The Theory of Wealth Relativity

“Mom, How Much Do You And Dad Make?”

Middle-school memories are unreliable, soupy with hormones and narcissism and a terribly confused point-of-view. Here’s one, though, that is so unlikely I think it must be true: I am thirteen years old, lying on my stomach on the yellow wood floor of my parents’ loft on West 17th Street, schoolwork fanned out in a crescent moon around me. Prompted by an assignment from one of the socialist history teachers at my new prep school, I turn to my mother, busy burning salmon and rice in the kitchen, and ask her about our household income.

My mother, who is now beating the bleeping smoke alarm with a broom, answers with a number I don’t recall. It could have been $180,000 or maybe $200,000, depending on how close to full-time she was working that particular year.

“We’re wealthy,” I inform my mother, to her surprise. Or possibly I said, “You’re wealthy,” because it is with such charm that I am inclined to speak to my mother when I am thirteen.

“We’re middle class,” my mother says, the smoke alarm now opened like a clamshell and dangling half off the wall, thoroughly cowed and silent. “Upper-middle class.”

“Everyone says they are middle class.” I roll my eyes, repeating the words of my teacher. “Everyone in America believes they are middle-class, but not everyone is. Not everyone can be in the middle. People don’t like to admit class in this country because they think America is a meritocracy, but it’s not.” I explain to my tired mother: “We are rich.” Or, possibly, “You are rich.”

God bless thirteen years olds.

As an adult, I understand completely why my mother answered “middle class” even as she and my father earned, roughly, five times the country’s median income. It wasn’t only because they live in New York, though, of course, that is part of it.

Not long ago, I was complaining to my mom that teaching felt like a job — the kind of thing you wouldn’t do if someone wasn’t paying you — rather than the vocation I hoped it would be. This was shortly after I’d returned to work following the birth of my second child. If I wasn’t going to be hardcore Do What You Love!-ing, I reasoned, perhaps I should have chosen a career with more money, more prestige, more quiet.

I was trying to figure out if somewhere in the great wild yonder was a career that would do a better job of satisfying the parts of myself that could be satisfied through work. Or I would feel lackluster no matter where I turned? Because I was exhausted; because what I really wanted was to be home with my last sweet baby and my young toddler; and because a low level dissatisfaction with my surroundings is, maybe, constitutionally part of who I am.

My mother tended to believe the latter. “That’s how it was for me, too,” she said, shrugging.

I protested. She was a doctor. Prestige! Money!

“Not a fancy doctor,” she said. “I had jobs. They closed, or I got fired. I got other jobs.” Her career ended without a planned, formal retirement; she just had jobs that she worked at until, one day, she wasn’t working at jobs anymore.

The joke — What do you call the medical student who graduates last in his class? Doctor — is funny, it turns out, only to those outside of the profession.

My parents met doing their psychiatric residencies at the dearly departed St. Vincent’s Hospital, which is now a block of condos. They married and had me while my Dad was finishing up an internship in child psychiatry. I was born a little less than a year into my mother’s first doctor job.

That year, she made $50,000 and had six weeks of maternity leave. She greeted each day by waving my father off to work and then crying into the phone for her own mother to come to the apartment and help with the baby. She returned to her work at a neighborhood substance abuse clinic at two-thirds time, and, for most of my childhood, worked at clinics and agencies close enough to my elementary school to be able to literally run over in an emergency. Her schedule was a patchwork: one day at this agency, three afternoons at another one, and so on. She took her first full-time position with benefits at a hospital shortly after I left for college.

My father worked longer hours than my mother, and, after the internship year, earned more money — maybe 65–70% of the household income. He, too, worked for social service agencies, but more of them, and for longer hours. In the evenings he saw patients in private practice. By his own account, he was extremely fortunate to have a career making “good money” doing something that interested him, that is useful, and that he was good at.

Still, compared to medical school classmates, he doesn’t think of his career as “impressive.” Even though my perception as a child was that he worked all the time, he doesn’t see himself as someone driven to the highest levels of achievement in the world of work. “I saw those kinds of people in college,” he has said to me, “and thought, ‘there’s more to life than this.’” His professional life didn’t have the kind of upward trajectory that culminates in academic appointments, books, contributions to research. All he did was work, and in working, help many people.

When my mother was standing in the smoke-filled kitchen, divulging her earnings to her 13-year-old, she couldn’t know what the denouement of her and my father’s careers would look like. But she did know their origins, and origins, too, have something to do with class, in both its socioeconomic and the emotional dimensions.

Wealthy, to my parents, as to many, has connotations of inheritance, of leisure, of, to use my mother’s word, fanciness. My father grew up in Brooklyn: not Girls Brooklyn, but the working-class neighborhood of Dyker Heights in the ’50s and ’60s, where he lived in a floor-through with his single, working mother and immigrant grandparents who spoke a wet Sicilian dialect. He was the first member of his family to go to college, attending on full scholarship, and was so alienated by the experience that, when it was my turn, I wasn’t allowed to look at Cornell.

My mother’s situation was different, more solidly middle class. She grew up in Stuyvesant Town, the housing complex on East 14th Street built for returning (white) GIs after World War 2. Her father was a Jewish, CUNY-educated scientist, reportedly brilliant but perennially underemployed. (Those were the days when an underemployed scientist could still afford decent housing in Manhattan, a summer house on Fire Island, and tuition for three red-haired daughters to attend progressive private schools.) He died suddenly when my mother was a teenager, prompting her mother, a housewife, to find work as a receptionist in a medical office.

“I think that’s the only reason I got in to medical school,” my mother once said to me in a stage whisper, even though the only other person in the room was a pre-verbal infant. “My mother was the secretary for the head of admissions at Mt. Sinai.”

So, when my mother described our status as middle class, she was saying, We work for our money, and we work at jobs.

She was saying, Your father and I, given our pasts, will never feel entirely secure.

She was saying, I don’t know what kinds of things you might be seeing at your new, fancy school, or what kind of messages you think you are picking up on, but make no mistake about it: you, too, will work jobs, kid.

She was saying, We may have so very, very much, but wealth, you know, is relative.

She was saying, Joanna, stop asking. I’m not buying you a Kate Spade bag.

The irony of me accusing my parents of being wealthy is that, for the first time in my life, I felt poor; or, at least, I had become suddenly aware there were people in the world with much more than me — more than I had previously known was possible to have.

In 6th grade, my “senior” year at my neighborhood public elementary school in the Village, while my friends were missing school together to tour the public I.S.s in our zone and discussing on the brownstone stoops where we ate lunch how they planned to rank the schools on the district preference form, I was missing school alone so my mom could drag me to the Upper East Side and to Riverdale and Brooklyn Heights. In scratchy tights, button-down shirts from the Gap, and a kilt that my mother mistakenly believed made me look like I belonged, I sat in quiet admissions offices in palatial, light-filled schools getting sorted by IQ tests and interviews.

I ended up at a private school in a leafy-green enclave of the Bronx consisting of architecturally confusing mansions, an expansive park, and a dull commercial strip. On my first day of 7th grade, I came home to my mother asleep on the couch, between jobs after the closure of a day-treatment facility, and woke her up to report, somewhat shell-shocked, that the girls at my new school wore outfits. Outfits, not clothes: matching articles, tops and bottoms, something off the set of Clueless.

I had spent days, maybe weeks, agonizing over what to wear, before deciding on my black X-girl t-shirt, my carpenter jeans from Urban Outfitters, and a baby barrette perched uselessly on my triangle of frizzy hair. I might as well have shown up in an astronaut suit.

The girls at my new school were beings from another universe in J. Crew twinsets, pearl earrings, and Diamonds-By-The-Yard™. Their hair was professionally highlighted, so shiny it could show you your own frumpy reflection if you stared long enough. They wrote down their homework assignments in Filofaxes and patted their T-zones with MAC foundation between classes. Miniature versions of their mothers, every one of them. They were beyond backpacks. They used $200 Kate Spade shoulder bags to carry their binders, their Aprendemos! workbooks, their copies of Catcher in the Rye.

The girls at my new school were beings from another universe. Their hair was professionally highlighted, so shiny it could show you your own frumpy reflection if you stared long enough.

It wasn’t just the amount of wealth that shocked me; it was also the culture in which wealth was so openly celebrated, where currency was the currency. I’ve always loved the phrase “an embarrassment of riches,” but as far as I could see, there was no shame about money here.

In public school, I had been sharply aware, for instance, that my family’s vacations — to Cape Cod in the summer, to the Caribbean, sometimes, in February — were not experiences shared by my classmates, and therefore not something I supposed to talk about. The parents of my closest friends from elementary school were people who now would be called creatives — a model/playwright, a drummer, a designer, several actors — or, as I thought of them in the ’90s, artists: the type of people who were short on cash but long on cool.

My parents, despite their conventional choice of profession, managed to convey to me in a thousand tiny ways — possibly too well, in retrospect — that there are higher pursuits in life than money.

Even recently, when I was moping about money — specifically, about the crushing expense of preschool in the Bay Area, which, for my two children, will cost as much money as I take home, maybe more — my mom pulled me over to show me a video of a woman tap-dancing beautifully, percussively, on some late-night show. “Look at this, Joanna,” she said. “Look what she’s doing. Think how that feels and how much money she’s making. Tap-dancing.” The last word a reverent whisper.

So the kids at my new school, who talked about Vail and Bloomingdale’s and frozen hot chocolate from Serendipity were, on the one hand, total squares, with shallow interests and bad taste in music, too sheltered to take the subway alone. But on the other hand, because this was middle school and because I was new and wanted nothing more than to be beautiful and to belong, their lives, their grooming, even their ugly Kate Spade bags became the objects of my deep yearning and envy.

Once, while sitting cross-legged on the white-carpeted bedroom floor of a new friend — my only friend, actually, at my new school — beneath a hand-painted, larger-than-life mural depicting her, beautiful and intense, jumping a fence atop her favorite show horse, the topic of wealth came up.

“We’re not wealthy,” she said of her family. “We’re middle class. My parents have to work very hard for our money.” If the live-in British nanny didn’t at that moment arrive at the bedroom door with a plate of piping hot Bagel Bites, she might as well have.

“Yes, but you have so much of it.”

“I know what wealthy is,” she said slowly, educating me. “We have friends who have their own planes, who have their own islands. And besides, when you make over a million dollars, you have to pay half of it to taxes.”

“But you still have half a million dollars.”

If you are thirteen years old at a new school and have just been invited into the inner sanctum of your first real friend, maybe don’t take it upon yourself to push your new friend towards a class awakening.

We were not friends for much longer.

My own children are too young to think anything at all about wealth, class, or work. The closest they come is when my daughter slides her tiny feet into my clogs and shuffles to the door. “Bye-bye, Mommy,” she says, face very serious, little hand waving. “I go to work.”

My children’s daycare provider is an older Honduran woman who sings to them in Spanish and keeps a knife in her pocket so she can cut up the whole fruits I throw, recklessly, exhaustedly, into their lunch bags. My children spend 40–50 hours with her and her husband each week while I teach and occasionally mother other people’s children.

Lately, she has been telling my son that his mother is a teacher.

“Mommy, you are a teacher,” my son will say to me, as I stand in the kitchen, dumping frozen fish sticks onto a metal pan, and letting the frozen green beans boil into mush. “Mommy, you a teacher,” he says, squinting and turning his head sideways. The word is, for him, a black box, plainly vital to the mystery of his mother and what she does all day, yet offering no hints at its meaning.

So much of my children’s reality — the tiny, intense experiences that weave together to form the cloth of childhood — is a mystery to me, too. I can guess at but never enter their perceptions. What are they learning about class and money and jobs?

Their parents are a public school teacher and a government worker. My father, in his work as a doctor, served neighborhoods he wouldn’t raise his own daughter in; and I can’t afford to live in the wealthy community in which I teach. I commute to school from the nearest city I can afford and live on the ugliest block of the best school system I can access. Thinking about my childhood and about my parents, I sometimes feel that I chose wrong, that I fell short of the implied promise to provide for my children at least as well as my parents provided for me. Did my parents send me to private school for this?

I commute to school from the nearest city I can afford and live on the ugliest block of the best school system I can access. Thinking about my childhood and about my parents, I sometimes feel I chose wrong.

Yet my children have so much: a warm house, good health care, quality childcare when their Mom and Dad have to be away at work. They have clean clothes and toddler soccer lessons and shelves and shelves of books. They have grandparents that never cease buying them new shoes: sneakers, rain boots shaped like fire trucks, dress shoes that glitter, sandals with with cat faces, etc. An embarrassment of riches.

My children go to public school. Our immediate neighbors, with whom they will attend elementary, live in public housing. Then there are kids from mansions on literal hills, who talk about their vacations in Tahoe and Hawaii.

I imagine that when my children ask me how much money we make, I will tell them, We are middle class.

Joanna Petrone lives, writes, and teaches in the Bay Area.

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