(Poverty) is like a box of chocolates
When I was in the grocery store last week, I saw these fancy chocolates. They are delicious, as I know from personal experience. But I could not bring myself to buy any, even “just for guests” or “for the kids,” two of my usual excuses for buying extraneous treats. The taste of these candies is one of the many flavors of poverty, along with lesser foods like microwave popcorn and pesto out of a tube.
It was Christmas 1989 the first and last time I encountered these chocolates. I lived in Boston. Taking an involuntary “break” from college, I was living in a cockroach-infested apartment I couldn’t afford with a friend who was turning into a creep who sold weed. At first I’d had plenty of work — balancing a full-time office temp job for $8 per hour (twice my salary at college) with an evening gig (for slightly less money) working at the funky, hippy clothing chain. But then work dried up. Perhaps it had to do with how terrible I was at office work, seeing as how my liberal arts college education had taught me much about 19th century art but little about making spreadsheets.
So in the month leading up to Christmas, I working a few hours at the hippy store, waitressing, and wrapping presents as a seasonal worker at Filene’s department store. I wanted so badly to be a decent waitress — independent, tough, literally good on my feet. In the terrible stuck place I was in, waitressing seemed like the surest path to financial security. In fact, I was that smiling and well-meaning, slow and incompetent kind of bad waitress. But I loved going into the fancy little Mexican place on Newberry Street and hoped that the owners would always schedule me for at least two or three dinner shifts, so that I could eat a meal before work.
The job wrapping gifts was in the men’s fragrance department, and though we didn’t do a brisk business, my job was mostly to wrap the gift packages of aftershave, cologne, soap-on-a-rope, and shaving accoutrements in baskets with cellophane and ribbon. We added chocolate to some of the packages, Baci hazelnut confections with love notes inside. The romantic messages were in Italian, English, and French script — like upscale, Euro Valentines hearts. The manager, a beautiful, statuesque woman who would have passed for a drag queen, thought it was a nice touch for the guys.
Standing amidst the towers of Drakkar Noir and Polo by Ralph Lauren, I was supposed to wrap gifts whenever it was slow. So I was always wrapping gifts. I never actually made any sales; in retrospect, my function was probably to prevent excessive shoplifting by simply being a warm body watching would-be thieves. I was supposed to give all the sales to the regular employees, since their hourly and daily sales totals determined their bonuses and whether or not they would keep their jobs. The manager didn’t mind if I ate a few chocolates, so I ate a couple when she was around. And I ate a lot when she was busy with customers or talking with our coworkers about her boyfriend. I always read the notes from the chocolates, out of a sense of curiosity (which of the moony, lovestruck notes would this chocolate have?) and a little morbid self-torture; as stupid as the notes were, I had no one in my life saying them to me and would not be meeting any straight guys in my underage, minimum wage retail and food service hell. Adding the clandestine chocolate binge a couple of times a week to the hot Mexican meal a couple of times a week to my usual diet of pasta with a squirt of pesto from a tube or a bag of microwave popcorn, I was doing okay and no where near genuine starvation. By Christmas, my drug-dealing friend had brought in another guy to live with us, but still the $850 rent was nearly impossible.
I’d only been living like this for a couple of months, but I was terrified that this was the new normal, now that I was kicked out of college, with no credentials and not enough moxy. Growing up in Wisconsin, we’d been poor but never food insecure. My grandfather had a farm and grew and canned plenty of food, and there was no week so bad that we couldn’t afford frozen pizzas or jars of Ragu spaghetti sauce, pasta, and a head of iceberg lettuce (39 cents at the time). When Christmas came, and I used the discount plane ticket purchased when I still had an office job to go home, I was never more grateful to eat the simple, cheap, yet plentiful food of my childhood. And the following month, when I returned to college to try once more not to squander my education, the memory of more than one kind of hunger remained.
