Reading Mary Karr’s Lit and thinking again that my problem is as much
that I was never trashy enough as that I was never middle-class enough. I have
no long tale of insane mothers, strings of divorce, fathers coming home at dawn
from the night shift with flaccid white skin peeking out below their farmer
tans. This means that I am abject, stretched between those two categories, those
two known identities of doctor’s daughter and alcoholic night-worker at packing
plant’s daughter, but alienated from both. Trashy picaresque at least is
interesting; but I was too garbagey for the one, too chicken-livered for the
other. That’s the source of my malady. If I reach deep into my gut all I pull
out is a limp, detached set of testicles that, never having descended, simply
shrivelled up and died. I have never been a man in any form at all. Men come in
all sorts, from the carefully groomed Wasp to the dock-working Marlon Brando.
But they do not come in abject, which is what I am.
I didn’t even have
the courage to launch myself into a life of drugs and alcohol. I, descendant of
a long line of Irish alcoholics, and I mean serious alcoholics, the kinds that
drink themselves to death, could manage no better than an eating disorder. It
was a pretty good eating disorder, complete with the firecracker shed full of
blow ups. But all the drama took place behind locked doors. The whole force of
my pain and outrage was directed at imaginary beings, God, mostly, because I
never would have had the guts to explode in public or even in private at a
lover. I was a pathologically normal cut-out figure leading a wacky drama inside
my own creepy head and acting it out on my own grotesque form. I got the whole
dismal load of self-loathing without the drugged-out lit-up coolness of being
out of control.
No, and the whole time I was leading that midnight game
of chicken all by myself I was practicing a bizarre game of passive Midwestern
congeniality that somehow kept getting me chosen. In those days, we girls were
chosen, asked to dance, asked out on dates. My practice, so natural to me, was
to be nice. I had a sort of pliant thing going that attracted a certain kind of
dweeb who, relative to me, would see himself for the first time able to take the
initiative, and thus he would choose me. They too were abject but too horrified
at myself I could not feel any sympathy; all I saw in them was what I was trying
to escape in myself, that is, the lack of belonging, the weirdness, the
inability to fit my square gawky form into any known shape. It always blew up.
Because I could never hold the façade of nice girl together; something always
didn’t work. How could it when I all I felt was imposed upon for having been
chosen by another abject being, and I wanted out, wanted out, wanted out, wanted
to get in a car, hit the road, and keep on going. I wanted Paris, I wanted
Berlin.
I was such a pusswad. Remember going to Paris as an au pair and
lasting exactly one night? I woke up, crying, unable to pull it off. Let someone
like Tiger Woods’ magnificent wife, Elin, pull off an au pair stint. She can,
because of her privileged background. But I crumbled. Being a servant in a rich
person’s house feels like being part of the family for someone like Elin. But
for me it cut too close to the bone; it reminded me that in a profound way I was
a servant, taking up a job that I’m sure my ancestors must have taken when they
came off the boat, in the homes of wealthy New Yorkers, before they hit the road
for the Midwest and a farm. We servants know that we are servants, and, unlike
the privileged, we cannot really play at being one. I did not have the courage
to be a servant even in the most benevolent of families.
So I told the
very nice lady of the manor that because of my own easy background I found
myself unable to act as someone else’s servant. I could hardly tell her the
truth, that I couldn’t be her au pair because the position activated a lifetime
of dormant knowledge of my family’s servitude. And she graciously called me a
cab which I took to the airport, a luxury that I would not allow myself even
now, when I have a 6-figure (barely) income. Needed to do that, though, to show
myself that I was NOT a servant, to re-establish the boundaries that had been so
abruptly rubbed out when I entered into au pairdom.
So I have worked
hard without any boundaries, the kind that we need to know who we are, to find
who we are, which is the first step before we can do anything. My God, what a
job. As Mary Karr writes, sort of, can’t remember quite what her exact words
are, “It’s taken me so much effort to do as medium shitty as I’ve heretofore
done....” I applaud you, Mary Karr. You are brilliant, funny, and, besides, you
are skinny and beautiful and dressed in black. But I submit that it is even
harder to find your way when you emerge out of the dirty soup of dreams of
middle-class without the mordant edginess of the trailer court. That slice of
protoplasm you see slipping around the margins, that’s me.
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