“I’m fine,” I said and reached down to pick her up, making my fingers into claws. The tickle monster. I roared, and Mia squealed in delight, running around the kitchen table with me close behind. I caught her at the couch, tickling her so much that the binky fell out of her mouth from laughing. That’s when I bent my arms around her, picked her up, and hugged her little body close, feeling her warmth, smelling her skin.
She started squirming. “No, Mama!” She laughed. “Again! Again!”
She ran to her bedroom with me close behind, without anyone yelling at us or hitting the underside of our floor with a broom.
5
SEVEN DIFFERENT KINDS OF
GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE
My hand reached for the hood of my raincoat to pull over my head, but the late-summer rain had started so heavy and fast my hair was already soaked. I walked over to the cobblestoned wall where my partner stood, his face engulfed by his raincoat’s hood. “Well, what do we do now?” I shouted, straining for my voice to carry through the pouring rain.
“We go home,” said John, my friend Emily’s husband, who had hired me to help him with landscaping six months earlier. He gave me a shrug and attempted a half smile, even though his forest green raincoat was still peppered with the hail that had pelleted us before the rain started. He took off his glasses, wiping the fog and drops of rain from them before putting them back on.
I drooped my head in defeat. We’d been doing that a lot lately, cutting our jobs short due to rain. The season’s end was near, and so was my main source of income.
We loaded the garbage cans, trimmers, and rakes into the back of John’s yellow pickup, and he smiled at me again before getting in and driving away. I watched him go, before my eyes returned to my car, parked on the side of the street. The front windows were open. Shit.
When I got home, I balanced on one foot in the linoleum square that marked the entryway, struggling to pull off my rubber Xtratuf boots. I unbuttoned my Carhartt pants and pushed them down to my knees so I could step out of them. They were so thick with mud and rain they didn’t fall flat to the floor and remained standing in their accordion-like shape. Real Alaskans have a saying that that’s when, and only then, a pair of Carhartts are ready to wash: when you’ve taken them off and they still stand on their own.
Mia was with Jamie that evening until seven, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with my time. A few textbooks sat on my kitchen table, reminding me of the homework that had become part of my daily life. I had begun the painstakingly slow process of earning a degree and had registered for twelve credits: two online classes and one that met in a building close to Mia’s day care. When I’d met with the admissions counselor, I’d told her I just wanted to get an associate of arts transfer degree. Most of the classes I’d taken in high school through the Running Start program, which allowed me to take college classes for high school credit, and at the University of Alaska counted toward that. A two-year degree at a community college would be the easiest place to start, and I’d have my core classes completed in the cheapest way possible. Then, I could transfer to a four-year university with some ease. But, like most single parents with not much support, it would take me years to get to that point.
Since I’d already claimed Mia on my taxes, getting a government grant to pay for school was sort of an easy process. Claiming her as a dependent, and having the tax forms to prove it, was the simplest way to show I supported a child with my minimal (nonexistent) wages.
The Pell Grant, a federal program that offers financial aid to low-income students, paid more than my full-time tuition for the quarter, leaving me with $1,300 extra. With $275 a month in child support, and $45 a week from cleaning the preschool, that meant we had about $700 a month to float us through. Food stamp money was a little less than $300, and we still had the WIC checks. Thanks to TBRA and LIHEAP, housing expenses hovered around $150, which left my expenses for car insurance, phone, and Internet. With the winter season, I wasn’t working anymore, so the grant for Mia’s day care ended. Getting an education, going to class, didn’t qualify me for childcare assistance, so I had to find people to watch Mia for a couple of hours twice a week during my French class, which was not only required but met in person. Even though I kind of hated everything about it, most weeks it was the only time I sat in a room with other people.
Many nights I’d make a large cup of coffee after Mia went to sleep and stay up until one or two in the morning to finish homework. Mia didn’t take naps, and she hardly stopped talking or moving. She needed my constant attention and care. I couldn’t find work to fill the gaps in my schedule, so we went for long walks through the woods and by the ocean shore, like I’d longed to do when I was working, only now I walked with the heaviness of only four hours of sleep and a lot less money. It had been easier when Mia was younger, before she started walking and her protests lasted only as long as it took to bounce her to sleep. Now, her strong-willed nature started to really come through. Mia definitely had an independence to her spirit; so much that she wore me out in a single morning.
But after she’d gone to bed, I stared at my textbooks in the stillness of our kitchen. The tedious task of reading assignments and end-of-chapter discussion questions in front of me only magnified my loneliness. That summer had been a period of constant movement as I focused on getting secure housing. Now that everything was in place, my mind could settle a bit, and the realization that I was taking care of a child all alone creeped into my mind like a thick fog. With so much drama revolving around Mia’s time with her dad, and because his visits were only two or three hours at a time, I never felt like I got a break. Mia’s energy knew no end. On walks, she insisted on pushing the stroller herself at a snail’s pace. At parks, she insisted on me pushing her for what felt like forever on a swing, or me watching her as she went down a slide, over and over and over again. I was almost thirty, and many of my friends were getting married, buying houses, and starting families. They were doing everything the right way. I stopped calling them completely, too embarrassed to admit how bad things had gotten. If I had stopped to add it up, the Pell Grant, SNAP, TBRA, LIHEAP, WIC, Medicaid, and childcare would total seven different programs I’d applied for. I needed seven different kinds of government assistance to survive. My world was quiet amid the constant chaos of a toddler, of shuffling, of stress.
For the first time, my birthday came that month without anyone in my family noticing. Jamie must have felt sorry for me and agreed to take Mia and me out to paint our own ceramic mugs. Over dinner at the Olive Garden, I watched him hold Mia in his lap while she shoved handfuls of pasta in her mouth.
When we pulled up to my apartment, I sat there for a few moments before opening the door.
“Will you come in?” I asked.
“Why?” he asked, tapping the steering wheel.
I fought back tears for wanting, needing his company. “Maybe you could put Mia to bed?”
He pursed his lips in frustration but reached for the keys to turn off the car. I watched him, then looked back at Mia with a smile. Jamie and Mia were the only family I had.
I wanted Jamie to stay the night, even if it was to sleep on the couch.
On a normal day, every time I thought about going to bed alone, it felt like there was a monster in my chest clawing at me from the inside. I’d curl up as much as possible, and sometimes I hugged my pillow tight, but nothing soothed the deep pit that echoed inside. I desperately wanted it out, but every night it was persistent; it remained there. Now on my birthday, my first birthday in years without someone to snuggle me to sleep, I fought that feeling.
“Maybe you could stay?” I mumbled, looking at the floor instead of Jamie.
“No,” he said, almost laughing. He walked out the door without saying goodbye or happy birthday. I regretted asking.
I sat on the floor and called my dad. It was almost ten p.m., but I knew he’d still be up, watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC with his wife, Charlotte, like
they did almost every night. I’d liked that about living with them. After Jamie kicked us out, I stayed at their place for a few weeks when I had nowhere else to go.
“Hey, Dad,” I said and paused. I didn’t know what to say; I needed him but could never say it. The secret language of my family was that no one ever spoke.
“Hi, Steph,” he answered, sounding a little surprised. I never called anymore. We hadn’t seen each other or talked since Mia’s birthday party three months earlier, even though he lived a few hours away. “What’s up?”
I took a breath in. “It’s my birthday.” My voice quavered a little.
“Oh, Steph,” he said, releasing a deep sigh.
We were both quiet. I couldn’t hear the TV in the background and pictured their dark living room, lit by the paused image on the screen. Maybe Charlotte had gone out for a cigarette. I wondered if they still didn’t drink wine on weekdays.
* * *
In the beginning, just after I left Jamie and took refuge with my dad, he watched me sit at his kitchen table late into the night, surrounded by piles of paperwork and court documents. I imagined that Dad was trying to make sense of what was happening in my life. All he knew was that I had no money, no home, and Mia was only seven months old. He had no idea how to make it better. He could feed me but couldn’t really afford to. The housing crash had already impacted his occupation as an electrician. It was 2008, and developers struggled with not having anyone to develop anything for. I’d tried to ease the burden of having us there by purchasing food for everyone with my food stamps. I made dinner or breakfast and tried to clean the house during the day—but I knew it wasn’t enough. I was asking a lot of Dad and Charlotte, who were already working hard to make ends meet. They’d moved to the property four or five years ago and had planned to live in a mobile home while they built their dream house. Then their property value dropped drastically; their plans vanished. Charlotte worked from home as a medical coder for insurance companies, something for which she’d had to go back to school to get a special certificate. Dad had been an electrician since he graduated high school.
Charlotte had purchased the trailer after her divorce, where she was left to raise her son alone on a modest salary. Dad, in his best effort to make it a home, built a large porch off the back, where they had about a dozen different bird feeders. Mia loved watching from the living room window as the blue jays swooped in to grab peanuts, flapping her arms and squealing with delight. Dad laughed whenever she did. “She looks exactly like you did when you were that age,” he’d say with a sort of awe.
One night, Dad came home late, his arms draped with bags of groceries. After putting Mia to bed, I sat in the living room with Charlotte, watching TV. Dad slipped outside to the hot tub with a bottle of wine. Over the noise of the TV, Charlotte and I began to hear what sounded like sobbing. A grown man sobbing. I’d never heard anything like it. Charlotte kept going out to the porch to check on him.
“Stop it!” I heard her finally yell. “You’re scaring your daughter!”
I’d never seen or heard my dad cry, yet, as a child would, I assumed it was my fault. I’d burdened him by asking for help at a time when he couldn’t afford it. Earlier that week, he’d told me that I needed to move out. When I told Charlotte, she’d reassured me I could stay as long as I needed. I wondered how much they argued about me.
Dad’s breakdown felt ominous in that we’d have to live somewhere else. As much as I tried to feel compassion for him, the thought of Mia and me living in a place where I’d have to pay rent was so impossible without me being employed, I couldn’t even imagine what it looked like. I hadn’t had any time to recover from the shock of being homeless with a baby. Charlotte was right. He was scaring me, but probably not in the way she thought.
When Charlotte came back inside for the third time, she returned to her seat on the couch, and we didn’t say anything to each other. She unmuted the TV and we continued watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann. I couldn’t turn my head to look at her but I tried to remain still. Calm.
Finally, I stood up to go to bed. My uncle had brought over a short camper trailer and parked it in the driveway. Mia and I had made a temporary home there. The roof leaked over the door, and we couldn’t use the teeny kitchen or bathroom, but it had an electric heater and a space for us to sleep.
“You goin’ to bed, Steph?” Charlotte asked in an attempt to act like it was a normal night.
“Yeah, I’m pretty tired,” I lied. I paused at the door and looked at her. “Thank you so much for letting us stay here.”
Charlotte smiled, like she always did, and said, “You can stay as long as you want,” but now we both seemed to know that was no longer true.
When I peeked my head inside the door of the trailer, I saw Mia sleeping soundly on the fold-out sofa bed. I crawled under our blanket, teetering on the outer edge beside her. I wasn’t tired, I just wanted to lie there and listen to her nighttime noises, to forget everything else in our new world. I turned over to my back, then to my side, but I couldn’t get the sound of my dad’s sobbing out of my head. Maybe I could rent a lot in an RV campground for a while and park the trailer there. Or maybe we could move it back behind my grandpa’s house in Anacortes, but I couldn’t imagine living so close to Grandma, who I’d heard had taken to feeding fifty feral cats.
An hour later, through the thin walls of the trailer, I heard doors slamming at the main house. Dad and Charlotte were having a fight, and I heard a series of crashes and thuds. Then silence.
I slipped into the house to see what had happened. In the kitchen, magnets from the fridge were scattered on the floor. The table had been moved out of place. There was an uneasy stillness. And then I heard them on the back porch. My dad was still crying but now apologizing to Charlotte over and over again.
When Mia and I went in the next morning for breakfast, Dad had already left for work. Charlotte sat at the kitchen table, still in its off-centered place. I sat down, then instinctively reached for her hand. She looked up at me, her eyes puffy and dull.
“He’s never done anything like that before,” she said, her gaze locked on the opposite wall. Then suddenly, her eyes met mine. “He’s such a teddy bear.”
The events of the previous night began spilling out: how she had told Dad that she was leaving for her sister’s and started packing a suitcase, how she’d even said that she was taking the dog. I looked at her in admiration, wishing I’d had the strength to leave when Jamie’s outbursts started once I was pregnant. To be as strong.
“That was my mistake,” Charlotte told me, looking down at Jack, curled up on the floor by her feet. “That’s where I went wrong.” She put her coffee cup down on the table and carefully rolled up her sleeve, exposing deep purple bruises.
I looked down at Mia, who was playing happily next to the dog on the kitchen floor, patting his back, saying, “Dog, dog” with each one. Her hair was mussed from sleep, and she still wore her footie pajamas.
I closed my eyes. I had to leave.
That day I started calling homeless shelters. A shelter would, at the very least, be a roof over our heads for a certain length of time, and at best it would allow my daughter and me to live without fear of someone’s violence. By the time Dad called from work to tell me to leave, I’d already packed our car to move.
When I tried to confide in my aunt and brother about the bruises Charlotte had shown me, Dad had already talked to them and told them I’d made it up for attention, that I’d made up everything that’d happened with Jamie for attention, too.
* * *
“I’m sorry, Steph,” Dad repeated over the phone on the night of my birthday. He started to say that he’d been busy at work, but I stopped listening, regretting that I’d called.
He tried to make up for my forgotten birthday. A week later, I got a card in the mail with a check for $100. I stared at it, knowing it was a lot of money for him to just give away. Unable to fight my anger toward him for kicking us out, I d
ecided to do something reckless with the money. Instead of saving it to put toward a bill or necessary toiletries, Mia and I went out to lunch at the new Thai place in town, the one that had little bowls of rice sweetened with coconut milk and mangoes for dessert. Mia got rice so embedded in the strands of her fine baby curls that she needed a bath. I put her down for a nap afterward, sat in front of the computer at my desk area in the kitchen, and then decided to do something solely for myself.
Match.com’s website had been open on my browser for several days. I’d already filled out the profile, uploaded pictures, and looked around at the profiles of men my age. My parents had both found their current significant others on there, and so had my aunt. While I wasn’t totally sure I would find that, one thing was certainly lacking in my life: a social outlet. Most of my friendships had faded over the past year because I’d isolated myself and hidden from the embarrassment of my daily life. In the hours at night, long after Mia had gone to sleep, when I sat still for the first time all day, I longed for company, even if it was just someone to email or talk with on the phone. Not my friends who knew about all the drama that surrounded my circumstances; I was tired of hearing myself talk about that. I wanted to flirt, to escape into the person I’d been before all of this, to that tattooed girl with her chin-length brown hair under a kerchief, who’d danced to bands with a sweatshirt tied around her waist. I wanted to make new friends.
It seemed entirely too desperate to be on a dating site in my situation, but I didn’t care. I talked to men as far away as Salt Lake City, Utah, and Winthrop, Washington. I preferred men who lived a good distance from me, because there wasn’t any risk of me developing feelings for them. There was no way for me to travel to see them or for them to come stay with me, since Mia saw her dad only for short visits. All of that felt like too much work, anyway. I really just needed to laugh and remind myself of the person I was before motherhood and poverty had taken over every aspect of my personality. I’d completely lost that person, the one who’d been so free to come and go, meet friends or not, work three jobs to save up and travel. I needed to know that person was still there.
Maid Page 5