Maid

by Stephanie Land

  Jamie and I both worked at cafés, relishing the youth and freedom to do so. We both knew we were on to bigger and better things. He helped out with his friend’s catering business and did whatever side work he could find that paid under the table. In addition to the café, I worked at a doggy day care and sold bread at farmers’ markets. Neither of us had college degrees—Jamie admitted that he hadn’t even graduated from high school—and we did whatever work we could to make money.

  Jamie had typical restaurant shifts, from the late afternoon well into the night, so most of the time I was already asleep by the time he came home, a little drunk after hanging out at the bar. Sometimes I’d go down and meet him, spending my tips on a few beers.

  Then I found out I was pregnant. Through a wall of morning sickness, my stomach dropped, and the world suddenly started shrinking until it seemed to stop. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror for a long time with my sweatshirt lifted to examine my stomach. We’d conceived on my twenty-eighth birthday, the day before Jamie left for his bike trip.

  In choosing to keep the baby, I would be choosing to stay in Port Townsend. I wanted to keep the pregnancy a secret and continue with my plan to move to Missoula, but that didn’t seem possible. I needed to give Jamie a chance to be a father—it felt wrong to deny him that opportunity. But staying would mean delaying my dreams of becoming a writer. Delaying the person I expected myself to be. The person who would move on, become someone great. I wasn’t sure I wanted to give that up. I had been on birth control, and I didn’t believe it was wrong to get an abortion, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother, who’d possibly stared at her belly, debating her options for my life in the same way.

  In spite of all my hopes for a different path, I softened in the days that followed and began to fall in love with motherhood, with the idea of me as a mother. When I told Jamie about the baby, he’d just finished his bike trip. His initial tenderness in coaxing me to terminate the pregnancy abruptly changed when I told him I would not be doing that. I had known Jamie only four months, and his rage, his hatred toward me, was frightening.

  One afternoon, Jamie barged into the trailer where I sat on the built-in couch by the television, trying to stomach chicken soup while I watched Maury Povich reveal the results of paternity tests. Jamie paced while he stared at me, mirroring the men on the show, yelling about not wanting his name on the birth certificate. “I don’t want you to come after me to pay for that fucking kid,” he kept saying, pointing to my stomach. I stayed quiet like I usually did when he went on these tirades, hoping he didn’t start throwing things. But this time, the more he yelled, the more he fought and told me what a mistake I was making, the more it pushed me closer to the baby, to protect it. After he left, I called my dad, my voice shaking.

  “Am I making the right decision?” I asked after telling him what Jamie had said. “Because I really don’t know. But I feel like I should be sure. I don’t know anything anymore.”

  “Damn,” he said, then paused. “I’d really hoped Jamie would step up to the plate on this one.” He paused again, maybe waiting for me to respond, but there was nothing to say. “You know your mom and I were in the same position when we found out about you, except we were in our teens. And, you know, it wasn’t perfect. I don’t know if it was ever even close. We didn’t know what we were doing, or if we were doing the right thing. But you, your brother, me, and your mom—we’re all okay. We turned out okay. And I know you, Jamie, and this baby will be okay, too, even if it’s not what you think it’s going to be.”

  After that call, I sat and looked out the window. I tried not to let my current surroundings—the camper sitting next to a large shop in the woods—distract me from envisioning my future. I started speaking differently to myself, quelling my doubts. Maybe Jamie would come around. Maybe it would just take some time. If he didn’t, I decided I could deal with that, even though I had no idea how. I couldn’t base my decisions on him, to have a baby with him, but I knew I had to at least give him the opportunity to be a dad. My kid deserved that. Though it wasn’t an ideal situation, I would do what parents do, what parents had done for generations—I’d make it work. There was no questioning. No other option. I was a mother now. I would honor that responsibility for the rest of my life. I got up, and on my way out, I ripped up my college application and went to work.

  3

  TRANSITIONAL HOUSING

  My parents moved us out of Washington when I was seven, away from all of our relatives. We lived in a home tucked into the foothills of the Chugach mountain range in Anchorage, Alaska. The church we went to then had several outreach programs for homeless and low-income communities. As a child, my favorite was giving to families in need during the holidays. After Sunday service, Mom would let my brother and me select a paper angel off a Christmas tree in the church lobby. We’d go to the mall after brunch to select the listed items for a nameless girl or boy close to our age whom we’d give new toys, pajamas, socks, and shoes.

  One year, I went with my mom to deliver dinner to a family. I waited until it was my turn to give my delicately wrapped presents to the man who opened the door of a damp apartment. He had thick, dark hair and leather-tanned skin under a white t-shirt. After I gave him my bag of presents, my mom handed him a box with a turkey, potatoes, and canned vegetables. He nodded and then quietly closed his door. I walked away disappointed. I thought he’d invite us in so I could help his little girl open the presents I had handpicked, wanting to see how happy my presents made her. “The new shiny shoes were the prettiest in the store,” I would tell her. I wondered why her father wasn’t happier to give them to her.

  As a teenager, I spent some afternoons in downtown Anchorage handing out bagged lunches to homeless people. We were there to “witness” and share the gospel with them. In exchange for their listening ears, we fed them apples and sandwiches. I’d say Jesus loves you, though one man smiled at me and said, “He seems to love you a little more.” I washed cars to fund-raise for our travel to orphanages in Baja Mexico or to do Bible camps for children in Chicago. Looking back on those efforts and the place I was now, scrambling to find work and safe housing, those efforts, though noble, were charity and Band-Aid work that made poor people into caricatures—anonymous paper angels on a tree. I thought back to the man who’d answered the door, the one I had given a small bag of gifts. Now I’d be opening the door, accepting charity. Accepting that I couldn’t provide for my family. Accepting their small token—a new pair of gloves, a toy—in their impulse to feel good. But there wasn’t any way to put “health care” or “childcare” on a list.

  Since my parents raised my brother and me thousands of miles away from our roots in Northwest Washington where my grandparents lived, my upbringing became what most think of as middle-class American. We didn’t lack for any basic needs, but my parents couldn’t afford a lot of expenses like dance or karate lessons, and there was no account for our college education. I learned the importance of money pretty quickly. I started babysitting at eleven and almost always had a job or two after that. It was in my blood to work. My brother and I were protected through the shroud of our religion and my parents’ financial security.

  Safety was instilled in me. I was safe, and never questioned that, until I wasn’t.

  * * *

  Jamie’s eyes narrowed when I told him I wanted to take Mia to go live with my dad and stepmother, Charlotte. Mia was barely seven months old but had witnessed too many of his angry outbursts; the lashing out and destruction had traumatized me.

  “I looked online,” I said, reaching for a piece of paper in my pocket while holding Mia on my hip. “They have a child support calculator, and the amount seems more than fair.”

  He snatched the paper out of my hand, crumpled it, and threw it at my face, his intense glare not leaving my eyes. “I’m not gonna pay you child support,” he said evenly. “You should be the one paying me!” His voice grew louder as he spoke and paced back and forth. “You’re not g
oing anywhere.” He pointed to Mia. “I’ll take her so fast it’ll make your head spin.” With that, he turned to leave, releasing a yell of rage as he punched a hole through the Plexiglas window on the door. Mia jumped and let out a high-pitched scream that I had never heard before.

  My hand trembled while I dialed the domestic violence hotline. I was barely able to explain what was happening before Jamie started calling repeatedly. They advised me to hang up and call the police. Minutes later, the headlights of a patrol car lit up the entire side of the single-wide trailer. An officer knocked gently at the broken door. He stood so tall, his head nearly grazed the ceiling. While I told him what had happened, he took a few notes, examining the door, nodding, asking if we were okay. If we felt safe. After a year of abuse, threats, and screaming insults thrown at me, that question came with much relief. Most of Jamie’s rage had been invisible. It didn’t leave bruises or red marks. But this—this I could point to. I could ask someone to look at it. I could say, “He did this. He did this to us.” And they could look at it, nod, and tell me, “I see that. I see that he did this to you.” The police report the officer left was a validation that I wasn’t crazy. I carried it in my purse for months like a certificate.

  * * *

  Those first nights we spent in the transitional housing apartment building off a main street filled me with uncertainty. Every noise that echoed through the walls and floors of the complex made me jump. I constantly checked to make sure the door was locked when we were home, something I’d never done before. But it was just my daughter and me, and I was our only protection.

  When we lived in the homeless shelter, the driveway led straight to my cabin’s door, so my car was parked right outside if we ever needed to get away. I never saw or heard my neighbors, who all lived in separate cabins, and we were surrounded by nature—trees and fields that triggered a sense of peace, not trouble. That little space was my own, and I didn’t fear invasion. But in the apartment, the walls and floors seemed so thin, and there were so many unfamiliar voices. In the stairwell, strangers filed up and down, yelling at each other. I’d stare at my front door, the only thing between us and the rest of the world, knowing that someone could break through it at any moment.

  Apartments surrounded us in that gray rectangle, but the only evidence of occupants was the voices from behind the walls, the trash piled high in the dumpster, the cars pulled into the parking lot. Maybe I would have felt safer had I met my neighbors, had I seen what they looked like. Their night sounds, heels that clicked across the floor, an unexpected deep voice, then the laughter of a child, paddled my sleep. I’d get up several times throughout the night to check on Mia. She slept in the next room in a portable crib.

  Most nights, I’d lay awake for hours replaying the moments in court with Jamie.

  I’d stood in front of a judge, next to Jamie and his lawyer. I was homeless and fighting for custody of Mia. It was no secret that months of Jamie’s angry words against me had caused my depression, and now he used this as the basis of his claim that I was unfit to parent our daughter. My failure seemed to shroud me. It was like Jamie’s lawyer and the judge thought I preferred it this way, like I thought raising a child without a stable home was okay. Like I didn’t think every single second about how I needed to improve our situation, if I had the ability to. Somehow, it reflected badly on me that I’d removed Mia from a place where I was punished and brutalized until I was curled up on the floor, sobbing like a toddler. No one saw that I was trying to give my daughter a better life—they only saw that I’d taken her out of what they considered a financially stable home.

  Somewhere, I found an almost primal strength, and I won the custody case. I got my own space, a place for Mia to be with me. Still, most nights I wrapped myself in guilt for what we lacked. Some days, the guilt was so heavy that I couldn’t be totally present with Mia. I’d muster reading her books before bed, rocking her gently in the same chair where my mom had read me stories. I’d tell myself that tomorrow would be better; I’d be a better mother.

  I’d sit and watch Mia eat, or I’d pace around the kitchen, drinking my coffee and staring at our budget and my work schedule, which I hung on the walls. If we went out and got groceries, I’d spend the morning scrolling my bank account balance and my EBT (electronic benefit transfer) card, a debit card for food paid by the government, to see how much money we had left. EBT cards were still relatively new and had been used only since 2002. I’d applied for food stamps when I was pregnant, and Jamie still remembered his mom paying for groceries with paper stamps and always sneered at the memory. I was grateful for programs that fed my family, but I’d also carry back home a bag of shame, each time mentally wrestling with what the cashier thought of me, a woman with an infant in a sling, purchasing food on public assistance. All they saw were the food stamps, the large WIC paper coupons that bought us eggs, cheese, milk, and peanut butter. What they didn’t see was the balance, which hovered around $200 depending on my income, and that it was all the money I had for food. I had to stretch it to the end of each month until the balance was re-upped after the beginning of the month. They didn’t see me eating peanut butter sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, rationing my morning cup of coffee to make it stretch. Though I didn’t know it then, the government had worked that year to change the stigma surrounding the twenty-nine million people who used food stamps by giving it a new name: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). But whether you called it SNAP or food stamps, the assumption that the poor stole hardworking Americans’ tax money to buy junk food was unchanged.

  Despite getting lost in my head, I obsessed over whether or not I was a good mother. I was failing; I was more in tune with how we’d survive the week than with my child. When I was with Jamie, his job had provided me the ability to stay home with Mia. I missed having whole days to ourselves, stopping to look and learn and wonder. Now it felt like we barely got by. Always late for something. Always in the car. Always in a rush to finish meals and clean up. Always moving, barely pausing to take a breath. In fear that I’d fall behind on something, forget something, screw up our lives even more—I just didn’t have time for Mia to watch a caterpillar inch its way across the sidewalk.

  Though I heard almost every ghostlike toilet flush and chair moving across the floor of my neighbors’ apartments, the lady who lived below me would make herself known, hitting her ceiling with a broom or mop handle and yelling whenever Mia ran across the floor. When we first moved in, I swept the leaves and spider webs off the deck to the ground below. She yelled, “What the fuck?” out from under me. Besides the broom-handle banging, that was the first time she’d spoken even semi-directly to me. “What’s all this shit?” she went on. “You’re fuckin’ shitting on me!” I slinked inside, shut the door softly, and sat stiffly on the couch, hoping she wouldn’t run up and knock on my door.

  My upstairs neighbors—a mom and her three children—were hardly ever home. For the first few weeks I only heard them. I’d go to bed around ten p.m., and they’d come walking up the stairs around that time. After twenty minutes or so, they’d quiet again.

  One morning as the sun came up I heard them leaving and ran to the window to see them, curious about who the other people in my same situation were.

  The woman was tall and wore a purple-and-red windbreaker jacket and white sneakers. She limped from side to side when she walked. Two school-age boys and a girl walked behind her. I couldn’t imagine what she was going through. I only had one to care for. I saw her from time to time after that. The little girl’s hair was always neat, in cornrow braids decorated with bright ribbons. I wondered where they went all day, how she kept her kids so quiet and well behaved. She seemed like a good mother—respected by her children, which I envied. My kid had just learned how to walk upright and seemed to run from or fight me every second she was awake.

  “You learn to love your coffee,” my neighbor Brooke had told me when we saw each other after a house check, referring to us being pr
ohibited alcohol. We had sort of awkwardly shuffled past each other, and this was the first time we spoke. I’d known Brooke in what felt like a former life now, back when she poured the beers I’d ordered from her at the bar. I wondered what brought her to this place. But I never asked. Just like I didn’t want her to ask me.

  I never talked to any of the men who lived in the halfway house on the far side of the complex. I’d see them standing on the path that went to their apartments, smoking cigarettes in sweatpants and slippers. One older man had family who picked him up every so often, but the others didn’t seem to go anywhere. Maybe they were just doing their time in that place. I kind of felt the same way.

  I missed going out to bars. I missed having a beer if I wanted to, not necessarily the beer itself, but not having to worry about the housing authority popping up, having that freedom. I missed having so many freedoms: to go, to stay, to work, to eat or not eat, to sleep in on days off, to have a day off.