Closing Time (7 page)

 

The section of the project we lived in was organized in a peculiar, modular fashion. On each of a series of adjacent cul-de-sacs, a row of four attached maisonettes sat perpendicular to the street, with another four units facing them across a narrow pathway. At the end of each path stood a twelve-foot-high fence topped with barbed wire, sealing off the railroad tracks plied by local commuter trains. On the other side of the tracks, up a steep hill, sat a middle-class development of top-notch two-story, redbrick houses that were always referred to as the New Homes. They, too, were sealed off by barbed wire. Because of this wrong-side-of-the-tracks arrangement, which may have been inadvertent but probably wasn’t, we could catch glimpses of the good fortune and respectability that lay just outside our reach merely by turning our eyes north.

Proximity to mild affluence did little to inspire us, for even though the New Homes were less than fifty yards away, as the crow flies, we were not crows. To reach them, we would have had to walk all the way to the back of the project, where the barbed-wire fence ran out, then hack our way through a “jungle” teeming with weeds that never got tended, then make our way up a narrow road with no sidewalks, and finally climb up a steep hill to arrive at a neighborhood we had no business being in. I never visited the New Homes until forty years after we’d left the project, and when I did, I still felt that I did not belong there.

The houses we lived in were designed in an unconventional way, fusing intimacy with anonymity, despite the fact that behind each home stood a virtually identical unit. In fact, the houses were grafted together jigsaw-style, with the kitchens of the rear units jutting out into the living rooms of the front units and vice versa, and the bedrooms interlacing in an identical pattern. At the end of each block, a four-foot-high chain-link fence separated the eight units on one cul-de-sac from the eight units on either side. This largely cosmetic barrier discouraged fraternization between people living in adjacent cul-de-sacs. In fact, it discouraged any intercourse whatsoever with the people who lived just a few feet away on the other side of the walls. Due to this socially prophylactic layout, we could hear the people whose living quarters intersected ours, but we never actually saw them. They were our neighbors, but then again they were not our neighbors. They lived right next door to us, but we never felt that they lived right next door to us. It was as if the walls were swarming with gigantic squirrels.

The gimcrack architecture and weird, arbitrary boundaries disconnected and desensitized everyone. One day, a little girl living directly behind us set herself on fire while playing with matches. This was in the early sixties, an era when children still wore flammable pajamas and often perished in them. The firemen were summoned, but the child could not be saved. The rest of us could see some sort of creature lying on a blanket on the ground beside the house when we came home from school. Her father and brother, who may have been Amish, or Hasidim, or even prototypes of hippies, were standing there weeping. Another person, the mother, was charred but extant. To the best of my knowledge, she survived, though I may be mistaken, for, from our perspective, the fire was the end of their story. Despite their physical proximity, these people were complete strangers. We never knew their names. We never spoke to them. We never found out what happened to them after their little girl died.

Years later, I asked my mother if she or any of the other neighbors had gone around the corner to console these ill-fated exotics after their child incinerated herself. Were there flowers, pastries, mass cards, commiseration?

“No,” she replied.

“Why not?” I asked.

“We didn’t know them,” she replied.

“What do you mean, we didn’t know them?”

“We didn’t know them,” she reiterated, and that was the end of that.

Just months before this conversation, when my best friend’s ten-year-old son died after his heart stopped in a swimming pool in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, everyone in the community grieved; it seemed as if the earth itself cried out in anguish at his demise. This was not the case in the project. We did not know the parents of the dead child. They did not know us. A foolish youngster had set her pajamas on fire and died. The earth did not cry out in anguish.

 

All but the most perceptive children find poverty incomprehensible, because poverty is idiotic. Further confusing the issue is the fact that poverty comes in several distinct varieties. From the start, my sisters and I had trouble figuring out which brand of indigence we were experiencing. We knew that we were not black, a tremendous relief to us all, and we knew that we were not poor in the way the Okies or the starving children of Armenia were. Mostly, what we endured was intermittent deprivation—poverty, yes, but not abject destitution. Sometimes we had little to eat, a few times nothing. One Friday evening, Ree and I stayed up until midnight, gnawing on raw spaghetti noodles, waiting for my father to come home with his paycheck and perhaps something tasty to nibble on. Eventually, we gave up and went to bed. It was the first time he failed us in this way, but it would not be the last.

Poverty, conceptually as well as viscerally, suffers from a mythology concocted by those who were never poor. Poverty goes far beyond not having money or food. Poverty means that when you do have money and food, the money gets spent unwisely and the food is not nutritious. Poverty is not simply a matter of being unable to buy certain things; it’s about buying the wrong things, or the things that nobody else wants. It’s about off-brand shoes, off-brand underwear, off-brand socks, off-brand ice cream, off-brand appliances, off-brand roach killer. It’s about sneakers that fall apart the third time you drive to the basket, shoes held together with adhesive tape, shirts that start out as XLs but end up as Mediums the first time they’re laundered. It’s about socks that aren’t worth mending, jeans that aren’t worth patching, appliances that aren’t worth fixing, cookies whose packages bear a vague resemblance to Fig Newtons and Lorna Doones but prove upon closer inspection to be Smack Dibbers or Chunk Fiddles. It’s about buying FBR when everyone else is buying RCA, about settling for a $3.95 Val-Tex when everyone else is buying a $12.95 Ban-Lon. It’s about wearing shirts with labels that deliberately obscure the miniaturized words MADE IN PAKISTAN because everyone else is wearing shirts whose labels proudly proclaim MADE IN THE U.S.A. It’s about always eating in and eating badly, never eating out and well. It’s about bad diets, bad teeth, bad feet, bad playgrounds, bad parents, bad housing, bad attitudes.

Poverty is a tumor it takes a lifetime to excise, because poverty is lodged deep inside the brain in a dark corner where the once-poor don’t want to look. Poverty is a lifestyle, a philosophy, a modus vivendi, an agglomeration of bad habits, which is why nobody who has ever been poor physically ever stops being poor emotionally. The once-poor simply become masters of disguise, listening patiently while other people lament problems they cannot imagine having, trying to keep a straight face while someone talks about low self-esteem resulting from a relationship with an emotionally distant parent or the trauma of realizing that Kristin, wait-listed by Dartmouth, will probably have to swallow her pride and go to Middlebury. But every night before they go to bed, the once-poor empty their pockets and count their change, never quite believing that they are no longer paupers.

The poverty my family experienced was grinding, dull, and monotonous—the traditional one-size-fits-all, no-frills variety. We did not have enough food. We rarely ate fresh fruits or vegetables; everything came out of a can. We had crummy toys. Our appliances were always going on the fritz, because my father tended to buy dud lookalikes “on time” at twice the normal retail price. We wore hand-me-down clothes and shoes that did not fit; we never had money for anything stylish. We did not have a car. We did not have a telephone. We did not go on vacations, as my father never held a job long enough to earn time off. When my sisters did get whisked away one time to a summer camp operated by the Catholic Charities, they came back two nights later scared speechless by the hoodlums who made up much of the camp’s population. They also returned with their hair swarming with lice. Last but not least, there was the matter of our macabre dental care. One afternoon, my mother, at the ripe old age of thirty-nine, waltzed in and casually announced that she had just had all her teeth pulled. They’d been acting up lately and were far too much trouble to tend to on a daily basis, she explained; a nice set of dentures would make things easier on everyone. I had suspected for some time that my father was not quite right in the head; now it seemed that the affliction was spreading.

Did the moral injustice of poverty ever occur to us? Yes, but it was not something we could dwell on at the time. While we were living in the housing project, we were far too busy worrying about our father to worry about bias in the social order. Not until years and years later would it ever occur to any of us that the deck was stacked against members of our class, that whatever adults may have done to wreck their lives, it was unfair for their children to begin life with their chances for success preemptively sabotaged. In this sense, poverty is not so much cruel as unsportsmanlike. Those who despise the poor, Calvinist types who unfailingly point to wantonly self-destructive behavior as a sign of the underclass’s moral and intellectual inferiority, do not understand that poor people behave stupidly because poverty is a finishing school where children learn how to be stupid. Growing up poor teaches young people to buy clothing that shrinks, appliances that break, furniture that disintegrates, food that provides no nutrition—and, if possible, to overpay for it. If a young person born in a housing project in the United States of America grows up to be stupid, self-destructive, or evil, this should come as no surprise to anyone. They have studied at the feet of the masters.

I did not start thinking these thoughts until I went to college and was exposed to provocative class-warfare theories promulgated by sensitive chaps from Bryn Mawr. As a child, the thought of blaming society for our tribulations would never have crossed my mind. The responsibility lay with my father. He was the one who couldn’t hold a job. He was the one who drank up our money. He was the one who beat us. True, the inequity of our daily existence confused us. We were the smartest children in our classes, usually by a wide margin. We had a flair and a creativity that was lacking in most of our peers, interchangeable drones destined for low-level administrative duties with Blue Cross of Pennsylvania or the Naval Supply Depot. We were well-scrubbed, well-groomed, and dressed as well as it was possible for our cash-strapped mother to dress us. We were easy to get along with, never got into trouble. Our teachers liked us, encouraged us, perhaps even admired us, constantly reassuring us that we would all do well in life if we would merely lay our troubles at the feet of the Lord and be patient until He took them up.

It was all well and good to tell us that better times lay ahead, that a heaping pot of gold lay somewhere at the end of the rainbow. But this did not help us in the existential moment. In the existential moment, we wondered why we were living in a housing project, the penniless offspring of a vicious, violent drunk. Why did other kids get to go home to safe neighborhoods and warm houses and delicious meals and parents who enjoyed their company; children whose births were planned events, a dream fulfilled, not the haphazard by-product of adherence to a scientifically unreliable insemination schedule? Why didn’t we get fancy clothes and trips to the seashore and a backyard with flowers and a swimming pool and a car? Whose idea of a childhood was this?

Because of my mother’s hoi polloi-shunning temperament, we never felt the slightest sense of solidarity with our class. If anything, we despised them. We were like haughty survivors of a shipwreck floating aimlessly in a lifeboat: The only thing we had in common with the other passengers was that we did not want to drown, and if we did have to drown, we would prefer to do so with a better class of misfits. But at some level we were baffled by our situation, unable to position ourselves in a precise historical context. We certainly did not feel that we were part of a heroic struggle the way people did in the 1930s, when everyone pulled together and made common cause. But we also never considered ourselves participants in the economic explosion of the 1950s. Quite to the contrary, we felt that we had been remanded to the sidelines. The U.S. economy was undergoing a stupendous boom when we were young, transforming what had been a sleeping giant into the mightiest industrial colossus the world has ever known. But we were not profiting from it. To this day, when I am asked about growing up in the fifties and sixties, I mechanically confirm that it was an era of immense wealth and social mobility, which in fact it was. But in talking about the fifties as most Americans experienced them, I might as well be discussing Maori dining rituals.

Our fifties family life bore no resemblance to the world of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo or Ward and June Cleaver. Ward did not beat his children with the buckle of his leather belt. Ricky did not drink boilermakers all night while his family went hungry. Lucy did not suffer from manic depression. June could cook. When anyone asked about the fifties, a world we knew only in retrospect, at a distance, we would respond like a recuperating coma victim who devours reams of disintegrating old newspapers to get caught up on everything he missed during the seventeen years he was out cold after that I-beam flattened him. We responded in terms people could understand, providing essential, plausible details about a bygone era as if we ourselves had actually participated in it. We were like Yankee utility players who got traded to the Senators in April of the year the Bronx Bombers entered the Pantheon of the Immortals.

“Didn’t you play on the ’27 Yankees?” people would later ask.