Reading Mar 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.
