The Working Poor (30 page)

It happened to Brenda. She had counseled an eighth-grader from a miserably disrupted home, spent hours a day listening to him, and pressed him to finish school. He ignored her, dropped out, and disappeared. Years later, out of the blue, he called from Virginia to tell her that he had “made it.” He was nineteen, had gotten his G.E.D., was in the military working happily on helicopters, and was engaged to be married. There is always a spark to be fanned into flame.

So it was with “Melissa,” who had been beaten and sexually abused by her father. “She lies all the time,” Brenda lamented. “She doesn’t trust anybody.” At twenty-two, she was living on welfare in a cluttered apartment with her boyfriend and their two-year-old daughter. The boyfriend had been accused of molestation at age sixteen, so he was afraid even to change his daughter’s diapers.

“You would cringe if you walked into that place,” Brenda said. “It is so dirty. She’s been doing good since I’ve been working with her because she knew what days I was coming, and she’d go down and she’d get her dishes done, she’d clean, she’d be all so proud because someone paid attention that she cleaned.… There was rubbish, there was garbage outside.… If you saw the mattress you would die.… Whenever I walked into that place it was so bad.… There was dirty diapers. It was horrible. It was so bad that [the landlord] took pictures and took them to court. It was trashed. A nice apartment, too.”

Yet Melissa was devoting extraordinary efforts to being a mother. “She does not let that little girl out of her sight, even with me,” said Brenda. As if she were walking along a knife edge of risk, Melissa seemed acutely afraid that what had happened to her might happen to her daughter. At least so far, the anxiety was generating something good for the little girl. “I will say one thing,” Brenda conceded. “She reads and reads and reads to her [daughter], and what a difference. That little girl will look like a dirty little Rugrat 90 percent of the time, but she is smart…. She loves that little girl and spends a lot of time with her.”

Melissa found the time in a way that would not have won any points with welfare reformers: She had quit her $6-an-hour job at a paintbrush factory. “Things are complicated when you don’t have any money,” she remarked wryly. “I could go out and get a job, but I feel at her age it’s more beneficial for me to stay home with her. ” And what did she wish for her daughter? “I want her to be whatever she wants to be,” Melissa declared bravely. “She’s gonna finish high school, because that’s the biggest mistake I made. … If she wants to be a ballerina, then she’ll be a ballerina.” Or, a doctor, Melissa added. “Sometimes I’ll look at her and say, ‘You can be whatever you want to be.’ And she will be.”

The fragile life of Tom and Kara King fell apart piece by piece until nothing was left but love and loyalty. They lost their jobs, they lost their health, they saw their meager savings melt the way a February thaw eroded the winter’s snow, once fresh and deep, into muddy rivulets behind the rundown house they rented. The only asset that remained was affection, which became their sustenance. Its web of support embraced them and their three children, a few of their key friends, and even a stranger who encountered them one evening.

For many weeks, Tom and Kara had collected scraps of cash, enough to treat themselves and the kids to a restaurant meal—not to celebrate, just to soothe their anxieties a little. Kara needed a bone marrow transplant, she had learned, and so the family went to a truck stop in Lebanon, New Hampshire, where the portions were huge. The two boys held a contest over who could eat more. The family laughed a lot. They talked about their
hardships, and snatches of their conversation were overheard by a stranger at the bar. He was a truck driver passing through, a man who got little time with his family.

“I asked the lady for the check,” Kara recalled, “and she said, ‘There’s no check.’ She said, ‘A gentleman at the bar paid your bill.’ I was very offended. I tried to explain to this lady that I didn’t accept charity.” Nothing insulted Kara more than pity. Poverty and sickness infuriated her, and as they drove home to Newport, where they lived beside a junky auto repair shop, she boiled and brooded. She had lost her long chestnut hair from chemotherapy, her teeth from lack of funds for dental care, her stamina, her gaiety. She was not about to lose her dignity as well. So she called the truck stop and demanded the name of the benefactor. He was still there, the waitress said, and she handed him the phone. Kara asked him frostily why he had paid, and he told her. “He had never heard a family discuss problems that openly,” she said. “We were so close-knit, and he was a truck driver on the road a lot and just wanted to do something for us. He was touched. This man couldn’t believe we could laugh at life like that.”

She remembered him telling her: “I counted. Your children said they loved you twenty times.”

Her anger suddenly cracked. “I broke down, and I cried.”

The family that the driver so admired was unlike anything that Kara had known in childhood. She had been neglected by her mother and molested by her father, also a truck driver. “I can remember eating dog food when I grew up, rabbit pellets,” she said, “and I’ll be damned if my kids will ever have to go through that—going to school and having my teacher wash me up and bring me clothes. My parents just didn’t care. My father was an alcoholic, my mother was an alcoholic.” Still, as her father lay dying of cancer, she granted his wish to have his gravestone taken from the top of Cat Hole Mountain, where he could always be found, gun in hand, on the first day of deer season. “So we went and got this humongous piece of marble, white marble,” Tom remembered, “and it had one flat face on it, and we got together and we bought this bronze plaque to put on this stone.” Kara did not sever family ties easily.

She had repeated her family pattern by marrying two alcoholics in a row. Her first husband, the father of her two sons, Zach and Matt, “used to smack me around and break my teeth,” Kara said. Her second, Tom King, plunged into her life after his wife threw him out and he rented a room from Kara and her husband. One day, when Kara’s husband “came home
all messed up, started to beat on her,” Tom recalled, “I said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ And the next thing I know, we’re all out in the street…. The last thing I heard him say when we walked out the door was, ‘You want that bitch? Take her.’ ” So the two wandering souls found an apartment and took each other in. “For four and a half, five months, we lived a purely pla-tonic relationship, we split the apartment: She paid her half, I paid mine. And then we just kind of fell in love. Been that way since.” They married four years later, after their daughter, Kate, was born.

Tom liked Jack Daniel’s, even a shot or two for breakfast with his coffee. Kara worked on him lovingly, steadily, and finally got him into Alcoholics Anonymous. “I never missed a day of work,” he insisted, but “in the evening, it was bad, and one night we set down and she said, ‘What are you gettin’ out of it?’ She said, ‘If you think about it, you’re sick and tired of waking up sick and tired.’ ”

Tom was forty-six, Kara was thirty-two, and they both looked older still. He smoked Marlboros. Sometimes he wore a black bandanna covered with little skulls and crossbones, or American flags, tightly tied so that his hair, long and stringy, hung back out of the way below his collar. Lean and muscular, his arms were covered with tattoos. One said, “Love.” Another read, “Tom -n- Kara.” He had a gentle smile and a quiet resilience. When you asked him how things were, he’d always say, “Good,” even when they weren’t, and then he’d rub his whole face with his hand, as if to wipe away the worry. But he was also willing to admit that he was scared, and even to cry. Together, he and Kara found a mutual blend of vulnerability and strength.

They both worked for U-Haul, she behind the desk for $6 an hour, he as a mechanic for $7. “We were doing fine,” she said defiantly, as if to restake her claim to a modest victory that had been stolen from them. “We didn’t have credit cards. We didn’t owe anybody money.” They lived frugally, met their bills, and managed to save a little every month. At work, Kara felt confident enough to cloak herself in a little too much integrity. “I’m a very honest person,” she declared. “They said you had to down a truck that came in with bad tires, so I’d do that, and [later] I’d see they’d rented it.” When her manager once instructed her to rent out a truck with nonworking headlights “in the daytime,” she refused. “They were very unhappy with me,” she bragged. She did not get raises. Her applications to become a manager were ignored. Then, after being granted a week off so
her son could have surgery on a cleft palate, she returned to find someone else in her job.

Finding other work proved difficult. Because she had epilepsy, Kara was not supposed to drive, although she did anyway at times; otherwise, she would have felt chained down in a rural area without much public transportation. She eventually managed to qualify for a Social Security disability payment of $484 a month, which covered nearly all of the $500 rent on their old house. But the downward spiral continued. Tom wasn’t getting along well at U-Haul either. The defective rental trucks were causing him headaches, generating late-night phone calls for emergency repairs. The managers were “kids” in their twenties with no hands-on skills, he complained. After three years without a raise, he got fed up, quit, and went to work driving a truck to and from Massachusetts for a vegetable farmer in Claremont, New Hampshire.

The next blow fell: Kara was diagnosed with an aggressive lymphoma. The prognosis was poor. Without financial means, her best prospect for treatment was to become part of an experiment, “a guinea pig,” she said. She began chemotherapy for free in a clinical trial at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. If sheer determination could ever defeat a disease, she knew that her iron will would be victorious. “I am gonna get through all this,” she declared stubbornly. “It’s gonna be a long hard haul. I’m gonna go out and help people. I’m gonna tell these young women with babies that they don’t have to get beat up.”

Their rental house had a faded joy, its pale blue-green wood and red trim dulled by age and hardship. Anyone walking in through the cluttered back porch met a wall of cloying air thick with the odor from a big round kerosene heater in the middle of the kitchen floor. Kara was at the table. She had wrapped her bald head in a turquoise scarf. Her appearance mortified her sons, who didn’t want her to visit their school. She shared their embarrassment, mixed it with a terrible anger, and justified her shame and rage by keeping on display a framed picture of herself with her long, flowing hair. In her eyes, the camera had caught a hint of laughter then. Now, against her gaunt face, they were fiercely bright, pleading, proud.

She had come to feel the mockery of chance, and she couldn’t help a wry smile as she told the sour story of her prize at the Cornish fair. New England still loves those quaint country fairs full of wholesome Norman Rockwell faces from communities gathering to see who has baked the best
pie, who can eat one fastest with her hands behind her back, who can win a fire department raffle, and who can throw a ball and hit a plunger that will dunk a favorite son into a soaking pool. At the Cornish fair, Kara bought a raffle ticket for a dollar. In the thirty-one years of her life, she had never won a thing. This time, miraculously, her name was drawn for a fat pig named Emma. “I was amazed!” she declared.

But to a star-crossed family, even a delightful trophy can bring misfortune. Tom and Kara housed Emma in a pen at a friend’s house. Then the friend’s dogs got in, chewed her up, and got Tom thinking that he should build a pen at his place. He called his mother, who had a covered pickup truck, and they got Emma. Tom rode with the pig in the back. A sad comedy followed, one familiar to New Hampshire, where signs warn motorists of the danger. A moose stepped into the road, a car in front of them slammed on the brakes, Tom’s mother plowed into the car, and Tom was bounced around inside the back of the truck like a piece of popcorn. The local hospital’s emergency room checked him out, sent him home, and made an appointment for him with an orthopedist a week later. The orthopedist discovered that his back had been broken.

To m King worked with his hands—that’s all he knew how to do. He had grown up in the family’s cordwood business; his mother had driven a bulldozer in the woods. In tenth grade he’d gone across the Connecticut River to Vermont to live and work with a farmer and continue school, “and then the school system in Vermont found out that I was out of state, so they decided that they was gonna charge me tuition,” he recalled, “and I said, ‘I think I learn more on the farm than you people can teach me anyway,’ so I just quit school and went to work on the farm.” He got his G.E.D. later, in the army, which sent him to Vietnam—an experience that he believed led him to alcohol.

He couldn’t think of any jobs that his G.E.D. had helped him get. He romanticized his way of learning: from using his hands, he said, not from reading books, which he could not do well in any event. “I can stand there and listen to an engine run and pretty much tell you what’s wrong,” he said. “A lot of that’s from being around the old guys. Back when I got into the field, you didn’t have these guys with electronic equipment and that stuff. You had those old boys out there and you’d turn it over; they could tell you why it didn’t start or why it didn’t run just by listening to what it was doing. I pretty much learned from the ground up.”

In other words, Tom was an outdoor man with the wrong skills and
the wrong temperament for a desk job. He’d worked in three or four factories, “and after a while they tend to get small,” he observed. “You tend to pace.” So, he didn’t have a lot of job options. In constant pain, he was now confined to the dingy couch in his living room staring at the unrelenting idiocy of daytime television. Like many people with back injuries, he found himself lured by the mirage of SSI, or Supplementary Security Income, the disability payment administered by the Social Security Administration. It helps many and teases many others who hope to qualify. Since his wife was getting it and now he too was disabled, he applied. “I wasn’t asking for it to be total,” he said. “Partial would be fine with me. I don’t want nothing for nothing. I didn’t apply for it permanently, just to help me get back on my feet.” If he could find a light, sit-down job, he feared, it would undermine his claim that he couldn’t work, but as his back slowly healed, he looked a little anyway, in vain. It took Social Security a full year to deny him benefits, on the ground that he could lift ten pounds and stand for more than twenty minutes—not enough to get him work as a mechanic, just enough to disqualify him for assistance.