WASP-iness

I am deep into Cheerful Money, the surprisingly touching and emotionally open and gorgeously written memoir by Tad Friend, about himself, his family, and the decline of the WASP in America.

I read with interest because all my life I have been mistaken for a WASP--in good situations and bad. Those assumptions have brought me both acceptance and hatred, with me always lagging a few steps behind what people were thinking about me.

No, no, I wanted to tell them. That is not me. Those people look like me. But I am not that. I promise you.

It is true, I am white, anglo-saxon and protestant. And I grew up at least partially in New England, in a white-clapboard house with green shutters that was kept at a frigid temperature in the winter. I summered at the Wadawanuck Club in Stonington, learnws to sail and swim there, wore Izod shirts every day, and watched a lot of adults drink a lot of gin and tonics. But they weren't my parents.

And I did not come from money. Or attend an elite prep school in New England. Or have a hot French au pair in the summer. Or have a family compound on Watch Hill. Or grow up with a sense of entitlement.

I met people like that at the Wad club. But I was just a townie, with parents who perhaps had aspirations. I don't know.

My father was in the Navy, from California, raised a Catholic, with a spirit far too ebullient to ever be classified as WASP. My mother fit the mold more, I suppose, with her Smith and Yale pedigrees, and her deep emotional reserve, but still, she was the daughter of a Pennsylvania farm boy and a history teacher.

Still, as I headed off to college people often mistook me for the real thing. A real, died-in-the-wool, flesh and blood WASP. It was more the people from outside New England who made the error. Some of them hated me. And would scream at me about my sense of entitlement--though it was I who had gone to a crazy public school, while they attended a private school in the suburbs of Tulsa, or wherever. Other people assumed I was the real thing--that I did not have to work in the summer--or that my parents gave me whatever I wanted and I had a trust fund. And they liked me more because of it. I have a friend here who asks me to help her with a distant, emotionally dysfunctional WASP character in her novel. It was said with love.

So it is strange to read this book and find out, perhaps, what it is people were assigning to me, when they saw my pleasant-but not exotic-Anglo features, found out I could sail, or play tennis, was well-read and polite, and had lived--for a time--in New England. It is like getting the back story to a tale I never understood but was always assumed to be part of because of my looks. And this case of mistaken identity--layered on top of various chameleon personas pulled out for survival in new towns and new schools because I was a Navy Brat--just added to my eternal sense that the real me could not be seen.

And I wonder, deep down inside, if one of the reasons I like California is that all of that is left behind. I do not need to confirm or deny what a WASP is, and whether I am one. Because out here in Los Angeles it just doesn't matter.

And I like that.