by Sarah Smarsh
I left the stage and walked straight to my family. Matt, who was six years old, was yelling and jumping up and down. Mom had a big smile on her face. Dad and Grandpa’s clothes didn’t have dirt on them. They all hugged me, laughed, and took pictures. I had no choice but to understand that people can demean and hit you and in their better moments love you, at once be a mess themselves and carry a deep pride in your strange togetherness.
They suffered from weaknesses of character, yes—just like every other person, in every other income bracket. What really put the shame on us wasn’t our moral deficit. It was our money deficit.
Chris’s addictions got worse over the years, and even as an adult I found myself judging her as a “bad person” for it. A combination of prescription opioids, aspirin, and alcohol eventually burned such a hole through her insides that she had surgery to remove most of her stomach. Having been extremely thin to begin with, her inability to eat almost withered her to death. For years, her behavior was erratic and sometimes put all of our safety at risk. She went on spending sprees, shoplifted, passed out in her parked car. Cops brought her to my dad’s door.
I was mad at Chris for what I saw as failing my dad, who was her caretaker and enabler in those years. But something was going on in America that was bigger than Chris, her willpower, or her goodness. Opioid addiction was a national health epidemic on the rise, most deadly and financially devastating within poor populations. It was hard for me to see it that way when it was my aging father’s finite energy and hard-earned wages taking care of the problem.
If Chris had failed, what about the systems that failed her? The criminal justice system that, rather than finding her help for a health problem, put her in handcuffs and collected bail. The job market in which her high school diploma diminished in value just as she was acquiring it in the early 1980s, such that her wages couldn’t keep up with living costs. The for-profit health-care industry pushing opioid prescriptions that made them rich, like the small-town doctor who prescribed Chris’s drugs for years and eventually went to prison.
I sometimes felt ashamed about my proximity to the situation. I used to imagine taking a friend to my dad’s house. How would I explain Chris’s wild behavior and scrambled language? Could I do it without feeling embarrassed? I hoped the answer was yes. But I’d learned that most people had no idea what to say or do and felt uncomfortable when presented with stories about my family’s troubles.
Dad refused to vilify Chris, long before unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies were revealed in the news. Chris had early-onset dementia and brain atrophy, he told me doctors had said. But those likely were symptoms of the problem he wouldn’t name. For a man raised as a Catholic farm boy, to call his own wife an “addict” was too much, I guess, even as her substance use disorder and related legal and financial troubles hurt them both. He had made a promise to Chris to stand by her as her husband and he would keep it, he told me. He couldn’t leave her like that, he said, when people told him to save himself. He never once complained or said a bad word about her, which is more than I can say for myself or this country that views addiction and so many other systemic problems as personal failures.
After more than twenty-five years of struggle with opioids, Chris got a prescription for methadone, which numbs the addiction. It also rots your teeth—a side effect that surely harmed Chris in the court of public opinion. But, for seven years, she dutifully went to the clinic every morning for her dose—her mind clearing and focusing along the way as she rebuilt her health and her will to live.
In the years after that, by then wearing dentures that were superglued together due to a crack she couldn’t afford to fix, Chris maintained her recovery by helping others who struggled as she had. She let broken and addicted people—penniless, jobless, just out of jail—into the house, sometimes at her and my dad’s peril. She gave selflessly whatever she could: her time, her encouragement, her understanding. She drove them to work at McDonald’s at dawn when their drivers’ licenses had been revoked, their cars busted or repossessed. She never judged what they had or hadn’t done with their lives.
When I was still a kid, though, Chris was not yet a debilitated addict or a recovered Samaritan. She was a fun, sweet young woman whose economic vulnerabilities were setting her on the hard path that so many Americans would follow into the twenty-first century: too much trouble and not enough help. Along the way, she lost not just money and health but lifelong friends. They were embarrassed by her behavior, angry about what they said she had done to herself.
It was around the time that I first met Chris, those couple postdivorce years when I lived in Wichita in fourth, fifth, sixth grade—my last moment as an unnoticed girl before puberty—that my concept of you came into view.
I would guess that’s because those were such pivotal, defining years for me and my trajectory. My life contained a tension between what people think of as two different kinds of life paths. I was old enough to roam the streets unsupervised, at least in my family’s eyes, and in those moments I found release by doing things that sent kids in my neighborhood to juvenile detention hall: stealing, vandalizing. I was coming to understand, too, the deep well of violence, substance abuse, and brushes with the law—the generational markers of poverty—within my family and their implications for my own life. Where my earlier childhood years had been lonely and frustrating, my new reality was chaotic and confusing.
I’d gone to three different schools in the span of a year and a half. Both my parents were newly partnered with people who, in some ways, didn’t have much business caring for children. My cousin Shelly, who was four years older than I was and who had been forced by the transience of poverty to attend fifteen schools by the time she was in high school, was running around with tough teenage characters. A girl my age was abducted while walking alone in a poor neighborhood not far from where I lived. Her body, raped and strangled, was found in a field.
Life increasingly felt like the courthouse where Grandma worked—dangerous people and innocent victims, with poor people like my family filling both roles. The only thing I did harder than study and read was pray.
I sometimes prayed alone on my knees until they hurt as a sort of sacrifice to a God I’d been taught dealt in trade. My prayers were for my family but also for me in my quest for a better life. That quest, I thought, was threatened by a B on a test at school. “I promise that I will stop stealing baseball cards,” I’d pray out loud, “if you will let my report card be all A’s.”
The American narrative of a poor kid working hard, doing the right thing, and finding success for it is so deep in me, my life story so tempting as potential evidence for that narrative’s validity, that I probably sometimes err on the side of conveying a story in which I’m an individual beating the odds with her own determination. There’s some truth in that story. But my life is a litany of blessings somehow sewn into my existence rather than accomplishments to my own credit. My awareness of you is one of those.
When deciding my actions, in late childhood, I vaguely felt a new question.
What would I want my daughter to do? Or sometimes it was, What would I tell my daughter? Or, What would I do for my daughter?
When I heard those questions inside me, I felt an immediate calm and clarity. It felt like when I was small and stumbled onto the trick with the mirror, looking into my own eyes until I felt a little shift behind my forehead and knew myself as a presence beyond that little girl.
But now the child I intended to protect wasn’t just myself. Now the child I intended to protect was you.
It was a handy way of reframing my life on the cusp of American adolescence and the angry urges toward self-destruction that can come with it. In certain moments, I could and would fail myself in the struggles ahead. But in those precarious years, even as I was still a child myself, I’d think of you as my responsibility. For some reason, I could be impeccable with that assignment.
; You were like the baby farm animals I hovered near at dusk when the coyotes came out, earning Grandpa Arnie’s farmer respect as someone who would crouch in the cold to help keep a fragile thing alive. But they had their own mothers, which in some important ways I did not. That void is where I found you.
Unlike with the piglets, calves, and chicks, no one could take you to auction or grind your flesh in the butchering shed. You were above the markets that defined the lives of farmers and farm animals, beyond the shame a country or a church could assign. You were more real than the girl I saw in my own bedroom mirror—quieter than my uncertain world and somehow holier for being invisible.
5
A HOUSE THAT NEEDS SHINGLES
You probably would have lived in a strong, old house, purchased at its most broken moment and fixed with my hands. That’s because I learned renovation skills from my own parents, whom I now think of as a sort of god and goddess of houses: Dad was a carpenter who could see the ghost of the people who died in old homes. Mom had an eye for transforming interior spaces and got paid to find a house’s next inhabitants.
A construction worker and a poor-neighborhood real estate agent aren’t what people think of as artists, but that’s what Nick and Jeannie were. Dad could draw a home addition on the side of an envelope with a carpenter’s pencil and then make it real with materials salvaged from commercial job sites where he made his hourly wage. Mom could go into an estate sale with a $50 bill and come out with antique light fixtures and hardware to refit an entire neglected home, her effort the difference between the property sitting on the market for six months and selling in two weeks.
I doubt either of them would have worked in that industry if given many other options. Dad didn’t read books but had a habit of secretly jotting original poems onto lumber scraps; Mom used the language and humor of an intellectual. Theirs was not a world where natural gifts and interests decide your profession. Dad inherited his craft from his father. Mom was a saleswoman for whom charm was a professional asset and a house was the biggest possible commission. But they both had talents about houses that school can’t teach and money can’t improve, as well as an appreciation for homes that had been deepened by deprivation.
Like me, over the years they had no choice but to move into and out of the places people see when they picture poverty: trailers with dents in the metal skirting over the wheels, bad apartments with unlit stairwells, houses full of outdated finishes and broken appliances. Sometimes, though, they were able to make a decent and even beautiful home out of something bought or rented cheap, given up on by people with less vision and fewer skills. They taught me everything they could, if only because I was free help.
From Dad: The actual dimensions of a two-by-four (about 1.5 by 3.5 inches). How to angle a hammer to pry a crooked nail without denting the wood. The engineering process that keeps parking lots from flooding when it rains, the relationship between contractors and subcontractors, the politics and corporate influence behind safety standards. The economics of labor unions. The tradesmen who price-gouged (electricians) and the ones who earned every penny (plumbers). How to get all the subcontractors on the same page with a cut-the-bullshit group meeting of hard hats. How far down to bedrock. How to lay a concrete foundation, how to lay brick. How to run every kind of saw, which saws really called for safety goggles and which really did not. How to put up sheetrock, how to mud and sand its seams. How to not inhale or absorb through your hands the tiny, painful particles of fiberglass. How water flows through houses; the hell of a septic tank, of a crawl space. How to stay a foundation, shifting with the silty Kansas soil, with beams against a basement wall. How to make anything level with a shim.
From Mom: How to drive a FOR SALE sign’s metal legs into hard, dry summer earth while wearing high heels. The reliable financial return, via word-of-mouth recommendations, on a $50 house-closing gift for the client. How to make a crappy house look less crappy for a showing. How to deal with idiots. How to operate a mortgage calculator (the handheld sort, before the internet). The terms: mortgage, broker, seller, commission, owner carry, buyer, prequalification, refi, showing, open house, contract pending, under contract, sold, kickbacks, inspections, loan approval, HUD, 30-year conventional. The sort of advertising that was cost-effective (business cards with one’s pretty headshot, to be handed out personally) and not (expensive space on bus-stop benches or billboards). How to affect a Business Voice. The names of the three credit-reporting bureaus and the ways they were and were not full of shit about what actually affects one’s credit score. Rent was money down the drain. Real estate is the best investment because you have to live somewhere regardless, and there was a federal tax deduction for mortgage interest, to boot. How everything happens for a reason, however mysterious, because inevitably if some poor young couple had their hearts broken when a contract fell through, they’d find a better house the following week. Remember, if something goes sour after the contract has been signed, legally you can make a seller sell, but you can’t make a buyer buy. Above all else: In negotiating a purchase price, he who cares the least, wins.
I’m not as good as they were at building, fixing, beautifying, negotiating, designing, drawing up contracts, intimidating bank appraisers. But I’ve done all those things. There is a good chance you would have been poor in a house that didn’t look it.
That mattered to my parents and me because we were sensitive people who thought a house was more than shelter—an expression of yourself, an environment whose colors could affect you almost as much as the weather outside the walls. When my parents were still together and Dad had just finished building our house, Mom painted one wall in the family room a deep, rusty maroon; like a director or a painter with a visual signature, she painted one wall that exact color in every place she lived from then on, even if it was a rental and she wasn’t supposed to.
My grandparents were different sorts of people. Chic and Arnie were farmers who appreciated smart, efficient construction but for whom a house was mostly the bathroom, where the straps of overalls were unsnapped to shower after evening chores, and the bedroom, where they slept until dawn at the latest. Betty and Teresa were both rigid, pragmatic women who wanted things clean and functional but didn’t have an eye for beauty. I don’t know where Nick and Jeannie came from sometimes. But what you inherited about houses would have been mostly because of them.
Their sensitivity wasn’t just about spaces but about what a space holds. When they were dating, Dad slept on the couch at Betty and Arnie’s farmhouse and left in the middle of the night because of something he saw in the doorway to the dining room, which he never would talk about. In the houses she listed for working-class Wichitans, Mom just had a feeling when the would-be buyers walked through the door. I don’t necessarily believe in ghosts or psychic abilities, but I do believe in a person’s honest, sometimes unexplainable experience of the world. Like my parents, I’ve seen too much to ignore those sort of mysteries.
For them, a current of time and meaning ran through every house. Time was marked by different people moving in and out, but the meaning stayed the same: security, safety, stability, structure, home. All the things they valued more for having lacked. All the things they were never quite able to give me.
Once, when she first got her real estate license in the early 1980s, Mom helped push through a loan for a big family of Vietnamese immigrants trying to buy a little house on the south side of Wichita. They were so grateful that they insisted that she and her family come to a celebratory dinner in their new place. They didn’t speak fluent English, and my parents definitely didn’t speak Vietnamese, but the honor of their invitation was understood at the table. The bit of the American Dream they had obtained involved a bank, where someone whose name they’d never know wore a tie at some desk. But their human connection to the deal was a young woman in high heels walking up their driveway with a talkative blond toddler and a nervous husband wearing snakeskin cowbo
y boots. The market turns housing into an abstract measure. But there is nothing more personal than a house.
My parents had seen houses the way a doctor has seen a body—reduced to its parts, stripped to its studs, condemned or repaired, cosmetically rearranged, a list of costs someone writes a check for. That might sound like a detached and cold relationship to homes, and for many people in that industry it must be. For us it was the opposite. Dad’s blood was inside a wall somewhere, on the beam that he’d cut by running a board through a table saw that nicked his hand. Across town, in another house, probably near train tracks, Mom’s heart was in the closing-gift bouquet she gave the young couple who bought the place with a down payment they’d saved by working overtime for five years.
On weekends, I swept up Dad’s sawdust and lit candles in strangers’ kitchens before Mom’s open houses. I understood the construction and the sale. But I absorbed from Nick and Jeannie that houses were less important as economic investments than they were as containers for souls.
In America, meanwhile, the house is the ultimate status symbol, and ownership is a source of economic pride.
That pride is by design. After the American industrial revolution and World War I made the United States a wealthy world power, the government that once enticed people west with false promises of an agricultural paradise would entice people away from the vertical, communal living space of city centers to the “single-family unit” of suburbia.
“The man who owns his own home has a happy sense of security,” future president Herbert Hoover said as secretary of commerce during the 1920s. “No man ever worked for or fought for a boardinghouse.” That was the thinking behind a national push for homeownership in that money-fattened, postwar moment: The hard work that maintains an orderly country is tied up with ownership of an orderly block. In this way, the American homeowner was envisioned as both a linchpin of the national economy and a steward of civil obedience.