“They actually had me on W-2 T because, um, I go to counseling for depression….I go see my therapist once a week. And they have me doing a job search. They’re trying to get me job-ready, but they’re also trying to get me to apply for SSI.”
“Better to not live on either,” Carol said, telling Arleen to get a job.
“I know,” Arleen said.
Arleen fudged her income, telling Carol she actually received child support. And after Carol said, “We don’t have any kids in this building,” Arleen lied about her kids too, mentioning only Jafaris. “I need to come see where you live now,” Carol told Arleen. She said she’d stop by Thirteenth Street in a couple of hours.
Back in her apartment, Arleen took out the trash and swept the carpet and hid all of Jori’s clothes. There was little she could do about the bathroom—there was standing water in the clogged tub, and the sink didn’t work—but the light was also out, so maybe Carol wouldn’t notice. In the kitchen, Arleen stood over the sink, staring at a pile of dishes. Little rubbed himself against her legs and meowed for food. They were out of dish soap, so Crystal’s laundry detergent would have to do. As the water ran, Arleen placed both hands on either side of the sink. She scrubbed the pots. Her phone rang. “It’s nothing,” she said to the person on the other line. “Nothing. Nothing.” Then she allowed herself a hard cry.
Crystal, who had stayed on the couch and watched Arleen frantically scurry around, got up and embraced Arleen. Arleen cried into Crystal’s shoulder, and Crystal did not pull away. When Arleen stepped back, Crystal said, “I promise you, if you believe, you will have a house.”
The apartment looked decent when Carol showed up. Arleen had even sprayed Febreze. After a brisk walk-through, Carol sat down at the glass dining table. “This just, honestly, does not look good,” she began. “And, yeah, I understand your sister died and everything, but how is that your landlord’s problem?”
“I understand what you’re saying.” Arleen thought that white people liked it when she said “I understand what you’re saying,” and “I’m trying to get my stuff together and stop making dumb choices,” and “I’m going to start going back to school for my GED.” And eye contact, lots of eye contact.
“I’m not saying it isn’t terrible,” Carol continued. “But I mean, we actually have an employee whose mother died. And she had no insurance or anything. The county paid. You know, they give you three hundred dollars or whatever for the funeral. And that’s the funeral she got.”
Eye contact.
“So what changes are you going to make so that I’m not throwing you out in a month?” Carol tapped her pen.
At this point, Arleen had applied for or called on twenty-five apartments, and Carol was her only hope. Sensing that hope pulling away, Arleen played the only card left in her hand. She offered Carol the option of arranging a “vendor payment” with W-2, which would automatically deduct rent from each month’s check. “So that by the time I get my check you already have your payment.”
“I like that!” Carol responded, surprising herself. “That sounds like a good compromise.” Then she added, “The cat can’t come.”
“Okay.”
“I was going to say, you got to worry about feeding you and your kid.”
“I want to give you a hug because, let me just.” Arleen hugged Carol, who blushed and dashed out the door. Arleen hugged Crystal and ran around and danced. “I got a house! I can’t believe it! I got a hoooooouse!”
—
Carol told Arleen that she could move in the first of the month. Until then, Arleen planned to take her boys to a shelter and lock her things in storage. As a shelter resident, she would be eligible for Red Cross funds that would cover her security deposit. It was the only way she could give Carol all her money.1 Arleen collected cardboard boxes from neighborhood liquor stores and began packing her things.
“Don’t cry when I leave,” Arleen told Crystal as she placed dishes in a box.
“Bitch, you act like you gonna be gone forever. You gonna come around. ’Cause you can’t live without me now.”
“And you can’t live without me either.” Arleen smiled.
Crystal began clapping her hands and singing, “I ain’t going. I ain’t going.” Then she slapped Arleen on the back.
“Ow, Crystal!” Arleen said, and the two women wrestled a bit, laughing.
As Arleen resumed packing, Crystal asked, “Could you leave me some dishes?” Arleen set a few aside.
At sunrise on Thursday, the sky was the color of flat beer. By midmorning, it was the color of a robin’s egg. The still and leafless tree branches looked like cracks in the sky’s shell. Cars rolled slowly through the streets, caked with salt and winter’s grime. Milwaukee Public Schools canceled classes because of the cold advisory. Arleen’s boys weren’t going anyway. She needed them to help her move. Jori loaded a U-Haul truck that a family friend had rented for them. The cold gripped him. His fingers and ears began to sting. Icy air filled his mouth, and it felt like his gums were hardening into one of those plastic molds of teeth in the school nurse’s office. His breath was a thick white gauze circling his face. He smiled through it, happy to be useful.
After a few trips, Jori ate his pride and put on Crystal’s sand-colored coat. Crystal herself sat on the floor, covered in church-donated blankets, eating banana pudding and watching talk shows.
The night before the move, Arleen had glued on a new wig and cleaned her shoes. She wanted to look younger than she was because who knew whom she might meet at the shelter or Public Storage. No shelters had called back, and Arleen didn’t know where she and her boys would sleep that night. She would have to worry about that later. For now, she was focused on taking what she could to a storage unit.
The man behind the counter at Public Storage wore a pinky ring. His hair was slicked back, and he smelled of liquor and cheap aftershave. Arleen’s storage unit would be C-33, a ten-by-ten-footer. “It’s the same size as the truck you got,” the man said with a Texas drawl. “All you got to do is be creative.” Everything fit easily. Arleen had scraped together $21 for the discounted fee by selling some food stamps and a space heater. (Next month’s fee would be $41.) But she didn’t realize she had to buy a lock and $8 worth of insurance too. She didn’t have it. The Texan, whose weatherworn face told her that he had seen hard times too, found Arleen a lock and let her slide on the insurance. She thanked him before shuffling through the cold concrete lot to close the orange aluminum door to C-33. At least her stuff had a home.
—
They spent the night, then the weekend, back at Thirteenth Street with Crystal, sleeping on the floor.
Arleen called the Lodge and other shelters, but they were full as usual. On Monday morning, she tried domestic-violence shelters and secured a room at one she had stayed at years ago, when fleeing Jafaris’s father. When Arleen called Carol to tell her the name of the shelter for Red Cross money purposes, she learned that Carol had rented the apartment to someone else. Arleen didn’t ask why, but she figured Carol had found a better tenant, someone with more income or no kids. Arleen let out a long, emptied-out sigh and balled herself up in a chair. “I’m back to square one,” she said.
Soured, Arleen gathered their last remaining things in the apartment. She took down her curtains and remembered some dirty clothes that were in Crystal’s closet. She and Jafaris brought Little upstairs to Trisha.
“Take care of kitten,” Jafaris asked.
“I am, baby, I promise,” Trisha answered.
He thought and said, “Give him some food.”
Arleen planned on leaving behind her love seat, which had collapsed since Crystal began sleeping on it. Besides that and a scattering of clothes, blankets, and broken lamps, the place was barren. Then Arleen remembered that she had bought a $5 adapter that connected the stove to the gas line. She told Jori to remove the part, which would have rendered the stove useless.
Seeing this, Crystal screamed, “Get out of my house!
” She began picking up Arleen’s things and throwing them out the front door. “I don’t need none of your shit!…Got me fucked up!”
“Stankin’ ass bitch!” Arleen yelled, getting in Crystal’s face.
“You call me stankin’, but whose clothes you got on? Mines. My shirt!…Three days in a row, you nasty bitch!”
“I’ll hit you in yo’ mouth!” Jori yelled at Crystal, running up. He put his nose inches away from Crystal’s face and cocked his fist back. “I’m fittin’ to scrap you!” he yelled. “I don’t give a fuck about no fucking police!”
Suddenly, Quentin was in the room. He had been showing prospective tenants the rear apartment when he overheard the commotion. Quentin walked in the open door and grabbed Jori by the shirt collar. “Hey! Hey!” he barked.
Jori lunged at Crystal. “Come on!” he yelled, his fists flailing. Quentin tugged him back. Crystal only stepped closer. “Look, boy,” she said, chuckling. “You are not hard as you think.”
“No! No!” Jafaris cried. Trying to be helpful, he had found a broken shower rod and was hitting Crystal with it. Arleen grabbed Jafaris and pulled him out the door. At Quentin’s prodding, Jori moved in that direction, stopping to kick in Crystal’s floor-model television.
As the family left, Crystal stepped onto the front porch and continued throwing their things everywhere. The front lawn was soon littered with random stuff: schoolbooks, a Precious Moments doll, a bottle of cologne. “Y’all ain’t untouchable,” Crystal was screaming. “This is America! This is America!”
If Arleen hadn’t been under so much pressure, she might have realized that removing the adapter was throwing Crystal’s desperation in her face. Maybe she would have been able to defuse the situation. Under better circumstances, they could have been friends. They got on when there was food in their bellies and some certainty about the next day. But Arleen was in the press of the city, depleted. So when Crystal exploded, Arleen exploded right alongside her.2
Crystal could quickly turn violent. The year before she met Arleen, Crystal had been examined by a clinical psychologist who diagnosed her with Bipolar Disorder, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Reactive Attachment Disorder, Borderline Intellectual Functioning, Neglect of a Child, Sexual Abuse of a Child as Victim, and Emerging Personality Disorder Dynamics with Borderline Features. Her childhood had left a mark. “Crystal is highly sensitive to anticipated rejection, abandonment, and harm in her relationships,” the psychologist wrote in his report. “She has immense underlying rage at significant others for their perceived unwillingness and/or inability to respond to her needs for nurturance, security, and esteem….She has limited ability to tolerate much in the way of frustration or anxiety and a proneness to act out her tensions without much…forethought or deliberation….She is still seen as being fragilely integrated.” The report surmised that Crystal had an IQ of about 70 and anticipated that she would need “long-term mental health treatment and supportive assistance if she [was] to be maintained in the community as an adult.”
And yet there she stood alone, in an empty apartment. Crystal picked through the things Arleen had left behind. When she wandered into the kitchen, she discovered that Jori hadn’t been able to remove the stove piece, but he did cut the electrical cord. Crystal told herself she wasn’t planning on eating that day anyhow. Pastor had called a fast.
18.
LOBSTER ON FOOD STAMPS
The line around the welfare building spanned the length of Vliet Street and wrapped around the corner. Barricades had been erected and extra police officers summoned. The governor had announced that food vouchers would be given to households affected by storms that had flooded parts of the state, including Milwaukee County, and by seven a.m., thousands of people had lined up, jostling for position and even trying to get inside by taking a door off its hinges.
The Marcia P. Coggs Human Services Center was massive. Three stories of cream brick, it had 170,000 square feet and 232 large windows. The building had originally held a Schuster’s department store. But the store, along with the surrounding neighborhood and city, had fallen on hard times around midcentury. It was finally shuttered in 1961 and the building sold to the county. When the building was renovated in the early 2000s, it consolidated 450 county employees under one roof. A California-based artist was commissioned to install bright, multicolored ceramic tiles above the windows that displayed words like “contemplation” and “dance.” She called her installation “Community Key.”1
A little past eight a.m., Larraine walked past the crowd and made her way inside, hardly looking up to notice the strolling security guards or escalators transporting people between floors to fill out forms and meet with caseworkers. She took a number (4023) and waited. Larraine was there to get her food stamps reinstated. Soon, not a seat was empty, and Room 102 filled with the sounds of children and chatter. An older woman leaned on her umbrella and tried to sleep. A mother spanked a toddler. Another was engrossed in Women Who Love Too Much. After one hour and forty minutes, Larraine’s number was called. Not bad, she thought, having spent entire days in the welfare building.2
“I had an appointment on the twentieth of this month,” Larraine explained to the multitasking and manicured woman behind the glass. “But I got, between the time of my scheduled phone call, I had gotten evicted.”
“You have to reschedule your appointment,” the woman replied. It was another missed meeting and another canceled benefit, both the result of an eviction that threw everything off course. The woman handed Larraine some papers. “Here is a list of things you need to bring with you.”
“I don’t have anything with me,” Larraine replied, reading the list. Most of the necessary paperwork was in storage.
“Well, if you don’t have anything, then you can’t bring anything.” The woman smiled.
Larraine looked confused. “But will I still get my benefits?”
“That’s why you have to come in for the appointment….I can give you a food pantry referral. Would you like to go to the food pantry?”
Larraine took an escalator downstairs to the food pantry, walking out with two grocery bags filled with canned beef and kidney beans and other things she hated. Sometimes, family members who didn’t know any better would ask Larraine why she didn’t just call to schedule her appointments. Larraine would laugh and ask, “Oh, you want to try the number?” She had never once gotten anything but a busy signal.
At her follow-up appointment, Larraine managed to get her $80-a-month food-stamp allowance reinstated even without all the necessary paperwork. Leaving the welfare building, she shuffled past throngs of bored, tired people and street alcoholics congregating outside and into a nearby furniture store with bars over the windows. Inside, experimental jazz was playing over an organized clutter of plump recliners, dark wood dining-room sets, and brass lamps.
A salesman with a Middle Eastern accent approached Larraine, who asked to see the armoires. She inspected a seven-piece bedroom set. She gawked at a sixty-two-inch television.
“I have TVs smaller than this,” the salesman said.
“No, but I want this one!” Larraine smiled.
“Why don’t you do it layaway, then?”
“You have layaway? I love layaway!”
Larraine was participating in a kind of cleansing ritual, swapping the welfare building’s miasma of unwashed bodies and dirt with the smell of a new leather sofa. She was also entertaining a fantasy of making a good home for herself and her daughters. Jayme was finally out of prison and staying with Larraine and Beaker until she found an apartment; and maybe Megan would come around. She used to put the girls’ clothes, new clothes, on layaway.
To Larraine, putting something on layaway was saving. “I can’t leave money in my bank,” she said. “When you’re on SSI you can only have so much money in the bank, and it’s got to be less than a thousand dollars. Because if it’s more…they cut your payments until that money is spent.” Larraine was talking about SSI’s “resource limit
.” She was allowed to have up to $2,000 in the bank, not $1,000 like she thought, but anything more than that could result in her losing benefits.3 Larraine saw this rule as a clear disincentive to save. “If I can’t keep my money in the bank, then I might as well buy something worthwhile…because I know once I pay on it, it’s mine, and no one can take it from me, just like my jewelry.” Well, no one except Eagle Moving.
Before her eviction, Beaker had asked Larraine why she didn’t just sell her jewelry and pay Tobin. “Of course I’m not going to do that,” she said. “I worked way too hard for me to sell my jewelry….I’m not going to sell my life savings because I’m homeless or I got evicted.” It wasn’t like she had just stumbled into a pit and would soon climb out. Larraine imagined she would be poor and rent-strapped forever. And if that was to be her lot in life, she might as well have a little jewelry to show for it. She wanted a new television, not some worn and boxy thing inherited from Lane and Susan. She wanted a bed no one else had slept in. She loved perfume and could tell you what a woman was wearing after passing her on the sidewalk. “Even people like myself,” Larraine said, “we deserve, too, something brand-new.”4
Larraine didn’t put anything on layaway that day. But when her food stamps kicked in, she went to the grocery store and bought two lobster tails, shrimp, king crab legs, salad, and lemon meringue pie. Bringing it all back to Beaker’s trailer, she added Cajun seasoning to the crab legs and cooked the lobster tails in lemon butter at 350 degrees. She ate everything alone, in a single sitting, washing it down with Pepsi. The meal consumed her entire monthly allocation of food stamps. It was her and Glen’s anniversary, and she wanted to do something special. “I know our relationship may not have been good, but it was our relationship,” she said. “Some things I will not ever get over.” But the lobster helped.
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