Grew Up With Money
Amy Day Wilkinson
“You could tell she grew up with money,” my sister said recently at the beach.
We were in the living room of an oceanfront house our parents had rented. I’d driven down from the city with my family— husband and two teens—and my sister, Penelope, had driven down from Massachusetts with hers—husband and preteen. Penny, her eleven-year-old daughter, and our mother had just gotten back from a walk on the beach road. On one side were ocean-facing mansions like ours, swollen pastel homes on tiny sandy lots, and on the other were similarly large houses interspersed with access streets, also lined with houses. The streets were named for Southern states up the Eastern seaboard—Florida Ave., Georgia Ave., South Carolina Ave., etc.—and led to the four-lane, divided Coastal Highway where one finds surf shops, ice cream windows, crab shacks, seashell stores, caramel corn slingers, all variety of minigolf.
“You could tell she grew up with money,” my sister said, referring to a woman they’d seen on their walk.
My sister, two years my junior, forty-six to my forty-eight, is into wellness. And, quite frankly, starving herself, though she has other language to describe her miniscule eating practices. She’s angular in ways she never was as a teen or a twenty-something. Her clothes are flowing, italicized. Natural fibers, earth tones. Our first day out on the beach—me in my Lands’ End black one-piece;
Penny in a paisley bikini—we all remarked upon the red circles on Penny’s tanned back.
“Cupping,” she said, “for the toxins.”
Then she had to explain that particular spa service to our seventy-five-year-old mother.
At the time of the “grew up with money” comment, Penny was sitting straight-backed and cross-legged in the center of the primary sofa. Whenever we congregated inside, she took that spot. On the drive back to New York, during our regular hiss out complaints about my sister and her family session, my husband and I realized that neither of us ever sat on the primary sofa. It was, quite clearly, Penny’s throne, her birthright.
So, she was there, ensconced, her eleven-year-old daughter, Eden, tucked in beside her, Eden with her typical, how shall I put it, snarky expression—lips puckered a little, open a crack, making her small eyes even squintier—talking to our mother, who was in the chair in the corner. The chair with a view of nothing, I might add. Not the beach, not the TV, just Penny and Eden.
My family and I, late risers—a constant point of contention with the Massachusetts set, who’ve always been real early-birdgets-the-worm, pat-themselves-on-the-back types—were having bowls of cereal at the dining room table, but it was all one big room, space spilling into space. Kitchen, dining room, living room. Deck, dune, beach, ocean. My dad must have been napping: It was 10 A.M.. My sister’s husband was off somewhere with his laptop.
“You could tell she grew up with money.”
The woman they’d seen on their walk was, apparently, about my sister’s age, out strolling with two similarly aged friends, and then she peeled off, said goodbye to her pals, entered one of the beachfront mansions.
Nobody described the woman, but I conjured a petite, fit blonde. Tank top and skort. Ponytail. Somebody who was on the tennis team in high school.
I gathered that the group of ladies who’d caught my sister’s eye, middle-aged women like us, appeared to be more permanent residents of that beach enclave than we were. We, who were merely renting—or our parents were, anyway—for just one week.
“Maybe she was the daughter of the owner,” my mom said, from the corner.
“No, Granny,” Penny said. “It was clearly her house. Or hers and her husband’s. They probably live in D.C. and summer here,” as if to summer is a verb. Then the sentence that, since seeing Penny, has been chiming in my brain, ding ding ding:
“You could tell she grew up with money.”
And then the conversation changed course. Probably to what expensive, mediocre restaurant Eden wanted Granny and Grandaddy to take her to that night.
My family and I, having slept through the early-birds’ bacon, egg, and pancake spread, though the house still smelled of it, continued spooning cereal. I felt the usual low-level thrum of annoyance—every summer my family bristles at sharing a house with my sister’s family—but the day moved on, as did the week, and now we’re all back in our natural habitats, some of us getting cupped, some not.
In general, my sister and I check in with each other about once every two weeks. We do this by talking on the phone. I get the impression she texts with other people but not me. I’ll call while I’m out walking the dog in Prospect Park, or she’ll call while she’s out running errands in her Mercedes SUV. We tick through the kids and their recent accomplishments. My two, debate and singing; Eden, sports. We ask about work. I’m a college professor, humanities, as was Penny, sciences, till she jumped ship for a lab position at a pharmaceutical company. Still, we share common ground in our disdain for vengeful admins and time-sucks of meetings. We report briefly on the husbands. Mine, also a college
prof; hers, the manager of personal investments and writer of an expensive, subscription-based newsletter called, thrillingly, “Investment Strategies.” We share news of Mom and Dad, who live many miles south of both of us in the southern Virginia town where we grew up. They are, thankfully, still healthy enough to play tennis and golf and to attend Pasta Night at the club on Thursdays. Penny thinks it’s time for them to look at senior housing or assisted living facilities near her and maybe she’s right. Though it’s hard for me to imagine my southern parents enjoying Massachusetts. Anyway, on these calls, the thing that gives Penny the greatest pleasure is when she gets to pity me something or another.
“Your son didn’t get the teacher he wanted? I’m sorry.”
“You have a lot of papers to grade? I’m sorry.”
“Your ceiling fan is broken? I’m sorry.”
“The grocery store was out of rotisserie chickens by the time you got there? I’m sorry.”
I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, Penny loves, “I’m sorry.”
After I got home from an academic conference in Lisbon and told Penny that a few people there corrected me when I attempted to speak the language—Portuguese thank yous are gendered, by the way: as someone who identifies as female, I’m supposed to say obrigada not obrigado—she said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
Let me get this straight. I got to go to Portugal and a waiter, a complete stranger, taught me something about the language, and very politely, I might add, and, meanwhile, work paid for the trip. What exactly is there to be sorry for, Penny, and who appointed you Chair of the Portuguese Apologizing Committee?
So, then, imagine the pity Penny would get to dish if she knew that my family, unlike hers, lives paycheck to paycheck and has an American-sized hill of debt. (“Cupping’s not in the budget? I’m
sorry.”) Maybe choosing to raise our kids in New York City, which is not exactly known for being cheap, as two low-paid humanities professors wasn’t the best call. Maybe becoming humanities professors at all was our mistake. Big pharma certainly isn’t looking to poach English PhDs from teaching posts. But, then, it’s not like we could have chosen, as was just the case for a certain newsletter writer I know, as if newsletter writing is an actual job, and, oh, by the way, there was no choice involved, to be the greatgrandson of a New Englander who made his money by being in on the early stages of establishing one of the nation’s largest insurance companies. Investment Strategy number one: Start with a million dollars.
Penny and I, to use her phrasing, grew up with money, or we grew up with plenty of money, anyway. Our dad was an executive at IBM. We lived in our own swollen suburban house with our own painted-the-colors-we-wanted-them bedrooms, plus guestrooms plural, plus a library, plus a “bonus room,” which served, and continues to serve, as a repository for desktop computers and exercise equipment. We took tennis lessons, golf lessons, swimming lessons, piano lessons, dance lessons, and, in Penny’s case, horseback riding lessons, hence her excellent posture. We went on beach vacations and Disney vacations and once in high school to Europe. When I turned sixteen, a third car, a Pontiac Sunbird, materialized in the driveway, and when we were both of age to apply to college, we were told we could go anywhere we wanted—Cornell for me; Duke for her—and we were off and running. And now, of course, our parents shell out twentythousand dollars to rent a beach house for a week and we’re all invited.
It was a childhood that I consciously chose not to try to recreate for my own children—give me the joyous, complicated chaos of a city, the diversity of a city, over the eerie, homogeneous,
tidiness of a suburb any day—but it was not a childhood in which we lacked for money.
So, what does “you could tell she grew up with money” even look like, Penny? A sense of ease moving amongst luxury goods? Entitlement embodied? You? Me?
I think you think it has to do with class. The woman struck you as classy.
It would be a stretch to say that Penny and I were close as kids—I read books, Penny rode horses; I was lonely, Penny was cool—contrary to the words penned on a folksy watercolor that still hangs on the wall of my pear-green childhood bedroom, a gift from my mom—Chance made us sisters. Hearts made us friends.— but we had our moments. Christmas mornings we’d wake each other up, vibrating with excitement, then hurry downstairs holding hands. For several summers we devoted hours to clearing vines and leaves in what we called “the woods,” really just a thin tract of trees creating a narrow buffer between our house and the neighbor’s, building what we called “forts,” patches of earth that were indistinguishable from their surroundings except in our imaginations. My fort was on the right of what we identified as the road; hers was on the left. We kept our matching pruning shears, tan and orange models with wrist straps, on a hook in the garage.
This summer, on the last day at the beach, Penny and I took a walk together. First we ran an errand for our mom. She asked us to pick up T-shirts for her two sisters, so we headed to the fourlane, divided Coastal Highway. A few blocks south was Sunsations, a stucco emporium of all things beach. Boogie boards, bikinis, hermit crabs. When the doors slid open and the AC puffed out, it smelled like I remembered T-shirt shops at the beach smelling, like coconut oil and vinyl transfers steamed onto cotton.
I picked out two innocuous Ts. Beach scenes with seashells, buckets, and umbrellas; cursive lettering in puff-paint. One was coral, one turquoise; both were extra-large.
Penny held up the coral shirt. She looked like a kid with a posterboard delivering a science report.
“Really?” she said, peering over the T. “They’re gigantic.”
It’s the size Mom told us to get, the size I’d buy myself.
Back outside, while waiting for the light to change so we could cross the highway, Penny surprised me by touching my wrist. I looked down at long fingers like mine. I looked up at Penny.
I know this makes me sound jealous, all of it. I know the value our culture places on wealth, on thinness, especially in women. But Penny is gaunt. I can make out too much of her skeleton. Her clavicle, her eye sockets. Her teeth appear too large. Her hair, despite expensive copper highlights, is lank. But in that moment her eyes, which are an astonishing gray, were glistening, childlike.
“Laura,” she said. “Should we be completely decadent and treat ourselves to ice cream?”
She pointed at the frozen custard stand across the Coastal Highway.
“Sure,” I said. “My treat.”
At the window we were served by a teen girl, the same teen girl who’s always at ice cream windows at the beach. Eyeliner, hairspray, Eastern European accent. I ordered my go-to, a Butterfinger concrete, and Penny got a child-sized cone, chocolate and vanilla swirl. She took two quick licks and exclaimed, “Oh my god. It’s so good.” Then we started back towards the house.
We were on North Carolina Ave., walking slowly, me devouring my concrete, Penny barely touching her cone. Probably to atone, Penny started telling me about an ab challenge she and two friends were doing together next month. Riveting stuff. Then we were passing one of the old beach cottages, a single-story place with a screened-in front porch. Almost all of the old homes have been torn down and replaced with multi-tiered structures—the land must be worth a fortune—but this place was sweet and lived-in
and cheery. Yellow with blue trim, the front yard planted with fake sunflowers, beside the door a flag with a jaunty parrot tooting, It’s 5 O’clock Somewhere! I was about to comment on the cottage, to say I liked it, when Penny noticed her husband and daughter making the turn from the beach road onto North Carolina Ave., a block from us.
Eden, in all new clothes and jewelry—she’d been modeling her surf shop purchases for Granny—started waving and jogging. “Mom, mom, mom,” I heard, shrill, like a seagull. Penny’s husband, a compact man who’s proud of his muscles, had on aviator glasses and a Red Sox cap.
With a flick of her wrist, Penny tossed what was left of her cone onto the lawn of the cottage, amongst its sunflowers. A real class act. Then she speed-walked away from me and towards her family.
I watched Penny’s narrow back, the swish of her linen skirt. There went my sister. The human I’m most genetically similar to on the planet. Shoulder blades, elbows, ankles.