Utah: Clothes, Panic & Flashbacks

She walks with a certain gait. She knows where she is going, and she smiles the whole way. Her skin is tanning booth brown, her teeth are bleach white, and her shoes cost more than the entire contents of my suitcase. Her boobs are squished together and hoisted up so that her cleavage starts just beneath her collarbones. Despite the heat of the day, Her hair stays in place – a fashionable highlighted bob that frames her perfectly made-up face.

I watch her from a short distance. Despite my best efforts at wielding a blow dryer and makeup brush in the morning, my hair has fallen flat and I can feel beads of sweat forming on my freckled nose. My mascara has probably formed dark circles under my eyes. My fingernail polish is chipped, my teeth ache, and my feet are swelling in the $12 sandals I found in the clearance section of Famous Footwear.  I could probably use a new bra, especially since I’m wearing a form fitting and garishly bright t-shirt that does absolutely nothing for my 48 year-old boobs.

It’s the kind of day that makes me feel out of my element and out of place, and the orange shirt I bought for this three-day trip to a Utah resort isn’t helping. I also bought a pair of white jeans that (I decided when I tried them on in my hotel room) make me look like an aging orderly who should be delivering J-ello in an institution rather than walking the hallways of a four-star mountain getaway.  Luckily, I’m not wearing the hospital pants — I folded them back up and opted for a loose pair of khakis.

Even then, I feel slightly creepy, like a geeky, slope-shouldered girl feels who’s donned an ill-fitting strapless taffeta dress for a prom she shouldn’t have been invited to, in the hopes that somehow she’ll blend into the environment, like a chameleon or potted plant.

The ice cream colored wardrobe was my attempt – my really wrong and clumsy attempt – to feel like the kind of summer-y, social woman who belongs at a resort. It was my way of trying to trick my hermitic, socially awkward, working-class self into feeling okay in a bustling hotel that smells of eucalyptus spa treatments and $30 dinners.

And of course, it was stupid. There are probably as many other women here who struggle with feelings of outsided-ness as those who feel like they belong. Clothes might make a person look less obviously outcast in their environment (if they’re good shoppers and have any fashion sense at all, which I don’t), but they can’t bridge the real gaps.

Earlier in the morning, I sat out on a sun-drenched balcony and watched the housekeepers cross the long expanse from the dirt parking lot to the employee entrance. It takes them about ten minutes. I’m sure they’re not paid for that time – twenty minutes a day in good weather, and probably about thirty in the winter.  Over the course of the year, that’s a lot of unpaid hours.

The housekeepers wear dark green smocks pinned with sparkling gold name tags, and most have their hair pulled back. I know that their feet probably ache when they get home, and the older ones likely have sore backs. I’m sure they can’t afford a massage with eucalyptus oil. Maybe, like my mom did after a day in retail, they go home, make dinner, clean the kitchen, give the kids a bath, and then sit in a recliner. Maybe one of their children rubs their feet in the hopes of currying favor and a later bedtime.

Maybe, like so many other working class women, they crawl into bed and dream of the day they can stop walking through dirt fields, get braces for their kids, and live in a house instead of an apartment.

My working class roots finds the dichotomy between the natural beauty of mountains and the manufactured beauty of this resort unsettling. It seems odd to me to see people in uniforms among the backdrop of pine trees. It feels strange to be in the mountains, but to have no sense of solitude or privacy – no quiet place to sit outside alone and reflect.

In the sense of “majority rules” my feelings are misplaced. People come here to bike, ski, hike, attend conferences, and take romantic gondola rides, and their needs are fulfilled. They enjoy lounging poolside, and conversing in lobbies filled with comfortable leather chairs. This is their prom, and it’s a happy occasion for them. For me, it’s a place where my heartstrings feel uneasily tugged.

I have more in common with the women in the shapeless green smocks than I do with the well-to-do woman with the bright smile, but there’s no comfort in this sense of familiarity – there’s only dread-fear and panicky memories of low-wage poverty. I flashback to cold, dark apartments, empty cupboards, broken-down cars, stony faces, and years of an exhaustion so deep I didn’t think that I’d ever fully waken.

I flashback to me: 13, washing dishes; 14, cleaning apartments; 16, working in a factory; 19, a single mother; 21, a casino cocktail waitress . . . and to all the times I held a second job, even when I was in advertising, in order to buy extras, like school clothes or dental appointments. Then there was the discovery, after a couple of years as an adult student in college, that I could actually make more as a blue-collar worker. I drove a frozen food truck. I became a massage therapist. I worked in an office filled with hostile workers. I climbed out of the worst of poverty, but was never more than one mishap or miscalculation away from disaster.

Longevity hasn’t brought me to peace with poverty, but it doesn’t scare me as it once did. I learned to do without so many things, over so many years, that even the simplest of things — like a good cup of coffee — still feel like a gift. What scares me isn’t the cold, or the hunger, or the absence of things in the poverty equation, it’s the absence of me.

What scares me is the bone-deep memory of having nothing left of myself at the end of long, fruitless days, and the sleepless nights spent fearing that if I fell asleep I wouldn’t hear the alarm clock in the morning.  What scares me is the visceral sensation of workplace antagonism: the coworkers who bullied those who ranked below them, the chronic complainers, the micro-managers, and the openly hostile or nepotistic supervisors.

Lastly, what scares me is my own lack of tolerance for such circumstances anymore, and the panic that rises in my gut whenever I think of returning to days of desperate energy and dead-end dreams.

I know that I write more for the women in the green smocks than the woman with the stylish shoes, and that there’s really no big demand for that – the shadowed underclass isn’t really a market as much as it is an undesirable demographic, and many people like stories with snap-on happy endings – but I’ll keep writing anyway. Not just because it’s what I know but because while some truths may never make it to the shelves of Barnes & Noble, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be told.