The Country Club Lunch

Learning how the other half lives: Part 2 of Poverty and Privilege

Editor’s note: Welcome! This is the story of Richard, a man with generational wealth, and Lauren, a single mom struggling to keep her household afloat. The twist is they both have Ivy League educations but life has turned out very different for each of them. The story is true but names and certain identifying details have been changed.

Look for it every Saturday here on Untrickled.

If you’re new to Poverty and Privilege, you’ll want to start with Part I here.

In previous generations, it wasn’t unusual for families of different incomes to live in the same neighborhood, but today, the rich and the poor don’t often see each other. They live in different zip codes and shop in different stores. Their children go to different schools.

People tend to signal their socioeconomic class by how they dress, speak and present themselves, as well as how they spend their free time. Even if they don’t mean to, they may make unconscious judgments about others based on these signals. As a result, many people today have little idea how the other half lives.

Richard initially set out to provide Lauren’s son, who had earned a full scholarship to a fancy prep school, with the appropriate wardrobe to help him signal that he belonged there.

What began as a modest charitable gesture (a few worn neckties and belts) evolved into a collaboration that surprised them both.

That changed this story from that of a wealthy man offering a handout to a struggling family into something entirely different.

The first meeting

Richard already had several business meetings scheduled in a city about halfway between himself and Lauren, so he suggested that she and her son, Peter, meet him for lunch. After arranging childcare for her two youngest, she and Peter made the two-hour drive to meet Richard at a particularly upscale country club, the sort of place where the money spent is old, not new.

Neither of them was quite sure what to expect before the lunch, but Richard had already begun working with Lauren and knew they made a good business team.

“I knew I wanted Lauren to work for me pretty quickly after speaking with her on the phone the first time,” Richard said, describing himself as “a pretty fast decision-maker” and Lauren as having “obvious energy and intelligence.”

“I knew she’d do good work for my consulting business.”

Richard had not previously known people living in poverty, so he is sensitive about avoiding offensive assumptions. For example, when he talks about how articulate Lauren is, he is quick to clarify he understands that speaking well isn’t a trait exclusively from his own world.

“I know that can be seen as a condescending comment about less privileged people — to say that they are well-spoken, implying that they should not be — but the combination of Lauren’s intelligence, positive attitude, interpersonal skills and overall manner have already benefited our business. Just this week, one of our biggest clients told me just how much they enjoyed working with her!”

Richard said he doesn’t remember precisely when he learned Lauren also had an Ivy League degree.

“At one point, I looked her up on LinkedIn, which mentioned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees. But I have been around higher education for a long time. A number of family members teach and work as administrators at several colleges and universities. So I know that the most talented people are often not the ones from the shiniest schools. In fact, my wife — another Ivy graduate — and I often talk about how most of the great scholars of her generation did not attend Ivy League schools, at least not for their undergraduate degree.”

Richard and Lauren had already worked together for several weeks before the club luncheon.

“I had a few goals for the lunch,” Richard said.

“First, I wanted to address any understandable concerns from her that I was not who I said I was, or not sincere about wanting her to work with me. The meeting put a human face to the abstract concepts of poverty, privilege, and socioeconomic mobility. While I would like to think that Lauren’s Ivy League pedigree did not really impact my decision to hire her, I do recognize the marketing value to our affluent and well-educated clientele.

“I also wanted to expose her son to a privileged club. I already knew that Peter had responded favorably to the wardrobe contributions, so this actually gave him an opportunity to wear some of the newly acquired garb.”

‘Another world’

Children often set their life goals according to the lives of the adults around them. A young person generally benefits by being exposed to a variety of careers, cultures, and life circumstances.

“Peter had a wonderful time, both at the club and at the theater, which was his first time seeing a professional production,” Lauren said.

“Before we met with Richard, Peter had mentioned envisioning himself somewhere like the University of Miami for college one day — I don’t know where this came from, but he had mentioned it several times — and becoming a police officer.

“But after our meeting with Richard, Peter is suddenly all about the Ivy League and now says he thinks he wants to become a lawyer. On the one hand, these are probably signs of his youth and immaturity but I think also from him being exposed to another world he didn’t fully realize existed. Peter was enamored with all of the parts of our visit, including Richard himself.”

The closest most people will get to the rarified atmosphere of the historic club where Richard belongs is when watching a period movie set in the Gilded Age — a heady experience for an eighth grade boy accustomed to sometimes accompanying his mother on DoorDash deliveries.

Lauren said she believes Peter will adapt well to the new world of the private prep school.

“Peter’s eighth grade class is quite small — only 14 kids — and he is one of six boys headed to this prep school. They’ll all take the bus together in the morning, so he will have some companions right off the bat. He’s also 6 feet tall so I think not terribly likely to be bullied by upperclassmen, and as far as our relative poverty, I suspect he'll blend in well, thanks in large part to Richard’s wardrobe assistance. So, all in all, he’s excited about school.”

When we speak of socioeconomic classes, there are distinct differences between a family that has experienced generational poverty and a family like Lauren’s, which has had a mix of experiences.

Peter is growing up in an economically precarious situation, but his mother earned an Ivy League degree and still feels comfortable in that world. Both Richard and Lauren want to give Peter the opportunity to join it.

Richard said he believes Peter’s glimpse into another world will help him to carry himself around the boys he’ll soon need to fit in with. Wearing the right clothing is only one part of that. Exposure to the culture of privilege is another.

Richard decided that in addition to lunch at an exclusive club, Peter should experience professional theater.

“I am a big theater fan, so when Lauren and I discussed the fact that Peter had read and enjoyed Romeo and Juliet in his eighth grade English class, I wanted to enable them to see the professional Shakespeare production playing in the city that day.”

Peter not only loved it, Lauren said, but recognized some of the class distinctions depicted in the play.

The next generation

Because of his family money, Richard never had to worry whether his work was particularly profitable.

“I know that is not the case for 99 percent of Americans,” Richard said. He spent part of his career in academia, in a position with high status but modest pay that is increasingly practical only for people who have family money to fall back on.

Thanks to the work Lauren is doing for Richard’s business, he believes she will make it into the middle class, and that her children will do even better.

“I believe the sky’s the limit for her kids. While they will not have the luxury of family wealth to enable them to pursue lower paid employment, as I have, and still live like the rich, I see many professions, including law, medicine, finance, and many businesses where each of her children, given their private school and higher education possibilities, could enter the workforce well above $100,000 annually in current dollars.”

Richard believes it’s likely all three children will have access to financial aid through high school, college and graduate school. Given their talents and the ambitions nurtured by their mother, aunt and grandmother, he thinks they will be admitted to the private schools and colleges that are on the lookout for diamonds in the rough.

“Like a professional athlete who is able to buy his or her mother a new house, I can certainly see Lauren’s extended family becoming quite wealthy in succeeding generations, starting with her children. Although it might seem trite to reference the promise of upward mobility and the American dream, I have, fortunately, seen it happen so many times in my lifetime to young people with talent, drive, and supportive families,” Richard said.

“Admittedly, I am an optimist, but I think that there are plenty of people in my financial situation who would welcome the opportunity to engage with and support a family the way I have been able to help Lauren.”

Next week: How It Happened: One Family’s Fall From the Middle Class

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. I also have a new Substack aimed at authors who want to self-publish books, called The Indie Author. My most recent book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules. If you prefer to give a one-time tip, I accept Ko-fi.

All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park

For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.

Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.

When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.

Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.

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