Without a Net

by Michelle Tea

  On my visit I recognized a woman I had gone to middle school with, repeating the pattern of many women there—welfare, living in the projects. I spoke with her, but we didn’t have much to say. I learned that a childhood friend of mine had been murdered in a shootout. During that visit I felt that Sunnydale could be anywhere in the United States, in any Third World country; it will never be seen on any postcard from San Francisco, and remains unseen by the elite within the city. I left Sunnydale that day feeling grateful that I was able to escape from the prison I called home for twenty-three years.

  A CATHOLIC LEG

  TERRY RYAN

  MANY CHILDREN GET THE SHOCK OF THEIR LIVES WHEN THEY DISCOVER THE truth about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. My greatest shock, which had nothing to do with fiction, came when I realized that our family was poor.

  The news should have come as no surprise, considering that my parents, Evelyn and Leo (Kelly) Ryan, had ten children to support on Dad’s meager pay as a machinist in the small Midwestern town of Defiance, Ohio. Still, the precise scene that triggered this awakening is lost to me; in retrospect, many would serve as appropriate epiphanies.

  Was it the day in early August 1948 that Mom’s labor pains began, and she and Dad raced in our old jalopy not to the hospital, but to the bank to borrow twenty-five dollars?

  Twenty-five dollars would pay at least part of the hospital expenses when my mother finally gave birth to her seventh child, Michael, later that day. My parents knew from experience that the total bill would be sixty-five dollars—it had been sixty-five dollars in 1944 when Bruce was born, and in 1946 when I was born; it would be sixty-five dollars in 1950 when Barb was born, and in 1952 when Betsy was born. In 1937, 1939, 1940, and 1942, when Lea Anne, Dick, Bub, and Rog, respectively, came into the world, the bill never topped twenty-three dollars and fifty cents. Only in 1954, when the last of the ten Ryan babies, Dave, was born, would the price shoot up to a phenomenal ninety-five dollars.

  Was it the moment in the early fifties when I noticed I happened to be wearing everyone else’s clothes, and always had been?

  My wardrobe consisted of shoes my older sister Lea Anne had outgrown, shirts and pants formerly worn by my four older brothers, jackets and winter coats donated from relatives as distant as an aunt’s sister-in-law’s adopted daughter.

  Or could it have been any Thursday afternoon in the mid-fifties when I witnessed my lilac-perfumed and white-gloved Aunt Lucy pull up to the curb in her forest green DeSoto to take my mother grocery shopping at the A&P?

  It took all those years of Thursdays for me to understand that Aunt Lucy didn’t just drive my mother downtown to the market. She in fact paid for two shopping carts of food every week, without fail. My mother was shy in the face of such generosity and chose from the shelves only the most vital and inexpensive items: flour, soap, sugar, bread. It was Aunt Lucy who went hog-wild, filling the carts with hamburger, chicken, eggs, tomatoes, fruit, cereal, cookies, ice cream, sausage, and soup. By the age of ten, I realized that without the weekly visits of our beloved aunt, we would surely have gone hungry.

  Then again, how about the night when I was closing in on seven years old and stood in the doorway of the kitchen watching my burly red-headed father drink himself into a raging stupor, as he did every evening, on whiskey and beer?

  In his twenties, Dad played the violin and sang with a roving dance band. I don’t think he ever imagined he’d eventually have to forfeit his free-as-a-bird life of laughter, drink, and dance to toil in a machine shop forty hours a week.

  It occurred to me then that he was consuming something far more dear than alcohol. At least a third of his weekly paycheck evaporated in this way, and perhaps more. Not to mention the effect of the drinking on his disposition. He roared his way through the night, a shot glass in one hand and a beer bottle in the other, in a mad monologue that could be heard a half a block away. An inebriated Dad was, as my mother used to say, “about as affable as a bee-stung bear,” a generous quote that makes him sound almost charming. He certainly could be—when he was sober, when he put his mind to it.

  He had an Irish love of words and music, and a talent for entertaining that had surfaced when he was quite young. In his twenties, Dad played the violin and sang with a roving dance band that toured northwestern Ohio. I don’t think he ever imagined he’d eventually have to forfeit his free-as-a-bird life of laughter, drink, and dance to toil in a machine shop forty hours a week.

  Granted, my father worked hard every day, under pre-OSHA conditions—no ear plugs, no goggles, no heavy aprons, no steel-toed shoes. As a machinist at a locally owned plant called Serrick’s, he tended a stationary screw machine ten times his size that consumed buckets of oil and melted solid bars of metal, re-forming them into bits of useful hardware, such as screws, nuts, and bolts. Serrick’s had a score of these metallic monsters, lined up in rows, forming a perfectly aligned orchard of steel. Their collective vibratory roar was known to loosen leaves from neighboring trees.

  Dad would arrive home every afternoon with hot-oil burns and bits of metal embedded in his clothes, skin, and hair. The grease, which caused boils on his wide, pink, freckled arms, never washed out of his work shirts and pants. His shoes fairly squished when he walked. He once dropped an unwieldy hunk of heavy metal on his feet, crushing his shoes and maiming his toenails for life. But he never missed a day of work because of drinking.

  One of the most memorable benefits of Dad’s job, at least as far as the Ryan kids were concerned, was the annual Serrick’s summer picnic. While the adults hung around in the shade of tall, sprawling oaks drinking beer and eating ham sandwiches, the kids clawed their way through twenty square feet of ankle-deep sawdust that had been salted with nickels. Six-foot-long coolers held free icy-cold bottles of pop in every flavor. Each of us drank as many as possible, because opportunities like this were rare. I always started out with Dodger Wild Cherry, moved on to Dodger Cream Soda, and finished up with a large Coke. By the end of the day, my right arm would be nicely chilled from dipping into the cooler so often.

  Of course, no matter how much money Dad earned or wasted, having ten kids was almost guaranteed to keep his family living at the poverty level. In a single year, ten trips to the dentist, ten new pairs of shoes, and ten piles of school books would put the jackhammer to anyone’s bottom line.

  Knowing we were poor, however, didn’t make my brothers and sisters and me any less happy. In the days before public assistance, Defiance, Ohio, was a good place to grow up in if money was short. The local Lions Club bought our eyeglasses—no small expense for the five of us who needed them. St. Mary’s Catholic School waived the annual fees so the Ryans could attend parochial school. Friends and relatives (like Aunt Lucy) were always there to help out.

  But the real reason we were a positive-thinking group was our mother, Evelyn Ryan, a woman of high energy and great mirth. Her main creative outlet, aside from having produced the ten of us, was her talent for winning contests. What she called her “knack for words” brought cash and furnishings into the house. In the contest boom years of the forties, fifties, and sixties, magazines and supermarket aisles were filled with product entry blanks, offering big prizes for clever jingles and twenty-five-word-or-less statements on why Dial Soap or Kellogg’s Corn Flakes or Heinz Ketchup was the best of its breed. My mother’s attention to detail—like noticing that Tootsie Rolls were divided into one-inch segments—was one of the keys to her success. This entry was worth ten dollars:

  For chewy, toothsome, wholesome goodness

  Tootsie Rolls are right—

  Lots of nibbling for a nickel

  And they show me where to bite.

  How she found even the time to think clearly in a house with twelve people, most of them under the age of ten, I’ll never know. Mom scribbled funny verse and contest entries while ironing, while cooking, while sitting in the back of the church at Sunday Mass. What she didn’t find humorous in the world, including her own financial need, cou
ld fit into a teacup.

  Going, Going, Gone!

  We can’t take it with us—

  That much we all know;

  My trouble’s been keeping

  The stuff ’til I go.

  Mom won cars, trips to Europe and New York, TVs, radios, clocks, watches, cameras, bicycles, thousands of dollars in cash, and every appliance we ever owned—from toasters to coffeemakers to blenders to refrigerators. Thanks to our constant financial difficulties, she had to sell the largest prizes to keep the family afloat. Smaller cash prizes were used to pay off medical bills and to spring kids’ raincoats and shoes, boys’ shirts, and girls’ dresses from the limbo of layaway at the local JCPenney store. Beyond the dollar value of all the wins, they instilled in my family a belief in miracles, which buoyed us in hard times.

  MY MOTHER, FIVE YEARS YOUNGER THAN DAD, WAS BORN IN 1913, the year Congress imposed federal income taxes. The year Henry Ford pushed the “on” button on the first moving assembly line, and the year a Model T automobile cost four hundred and forty dollars. This was also the year that workers’ wages averaged just under three dollars a day, a loaf of bread cost a nickel, a dozen eggs cost a quarter, and a quart of milk cost a dime. A dollar could feed a person for almost a week.

  Mom’s contest wins brought in a lot of needed money and prizes, but neither her wins nor Dad’s weekly paycheck could keep up with leapfrogging expenses. By 1944, after seven years of working at Serrick’s machine shop, Dad’s take-home pay was $3207.46, just over sixty-one dollars per week. With five children and a wife to support, he must have found it daunting to make ends meet.

  In 1954, he would be trying to raise ten children on almost the same pay. Forget making ends meet. Those ends were moving in opposite directions.

  Still, the truth is that Kelly Ryan did not enjoy labor—whether he was paid for it or not. He worked at Serrick’s from eight to four because he had to. Anything beyond that—mowing the lawn, mending a cracked stair step, fixing a broken lamp—was, to Dad, a useless and falsely pious enterprise.

  He liked to take the family for car rides in the countryside when the weather was balmy and the crops were high. We headed out one warm Sunday afternoon, piling into our old blue-and-white Chevy Bel Air, leaving behind appliances in various states of disrepair and a fragile screen door hanging from its frame by a thread. Two blocks from home, Dad spied a middle-aged man raking up leaves from an otherwise pristine lawn and said, in all sincerity, “That sonofabitch thinks he’s gonna live forever.” He could not fathom personal industry.

  Dad also believed that if he had to work for a living, then no other living being should be exempt from the same nine-to-five fate. He envied and despised our cat—a petite black-and-white alley vagrant—and shut her out of the house because, as he often reminded us, “She’s too goddamn lazy. All she does is lie around all day.” He really meant this. It did no good for one of us to point out that her job was to lie around all day. “The hell with her! Let her work for a living, like I have to, and see how she likes it.”

  The first house I have any memory of inhabiting was a small, two-bedroom rental on Latty Street, an old and quiet avenue lined with majestic maple trees. The rent came to sixteen dollars a month. My brothers and sisters and I slept in the single upstairs bedroom spread among two double beds and several cots. The house had no bathtub or shower, so those who were young enough to fit took baths in the kitchen sink. My mother washed clothes by hand in an old wringer washer and then dried them on a clothesline suspended between poles leaning at a precarious angle in the back yard. Her work, physical and mental, never stopped.

  Who’d trade

  Peace of mind

  (To most rich men

  Denied)

  For all of their

  Worrisome money?

  I’d.

  She knew her life would be a lot easier with an automatic washer and dryer, so she won a set in a 1953 contest. Along with those, she won five thousand dollars in cash, using most of it as a down payment on a four-bedroom house a few blocks away. Four bedrooms and a bathtub! We finally had a home that could accommodate all of us. There was still no privacy (with three kids per bedroom, none of us even had a dresser drawer to call our own), but no one cared.

  When, twelve years later, my father secretly took out a four-thousand-dollar second mortgage on the house and couldn’t pay the money back to the bank, my mother won another huge contest in the nick of time to save the house from foreclosure.

  Thus, over the three decades from 1940 to 1970, our family hopscotched its way between destitution and deliverance. Some days, we didn’t have enough money to pay the milkman; other days, we could have sent him to Europe, all expenses paid.

  My parents were apparently destined for financial insecurity—even with no children left at home to support—all the way to the end of their lives. In 1973, at the age of sixty-two, Dad retired after thirty-three years of working at Serrick’s. He had been diagnosed with diabetes a few years earlier, but the condition remained manageable as long as he spent a third of the day working and a third of the day sleeping.

  Once retired, though, Dad devoted even more hours of the day to drinking, and his circulation slowed to a crawl, causing festering sores on his feet and calves. By this time, Mom worked as a clerk at the JCPenney store and raced back and forth between the Men’s Shirts and Pants Department and home, where she tried to heal the leg ulcers with an infusion of aloe vera gel and golden seal.

  But in 1974, despite Mom’s efforts, one of Dad’s legs became gangrenous and had to be amputated. The night after the surgery, the phone rang, and Aunt Lucy, who had kept Mom company at the hospital and driven her home, picked up the receiver. One of the local priests, calling from the hospital, asked to speak to Mom.

  “Mrs. Ryan,” he said, “we need to know where to bury the leg.”

  “The leg,” Mom repeated. She had no idea what he meant.

  “Yes,” he said. “Your husband’s amputated leg. We need to know what you want done.”

  “Well, don’t you just… uh… discard it?”

  The priest fell silent. Mom, fearing she had said the wrong thing, added, “I mean in some final… respectful manner.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Ryan,” he said. “No. It’s a Catholic leg and has to be buried in consecrated ground. You understand.”

  But Mom, who was raised Methodist and converted to Catholicism only when she married Dad, didn’t understand. “Consecrated ground?” she said. “You mean like a cemetery plot?”

  “Well, not a whole plot, necessarily, but in a portion of a plot in the Catholic section of the cemetery.”

  Mom could see the dollar signs adding up. “Egad, Father, you mean a full burial? With a casket? With a headstone?”

  “No, no, no, Mrs. Ryan,” he said. “That’s not necessary. Don’t you already have a plot at Riverside?”

  “Well… no,” Mom said. An expense like that was the least of her worries. “I guess Kelly and I have been too busy paying off the debts we’ve accumulated while alive. I’m sorry, Father, you’ve got me flustered. I’m afraid I’ll have to think about this and call you back.”

  Then Lucy, who had overheard Mom’s half of the conversation and immediately guessed Father’s half, laughed and said, “Oh heck, Evelyn, just toss it in my plot.”

  And so they did. With requisite ceremony and little expense, a small but deep hole was dug in a corner of Lucy Agnes Moore’s personal plot in Riverside Cemetery in Defiance, Ohio, and the remains were interred.

  Aunt Lucy died in 1989 and was buried in the same plot as her brother’s leg. Dad died in 1983, and was buried in a plot the Ryans were eventually able to afford. Mom died in 1998. Evelyn and Kelly Ryan rest side by side in the cemetery, about ten yards west of Dad’s Catholic leg.

  DEEP CLEAVAGE, BLACK DRESSES, AND WHITE MEN

  VIRGIE TOVAR

  CLASS IS MAINTAINED THROUGH A SERIES OF SUBTLE AND DENIABLE ACTS.

  Wearing a white T-shirt that was c
hosen to indicate tasteful restraint, but with a signature stitch or subtle insignia that communicates that this is no regular T-shirt. No, this is a $300 T-shirt. My friend Sophie calls this look “aggressively casual.”

  The way that one responds to the question “How are you?” is a sure sign. It’s like a tiny test at the beginning of each interaction, gauging who it is you’re dealing with: They say “well” if they are a refined cosmopolitan and “good” if they’re not.

  Smoking is a telltale sign. A white man who smokes nervously and is very handsome is probably class jumping.

  The pathological inability to be rushed no matter the circumstance is a dead giveaway. A woman who can’t be convinced to please quickly finish the last sip of her cocktail is a woman who grew up with at least one generation of wealth ahead of her.

  A woman who can’t be convinced to please quickly finish the last sip of her cocktail is a woman who grew up with at least one generation of wealth ahead of her.

  When someone says she went to college “back East,” this is pretense, a fauxstab at middle-class humility by not naming the Ivy League college she attended. It’s a coded phrase meant to indicate an assuredness that is so unshakeable that name-dropping isn’t even required.

  Tasteful hints of cleavage that court an air of mystery are an absolute must (upper class). Never more than half an inch, which indicates an undisciplined relationship to desire (working class).