My parents’ astute refusal to pay twice the cost of a wardrobe staple became my first awakening, however absurd, into the subtle differences between middle- and upper-middle-class finances. I’d seen poverty up close for the first time when I was nine, during our trip to Puerto Rico and Culebra for my dad’s work. “They don’t have…pants?” I said, crying, when I saw children running around various slums, barefoot and half-clothed. But nearly every single one of my friends from Potomac was the child of a doctor, lawyer, government worker, or architect father and a homemaker mother. And more than half of them, or so it seemed, were white and Jewish. It didn’t even occur to me that being Jewish put me in a tiny minority in the U.S. until after I arrived at college.
To help pay for my first year of college, Dad sold one of his paintings: a large canvas he’d splashed with multicolored acrylics. His lawyer salary covered our expenses, but Harvard was $16,000 a year at the time, meaning he made too much money for me to get a scholarship but not enough to have an extra $16,000 a year in the family budget, nor had he been able to save for his daughters’ tuitions. (As is often the case with even upper-middle-class families.) Once ensconced back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the city of my birth, my eyes were finally opened to the vast stratification of U.S. society, but this was back in 1984, when the delta between rich, middle class, and poor was less extreme.
I met kids who came from either nothing or next to nothing; students who’d studied at elite boarding schools such as Exeter, Andover, and St. Paul’s; other public school suburbanites like me; and the children of foreign dignitaries and American royalty. Robert Kennedy’s son Max, who’d gone to Andover, was my classmate. Samir Rifai, who would go on to become prime minister of Jordan in 2009, was the son of the 1984 prime minister of Jordan as well as a graduate of the then all-boys’ prep school, Deerfield. Harvard had placed him and his security detail in my freshman dorm with a Jew who’d attended Andover and an Irish Catholic who’d attended Milton, like the joke about the Muslim, Jew, and Catholic who walk into a bar, but they’re all wearing bluchers.
I’d heard of none of these prep schools before arriving in Cambridge. Or bluchers. And I’d certainly never noticed or understood the not-so-secret signposts of having matriculated from one: those L.L.Bean “blucher” moccasins, falling apart at the seams; the games of hacky sack; the Norwegian sweaters covered in tiny white dots, worn several sizes too large; the intricate wall tapestries from Nepal and makeup-free faces and pirated stacks of Grateful Dead tapes and slightly frayed navy pea coats and air-dried blond hair, even in winter, and what I can only describe as an unobtainable insouciance I’ve yet to master. Boarding school, to my mind, had always been where kids were sent after they either failed out of their public schools or set them on fire.
Not that I would ever admit this to any of my new classmates. No, instead of owning and embracing my solid, middle-class, public-school upbringing, I bought a Norwegian sweater at a Cambridge thrift shop and hid under it.
When people would ask where I grew up, I’d say D.C. instead of Potomac. When someone brought up the Social Register,* I feigned knowledge of its existence. When they inquired about my schooling, I’d evade. When they wondered where I summered, I’d pretend to understand what that meant. “On the Cape,” I’d say vaguely, referring to our two weeks of family vacation in a tiny rental cottage in West Harwich, not to the whole summers many of my classmates spent in the Hamptons or on Nantucket or Newport in grand homes with ocean views filled with gently used furniture passed down through multiple brand-name generations.
When my first college friend, Cordelia—descendant of Cornelius Roosevelt, the grandfather of President Theodore Roosevelt—invited me as her guest to the thirtieth International Debutante Ball at the Waldorf Astoria in New York that winter of 1984, I had no idea what a debutante ball was or how to dress for the occasion or that only the girls “coming out” (“Coming out from where?” I’d asked) were allowed to wear white. So I showed up in my all-white high school prom dress: a garish, sequin-covered number in polyester and Lycra that had seemed like a good idea when I bought it on sale at Montgomery Mall but suddenly, in that grand ballroom, singled me out as lacking whatever everyone else in that room had.
I remember standing there, feeling utterly exposed as a fraud as several female members of my college class, wearing puffy silk and satin white wedding dresses, minus the veils, were escorted into the ballroom by many of the male members of my class, all of whom were wearing white tie and tails: not that I even understood the semiotics of this particular garment either. Then—oh, god—I spotted Struan, the lovely and kind classmate I’d been dating that fall, having had no idea he was from this rarefied world of penguins and princesses.
We’d broken up, amicably if sadly, just after Thanksgiving of freshman year, when I told him I’d spent all of my high school years and even the summer before college in serious relationships, and I just wanted to be untethered for a bit, to see what that felt like. Struan is now the father of five and a kick-ass orthopedic surgeon who, when I tore my knee’s meniscus during my third pregnancy, then waited twelve years to fix it for lack of time and resources, didn’t lecture me about my stupidity but simply smiled his big Struan smile, scrubbed in, and fixed it.
“Deb!” he said, lifting me off the floor in a giant bear hug in the Waldorf ballroom. “What are you doing here?” Never before had my name sounded so idiotic. Deb! At the deb ball. In her totally wrong Deb dress. What was I doing there? But before I could answer this question, either to myself or to him, Struan was already being dragged by his new deb to the dance floor, where she and all the other girls in white dresses performed a choreographed courtship display dance with fans, like so many strutting flamingos in a National Geographic documentary. Afterward, the debutantes and their dates hopped into limousines and town cars heading north to various after-parties on Park Avenue, while I rode the subway downtown to my great aunt Ruth’s place in Peter Cooper Village, a once-affordable housing complex built for World War II vets like my grandfather, who helped Ruth land her small one-bedroom two floors below. “How was it?” she asked.
“Fun!” I lied. How to tell the aging single woman with whom I watched every hour of Princess Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles on TV that actually getting a chance to be Cinderella at the ball feels less like being welcomed into a world of prestige and glamour and more like walking through the hallways of your high school naked.
In other words, yes, I come from privilege. Immense privilege vis-à-vis most of the rest of the world and many others in the U.S. But it was not expendable-income safety net privilege. It was not trust fund privilege or here’s-a-few-bucks-to-get-you-started privilege. It was solid middle-class privilege, which used to mean something to my parents’ generation: an ability for a family to stay afloat comfortably enough, on one salary, from a four-decade career spent at the same firm, without tiring themselves out from too much treading.
But to my generation and those that followed, coming of age as the gap between rich and poor widened into a jagged chasm, being from a middle-class background has often meant that the minute we raise our heads above water, another sixty-foot wave appears: untenable childcare and housing costs; healthcare snafus, whether illness or loss of insurance; eldercare and sick parents; college tuitions that cost more than our yearly incomes; another round of layoffs without severance. This is particularly true if, having some vague notion of doing good in the world, we entered into less remunerative careers such as journalism, teaching, the arts, small business ownership, government, architecture, non-profits: all of which, in my parents’ era, would have provided more than enough income to get by and then some. One of my dad’s best friends, Jerry Landauer, was an award-winning investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal who fled Nazi Germany with his parents in 1938 and was raised on modest means in Queens. On his journalist’s salary, he and his partner, Roz, who was just starting out in he
r legal career, were able to buy a beautiful house in a leafy neighborhood in D.C. that would be utterly out of reach to any Wall Street Journal reporter today.
Visiting that house, in fact, when I was a young girl—seeing Jerry’s light-infused home office, with its Persian rug and giant window, its messy desk stacked full with reporters’ notebooks, files, receipts, newspapers, and books—that was the first time I thought: That looks like a fun job. I would eventually model my Harlem home office on the memory of his, down to the Persian rug my dog peed on.
When I left college at twenty-two to begin my life as a war photographer in Paris, I lived behind a particle board cupboard in the closet of a one-bedroom apartment I shared with three other friends from college, then on a pull-out couch in a colleague’s living room for the rest of that first year. After I’d established myself professionally and could pay a little more rent—we’re talking 2,000 francs a month, which back then was around $350—my first solo apartment was a chambre de bonne (a small room that used to be the maid’s quarters) on the Rue Saint-Denis, a street famous for its prostitutes. My courtyard view out my one window looked straight into the apartment of an elderly célibataire, who cooked his dinner every night in the nude. My futon took up the entire floor space, such that I had to roll it up every morning to unfold a small table for breakfast. Sometimes, between assignments, I went hungry.
The man I met at twenty-four and would marry at twenty-seven had been orphaned as a young teen. He had neither income nor liquidity when we said “I do.” In fact, he had student loan debts. I set aside one eighth of my monthly income as a TV news producer to help pay them off, just so we could start from zero instead of under water. We finally paid off his student loans in full after we’d had kids of our own, just when a new tsunami of housing and childcare expenses crashed down on us.
My three pregnancies set us back $9,000 each—$27,000!—for the deliveries and hospital stays, even though we had what was then considered good health insurance. My unpaid maternity leaves, when I was the primary wage earner, left us in debt. Then my husband, without informing me, invested all of our savings into an internet car-selling business that immediately went bust before losing his job in both the 2001 and the 2008 recessions. Suddenly, we were paying an extra $2,000 a month we didn’t have in COBRA fees. My father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the beginning of the recession of 2008, right after my husband was laid off.
A week after my father died, when I was still groundsunk with grief, my husband insisted—as much as I begged him to leave me alone to lick my wounds in peace—that I take the subway downtown to meet Dad’s college roommate at his Midtown jewelry store to beg for a loan.
“No, I won’t do that,” I said. “Please stop.” I was nearly done with a new book proposal. It would soon sell, in a two-book deal, and we would be back on our feet.
“We can’t wait that long!” he said, growing frantic. Our landlord had just raised our rent another $1,000 a month. Our savings were gone. We were facing both eviction and loss of health insurance for COBRA nonpayment by February.
It was mid-December 2008. Bell-ringing Santas stood on every corner of Fifth Avenue, soliciting dimes for the poor. I reflexively reached into my pockets to donate a few only to remember I’d already wrapped up all of our coins and lugged them to the bank to trade them for cash. Dripping with shame and fresh snow, I slipped into the silence of the store, the kind of place you need an appointment just to enter, worried that my slush-covered boots would stain the carpets. Inside that hushed interior, a thirtysomething blond in a full-length mink held the arm of a gray-haired older gentleman as they eyed an artfully illuminated case of necklaces encrusted with diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, and rubies. “That one,” she said to their jewelry advisor, pointing to the largest necklace. No prices were listed, but by my estimate, the piece probably cost roughly the equivalent of a decent three-bedroom home.
Through a narrow hallway, I reached the inner sanctum where Dad’s friend sat waiting. He’d hosted me in his Upper East Side brownstone during the summer of 1986, when I worked as a summer intern at a New York headhunting firm. He seemed appropriately stunned and confused by both my appearance in his office and by my request for a loan so soon—eight days!—after we’d shoveled dirt onto Dad, but he took pity on his former roommate’s grieving daughter and sent us a check, two months later, for $25,000. (Yes, this, too, is privilege. Immense privilege.) We were supposed to pay it back, with interest, in three $8,333.33 installments over the next three years, and we were doing well on that front, after I’d landed the new two-book contract; and my husband found a new job with benefits; and we moved into the house in Harlem to halve our housing expenses. But then, after paying back the first installment, my husband got laid off from his new job. Corporate belt-tightening.
I still owe the last installment.
Yes, this is all humiliating to admit out loud, let alone in a book. I didn’t want to. I still don’t want to. But I must, because I’m hardly alone in my financial struggles, and shame shared by one, in my experience, becomes shame mitigated in others. Of all the motivations I have ever had to put pen to paper, this one sits near the top. If those of us in the non–one percent want anything to change, whether white collar or blue collar, we need to start screaming about income inequality, the ease with which we fire our workers, and the insanity of the costs of healthcare and housing in this country. That billionaires’ wealth will rise by more than 25 percent, in the middle of a global pandemic, to $10.2 trillion, while eight million more Americans will slip into poverty, is both proof of our broken system as well as a shanda, as we Jews like to call a terrible thing that should never be allowed to happen because it’s shameful, a disgrace.
“Billionaire wealth equates to a fortune almost impossible to spend over multiple lifetimes of absolute luxury,” said Luke Hilyard, the executive director at a think tank that studies the societal effects of excessive pay. “Anyone accumulating riches on this scale could easily afford to raise the pay of the employees who generate their wealth, or contribute a great deal more in taxes to support vital public services, while remaining very well rewarded for whatever successes they’ve achieved.”
Simply put? The reason Jeff Bezos is worth nearly $200 billion is because his warehouse workers earn $15 an hour. That’s it. That’s the whole tweet. Worse, he brags about these wages, as if he were being generous: “More than 40 million Americans—many making the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour—earn less than the lowest-paid Amazon associate,” he’ll write in his 2019 letter to shareholders, patting himself on the back.
On the one hand, okay, yes. Earning $15 an hour is quantifiably better than earning $7.25 an hour. On the other hand, dude, that still comes out to only $31,200 a year salary, which barely covers most Americans’ necessities. In many cities, it will leave a family impoverished. Which raises the question: How many billions more than one does Jeff Bezos actually need?
Add a divorce into this broken system, if you’re a woman, and the free fall is staggering, particularly for those mothers who, because our caregiving system is broken, and meetings are still called after 6 p.m., and men have yet to step up in any meaningful way, were forced to cut back on their hours or quit their jobs.
An American woman who files for divorce in her fifties—I was forty-seven when I got separated, fifty-two when my divorce was finalized, the financial disaster sweet spot for women—faces a loss of 41 percent of her household income after her marriage ends. And that’s just her downward mobility if nothing else goes wrong; if she keeps her job; if her housing costs stay the same; and if she is receiving appropriate child support and/or alimony, neither of which I was receiving. Add on a hysterectomy, a rent hike, two college tuitions, a breast lump, a job loss, multiple extra hours of childcare, and $2,300 a month in COBRA fees, and those numbers go straight out the window, along with the woman’s dignity, peace of mind, and hope for a
better future.
In other words, when I lost my job at Health Today, I also lost whatever tenuous foothold I’d had on the middle-class ladder. The fall was steep. And (literally) heart-stopping.
Because of my Hail Mary trip to L.A., made possible through airline points and the kindness of my friend Julie, who let me crash at her house, Eddie and I were able to sell my Shutterbabe rights to Eva Longoria’s company, UnbeliEVAble, for a nominal fee. Better yet, for a single mother in dire need of health insurance for herself and her family, I’d been hired to co-write the pilot. Eventually this will bring in $80,000 of income. The initial offer had been $38,000, but Eddie’s agent had agreed to double my fee by lopping off a small chunk of his quote, which, because he’d been an executive producer on several ’90s-era Must See TV shows, was significantly higher. This payment, in turn, will allow me to join the WGA (Writers Guild of America), the screenwriters union, which provides excellent, low-cost health insurance to its members, which will now include me and my family for the next two years plus each year after that, should I make $38,000 a year from then on as a screenwriter.
(I won’t.)
The night I get the call from my agent alerting me to this life-altering news, I’m cooking the last of our pasta supply for dinner. I collapse on the black-and-white linoleum-tiled floor like a fallen rook, still gripping my wooden spoon. It’s not like fainting. I don’t feel the sound sucked out of my ears or the curtains falling over my eyes or that weird presyncope whiff of something resembling rubbing alcohol, if I had to name it, and I don’t hit my head on the way down. It’s more like having legs that can no longer support my body so they buckle. “How quickly does the health insurance kick in?” I ask. From my vantage point, sitting with my back up against the back wall of the galley kitchen, I spot one of the roach motels I’ve placed along the perimeter of the kitchen, teeming with new guests.
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