Sunday, August 9, 2009

Hardy on Family

"Angel sat down, and the place felt like home; yet he did not so much as formerly feel himself one of the family gathered there. Every time that he returned hither he was conscience of this divergence, and since he had last shared in the Vicarage life it had grown even more distinctly foreign to his own than usual. Its transcendental aspirations... were as foreign to his own as if they had been the dreams of people on another planet."

Tess of the D'Urbervilles
, Thomas Hardy

The Poor Upper Middle Class Graduate

The three months of my unpaid internship have come and past, and, thankfully, I now find myself gainfully employed—well, gainfully employed to the tune of 14 dollars an hour with no benefits. The book publisher I have been interning for has decided to keep me on, and despite their struggling finances and a company-wide hiring freeze, they’ve signed me for another three months, paid.

On the one hand, it’s an enormous relief, and trust me, I was and am ecstatic. I feared my ability to find other work, and I’ve really loved writing and editing as my—can you believe it—actual job. On the other hand, I have entirely burned through my savings from my previous loathsome-but-unfortunately-better-paying law firm position, leaving me breathtakingly broke at this point in time.

Most of the time, one tries not to think about it. I check WellsFargo.com as little as humanly possible these days. This may be about as intelligent as sticking my head in the sand, but I go into paroxysms of doubt and anxiety when I see the account balances. Aside from paying my rent, my train and bus pass, and insurance, I endeavor to buy nothing. Yes, absolutely nothing. Is this practical? No. Am I in credit card debt? Of course, although nothing, I desperately hope, that two more paychecks (halle-freaking-lejah) won’t sort out.

I have started compiling a list, of those things that I need, want, and generally pine after. It is entitled the When Becky Isn’t Poor Anymore List:

Dry cleaning
Take shoes to cobbler
Blender
Ramekins
Tart pans
Steaming rack
Mascara
Clothes shopping
New laptop
A Subaru Outback Legacy, from approximately 1997
A pony

If some of these items seem frivolous, well, so be it. You try living with four month-old mascara, or having a bag full of clothes that you would really quite like to wear but haven’t been able to since June because you can’t afford to take it to the cleaners. I would like to point out that the computer that I write to you from is literally falling apart. My charming youngest brother Bruce kicked it a few years back, and the hardware has been slowly splitting apart ever since. Yesterday the poor thing lost a foot. It gives me a whole new appreciation for the cliché of not having a leg to stand on.

On a more serious note, however, I do know that credit card debt, however minor, is nothing to dabble in. And there is, as you may have guessed, reader, one inevitable and depression-inspiring solution: the much dreaded phone call to the parents. I can’t bring myself to do it, or at least I haven’t been able to yet. At this point I’d rather pay off interest than admit defeat. My parents are investment bankers, and while they made very positive noises when I announced that I was going to quit my vile law firm job after only nine months, I have and continue to have my doubts about their enthusiasm. Part of me thinks they’re waiting for the call, and I hate that. I so desperately want to make this work on my own, and prove to myself, more than anything, that I’m a competent human being and not just an entitled, impractical, upper middle class brat.

I am amused by the fact that my banker parents have been blessed with markedly impractical children, and I suspect this poetic justice must often be the case in comfortable families. There are four children in my family, and so far, of the three of us that have graduated, we’re batting 3 for 3 going into the arts. My sister Jessica is an assistant in a modern art gallery in Manhattan, my brother Jason is an aspiring documentary filmmaker/bartender, and then there’s me, book publishing. I don’t know how much my other siblings may have dug into the parental resources or not. At the end of the day, does it matter? Regardless of the exact details, there’s a mindset singular to the newly “self-sufficient” upper middle class college graduate. We have never considered the possibility that we’re not going to be okay. This, I believe, drives our career and life choices just as much as a tenuous financial background may drive another graduate to consulting, i-banking, or, ahem, law school.

The thing is, I think my parents are guilty of more than just spoiling us (which, of course they have, though god knows they’ve tried not to). I was up visiting my parents for a weekend recently, and I had a conversation with my mom. We were in the kitchen and I was attempting to evasively answer her questions about my finances. She started in on describing the path that had led her towards business school, something I’ve heard many times, but something that I hadn’t heard before came up.

“My father, the architect,” she mused, “struggled his whole life. My grandparents even paid for the deposit on the house in Mercer Island, for instance. He just never seemed able to sever that umbilical cord. When I graduated, I was sure I never wanted that to be something I worried about.”

For a moment, I was floored. Images of my own umbilical cord floated up behind my eyes; wrinkled, spongy, and supernaturally white, it was tying me forever to this woman in her sunny kitchen with her 80s Italian pottery and enviable complete Le Creuset set. And then, I recovered. If nothing else, my elite education has given me the ability to draw a counterargument, even if I may not have entirely convinced myself yet.

“But mom,” I said, shimmying a pan the way she taught me. “Surely that can’t be all there is to it. It is not some random happenstance that made all of your children go into the arts. You were an East Asian studies major; Dad was Latin American History. You may have been very happy with your jobs, but they were always your jobs, not your interests. Growing up, you read us C.S. Lewis and the Legend of Davy Crockett, not the Wall Street Journal. I don’t just happen to love literature. I was taught to. And even if I can’t make it work, I think I owe it to myself to try.”

“You’re right,” my mom patted my shoulder. “You go for it, kiddo.”

I don’t know how much she meant it. Most of the time, I don’t think I have half the conviction I pretend to have in what I’m doing right now. But in my better moments, I hope that if I can just scrape by for the next three months, it will all have been worth it. That I’ll look back on my life and think of these as my formative years, when I made a decision about who I am and what I want, and just went for it. Right? Well that’s the theory, anyways.