by Michelle Tea
If you want to pass as upper class, never, under any circumstance, be fat.
And always wear black. Especially at parties. That is what respectable women do. This was a lesson I learned not too long ago. I want to tell you that story.
I’M A 250-POUND BROWN WOMAN WHO GREW UP IN A MEXICAN immigrant household in the suburbs of the Bay Area. I was raised by my light-skinned debutante grandmother from Monterrey, one of the northernmost cities in Mexico (her proximity to the U.S. border revealed itself in her European features and reputed snobbery) and my dark-skinned grandfather, who pulled himself out of poverty and into gold teeth, a mortgage, and a champagne-colored 1993 Ford Thunderbird.
I was raised by my grandparents, but I am technically a third-generation American. I am the generation that was supposed to be seamlessly absorbed into U.S. culture. My grandparents didn’t have money; assimilation was my inheritance.
My homelife was emotionally volatile, with decades of unresolved trauma trickling down. Alcoholism, colonialism, war. Is rage epigenetic? Is sadness?
I wanted to love my grandparents, but that felt dangerous, like I was walking along the lip of an emotional black hole with incredible magnetism. So I became consumed with the escape that academic ambition promised. I went from a mostly immigrant, brown, working-class suburb in San Pablo to rich, white Berkeley (I didn’t know the people around me were rich; I didn’t know how to read the signs back then). Eventually I moved to San Francisco, got a decent job, and started writing.
I THINK THAT MY ATTRACTION TO WHITE MEN BEGAN HAPPENING around the time I moved to San Francisco. My pussy became my conduit of class mobility. Class is racialized and so of course my desire became inscribed with a racism that is very old. I didn’t know it then, but my sexual desire became part of a global history of that same war that had ravaged my family—the war for the domination of people of color by white people, of women by men, of land by all of us; we all become soldiers through our frenzied drive to survive. How does a clitoris know how to maintain colonialism? It’s magic.
And this brings us to the black dress.
I had just started dating a lawyer.
“A white lawyer!” my friend squealed as we walked arm-in-arm down Valencia Street. “Girl, have his babies immediately.”
My friend is a black punk who escaped the stultifying homophobia of the American south. He also seemed to understand my pussy’s potential for creating a legacy that would take me farther from my family, farther from him. The pain of this class migration is never discussed. Upward mobility takes us away from the place that we came from and the people who inhabit that place. It’s understood as positive by all parties involved because, theoretically, we can all “come up” together. In my experience, however, much is lost along the way.
My boyfriend had invited me to his firm’s Christmas party, and I didn’t know what to wear. I sensed that there was some unspoken set of rules regarding clothing at such an event, but I had never been closer to the epicenter of white respectability.
I reached out to my friend, a white feminist with a PhD, who is married to one of those tech money guys.
“Oh, we wear black,” she replied. “Our job is to fade into the background.” We. Our.
I was surprised by her response, and thought maybe she was following the rules too closely. I don’t know. I mean, a bright red mod dress with a poinsettia lace shell felt more than appropriate to me. I mean, it was festive and had a boat neck. Like, the kind of neckline that people with boats have. I began internally bargaining.
Meanwhile, I made an appointment at a nail salon, a gossipy place close to my house. These nail technicians had been hired by the boss lady, who was filled with Botox and venom. The kind of woman who would cut you with a tiny razor she held between her teeth at all times if no one were watching. The kind of woman who’s had to do things, too, to be here.
“What’s wrong with him?” the woman who was filing my nails asked after I told her why I was getting my nails done. I imagine this question may have been prompted by my being unshowered—I’d been short on time and hadn’t bathed before my appointment—and fat. He must be some kind of murdering domestic-abusing mutant, because normal lawyers don’t date fat brown women who don’t shower before their nail appointments, right?
Since I was getting judged anyway, I figured I would vent about my outfit conundrum. So I told her about the office party.
The petite white woman with curly hair sitting next to me asked demurely, “What firm?”
I told her where he worked.
“Oh my god. My boyfriend works there, too!” she sang. “Definitely do not wear red. I am wearing a simple knee-length black dress.” She finished by pointing to her ears: “We get to have fun with our earrings” and then wiggling her fingers “and our nails.” We. Our.
I DIDN’T WEAR A BLACK DRESS AFTER ALL, BUT I DIDN’T WEAR the red dress either. I wore an off-white silk blouse and a burgundy leather skirt. I got my hair blown out into a circa-1960s style, a nod to the dress that got left at home.
When we arrived at the party on the top floor of the San Francisco Ferry Building, I took the room in quickly and immediately understood what was happening.
The dresses were like a silent demarcation—a color line. The (few) women who were lawyers and the women who were partnered with lawyers were slender, had little or no makeup on, and wore black. The secretaries and female staff were black and brown, mostly plus size, and wearing leopard print minidresses, vinyl pumps, dangly earrings, stiletto nails. They looked more like me. They were certainly wearing what I would have preferred to wear.
I’m not sure if what I saw was some perverse drama that I had transmogrified within my mind, or if it all really was so obvious, so absurd, so awful, so contrived, but I was ashamed for knowing. I was sad that I would never unknow.
The theme of the party was “Caribbean Vacation,” an inside joke enjoyed by men who take great pride in working too much. I can imagine them chuckling: “This taco is the closest thing I’m going to get to a vacation as long as I’m taking all those depos!” Somehow “Caribbean” translated into steak fajitas and other anglicized Mexican food. I was into the spread but I was unsure if they knew this was not the right food or if they thought the whole equatorial world was a homogeneous territory, and that anything made with a tortilla elicited the sense that one was on a holiday.
The white women in black nursed a single, tiny flauta and anemically sipped on a glass of wine.
The darker, fatter women in bright dresses laughed with their mouths open, requested cocktails at the open bar, and enjoyed the food.
Just like always, I felt caught between these two kinds of women and the worlds they represented. One that meant nothing but that I’d been taught was everything. And one that I didn’t know how to want because it was too terrifying. It represented self-acceptance, the end of striving, the power of knowing that I had already won the race that never seemed to end, a return to the kind of femininity and love that reminded me of home, which had hurt me so much.
I wanted to want to pass, to belong. I mean, this was adulthood, right? I’d always known that someday I would have to put away the “childish trappings” of loud music, shared apartments, huge rings, huger sunglasses, getting high on the beach, talking about my bowel movements at dinner parties, having my tits out, tiny shorts, cracking up when something was funny, calling it like it is, never getting confused about what was a hustle (this was a hustle). I’d imagined that someday I would shed all those desires and wake up one morning with the genuine thought, “Ya know, today I’d like to wear a necklace with a delicate rose gold chain that features a ¼-inch earth-toned stone.” Or, “Oh my, aren’t Eileen Fisher scarves just wonderful?”
But I also wanted to dance. The firm had hired a DJ for the party, but only the staff—none of the lawyers or their black-dress-wearing attendants—danced. I kept looking over at the women on the dance floor, smiling like they were the ones who needed assurance, t
rying to give them some kind of signal that I was like them. I wanted to tell them how good they looked. I wanted to tell them how bomb their shoes and earrings and nails were. I wanted to tell them how they should get down on the boss’s dime because fuck these people.
I tried to get Boyfriend to dance. “Come oooonnnnn,” I whined, like this was my last chance at redemption. I dragged him onto the dance floor. He stood there bouncing awkwardly—painfully aware that he was violating the class laws—while I got down. The only one from the black-dress crowd on the dance floor—imposter revealed.
No, they knew before then.
I TRIED TO CONVINCE MYSELF I WANTED TO STAY IN THAT WORLD. Boyfriend bought a home overlooking the Pacific and gave me a key. We had a housewarming party. I made jokes about becoming a Xanax-and-chardonnay addict.
I told my friends it would be so fun. They could have all the shit he’d bought for me. Wouldn’t it be great? I was happy for them. But my friends genuinely heard the story I was telling. My friends are feminists, queers, weirdos, sex workers, activists. The kind of people who don’t wear black. The kind of people who are magic. They told me I deserved better than a big house with lots of things. They told me “There’s no language, no framework, for choosing this when you have access to that. You have to write it yourself.” They told me I was valuable on my own, and they didn’t need things as much as they needed me to be O.K. They told me they would be there when I was ready to leave.
I started telling my grandma I wasn’t happy, that I couldn’t stay with him. She started giving him our family heirlooms. Her allegiance to my financial security was stronger than her wish for my wholeness.
The day I finally left, my friend Sara had come to see me. We met in college, where she used to do Jim Carey impressions. She sat with me at the kitchen table, where you could watch whales with a small pair of binoculars that Boyfriend had been given at his housewarming party.
“I feel like it’s wrong to leave like this.” I had packed all my stuff in my car, my grandpa’s car that I inherited after he died. The champagne-colored 1993 Ford Thunderbird.
“It seems like maybe you’ve been wanting to leave for a long time,” she says.
But I also wanted to make it work. I wanted to bury myself and live in a big house with a white lawyer and have his half-white babies and disappear. I’d teach those babies how to sing Raffi songs. They wouldn’t know Spanish because I don’t know Spanish. They wouldn’t like big earrings because they never would have met their grandfather. I would trade my hooptie in for a Subaru. I would make sandwiches. My cleavage would disappear. So would my cheetah print wedges. My Mexican-ness would be nothing more than a passing point in conversation.
Instead, I got in the car, turned it on, pulled out of his driveway for the last time, and drove down the coast. Down my favorite curve in Highway 1, where the Pacific Ocean suddenly appears and becomes all you can see for miles and miles.
MY FATHER’S HANDS
DAISY HERNÁNDEZ
MY FATHER IS IN HIS SIXTIES. HE IS A TALL, THIN MAN WITH AN ALMOST bald head. He has a small beer belly beneath his white cotton T-shirt. His hands are never empty. There is always a cigar, cigarette, or beer can in them. He’s handsome, and he’s an alcoholic.
Years before the Cuban revolution, my father, then a teenager, saw a soldier in the hills where he and his family picked coffee beans, cut sugar cane, and raised pigs. He liked the soldier’s matching jacket and pants, the uniform’s sense of purpose. My father didn’t want to be a farmer. He wanted something more. He wanted to be on the side that won.
Some years later, he got the uniform and fought against Fidel Castro. Unfortunately, he only talks about it now when he’s drunk, slurring the words and his history into a number of possibilities. But this much is true, he says: It isn’t easy to switch sides in a war. So he left the island along with the United States embassy workers and came to New Jersey, where he cut hair, opened a bakery, painted houses, closed the bakery, and cut wood. By the early 1970s, he had settled into factory work and married my Colombian mother.
He returned to visit Cuba once before NAFTA and told his cousins how good work was in the north. His job was to stay up through the night with a textile machine. He’d replace needles that broke and alert the bosses to any problems. It was he and the night and the deafening sound of the machines. He didn’t need more than a few English phrases. On weekends he made extra money helping with plumbing, electricity—those many jobs where a man is always useful.
Then, in the nineties, factories began closing. My father’s work hours were cut from twelve a day to eight, and then six. I began finding him home at all hours of the day and night and after a while I stopped asking why, because all he would say was, “Se terminó el trabajo (the work ended).” The work ended like a novel, its mournful last page close at hand.
When he wasn’t on the clock, my father drank. His hands would point at me and remind me to study hard because “you don’t want to end up at a factory like your mother and me.” Even before I understood words and phrases like “manual labor,” “working class,” and “alcoholism,” I knew how they felt: like my father’s hands.
Parts of my father’s hands are dead. The skin has protected itself by hardening, turning his large hands into a terrain of calluses and scars, the deep lines scattered on his palms like dirt roads that never intersect. His hands are about power and survival, my first lessons about class. The dreaded question comes on Wednesday afternoons when my father drags the trash cans to the curb. That’s when the Colombian lady across the street pushes her screen door open. She’s noticed my father at home lately and asks him about his job. When he tells her the factory is closed por ahora, she tilts her head like she already knew. “Y estás colectando?”
What she really wants to know is if he’s collecting unemployment benefits.
“There’s no work to be found,” my father answers. His pants are falling from his narrow hips and he yanks them up with his left hand.
“Pero, estás colectando?”
My father shrugs his shoulders. “Es la mísma basura.” It’s the same garbage.
He wishes the Colombian lady well. From my bedroom window, I watch him walk into the two-family house he and my mother bought with years of savings. In the basement, he finishes a six-pack of Coors beer and listens to Radio WADO. He’s found a store down Bergenline Avenue where the price of beer drops when unemployment rises.
AT CATHOLIC MASS ON SUNDAY, THE COLLECTION BASKET MAKES the rounds. The Cold War is over, but the world is still divided into good and evil, democracy and communism, Catholics and others, the ones who give and the ones who collect. It is a simple arrangement. One ill-spoken word could damn you to hell, communism, and poverty.
There is some comfort in knowing even God has to collect. But still the church’s collection basket makes me anxious. I’m afraid we don’t have money to give because, when it comes to Strawberry Shortcake stickers, my mother says we don’t have the money. In church, my eyes rarely turn to her. Instead, I listen carefully to hear whether her pocketbook will join the others to interrupt the church’s silence. It does.
The collection baskets crawl down each pew and swallow the sounds of crinkled dollars and jingling coins. I hold two, sometimes four quarters, excited to throw them into the basket. The tap dancing of those coins into the basket makes me feel we are as good as any of the families here with five-dollar bills in their hands.
Spanish is a Romance language except when you’re trying to make ends meet. The Spanish we speak is a language in which life is reduced to talking about what you need, what’s working and what isn’t. No hay trabajo. Media libra de chuletas. Basta ya. Van pal’iglesia. Estás colectando?
Are you collecting? The rest of that sentence, the words “unemployment benefits,” never makes it into Spanish.
Are you collecting? The rest of that sentence, the words “unemployment benefits,” never makes it into Spanish. There is no need for it, because every
one here knows what is meant when the question is asked. No one says we’re “receiving” or “getting,” because no one here really believes we have a right to that money. You’re “collecting” because you don’t have work. You’re one step away from la gente en welfare and two steps away from the old lady at Port Authority who’s collecting pennies from commuters. Even in English, we call it “unemployment benefits,” thinking it’s a benefit to get something back from the work we do.
I live with Spanish, with coming home to find my mother watching a telenovela. Her factory shut down for a few days and her Spanish words are to the point. “Your father’s in the basement. They called from work, said to not come today.”
In the basement, my father talks to Elegua, an Afro-Cuban god without hands who lives in a clay dish and opens doors. He has only a face, sculpted into a round pointy crown. When my father is collecting unemployment, he feeds Elegua more candy and espresso so the god will open the door to another job.
Elegua is better than learning English. He’s the god of trickery and journeys; you can trust him more than English words that change tenses, don’t sound the way they look, and get turned on you at the factory.
As a child, I am drawn to Elegua and his candy dish. The Cuban women explain to my Colombian mother that Elegua loves children and that’s why I’m spending time with him. But they are wrong. I am a practical child. Elegua’s the god who opens doors and I am desperately trying to get away from my father’s angry, drunk hands, and the feeling that our destinies are scribbled in the square opaque windows of my father’s factory. Because Elegua is the god of crossroads, I imagine he understands the contradiction of my growing up: that I want to escape from my father and also take him with me, that I want to flee my life without leaving Papi behind.
I am meant to escape. Everyone tells me so at the barbecue for my mother’s birthday. “Girl, you’re going to be something some day. You’re going to make it. Irma, will you look at this thing the nena wrote for the school paper, her name and everything. Girl, you’re going places.” No one ever says where I am going, but they are sure that a place is waiting for me.
