by Sarah Smarsh
In the spring of 1984, Dad and his friends finished our house. They put up sheetrock, laid shingles, poured cement in front of the attached garage. A hired man dug a pond with a dozer. Dad built a wooden dock before the big hole was filled with water. A family friend who raised catfish a couple miles down the road stocked the pond. Mom and Dad moved our few things from Betty and Arnie’s farm, along the two-lane blacktop that curved around Cheney Lake.
Mom decorated the house with things that to our eyes looked nice and to anyone else’s eyes were at least well arranged: a shiny black vinyl sofa next to antique chairs from an auction, satiny rose-colored wallpaper in the formal entry that faced the pond. In the family room, burgundy paint and a print of men wearing riding habits and hunting foxes with their hounds, as though Mom meant to redefine what sort of “country” people we were.
She had a knack for making it appear that we had more money than we did. There was about her an audacious dignity. She said people hung art too high on walls. It really bothered her, as though she’d never had a real problem. She was bothered, too, by dirtiness—a necessary awareness, as there would be no visit by a cleaning lady. Her attention to cleanliness might have been defensive, as well, to avoid giving credence to ideas that people like us might be dirty. This inherited concern ran deep in us as females. It’s clean would be Grandma Betty’s first report after approving a new burger joint or roadside motel.
As for deeper problems, I knew Jeannie’s with the unparalleled expertise of any mother’s child. One of them, it seemed clear, was that I existed. Though I wouldn’t know for years that I’d been an accident, I felt the knowledge at an atomic level. I’d materialized over one word that either wasn’t heard or wasn’t heeded, that night she told Nick not to come inside her: don’t.
Maybe that’s why, as a kid, I heard nothing but don’t—don’t speak, don’t breathe, don’t laugh, don’t cry. The price of my existence—the food, the air, the water, the space—was made known, and my actions either did or didn’t justify it. My life’s merit was met with the same suspicion as my mother’s and that of countless people before us.
I was determined that you would never know that feeling. It reached for you from far back in time, well before I existed, before my parents or grandparents existed. We were centuries-old peasant stock.
Mom’s lineage was a mix of Scandinavian, German, and Scots-Irish, best I can figure out. I knew that side of my family as single mothers who moved like the wind and called themselves gypsies.
Dad’s Catholic bunch—me representing its fifth generation farming the windswept plains of Kansas—descended from foragers and farmers in what is now the German-Austrian border region, it appears. We ended up raising wheat and cattle, but our name, Smarsh, was for a much humbler food: mushrooms. In our ancestral homeland, I once read, poor people said mushrooms were holy fingers poking through the earth to nourish them.
That sort of alchemy, assigning a meaning—turning what some might view as the lowly act of foraging into a direct communion with God, for instance—is often the only sort of power a poor person has.
One thing Mom and I had in common was that we understood and respected the power of words and names. Her own mom said she had wanted to call her Jennifer, but Ray insisted they name the baby after Betty. That’s how Betty later remembered it, anyway. So my mom was named Betty Jean and spent a lifetime explaining why she went by Jeannie.
My parents didn’t know much about our lineage or even the meaning of our last name, but maybe Mom sensed it. She gave me a first name she knew meant “princess,” as though someone who foraged to survive could still be regal or even rich in her own way. But it was my last name and its origins that decided the stuff of my life. Like poor immigrants not so far back in our bloodline, we were raised to not expect much and to ask for even less. It was a good thing, too. The house that Dad built wouldn’t be ours for long.
I answered the question of whether I deserved to exist by working hard: folding laundry before I could read, reaching on my tiptoes to wipe off the bathroom counter while George Strait sang on the record player about rodeos and pretty women. I was raised to not be idle. Our hard work was how we had a roof and enough to eat.
What I did hunger for sharply, what my life lacked most sorely, was in my mother’s heart—which had been scarred by the traumas of monetary poverty but carried a feeling of perpetual lack and discontent that knows no class.
The poverty I felt most, then, was a scarcity of the heart, a near-constant state of longing for the mother right in front of me yet out of reach. She withheld the immense love she had inside her like children of the Great Depression hoarded coins. Being her child, I had no choice but to be emotionally impoverished with her. I offered to rub her back every day so that I could touch her skin.
One develops a cunning to survive, whatever the shortage. My family excelled at creative improvisation: eating at Furr’s Cafeteria on the rare food outing since it was all-you-can-eat and required no servers’ tip; scanning garage sales for undervalued items that could be resold at higher prices; rigging our own broken things rather than calling an expensive repairman; racing to the grocery store to buy loads of potatoes at 5¢ per pound when the Wednesday newspaper ad had a typo that the company legally had to honor.
Similarly, I haunted hallways around the corner from where my mom sat reading Stephen King novels or watching soap operas as I tried to get up the courage to ask her if she loved me. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t know the answer as that I wanted to make her say it. Nothing was more painful to me than true things being denied.
When I asked, her answer had the right words but the same cruel tone as her silence. I wanted her affection, but more than anything, I wanted her to be happy. From what I’ve observed, a poor child’s agony is just as often for her parents as it is for herself. You could say that is still a selfish impulse, because in order for a child to survive, her parents must survive, too. But I felt my family’s burden as my own well past childhood.
You would have been born to creative, industrious people. That’s what poverty requires.
Mom and Dad both were good at coming up with ways to make a fast dollar. During the summer of 1984, Dad got one of his more ambitious ideas when Sedgwick County banned the sale of high-powered fireworks—M-80s, bottle rockets, items known to blow people’s hands off. Dad knew that Wichita people would have to go somewhere else to have some real fun on the Fourth of July.
We lived past the county line, in Kingman County, where no elected official would dream of banning any class of fireworks. The people of our county were farmers who drove enormous combines with giant, sharp blades that cut the wheat; carpenters who built their own giant sheds by swinging hammers while perched high on wooden rafters; and women who held down calves to inject vaccinations before they drove four-wheel-drive pickups to office jobs on the brick streets of small towns. They could handle their firecrackers.
In June, Mom drove to a wholesale warehouse on a blacktop road through the prairie. She wrote a check for hundreds of heavy boxes of various fireworks manufactured in China. Strings of Black Cats, TNT-brand variety packs, M-80s, M-60s, bottle rockets, children’s sparklers and smoke bombs, little hens that shot glowing eggs out of their behinds, and cardboard columns that released quiet, pretty fountains of colorful sparks and had names like Springtime Sunrise.
Dad and Grandpa Arnie hammered together a vending stand with lumber out of a scrap pile Dad kept in our shed. They loaded the wooden stand onto a hayrack and pulled it down the county blacktop to the gravel parking lot of Kampling’s Live Bait Shop, which stood at the entrance to Cheney Lake, a draw for people over the holiday weekend.
The fireworks stand was a narrow rectangle with a roof, a counter for customers to approach, and a visible rack of shelves on the back wall. Mom and Grandma Betty lined the shelves with merchandise, taking breaks to smoke Marlboros and stare at the horizon with w
eary looks. I was almost four years old and held red-white-and-blue bunting to the counter as they stapled it in place, the thick, smelly plastic blowing in the wind and sticking to our sweaty, dusty legs.
Dad hauled his power generator from our shed to the fireworks stand. It would run electricity to lightbulbs strung overhead, and to the blinking arrow sign he had rented and situated in the prairie grass next to the blacktop road. When the sun set, the sign’s little bulbs flickered to life, and June bugs buzzed against them.
The morning we opened for business, the people of Wichita appeared from the east, pulling speedboats behind pickups and carrying wallets full of cash. They bought heaps of fireworks and headed off through the lake entrance for a long weekend. Grandma Betty, her short blond hair darkened by sweat at the neck, counted the growing pile of bills in our cash box.
Dad and Grandpa Arnie spent the days in the fields, cutting wheat with combines or, after harvest, plowing the stubble under. In the evening, they arrived to help at the fireworks stand. Sunburned, eyes tired, whiskers full of dust and bits of straw, they moved heavy boxes and drank beer and laughed.
My older cousin Shelly and I played with bugs in the hot dirt and wrote fizzy sparklers across the dark sky until Shelly, who could be meaner than any boy and was tougher than most of them, shoved a firecracker up a frog’s butt and lit the wick, which made me cry. Shelly’s skinny teenage sister, Candy, stood near the ditch and waved in cars from the road, twirling a baton and wearing a stars-and-stripes bikini and garters. She had a paper Uncle Sam top hat over her short, sandy hair. Neighbor farmers waved when they passed. Everyone was covered in a thin film of dust.
When the stand closed around midnight, Dad spent the night sitting in his parked pickup, a loaded shotgun on the seat beside him, in case someone had a mind to rob us. There was security in guns for good reason where we lived. What we owned wasn’t locked in a bank but sitting in a wooden stand with plastic bunting flapping in the prairie wind.
“You can’t be too careful,” he’d say, holding his gun with respect for the weapon but no pride about carrying it.
When it was all over, the morning after the Fourth, Mom and Dad counted and rubber-banded the bills. Once they paid off the wholesale supplier, the county permit, and the family help, they had a fortune of a few thousand dollars. It would come in handy, as Mom’s belly was large with a baby that would be born in the fall.
Mom and Dad had their first fireworks stand the year Reagan was reelected—selling American pride in a field next to a two-lane blacktop while think tanks sold “trickle-down” economics. It’s funny that both of their children were born weeks before an election that Reagan won. We would be able to map our lives against the destruction of the working class: the demise of the family farm, the dismantling of public health care, the defunding of public schools, wages so stagnant that full-time workers could no longer pay the bills. Historic wealth inequality was old news to us by the time it hit newspapers in the new millennium. That’s the difference among the person selling the fireworks and the one watching them sparkle in the sky from a public park on a work holiday and the one watching them from a nice apartment in a city high-rise. You live in different Americas and thus have different understandings.
Dad didn’t own any stocks or follow any market other than agricultural commodities. But he knew something about the economy wasn’t right. Things were getting more expensive compared to how much money was coming in. That’s a ratio felt acutely when you have to calculate budgets to the dime.
Dad saved coins in a giant glass bottle that had previously contained Canadian blended whiskey. One night he reckoned it was time to count them. He poured them onto a foldout card table in the living room near the brick fireplace. I watched the pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters trickle down into a pile. Touching the coins with great care, Dad separated them into stacks. He was not a materialistic man. I never knew him to buy anything for himself but work tools. But he lived in a materialistic world, a system of goods and services that required monetary compensation. He added figures on a notepad and a calculator. He left the family room for a while and returned to count the coins a second time. I walked past.
“Sarah, come here,” Dad said.
“What?” I asked.
“Do you have something you want to tell me?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Dad sighed and looked at his coins.
“I know what you did,” he said.
“What?”
“You took a nickel.”
I hadn’t.
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
“Sarah, don’t lie to me.”
“I didn’t take it.”
“Just be honest, and I won’t get mad at you.”
“I didn’t!”
Dad sighed again and put his head in his hands, agonizing over what the moment meant to him: A nickel was unaccounted for, and every missing cent was his fault. I stood there looking at him and the stacks of coins on the wobbly foldout table feeling like I could cry. I hated being misunderstood, and I hated when my parents were unhappy. This moment was all of that at once, and the air smelled like dirty metal.
I realized the weight of those coins, then. The big, silver ones were worth the most, but the smaller ones mattered just as much when you needed every penny. It’s a lesson I sometimes forgot. Grandma Betty scolded me once for throwing a few dirty, sticky pennies in the trash.
Her mom and grandma had worked on the Boeing assembly line during World War II. Once, a pay period shook out so that the company cut a check to her grandma for exactly one cent. After she died, the paycheck ended up among Betty’s keep-sakes.
“Here’s a paycheck for one friggin’ penny,” Betty would say, holding it with reverence. “Can you imagine? But a penny is a penny. Every bit counts.”
Currency values used to be based on a gold standard, Dad would explain when I was a little older, but now they were based on nothing tangible. It was just a game, really, the whole money system. Grandpa Arnie watched wheat prices go up and down in the local newspaper or on the price board that hung outside the grain co-op. At the courthouse in Wichita, Grandma Betty made less money than men who did the same job with less skill. We didn’t own stocks, but the psychological underpinning of the market wasn’t lost on us.
“Paying retail is for fools,” Mom used to say. We could walk into a store and with one glance at a tag discern a showroom full of ridiculous markups. Mom would pick up a dish off a shelf, turn it over to read the number on the bottom. She’d raise her eyebrows and set it back down.
“I don’t think so,” she’d whisper.
Betty would raise her eyebrows, too.
“What a rip,” she’d say once we were outside the store, walking back toward our car but not holding any bags.
Money was what made the world go around, I learned fast. I knew how to compare prices on tags before I knew how to read words. Yet money was a lie—pieces of paper and metal suggesting prices for goods, services, labor, and human beings themselves in a way that often had more to do with profit than with true value. We were on the losing end of that lie no matter how many acres of wheat we farmed.
In that way, my family and our class might have been the least fazed by America’s obsession with wealth. As workers living at the taproot of the agricultural economy, we not only could grow and build our own necessities—we also understood the hard work a loaf of bread represented and thus put less faith in the money that bought it than in the bread itself.
Wealth and income inequality were nothing rare in global history. What was peculiar about the class system in the United States, though, is that for centuries we denied it existed. At every rung of the economic ladder, Americans believed that hard work and a little know-how were all a person needed to get ahead.
Unlike so many people
of my generation, I did get a good life for my hard work and know-how. In addition to what I might have earned, there were strokes of grace along the way that I can’t take any credit for. Somehow I ended up with a better situation than my parents had.
But the American Dream has a price tag on it. The cost changes depending on where you’re born and to whom, with what color skin and with how much money in your parents’ bank account. The poorer you are, the higher the price. You can pay an entire life in labor, it turns out, and have nothing to show for it. Less than nothing, even: debt, injury, abject need.
No matter who you are or what you started with, though, your fortunes are not assured. For decades, far more people fell down the ladder than climbed up it. The American economy is less like a dream supported by democracy than it is like an inconsistent god. Most of us, regardless of economic station, sacrifice a great deal to it.
That can be a satisfying agreement. Grandpa Arnie loved working the land not for the price of wheat per bushel but because smelling damp earth at sunrise felt like a holy experience. Dad loved building something beautiful out of good lumber not for the paycheck but for seeing his own creativity turned into a sturdy, useful structure. The pleasure that Mom got when she sold a little house in Wichita wasn’t just for the small commission but for the tears in the family’s eyes when she handed them the keys.
Work can be a true communion with resources, materials, other people. I have no issue with work.
Its relationship to the economy—whose work is assigned what value—is where the trouble comes in.
My family’s labor was undervalued to such an extent that, while we never starved or went without shelter in a chronic way, we all knew what it felt like to need something essential—food, shoes, a safe place to live, a rent payment, a trip to the doctor—and go without it for lack of money. That’s the sort of mess I wanted out of. That’s the sort of mess I never wanted you to experience.