This is the second of what will be a three-part series; here’s part one. It might seem strange if your family is free of financial comparisons and resentments (assuming such families exist), and I understand it might not be too relatable at the moment, but it provides context for part three.
If I had a nickel for every time one of my sisters said “Must be nice having a rich girlfriend” after they learned I was dating a physician, I could’ve paid off Crankenstein’s student loans 10 years ago. That refrain, annoying from the start, intensified in obnoxiousness as they rewrote history to attribute my past financial accomplishments to someone I’d only recently met.
The house I bought before knowing she existed and every investment I’d purchased years earlier to fund my future with Ex were magically the work of Crankenstein. Had I mentioned a sale on oatmeal then, one of my sisters would’ve replied “Must be nice to have a doctor girlfriend who can afford steel cut oats. We have to cut ours with dull, rusty scissors.” I’m sure that sounds hyperbolic, but on one memorable occasion Youngest Sister reflexively said she couldn’t afford to shop at Aldi after we mentioned our last trip there.
Once we were engaged, any resentments they harbored that still wore a stitch of clothing were finally naked as a jaybird. The grievances nurtured by Tom, as we’ll call Middle Sister, were particularly intense, which I wasn’t alone in noticing: our dad found it upsetting enough to privately confront her about it.* She didn’t begrudge me happiness — few people in the universe care more about me than Tom — but evidently she wanted me to be happy on a budget. Our parents hadn’t prepared her for a world so unjust that one of her siblings might have something she didn’t and it was a hard pill for her to swallow.
There were extenuating factors as well, like her girlfriend’s new job doing household work for a double-doctor family. It wasn’t an apples-to-apples comparison: Crankenstein was in a different field of medicine, had no intention of ever owning surgical centers (which is good news for patients since she isn’t a surgeon), and was still firmly entrenched in the earliest and most financially exploitative stage of her career. But Tom considered her part of the problem and eventually proposed a solution. One day, after ranting about her girlfriend’s bosses, she asked if I agreed no doctor should earn more than $200k per year.
My answer was the same as if I’d never met Crankenstein: “No.” That’s how I came to be known as — let’s cheerfully shout it in unison, like kids from a Barney episode — “a stupid autistic fuck who doesn’t understand anything.” She didn’t dive right into it but we reached the moment soon enough as her attempts to cajole me into consensus fell flat. First she proposed making medical school free, with the caveat that any beneficiaries of such largesse would have their compensation permanently capped at $200k per year. Did that change my opinion?
It didn’t, and already her responses were emotionally charged as she reconsidered her approach. Next she railed against a for-profit healthcare system that prevents indigent patients from being treated at world-class hospitals like Crankenstein’s. I clarified that Crankenstein’s hospital and most like it were non-profits and that she treated a high number of indigent patients, but agreed the healthcare system needed massive reform. That’s when she stopped beating around the bush, as I noted in a contemporaneous account of our exchange, and indignantly posed a question that still ranks among the most unusual I’ve ever been asked: “Do you really think [Crankenstein] deserves $200k or more per year?”
An honest answer of “Yes” or “You should be ashamed of yourself” would’ve sent her over the edge and I was already sufficiently uncomfortable with the conversation. Crankenstein was still in fellowship and her salary came nowhere near even $100k, nor was she likely to accept any of the lucrative job offers already landing in her inbox from all around the country, none of which we discussed with our families for the simple reason that it wasn’t any of their business. Meanwhile, the interest on her student loan debt compounded relentlessly despite our overpayments, filling us both with dread.
Rather than get into that or express disappointment that anyone who knew how hard Crankenstein worked, or who was aware of the obstacles she’d overcome, might begrudge her the long-delayed fruits of her labor, I joked “You’d be less worried about [Crankenstein’s] future compensation if you were familiar with academic medicine.” That wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Next she asked if I had a problem with the country’s highest earners making obscene salaries “when the rest of us need a universal income program to survive.”
I figured my response — that my problems were with CEOs collecting eight-figure annual bonuses while underpaying their workers and sending jobs overseas, and with the rapacious greed of health insurance companies and hospital administrators, not neurosurgeons making $600k per year after four years of undergrad, four years of medical school, and five to seven years of residency (plus optional fellowships), some of them carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt — was uncontroversial, but Tom’s anger was still palpable, her eyes teary.
That’s when she pronounced me a stupid autistic fuck who doesn’t understand anything. She may have also called me “a person of low character” during the same argument, but she threw so many fits about money during that period that eventually it all blurred together. What I know for certain she said next was “You’ve changed since you met [Crankenstein].”
“I think you’ve changed since I met [Crankenstein],” I countered, and she fled to the bathroom in tears. Reading the record of that conversation years later, the first thing I noticed was the date: her outrage spilled forth a few weeks after attending a bridal shower one of Crankenstein’s mentors threw for us at her opulent home. Might a disapproving Tom have assumed that was the life that awaited me?** It could’ve been a factor, but her emotional volatility when discussing other people’s money (real or imagined) has only increased over the years, partly thanks to inflammatory social media rhetoric she’s absorbed like a sponge.
We grew up with a few relatives who comported themselves similarly and our father always implored us not to mimic their behavior. He knew firsthand how corrosive it was because his sister wasted much more time and energy counting other people’s money than she ever spent minding her own. Tom and I used to joke that she could find herself on skid row with her siblings following a global economic collapse and the first thing she’d do is complain “The refrigerator boxes they’re living in are nicer than mine!”
For now she sees no comparison between our aunt’s suggestions — made in the years before our grandmother died destitute — that her siblings sign their inheritances over to her (since they have spouses and she doesn’t) and Tom’s assertion last year, following a death in her girlfriend’s family, that the girlfriend should receive her siblings’ inheritances because they outearn her. It wasn’t the first time I was taken aback by her sense of entitlement and probably won’t be the last, but that she said it without an ounce of shame made me fear she was morally lost.^ As a person of ‘low character’ myself, I accept that my judgment might be impaired, so I hold onto hope that I’m wrong.
* I’ll explain ‘Tom’ eventually. The gist of it is that she’s always preferred a masculine nickname, similar to Lizabeth Scott and ‘Scottie.’
** In retrospect, that was a particularly fraught time in my relationship with Tom. She’s an outspoken critic of marriage and looked down on me for agreeing to a church wedding and other things Crankenstein wanted. But more than that I suspect she was intimidated by whatever world she thought I was about to enter without her, and I was too busy trying to stay out of the hospital and handle last-minute wedding details to pick up on it and say whatever it was she needed to hear.
^ One of the most notorious displays of that entitlement happened at our parents’ house in front of the rest of our siblings and my former partner. When our dad mentioned that Papa used to stash cash in LP covers (it’s a long and sordid story), Tom — who knew I’d inherited his vinyl collection and that it was stored in our parents’ basement — ran downstairs hoping to claim anything left behind. When our father reminded her that those were my records, not hers, and that any cash in them belonged to me, she said “I need a new car” and continued her frenzied work. She found what she deserved, which was nothing. Had she known Papa better she would’ve realized he spent that cash on tobacco, Chinese takeout and mistresses during the Carter administration.