when i was eight years old, I went on my first trip to Europe. In a small cabin on the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2, my mother upended our suitcase, gazing at the confetti of clothes on the bed. She tossed a blue dress over my head, cinching it with a monochrome polka-dot belt. She tied a silk scarf to my body; abstractions brightened my skirt. She stacked bracelets from wrist to elbow, adorning me like a stage star from her vintage postcard collection. Shells, pearls, and beads cascaded down my chest. Then she grabbed a sewing kit and stitched sample perfume bottles around the brim of a beach hat. She placed it on my head along with a lei, a relic of a past trip to Hawaii. I shifted in boredom, staring at the TV screen that seemed to live-stream the ocean into our windowless cabin. I protested a smear of lipstick. Finally, she safety-pinned a pack of Merit Ultra Lights to my chest, found a marker, and scratched nothing to declare in giant letters on the back of a ship announcement. She attached the sign to my back.
When I stepped into the ship’s ballroom for the children’s costume contest that afternoon, there was sudden quiet followed by a crescendo of laughter. I was dressed as a tourist. The other kids had elaborate costumes: crepe-paper fairies spun across a polished floor; a perfectly appointed Lady of Liberty twirled a hand-sewn flag. They had nannies on board who had spent the day conjuring costumes for them, magic tricks spun from stratospheric wealth. I looked like a cross between Iris Apfel and a junk peddler. My mom was clever: she knew unruly consumption would be amusing to a class whose wealth flickers to the surface only in controlled signs of prestige.
Our presence on the QE2 was one of several extravagant gestures my mother made in my childhood. She had spent around a year of her income so that we could undertake a transatlantic crossing to Europe. Later, I would read about the painter Willem de Kooning requesting a half year’s advance of his salary in the early 1930s so he could buy a Capehart high-fidelity system, a high-end record player, and thought of my mother—that outsize desire to have something. My father chose to fly, not seeing the point of the expense.
For a child who spent her first years navigating suburban Indianapolis like Pac-Man stuck in a maze, I felt the unparalleled surprise of salt spray—of a massive ship crawling toward an open horizon. The year we went on the QE2, 1989, my mom bought me a Steinway Model B on sale. She started collecting Montblanc pens and ordering first editions from the Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan. She photographed me that summer outside Le Grand Hôtel Cabourg in Normandy, in crisp culottes and a fitted shirt, an outfit that made me look distinctly alien against my Abercrombie-clad cohort back in “Indianoplace,” as my dad jokingly called it. In the photo, I have a slightly contemptuous smile on my face, as though I knew my mother was sculpting me so I’d never fit in anywhere.
Later, this same mom, the one who swished into a Paul Bocuse restaurant without a reservation, would lurch out of a broken-down Cadillac after a cancer treatment, vomiting the remains of a chain-restaurant dinner and cheap Chianti onto the side of the highway. Afterward, her hand would shake as she sipped McDonald’s coffee from a Styrofoam cup. She would spend her dwindling savings on my education at Yale and then, after I graduated, on helping me move to New York City. She would lose her health insurance and enroll in Indiana’s high-risk insurance pool plan, an expensive safeguard in a pre-Obamacare era of preexisting condition exclusions.
But in 1989, my mom was full of energy and ideas. She spoke French perfectly and wore designer clothes and people fell in love with her. She had sundry projects, and an unspoken one was to differentiate us from our surroundings in Indianapolis, where she never intended to live, with European travel and relentless book buying. She was coding me to reject my class and surroundings. Day to day, that looked like fights with other Girl Scout moms for using instant chocolate pudding mix on “France Day” instead of, as my mom suggested, just making a goddamn chocolate mousse. But long term, it also involved creating in me a certain legibility to the upper classes. The slow, ceremonial journey across the ocean was my mother’s form of a pilgrimage. I’d understand later that she was bringing me to the place where all her mythologies were born.
Somewhere in these graphs were my parents, motes in this upward swell of redistribution.
My dad was born in 1925, my mom in 1947. And I was born in 1980. Now that I’m forty-four, my immediate family has spanned a century’s worth of capitalism’s chutes and ladders. When I read Thomas Piketty’sA Brief History of Equality, I noticed that he returns to the year 1980 again and again. The year of my birth, it turns out, is an inflection point in the history of capitalism, one of those spots you’re trained to find in calculus to track the fate of some or other curve. First, Piketty identifies 1914–80 as the “Great Redistribution”: the most significant deconcentration of wealth in human history, predominantly in the United States, France, and England. The unprecedented success of confiscatory tax rates on the wealthy coupled with a massive expansion of social spending created the conditions for the state to escape “the exclusive control of the dominant classes” for the first time on such a scale. Piketty also sweeps through the ways in which colonialism, sexism, and racism warped this “anthropological revolution,” diverting disproportionate gains in wealth and income to the white middle class in America. Finally, he shows this uneven yet hard-won progress reversing after 1980, as the welfare state shrank, and progressive taxation declined. He supports what seems intuitive with data: economists and policymakers spin fables to lend socially engineered inequality the imprimatur of authority. As a bonus, Piketty’s fun to read; he debunks countless Republican talking points with calm elegance, with the same mental expenditure of swatting a fly.
My parents’ journey from the low- to the almost-high-income bracket and then back down again between 1925 and 2010 lines up so perfectly with Piketty’s graphs that when I see the middle 40 percent’s share of wealth decline after 1980—staggering, falling, staggering, and falling—I see the cracked steps leading out of the final home my family owned. We moved to a small, nondescript house in Pendleton, Indiana, from a large one in the suburbs of Indianapolis in 2006, after illness and a lack of a social safety net crumpled my family’s savings. I also see my presence in the four-thousand-square-foot home in the suburbs—the one with a circular drive, marble foyer, and parkland-esque expanses of grass—as the result of a wealth redistribution that was racist. When Piketty charts the enormous gains of the middle class after World War II, I see my nineteen-year-old father, who grew up eating squirrel meat during the Depression, perched in a B-26 Marauder somewhere over Normandy on one of his sixty-seven missions during the war. My dad took aerial photographs from the window of the plane. One, labeled in his scratchy handwriting: 10 June, 1944, the ruins of Saint-Lô. Beyond a welter of smoke in the center, the entrails of the shelled town spread with surprising clarity in all directions. As Piketty points out, it was easy to impose confiscatory tax rates on the rich after this: the war destroyed wealth, but it also created the conditions for redistribution. My dad went to college on the GI Bill, a droplet of this postwar surge in government expenditure. In 1965, my mom became the first in her working-class family to go to college, a beneficiary of scholarships that didn’t exist for her parents. As I read, I kept visualizing; somewhere in these graphs were my parents, motes in this upward swell of redistribution. The wealth diversion in Piketty’s charts and my mother’s operatic personality form some kind of QED of how I became an eight-year-old suburban Midwesterner aboard the QE2.
in the summer of 2010, I sat cross-legged in my old bedroom in Pendleton, listening to a meditation on my phone. Eyes closed, I sank into my nervous system. I had learned to love this submission to inner sensation; I thought of meditation as a space where the shitfest of my life ceased to exist. Sometimes, prompted by the meditation leader, I would switch my focus from bodily churnings and visualize an actual place instead. I don’t remember what I thought of that day, but sometimes I’d conjure the courtyard of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, where I once sipped mint tea in a light rain, myrtles enfolding me in humid privacy while I sat out a panic attack. My mind would flit between the courtyard in Athens and the meditation leader’s voice. I’d never seen a picture of him, but his voice gave me a sense of intimacy. It was deep with a tremulous edge; a current of kindness, wisdom, and humor gave his words a warm patina. The grain of his voice reminded me of one of those well-worn entrances to old churches I first saw in Europe as an eight-year-old, their marble steps grown distinguished through use.
“Sit and know you are sitting,” the meditation leader said.
I heard my elderly father switch off the TV downstairs. He’d been watching The O’Reilly Factor, and I’d soon go down to help him make lunch. That spring, Mom had died, and I’d left my sublet in Bushwick to return to Pendleton. Everything about the house spoke of decline: the filthy garage with stacks of boxes left unpacked after their emergency move from our larger home in the suburbs, my Steinway Model B shrouded in a heavy cloth, taking up the entirety of what was meant to be the dining room. And the living room, with its frieze of chickens circumnavigating a dirt yard. “Christ,” my mom had said when she first saw it. “What happened to cherubs?”
As she held my eye, I realized she might be praying.
Soon after we moved, my mother’s brain tumor got worse, and we never bothered to change the wallpaper. My dad had worked as vice president of sales for General Cable. He drank martinis at lunch and sold telephone wire. Forcibly retired in his seventies, he was given a lump-sum retirement package that my family ate through in a decade. Around the time that either of my parents could have taken on another job for extra income, they both became ill, my mom with metastatic cancer and my dad with Alzheimer’s. When my mom died, I discovered that, the house aside, we were broke. I paid for her funeral with an inherited credit card.
Due to a combination of bad luck and the lack of a plan for the inevitably messy end, there were no close relatives or friends nearby to help out. Perhaps because I was twenty-nine, there was also scant emotional support. My friends weren’t sure what to say about my dad. They looked sympathetic but drifted to other topics over salads in Brooklyn. “That sucks,” one had said, sighing.
Meditation over, I went down to the kitchen to find my dad stacking domino-sized wedges of cheddar on top of a Red Baron four-cheese pizza.
I braced my hands on the edge of the counter, staring at the igloo of cheese.
“Dad, what?!”
My father ignored me.
“Maybe your mother will want some,” he said, pushing it into the oven.
I bit my lip and tried to remember what the meditation leader had said about making friends with your anxiety.
Not long after, I was sitting in my mom’s study when I heard a crack emanate from the side of the house. I thought it was a demolition. I ran out and found my dad staring into space over the steering wheel of his black 1990s Cadillac Eldorado. The car was angled awkwardly over a tangle of crushed wood, the remains of the fence at the end of our driveway. “Dad, what the fuck?” I shouted. I saw our neighbor looking out her window. She’d brought us a pie when we first moved in, but after seeing Man Ray photographs of breasts in our entryway, she avoided us. As did most of our neighbors—they didn’t seem to know what to make of us. Earlier that summer, I’d noticed someone driving an ecru Ram pickup. Two American flag stickers flanked the rear window, and a German shepherd bounced around in the passenger seat. A pair of enormous exhaust pipes emerged in symmetry below each American flag. Recently, the neighbor staring at us had erected a small gray tower at the border of our yards, just inside her fence. I eventually figured out that it was an ultrasonic device meant to zap our dogs each time they barked. As she held my eye, I realized she might be praying.
I drove my dad to Indianapolis for an evaluation the day after the crash. His test over, a smiling silver-haired woman handed him a piece of paper that stated he should immediately cease driving. But when we got home, my dad ripped it up and soon forgot the whole thing. I decided to try to hide his keys, but eventually my surveillance broadened: I began to keep watch over him. I found myself caught in the strange atmospheres of his clear blue eyes, which reminded me of the expanses of water one would see from the deck of a slowly sinking ship.
when the queen elizabeth 2 pulled into the dock at Southampton after a week at sea, the experience began to blur. Diving into my first saltwater pool: eyes open, then blinded by stinging, and me clawing panicked to the surface. Picking out a Swatch at one of the stores on board, admiring my pale wrist bedangled with teal, purple, and pink. Chatting with one of Ralph Lauren’s groundskeepers in a silk tulip dress. Throwing my mom’s lit cigarette into a fancy trash can and watching her frantically dig it out, afraid of the ship catching fire. Noticing the ship’s doctor, who seemed to have been sticking near my mom since the day we both needed medication for seasickness, lean in close to her after cocktails one night. I tugged her hand, feigned a stomach ailment, spoiled their frisson.
When my feet first touched ground at Southampton, I felt the shock of terra firma after a week of sea, and the rocking ghosted through my system for hours. I learned later that this sometimes stretches on through a lifetime, the swaying trapped and instantiated in the nervous system through a neurological disorder known as mal de débarquement.
during my twenties, I earned most of my income working as a tutor for wealthy people’s children in New York. As my rate climbed from $100 to $900 an hour over the years I freelanced for an elite agency, I started to have the sense that the city was not the one on the maps, a grid of concrete and taxis and steel, but an inverted city formed from a manicured privacy of interiors. Tutoring in hundreds of homes converted the city into a labyrinth of halls connected by mirrored elevators opening onto alcoves with splendid bouquets: freakishly large, unlike any I had seen in my childhood, ornate urns exploding with candy-colored tulips. My eyes met an unfurling of antique prints in gilded frames, or perhaps spans of toile wallpaper on which tiny people having picnics or making out on swings offered fantasies of white leisure. There were lobbies with plush sofas and central fountains. Some of the most exclusive, though, were tiny and ancient, with hunting prints in dim corners and a person whose job was to press buttons in the elevator.
Eventually, a door was opened for me, my name announced, and I would settle in next to my student at a desk or table, often on a high floor. Scanning the circuitry of lights below us, I sometimes thought of my parents’ property in Pendleton, with its tilting sunflowers and dirt patches in the yard. The thought was comforting: my home didn’t have a moneyed gloss, but dispossessed of a need to play to anyone’s fantasies, it had the freedom of the untransfigured.
As a highly compensated private tutor, I was well trained. I was able to cast a kind and impassive gaze when a student burst into outraged tears over an Annie Dillard passage.
“I hate nature,” my student sobbed. “This is pointless.”
After a pause, I asked if sorrow was helpful.
“No.”
“What would be helpful right now?”
My student frowned and pulled the edge of her cardigan. “I just know I’m going to fail.”
“What if we let go of that and focus?”
Afterward, the parents were always delighted. My containment of their daily Sturm und Drang was exactly what they were paying for. Often, they’d spent years fusing outsize ambition to middling ability, and they presented me to their child like a Communion wafer.
“You’re so supportive,” they gushed.
Sometimes, after weathering a meltdown, I went to Sephora. I drifted through the aisles and obliterated myself. I left with highlighted cheeks and glossy lips, trailing strange clouds of citrus, musk, and juniper.
When my rate went up to $600 an hour, my mother was taken aback.
“What kind of tutor is worth $600 an hour?” my mom said. “You’d have to be made of solid gold to be worth that kind of money.”
“My boss charges $1,000 an hour.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I’m a Veblen good, Mom,” I explained. “I’m the educational version of a Gucci handbag.”
After my mom died, I often felt ripples of panic at work. I imagined my mind as a rider and my body as a bucking horse; each day the journey from my apartment to a parking space on the Upper East Side to my students’ well-appointed rooms contained the same drama and difficulty—and possibility of public failure—as a rodeo performance. Sometimes in the middle of an explanation of dangling modifiers or the Pythagorean theorem, I would feel waves of dizziness or internal jolts like airplane turbulence, and my urge to run from the room was so strong I would have to clutch my armrests. The amount people paid for my services seemed to make exiting impossible. Sometimes I imagined what I would say as I bolted for the door. I’m so sorry. One parent is dead, the other dying, kind of, and I desperately need your money, but what I mostly need is fresh air.
I bought purses, new clothes, and smoking loafers with octopuses embroidered on them—stupid, gorgeous things.
Sometimes my students startled me out of my inner fireworks. “This looks like a circle eating a square,” a student whispered once, staring at an SAT problem. I glanced from the diagram to her pale, pinched expression. She looks like a doomed Edward Gorey child, I thought. I chugged what looked like a four-ounce bottle of San Pellegrino the housekeeper had handed me and abandoned all thoughts of escape. I’d become one of those feeder fish that troll for resources on the backs of larger fish. I survived off an unregulated industry that sucks up surplus wealth in a way the rich feel especially good about—education. High-end tutoring plays into the myth that paying more means getting something better. I was like a Michelin-starred tutor, an impeccably sourced and plated SAT lesson, one more luxury brought about by the end of Piketty’s Great Redistribution.
My ability to do this work was predicated on a series of unfairnesses: I have a fancy college degree that my boss could “sell.” There were other, unspoken things I think he may have been selling too: tutors with glowy eyes and a hipster air who dressed well but not too well. None of us actually looked like nerds; you could see the surprised relief on clients’ faces when we showed up. We were custom-wrapped for affluent Brooklynites. After I stopped tutoring for the company, the perfection of my marketing was confirmed when a New York–based movie actor emailed me about tutoring their child. If I were other-bodied, had a disability, or had taken the full scholarship to Indiana University that I was once offered, I wouldn’t have been hired. But because I went to Yale and look the right way, droplets of wealth were flicked in my direction.
I didn’t think about this when I tutored, though; I focused on what I would be able to buy with the money. I bought my mom an iPhone, an iPad, and a laptop, because something about the Apple store made me believe she wouldn’t die from her cancer. I bought purses, new clothes, and smoking loafers with octopuses embroidered on them—stupid, gorgeous things. But also: a guardrail for the stairs so Mom and Dad wouldn’t fall, a wheelchair ramp when Mom could no longer walk. In the last month of her life, I bought an expensive necklace from an Israeli designer she loved, ignoring the certainty she’d never live to wear it. Years after both parents die, after I rebuild my finances from their nightmarish descent, I’ll spend a chunk of my tutoring money on a family gravestone. After that, I’ll use my high earnings for trips to Europe and—most significantly under capitalism—countless unencumbered afternoons.
back in the summer of 2010, after my mom had died and my dad was in the middle of unraveling, I shopped for groceries in Pendleton. The grocery store was a warehouse set down on the edge of unfathomable corn. The suburbs were expected to overflow here in a tide of overdevelopment, but it hadn’t happened, so I walked the aisles of neatly stacked industrial food alone.
I exited the store and pushed the cart of groceries to my dad’s Cadillac in the parking lot. I felt a scrim of unease as I got closer, but at first I couldn’t tell exactly what was wrong. Then, finally, when I was right on top of the car, I spotted it. On the hood, where the Cadillac logo had been, nothing. I stopped in disbelief. Kneeling down quickly, I found myself gazing into a black hole on the radiator grille, as though I were staring into one of those voids in a Lee Bontecou sculpture. After a moment, something organlike and tangled in wires faded into view. Distress scudded through my body. I concentrated.
I sat on the curb next to the car. The loss of the Cadillac’s remaining claim to prestige seemed peculiarly final. The parking lot started to rock slightly: my nervous system providing me with a physiological metaphor. I realized my dad’s wayward neurons were just a condensation of the anarchical energy everywhere. I was in the middle of a meltdown for which there were occasional static signs—just enough to assure me my disorientation was only natural.
I saw an older woman staring at me with concern. I was wearing a flowing caftan from a designer in Brooklyn; I looked like I was on vacation in Mallorca. The woman’s gaze told me that the car and I didn’t make sense. Later I googled and discovered the car had been “debadged”—a strangely existential prank.
Later that summer, the driver’s-side window of the Cadillac got stuck. I watched from the house as my father took a crowbar and tried to pry it open. His hair was wild and white and blowing around. The crowbar slipped, ripping the tint off the window in a jagged path, like a lightning bolt. I visualized the incision on my mother’s head after her brain surgery. My father shook his head and walked away.
Not long after, he discovered I’d hidden his car keys again. He followed me to the door, grabbed my arm, and tried to hit me as I wrenched myself free. I evaded him, shaking. In a voice chiseled calm by rage, he said, “If you don’t give me the car keys, I’m going to burn the house down.” As I turned away, the dimly lit chamber of our entryway angled sharply, as though I were on an enormous boat. The thought I’m panicking floated through my mind like one of those banners that trail behind airplanes. I started to sprint around the house, frantically collecting the things I most didn’t want to lose.
I wanted to tell her that capitalism itself had created these strange shipwrecks.
The next thing I remember, I was speeding down the highway in my father’s Cadillac, which I’d packed with my mother’s stuff. Her poems, her journals, her notebooks, her jewelry, her clothes. The two Montblanc Meisterstück fountain pens she used to write her poetry—pens I’ve still never mustered the courage to write with. Her collection of vintage opera glasses. A fifty-pound 1928 edition of Dürer’s drawings from the Albertina Museum. Of hundreds of thousands of vintage postcards, I’d taken two black trunks that held my mom’s private collection of opera singers, popes, fantasy photographs, and artist-drawn glamour, circa 1900–1920. Without thinking, I’d also grabbed an original Opéra-Comique poster advertising a banal Massenet opera from 1905: scrolls, flowers, lutes, lovers, a cherub. It now hangs in my study.
Eventually, I pulled over at an anonymous hotel on the outskirts of Indianapolis, the kind with an artificial pond and dutiful shrubs. My head splitting, I carefully stacked the Massenet poster and all of my mom’s stuff on the extra double bed. At some point, I called the police, who found my dad locked in the garage wearing a black trench coat and cowboy hat. They took him to a psychiatric ER—in a few weeks, he’d forgotten it happened. He never returned to the house we lived in. Instead, my boyfriend, Geremy, flew out and helped me move him to an assisted-living facility in Long Island. After that, we repacked the Cadillac and rented a U-Haul, then brought my parents’ collections to Brooklyn.
Months later, the Cadillac—with its title still in my father’s name—was taken to the pound after I parked it illegally. No one at the Brooklyn Tow Pound Facility believed the car was mine—I didn’t look right for it, and I didn’t have the correct paperwork. My story about a dead mother and a demented father seemed off. I found myself pleading with an NYPD officer behind the counter. I wanted to scream, Why would I make this shit up to get a busted Cadillac out of the pound? I wanted to tell her that capitalism itself had created these strange shipwrecks. But I imagine she, in her own way, already knew that.
After several years in the gloaming, my father died, a stranger.
when i turned forty-two, the same age my mom was when she took me on the QE2, I went on a solo trip to Europe. I chose my mother’s idée fixe, Paris, and obviated the churning obstacle of the Atlantic by flying, reducing it to a monotonous glint. The fancy sections of Paris were a kaleidoscopic recombination of my mother’s dreams: fountains, cherubs, gilded extravaganzas of ornamentation. Escutcheon-wielding lions flanked the hotel entrance. On my room’s wrought-iron balcony, which overlooked a cobblestone courtyard, red geraniums spilled from a flower box. The room’s wallpaper was chinoiserie toile. It was like a visual compendium of her obsessions, all traceable back to some more modest parallel in my childhood home.
The trip reminded me of an art nouveau postcard from my mom’s collection. On it, a woman with her back turned wears a red gown studded with chrysanthemums, stylized to look like exploding stars. She has a crenellated collar and sleeves, and her hair is gathered in a loose chignon. She smokes a cigarette into a hazy blue beyond. The decorative border encircles the sky and drops below her dress, ending in a flourish with one word: Paris. The postcard is puzzling. What it has to do with Paris is unclear, unless, of course, Paris is the unknown entity giving the woman her air of sophistication, of having tumbled out of a Henry James novel. It offers a clue to my mom’s cultural affiliation with the city. Like James, my mother thought Europe had a message for Americans, and while it was a message she didn’t adequately disentangle from wealth and power, she nevertheless relayed it to me as a strange gift, as ubiquitous and diffuse as the art nouveau woman’s cigarette smoke, a negation of my childhood surroundings. To borrow from The Ambassadors, if Paris is not 1890s Woollett, Massachusetts, it is certainly not 1990s Indianapolis.
Like everyone else, I was a tourist in the kingdom of the wealthy.
I started to see my mother’s Europhilia as one grand, sometimes quixotic effort to change a script. She had working-class parents who didn’t want her to go to college. European culture became the life of her mind. She read obsessively as a child, mostly nineteenth- and twentieth-century European novels, books that often offer literary solutions to the problem of stultification. Admittedly, the solutions they suggest for women are mostly terrible, but they seemed to give my mother a new horizon anyway: she climbed through college and graduate school and spent a life with books, eventually writing poetry and founding her vintage postcard business, which would become internationally known—all pursuits that would have been unthinkable and potentially dubious to my grandparents. Because of my mom, I’m someone who grew up scarfing down Tater Tots in a school cafeteria while wearing a toile dress with a lace neckerchief—an Elizabethan clown in a prairie of Styrofoam, linoleum, and corn. But I’m also someone who read Proust’s Balbec sequence in raptures—not to be matched by any reading experience in my life before or since—only to realize after the fact that this seaside, this grand hotel, were, thanks to my mom, places I had actually been.
One morning, I sat surrounded by mosaics and frescoes in the palm-lined courtyard of the Petit Palais to write. I began having a jet-lag-induced panic attack—the usual—and distracted myself by gazing around. The Beaux-Arts building, an expression of imperial wealth at the Exposition Universelle of 1900, now houses a delightfully random cornucopia of French art. I faced a ship on the bottom edge of the roof, which I figured must be some kind of imperialist hangover. The environment, on top of the obscene Jeff Koons tulip sculpture I saw on the way in, gave me the sense that, like everyone else, I was a tourist in the kingdom of the wealthy.
Oddly, focusing on class anxiety started to allay my panic, gave me a grounded feeling, brought clarity. I wondered if it was time to loosen my shame about my family’s glissandi through the classes. I used to be embarrassed by my dad’s Cadillac. I was embarrassed by the end of my parents’ lives: the frozen ravioli dinners, The O’Reilly Factor, the Depends, the out-of-control dogs, the sad yard, the wound-care supplies. And, most of all, I was embarrassed by my panic disorder, which seems like the only way my body can acknowledge what my mind resists. I took a breath and wondered what it would feel like to stop pretending to be something I’m not: an ultra-cultured upper-class person with such exquisite luck I’d never be caught dead climbing out of a decrepit car. I googled the ship sculpture I’d been staring at. It didn’t have to do with imperialism. It carried the inscription Fluctuat nec mergitur, the motto of Paris. “She is tossed by the waves but does not sink.” I’ll take it, I thought.
Once I lost my affiliation with Paris, I started to enjoy myself. I didn’t try to pass; I embraced the fact that I didn’t belong. At a Sarah Bernhardt exhibition inside the Petit Palais, I got a picture of my face superimposed onto Bernhardt’s in a special photo booth. I was pleased that I looked like a man. On the way out, I thought of how Jackson Pollock reportedly pissed in Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace, and I gave the finger to Koons’s shellacked tulips. I cheerfully exposed Parisians to my abominable accent.
A few weeks later, I traveled from Paris to Mallorca. I rented a car on the island and took it to a village in the countryside. As I wove through orange and lemon groves, the high stone walls on either side of me became narrower and narrower. I eventually realized I wouldn’t be able to get through. As I backed up, I repeatedly struck stones that were, in their textured beauty, jutting out at weird angles. I got out and looked at the zigzagging scratches on both sides of the rental car. As I surveyed the damage, I remembered a breathing exercise I had read about in a magazine. Navy SEALs use it to center themselves in emergencies: Four seconds in, pause, four out. I thought of my father’s Cadillac. Then I shrugged and jumped back into the car.
Jennifer Stock is working on an essay collection, Object Lessons.
