I have always felt like part of the lower class—a girl from a blue-collar background who doesn’t know how to dress or behave in the upper class world.
I’ve never been to an opera, and when I casually mentioned this to a group of ladies at a neighborhood party in San Diego, I got funny looks, like “Uh oh, she isn’t one of us after all.”
Maybe it started with my rich cousins from Short Hills, New Jersey. They made it pretty clear that they were above us. To add insult to injury, I got my cousin’s hand-me-down dresses and party gowns, which never fit me right.
Another set of rich cousins invited us to their country club for a swimming picnic. When my sisters and I came out of the dressing room in our bikinis and jumped into the pool, we were told we’d have to leave because bikinis weren’t allowed.
I think I might be the only one of my brothers and sisters to be afflicted with this lasting sense of low-class-itis. My younger sisters don’t even think of our family as having been poor. By the time they came of age, my older brothers had left home and money was not as tight.
I’m the one who remembers trying to help my mother make a budget and realizing there wasn’t enough money coming in to pay all the bills. I blamed my father, but he got up at 4 a.m. every day to go to work driving a Fisher’s bread truck, making deliveries to grocery stores. If anything was to blame, it was my parents’ fertility, which produced six mouths to feed.
I never learned how to walk, dress, or apply make-up like a lady. Maybe it’s because I had only older brothers, but it certainly wasn’t me who taught my sisters those things.
When I did use make-up—for the fun of it—I looked like a whore. At least, that was the opinion of one of my teachers at Cooper Union. He warned me that I was headed down a dangerous path that would lead to my destruction. He didn’t see that it was just an instance of performance art before such things had a name.
I know my feeling of being low-class is a bit irrational. Yet, when I am asked about the possibility of joining the “distinguished board” of the Saltonstall Foundation, I have an uneasy feeling that I don’t belong there. The foundation is an arts organization, so why wouldn’t I belong? I’m an artist.
I even have a Ph.D.
But to me, it was all a pose. Getting the PhD, being a professor—all a game, a ruse, a play-act.
Maybe what I really am is just an outsider.
