What Will Suffice

Three weeks ago I visited some friends of mine in Toronto while renewing my visa. All are of a bookish liberal sort. We were at brunch, and during the conversation. I commented that some friends lived in a “more working-class” part of my Brooklyn neighborhood. Raucous laughter erupted at the table, at which sat two lawyers, an English lit PhD student, a legislative aide, a financial consultant and a former junior curator at the Tate. “By working class,” said one, “Michelle means people who work for the government, or, like, teachers.”

In that moment I was embarrassed on so many fronts that I could feel my blush seep into my cheekbones. Of course, I hadn’t meant it that way – it was, indeed, my impression that “working class” was the proper term here – but I had, as I seem so often wont to do in this particular set of company, spoken incorrectly. Even worse, all of these people – again, who I like a great deal and who surely did not intend all of these layers of shame to wash over me – were not people who knew the working class demographic very intimately at all.

I do, so it felt like I had committed a betrayal. My parents emerged from it, and they still bear the marks. My dad has a college degree only by the good graces of the Canadian military. Neither my mom nor my dad buy clothes at anywhere more expensive than Kmart. They listen to country music. My dad is the closest my extended family got to what my new milieu would recognize as a “professional” before I went to law school. We read books, but mostly they were the sort of popular fiction I might now roll my eyes at if I ever forgot that one book always leads to another.

A couple of weeks ago, in what almost seems another age, Ta-Nehisi Coates said of Sarah Palin, “We are not so different, you and I.” And immediately I knew what he meant. I can’t claim to have come as far as he has to be where I am now, because I had parents who let me stand on their shoulders once they’d pulled themselves into the middle class. I didn’t have to fight for books. I got to go to Europe when I was seventeen. My parents could afford to pay for my undergraduate degree. So my own background isn’t particularly hardscrabble, though my parents’ was.

But when I arrived at university, I knew immediately there was something a little off about me. I hadn’t read the right books and I didn’t say the right things and I’d never had sushi and couldn’t imagine why anyone would eat it. I didn’t read Vogue and could not have told you the difference between Rothko and Jackson Pollock. I had no appreciation for classical music. My European trip, which had seemed so culturally enriching at the time, scarcely impressed since it was just assumed that everyone knew something of the Europe. I didn’t get people’s jokes about obscure shows on CBC Radio and I had never heard of the New Yorker or the Economist. I definitely watched way too much television and way too many contemporary Hollywood movies. And some inner part of me shrunk whenever I heard people make fun of trailer parks and RVs, since my parents had always spoken of RV-owning as a dream of theirs.

In the interest of full disclosure, of course, I was awkward straight through late adolescence. I never was as comfortable in the world as I was in a book (but not the right kind of book, of course) or a movie, and it showed. Into my early twenties, I spoke like a person who had only recently awoken to the reality of social interaction. So some of my fish out-of-water was par for the course in a life that has never felt altogether in sync with the universe, if you catch my drift.

Still, as I’ve gotten older and much better at the people stuff, the reminders that I was not brought up by quasi-bohemian urban professionals continue to pop up frequently. And they have surfaced in the political context too, because some part of me responds when I hear populist slogans, which in the circles I travel in is generally uncool, uncool. Some part of me wants to smack anyone who uses the phrase “white trash.” Some part of me becomes small and hard and defensive when I hear complaints about the general ignorance of the working class voters who respond to Palin, or when someone affirms that their smartness is self-evident, since they attended (insert college).

At this point I’ve lived among this bookish liberal sort of person, of course, for the entirety of my adult life.  Some of them are my very best friends. And I love them dearly.  More importantly, I think, on first impression, I now appear to be one of them.  But I sometimes feel alone among them. My manners and my references are not up to par, and they probably never will be.

And every year I get closer to being the kind of person who belongs here, and farther away from whatever I used to be, which of course is the only thing that got me into this strange straddling of universes I now live and which I would, in any event, never give up. I wonder if I had a child if I’d let her read the Babysitters’ Club with impunity the way my parents did. I wonder if I would buy her expensive clothes and teach her to put on eyeliner. I wonder if I’d raise a child who years down the line, hanging out as an adult, would make someone who hadn’t grown up with a mother who took her to the theatre and liked French thrillers best feel small and hard and defensive, and altogether out of place.