high jinks struck me as strange and unsavory. Its seamy underside was the notion that some parents and some children were more worth it than others. This was repellent, but it was also the name of the game. If my son was finally playing with schoolmates and was happy, I was happy. And I felt very indebted indeed to the alpha, even if Candace and Lily agreed that it was a bad idea to count on him for anything. Wasn’t he married to one of these unfriendly women? Could he be much better himself? they asked. I wasn’t sure. I just knew that in this upside-down world, where the parents lived through the kids, it was sort of like being a teenage girl again, and having the attentions of the high school football team’s star quarterback. His casual friendliness had utterly transformed my son’s social life and my rank, which I now realized were unquestionably and inextricably linked. Like Candace and Lily, I didn’t trust the state of affairs to last for long, and I was right—Alpha Dad moved on, as alphas do. By that time, though, my son had what he needed, which meant I did, too. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so hard after all.
CHAPTER THREE
Going Native: Mommy Wants a Birkin
WHEN I STUDIED anthropology in college and graduate school, I was fascinated by descriptions of the anthropologist who “goes native”—merging with the culture she was supposed to be studying, slipping into being one of those she had set out to examine and analyze. With Bronislaw Malinowski, about whom I wrote my doctoral dissertation, it was a gradual process. He became increasingly fed up with his informants in the Trobriand Islands, who were not as forthcoming as he wanted them to be, and eventually commenced having sex with Trobriand women. In another case, a professor of Middle Eastern culture of my acquaintance revealed he had “gone native” at dinner one night when he greeted his graduate students dressed in traditional garb from Yemen, where he had done fieldwork, and proceeded to conduct himself as an indigenous Yemeni tribesman for the course of the evening (sabers were involved). In Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, Paul Rabinow made an entire narrative out of losing it—and himself—there.
Going native is today viewed by anthropologists as equal parts inevitable and instructive, a dynamic process that happens as fieldworkers get to know their subjects, and come to understand, value, and internalize some of their beliefs. First, typically, a fieldworker may feel at sea, alienated, overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity all around him. Bit by bit, however, she gains her footing and eventually, without even noticing it is happening, she begins to “think Samoan.” Or Aka. Or Upper East Side.
But “going native” was long tainted with shame in the field. This is because anthropology struggled for so long to distinguish itself as a “science” separate from and superior to its actual historical roots—in missionary work, Victorian “armchair science,” and plain old imperialism. Slipping from scientist to “one of them” is messy and unscientific, to say the least. So, for a long time, anthropologists prided themselves on their “objective distance” from the culture they studied and lived in, staving off “going native” like a case of malaria. “Going native” has always carried with it a whiff of impropriety, and a menacing, thrilling sense of losing one’s very self.
As a self-designated participant-observer of privileged Upper East Side motherhood, an interloper in the Upper East Side mommy tribe, I frequently felt conflicted about my relationship to the women and culture around me. On the one hand, I longed to fit in, to become one with and one of them, and felt I had to, mostly for the sake of my child (and, later, children). But I also struggled to keep my sense of apartness or separateness—some semblance of analytic distance—as I watched and took part in the frequently insane-seeming doings and goings-on about me. The back-turning, the dozens of illegally parked Escalades, one of which nearly plowed into my son one day as we struggled to get a cab after pickup—Who the hell wanted any part of this selfish, entitled world? I sometimes asked myself.
Ultimately, though, the drop-off dramas and experience of being a playdate pariah—which made me feel so vulnerable, sad, and rejected—actually drew me deeper into the world of my son’s school. They hardened my resolve to assimilate and win acceptance. I wasn’t going to let anybody reject me, or my kids. Screw them. And once he (and I) had playdates and a school-based social life, these “triumphs” drew me further into the world I was observing, rendering my foothold on the world outside it more tenuous. I called and saw my downtown friends less and less, given the rigors and demands of work and keeping my hand in the game and maintaining friendships for my son and me uptown. Before I knew or realized it, I had surrendered to this new world in a real way, and there was no going back.
My final undoing was a powerful talismanic object with nearly magical and certainly mesmerizing powers—an Hermès Birkin bag.
The first time I really noticed it happening, I was headed back home after a quick trip to the corner market. Swinging a plastic bag of bananas and a carton of milk by my side as I made my way from Madison Avenue toward Park on East Seventy-Ninth Street, I felt expansive and happy. The sun was out and the wide sidewalk was remarkably uncrowded. It was a lull period—morning rush hour over, not yet lunch time—and there was hardly anyone out and about in our normally bustling neighborhood. For a Midwesterner accustomed to space and quiet, it felt, momentarily, a little bit like home—only with elegant prewar buildings and doormen in upbeat moods saying hello as you walked by. My son was in a good school. He had school chums, a social life, if you will, and so, by extension, did I. Sure, I wished the moms were a little friendlier, and I still felt distinctly on the outside most of the time when I dropped my son off and picked him up. But I was a good enough mother of one, with another on the way. I was finally finding my way and my place on the Upper East Side, it seemed, and on this day I was pleased.
Half a block ahead I saw a solitary, well-dressed woman striding purposefully toward me. We walk
briskly in Manhattan, and in no time she (perhaps in her mid-fifties) and I (late thirties) were closing the space between us. In keeping with Manhattan sidewalk etiquette—more like a traffic law, really—I did as cars and New Yorkers do and kept to the right. So why was this well-dressed, well-coiffed woman drifting to her left, directly into my path, with every step? Were we in England?
I adjusted to the right again, and yet again, to give her even more room as she continued her course toward me. If I kept moving to the right as she was quite clearly forcing me to do, by bearing down on me in this way, I realized, I would walk directly into the big metal orange trash can now several steps in front of me. This was ridiculous, I thought, surveying the entire wide, empty sidewalk and slowing down. Just before the trash can, I came to an abrupt halt (what choice did I have? Dart in front of her to the other side of the sidewalk entirely?) and looked at her—for she was a mere six inches away from me now, in spite of the vast expanse to her right. She caught my eye and held my gaze while she deliberately and not at all gently grazed my left arm with her magnificent bag. Then she smirked—she actually smirked!—and continued her purposeful brush past me. I turned around to watch her back recede down the sidewalk, breathless with surprise that she had done what she had done. Whatever it was. What was it?
I had been charged. At least that is how it felt to the anthropologist in me, who had watched hours of documentary footage of chimps coming toward one another with aggressive bearings and intent—arms swinging, teeth displayed, emitting screeches and guttural vocalizations—in my undergraduate days. Unpacking my groceries, I played back the encounter in my mind, feeling uneasy, aggravated even. What the hell was going on? I realized, now that I thought it through, that this kind of thing had happened before—a woman taking the measure of me and then crowding me—but never quite as explicitly. It was time to start paying attention, really paying attention, to Upper East Side primate social behaviors.
Sure enough, I began to notice similar encounters unfolding all around me. In uptown crosswalks and upscale boutiques and the waiting room of a famous cosmetic dermatologist, I perceived that, subtly and not so subtly, women dressed to the nines not only took the measure of but also “charged” other women. Not infrequently, one of those women was me. Sometimes, in these encounters, I actually had to step aside toward the curb or flatten myself against the wall of a building to allow a woman to stride by me, so adamant was she in her refusal to budge or swerve a fraction of an inch from her course, a course that had been altered as if to tell me . . . something. What, I wondered, did the woman who charged want the woman she was charging to do?
My previous territory, the West Village, was mere miles away, but another country, apparently, when it came to uniforms, customs, and warfare between women. Sure, I recalled now, once in a while down there you would encounter a blank-faced, freakishly tall supermodel striding down the narrow, buckling strip of concrete that ran alongside Bleecker Street, as if it were her own personal catwalk. But that was just a professional narcissist doing what she did. Stepping out to run a quick errand on the Upper East Side, on the other hand, you could find yourself embroiled, unwittingly, in a remarkably antagonistic and neatly gendered game of chicken, in which one apparently high functioning, well-dressed and otherwise-normal-seeming woman asked another, Who’s going to move first?
After a few weeks of watching and walking about while tuned in to the charging phenomenon, the female pedestrian in me was thoroughly inside the experience, constantly alert and ready to joust when out for a walk or en route from one place to another. But my inner social researcher wanted more data. And so, early one morning, having dropped my son off at school, I bought myself a coffee and parked myself in front of a doorman building in my neighborhood, and I watched. The next day and the next and the next I stood outside a store, and then near an intersection with real foot traffic. A few times I actually made observations inside buildings frequented by women, or rather the entrances to them, since entering and exiting seemed to be highly fraught and contentious moments when charging was likely to happen—high-end retail shops, a restaurant known to be the native habitat of a cross-section (age-wise) of ladies who lunch, and a few lobbies.
Eventually, I observed nearly a hundred of the type of encounter I had that day on East Seventy-Ninth Street. My research was informal, of course, but I did come to some conclusions. Chief among them: women on the Upper East Side, particularly women in their thirties and women on the downhill slope of middle age, are utterly attuned to and obsessed with power. In many but not all of the encounters I observed, it was an older woman who “charged” a younger one, moving toward her until a kind of social crisis point was reached, when actual impact was avoided—often at the last second—as the younger woman quickly moved aside. The actors in these scenarios then unfailingly continued as if unaware of the (non-)exchange that had taken place between them. It was as if both players were complicit in some deep sense, agreeing to agree that what had just happened hadn’t.
Over and over, I watched encounters unfold, until an explanation began to take shape about women and their bids to assert their dominance over other women. It was their right, they said as they charged, to expand their space by forcing others to give it up. Their message, when I had observed enough of these encounters, was pretty clear. It was not simply “Get out of my way” but something more pointed: “I don’t see you. Because you don’t even exist.” Their handbags—heart-stoppingly beautiful and expensive-looking affairs slung across or hanging from their shoulders or dangling from their hands, quilted and dyed, snakeskin and lambskin and ostrich, with interlocking Cs or Fs or intricate buckles and locks—apparently had a lot to do with it. They were armor, weapons, flags, and more, it seemed: everyone who charged someone seemed to have a fantastic bag, and to revel in brushing her opponent with it. This was the coup de grace.
The late Nora Ephron wrote that people in LA have cars, and in Manhattan we have our handbags, and these encounters between women brought new meaning to this analogy for me. If handbags are our cars, as Ephron suggests—at once functional and utterly symbolic, our attempt to get ourselves and our stuff from point A to point B, but also to be seen as we hope to be seen as we traverse the town—then, it seemed to me, all along the uptown avenues of affluence there was plenty of road rage. With nothing but a plastic bag from the grocery store on my arm, I had been asking for it.
I thought, too, of the dominance displays of Mike, a chimp in Jane Goodall’s Gombe troop. Mike is legendary among primatologists and students of anthropology for having shown the kind of remarkable resourcefulness that can reorder the world. Or at least upend an entire, well-established social hierarchy. Small and low-ranking, Mike was a relatively new transfer to the troop when Goodall arrived in 1960; she observed that he often took a beating, literally, from the older and bigger chimps of Gombe. His life was that of a miserable, stepped-on outsider, an ostracized newcomer to the party.
And then, Mike got himself a beautiful purse.
Actually, he discovered a couple of empty, discarded, lightweight metal kerosene canisters with handles. And brilliantly, he realized he could incorporate these props into his dominance displays—choreographed performances in which male chimps seek to intimidate and impress the chimps they live with, without actually harming them. Usually in a dominance display chimps chase or body check one another, further making their point by shaking branches, slapping the ground and throwing rocks, all the while issuing loud, pant-hoot calls.
Primatologists and wildlife photographers have frequently been on the receiving end of such dominance displays and report that they are startling, even terrifying. So imagine the surprise of the Gombe troop members when Mike came running at them dragging a big, noisy unfamiliar thing by its handle, banging it and swinging it through the grass like a scepter. And then further enhanced his display by standing tall in the middle of the group and crashing the mysterious objects together, m
aking an unholy, previously unheard racket that seemed to say, Now I own you! This groundbreaking social spectacle sent even Goliath, the reigning alpha male, into a cowering panic. The researchers of Gombe quickly removed the canisters, to little effect. The other chimps remained in utter awe of Mike, who rapidly dethroned Goliath, in spite of his high-ranking supporter, the former alpha male David Greybeard, to become alpha chimp himself. For five entire years. Such was the powerful half-life of a great handbag.
I could not change or beat them, and no, I certainly could not and did not want to join these grown-up Mean Girls west of Lex. Or maybe I did and could, kind of. What I needed was a kerosene canister of my own. Yes, something about these arrogant women, who pushed and crowded me like I didn’t exist, let alone matter, made me want a beautiful, expensive bag. Like a totem object, I believed, it might protect me from them, these ladies who were everywhere in my adopted habitat, and said so much without a word, using only their eyes and their faces and always, their handbags. Perhaps, I thought, a nice purse like the ones they had might trick them, mesmerize them into believing that they oughtn’t challenge me to sidewalk duels and all the rest. That it would be worth it to say hello, when we saw each other at a party or in the school halls or at a restaurant, without giving me a disdainful once-over. Plus, I reasoned, it might annoy them. With a gorgeous bag, I thought, I would not just have a sword and a shield. I would have something that they did not have, or something that they wanted, or something that they did have and didn’t want anyone else to have. I imagined Queen Bee trying to brush by me, and getting stuck in her gut with my boxy Birkin. Really, you couldn’t put a price on that.
I had caught my first glimpse of an Hermès Birkin bag in Paris, in the late eighties. The bag the woman in jeans and a little tailleur was clutching was Perfect. It was red: not a predictable scarlet, not some insipid pinkish red. It was an insouciant, self-confidently uncommon brick-red, the lipstick color you have been looking for for years and never found, the platonic ideal that drove you to buy tube after tube of not-right reds in pursuit of The One. The shape, too, was just right—just off the visual map of things you were used to, provocative in its subtle difference from a purse or a messenger bag. There were file folders in there, barely peeking out, suggesting a life of work and beauty. I actually followed the woman a few blocks through the Eighth (of course it was the Eighth, the arrondissement of all things starchily, sexily French), stalking her handbag, trying to figure out what it was.
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