by Sarah Smarsh
Those women knew struggle along highways as a way of life, and as their immediate descendant I felt their destiny pushing itself onto me. Now those women I loved, once seeming forces of power above me, had been revealed as hurt little girls. No matter how much I loved them and the home we had shared, I was getting out of their goddamn car.
Economic inequality is one cultural divide that causes us to see one another as stereotypes, some of which allow the powerful to make harmful decisions in policy and politics.
That separation is experienced intimately, though, as distances we might not realize are related to class. I grew up seeing, in particular, how it rips at the bond between children and the people who might have taken care of them. The struggling divorcée, lacking means to provide a proper home, loses custody of her child; the poor teenager puts her baby up for adoption; the meth addict tells her kids to hide when state child-welfare agents knock on the trailer door; the alcoholic, unemployed father knows his children will be better off without him and drives away with a broken heart. The young woman I once was longed to have you but knew she couldn’t do right by you or herself if she did.
By the time I was in high school, I had figured out that Betty had a son. We had never talked about it. All I knew of him were a couple black-and-white photos in which a mysterious blond baby sat next to my four-year-old mother in living rooms I’d never seen. I recalled whispers, cryptic conversations between Grandma and her sisters about a boy named Bo.
One day when I was in high school, I came home to find a list, in Grandma’s handwriting, near the cordless handset that had replaced the rotary phone next to the bathroom door. It was a list of phone numbers for private investigators.
When Grandma got home with sacks of groceries, I told her I thought she should find her son. She let out a loud sigh, the way she always did after I had badgered her enough about something she didn’t want to think about. She told me about when Bo was nine or ten, just before she lost in court for good and decided it was best for him if she stayed away, when she drove to Colorado and got to spend a few hours with him.
“I told him I’d see him again soon, and that I’d have a bicycle for him,” she said, her voice shaky. “He wanted a bike real bad. He was so excited. But I didn’t have any money. I was dirt poor. Christ, I was just a kid. So I never got him the bike. That’s the last I seen him. He probably grew up thinking, ‘Wow, what a lousy mom, she lied to me and split.’ ”
Her face was wet. She turned back to the sink. I sat there thinking about how I should get up and give her a hug, but I didn’t.
“I think he’s lucky to have you for a mom,” I said.
“Thanks, Lou.”
Soon, in the fall of 1996, during my junior year of high school, Grandma asked me to go with her and Grandpa Arnie to Denver to meet her grown son. Mom didn’t come with us—maybe because of work, maybe something more.
Driving along the highway, Grandma smoked even more than usual. I asked her to crack the window. The sound of wheels on the highway and the wind of western Kansas was better than a cloud of smoke. I stretched out across the back seat of the Toyota minivan that Grandma had bought used so that I could drive the 1986 Corolla every day to and from work and school.
Grandma didn’t speak after we left the farm with an Igloo cooler of canned pop and plastic baggies of licorice. She was usually quiet on the road but not this quiet. It was a ten-hour drive to end a nearly thirty-year separation.
Grandpa Arnie snored in the passenger seat. He had never met Bo and didn’t know the details of that story from Grandma’s past. But he had a way of understanding things without needing to discuss them. He had left the farm in someone else’s hands for the weekend—the first time I’d seen him do so in my entire life—and that told me how much he cared.
Arid western Kansas is even drier than our southern part of the state. Tumbleweeds blew in the dirt that the highway cut through. A few trees marked the flat space between horizons. It was hard to see autumn with so few changing leaves.
We crossed into Colorado and soon saw the faint outline of mountains on the horizon, always thrilling to us. We pulled into Uncle Carl’s driveway in the winding streets of a Denver suburb in early evening. He and Aunt Pat lived in a big, nice house with new carpet and a neat garage full of golf clubs and bicycles in a winding suburb. Carl had come a long way from his and Betty’s poor childhood.
It was weird that he ended up here, I thought, from Kansas to Texas to Michigan to, by chance, the same city as his long-lost nephew. He had offered his home as a place for the reunion with Bo, who was now thirty and working as a cable-TV installer, climbing poles to connect wires. He had been a Marine in the 1980s and was newly married.
Uncle Carl looked more like Dorothy than ever with his shiny, round cheeks and bumpy nose. He gave us a tour of the place, and Grandpa Arnie inspected all that was growing in the backyard. Betty wandered around the house like a wild, frightened animal. Or she went to the bathroom to comb her hair or make sure her shirt was evenly tucked into her pants, a larger size than in years past.
We finally heard a car pulling into the driveway. Betty moved toward the window to peek outside, and Pat opened the door. A blond man stood there with his young wife. Betty’s chest had been puffed out since she left the living room, like she’d taken a deep breath and not let it go. The instant she saw her son, she turned quickly and looked at me with huge eyes and a half smile.
“God, you look just like your father,” she told him.
Bo sucked in a shaky breath, like maybe that hadn’t been the best thing to say. After all the introductions, he turned to her with a pained look.
“Why do you keep calling me ‘Bo’?” he said. “My name is Robert.”
Betty blinked. “Okay,” she said.
They stayed in touch after that. A couple times a year, he would make the ten-hour drive to the farm or we’d drive to Denver. He and my mom ended up being close; she even moved to Denver some years later to be near him and his young family. It was a reunion owed in large part to what Betty had made of her life—the confidence she had gained working in “the system,” as she called the criminal courts, the steadiness and sanity that she ultimately found in spite of her chaotic past, the mere fact that she had survived.
Perhaps most important to our family’s happier endings was that, while Betty had plenty of good excuses to become a bitter, cynical person, she had somehow preserved her natural outlook on the world: that justice is worth fighting for, and the notion of a better life is always worth a shot.
Just as Betty and my mom were reuniting with Robert, I was getting ready to leave home. The specifics were unclear and fell to me to organize and decide, as is usually the case for a college-hopeful teenager whose family never went.
The Marines set up a table in the lobby of my high school and said they’d pay for my college. I took their information packet home and read every word. Shelly had gotten involved in ROTC at her high school in Wichita. My new uncle Robert had appreciated his time in the Marines, he told me. A couple younger cousins of mine, Polly’s teenage sons, would soon join the Army and Navy.
Dad had barely missed going to Vietnam. He turned eighteen two years before the draft ended, and Grandpa Chic told him he would turn recruiters away if they knocked on the door of the farmhouse. Both of his older brothers had been in the National Guard. But Dad didn’t think much of the military and wasn’t sorry he missed going overseas. He thought the United States had done terrible things with its armed forces over the years, back to its crimes against the American Indians whose arrowheads he’d found in the dirt when he built our house in 1984. You didn’t need a college education to know that, he said.
All the same, the prospect of getting an education for “free” made me lie awake at night, listening to the bullfrogs outside and the fan whirring in the window and picturing myself as a soldier. It would all depend on wha
t sort of scholarships I got, I decided. I prayed.
The teachers at Kingman High said it wasn’t necessary to take the SATs, which were required for admission to most major universities across the country, so I didn’t. Kansas universities required only the ACT, they said, so I took that test.
I’d previously taken the PSATs while seated on a folding chair in our gymnasium. I was exhausted from waiting tables at a Pizza Hut on the highway the previous night and, thinking it inconsequential practice—the “P” stood for “preliminary”—I answered questions with uncharacteristic carelessness. Weeks later, the guidance counselor, who was also the boys’ track coach, approached me in the hallway.
“You only missed National Merit by a few points,” he said.
“What’s National Merit?” I asked. It was, it turned out, an academic honor that would’ve paid my way at many elite universities. Kansas public education was excellent on a national scale, but my years in rural schools didn’t come with the same opportunities as Wichita districts.
Still, I started getting brochures in the mail from colleges across the country. We didn’t have a computer at home, and my high school had just one computer online; it wasn’t yet the “digital age” for most people, so our rural mailbox was the only way for universities to reach me. Their brochures included pictures of happy kids my age walking across campuses of trees and old stone buildings with happy parents who had sweaters tied around their shoulders.
The pile of recruitment materials outgrew the folder I kept them in, then outgrew a box, until finally I kept them in big bags in my bedroom. I had no idea how to process them, other than to keep the ones from universities famous enough that I’d heard of them.
Many of the letters named visiting days for touring the campus. I didn’t know that visiting colleges together was a rite of passage for many families. The cost of travel would have been unthinkable, anyway. Grandma had a small stash of cash from her years of working at the courthouse while living in Grandpa’s paid-off farmhouse. I didn’t know exactly how much it was, but it was there when friends and family needed bailed out of a bind. I never thought to ask her to pay for campus visits. I understood college as a wholly independent endeavor—one my parents and grandparents vaguely supported but became nervous and even self-conscious discussing. They knew even less about the process than I did.
On graduation day, I looked out at my class of sixty or so graduates in red caps and gowns, lined up in folding chairs on the small-town gym floor painted with a red eagle. My family was all there, proud. They had not been to many high school graduation ceremonies. But I felt less satisfaction than I did relief. There was a diploma in my hand, a scholarship with my name on it, and no baby inside me. I thought, No matter what happens now, I made it.
There was a great deal of work ahead of me, but I had passed the first gauntlet in escaping a probable version of my life—one where all my hopes and dreams were compromised by the necessity of caring and paying for your life.
College applications require an application fee, so I had ended up applying to only one school, the University of Kansas. I knew I liked the hilly town where it was located, since I’d attended an honors academy on scholarship there a couple summers prior, and it had a good journalism school. Most of my friends were going to the historically agricultural college or small university outposts in windblown western Kansas. KU in liberal Lawrence was thought of by most people in Kingman as a snobbish place. I experienced my enrollment there as an unimaginably fancy achievement.
I received merit-based and geography-based scholarships that covered my tuition and then some, so I dropped the idea of enlisting in the military. I didn’t get Pell Grants, though. While I’d moved out years earlier and they didn’t pay for most of my upbringing, Mom and Bob still claimed me as a dependent for the deduction on their taxes. Since my grandparents had not legally adopted me, I had to list Mom and Bob’s joint income on my federal aid application. So while my actual need qualified me for Pell Grants that wouldn’t have to be repaid, Bob’s modest income meant I received only federal loans with subsidized interest.
That excruciating experience was a formative one, I see now. I started my college career needing something I didn’t get because the need went unacknowledged on a form that didn’t ask the right questions. Most people who write laws weren’t raised by their grandparents due to economic hardship, and the federal aid formula is based on the assumption that parents help pay for college.
I ended up doing an investigative story about the issue for the student newspaper. It was the first thing I ever wrote that was picked up by the national wire to run in papers across the country. So many students thanked me for writing it that I never stopped thinking about the distance between how poverty is handled in public policy and what it looks like in human lives.
Before I got to campus, though, I spent the summer after graduation saving up money for a car. I’d been in a bad wreck and totaled Grandma’s old Corolla on the last day of classes. I borrowed her van to work the wheat harvest at the grain co-op in Kingman. At the old elevator at the end of Main Street, a high school friend and I weighed wheat trucks when they rolled onto the scale. I ran out the door to hand farmers tickets printed with the weight of their load, the price of wheat that day, and how much money was going into their account.
“You’re Nick Smarsh’s girl, aintcha,” some of them said, and I smiled. I hadn’t lived with my dad in almost ten years, and he’d been gone from the country for just as long. But out there a person is forever known by what family she belongs to.
We wore hard hats when we went in and out of the mill with sacks of feed. A tall, poorly ventilated column full of dusty grain in the Kansas summer is a volatile thing. While I worked there, a grain elevator to the east blew up and killed seven men working inside it.
Once the June harvest was done, I worked fifty miles away at a hotel reservations call center on the far east side of Wichita. College hadn’t even started yet, and I’d been exhausted for years.
In August, I handed a man $3,000 in cash for a small brown sedan with a good engine and a deep gash in the driver’s seat. A few days after I turned eighteen, I loaded the backseat of my car and said goodbye to Mom in the driveway of a suburban town house into which she, Bob, and Matt had recently moved. Bob was proud of me and excited for my upcoming adventures. He looked at my mom.
“You’re not going to help your daughter move to college?” he said. He’d done so with his own three kids in recent years, as I recall.
Mom looked embarrassed, like it had never occurred to her. It hadn’t occurred to me either. We all hugged, and I drove away with my map.
I wonder now whether she didn’t go with me because the thought of a college campus—and all that she wouldn’t know to say and do there as my mother—intimidated her. She wasn’t one to act intimidated, of course. But when I got older I’d see how uncomfortable my family sometimes acted in places that had become natural to me.
From the farm to campus, the journey was eight counties, two hundred miles, three hours of prairie. I drove northeast through the heat on the tall golden grass, up through the Flint Hills toward the Kansas River. August was a wealthy month for wheat farmers, recently paid for the grain they’d spent all year farming. August was also the month when I harvested a lifetime of hard work and left.
In college, I began to understand the depth of the rift that is economic inequality. Roughly speaking, on one side of the rift was the place I was from—laborers, workers, people filled with distrust for the systems that had been ignoring and even spurning them for a couple decades. On the other side were the people who run those systems—basically, people with college funds who end up living in cities or moving to one of the expensive coasts. It’s much messier than that, of course. But before arriving on campus, I hadn’t understood the extent of my family’s poverty—“wealth” previously having been represented to me by a frien
d whose dad was our small town’s postmaster and whose mom went to the Wichita mall every weekend.
Even at a Midwestern state university, my background—agricultural work, manual labor, rural poverty, teen pregnancies, domestic chaos, pervasive addiction—seemed like a faraway story to the people I met. Most of them were from tidy neighborhoods in Wichita, Kansas City, the greater Chicago area. They used a different sort of English and had different politics. They were appalled that I had grown up with conservative ideas about government and Catholic doctrine against abortion. I was appalled that they didn’t know where their food came from or even seem to care since it had always just appeared on their plates when they wanted it.
There was no language for whatever I represented on campus. Scholarships and student organizations existed to boost kids from disadvantaged groups such as racial minorities, international students, and the LGBTQ community. I was none of those things, and professors and other students often assumed from looking at me or hearing me speak that I was a middle-class kid with parents sending me money.
To pay my room and board during my freshman year at college, I worked as a tutor for poor middle-school kids in nearby Kansas City and Topeka in the afternoons, as a stage technician for a performing arts center in the evenings, and as my dorm’s front-desk attendant overnight. During spring break, I was the trail boss for an environmental cleanup crew. I waited tables, too, late-night shifts worth a forty-five-minute drive to Kansas City because the tips were better there. I knew other kids with jobs but not many who had no choice but to work.
A young woman in poverty, vulnerable twice over, I was mistreated at many of those jobs. I thought of you often, then—that question, What would I want for my daughter? The answer was always to quit and find another job, so I would. I felt the tension between my need and my dignity every day. Some days I went hungry because I refused to work somewhere a male boss looked at my body.