Ballad of Self-Consciousness: Upper-Middle-Class Suburban Division

by Lisa Gluskin

This isn’t just about going to the grocery store and walking up and down the aisles and maybe getting indignant because they don’t carry organic spinach. Or even about running into someone there, an old acquaintance, say, from high school, or your mother’s bridge partner, and this person asking you what you’re doing now and you find these words coming out of your mouth, not lies at all, but such wondrous reconfigurations of the truth (and yet exactly, logically the truth—that’s what’s so wondrous) that you could use them in a job interview, yes, and get the job, too, any job—and they say, so what are you doing now, and we never see you around here anymore, and you say something gracious and impressive and suddenly become very aware of your shoes, how stylish they are compared to the shoes of your interlocutor, stylish in a way that of course doesn’t scream trendy, even a bit scuffed up really, and how superior that makes you feel, being an indicator for a whole lot of things about class and education and hipness, and (entirely simultaneously) how ashamed you are to be that shallow, and all this passes of course in a second, maybe two, and you wake up and you’re blabbing on and this suddenly matters to you in a way it never has at home. And in your head there’s this skinny teenage girl, overwrought and romantic, thinking if she does everything perfectly they will maybe leave her alone, she can escape, she’s paid her debt to society if she gets really good at this, this random violence in a grocery store. You stare down at the garbanzo beans. You’ve separated yourself for so long that you’ve ceased to despise and started to romanticize this place, this nowhere where you come from, you’re even thinking of putting it in a poem. This flat flat town, this suburban blankness. How you always envied those kids with the intellectual parents, houses loaded with books and with the possibility of something different, something beyond love, maybe understanding or engagement, and if you had that then (instead of this life of shoes, spinach, other privilege), you would have a different life, wouldn’t you, and the question is, what would you write about, not having to go to the supermarket at all, having everything that you thought you wanted.

Lisa Gluskin lives in San Francisco.