I never thought about money a whole lot before moving to New York City. At least, not in the how-am-I-going-to-afford-to-eat sort of way. My parents aren’t wealthy, but they’ve always owned their own home and packed school lunches with carrots and whole-wheat sandwiches for their three kids. When I was twelve, we went to Washington, DC, because my dad had a conference there and the hotel room was paid for by his work. We visited all of the free Smithsonian museums and I ate a Reuben sandwich for the first time at a restaurant near the theater where Lincoln was shot. I had no firsthand frames of reference for the outlandish wealth or the desperate poverty that New York City encompasses. Growing up, my family and I volunteered regularly at soup kitchens and donated to homeless shelters, but there’s a remove when you drive an hour home afterward to the scrubbed, mono-economic suburbs. I knew intellectually that a vast chasm exists between rich and poor, but I hadn’t encountered an academic or journalistic rendering of the divide that adequately conveyed the visceral feelings of experiencing it for myself. Turns out, AmeriCorps was my year of economic extremes, my year of food stamps and of billionaires.
A doorman in a matching burgundy cap, jacket, and pants with gold piping, and white gloves, flung open the door for my boss, Sara, and me and then ushered us through the marble, rococo-inspired lobby, with gold leaf fleurs-de-lis on the walls. “We’re here to see Marcy,” my boss told him as he escorted us to the elevator, where he pressed the button marked “18.” No last name needed; the doormen in our donors’ buildings knew every one of their residents and exactly which multimillion-dollar apartment they inhabited. I was a development associate, the second on a team of two tasked with raising money for the small nonprofit that AmeriCorps had assigned me to. When I filled out my AmeriCorps application online, there was a drop-down menu of fields to choose from, and I’d picked “fund-raising” because my dad was a fund-raiser and I knew it involved things I thought I knew how to do, namely, writing and talking to people.
A woman in wash-and-wear slacks and a beige top, which, in my nonexistent experience with domestic help, I would’ve called an art smock, opened the door to Marcy’s apartment and led us down a hallway with an inlaid wood floor. Sitting on a marble-topped mahogany table with carved ballerina legs was a bouquet of white roses and pale pink peonies that was more of a centerpiece than a bouquet, and I wondered briefly if it was left over from someone’s wedding. No, I quickly realized, it was just the foyer bouquet, which coordinated with a smaller but no less opulent arrangement on top of the grand piano in the living room where Marcy stood poised for our arrival. She glided across an expanse of white carpeting to embrace Sara and kiss her on both cheeks. I was trying to figure out who the nameless woman in the smock was and found my answer when she silently carried in a tray of tea sandwiches. I then understood that we wouldn’t be introduced.
Everything in Marcy’s home was precise and immaculate and, by contrast, I felt elephantine. I stood frozen in place on the pristine white carpeting as I inclined my head toward Marcy so that she could kiss my cheeks too. I hadn’t washed my hair that morning and flushed with shame that she would smell my lower-class lack of hygiene. I knew Marcy and her lot didn’t wash their own hair; they popped over to a dry bar for a blowout. I thought I saw her smooth, pearlescent forehead wrinkle as she rounded my face for the destination of my second cheek, her Chanel earring scratching my skin ever so slightly, leaving an indentation of you-can’t-afford-this in its wake. My scalp suddenly felt greasier than the cheap cheese pizza my roommates and I scarfed on the floor of our dining-room-table-less living room. I swear dandruff started to plume.
The kissing ritual over—a bizarre New York City thing that I never fully understood or felt comfortable with—I turned my head to the left, pretending to look out the floor-to-ceiling window with a view of Manhattan, in order to surreptitiously check if there was any dandruff on the shoulder of what I now realized was a provincial, criminally unfashionable beige suit with thin blue stripes and pleats all the way around the hem of its knee-length skirt. Marcy and Sara were chatting about chemical-peel facials, a conversation I had nothing to contribute to, so I began to inch around the room, taking in the incongruous collection of art on the walls. As far as I could tell, the only unifying thread was that it was all real art by real artists.
Our goal today was to secure a donation from Marcy—perhaps one of these paintings—for our nonprofit’s annual gala fund-raising auction at Christie’s. Sara also planned to ask her to consider purchasing a dinner table at the event for $25,000. This being a sum nearly three times my annual salary, I couldn’t imagine she’d say yes. Even though I knew that to Marcy $25,000 was about the equivalent of $5 to me, I still couldn’t comprehend how a person could have enough excess cash to simply give away that much money. In this way, fund-raising felt miraculous to me. I liked that we gave people a chance to help others, a chance to do something meaningful with their money. But I still couldn’t fathom the dollar amounts, and was relieved that Sara made the actual ask.
Marcy and Sara were helping themselves to the spread that the maid had brought in but I hesitated, mortified I’d drop food on something priceless. I wondered if there was any way I could avoid eating without seeming weird. I couldn’t feign vegetarianism or an allergy to gluten, since my boss had witnessed me wolf down a cheeseburger when we’d gone out for a team-building lunch the week before. Plus, I was starving and not in a financial or hunger position to turn down a free lunch. So I held my breath while balancing a Limoges plate of ham sandwich on my lap, perched on the edge of a pale rose–colored damask sofa that probably cost more than my undergraduate degree. My legs and back were cramping because I had my knees jammed together and my lower back arched to keep the plate stationary while alternately smiling, saying a few conversationally appropriate words to prove I wasn’t mute/an idiot, and taking infinitesimal bites. I looked down and saw a determined run in my nylons making its way from somewhere deep inside my brown, half-inch pumps up the outside of my calf. Every time I shifted it bolted upward. My mom had taught me that if I ever accidentally broke something at another person’s house, I should pay to replace it. But there was no way I could afford to even offer to replace anything in Marcy’s apartment, which made me feel unwelcome in my own mind. I’d only ever been in the homes of people relatively close to my own position on the economic spectrum: people who owned things from Bed Bath & Beyond or World Market and perhaps, on the high end, Pottery Barn, but probably purchased with a coupon or on clearance.
I prayed that we’d move over to the security of the massive dining room table I could see lurking in the next room, replete with its own coordinating floral centerpiece. A plate is so much more stable on a table, so less likely to be dropped onto white carpeting. No luck; we were quite clearly staying in the living room on these unforgiving light-colored surfaces with nowhere to rest cutlery or one’s glass of lime-infused sparkling water. It occurred to me that no one who cleans their own home would have this much white/nearly white furniture. Sara, a consummate pro, mercifully did all the talking because I wasn’t sure what to say to a person who had hundreds of dollars in floral arrangements delivered to her home every few days. Marcy offered to donate a week at their vacation home in Nice, France, and to purchase a dinner table. Our work was done.
That night, I was drained from maintaining a faux smile and a tenuous perch on Marcy’s living room furniture all afternoon. Riding home on the train, I didn’t have the energy to read the Brooklyn Public Library book I’d dragged around with me all day. I just sat there and stared at people as they got on and off the subway car. Forty-five minutes later, I was back home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. There were police cars stationed at every other cross street of Franklin Avenue, and a police observation tower sitting outside of the Yaffa Money Mart bodega three blocks up from my apartment. I walked over to a police car and asked what was going on. The officer told me they were on routine surveillance for drug- and gang-related activity. I asked if I should do anything to protect myself and he said, “Move to a safer neighborhood.”
Stunned, I walked home and locked the door. I’d seen a gun not attached to a law enforcement officer for the first time and the inside of a billionaire’s home for the first time during my first month in New York City, and the whiplash was almost unbearable. I was starting to feel like I’d made a mistake in coming here, but I couldn’t back out now. I was on contract with AmeriCorps for a year and, more to the point, I well knew that nowhere else would hire me without this year of experience on my résumé. So I sat in my windowless bedroom, staring at my cardboard dresser, eating black beans from a can, drinking wine from a box, and wondering how I’d survive the next eleven months.
There wasn’t a grocery store in my immediate neighborhood, but after a few weeks my roommates and I found a Key Food eleven blocks away, which had cramped aisles of mostly canned and frozen goods with flyspecked fluorescent lights overhead. Despite reading about them, I’d never understood what it felt like to live in a food desert. I had $120 in food stamps every month, which was another benefit of AmeriCorps. Since my rent was $500 a month and I brought home $833.33 every month (and was trying to save as much of that $333.33 as humanly possible), I couldn’t afford to spend any more than the food stamp allotment on my meals. After I figured out I could slip laundry detergent and shampoo in with my groceries and pay for them with my food stamp debit card, I spent even less on actual food. I’m a terrible, not to mention unenthusiastic, cook, so I worked out a rotation of canned tuna, peanut butter (usually without bread), black beans, pasta, and frozen dinners that fit my budget of around $4 or less per day. Since my office provided a pizza lunch every Friday, I’d stuff myself and then take home all the leftovers I could squeeze into a gallon-size ziplock bag I’d bring from home and wash out each week. I was dizzy with excitement the hour before the pizza was delivered, steaming hot and delicious with doughy, garlicky knots as an appetizer. I’d learned about poverty in college, and food deserts specifically, but none of that effectively conveyed what it feels like to carry a week’s worth of cheap groceries home, the plastic bag handles digging into my wrists, for an eleven-block walk over urine-soaked sidewalks with people asking me to give them my food and me feeling guilty for not giving it to them because I just could not repeat the ordeal. There was a bodega on my street that sometimes had fresh fruit, so I’d buy apples or bananas on my way into work if they weren’t too brown and spotted. I couldn’t get over the fact that back in the Midwest, we’d considered it an actual chore to hop in our car and drive a few miles to a gigantic, sparkling, air-conditioned grocery store that played Top 40 and sold every kind of vegetable you could ever want (and a lot that no one ever did seem to want).
“Go back to where you came from!” a woman screamed at me as I pushed my four-wheeled metal cart to the laundromat one Saturday morning. I was walking down the sidewalk with my dirty laundry, so I thought it was pretty obvious that I, in fact, lived here. Up until that point, that moment of being yelled at in the street, I’d assumed I was struggling alongside my neighbors. That we were all poor and on food stamps and desperate together. Every week, we sat side by side on the cracked orange plastic chairs in the laundromat that stank of feet and had washers encrusted with grime around the edges. We all dully watched our clothes rotate since it was well known they’d be stolen, still dripping wet, if we left. But that woman’s words, and the naked anger behind them, made me realize that I was a fake. I was just trying on the mantle of poverty for a year, making a cutesy budget to mete out my food stamps and picking up loose change underneath swank Manhattan bars I’d duck into pretending I was meeting a friend, but really just hoping someone had dropped a twenty as they ordered their third martini.
I wasn’t living in entrenched, generational poverty with no way out, and I had no one to provide for but myself. What a selfish, entitled brat I was. I’d be gone as soon as my contract with AmeriCorps was over and my lease ended. I had no intention of living here in any permanent sense and my neighbors knew it. They hated what I represented: white, educated, wealthy privilege. Forget my billionaire donors; I’d never understood my own privilege in such sharp relief. I hated living in Crown Heights. I hated the yelling at all hours, the gunshots, the mice and cockroaches in our apartment, and the inexplicable incident where someone ripped all the sidewalk trees out of their planters one night, but I’ve never been more grateful to live somewhere. Without that experience, I wouldn’t have a frame of reference for how fortunate I am and for how grinding and chronic true poverty becomes. I wouldn’t understand how profoundly fortunate it is to live in a neighborhood you’re not terrified to walk through alone at night and that has a grocery store and banks and doctor’s offices. I didn’t make a conscious choice to live in Crown Heights and at the time, all I could think about was leaving, but it was the best thing that could’ve happened to privileged, sheltered, twenty-two-year-old me.
I didn’t belong in either the living rooms of the wealthy or my neighborhood with its en plein air drug trade. I started to despise both. I learned that I didn’t want to be rich after listening to our donors complain about managing their household staffs and which apartment building they could afford to upgrade to and where they’d summer and which elite schools their children would attend. It struck me that most of these people weren’t happy in a deep or genuine way. There was too much peer pressure to conform, aspire, strive, and prove their wealth to simply enjoy life.
Moreover, I got the sense that if you’re tremendously wealthy, you never know if people are interested in you or in your money. I also saw that some people in this echelon came to define themselves by their wealth more than by any other aspect of their lives. Exactly like my Crown Heights neighbors, some of whom were ruled by their lack of money, the affluent are sometimes ruled by its presence. I didn’t want any of that. I felt as though there had to be more to life than an endless acquisition of money in order to continually buy more stuff.
On the other pole of things, I didn’t want to be poor, with the attendant desperation, anger, and depression. Both worlds were completely obsessed with money for opposite reasons. I realized that I wanted a life where money wasn’t important; and so, in addition to my resolve not to take on debt that year, I decided to save as much as I possibly could. I had no idea if this type of life was even possible, and I knew next to nothing about managing my finances (pitiful as they were) but I figured that the place to start was with money in the bank. And so I began to save.
The upside here was that my plan vis-à-vis Nate seemed to be working. His job in Kansas was a contract position that ended in November, so he decided to look for his next employer on the East Coast. In December, he flew to New York and spent the month holed up in my windowless bedroom, job hunting on the spotty Wi-Fi we “borrowed” from our downstairs neighbors. But what he was more successful at, and has always had an uncanny knack for, is networking. This is how we found ourselves one Thursday night at a bar in Hell’s Kitchen that served free hot dogs and how, in true Nate fashion, he left with an interview scheduled at a firm in Boston that married his two great loves (other than me): politics and software engineering. He was hired the next week. In early January, we took the $15 Fung Wah bus up to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to find him an apartment. He settled on a subterranean basement unit with the pros of being in a desirable urban neighborhood and a five-minute walk from his new office. We celebrated with dinner at a BYOB Indian restaurant in the East Village that, for unknown reasons, is covered with Christmas lights. It’s also cheap beyond belief, two things I have to believe are correlated. Nate was gone the next week.
Cambridge is a lot closer to Brooklyn than Kansas, but it’s still a 217-mile distance in one of the most expensive corridors of the United States. Neither of us owned a car, so we were left with the bus. Let’s iron something out right now: a city bus is fine. A city bus is cheerful with a jovial driver and passengers who have recently bathed, all zipping around town with ease. But a long-distance bus? That is an entirely different animal. A long-distance bus is no one’s first choice. It’s no one’s second choice. It’s the choice of last resort for people who cannot afford to cross state lines in any other way. Any other way, I tell you.
Every Friday at exactly 5 p.m., I’d run from my midtown office to Grand Central Terminal banging my suitcase (a beaten-up, green, ’80s-era hand-me-down from Nate’s dad) behind me and ride to the Lower East Side where the Fung Wah bus picked up, standing the whole way so that I could be the first person to bolt off the train and up the station steps. There wasn’t a stop or a station per se for the Fung Wah, just a window counter jutting out of a Chinese restaurant where I bought my $15 ticket. Then, no matter the weather, I stood on the sidewalk in a glum queue of people who simultaneously wanted to get to Boston, but did not want to get on this bus, with its inoperable windows and ingrained stench of fish and fried food. I’d slump into an aisle seat and try to look like I had typhoid/anger management issues, hoping no one would want to sit next to me. And no one wanted to sit next to me because we all tacitly agreed that the only thing worse than riding on a bus for four hours is sitting next to a stranger on a bus for four hours, which is what usually happened. A latecomer would rush on the bus, sweating from their jog, victorious they’d made it, and squeeze in next to me, our coats and bags jumbling at our feet and falling down on top of us from the too-small overhead bin. We’d nod apologetically at each other, both knowing we’d prefer to sit alone, but also acquiescing to our new reality. My fellow passengers and I would eat the dinners we’d brought, not making eye contact, facing forward, futilely praying we wouldn’t be delayed in the inevitable, inexorable Friday evening rush hour traffic for more than an hour or two. Once, we were stuck for seven hours on the highway in the middle of a blizzard. I’ve tried to think of worse experiences in my life. The only one that comes even remotely close is the time Nate and I flew to Belgium for vacation and I contracted food poisoning in the airport and spent the entire flight running back and forth to the lavatory. The Fung Wah bus service was shut down in 2013 for safety violations, but this was 2007 and they were, somehow, hurtling passengers down the highway, providing a means of transportation for everyone who couldn’t afford a $200 train ticket just to get from one state to the next.
At the end of this four-to-seven-hour trudge, Nate would meet me at South Station in downtown Boston and we’d snuggle on the T ride to Central Square in Cambridge. The weekends were how I wanted the rest of my life to be: playing house with Nate. He was it for me; he was my future. We were too poor to do anything, so we’d melt cheese on bread in the toaster oven his parents gave him as a new job present and drink boxed wine by the light of Christmas candles I bought for us in the Walgreens holiday clearance section. We slept late on Saturdays and then walked the length of the city many times over, pausing to read the menus of restaurants we couldn’t afford to eat in. The only reason I brought a suitcase every week was to load it up with my dirty laundry, sheets included, and wash it in his in-unit washer/dryer, which was located in the front hall/living room right behind the couch.
Every Sunday afternoon starting at about 3 p.m., a hollow well of despair bloomed in me. I’d watch the clock, try not to watch the clock, then watch the clock again as my time with Nate ticked down. It was the lowest point of my week, every week. Initially, I took a midafternoon Fung Wah home, but as the months wore on and our ritual of creating a two-person nest deepened, I moved my departure time later and later. I ended up with the 7 p.m. bus, which was the latest I could possibly go and still make it to work the next morning by 9 a.m. The Fung Wah dumped me in the fish gut–drenched streets of Chinatown at 11 p.m. Then I’d take two trains back to Crown Heights and walk the eight blocks home guided by whichever streetlights happened to be working that week, trailing my suitcase of clean laundry, nursing my weekly broken heart.
In April, Sara offered me a full-time position to begin after my AmeriCorps tenure ended in September. I was flattered but presented with a dilemma since I didn’t want to continue this Fung Wah drudgery. I wanted to move in with Nate, but not without first getting engaged. I thought if I just moved in with him, we might never get married. We’d slide into cohabitation and never see the point of making it official. I’d miss out on that element of adulthood. I was so bent on following what I envisioned as the prescribed steps for achievement that I was convinced marriage had to be part of my life in order for me to be perceived as successful.
Sensing that this was my moment for leverage, I outlined the situation for Nate in one long, awkward sentence that went something like, “My lease is up at the end of August, I want to leave Brooklyn, I’m tired of the long-distance relationship thing, and ideally, I’d move in with you, but I’m not willing to do that unless you’re ready to put a ring on it.” I figured if he didn’t propose soon, he never would.
Eons elapsed (by which I mean a month), no proposal happened, and I started what can only be correctly described as world-class stressing out. What if spending the rest of our lives together wasn’t what Nate had in mind? I’d considered our marriage a foregone conclusion since the beginning of our senior year, when I’d returned from eight months of studying abroad and he’d come to the airport with my parents (after driving the five hours to St. Louis and staying at their house overnight without me). Us not getting married hadn’t entered my calculations. I was now twenty-three with very little in savings, and no clear next step other than moving to Boston and getting married. I hadn’t made contingency plans because none of my future-casting was without Nate by my side. The job I’d been offered (that is to say, the job I had) would pay $30,000 a year so I’d no longer have access to food stamps or a free MetroCard (another AmeriCorps benefit). By my calculations, that meant I’d still be slogging through white-collar poverty. Both of my roommates had already made plans to move in with other people, and I had no clue where I’d live in New York City. I certainly didn’t want to stay in Crown Heights, but I also had no prospects for roommates. All of my friends were already partnered or roommated up, I couldn’t afford to live alone, and I was terrified of moving in with Craigslist strangers.
I was also keenly aware of the financial ramifications of us getting married. Neither of us earned enough at that point to pay rent, buy groceries, and also save anything close to “real” money. The only hope I saw was for us to combine powers. Living together in Nate’s tiny one-bedroom would dramatically increase our savings rate and allow us to put some distance between us and a $0 net worth. Yeah, I loved Nate and wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, but I also saw marriage as fiscally prudent. If our salaries were merged in the same bank account, we’d actually be able to shore up a decent emergency fund—a concept I’d recently learned about from my secondhand copy of Personal Finance for Dummies. I was also vaguely aware that we were supposed to be saving for retirement, a fairly ludicrous concept when you’re a twenty-three-year-old struggling to buy food, but I saw the economizing efficiencies of marriage as a way to get us closer to these desirable, adultlike ends.
A clammy panic wrapped its fingers around my Nate-loving heart. Nate balances out my perfectionist neurosis (example: see above paragraph) and pushes me to be a better, more accomplished person. There’s no one I’d rather spend every day of my life with. I even like going grocery shopping with him because he pretends he’s a modern art critic when discussing food package labels. No one else does that. If he didn’t propose, not only was it going to screw up my whole life trajectory/fact that I’d already made a list of baby names that sound good with Nate’s last name, I also had very real logistical concerns come August 31, 2007.
In June, Nate and I took a trip to visit my parents and our college friends who still lived in our college town. On our first day in Lawrence, Kansas, Nate said he wanted to take a walk around campus. We headed out and he took a backpack with him, which I thought was odd because he prides himself on never carrying anything, but he explained it was supposed to rain that afternoon and that he was bringing an umbrella. Nate was speed walking and, at six foot two, he has a way of getting ahead of me, so I was running to keep up. He seemed oddly sweaty so I wondered what was up. Was this a sign that he was on drugs? Sweating, fast walking, a quick pulse, nervous eyes, and an unexplained backpack? I made a mental note to google it later. We came to Budig, the building on campus with the biggest lecture halls, and Nate said he wanted to go inside to use the restroom. To do drugs? I wondered. He returned a few minutes later with a janitor who unlocked one of the lecture halls for us. Nate ushered me up the steps and practically pushed me into a chair near the top of the auditorium. The lights were off in half the room so I twisted in my seat to see where a light switch might be. When I turned around, Nate was down on one knee, my late grandmother’s engagement ring in his trembling hands and his mouth moving. He was asking me something that I couldn’t understand because I was crying so hard. He looked nervous and asked if these were good tears or bad tears. “Good!” I managed to sputter. He slipped the ring on my finger, the wrong one actually, but that was much more easily remedied than redrafting my entire life plan. I now understood where we were. These were the exact seats we’d sat in the first time we met in a Journalism 101 class the second semester of our freshman year. He told me later he’d read a poem he’d written about our love, but I have no memory of that. All I remember is being filled with overwhelming joy and, if I’m honest, a pretty large amount of relief.