Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [101]
The Marshall girls are fifteen months apart in age. Like their parents, both are tall and thin. Fern is an avid basketball player. Stacey prefers gymnastics. The field-worker described Stacey this way:
She has medium brown skin and wears wire-rimmed glasses. Her hair is styled with a small bang, and then the rest is pulled back into a rather tight ponytail. She wears a white T-shirt with a Tasmanian She-Devil cartoon character on it, and white shorts. When she smiles, I notice her dimples.
As Ms. Marshall says, her daughter is a “personable person” who is more like her talkative father than her quiet mother. Stacey is both a talented gymnast and a good dancer. At home, she often hangs out by herself in her bedroom, watching television; but with friends, she can be lively. At the summer camps she attends, she has collections of friends to regularly chatter and giggle with.
At home, Stacey seems less bubbly. She and Fern annoy one another. The two squabble routinely; spats break out all through the day. For example, one afternoon, Stacey answers the phone, using the extension in her bedroom. She yells to Fern that the call is for her. Then, instead of hanging up, Stacey listens in, eavesdropping on her older sister’s conversation. Fern strides into Stacey’s bedroom, fuming. Wordlessly but angrily, she disconnects the phone from the wall. Stacey leaves the phone unplugged for a bit, but then returns to eavesdropping. These little tense encounters are often repeated. In the car during a ninety-minute drive, Stacey and Fern fuss at each other, at first jovially, but then angrily, including slapping, spitting, and pulling each other’s hair. In general, Mr. and Ms. Marshall treat these sorts of interactions between the girls as part of normal sibling rivalry. The parents often make comments designed to defuse the girls’ quarrels. They also frequently simply look at each other and sigh over their daughters’ behavior or, in the car, separate them into different seats. There are also, however, moments of warmth as when Stacey uses her birthday money to buy her sister chocolates or when she seeks Fern’s fashion advice, explaining to the field-worker, “Fern usually knows what looks right.”
The girls and their parents (along with two guinea pigs, Scratch and Tiny) live on a quiet, circular street lined with large, recently built, two-story suburban homes with a market value of about $200,000 each. The Marshalls’ neighbors include other Black middle-class families as well as white ones. Their beige-colored house has a small lawn and flowers in the front and a large lawn in the back (the girls are pleading with their parents to install a pool). Along with the family’s two cars (a Volvo and a large Sable station wagon), the driveway is home to a basketball hoop. Fern often plays ball there with her friends; sometimes Mr. Marshall joins in. Inside the house are four bedrooms, two and one-half baths, a formal living room with a piano and African art decorating the walls, and a “great room” that opens into the dining area and a large kitchen. This family living area, which is light and airy, has a relaxed feel to it, with a television, director’s chair, and comfortable tan corduroy couch on which the girls may leave a book or a Walkman. A gymnastics balance beam is resting on the floor; people step over it as they move through the family room area.
Each of the girls has her own bedroom, and in each there is a television and a telephone, along with the girls’ collections of CDs, Walkmans, radios, and other electronic toys. In part because of Ms. Marshall’s work, there is a computer in the house. Although the Marshalls’ income is around $100,000 per year, the family, especially Ms. Marshall, often worries about money. We heard many comments about the cost of things and about the lack of job security in the computer industry. The company