Domestic Demon
<<2003-09-26 - 4:04 p.m.>>

I mind.

I mind because this feels like an accusation of gluttony, like she is saying we all know how you eat more than everyone else and we talk about it and decide to protect ourselves from you. And this is the reason that I can never, never explain, because an eating disorder would strike Fury as hopelessly bourgeois, like knowing who Bill Buford is, like reading Vogue when it's left lying around, like my theatergoing habits and my penchant for vegetables and my tendency to forget to unplug my computer and my substantial collection of M.A.C. cosmetics—like so many things about me.

I mind also because I pay for things I don't eat: powdered milk (ew, ew, ew), juice concentrate, rice, potatoes, ramen. I mind, thirdly, because when I cook with cheese (macaroni and cheese, grilled cheese sandwiches) I cook for everybody who's around—usually Kara, Miriam, and Chris. These are the sensible reasons which I will expound at the house meeting which has yet to be scheduled.

But I am so, so close to wanting to extricate myself from the communality of this arrangement. It would be cleaner, neater, surely, to buy my own everything, to cut ties.

It always seems cleaner to be distinct.

The problem at core is probably the fact that I feel the weight of Fury's (and, less dramatically, Chris's) disapproval. I'm running along, perfectly reasonable after having started the discussion with a request that she cease to nag me in a passive-aggressive way and begin to nag me in a straightforward way, telling a story about being ten years old and piping up at breakfast-table conversation with one of my father's awful D.C. friends about my support for needle exchange programs and being attacked with the full force of his conservative newspaper-owner public policy. "I mean, Jesus," I said, "I was ten. Who tells a ten-year-old what to think?" Apparently, this too is bourgeois, this expectation that intellectual curiousity would be fostered.

And I'm sorry, but my background is not my fault. I went to private elementary school and then weird-ass test-in high school where the talent show is won by tiny seventh-graders reciting the first 125 digits of pi. I go to the theater a lot. I read The New Yorker. I have open-ended dinner-table conversations with my family and dinner parties with my friends and I go to museums for fun and I get to see art movies. I had lots of extracurricular opportunities in high school and we had an uncensored literary magazine and I flew to Atlanta for a debate tournament and then taught debate in Mongolia and sat around and discussed gender and sexuality Thursdays at lunch and I have friends who share my intellectual and aesthetic pursuits and I know that this represents cultural as well as financial privilege, but I really, really, really don't want to be made to feel guilty for it. I'm privileged. I'm lucky. I know this. I have my own ambiguous relationship with my background. But Jesus, lay the fuck off the guilt trips. It's not my fault.

I'm frustrated and I'm hurt and I don't want to always be watching what I say in case I accidentally refer to something I've done or had or seen that's wrong, that's too rich or too intellectual or too urban.

I hate that I'm on the wrong side here, but really, we are not representatives of class groups. We are six people (five, really, Noah's not a big part of the house dynamic) who are trying to live together. And there's really nothing I can do that's right. I can't really say, "Hey, Fury, I wish you could make some compromises," because even I know the answer to that: she can't afford to make compromises. That's up to me. But the separate cheese would be fine if she could stop reminding me to load the dishwasher, if she could stop treating me like the village idiot. I just want the looks to stop, the sideways looks and bitten-off comments that slid my way the one time I mentioned a play I'd seen in her presence.

I'm self-conscious and I don't want to be. I feel shame I don't want to feel.

And the irritating thing is that Kara's family has more money than mine. In her car the other day, Kara got a phone call from her father on her cell phone. He'd been playing the stock market and had finally won: her tuition for the next three years? Taken care of. Kara chuckled, said he'd probably lost a million dollars over the years. A million dollars? My family doesn't have that kind of money to spend, let alone to lose. My privilege is different, is free theater tickets and an attenuated connection at the Times, is late nights in Rome and Matthew Barney at the Guggenheim.

And I'm sorry. I feel guilty for loving these things, for my deep enjoyment of the French bakery I go to after my annual gynecological exam, for my propensity to drop in at MoMA (before it was MoMA Qns, that is) on my student pass to kill an hour wandering the galleries of Pollock and Giacometti, finding my grandfather's piece, thinking of Moira's poem that starts at MoMA and spirals out out out. Guilty for the bored drawl that my voice sometimes takes, guilty for my affinity for Jorie Graham, guilty that my friends go to Harvard and Yale and Amherst and UPenn and Deep Springs and MIT. It's not like they're not on eight gallons of financial aid apiece, it's just the names. It's the atmosphere of where I come from. It's not the money. Hanna's mother runs a drycleaner in the Bronx and works an eighty-hour week, but Hanna loves nice restaurants, keeps up with the season's theatrical offerings and goes to Amherst. Which makes perfect sense: you read Time Out and find the cheapest interesting restaurants, you use High Five to get $5 Broadway tickets with student ID, you get financial aid. And this very well might provoke exactly the same reaction from Fury. I come from a place of cultural opportunity: Shakespeare in the Park is free, and you can get an expansive Indian meal for $5 on Sixth Street. Hunter kids get snubbed by the bookstore that gives the Spence girls discounts, but in Fury's eyes, I might as well be wearing that green-and-blue plaid skirt.

It makes me uneasy. Guilty, angry at being made to feel guilty, upset that there doesn't seem to be a way out.

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