The outsider enters society by the same path, but it is steeper and longer because there is an outer gate of reputation called ‘They are not people of any position’ which is difficult to unlatch.
—Emily Post, “The Entrance of an Outsider,” Etiquette, 1922
When I was five years old, my mom got a button that said “Welfare Bum.” I don’t think she ever actually wore it when she had to go to the welfare office and, as she put it, “beg.” I knew the button was supposed to be a joke, but I did not get it.
My favorite joke was: What’s green and sucks blood? A vampickle.
*
The procedure called zigzag eating is this: With knife in right hand and fork in left, the diner cuts a piece of meat. Then instead of lifting the piece to the mouth with fork in left hand—or at least cutting several pieces—the knife is at once laid down, the fork transferred to right hand, turned over, prongs up, and the piece of meat speared and conveyed to mouth… don’t let us even picture it.
—Emily Post, “Table Tricks that Must Be Corrected,” Etiquette, 1945
It was a rare treat to be invited to New York to dine with Uncle Herman. He was the absentee father of my cousins Melissa and Nikki, but I wished he were my absentee father instead. Dinner was delicious, and I was gobbling away like a starving raccoon—pausing only to spell the word “antidisestablishmentarianism,” this being my hit number at age eight— when I became aware that Uncle Herman was watching me with concern.
“Sarita,” he said. “Don’t you know how to use silverware?”
I looked down at my fat little fists, clenched around the cutlery, and the mounds I was building on my plate. It wasn’t that Mom didn’t take us out to eat—I had been calculating fifteen percent tips for her since first grade—but her idea of restaurant etiquette was to invite the waiters to join her bipolar support group. She did teach me and my brother to put the napkins in our laps. After that, all she said was “Gentiles have better table manners.”
Uncle Herman wrapped his arms around me in a totally appropriate and yet also romantic manner and, as I breathed his cologne, showed me how to take up the silver so my index fingers stretched along the edge. Together we steadied a piece of chicken, cut, passed the fork to the right hand, and lifted it to my lips.
I liked the knife-fork switcheroo. It felt like learning the rules to a new game. It was not until reading Emily Post that I realized it was considered gauche. Zigzagging is an American habit, and when it came to table manners, Post had an aspirational relationship with the Continent similar to my mother’s with Gentiles.
*
If any women are to be present and the interment is to be in the ground, someone should order the grave lined with boughs and green branches—to lessen the impression of bare earth.
—Emily Post, “The Service,” Etiquette, 1922
Grandma said Uncle David had an accidental overdose. Mom said it was suicide and that Grandma was in denial. Everybody went to Cleveland for the funeral.
David had been autistic, but back then we called it “slow.” I wasn’t that sad when he died. The sad part had been when he stopped being my friend. Until I hit middle school, we had spent hours listening to records together in the dark and obsessively photographing Grandma’s dog, Triscuit. The older I got, the rarer this became, until one day he stopped opening his bedroom door. It was like aging out of Narnia.
We threw roses on the coffin, and then we went back to Aunt Selma’s, where the adults sat around exchanging cutting remarks while my brother and I watched TV. Mom kept trying to get Grandma to admit David killed himself.
We must have made too much noise or forgotten to clean up, because when we got back home, Mom said that Ellen said that Cousin Marian, who had let us crash on her sofa bed, said we lived like pigs.
I knew it was true. Even my mother, normally immune to such sensations, seemed to feel the shame.
*
A custom in many fashionable houses is to allow children as soon as they are old enough, to come into the drawing-room or library at tea-time, as nothing gives them a better opportunity to learn how to behave in company.
—Emily Post, “Children at Afternoon Tea,” Etiquette, 1922
I met my first boyfriend on Martha’s Vineyard while nannying for an awful family I had met at Brown. Nat lived there year-round caring for his elderly grandfather.
We would dress up every afternoon for cocktails and sit together in the backyard, drinking gin-and-tonics and watching the birds. The old man would take handfuls of salted cashews, shake them like dice, and pop them in his mouth. Although his memory had receded, he was still the height of courtesy.
Nat said, “Grandpa always wants everyone to feel graceful.”
One evening, a little girl came padding across the lawn. She was about six and completely naked.
“Hi!” she said.
Her skin glowed white against the green grass, and her hair was the color of cornsilk. It was like seeing a unicorn. I was terrified of scaring her away.
She told us she was staying in the cottage next door. We told her about the hummingbirds and the baby deer. She asked if we had any cookies.
After a while, her father appeared, a jovial man with that look of nonchalant wealth common to those who use “summer” as a verb. He did not seem surprised to see her. We all stood in the kitchen, eating cookies, until she said, “I think I’ll go home now and get dressed.”
Her father said he knew she was getting a little old for that kind of thing. He would have a talk with her before they left the island.
*
“You are liaison officer, I suppose, with the Americans? But may I be permitted to ask why you wear their uniform?”
The other smiled: “I am an American!”
“You an American? Impossible! Why, you speak French like a Parisian, you have the manner of a great gentleman!”
—Emily Post, “Traveling Abroad,” Etiquette, 1922
There was meat inside, the professor warned in his mellifluous French. He apologized in advance in case we were vegetarians and stood there holding a silver tray. None of the grad students made a move.
The professor wore well-tailored jackets in jewel tones. In my sex fantasies, he was Jean-Hugues Anglade and I was either La Femme Nikita or Betty Blue, depending on my mood. I was the only undergraduate in his post-colonialism seminar and had to force myself to speak in class. Once I even mustered the courage to go to office hours. He told me my French wasn’t that good, but at least I said perceptive things, unlike his grad students. I had not noticed this, since I rarely understood what the grad students were saying.
Now the class was over, and I had actually been invited to his home! But he was still standing there, holding out his silver tray, which held little triangles of pastry.
What was wrong with these grad students? It is always awkward to take the first or last helping of food, but I felt (as it happens, incorrectly) that it was more awkward to leave our host hanging. And so, adopting a tone of joie de vivre mixed with a soupçon of savoir faire, I snatched up one of the pastries, declaring that I ate everything. Except what I said was “Je mange n’importe quoi,” which I learned, when I stopped crying long enough to look it up in Petit Larousse, was like saying I would eat the contents of a garbage can.
The professor recoiled, exclaiming, “Mais, c’est pas n’importe quoi,” which was like saying that I would never again be invited to his home. The grad students regarded me with expressions ranging from horror to amusement. One by one, they reached out and took a pastry.
*
All colloquial expressions are little foxes that spoil the grapes of perfect diction, but they are very little foxes; it is the false elegance of stupid pretentiousness that is an annihilating blight which destroys root and vine.
—Emily Post, “Phrases Avoided in Good Society,” Etiquette, 1922
After college, I got a job temping at a psychiatric hospital in Providence. A childhood of taking messages for Mom’s bipolar support group had prepared me well for this work. One day, my supervisor Sherri warned me to expect a man with Tourette’s Syndrome.
She said, “You’re supposed to pretend not to hear the bad things he says.”
This was exactly what I had done the day before, when Sherri offhandedly called me “asexual.” She knew I lived with my boyfriend, so I think she meant this as a commentary on my physical appearance. My hair was still growing out from when I had shaved it off after getting rejected by an improv troupe. I had hoped that shaving my head would make me stop caring what other people thought of me, but it didn’t.
I was excited to meet the man with Tourette’s. What would he be like? I imagined my favorite Muppet, Animal, playing the drums in a red rage.
“That’s him,” Sherri whispered.
We watched him come across the lobby: a middle-aged white man in a polo shirt, dark eyebrows furrowed. The Muppet he most closely resembled was Bert. He paused before my desk and groaned.
I said, “Good morning.”
He groaned again. When he finally managed to say hello, his speaking voice was unexpectedly gentle, making it easy to distinguish from the obscenities that followed.
It was fun escorting him around the hospital. I found his company restful, as though he exuded a force field that neutralized shame. I was fascinated to discover that his insults were not random but targeted to his audience. “Ugly lesbian,” he snarled at me. He called Sherri “Fat cunt.”
*
If a servant blunders, it makes the situation much worse to take her to task, the cause being usually that she is nervous or ignorant… Beckon her to you and tell her as you might tell a child you were teaching: “Give Mrs. Smith a tablespoon, not a teaspoon.”
—Emily Post, “Blunders in Service,” Etiquette, 1922
I was no longer cooking for a living, but when a yoga student asked me to cater a private party in the Hamptons, I agreed. She was surprisingly kind and normal for someone whose husband was listed among the Forbes 400.
It was a buffet for thirty, served on long tables that faced their spectacular ocean view. Because I was so terrified of fucking up, I only made simple things I knew I could execute: chile con queso, ceviche, potato salad, Jersey tomatoes with watercress oil, spoonbread, dirty steak, biscuits with sugarcane ham. Although I disliked my conservative Texan father, I was still born down there, and I liked cooking that way. Sticking close to my roots felt like metaphysical protection.
Emily Post was a Southerner, too, for all her association with the Astors and the very first 400 list. She was also scandalously divorced; there were houses in Tuxedo Park that refused to receive her. Perhaps these minute divergences from the dead center of the New York elite gave her perspective on its means and ways.
Teaching yoga gave me some, too. I had a nebulous status in my students’ lives, somewhere between servant and friend. That was why, the third time my student implored me to join her at table, I complied. The meal was almost over; everyone was raving about the peach cobbler. I flipped my apron so the clean side faced out and pulled up a chair.
Her husband noticed my action before she did. For a split second, he looked confused, but then his gaze crystallized into an expression of contempt so powerful and pure that I have never felt its equal. Then again, I have never met another billionaire.
*
Do not expose your private affairs, feelings or innermost thoughts in public. You are knocking down the walls of your house when you do.
—Emily Post, “Walking on the Street,” Etiquette, 1922
My mother taught me to look both ways before I crossed the street, but I had come to Quebec to forget a bad breakup and my mind was frozen with grief.
Emily Post knew about heartache. At her society debut at Delmonico’s in 1889, she collected so many cotillion favors that four gentlemen were required to carry them back to her carriage. She married impeccably, a young man from old money, but all of her etiquette could not make him love her.
I stepped off the curb into the street, but an arm shot out of nowhere and yanked me back. A bus zoomed by, right where I had been.
A red-faced Canadian stared at me, gripping my sleeve and stuttering in French. He looked like he was about to cry. All I felt was embarrassment. I was actually angry at him for making a scene. I yanked my arm free and ran away.
That stranger saved my life. And I did not even say merci.
*
She is as sympathetic to children as to older people; she cuts out wonderful paper dolls and soldier hats, always leisurely and easily as though it cost neither time nor effort. She knows a hundred stories or games, every baby and every dog goes to her on sight, not because she has any especial talent, except that one she has cultivated, the talent of interest in everyone and everything except herself.
—Emily Post, “The Considerate Guest,” Etiquette, 1922
I pay a call on my most thoroughbred friend. A beautiful woman of a certain age, she always comes to mind when I buy cut flowers. She prepares an elegant dinner while I sprawl on her oriental rug, chugging white burgundy and petting her pony-sized dog. I tell her I am having trouble writing my essay on etiquette.
She says, “Etiquette! That’s the last thing I would think you’d write about.”
My hand freezes on the dog, but I do not cry, because that would be bad manners. Also because I want to stay in her mansion.
It is possible she means it as a compliment, that she finds etiquette too frivolous a topic for my vast literary gifts. Except I think she did read my essay about the dildo. So I imagine she means, “Etiquette? What would you know about it, you welfare bum? You pig. You gauche, asexual social climber with your zigzag manners and fool’s motley.”
I say, “Those who can’t, teach.”
She laughs, which makes me feel better. Controlling the laughter has made me feel better since the days of vampickles.
My friend lets a lot of people stay in her mansion. One of them, a willowy Belgian man in leather pants, glides in and begins elaborately making tea. My friend says the Belgian and I have something in common: we are both kidney donors.
“Who did you give yours to?” I ask.
“A stranger.”
I conceal my shock. I tell him I gave mine to my mother, ensuring that she would live to annoy me for many more years.
I want to talk about Emily Post, but it is difficult.
“She wrote the most famous American book about etiquette,” I say.
Its 640 pages read like something Edith Wharton would scrawl on the walls of a madhouse. It is alternately gorgeous and boring, rife with internal contradictions, and has put me in a fugue state in which I almost bought a $500 hat tree.
I still don’t know if etiquette is good or bad. I know it comes from the French word for “ticket” or “label.” I know that Emily Post labeled herself a champion of democratic civility, but I also know that when the first mixed-race woman made the social registry, Post wrote to the editors and got her cut. If etiquette is a ticket, Emily Post wants us to stick to our seats.
The Belgian says he wants to make a joke.
I am awed by his selflessness. I always assumed altruistic organ donors were religious lunatics, but everything about him is sympathetic, from the way he sips his tea to the way he delivers his line, so that we understand he is not telling the joke itself, which would be at our expense, but a joke about a joke, which cuts both ways.
“I want to joke,” the Belgian says, “that an American should write about etiquette!”
Sarah Deming’s novel Gravity, about a female boxing champion, will be published in 2019 by Knopf Books for Young Readers.
