Part 2: I Let Them Have Me When and How They Wanted

Like everything in the realm of the rich, it was simply an exchange.

Photo by Alyssa Polizzi

This is part 2 of a 3-part series. If you haven’t, read part 1 of States of Exploitation here!

When I wasn’t tagging along with the RISD kids or peddling cheese, I went to Newport to see my friend Riley from college.

In her nautical paradise of a hometown, heirs to packaged goods fortunes rolled up to Michelin-star dinner reservations in cars that cost five times what my sister made in a year.

Newport, Rhode Island was so different from where I grew up that I couldn’t have imagined its existence until I arrived, and when I did, I was surprised to discover that people assumed I was rich by association, because why would someone with a bank account in the negative be allowed to share a bottle of pinot grigio with someone whose private school cost fifty thousand dollars a year?

My poverty was as foreign to them as their wealth was to me.

I didn’t understand that being white and young and conventionally attractive were their own privileges, ones that made it easy to pretend I was one of them.

But unlike the exploitation I felt at the hands of The Photographer, the self-exploitation required to posit myself as a rich girl seemed, at first, to benefit me.

On nights out in Newport, I borrowed Riley’s tight skirts, sprayed on her Nordstrom perfume, coated on layers of mascara. I leaned in close to the Sperry-clad boys until I could taste the rum on their tongues, nodding while they droned on about their internships at the family construction business—the boredom of which I escaped by holding their gaze until it became an unbroken spell, the eye contact sustained long enough to incite a sense of possibility between us even though I found them insufferable.

This was how I got them to buy me another dark n’ stormy I couldn’t afford, the clear plastic cups seeming to empty themselves while the night pressed forward at the bar overlooking the harbor, beneath a sky that in fact was dark and stormy, where the wind drew hurried ripples into the water below, so that if you scanned the horizon from the proper angle, it felt as if some great yacht were carrying you out to sea.

The world changed in the company of kids my age who knew nothing but their own privilege; their lives were defined not by what they didn’t have, as mine was, but by what else they could have.

With them, I tried my first oyster and wondered how that new, cold slip in my throat could be so familiar in theirs.

I used up the remaining money in my bank account by splitting a brunch where I said nothing, but listened to seven girls gossip about people I didn’t know, and never would.

At first, this game allowed me to try out the ease and superiority that the rich were born with.

Not long after the jest began, I saw that to the boys, I became just another conquerable indulgence. To the women, I existed either as competition or a pawn for going home with the guy they pined for. How could I come out on top, when I knew nothing about getting what I wanted?

Sun-drenched days by the shore turned into drunken nights stumbling on cobblestone slick with sea spray, which folded into aching mornings honing my awareness as my surroundings took shape. The vast, foreign bedroom at someone’s parent’s house, eastern light spilling through elegant drapery, the rich, shirtless boy next to me in bed.

The Newport kids allowed me to belong to them, if only because of our shared youth and stupidity; or rather, to be more honest, because of my willingness to let them have me when and how they wanted.

Like everything in the realm of the rich, it was simply an exchange.

Once, before working a shift at Whole Foods, I awoke in the Newport marina on a sailboat before dawn. Through the porthole below deck, the faint golden glow of sunrise teased on the horizon. Riley, in the bedroom with the sailor. Me, alone on a couch of foam, all of us one rope snip away from drifting off into the great blue.

I closed my eyes, opened them again, and Riley appeared, her pretty moon face hovering over me. “Let’s go. We have to get back before my parents wake up.”

Back at Riley’s house, I showered and pulled on the green dress. I couldn’t tie the low-cut corset without displaying my smashed-together boobs, because that was the intention of the outfit. To be costumed when others weren’t bore a certain breed of humiliation, but the revealing nature of that dress felt especially inappropriate on a sunny Saturday morning in Rhode Island’s richest community.

From a second story window, I scanned Riley’s front yard. In the driveway, I saw the 1997 Toyota Camry, a gift from our grandma that my sister let me borrow for the night. I saw the Airstream trailer Riley’s family took on camping trips across the country. I didn’t see, to my relief, any sign of Riley’s parents.

Her father, a renowned photographer, and her mother, a designer who managed their gallery. She’d decorated their house so beautifully that it would soon be featured in a multi-page spread in Rhode Island Monthly.

My plan? To clutch last night’s clothes to my chest and bolt to the Camry before anyone could see me. I laced up my white high-top sneakers, opened the door, and set off.

Halfway across the yard, I heard, “Morning!”

In horror, I slowed to a walk, then turned toward the voice. Her parents had been just behind the Airstream, sipping their coffees and planning a day of casual yard work.

“Morning, thank you so much, bye!” I reached the car and closed myself inside, aware of the giggles that trailed behind me.

Cheeks hot, shame pulsed through me. I knew they hadn’t been laughing at me, because they were generous people. They knew I needed to wear the uniform for work. The real reason for their laughter was worse. My clothes demarcated the gulf between me and them, and no one knew how to swim the distance.

That day at work, a woman snatched a tiny paper cup of camembert and asked, “Did you escape from Disneyland?” before hee-hawing herself into the next aisle.

This was another thing I learned about rich people: They found themselves very funny.

The cheese rinds were rough and chalky, intended to be eaten with a baguette and fig jam and white wine. But I never ate before my shifts because I didn’t have any money for breakfast, so instead, I gulped down samples of the cold, strong cheese when no customers or staff were looking.

Sometimes, if a customer rounded the corner and noticed me with my mouth full, I swallowed the sample-sized chunks whole and switched to sales mode. “Would you like to try a sample of our signature French cheeses?”

“No, thanks,” they’d say, and I’d smile and nod, smile and nod, eyes watering from the sharp taste of penicillium mold that gave the blue cheese its signature hue.

A thirty-something man walked into the aisle, glanced at me, glanced longer at my chest, then turned to his friend and said, “Get me out of here before I fall in love.”

I rolled my eyes, feeling that in some ways, to be a young woman is to be more vulnerable than a newborn baby, because there is no instinct by adults to keep you safe and well. Instead, your body is the only cure for men’s most insatiable hunger, which some stop at nothing to quell.

I thought about The Photographer and the imbalance of power between us. I’d known he was rich; he’d known I was poor. He was older, more versed in the ways of navigating the patriarchy to his favor, adept at convincing women they did not need to be paid for their work or their time, because together, we were part of something extraordinary: his art.

I tried to see myself the way he saw me, find confidence in it. But through the male gaze I was only less human.

It took me twelve more summers and many more exploitive encounters with men to understand how my discomfort in that moment with The Photographer served him. That feeling of being overexposed—with no money for a cab, no real home to go to, no confidence to say the word no?

That was not the byproduct of our encounter, but to him, the point.