by Michelle Tea
Copyright
Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class
First edition © 2003 Michelle Tea
Revised edition © 2017 Michelle Tea
“Another Year Older and Deeper in Debt” by Rachel Ann Brickner was originally published in Scoundrel Time literary journal in 2017: http://scoundreltime.com.
“Steal Away” by Dorothy Allison was originally published in the collection Trash, published by Plume in 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tea, Michelle, editor.
Title: Without a net : the female experience of growing up working class / edited by Michelle Tea.
Description: Revised edition. | New York, NY : Seal Press, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017036031 (print) | LCCN 2017044694 (ebook) | ISBN 9781580056670 (ebook) | ISBN 9781580056663 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Working class women--United States.
Classification: LCC HD6095 (ebook) | LCC HD6095 .W63 2017 (print) | DDC 305.48/230973--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036031
E3-20180117-JV-NF
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
INTRODUCTION
MICHELLE TEA
ANOTHER YEAR OLDER AND DEEPER IN DEBT
RACHEL ANN BRICKNER
THE BURDEN OF ENOUGH
IJEOMA OLUO
STEAL AWAY
DOROTHY ALLISON
FARM USE
JOY CASTRO
THE BEST PROFESSIONALS HAVE NEVER SEEN AN ARREST
NAOMI BEGG
THE PRISON WE CALLED HOME
SIOBHAN BROOKS
A CATHOLIC LEG
TERRY RYAN
DEEP CLEAVAGE, BLACK DRESSES, AND WHITE MEN
VIRGIE TOVAR
MY FATHER’S HANDS
DAISY HERNÁNDEZ
WHAT’S THE QUESTION AGAIN?
AYA DE LEON
WINTER COAT
TERRI GRIFFITH
THE JUST-ADD-WATER KENNEDYS AND BARBECUE BREAD VIOLENCE
POLYESTRA
CAREER COUNSELING
ARIEL GORE
MY DEAD ABUELO NEEDS A SUGAR DADDY
JULIANA DELGADO LOPERA
REVERSE
SILAS HOWARD
MY MEMORY AND WITNESS
LIS GOLDSCHMIDT AND DEAN SPADE
AUNT MARION, WHO LIVED IN FLORIDA
LIZ MCGLINCHEY KING
WINGS
tatiana de la tierra
THERE ARE HOLES IN MY MANDARIN DOG BISCUIT
SHELL FEIJO
ON EXCESS
CHLOE CALDWELL
THE LOWER-WORKING-CLASS NARRATIVE OF A BLACK CHINESE AMERICAN GIRL
WENDY THOMPSON
THE SOUND OF POVERTY
EILEEN MYLES
GHETTO FABULOUS
TINA FAKHRID-DEEN
GETTING OUT
FRANCES VARIAN
FIGHTING
BEE LAVENDER
SCHOLARSHIP BABY
LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA
SOMETHING FROM NOTHING
SHAWNA KENNEY
PASSING AS PRIVILEGED
LILLY DANCYGER
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
ABOUT THE EDITOR
INTRODUCTION
MICHELLE TEA
I DIDN’T GROW UP POOR, IMPOVERISHED, DEPRIVED. WE GOT BY. WE HAD enough. And it’s true—I had MTV and Catholic school. No college, though, but who went to college? Kennedys! My mom had money for Depeche Mode tickets when I begged her for them. Other times, no money for a candy bar. Don’t you think that if I had it I would give it to you? Really, no money for a candy bar? Really.
We weren’t broke, though. We were like everyone else in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and certainly better than many, the immigrant families crammed ten to an apartment, on welfare, or the families with a really bad alcoholic drinking all the money away. Our alcoholic dad split, no child support but that’s O.K., my mom doesn’t want to take nothing from nobody, no handouts, no charity. See? If we were really poor we’d need more. We’d be on food stamps, and we were only on them that one time when Ma had a hysterectomy and couldn’t work. Ma had to take off her jewelry, the thin, gold chain she wore, laden with little golden charms, a Tweety bird, Nefertiti, #1 Mom. If the case worker saw the gold they might think she was rich. A single mother, a nurse, raising two children in a slummy town, a deadbeat father run out the door, she doesn’t think we’re poor, fears we could actually be mistaken for rich by the workers who grant us our food stamps. Such is the head fuck of class in America.
This book, Without a Net, is important because it actually acknowledges that class exists in America. It investigates the particular intersection of class and gender, and calls into the story additional intersectionalities that complicate and illuminate. In a country where a racist white electorate voted in a fascist billionaire as an answer to their economic woes, a book like this is a lightning bolt of sanity. In a country where everyone, rich and poor, claims to be middle class, denying the reality of class stratification even as it intensifies and the government wages a very clear class war, attacking the voting right, health care, and educational opportunities, this book is radical. It was a necessary book, truth-telling and fearless, when it was first published, and the addition of new voices in this fresh edition makes it even more relevant. The class problem, the problem of poverty and the strange way it is regarded in this country, is not going away, and we need writers from low-income backgrounds breaking through the actual middle-class, often rich viewpoints and experiences that dominate the media. We need to hear about the poor kid who grows up to pass as privileged among her peers. The poor kid who grows up, jumps a class or two, and sags with survivor’s guilt every day. The anxious persistence of scarcity issues, the PTSD of a low-income childhood. The intersections of fat and poor, of brown or black and poor, of immigrant and poor. Radical, truth-telling magic. It might not be enough to rouse the country from its stupor of denial, ignorance, and hate, but at the very least it can be a lifeline thrown from one broke girl to another, and what a revelation it is to see your experience radiated back at you in a culture that denies you even exist.
The class problem, the problem of poverty and the strange way it is regarded in this country, is not going away.
I’m so grateful for the readers and teachers who have kept this book in print all these years. I’m grateful to share political community with the writers in this book, to be part of a sisterhood of broke girls. No matter if we grow up and manage to do
alright for ourselves, the way history haunts our psyches, the way family can be left behind, it weighs on our hearts.
May this book make its way to a new generation of readers who need it, who learn from it and take solace in it, who use it to counter the lies our culture tells us and inspire their own stories.
ANOTHER YEAR OLDER AND DEEPER IN DEBT
RACHEL ANN BRICKNER
SAY I TELL YOU A STORY ABOUT A GIRL WHO’S AFRAID OF MONEY. FROM A young age, she learned that there didn’t seem to be much of it and that hard work didn’t mean one would ever have much of it. She knew this from her dad’s dark tan in the summer that came from working twelve-hour days in the sun, laying mulch and planting flowers in the big, bright lawns of those with houses the size of her entire apartment complex. She knew this from her mom waking up early to go to an office job, and then going to work at an Italian restaurant rather than coming home, so that “after work” only meant the time it took her to get from the first job to the second one.
Say she asks for a pretend checkbook for her eighth birthday and makes her mom teach her how to balance it. She loves to practice her signature, the feeling of the thin paper on the side of her pinky as she writes. She loves to imagine buying things of her own someday—a bicycle, an old VW Bug, a small blue house—someday when she has more money than her parents.
By the time she’s a teenager, she hasn’t learned much more than this: Never let the balance go below zero. She spends the money from her baby-sitting jobs on thrift-store clothes, fast food, CDs. Later, she spends it on gas for her dad’s truck when she borrows it to get to and from her after-school job. She works at a pizza shop now, with almost all older boys and men twice her age.
SAY THIS GIRL STARTS OUT MAKING ONLY $5.25 AN HOUR, AND by the time she applies to college, her dad has left. She has only a couple hundred dollars to her name and relies on the men at work who like her to give her rides home. For a few dollars here and there, she burns CDs full of music for these men—metal and old rock, the kind of stuff that bores her—which she steals from the internet.
One of these men takes an interest in her. He’s broad-shouldered with bright red hair and a kind smile. He’s the one who will drive her home most often, late at night, when her mom has already gone to bed. Sometimes this girl goes on pizza deliveries with this man in his truck and they talk, joke, laugh. She feels seen by him more than by anyone else, and she thinks he might feel the same way. Sometimes, in the dark, in front of her parents’ house, he looks at her for too long, then asks if he can give her a hug before she leaves him. She hesitates, then says yes. When he holds her, she feels comforted but also scared. She can feel he’s getting something from this moment that she can’t quite understand, and she’s never completely sure if she’s safe.
Eventually she pulls away from him, goes inside, takes a shower, and sleeps for less than a handful of hours before going to school.
She tells herself, Everything is fine. She tells herself, I am safe.
SAY SHE FINISHES HIGH SCHOOL WITH HONORS. SHE GETS TO wear a blue sash and silver cords around her neck at graduation, but her gown is wrinkled. She didn’t realize she would have to iron it until it was too late and there was no one around to remind her. But on graduation day, both of her parents will come to the ceremony and watch their daughter receive her diploma, walking across the stage in bright teal flats, a huge smile across her face. After, they’ll all go out to lunch, eating cheesecake silently in celebration, pretending to be the kind of family she wishes they could always be.
There will be no one to take her on visits to the colleges where her high school advisers told her to apply. So, she’ll pick the school that’s closest to home, only thirty minutes away. It’s in the city, so she can get there on her own without a car. Besides, with small scholarships and grants, it’s the cheapest option. The dorms, the campus, the classrooms are her escape plan.
Say some days this girl feels nothing but a bell jar of guilt around her head as she walks across the campus, although she’s uncertain why. She thinks that maybe she doesn’t belong here, in college, in these classes, with so many kids who seem unlike her with money to spend—on books, on beer, on tuition.
In every classroom, she sits close to the wall and stays quiet. She looks up all the words she doesn’t know, when no one is paying attention: ostensible, extrapolate, pernicious, renege. How does one “unpack” a thought? she wonders. No one else seems to care.
When she realizes how much debt she’s in, she stares at her ledger for days in disbelief. How could a sum go so far below zero?
Later, when she realizes how much debt she’s in, she stares at her ledger for days in disbelief, wondering if she should drop out. How could a sum go so far below zero? So much debt in only two years, she can never pay it back with pizza shop money or old man CD money. She tells herself that there must be a job that will pay enough for her to live when she graduates in two more years. This is what everyone has told her, so she stays, her mom co-signing more loans each semester tuition rises, not knowing that later her daughter will have months where she’s unable to afford groceries and rent, even with a “good” job, one that requires a college degree.
She thinks of the cold pizza dough in her hands. Of the long, secret hugs in that man’s truck. And she learns to pretend to know and to have more than she does.
Tell me what you expect for her. Tell me how you think her story ends.
THE BURDEN OF ENOUGH
IJEOMA OLUO
THERE IS $10,000 IN MY BANK ACCOUNT RIGHT NOW. TO SOME PEOPLE, that is not very much money. To me, it’s an amount just large enough to give me heartburn. I check my balance every few days, with as much anxiety as I used to check when the balance was $20… or -$20. I take a deep breath, log on, close my eyes for a second, and then look. Yep. It’s still there.
The number was larger for a brief period of time. The day that the second half of my book advance came in, I was checking my account to see if I had enough money to cover the coffee I was drinking. I saw the suddenly sizeable balance and thought I was going to have a panic attack in the coffee shop. I thought there had been a cruel joke. Perhaps someone had put money into my account on accident and it was going to be ripped out only to leave me overdrawn. I was a good three minutes into worst case scenarios before it occurred to me that it might be the money for the manuscript I’d just turned in. When my agent confirmed that yes, this little tidy sum was indeed my book money, I sat there in the coffee shop and said to myself, “Well, now what.”
Growing up, there was never a question of what to do with extra money, because there was never any extra money. My mom worked the swing shift at an adult care facility. Backbreaking work that paid little above minimum wage. On that, she raised three kids. Money, or lack thereof, kept my mom up nights. It kept her sitting in the rocking chair on our apartment balcony crying at 3 a.m. while she tried writing numbers in different orders in the hopes that there would be a combination that would keep us fed and the lights on. Money was the reason why we couldn’t go to birthday parties and couldn’t go on field trips. Money was why we had no phone, why we ate ramen for weeks, why we had to use the hot water next door to shower. Money was why we only went to the ER, why we never went to the dentist, why we took out our own stitches. Money was what we searched couch cushions for, why we never opened our mail.
Money was never a future or a past. Money was never an opportunity. Money was always an emergency. So now, I have an amount of money that must signal a great emergency ahead and I’m just waiting for it to come.
In a fit of anxiety over the number, waiting there to be taken by disaster, I started giving it away. First to family, then friends. Then, when that was done and the number still scared me, I started giving money to strangers. I gave it away with a refusal to look at what I was doing, avoiding the math in my head. Eventually, even without looking at my balance, I knew I’d given more away than even someone trying to avoid money could excuse, so I had to stop. I
paid bills and fixed my car and then I ran out of places to put the money. So now the money is just sitting there. Waiting.
The first half of the advance was much easier. I was behind on my mortgage and knew that even if I weren’t behind, I wasn’t bringing in enough writing work to actually cover my bills. It was a stress, but a stress I’ve always known. When my advance came in I immediately sunk it into the mountain of debts I’d accumulated in the year since I’d moved to full-time freelance writing. I paid four months ahead on my mortgage, knowing that things would still be tight, but I’d be able to breathe for a while.
But now things are different. Right now there is no emergency to come and lift this burden off of me. My income from writing and speaking has been growing steadily and has consistently been enough to cover my bills (late, because I am still afraid of bills, but still paid). My mortgage is current. I even paid taxes. I know that I’m supposed to put this money into savings or something, right? But how? How can you just leave money there? If I leave it there, something will happen to take it all away. If I leave it there I will lose my job, or my car will break down or my kids will get sick. I know how to handle all of those things without money—I have handled all of those things without money many times. But I don’t know how to lose money. I’ve never had money to lose before.
It turns out that even when the bills are paid and it’s been years since a call I answered was met with a voice saying “this is an attempt to collect a debt,” the panic attack still comes whenever the screen on my phone says “unknown.”
“Spend it! Spend it now on whatever you want because you will never get an opportunity to buy whatever you want ever again.” That was the voice inside my head for a few weeks. But it turns out that even if you do buy whatever you want, when you’ve never had money, the list of “whatever” doesn’t come to much. I bought some dresses and some makeup, and I got my kids some toys and sports stuff, and then I kind of ran out of ideas. In my lifetime of poverty I never really dreamed of things. I just dreamed of being able to answer a call from an unlisted number without having a panic attack. But it turns out that even when the bills are paid and it’s been years since a call I answered was met with a voice saying “this is an attempt to collect a debt,” the panic attack still comes whenever the screen on my phone says “unknown.”
