The Working Poor (11 page)

So, one day when her father brought her home, Caroline took her into the bathroom. “I noticed she was red, front to back. And this was not right.” Alarmed, Caroline asked a college friend, Tina, to talk with Amber alone and see what she could learn. “And Tina said, ‘You won’t believe the things she told me.’ ” They took the little girl to the hospital, where a doctor confirmed that she had been penetrated. The police were called, Caroline’s welfare caseworker was summoned. As Tina and the caseworker questioned Amber, Caroline and a police officer watched and listened from behind a one-way mirror. The girl repeated what she had told Tina, and a restraining order was issued against Vernon Payne. To escape, Caroline moved with Amber to Florida for several footloose years that disrupted Caroline’s education, and Amber’s as well.

Nearly a decade later, when Caroline told Amber that her father had died, the girl, then fourteen, said in a sudden burst of relief, “Good, good.”

Amber’s “delays” became more pronounced in Florida. Further testing when she entered first grade measured her IQ at 59, in the low range of mild mental retardation, a handicap more prevalent in lower-income households. But she did not get the consistent special schooling that might have helped her, because Caroline repeated her parents’ syndrome of uprootedness by moving from place to place: a tiny apartment, a trailer with a woman friend, a filthy trailer of her own, a place with a male friend, and another trailer—all in New Port Richey, Florida—then to a cousin’s in Winter Haven and back to New Port Richey. In three years, Amber attended three or four different schools. Caroline then headed north to New Hampshire, where she moved a few times from one school district to another. Altogether, she estimated, Amber had been in seven or eight schools. “She was probably like this little rag doll that just got brought any-
where,” said her caseworker, Brenda, who pressed Caroline to settle down and resist her urge to keep moving; otherwise, Brenda told her, teachers and counselors could not get to know Amber well enough to provide fruitful help. The argument took hold after Caroline became a homeowner, until that achievement was reversed by misfortune and miscalculation. “She’s very good with Amber,” Brenda said then. “I work with so many families. Sometimes I wish I had another Caroline.”

There was no clear evidence on the extent to which educational stability might have aided the girl. Her middle-school principal called her condition “a language-based learning disability.” She could barely read and write, could not easily tell time from clocks with hands, and was unable to understand that she had enough money if she gave a storekeeper $10 to buy something for $4. Yet she could play the flute if her mother wrote the letter for each note on the musical score. She took gymnastics lessons at a dance school, for which her mother paid by cleaning the school’s studio once a week. And Amber could give a lucid verbal account of a class trip to Montreal, for example; if you heard her talk, you wouldn’t suspect retardation. With sweet courtesy, she eagerly helped her mother around the house, and she could cook for herself in a microwave. But she also had epilepsy, and the risk of a seizure prompted doctors to advise that she not be left alone. The logistical maze of arranging care for Amber around constantly shifting hours of work had Caroline tangled in anxiety.

Social Security provided Amber with SSI, a monthly disability payment, but that didn’t give Caroline the means that an affluent parent would have to muster an arsenal of expensive private tutors and therapies. Nor did Caroline have the skills and sophistication to help her child extensively at home, as school officials urged. “They came right out and told me in one of the meetings that it was my job to teach my daughter to read,” Caroline complained. “I said, ‘Wait a minute. I’m a single mom. I bring up my daughter … I do my job … I pay my taxes in full. You do your job.’ They gave me a dirty look. They didn’t say nothing.”

Brenda, her caseworker, hit the same wall. “I would say to Caroline, At night, please sit and read to your daughter, even if it’s ten or fifteen minutes.’ She’d say, ‘That’s not my job. That’s the teacher’s job.’ ”

So Amber had only the meagerly funded special education classes in the public schools of Claremont, a town so strapped for financing that it led a group of communities in a celebrated victory before the New Hampshire Supreme Court to win state grants for impoverished school
districts. The court’s ruling was not implemented effectively, however, and Claremont—ranking 236 out of New Hampshire’s 259 municipalities in per capita income—still badly underpaid its teachers. Amber felt herself standing still, and she was furiously frustrated, especially after she entered high school and was consigned to a vocational-technical department that taught cooking, check-writing, and other basic skills of independent living—but little or no reading.

Whether her capacities could have been expanded by the kind of training that money could buy was an open question. Would affluence have made any difference to Amber? Her pediatrician, Steven Blair, who had treated her since she was nine, paused for a long time, considering his answer. “Minute differences,” he said finally. “Not substantial differences.” On the other hand, specialists in mental retardation generally argue for “individualized therapeutic and educational services for the child in conjunction with flexible support services for the family,” as Jack P. Shonkoff puts it in a basic pediatrics textbook. “Such services are delivered best when they focus on the family as a dynamic system and view child and family adaptation as interdependent and mutually influenced by the environment in which they live.”
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That was as realistic in Caroline’s case as suggesting a long vacation in Paris.

To flee with Amber from Vermont, Caroline had to suspend her studies, which she later resumed in Florida, at Webster College, completing a two-year associate’s degree in office technology and information processing. She also ran up a debt of $17,000 in student loans, a sum that rose to $20,000 as she deferred payments. Contrary to conventional wisdom about education as a good investment, Caroline’s degree turned out to be a colossal waste of money. She never landed a job in her field of training, never got one that required anything more than a high school diploma. She would have benefited with a bachelor’s degree, of course, but the associate’s degree proved useless as a credential.

When she moved back north from Florida to New Hampshire, Caroline lived for two weeks with her aunt, applied for welfare, and had a typical brush with governmental absurdity. She was told by officials that the best way to get welfare benefits and subsidized housing was to move into a homeless shelter, so she did. That made her an emergency case. In just three weeks—a hundred times faster than if she had lived in a major American city—she had a Section Eight voucher that paid most of her
rent in a privately owned apartment. Then she set about working toward her dream: a house of her own.

For seven days a week she worked two part-time jobs—one in a store for $5.25 an hour, the other for “four something” an hour answering phones and doing other chores at the local lodge of the Loyal Order of Moose, where she was also a member. In two years, Caroline paid off most of her back bills and put herself in a position to start thinking seriously about finding a house to buy.

She did not quite realize it at the time, but she had assembled an essential structure of attributes to open the door to a mortgage. They included a record of diligence on the job and connections with people of influence—both intangible benefits of being in the workforce. Furthermore, she had a reliable monthly check in the form of Amber’s Social Security payment. Very few low-wage workers can claim a steady income from the government or helpful personal contacts.

The key individual for Caroline turned out to be her boss at the store, also a real estate agent, whose good friend happened to be president of the Sugar River Savings Bank. The banker met Caroline and was impressed. “She seems like the type of woman who would go hungry to pay the bill,” he told her boss. Not quite, though. She had two or three bills to take care of to burnish her credit check, so she spent a year on those while the house she wanted stayed unsold. The price dropped, and she finally got the bank’s approval for a mortgage.

It didn’t hurt that Amber’s Social Security payment of $514 a month would be deposited directly into an account at Sugar River Savings, from which the mortgage installment would be automatically withdrawn. (The SSI check rose to $736 after Amber’s father died, but the money flowed in and out, which usually left an account balance of under $100.) Using those funds for mortgage payments was legitimate, Caroline reasoned, because Amber would eventually inherit the house—an assumption that, in the end, couldn’t survive the family’s poverty. It was a terrible fact that a mortgage would not have been forthcoming without Amber’s disability.

The snug, gray clapboard house, built in 1891, was nestled among others on an icy street. It was about to be improved, courtesy of a federal program that would replace the siding, repaint the trim, and remove lead paint inside—testimony to Caroline’s skill at securing government aid. The windows were now insulated with plastic sheeting stapled to the
frames, and over the side door hung a “Merry Christmas” banner. In a different place at a different time, the house would have been considered quaint and charming enough to be worth plenty. But sitting in a sad, old neighborhood near the center of a New England town that had been left behind, it was worth just $37,000 when Caroline discovered it in 1997. With $1,000 from her income tax refund to cover closing costs, she became the owner—along with the Sugar River Savings Bank.

There was no price tag on her satisfied sense of possession and autonomy. She proudly conducted a tour: the two beige couches in the living room, the flowery wallpaper, the yellow curtains, the old TV set and VCR, Fluffy the cat with a red collar and a bell, the pantry and storeroom behind the kitchen, her adult son’s crossbow for deer hunting, the cellar with a washer and dryer and oil furnace, the upstairs where colorful afghans she had crocheted lay folded waiting to be given to Amber’s teacher and school bus driver and principal for Christmas.

Caroline worked in a clothing factory, sewing for $6 an hour. She was laid off. She worked a few hours a week at the shelter where she had lived, helping applicants to the fuel assistance program. When winter ended, she was out of a job, so she worked at Tambrands, a factory that made Tampax, for $6.50. Sitting for hours at a time, she began to get acute pain in her legs and finally had to go to the emergency room. Her back was the cause. “And so the doctor says, ‘I want you to take one night off and rest as much as you can. Stay off your feet. Stay off your legs.’ ” She called Tambrands, owned by Procter & Gamble, to tell them she wouldn’t be in on Sunday because of her back. Monday morning the phone rang: Her services were no longer needed. So she went back to the sewing factory and got laid off two or three times. Working at the edge of poverty means working on the coldest side of corporate America.

The Claremont Savings Bank, which had rejected her as a teller, called to invite her to apply for a filing job. She was hired for twenty-five hours a week at $7 an hour, with the prospect of going to $10 or $11. Mercifully, it was less painful because she could alternately stand and sit as she went about her main task of taking cancelled checks in a tray to a large open drawer where customers’ accounts were separated by dividers. Each account had a signature card, so Caroline—and others working the same job—were to verify the signature on each check, then file it in the proper account.

She liked the position. The bank was a short walk from her house. She had bought the right clothes. She would learn other tasks. She had $2.02
in her own bank account. Her mother was dying. Her tortured relationship with her mother was coming to an end—except, of course, it would never quite end but would rather be frozen in whatever emotions had been created over the years. And when her mother died, Caroline was thrown unknowingly into depression. She heard the diagnosis when she went for counseling. “I didn’t realize that I’d been in depression. I didn’t realize, OK?”

People at the bank were beginning to notice mistakes. “We know that on average, three or four times a year we will get a call that a customer has gotten wrong checks,” said a bank officer, preferring not to have her name published. “In a period of eight weeks, we got three or four calls. We started monitoring and had people double-checking, and we isolated it and found where the error was coming from.”

Caroline was called in for a talk. “They said I wasn’t catching on fast enough,” and she admitted that she may have made errors. But others were filing too, she noted. “I was gettin’ the blame for it, and I felt it wasn’t all me, you know what I’m saying? And in the meantime I was dealing with my mother being in and out of the hospital, dying, and they had told her she was gonna die but we just didn’t know when.”

It was hard to get the checks mixed up, the bank officer insisted, because they were different colors. Maybe Caroline’s attention wandered, the officer speculated. “She had difficulty learning what we needed her to do. There were other functions we needed her to learn how to do, but we could never get to that. We would ask people to start assembling statements to be mailed to customers, researching any errors.… We couldn’t even get to that. Microfilming. There’s a systematic way to microfilm work and file it away. She really had difficulty learning to do that, so we stopped having her do it. So she was only doing filing, and that was not working out well.… She wasn’t receptive at all to the fact that she was making mistakes. It was definitely her. To be honest with you, I was surprised she had trouble because I thought she could do it. In fairness to her, we had just come out of a situation where we had to do a lot of handholding. She came in after that other person was gone, and I think everyone was exhausted and didn’t have the energy to spend the time with her.” After eight weeks Caroline was fired.