The house where I started out – what class were we?

I’m in my 40s but the world I grew up in seems so utterly different from today’s sometimes I imagine my childhood wasn’t part of this lifetime, but from a previous incarnation. Of course it wasn’t and I’m not coming out for a belief in reincarnation just yet. But I still sometimes feel as if I imagined much of it. After all it was last century. And it doesn’t help that I am an only child and both of my parents have forgotten a huge amount about what went on back then. I’m starting to wonder if anyone else will remember my existence pre 2000 in a few years. I feel on some sort of odd par with Marty McFly in Back to the Future when he sees his own image fading from childhood pictures. Recently my Dad told me he didn’t remember that I was “into art” as a child, when all I ever did or talked about until age 10 was becoming an artist. I staged an “exhibition” of my drawings and paintings in our living room at age 8, signing and dating all of my “works” as in a gallery. I went to art classes, I spent all my time sketching or painting at an easel. Every visitor to our house, whether a social caller or boiler repairman would be presented with a quick charcoal portrait I did of them while they were here. When I was 10 I won a statewide art contest and my Dad drove me the two hours to go to the awards ceremony! And now he says, “Oh, I didn’t know you were into art as a child.” Did I exist?

When we started out in Princeton, NJ my parents were up and comers, both liberal and somewhat unconventional, both the black sheep of their families, the ones who moved away, WAY away from their families of origin both in distance and beliefs. My mother was the only one to leave the Mormon faith and the only one to leave Arizona. She had a master’s degree in Psychology and worked as a social worker when she became pregnant with me. My father was a young physicist, already several years into a well-paying career at a pure research facility. It had been years since he exited his parents’ dour Scandinavian household in Minnesota and met my mother in California. Although my Mom started attending feminist meetings when I was three weeks old, she had given up her career and friends in California to come to New Jersey for my Dad’s job. He just missed being hired by University of California at Irvine, and if he had I could have been a California girl. God knows how my life would be different? According to my Dad, my mother cried herself to sleep for the whole first year after they moved to New Jersey. That must have been quite a strain.

We moved to a beautiful side street near the downtown of Snooty Princeton.

We weren’t snooty, though. We were the outsiders. We made our own peanut butter and voted Democrat. Our place had nearly an acre of land and a creek running through it. Contrary to what New Yorkers and people who watch a lot of comedy believe, New Jersey really is the Garden State. There were massive amounts of woods and other green, vacant land in and around the greater Princeton area back then and despite Princeton having become a major commuter’s berg since then, there still is. The last house my Dad lived in before he moved back to the Midwest was a 15 minute drive from Princeton and had sheep farms on two sides of it.

Although we had some decent income and a fancy zipcode and my mother ended up working as a psychologist at Princeton University, we were not part of the Upper Middle Class or the Old Money. The other families around us had fathers who were doctors or stock brokers and mothers who were homemakers. The fathers worked and played golf and the Moms shopped, tanned and occasionally baked cakes. My parents went to plays, ate at cheap Indian restaurants, shopped at the Whole Earth Store and attended peaceful protests. Even though I went to a wonderful private school for several years which was an interesting combination of attracting Old Money and progressive educational techniques, there was a class system even within the school. I was friends with a girl Josie for a while and we got along great when it was just the two of us. Her family lived in an old mansion just off Nassau Street, a colonial with 3 storeys and a gorgeous old dark wood spiraling staircase from the entryway all the way up three floors. Even then I adored antique houses and wished that we lived in one.

Photo from Pixabay free for commercial use: skeeze.

Back then our house seemed like a starter house, despite the land and the creek. But it was three bedrooms and had two working fireplaces! I looked at it now on Zillow and it’s worth over $650,000. But the kitchen was tiny and I suppose there might have been other inconveniences I didn’t notice. It was only one storey. Compared with my friend’s house it was like a servant’s quarters. In fact, I think her house had a small “mother-in-law cottage” out back behind the main house that was similar to ours.

But it didn’t matter. Josie wasn’t pretentious or snobby, and she was smart and she got all of my jokes. Neither of us liked Barbies. In a way that can only happen by fate, we met and were immediately on the same wavelength. We played at each other’s houses, though I went to hers more often and I felt a little embarrassed about ours. It’s the only time I ever felt that way as a child, as if we were inadequate. I remember complimenting Josie’s mother on the beautiful old wallpaper they had in the kitchen, something in a faded taupe with pen and ink drawings of different bunches of berries at intervals. I sensed the mother was a bit taken aback by my comment, though I didn’t know why.

Photo from Pixabay free for commercial use: Moxlase.

At school Josie and I competed to see who could spell the most complicated words. I used to get frustrated by the simple words that the teacher asked me to spell on the board, and, obnoxiously, I would write the requested word and then quickly add another more complex word to show that I was “beyond this level.” The teacher rightly told me to stop doing that. When something struck me as funny I’d turn to look at Josie and she would have just turned to look at me, a glow of suppressed mirth in her eyes. At recess she dared me to go down the biggest slide, the one I had never dared slide down. I told her, “No.” She said, “Come on! I’ll be your best friend!” This was a common exhortation on the playground, but I took at it face value and braved the slide. It wasn’t as scary as I thought. “You did it!” Josie said. “Now we’re best friends.”

Photo from Pixabay free for commercial use: Thomas Wolter.

At our school every grade had two separate classes in order to keep classroom sizes small. In the previous year Josie had been in the other class, but in first grade she was moved to my room because her mother was a first grade reading teacher for her original class and they didn’t think she should have her own mother for her teacher. What I didn’t realize was that this move had separated Josie from her previous best friend, Becky, a little blonde girl with an attitude who was most definitely from Old Princeton Money. As Josie and I became closer, Becky made herself more and more present at lunch, at recess, between classes when both sets of students were able to mix in common areas. She could see our friendship progressing, and she eventually launched an all out war to take Josie back. Her primary weapons were their pre-existing friendship…and Class. Although I might not have had the vocabulary to describe it as an adult would, at the time I perceived instantly what Becky was doing. Every slight, every comparison she made was designed to show that she and Josie were “Us” and I was one of “Them.”

She was easily able to do this through referring to the rich, preppy clothes they wore, how they had their hair, what they did on weekends, what their houses were like and even how their families vacationed. I don’t remember the details now, but the social divide gave Becky a lavish set of weaponry with which to make the distinction between me and Them, and it grew with every look, every statement. I was not a fighter. Instead of being incensed and indignant, I was hurt and intimidated. I could tell Josie felt sad for me, but in the end the onslaught was too much for her, and she slowly migrated back to Becky and out of my life. After that they became a unit and when we looked at each other the separation was so complete that there wasn’t even any animosity left in Becky’s eyes or sympathy left in Josie’s. They both had a blank look of non-recognition when their eyes came across me.

Not long after I met my new best friend, Laura. We were best friends for the next several years until my family moved away.