Excuse Me, but Your Blue Collar Is Showing

A book of essays by women writers reflecting on their poor and working-class roots helps me understand some of my own hang-ups, confusions, and, mostly, my blurts.

When I feel uncomfortable, I blurt. Sometimes I’m lucky and the blurt is funny. Look at me, working the room! More often I’ve just barked something weird or plain stupid. “I only like catsup with other things,” I once said, desperate to make my way into a foodie conversation. Job interviews are a hoot.

Sadly for everyone in blurt-range, I’ve been uncomfortable since the summer of 2006, when my husband and I moved from North Carolina to Maine. There are many reasons for the discomfort. I left behind a large, caring community—the first I’d ever known. Maine was a distant concept, a blurry notion of lobsters and cranberries and too much snow. I really, really hate to be cold. And then there was the terrifying-as-much-as-thrilling adventure of the MFA program I finished last summer. So given the challenges of making new friends, culture-shock, the scramble for LL Bean sweaters, and the rigors of the writing program, I’ve been blurting at a record pace.

Am I trying to tell myself something? My mother, a woman who abhors silence, is so fond of repeating herself that she will often state the very same sentence three times in a row, then say, “You know?” or “Don’t you think?” Only very recently have I moved past the aggravation of the repetition to understand that if I acknowledge what she has said in the way she wants, she will stop re-stating. Is this what I’m doing? Blurting things I think I need to acknowledge? I’m pretty sure I have no need to explore more deeply my relationship with catsup. But maybe it’s time I pay attention to the fact that in the last couple of years, my blurts have taken on a theme. I can’t seem to shut up about my upbringing.

***

My friends here in Maine are mostly accomplished professors and professionals associated with the local college where my husband works. They are the children of diplomats, educators, administrators. Most have lived in other countries, all have traveled widely. You can’t name a major city they haven’t visited. In Jane Austen terms, I’m rubbing elbows with the gentry. And I love it, because they are wonderful people I’m delighted to know. We break bread together, gossip over coffee, speed walk or play badminton or do yoga, meet at the farmer’s market. It’s a great group. Do they ever notice that I don’t quite fit?

Neither of my parents graduated from high school. Their dream for the three kids was a high school diploma for each, no pre-marital pregnancies, and no divorces. I grew up in a house held together mainly with duct tape, a house that shamed my mother so much we kids were not allowed to bring home friends. I somehow mostly escaped the stain of that shame, but my sister still shudders at memories of being teased for living in a shack. We all wore hand-me-downs from neighbors and accepted gifts of food when necessary. I experienced the usual challenges of the first-generation college student, hated every moment not spent in a class I liked, and counted myself lucky to graduate in five years. These are some of the things I blurt when I find myself in conversation with people who assume I share their background.

***

Silence would make a nice change, but that doesn’t seem to be in my makeup. In “Our Mother’s Lie,” an essay in the collection An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots, Lorraine M. Lόpez says that she spends a lot of time listening, watching, studying. She goes silent among her academic colleagues for fear of being outed by a faux pas. I understand completely that feeling of disconnection. Here I flash on an unattractive picture of myself, smiling blandly, undetected, in a crowd.

My friend Shirley told me about this book of essays because she knew I would relate to the personal stories, might learn from them. Shirley is a professional from a working-class family, and our similar backgrounds have led us into a number of discussions about why we feel we don’t quite belong in either world we inhabit. We share the suspicion that our friends and peers don’t fully appreciate the privilege they have enjoyed, nor are they aware of the markers in their language and behavior that remind us of that privilege. Like Lόpez, Shirley worries about embarrassing herself because she never learned the right linguistic and behavioral code. But embarrassment be damned, I can’t imagine going silent.

Recently I asked one of my new friends if she’d noticed my blurts. You’re funny, she said. Refreshingly honest. I confessed to her that the compulsion behind some of these moments of refreshing honesty is more complicated than she thinks. I’m at a dinner party, I said, and somebody says something about where their parents went to college or mentions their childhood riding lessons or their senior semester abroad and I get defensive because I feel like I don’t belong. My friend, bless her heart, looked astonished. “I just can’t believe you feel that way,” she said. “If you didn’t mention it, no one would ever guess you grew up poor.” She smiled. “You pass.”

***

My father said to me what Lopez’s mother said to her: You can do anything you want when you grow up. Like her mother, he neglected to mention how I might manage that. They had no idea, of course. They never imagined university degrees for themselves, or white collars or vacations. So blanket but surface encouragement, rather than instruction, was my parents’ gift. I’m thankful they gave what they could. I’m thankful, too, that I’ve begun to see—there it is, just the slightest glimpse—what I must do to get where I want. But like the women in this book I’ve lived the first half of my life circling maybe’s and what if’s and one day’s. I’ve spent decades blind to the next step.

I understand exactly Angela Threatt’s confusion as a young woman, trying to figure out how to manage applications to college. In her essay “Somewhere in Between” she captures perfectly the same state of incomprehension that led me to mirror many of her mistakes in the pursuit of education and calling. “Are you poor or privileged?” she asked herself, a question I asked myself at that age, too. I was at a university, I was moving up. But I was miserable and failed too much before I succeeded. I understand, too, the particular species of work ethic she absorbed from her family. It’s the noble belief in hard work that can get you strapped to a wheel for life.

Our culture doesn’t exactly encourage students to make a life in the arts. In my working-class family, interest in art was considered particularly ridiculous. Music or painting or short stories—these are the masturbatory pursuits of preening elites. Sure, if you can burn the strings off a guitar or sing like Streisand, okay. But if you’re that talented the art will spring from you whole. Nothing could possibly get in your way. Now stop pretending and don’t be so lazy.

***

“You pass.” In the full context of our conversation, it was a perfectly acceptable thing for my friend to say. In any case, she only spoke the truth. I do pass. People are shocked when I tell them about my blue collar roots. They say things like, “How did you turn out so well?” and “You’re so articulate, I would never guess.” I haven’t figured out how to respond to comments like that. Not knowing what to say in those moments probably leads to more blurts later.

The perspective provided by these essays may help me subdue my defensiveness and accept with more compassion any genuine lapses in sensitivity from my friends. Lord knows they put up with enough from me. Still, I find myself intensely curious about the question the essayists don’t address: How did they do it?

Making a living as a writer is notoriously difficult for anyone, whether the pay checks come from the university payroll or a publisher. Add to the challenge any one or more of the following: Abusive husband, minority status, divorce, hungry children. Now add the disorientation, fear, and emotional strain associated with “jumping class,” and you begin to see the enormity of what each of these women has accomplished. How on earth did they manage the feat of success?

***

Like every other student and beginning writer, what I want most for my writing life is a blueprint. But until I get one it’s a relief to have role models. In appreciation, I will pledge one blurt-free day for each essay. Because if I don’t watch myself, I’m going to become all blurt, no thought. Worse, I might start playing myself at parties—blue collar girl grows up, learns to bake with lavender. Washes down biscotti with inappropriate, obscenity-laden jokes as act of defiance. Look at me, working the room!

Silence is not in my makeup. But I think I’ve heard what I’m trying to say. Surely now I can enjoy a few moments of quiet. Wish me luck.