The False Hope of Someday

America's promise isn't for me. I'm OK with that.

I grew up on a long road that wound up and over foothills, through dense forests that seemed to have no end.

A few miles down that road lived a middle-aged woman named Nicola.

She was Long Island Italian: gaudy, loud, and unapologetic about both.

Mostly, I knew Nicola because she owned the salon in town where my hairdresser rented a chair.

Nicola wasn’t fond of children—I could tell by the way she ignored me—but I loved listening to her raspy voice vault secrets about people in town.

“He’s been cheating on her from the beginning and everybody knew but her,”Nicola shouted. “She found out and sold his John Deere while he was at work, took the money, and ran. HA!”

Her gold bracelets jangled while she dyed clients’ short, gray hair a flaming auburn, then set it into curlers the way she had for decades.

For a country girl like me with shoddy dial-up internet, it was very salacious.

*

Like any true Long Island Italian, when Nicola wasn’t dishing gossip out, she was its subject.

“Saw Nicola down at the Hess again,” my father would say, kicking his oil-stained boots onto the wooden kitchen floor after a day at the auto shop. “I had to wait while she scratched off ten some-odd tickets, and I was just tryin’ to pay for my gas. That lady’s got a problem.”

For the people who lived on our road, the gas station where Nicola bought her lottery tickets was the last one for miles, making it a popular spot to fuel up and grab a snack after a long day of work or school.

More than once I wound up in line behind Nicola, Mom trading glances with the other people waiting while she vigorously scratched at her tickets, a tarnished quarter between two fingers, completely unaware of, and perhaps unbothered by, the local reputation she was building.

Everyone thought the same thing: How stupid Nicola was, wasting her money like that. It’s not like she would ever win.

I thought about Nicola recently in a gas station after dark, sugary drinks lined up in neon colors, lottery tickets glittering behind scratched plastic, and wondered if I was more like her than I thought.

Sure, she was also a woman, had Italian ancestors, and had lived on the same road.

But the semblance between us bore much higher stakes.

It had to do with the way we both wanted to try on a different life.

If you strip away the stigmas around gambling, scratch-off tickets, and the people who buy them, it feels true that the act of buying a lottery ticket is akin to saying, I want something better than this.

Don’t we all have our own version of this same dream?

*

For me, the idea that things would one day get better kept me going when I lived in deep poverty, uncertain where my dinner would come from or where I’d be sleeping next week.

My greatest wish of all was for a house.

Someday, I thought, I’ll own a house of my own.

This is because the house I’d had had been taken.

Seven years ago in Denver I acted out this dream nearly every day.

I rented a room in an older, suburban neighborhood that was slowly being gentrified with large, modern, million-dollar homes.

One of Denver’s wealthiest neighborhoods, Belcaro, was under a mile away.

I ran and walked through Belcaro constantly because it was a practice in dreaming up a better future for myself.

In Belcaro, there were considerably more trees than on our street, which offered the coolness of shade and the luxury of privacy.

It didn’t have that exposed feeling I get in so many other areas of Denver; instead, the lush foliage felt almost tropical. Rather than cracked city sidewalks, there was a fresh coat of pavement, as black and shiny as spilled paint. Belcaro’s smooth road had a perfect edge on either side where it kissed each yard full of grass, bright green even in the high desert summer when the rest of our lawns were brittle and brown.

There was a blue house with pine trees and four dormer windows and a cozy front porch.

Another, English cottage style, with sconces that gave the appearance of candles flickering all day and night.

Then the 33,000 square foot mansion with its own tennis pavilion, where my sister sometimes had an hourly gig painstakingly finishing the interior’s fancy metal features.

I wanted them all, and in my wanting, I was doing to myself what Nicola had done: I was putting all my faith in a future dream that, realistically, might never exist.

*

I recently listened to Edgar Gomez’s memoir, Alligator Tears, about his upbringing in poverty in Florida. Near the end of the book, Gomez writes how his mother instilled in him the promise of the future, a “someday” to look forward to.

Gomez writes:

“How flawed was the line of thinking that hard work and humility would save me. Those things hadn’t saved her, and no amount of pretending things might be different one day would change that. Suddenly, I saw the archetype of the humble poor person for what it was: a scam that justifies scarcity, that tells poor folks our suffering is for our benefit, that it will build so-called strength, a dangling carrot to keep us quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach.”

It’s the truest thing I’ve heard all year.

Because hard work does not equal wealth in America, despite the promise we are told.

*

According to a friend who lives on my old country road, Nicola is now toothless.

She is still buying her scratchy tickets at the gas station, still holding onto that dream of a distant horizon.

I don’t blame Nicola for wanting something better, for spending so much time and money on her shiny little tickets.

What she taught me, though, is that the American dream of a better life isn’t for everyone. It isn’t for my family, and it isn’t for me. It’s for those who already had far more wealth and power than we ever will.

I try not to spend too much time dreaming of someday.

I try to tell myself that I never needed to own a house—what I needed was a home, something I already have.

That home is where the people you love are, and they are always in my heart, no matter where I am.

I’m not forgetting about my future life.

I’ll still save money as much as I can.

I’ll still plan for a trip years in advance.

I might even buy a lottery ticket, just for fun.

But I’ll do so knowing that my life and happiness are here and now, not that far-off place of someday.