The Working Poor (7 page)

Like many New England mill towns, all that is left of Claremont’s quaintness are the pretty sounding names: Sugar River, and streets called Summer and Pleasant and Pearl. Most of the decent jobs in mills and factories have disappeared, leaving a gritty struggle to find work that barely pays a living wage. Willie and Sarah, who lived on Pearl Street, were luckier than most because Willie got a job through Sarah’s stepfather installing sheet metal roofs on candy factories and pharmaceutical plants being built in Massachusetts. Although it took him two and a half hours to drive each way every day, he could make $13 to $20 an hour, which added up to $31,000 in his best year. The trouble was, they spent it all, scratching little pleasures out of a constant, grinding, and unsatisfying chore of buying:
$50 a week on cigarettes alone; clothes, shoes, CDs here and there; almost every dinner out at McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, or Taco Bell. They had no bank account.

Willie was lanky, mild, easy, with glasses and a mop of light brown hair. He often wore a slight smile that made him look a bit lost, as if he had suddenly awakened to find himself in a mysterious mess. His kids were hellions, and Cody, the three-year-old, already had wild anger in his eyes, already shouted with a rage that sounded as deep as a man’s. He hit his younger sister, who in turn hit the baby. Cody actually looked like a good buddy of Willie’s, and sure enough, turned out to be the buddy’s son. But Willie was an honorable man, and he adopted his wife’s firstborn.

Sarah had short, spiky, reddish hair; a ring through her right ear; and another through her right eyebrow. Her face was very pale and often sullen, her pasty complexion betraying her preference to stay inside, usually in bed, rather than take her restless kids into the country daylight to run off their energy. She spoke in a morose and despairing tone, almost a whine.

“I got molested twice as a child,” she told me the first time we talked. “When my mom and dad broke up and my dad moved out, my mom decided that she wanted to be a kid again ’cause she had me when she was eighteen. She went to bars quite a bit. I was nine years old, and I stayed home by myself. So that was real hard. I was in foster homes, group homes. I was molested by an uncle and a family friend. I have a lot of mental health problems because of my upbringing. That’s why I can’t work. I suffer from severe anxiety, panic, post-traumatic stress syndrome, all kinds of different stuff. I have a severe drug phobia, too, so I go to see counselors, but I can’t take any medication.” She lit a Marlboro with a lighter. Nicotine was a drug she didn’t fear.

Sarah also went to bars quite a bit, because she also needed to be a kid, she explained. By twenty-one her marriage to Willie would collapse and she would have four children by three fathers. She fed the kids junk food and a constant stream of inconsistency, one moment allowing them to run wild, the next scolding them angrily for the same behavior. Threats of punishment—being deprived of a trip to rent a movie, being sentenced to bed—came and went like blowing leaves, creating no consequence.

Brenda, the home visitor, worried about the dangerous conditions. I saw them too while the couple was still together. Cody turned on an electric
fan one day, stuck his fingers close to the blades, and received a mild rebuke. He climbed onto the sill of a window without a screen. Willie said firmly, “Get out of the window,” and Cody ignored him with impunity. Brenda once arrived at the house to find Sarah asleep and Kayla, at eighteen months, chewing on a cigarette and putting a Bic lighter in her mouth. She played in the dirty toilet while Cody pulled his chair up to the stove with the burners lit. I saw Kayla hit the baby in the face with a sneaker and pick up a plastic bench, ready to slam it onto the baby’s head. Cody screamed, and Willie stopped her. But less serious behavior seemed to get more serious scolding: Kayla was permitted to eat cheese while walking around the living room, and then got a harsh reprimand for the natural result of dropping cheese all over the living room floor. Neither Willie nor Sarah nor the kids seemed to know how to play; their few expensive toys were mostly just dragged noisily around the house. Willie’s idea of a fun Saturday outing, after his license was suspended for drunken driving, was to walk with the children to Wal-Mart. Brenda’s agency and the state’s protective services tried unsuccessfully to get a judge to remove the children from the home.

Sarah’s marriage was stormy while it lasted. Having grown up watching her mother hit her stepfather, she explained, she did the same to Willie. “I beat the hell out of him. He goes through about four pairs of glasses a year.” Since she could stand a few paces back from herself and see clearly what she was doing, I asked, couldn’t she change? She answered in a small voice, “I feel absolutely helpless.”

To avoid her violence, Willie bought her off. “I know I could put money in the bank,” he said, “but what’s easier, puttin’ money in the bank or havin’ a mellow home life? Really.” With a wan smile, he looked over at Sarah. They had just kept a month’s accounting for me, and Willie and Sarah both thought they could have cut a lot of their spending if they’d tried. “Six hundred of it,” Willie estimated. What would that have done to their lives? “It would have been terrible,” he said. “You tell him,” he suggested to Sarah, who kept silent. “She can’t—you know, with her problems and stuff, it seems like, being depressed all the time, if she’s not spending money she’s not happy.”

But buying a couple of CDs didn’t make her happy for long. “For the day,” she said.

“Till she’s out of the store,” he countered.

Their routine living expenses were not exorbitant. They included $300 a month rent to Sarah’s grandmother, about $100 for the use of her phone, and nothing for electricity and cable TV. But Willie’s long commute usually cost several hundred dollars a month in gas, except when he hitched a ride with fellow workers, as he had to do after his license was suspended. The couple paid $220 a month for a car they couldn’t afford to insure, about $200 a month on laundry because their appliances didn’t work, and $200 a month to eat out because the gas company wouldn’t turn on their gas until they paid $400 in overdue bills. Also, Sarah rarely felt emotionally well enough to cook, and Willie was too exhausted when he got home from a fourteen-hour day.

Furthermore, they liked to spoil themselves sometimes. “We’re both young,” Willie explained, “and because neither one of us really had everything when we were kids, I suppose we do sometimes go overboard with birthdays and Christmas and stuff.”

Their accounting, from mid-April to mid-May, showed that they had added enough outflow to their rent, car payments, and other recurring bills to use up almost all of the $2,500 Willie had earned.

The groceries included expensive items, such as $3.99 a day for Lunchables, the only kind of lunch that Cody would not hurl around the room of his preschool. The Miscellaneous category comprised fifty-two entries, most of whose details neither Sarah nor Willie could remember a month after listing them. They ranged from $2 and $5 for instantly forgotten things to $161 for concert tickets (to hear Ozzy Osbourne), a $52 outfit for a wedding, and numerous presents at $45 and $50 for birthdays, weddings, and one of those occasions cleverly invented by the manufacturers of nonessential items: Mother’s Day.

Their main effort at economizing came at Willie’s expense. Instead of smoking Camels, his favorite, he agreed to smoke Marlboros at $4 a carton less. Cutting out smoking altogether did not make it onto the agenda. Forgoing restaurants, prepared foods, and junky snacks seemed an impossible
sacrifice, and Sarah angrily spurned advice on this point from Brenda the home visitor. “Her plans on a budget are: You eat hamburger and mashed potatoes for the week and stuff like that, and that’s just not the way I want to live,” Sarah scoffed. “I like to be able to eat what
I
like.”

Even if Sarah and Willie had been models of frugality, their lives would still have been shackled to a heavy history of debt. From leaner days before he’d landed his roofing job, Willie owed $700 on a phone bill, $5,000 on a repossessed car, and $10,000 in medical bills. He could not get a phone; she could, only because her phone debts were run up before she became legally responsible at age eighteen. Eventually, she would probably have to try a ruse employed by some parents in this situation: open telephone accounts under a child’s name and Social Security number.

Willie’s medical bills were incurred in a fashion typical of working people without health insurance. He could not afford to go to the dentist, his teeth were decaying, and he was on the road working construction jobs. Whenever an abscess developed, he went to the nearest emergency room for painkillers and antibiotics. The law requires hospital emergency rooms to treat everyone, covered or not, but they can then send bills, which are usually whoppers. The charges were all beyond Willie’s reach, and they ruined his credit rating.

“Poor,” Sarah said in describing their socio-economic level, and then laughed a high-pitched, nervous giggle.

“We’d put ourselves poor,” Willie echoed, “but I know if we were smart people, we could be very well off. Sometimes I bring home $700 a week. I know I could be very well off. But, you know, neither one of us can just sit home and say, OK, this is what we’ve got for dinner, and that’s it.” He smiled sadly. “If we had $10 in our pocket and we were sick and tired of sitting in the house, we’d go out and spend $10 on ice cream and supper. I guess it’s easier to make life easier by doing something that costs money.”

Sarah offered her definition of being poor: “We don’t have any money saved. We don’t really have a home we can call our own.”

“It’s our own fault,” said Willie. “I’m not blaming it on anybody else.”

Willie’s earnings from working with sheet metal were high enough to put his family above the federal poverty line but low enough to get them some benefits. The children were eligible for SCHIP, the federally funded State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and Sarah got milk, cereal, peanut butter, baby formula, and other foods from WIC, the Special Supplemental
Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. Some years, when they filed their income tax return, they received not only a refund of taxes withheld, but the additional Earned Income Tax Credit.

One year, they used part of their check from the IRS to get tattoos. “It’s like we’re still kids ourselves,” she said, “so we’ve got to act like kids once in a while.” Willie got a wizard etched on his arm. Sarah pulled her shirt up in back to show hers: a heart made of thorns.

Christie did a job that this labor-hungry economy could not do without. Every morning she drove her battered ’86 Volkswagen from her apartment in public housing to the YWCA’s child-care center in Akron, Ohio, where she spent the day watching over little children so their parents could go to work. Without her and thousands like her across the country, there would have been fewer people able to fill the jobs that fueled America’s prosperity. Without her patience and warmth, children could have been harmed as well, for she was more than a baby-sitter. She gave the youngsters an emotionally safe place, taught and mothered them, and sometimes even rescued them from abuse at home.

For those valuable services, she received a check for about $330 every two weeks. She could not afford to put her own two children in the day-care center where she worked.

Christie was a hefty woman who laughed more readily than her
predicament should have allowed. She suffered from stress and high blood pressure. She had no bank account because she could not keep enough money long enough. Try as she might to shop carefully, she always fell behind on her bills and was peppered with late fees. Her low income entitled her to food stamps and a rental subsidy, but whenever she got a little pay raise, government agencies reduced the benefits, and she felt punished for working. She was trapped on the treadmill of welfare reform, running her life according to the rules of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The title left no doubt about what Congress and the White House saw as poverty’s cause and solution.

Initially the new law combined with the good economy to send welfare caseloads plummeting. As states were granted flexibility in administering time limits and work requirements, some created innovative consortiums of government, industry, and charity to guide people into effective job training and employment. But most available jobs had three unhappy traits: They paid low wages, offered no benefits, and led nowhere. “Many who do find jobs,” the Urban Institute concluded in a 2002 report, “lose other supports designed to help them, such as food stamps and health insurance, leaving them no better off—and sometimes worse off—than when they were not working.”
¹

Christie considered herself such a case. The only thing in her wallet resembling a credit card was a blue-green piece of plastic labeled “Ohio” and decorated with a drawing of a lighthouse projecting a beam into the night. Inside the “O” was a gold square—a computer chip. On the second working day of every month, she slipped the card into a special machine at Walgreen’s, Save-A-Lot, or Apple’s, and punched in her identification number. A credit of $136 was loaded into her chip. This was the form in which her “food stamps” were now issued—less easy to steal or to sell, and less obvious and degrading in the checkout line.

The card contained her first bit of income in every month and permitted her first expenditure. It could be used for food only, and not for cooked food or pet food. It occupied the top line in the balance sheet she kept for me during a typical October.