34
Discovering the Closet
AP Psychology is Kayzia Whiteaker’s seventh-period class, her last of the day. At 3:20 p.m., which is when seventh period ends, Kayzia is about to reach down for her pink mesh backpack so that she can put her book and notebook and folder inside. But as she starts to reach down, she feels, of all awful things, tears sliding down her face.
Kayzia is mortified. She and Alyssa, her twin, are by now juniors at Parker High. Kayzia is a disciplined member of the debate team and, last year as a sophomore, was already a varsity debater who helped Parker get to the state tournament. She is a believer in neatness and self-control. Not a person to cry in public. And at this moment, as she is realizing that she is not making any crying noises—thank goodness!—she knows that she must get these tears to stop.
She gives her tears a talking-to. “This is not the time or the place,” she tells them in her mind. “You just can’t cry in the middle of class.”
The tears keep falling.
She keeps her head down, hoping that the other kids will be too busy with their own backpacks and whatever is on their minds to notice her wet, streaky face, which she knows isn’t really being hidden by her curtain of straight brown hair. No one in her class seems to be paying attention. But her desk is near the front of the room, against the wall and facing the middle. It is, in other words, near Mrs. Venuti’s desk.
Amy Venuti has been teaching social studies at Parker for four years, and she works closely with Deri Wahlert, whose classroom is on the same hall as hers. Amy has just finished today’s lesson on psychological disorders, and she happens to glance over at Kayzia and sees what is going on. She asks Kayzia if she has a minute to stay after class.
She is careful to wait until the other kids have left before she sits down in the desk next to Kayzia’s and, in a quiet, motherly tone, asks what is happening and whether there is any way that she can help.
Kayzia doesn’t have a clue what to say. In the past three years, she and Alyssa have become experts at hiding what is going on at home. They have become skillful at poking through the clothes at Goodwill to find designer jeans that look as if they got them new. At going along when their friends want to go shopping without drawing attention to the fact that they aren’t buying anything. What’s going on at home is not something to discuss with their friends.
Well, Alyssa’s boyfriend, Justin, knows. He knows that Alyssa appreciates hanging out at his house, because there is less talk about money, and she can ride with him on a four-wheeler and just feel like a teenager for a change. And last year, Kayzia had to tell Ryan, a senior who was her debate partner, when they qualified for state. She had to tell him that she couldn’t go. The team needed two hotel rooms near Ripon College, one for the three girls and one for the two boys, and she had to tell Ryan because she couldn’t afford her share. So he told the coach, and somehow—she still isn’t sure how—it was worked out that Kayzia could pay just a little and still go. And she made sure to be extra helpful, trying to make it up to whoever was paying so she could be there, even though the tournament was in the midst of a blizzard and the drive, which took longer than the two hours that it should have taken, frightened her.
So they had barely told friends, and, if they didn’t feel it was proper to talk to their friends, how could Kayzia possibly tell a teacher?
How could she tell Mrs. Venuti that her dad, Jerad, was now on his third job since GM, after having been out of work for over a year after he was laid off from the plant? Or that she had started to worry that he might lose this one? This third job had seemed lucky at first. He was a guard at the County Jail, where Barb Vaughn used to work and Kristi Beyer still does. It had taken almost a year after he applied for the job to come through, and it probably hadn’t hurt that the dad in a family they are close to, with Kayzia and Alyssa baby-sitting their kids since they were infants, is a Sheriff’s Department sergeant. Jerad works mostly the second shift, before Kristi comes on duty for overnight, and he does not know her. Jerad is grateful for the pay—almost $17 an hour, which isn’t GM pay but is better than $12 at the Patch Products warehouse, where he would have loved to stay if it had come with health insurance the way the jail job does.
Soon, though, Jerad has a problem with his jail job. Kayzia has been noticing that her dad seems different lately. Nervous. He seems almost scared to go to work. And the problem was getting worse over the summer, when he was putting in as much overtime as he could get, filling in when other correction officers were on vacation, to bring home the extra money. And even though almost $17 an hour is better than at Patch, Kayzia and Alyssa still hear their parents talking a lot about money, at the moments when they think that the girls and Noah can’t hear, with Noah getting more into sports and uniforms costing so much, plus the high deductibles on the jail’s health insurance which means that they have to shell out a lot for Kayzia’s doctors’ appointments to try to figure out why she is having so much pain in her abdomen. And Kayzia knows it’s hard on her parents to have gone from middle-class and figuring that GM would last forever, the way it had for her grandfathers, to lower-middle-class and maybe lower than that. She feels that she should be helping them more, but she isn’t sure what to do.
At school, Kayzia tries to keep her mind on her classes and not on what is happening at home. But in this unit on psychological disorders, the way Mrs. Venuti was talking today about depression and anxiety made Kayzia think of the changes in her dad. And putting two and two together in a way that she never had before, she felt during the last part of class as if a lump was stuck in her throat until she realized that the tears were coming out. In public.
Mrs. Venuti is being so nice in asking, and Kayzia doesn’t want to be rude, but she doesn’t think it is right to drag her personal life into class. So she waits a minute, trying to figure out what to say. She doesn’t want to say any of it; she knows she has to say something.
“My family situation’s not the greatest right now” is what she comes up with. And right then, she totally loses it, her silent tears becoming large, gulping sobs.
“We can help,” Mrs. Venuti is saying.
“Well, I never received help before. We don’t qualify for that,” Kayzia is telling her. While she is saying that, she is remembering her mom’s eyes looking red after trying and trying to get help from ECHO, the food pantry, where the staff kept telling her mom that her family’s income each month was just a few dollars above the cut-off line.
Mrs. Venuti is telling her that you don’t have to qualify for this kind of help.
She tells Kayzia to take her stuff, so Kayzia picks up her hot pink backpack, while Mrs. Venuti grabs her key chain from the top of her file cabinet. They walk out of the classroom to a closed door, across the hall and two doors down, which Kayzia has never really noticed before. When Mrs. Venuti unlocks the door, Kayzia can’t believe what she sees: shelves filled with jeans and shoes and school supplies, and open cabinets stocked with food and body washes and toothpastes. The Parker Closet.
What amazes Kayzia is not just that this room exists. What amazes her most is the avalanche of a realization she is having that, if this room exists behind the door that Mrs. Venuti has unlocked for her, that must mean that other kids at Parker are from families whose situations are not the greatest either.
Hard as it is to imagine, in Janesville where thousands of people have lost jobs and some are still out of work and some, like her dad, are job hopping and not earning enough money, it has never occurred to Kayzia before that what is going on in her family is going on all over town. That is what happens when she and Alyssa have decided that this is not a subject to discuss with friends, and other kids, who used to be middle-class, too, have decided the same thing. So, now, Kayzia is overwhelmed by this thought that is hitting her, all of a sudden. “There’s more kids like me!”
Amy Venuti has seen this “it’s not just me” astonishment before. Since she started at Parker, she has been helping Deri wit
h the Closet as it has grown from its dozen students the first year to nearly two hundred. Even if she doesn’t do as much as Deri, she has, lately, been introducing a couple of dozen kids to the closet each year. From the kids before Kayzia, she has learned that she is not just offering used jeans and toothpaste. With this offer, she knows, she is wrenching their understanding of their lives into a new and different meaning: as needy. One girl got angry and started to cry, insisting that her family didn’t need help. A boy whose parents were divorcing refused, too, until Amy came up with the idea of telling him that he now had to be the man of the house, and he couldn’t be working because his full-time job was to be in school and to play his sports, so he needed to take some stuff home as a small way that he could take care of his family.
She has to find ways to make it palatable, Amy has learned.
While Amy is seeing Kayzia’s shock as normal, Kayzia is on to her next thought, which is that someone is going to a lot of trouble to provide kids with this help that she never knew existed. People are taking time out of their day to be kind and to help, not just her, but her whole family, and not just her now, but her chances of reaching her goals of becoming a general practitioner and someday being in a position in which she will be able to help someone else.
It seems to Kayzia too emotional to be thinking all of this, so she doesn’t say it all out loud. She just asks Mrs. Venuti, “Well, where do you get this stuff?”
Donations, her teacher tells her. People in the community who chip in.
Mrs. Venuti is asking what she needs, but Kayzia is still focused on the amazing fact of this secret place in school that no one knows about unless they get into a situation where they need to know. And when she focuses on “needs,” she gets stuck on the fact that she and Alyssa and Noah have been taught at home to be giving people. Giving and independent people. She doesn’t want to take too much.
She picks out Suave shampoo and conditioner. She has learned that it’s cheaper to go without conditioner, but it will be nice to have some. And because it’s good to be a giving person, she takes an Old Spice deodorant for Noah.
When Mrs. Venuti asks whether she needs anything else, Kayzia tells her that this is enough. Before Mrs. Venuti locks the door again, a well-dressed boy Kayzia has never seen before, from a younger grade, ducks in for a minute and gets a few items, too.
She walks alone the few blocks between Parker and home, thinking about this discovery and about Mrs. Venuti telling her not to be afraid to ask if she needs anything else. When she gets home, Alyssa is at work, so Kayzia leaves the shampoo and conditioner and deodorant on the kitchen counter, between the table and the stove. She walks over for her 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. shift, serving up ButterBurgers and frozen custard in a blue Culver’s apron and cap.
When she gets home from work, Alyssa asks, as Kayzia knew she would, where the stuff has come from. Kayzia knows that her sister won’t like the answer. If they need something, they have been taught, they work harder for it. Or they do without.
Kayzia explains about Mrs. Venuti taking her to a room, about their school having something called the Parker Closet. As she is explaining, she knows that, even if they need it, Alyssa will not be easy right away with the idea of accepting help.
35
After the Overnight Shift
The overnight shift at the Rock County Jail ends at 7 a.m., so the sun is about to rise on these fall mornings when Kristi Beyer walks out of the jail and into the parking lot. When she was first hired, Kristi rotated shifts—days, evenings, nights. Switching around her sleep didn’t seem to bother her. Still, she found that she likes nighttime at the jail best. It is quieter. Besides, after Barb surprised her and quit almost a year ago, Kristi missed her, and two other correctional officers who have become her friends happen to work nights. When an opening came along, she applied. So Kristi works the overnight shift now, and it is 7:30 a.m., just daylight, by the time she reaches home.
The house is quiet at this hour. Her husband, Bob, has left already. Only her mother is up and about. Kristi likes an after-work smoke before she goes to bed, and Linda doesn’t allow smoking in the house. So this is the hour when Linda gets her coffee and Kristi, still in her Sheriff’s Department khakis, grabs her Newport 100s, and they head out onto their wide back deck and talk about everything.
Kristi enjoys this hour with her mom. The deck is nice for sitting outside and talking, even if the mornings have gotten cool. The wooden boards are covered with indoor-outdoor carpeting, and a metal overhang, with skylights to let through the early light, blocks the wind. This is the hour when Kristi entertains her mom with the stories from her night. About some stupid thing that a prisoner did. Or some prisoner needing to get sent to the hospital. Or officers needing to take TV privileges away, and what a prisoner had to say about that. She knows her mom loves these jail stories. Something different happens every night. Not like factory work.
Working at the jail is tough, though. Now and then, Kristi calls Barb and says she is unhappy there. Still, Kristi is proud that she has what it takes. And Linda is proud of her only daughter and happy that, at thirty-nine, Kristi has found a good job in a town with so many people who have not.
Most of their life, it seems, is settling down. Even for Bob, who started at Blackhawk later than Kristi, studied heating and air-conditioning installation and maintenance, and graduated in May. His unemployment was about to run out in September, no Janesville jobs in sight. His classmates have been having a hard time; one is planting soybeans to make some money, another is a store clerk. So Kristi felt Bob was fortunate when he was hired, at last, in August as a maintenance specialist at one of the state office buildings in Madison, which is why he needs to leave for work before Kristi gets home from her shift.
If Bob is working, finally, Kristi and her mother still have one big worry that they talk over on their back deck, along with the jail stories and their cigarettes and coffee. Kristi’s only child, Josh, is twenty-two. When he graduated from Parker High School in 2007, months before the recession arrived, a year before GM and its suppliers started to shut down, Josh joined the National Guard. And now he has been shipped off to Iraq.
36
Late Night at Woodman’s
Kayzia Whiteaker tiptoes over to the couch, where her mom, Tammy, is still up, as she often is now on weekend nights, working her scissors through a stack of coupons.
“Want to go grocery shopping?” Kayzia asks, gently as she can, trying to make it sound like it’s no big deal, like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world for a sixteen-year-old kid to offer to take her mom to Woodman’s and pay.
She realizes, as she asks, that her childhood is slipping away. This is what growing up too fast looks like, and it has been creeping up on her for a while.
A child wouldn’t notice that, the longer her dad, Jerad, works at the jail, the more depressed he seems. She can’t remember the last time he made one of his dumb jokes that crack her up. She has noticed that her mom, plowing through her coupons while her dad is asleep, has become the chief worrier. Kayzia knows that stressed-out look that sometimes sneaks across her mother’s face when she thinks no one is around. It’s a look that Kayzia can’t bear, and her mother knows it, so they have an unspoken agreement that Kayzia will pretend not to see.
Best not to talk about certain facts that were once surprising but now are old news. That after ten months at her first after-school job, at Culver’s, home of the ButterBurger, she has more in her checking account than her parents have in theirs. That it isn’t so rare anymore for one of her parents to ask her or Alyssa, very politely, whether they could lend a few dollars for groceries or gas. That her dad tries sarcasm—“We supported you the first half of your lives, you can support us the second half”—to hide that asking kills him, every time.
Kayzia and her parents may joke, but they don’t talk about the stark facts. Even now that she knows about the Parker Closet, so she no longer has the impression that her family is al
one in these problems, she doesn’t talk about money with her friends. She doesn’t talk about it even with her grandmother Lucille, her dad’s mother and her biggest cheerleader on Facebook and in life—the one person Kayzia is pretty sure knows just how she feels, because one other fact she has noticed is that her grandmother is quietly sending her parents a little extra each month for the mortgage.
There is someone, however, with whom Kayzia talks about everything. Especially about this. Since eighth grade, Kayzia and Alyssa have continued to worry together, ever since they huddled on their beds in their basement bedroom, trying to figure out what it meant that their dad was home for breakfast.
Looking back, Kayzia now understands that those were innocent days, their anxieties those of kids. The reality is that her dad still doesn’t have a job that can support them the way he once did, and there are no good jobs for him to find. Kayzia and Alyssa try to approach this problem in an optimistic and practical way. Kayzia will add a second job—working as a receptionist for a chiropractor in town. Still, once in a while, she and Alyssa let their minds drift further outward. What if a day comes when their parents can’t pay the mortgage? How will they afford college? Can Alyssa achieve her dream of becoming an engineer? Kayzia’s of becoming a general practitioner?
But that’s for the future. It’s now that’s the immediate problem: the fridge is nearly empty again, and her parents are low again on cash. And that specific problem, not the future, pulls Kayzia to decide that tonight is the time to tiptoe over to the couch and ask her mom the grocery question that has been in her brain for a while but has not, before this night, come out of her mouth.
Her mom looks up from her scissors and her coupon stack. From her expression, Kayzia can tell she’s used the right tone. Whew! Her little plan is going okay so far. It’s a delicate matter, after all, this scheme to pay for the family groceries.
Janesville Page 18