By Brandy E. Wyant

If I’m honest, I left the price tag on the cookies on purpose. In potluck situations, I make sure to stop at a specialty grocery store rather than the budget supermarket. The little sticker on the underside of the plastic cookie container says, I care about you meeting attendees so much that this is what I’m willing to spend on you. In retrospect, maybe not the best message to bring to a social justice book group. 

We form a circle of about twelve, disposable plates in hand, ready to munch our way through a discussion of the feasibility of implementing reparations for slavery and segregation. I glance across the circle and over your shoulder to check on the popularity of my cookies, filled with irrational pride to see their numbers dwindling.

I can count the number of times we’ve interacted. You are more acquaintance than friend. When it’s my turn to speak, I fumble through some fluffy, ineffectual comment that does little to move the discussion forward. As my voice trails off, you pick up the conversational thread. In your segue, you address me.

“I have money to give away. You probably don’t.”

***

Money to give away. So much that you’re confident you and your family will never need the savings, even in the face of debilitating diagnoses, uncontrolled inflation, or Social Security’s uncertain future.

I wonder if you ever compulsively calculated, like I do. For at least a year after opening my solo psychotherapy practice, each time a payment came from an insurance company, I’d watch the numbers swirl higher on the monthly income tracker in my practice management software, eyes greedy for them, dopamine surging as if I sat before a slot machine. Once the total updated, I’d turn to my calculator, figuring the sum at the end of the month if I continued earning at the same rate. 

When I was young, “the end of the month” served as a euphemism for the arrival of my mother’s paycheck. We can get that at the end of the month. This will work, just until the end of the month. Now, I know that my bills will be paid with some left over. Yet I won’t stop calculating.

I once watched an interview in which Oprah and her fellow billionaire interviewee commiserated over the experience of trying to decide between two items in a store until realization struck: “I could get both.” At the time, their net worth was a sum unfathomable to me, and perhaps even to you. The mentality of scarcity never leaves a person who has known it as a child.

My Catholic grade school had uniforms. School uniforms intend to equalize, to erase differences so that students are not distracted by comparison. Sprouts of privilege will poke through the soil of class blindness anyway. As long as accessories aren’t banned, differences exist. Gym class brought out brand name sneakers to change into. The child with an intricate hairstyle every morning, involving whatever hair clip was currently in preteen vogue, had a parent with excess time in the morning to spend on their hair. Not all of us did.

Upon reaching a certain grade level, the uniform jumper morphed to the uniform skirt. Mine literally morphed. My mother undid the stitching attaching the jumper’s top half to its skirt bottom. Girls from families with more comfortable means had new uniform skirts ordered from the catalog, with wider pleats and larger buttons on the hip. Same plaid, another reality.

Twenty years later, my mother and I would argue over whether or not our household had been “poor” when I was young.

“We were middle class,” she insisted, and I can’t say whether this is truly her belief, or statistically accurate by Census Bureau standards, or just an expression of what she wishes had been true; what was promised to her as a child, the American Dream.

But I know that “middle class” can also mean enough income to take a family of four on a cross-country vacation every year, to eat takeout every night, and to hire a tutor for your high schooler without sacrificing anywhere else. That was not us when I was a child. Or maybe middle class here and now isn’t the same as middle class there – the outskirts of Pittsburgh in the 90s. 

It amuses me still, how much my relocation, and with it the trajectory of my entire adult life, had to do with air quality. The moment I stepped outside the airport in Boston for my one-day visit to a graduate school program, the coastal air could be appreciated even through the exhaust of shuttle buses hugging the curb of the terminal.

Unless you live downwind of the country’s largest remaining operational coke oven, you wouldn’t know the feeling of waking on a summer morning to the smell of air pollution seeping in your open window and your mother muttering from the next room that U.S. Steel chooses “to release it” on a weekend or holiday to avoid complaints being lodged. The complaints hardly matter; the company pays the fines and nothing changes.

As a high schooler, I noted the irony of plumes of industrial waste pumping into the sky just a few blocks away from the birthplace of environmentalist Rachel Carson. If I squinted, I could see the ripples in the opaque smoke and marvel at the speed at which it entered the air. Following its path upward, within a few dozen feet it is no longer perceptible. Unless you’re facing the smokestack and watching it come out, you wouldn’t even know you’re breathing it. And if you’ve never visited a coastal town, you wouldn’t know that air can smell any different. 

I once sought reassurance from the woman sitting next to me on an airplane, another Pittsburgh-to-Boston transplant, about whether my future children were destined to speak with a Boston accent if raised in New England. We delighted in our shared aversion. She told me that her children spoke with a Pittsburgh accent as toddlers and now have no accent at all, and my eyes widened with joyful hope.

Now, I finally understand my own eagerness. If my children carry the accent of a southwestern Pennsylvania steel mill town, they will inherit my ability to say, “I came from somewhere else,”without saying anything at all.

Why does it matter? I suppose maybe it doesn’t, or shouldn’t. I wish I wasn’t so desperate to broadcast that despite holding two master’s degrees from East Coast universities, I was not raised upper middle class, and my parents didn’t pay my way into comfort. Why do I believe that an Appalachian accent communicates this? Surely because I’ve bought into a harmful stereotype of the region. See, I’m just as bad as you.

During my coming of age, I was socialized by my peers at an elite university that I barely squeaked my way both into and out of. Despite differences in socioeconomic background, we developed shared interests and values, with political viewpoints distinct from many longtime residents in the Western Pennsylvania towns I’d grown up in. 

Freshman year of undergrad, I’d entertain my dormmates with exaggerated Pittsburghese. SAHTH-side. DAHN-tahn. I thought we were equals, because we were all at the same school taking the same classes. That was before I understood just how severely the deck had been stacked against me. I blamed myself for not knowing how to study, though even the most rigorous courses available to me in high school gave multiple-choice tests. I had never faced an inch-and-a-half blank space in which I must explain the steps of cell division at a level of detail beyond listing them off. For my roommate, the introductory biology class was a review of what she had learned in AP Biology at her public high school. She came from a wealthy suburb, very similar demographically to the one in which we sit for this very meeting. My public high school didn’t even offer AP Bio.

My first full-time job at age 22 during the Great Recession paid $51,500. I took my roommates out for lobster the night I got the offer, gratitude filling me up and spilling over, a high I never knew before or since.

Just as with any first high, we chase the dragon. A few promotions came. When each annual increase letter arrived, with its form congratulatory language, I told myself that just getting to the next one would finally allow me to relax. Until the day I accepted that my six-figure income wasn’t enough to obtain a mortgage on even a modest home. All my life, I’d imagined those proverbial six figures and basked in the presumed security they would offer. Once I had it, I learned that it wasn’t enough, would never be enough, that a daily email alert of newly listed homes in my town had the power to pummel my mood before I’d even gotten out of bed, that this pattern would persist for years on end.

When you’re shopping for grad school programs but not intending to stay, you don’t consider the city’s cost of living. You assume your stay is temporary in its most literal sense. Then one day it’s 15 years later and you’re living a life you never chose, with too much established to start over. Just when I start to feel sorry for myself, guilt nags. Can I really believe that I had fewer choices than my grandfather, who went to work in a steel mill with his eighth-grade education?  

For each time I have a client draw a “pie of responsibility,” labeling how big of a slice of blame they should have for a situation, I eat the whole pie. I chose to move here. I chose to stay. I chose to build community in a wealthy town. Just as in college, I thought I belonged. All the while, I looked not in the mirror but through the looking glass, to the person I was supposed to be. A doctor. Somehow perfectly balancing clinical care with groundbreaking research and raising those imaginary children with their ambiguous accents.

Over the years, a combination of regrets and mental scorekeeping with colleagues and friends spun into a resentful depression, which constantly simmered, boiling over as an abrupt snippiness that surprised even me when it came out. One day, the target was an older woman collecting tickets for a music performance whose proceeds benefitted my church. My name wasn’t on the list, because I had purchased my ticket online just before coming over. No one would have questioned a 30-something appropriately-dressed white woman’s version of events. In fact, the ticket taker waved away my phone when I attempted to show the receipt. She believed me when I said I had already bought my ticket. Yet the wholly unnecessary comment slipped out of my mouth anyway. “For the amount of money I pledge to this church…”

Later, after the embarrassment faded and I summoned some meager self-compassion, I understood. I remembered the town in which the church is located boasts a median household income exceeding that of my high school town by over $150,000. For many of my fellow church members, that yearly pledge whose dent I could feel in my bank account was nothing. I needed to show the proof of payment for me, not for her. Because I don’t need any help. I don’t need a reduced-price option. In fact, I can cover the person coming in behind me. I needed to say it aloud. In case she was one of you.

***

How did you know that I probably don’t have money to give away? What made it a statement and not a question?

Not by my clothes, because at least half this meeting’s attendees sported some form of athleisure. My college student baby face is a distant memory, in its place a look of perpetual tiredness tinged with cynicism, the de facto for being middle aged in post-pandemic New England. Gray hairs speckle my head. By all outward accounts, I’ve been old enough to earn a professional salary for ten years at least.

Was it the accent, after all? Or the lack of a wedding band on my finger? In any case, maybe I can take comfort knowing that at least you plan to use your alleged reserves of wealth to address our race’s historical sins.

***

My rational brain cuts through the stomach-sinking flood of adrenaline, voice struggling to level itself over my racing heart and surging blood pressure.

“You shouldn’t assume,” I tell you.

You might have gotten defensive. If you’d heard. 

None of the ten other heads give even a swivel of acknowledgment towards me. For them and for you, my words evaporate like industrial waste into the air. You push on to make another point, then another.

After the meeting, I drove away in my two-year-old hybrid car to an outdated one-bed third-floor walk-up with the weed smoke seeping in from the apartments below and no dishwasher, and I cried humiliated tears alone.

Because you were right.

~~~

Brandy E. Wyant is a clinical social worker and writer based in Massachusetts. Her personal essays have appeared in Atlantic Northeast, Change Seven Magazine, HuffPost Personal, Solstice, and The Writing Disorder. Find her on Instagram: @bewyant