WHEN I THINK ABOUT THE TYPE OF POVERTY I GREW UP WITH I’M INCLINED to call it “enough.” We had just enough. I guess we were what they call now the working poor. We weren’t really poor, but my parents were afraid of that—poverty. So there were many actions and choices in between us and poverty and we lived in that in-between place where you were always slightly reminded that you didn’t have enough or you had barely enough.
I always think of the powdered milk. What kid didn’t like to drink milk, tons of it—a half gallon was plunked down on the table at supper and at lunch. But sometimes my mother sank down a pitcher and there were tiny bubbles at the top of it and we’d scream: No, Mom, it has bubbles. It’s powdered! It’s not, she’d insist. Then she’d give in. O.K., she’d admit. It’s half and half. Everything was always getting stretched a little bit. At a moment when everyone was proudly aware of the pop glamour of American products, we didn’t use Welch’s grape jelly—we used Ann Page, the A&P brand. Or Finast from First National. When it came to ice cream it was Marvel, whatever that was, and it was also neapolitan so that nobody could have their favorite flavor, everybody could have striped ice cream or nothing. Neapolitan is strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. You probably know that. We didn’t have Kool-Aid, we had Cheeri-ade, our supermarket’s brand. I loved when we ran out of something just before supper because I’d jump on my bike and go to the Monument market in the center which was run by some Italian guy who wore a straw hat and the Monument only carried brand names, we were locked in to something known. But usually we weren’t. As a result, there were certain things that actually seemed disgusting to me. Like butter. Too rich. I preferred margarine. I had to develop a taste for butter in college so that I wouldn’t embarrass myself by my preference for blandness. I’m afraid to taste margarine now because I think I would still like it too much and I would think about home. Growing up poor—growing up anything other than middle class situates you strangely in the culture. For instance, I don’t like television. Unlike every middle-class girlfriend I’ve ever had, I watched it plenty growing up. No one ever stopped me. Also, it was the sixties. TV was like a national sport. Those people who were questioning whether it was good for kids were total outsiders. Conceited and rich. Probably the same people who were willing to put their entire family on TV, like the Louds. My family would eat supper and then my mother would make about three dozen chocolate-chip cookies and we’d watch TV until it went off. We’d watch Johnny Carson and then we’d watch American jets fly over Buddhist temples and “The Star Spangled Banner” would play and we’d call it a day. Nobody did homework. Nobody asked. There was no future.
Nobody did homework. Nobody asked. My brother was considered a brain and he got good grades somehow and I didn’t but it didn’t matter, because I was a girl.
We were just there. My brother was considered a brain and he got good grades somehow and I didn’t but it didn’t matter, because I was a girl. So right from the beginning it seemed that being female was another occasion of poverty. In fact there were two of us in my family. We were referred to as “the girls.” Immediately I was part of a group. It’s been pointed out to me that in photography kids of color are generally photographed in groups rather than in individual portraits like white kids. In general, it seems to me, girls are less white than boys, or white in the wrong way. And again, there were two of us, so the more, the worse. And I was more a part of the group of my family than the group at school. My family was kind of Old-World. If all the females were getting permanents, I would get a permanent. There was no personal self, no point of resistance. Whatever style was tearing through the legions of other girls at school had no effect on the fashions of my family. Since there were two girls we would often get the same thing: two dresses, identical. My brother was a little different from us. There was the sense that he would go to a brand-name college, and my mother helped him buy a car in high school—a Volkswagen; yet still in the most basic ways he was just like us. He watched TV and he went to bed. He got up and the jelly and the margarine were there and—let me show you our lunch boxes. It was cool to have your sandwich on a big bulky roll—but of course instead I had Wonder Bread—oddly one of the brands that broke through to the working class. Everyone had it. I think Wonder Bread was considered good because of all those ways it built the body and it was also great to have a Drake’s cake in your lunch box, but I did not have a Drake’s cake, I had an apple with a bruise. It’s better for you, my mother would defend it. And she was right. But still I couldn’t believe those lucky kids would open their boxes or their bags and a product in cellophane would gleam out at them. And they would tear it open and the whipped cream would be stuck to the paper and it was theirs.
IN SCHOOL THERE WAS A BAND. I DREAMED ABOUT IT—A MARCHING band with drums and clarinets and saxophones—the best. I desperately wanted to join the band and play music with everyone. But my mother simply said no. We couldn’t afford it. My brother had a paper route so he could afford it, but Terry didn’t practice. Why would my mother waste the money on a horn I wouldn’t play, she explained snootily. She actually had distaste for the idea. But I would, I believed, my hopes fading into the wallpapered walls of our two-family house that we owned. See, we weren’t poor. We were World War II white average. My parents bought our house on the G.I. bill. Obviously other guys went to college on it as well. Not my father. My father decided to drink himself to death and die instead. When we wanted something my mother would immediately compare her experience—orphan, to our experience—lucky ducks with two parents, and then even one. It was easy to say no to me. She would think of what she had had—what they had taken away from her. At the point at which both of her parents died, there was a pianola in her house and she believed it was hers and the Polish relatives came and carted it away. People take everything. That’s what my mother believed. I think we kids were “people” too. By the time I was eleven and had given up the possibility of ever playing the trumpet, or the clarinet or the saxophone, and merely sat on a chair in the parlor tooting on my harmonica, my mother would lean in and say, You know, I always wanted to play the piano when I was a child. She looked at me sadly. We were a couple of kids. So it’s really difficult when I think about growing up without money, not much of it anyhow—to figure out what in fact was the weirdness of our exact economic situation and what was the kind of mourning that people endlessly express through dollars. My mother couldn’t let me replace her loss with a living kid with a horn. I had to stay empty too. And I did. I really think of language as a replacement for everything. Sitting here at my computer it’s like the revenge of nothing. I make my constant claim in silence. I toot my horn.