The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

  That was long enough, though. “I’m gonna be self-sufficient by next fall,” Tom declared solemnly. He and the boys had started work on a dilapidated “barn” for two steers. “I’m gonna raise my own pork, raise my own beef. [Mary] wants to put some chickens in. I’m looking for a diesel generator. There are a couple of emergency generators from Fort Dix, New Jersey. For $1,000. It needs to be rewired.” He shrugged as if that were an easy chore. When he laid out his plans, he got a clipped tone of false confidence in his voice, as if he knew that he was saying what he wished, not what would be. Three years later, he was still hooked up to the power grid.

  Mary knew about depression; she was on medication. Was he taking anything for his? “Well, Jack Daniel’s,” she said. “It wasn’t prescribed, but that was his own prescription. … It was his birthday, and I planned a nice birthday cookout for him, and he decides to start drinking at nine-thirty. So he was drunk by noon.” But now it had been four months without a drink. “He’s behaving himself,” she went on. “The last time he went on a drunk I dumped his bottle down the sink, and he hasn’t bought any since…. He deals with reality…. He’s finding his match when it comes to being a jerk. I’m not scared of him.”

  How about therapy? “The heaviest thing in the world to pick up is that phone,” Tom said. Maybe Mary was his best therapy, because she pulled him out of the paralysis that characterizes depression. He looked for work and found a job with Davey Tree company, under contract to trim branches around power lines. “It makes me feel good that I can go out there and swing from a tree for nine hours a day and walk home at night and say, yeah, a day’s work…. There’s things that I can do now that a year ago I wouldn’t think of doing because I didn’t think I was physically up to it. It don’t bother me to strap that saddle on my ass now and head up that tree and spend eight, nine hours up there. Go up the tree, trim it out, go back down.” He was teaching Matt, and they were trimming trees on their own land. Somewhere along the way, Mary moved out to her own place, and they continued to see each other, but not at such close quarters.

  Tom was laid off the next winter because of too much snow: eight weeks without work. He got a job welding fuel tanks for $10.50 an hour and was then laid off from that, too. In the summer he planted sixty-five acres of sweet corn for a farmer and helped with tomatoes and pumpkins; he was paid $300 a week and all the vegetables he wanted. After the farming season he went back to work for Davey Tree, but they wouldn’t let him climb once he turned fifty because insurance wouldn’t cover him. So he had no winter work except side jobs cutting and selling firewood. He did some maple sugaring and then got a job maintaining factory machinery at LaCrosse, a boot manufacturer, for $10.50 an hour. It was inside work, and he knew that pretty soon he would start to pace again.

  “Eventually,” he said with that lilt of false confidence, “I’m gonna put a slider [door] up here on my trailer, and this is gonna be the main entrance. No more parking where they park out front. Slowly but surely, you know. It’s been a house long enough. Time to become a home.”

  A year or so later, though, he replaced the trailer altogether with another used one, bought for $2,500 from a friend who had received it as payment for landscaping work. The job at LaCrosse was too good to quit. His only complaint was that he didn’t get to work in the woods. He got full benefits, including medical insurance that cost him just $38.15 weekly, and with a lot of overtime even during the recession of 2001–2003, he made about $550 a week. “It’s a pretty decent living, actually,” he said.

  His boys loved to work. Matt was installing insulation in a neighbor’s garage, Zach was doing carpentry for his high school coach, and they were helping their dad with household expenses. Matt was still winning blue ribbons at 4-H, and Zach, with his shy smile, had been elected Homecoming King in the autumn of his senior year. He had scored only 950 total on the math and verbal parts of the SAT and would have no access to the Kaplan or Princeton Review courses that rich kids took to improve their results. His networks of family and community could assist him on their own ground, not on the foreign territory of college. He applied to study architecture at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, but he chose to skip the optional essay, not realizing how attractive his journey along the edge of poverty would be to admissions officers scouting for youths who worked hard to overcome adversity. Wentworth turned him down.

  It was a hard winter. The cold was fierce, the snow relentless. Loneliness descended on Tom like an icy silence, and to warm himself he turned again to his old friend, Jack Daniel’s. The mechanics of survival in his cluttered trailer began to break down. First, the water suddenly stopped flowing after Christmas. The weight of heavy snow had dislodged a pipe and broken the wires to the pump at the bottom of his well. Then the septic system froze and backed up. Finally, a bearing seized in the heating system’s fan, and he came home to find the trailer full of smoke from his overheated furnace. “I lost it,” he said. He sent Zach and Kate to stay with Mary, and Matt to his oldest daughter by a previous marriage. Tom took his dog—the only pet he had left—and moved into a friend’s camper, heated with propane, on a wooded campsite.

  He spent the winter and the spring working and drinking. Every day, he grew more and more eager for the end of his shift, when he and a few other guys at the factory would go to a bar and have some beers. Tom would then buy more beer to take home, and so it went night after night, week after week, as the daylight gradually extended into evening and the snow melted into mud and the brown New Hampshire hills were tinted with the tender green of new growth.

  One June night, Tom followed his usual routine. He went to the bar, then bought a twelve-pack of beer. The next thing he remembered was lying in his driveway beside his pickup, whose engine was off but whose radio was on, hearing a female voice announcing the time as 3:30 a.m. There were only three cans left and no empties in his truck. He was jolted into action. He and a buddy from work enrolled in daily sessions at AA, and when I found him one Saturday at his trailer, he had been sober for four days and was digging up his septic system.

  Zach’s high school graduation would be the following week, and Tom was determined to be in good shape for it. He had a fuzzy recollection of Zach’s presenting him with forms for some college in Hartford, Connecticut, something having to do with financial aid. Tom didn’t know how to fill them out, though. He thought Zach would be going to college in a few months, but he wasn’t sure.

  Zach was accepted by the University of Hartford, but he didn’t go. The financial forms never got mailed in, and he decided to enlist in the Air Force, which promised to train him in aircraft maintenance. He was buoyant with anticipation, and Tom was proud. By October, the cycle had turned upward: Kate and Matt were back with Tom, who had built an addition to the trailer and was working the night shift, 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., at nearly $13 an hour. He hadn’t had a drink since June.

  Ann Brash chose poverty. The alternative, she firmly believed, was to sacrifice her bonds with her children by working multiple jobs days and evenings and weekends. That would have yielded only threadbare financial security, she figured, at the expense of their emotional security. “I made a decision to be around them rather than working the fifty, sixty hours a week to let them live a middle-class life,” she explained. So she took part-time jobs, accepted help from her church and friends, and managed to stay off welfare. Except for student loans, she steadfastly shunned government assistance: no food stamps, housing subsidies, or Medicaid. After a dozen years “walking along the cliff,” as she put it, she saw her son, Sandy, graduate from Dartmouth as a computer specialist and her daughter, Sally, studying voice at the New England Conservatory of Music. Sandy had been granted full financial aid; Sally had been funded by loans, scholarships, and private gifts.

  Ann remained poor, however—not according to the statistics (she had found a job that paid $23,600 a year) but as measured by her anxiety over substantial debt, nonexistent savings, and the painful limitations of her life. As
it does with many who are nearly impoverished, her tension came less from the present, in which she survived, than from the future, on which she could not depend. Yet her “cultural capital,” she said, had defeated the most debilitating characteristic of poverty: its hopelessness. She had strained to enlarge her children’s lives beyond the boundaries of their economic circumstances, and she had succeeded. “Both of my children say they’ve never felt poor,” Ann declared with satisfaction. “In some ways, it has made both of them more sure of who they are.”

  “I know what it’s like to be really poor,” said Sally when she was sixteen. “I know what it’s like to struggle to have money to pay for food for the next week. But I never felt poor.” She saw herself as quite unlike other low-income kids in public school. “There was this sort of hopelessness about them, as if they couldn’t imagine life any other way.” She concluded that poverty was not just a matter of money but also of dispirited loneliness. “If I knew one wonderful person and I was homeless with nothing, and hungry, I still wouldn’t be poor,” Sally insisted. “As long as I knew just one person that I could love, I wouldn’t be poor.” Her perpetual smile illuminated her entire face, including her eyes, which gazed merrily at the difficult world.

  Sally had been five and her brother seven when they were plunged into hardship by their parents’ divorce. She was too young to notice the sudden uncertainties. Her mother’s main obsession—not knowing whether they would have a place to live—became normal for Sally, merely “one of the worries,” she said, “one of the many worries like getting to school on time in the morning.”

  For her mother, though, tumbling out of the solid middle-class comfort that she had enjoyed from childhood was disorienting and traumatic. Ann began by sitting down with Sandy and making a list differentiating “wishes” from “needs.” She embarked on what she called “a day-by-day take-care-of-what’s-in-front-of-me effort.” That meant living in the present by figuring out how to pay for the immediacies of rent, heat, and food. “Living in the present means you spend only what you ‘need,’ and you always distinguish ‘want’ from ‘need,’ ” she observed.

  When she finally gained her footing on that new ground, Ann had trouble recalling the affluent world. “Before the divorce, we would go book shopping as often as we’d go grocery shopping,” she mused one day. Now, she added, “I can’t remember what it’s like to live with dishwashers and somebody that comes in and cleans the house. I can’t remember that anymore, but I think it used to free up a lot of time.” Confronting poverty kept her busy, but it also adjusted her focus so that she saw not only the basics of food, shelter, and clothing but also less tangible requirements for a healthy life. “We may not be able to even survive without simultaneously addressing our need for things like art, music, our goals, or hope of something beyond our immediate physical environment,” she said. “And we can’t survive without loving and being loved. So most of us use substitute things, things within our reach—alcohol, TV, drugs, Wal-Mart shopping.” She discovered that “when we are/become poor, we need to think more carefully than when wealthy about what contributes to our health as human beings.” That means “close healthy relationships, not feeling alone, fresh vegetables, not too much sugar, thirty minutes of daily physical activity. All keep us healthy, or at least surviving when we don’t know where we’ll live next month or year.”

  Ann Brash had arrived here partly through aimlessness, which left her with talents but not skills. She would have been financially fine if her marriage had lasted. She loved reading great literature and listening to Bach fugues. She reveled in ideas and spoke with articulate intelligence. Being white, she faced no racial discrimination. But for a woman graduating from high school in 1964, even privileged socio-economic standing did not automatically provide a sense of entitlement or vocational purpose. And that sore failure of American society was not overcome by her parents, who did not instill in her the value of professional self-sufficiency. Her father, a chemical engineering consultant who raised his family in Connecticut and Massachusetts, did not have high aspirations for his daughters.

  Ann dropped out of college after a year. “I hated it,” she said. She worked briefly as an assistant buyer in a department store. “I didn’t like it very much.” She then lived in Kyoto for five years, teaching English to Japanese. “I went to the hairdresser and had my nails done a lot.” Back in the United States, she worked as a travel consultant to an engineering company in Boston and tried going back to college. “I had no direction,” she confessed. She then married a draftsman who started his own business.

  After the divorce, she received child support amounting to about $10,000 a year, and she worked part-time—substitute teaching at $50 a day, doing clerical work at a college for twenty hours a week, documenting yachts, copyediting medical texts and other books for a piecework rate per page. The editing “was wonderful,” she said, “but last year I think I made $3,000 or $4,000.” Throughout, “I also chose to keep long-term goals for the children in focus. That is, I refused to do anything that would mean they hadn’t access to me. It made a lot of people mad, or at least they thought me lazy and unrealistic. But I had just enough income from child support to be able to feed the children, and I either found very low rent or shoved myself on my unwilling mother.”

  Ann and the children lived in her mother’s house for nearly four years, until her mother returned from a trip to France, suddenly decided to sell the place, and gave Ann a month to move out. “I was just destroyed,” Ann said. “I was clinically depressed. I went to a women’s center and got some help.” When her mother offered a modest monthly stipend for a year and a half, Ann did some calculations and refused the gift. “I said, ‘Please don’t do that, because it wouldn’t change our long-term financial picture, but it would mean that Sandy wouldn’t be able to get his scholarship to go to boarding school that year. So it would end up not really helping us, and it would really hurt Sandy’ ”The small amount, she feared, would push her into a borderland where she could neither afford tuition nor fully qualify for assistance.

  “Boarding school” sounds like a luxury for the wealthy, as it often is. For Ann, however, it meant an escape from the inferior public schools in the impoverished towns and neighborhoods where she could live. Her own upbringing had granted her an idea of the possible, the attainable, the expected that was far more ambitious than the notions held by generations of impoverished mothers who had inherited only a sense of the impossible, the unattainable, the unexpected. Her children were bright and poor—the perfect combination to draw financial aid—and their education was a central part of Ann’s stubborn cause. She tried Sally in a local school, then pulled her out and did home schooling for several years until Sally won a full scholarship to St. Paul’s, a boarding school in New Hampshire. Sandy went to private schools as well. This seemed incongruous to Ann’s relatives, who judged her irresponsible. “My sister said that Sandy had no right to go to private school and I didn’t have the right to make that choice, that we should take what is given to us,” Ann recalled. “So that was a very difficult time.”

  Ann acquired the remaining credits for her own bachelor’s degree by passing the College-Level Examination Program exam, but her money shortage didn’t ease. Instead, her life was invaded by unending anxiety about where she would find housing. Aside from hollow hunger, there is probably no more frightening void than the looming absence of shelter. A chilling emptiness resides where warm assuredness should be. In Ann’s worst moments through the years, when her pleasant features grew pinched with lines of worry and she descended into seizures of despair (always apologetically), she would knot her knuckles together and say, “Things are looking pretty scary,” and, “I don’t know where we will live,” or worse: “I don’t really want to live, I’m absolutely without hope, I’m so tired I can’t do this.”

  For a year after eviction from her mother’s house, she and the children lived with generous friends, who suffered inconvenience that An
n at last became unwilling to impose. She began to look elsewhere and grew desperate. The rents in New Hampshire, where she had located to find cheaper living, were still beyond her reach. Yet she had the kind of proud, deserving air that made people want to help—financially comfortable people who must have been attracted by her erudition, her introspection, her centered devotion to her children. Her manner and her interests did not betray the socio-economic class into which she had fallen; her children said that they were rarely seen as poor. To the contrary, professionals may have viewed Ann as just like them, someone with whom they could have traded places but for the chance roll of the dice. The results for her were therefore very different from what they were for single black women in urban ghettos. “We’re homeless, but we’ve always been taken care of in some way,” Ann noted. At a community college where she was studying, a professor and his wife befriended her, drew first Sally and then Ann into their Russian Orthodox congregation, and finally offered her their unused cabin in the Vermont woods. So Ann found housing and community, shelter for both body and spirit.

  The cabin made life hard and pure. It stood a mile from the main road, about two-tenths of a mile up a dirt drive. It had a tiny kitchen and a tiny bathroom that relied on gravity-fed water pumped to a tank on the second floor. It had an outhouse with a spider they named Charlotte, appropriately. The only heat in winter came from a woodstove, the only cooling in summer from an old wooden icebox that had to be kept filled with ice that cost about $12 a week—expensive, by Ann’s standards. The only light came from propane lamps and leftover beeswax candles from the church, which made reading hard on Ann’s eyes. As soon as the gray, still winter froze the water line, she and Sally had to lug five-gallon buckets up two-tenths of a mile from the well. “Luckily it started snowing,” Ann remarked, so Sally, then thirteen, could drag the buckets on a sled.