Mia and I had what looked like a normal life, one with places we needed to be during the day. I qualified for a childcare grant, but only for half days. My friend’s husband, John, had a small landscaping business, and he paid me $10 an hour to pull weeds, prune shrubs, and clear rhododendron bushes of dead flowers. I’d drive all around the northeast section of the Olympic Peninsula, to little gated communities, with a large garbage can in the back of my car, which contained a white paint bucket with tools and a few pairs of gloves. Some clients had a designated area for me to dump weeds and clippings, or I had to bag them up and set them by the curb, or even wrestle them into the back of my car. John had just a few regular clients with big enough jobs that required my help, so I filled the majority of my time with jobs I found on my own and worked my way up to charging $20 to $25 an hour, but with travel time I could work only two to three hours a day.
Landscaping meant crawling. Most people hired me to clear weeds from whole hillsides covered in wood chips. I’d spend hours on my gloved hands and double-kneed Carhartts, filling buckets, trash cans, and garbage bags with weeds that people paid me to organically kill by pulling out of the ground. It was good work. But, being seasonal, it would end in a matter of weeks, and I didn’t know what I’d do for work after that. Port Townsend’s job market was seasonal, too, dependent on tourists with full pockets and empty bellies. There weren’t a lot of “normal” jobs with “mom hours,” or ones I had any experience in, anyway. I’d always worked in coffee shops or at odd gigs that I couldn’t really list on a résumé. Even cleaning the preschool every Sunday wasn’t enough. But I had work, for the time being, and I tried to focus on doing the best I could with that.
I’d drop Mia off for day care by noon, and three days a week her dad picked her up and kept her until seven. Some evenings while Mia was with Jamie, I sat out on the deck, my back against the wall. One of my neighbors always seemed to be outside with her daughter, on the small strip of grass between the building and the trees. Her daughter was a little younger than Mia. They both had very fair, almost transparent skin. I’d listen to the young mother gently ask, “Are you gonna go down the slide?” as her daughter crawled up the steps of the faded red-and-blue plastic slide. It had probably been left there a few tenants ago. “Wheee!” the mother would say as the baby slid down. That’s a better mom than me, I’d think, listening to her narrate her daughter’s trips up and down the slide, knowing I could never muster the same excitement.
But on one of those late afternoons, paramedics and firemen walked past the little slide in the grass, moving it out of the way. They all went into the fair-skinned mom’s apartment. I didn’t hear the baby. I leaned forward on the rail of my porch to see what was going on. Several of my neighbors did the same. One of the firemen looked up at all of us, and I instinctively ducked back a step to hide. He shook his head from side to side. I wondered what we all looked like, women and men in transitional housing, peeking over the rails. I wondered how the police and firemen talked about the building, us; what other reasons they had been called here. I went inside before they wheeled the mother away on a stretcher. I didn’t want her to see me watching, even if her eyes were closed; I wanted to give her the dignity she deserved. I’d want the same.
An hour later, when I left my apartment to get Mia, Brooke came out, her eyes wide, cheeks red, ready to spill the gossip. “You know what happened, right?” she said, rushing toward me.
I shook my head. She said that someone had come to return the baby when they found her mother passed out on the bed. They couldn’t wake her up. She’d taken sleeping pills and chugged an entire bottle of vodka. “They found her in time, though. She’s alive,” Brooke reassured me. Then she sighed and shrugged. “So much for no alcohol.”
My first thoughts weren’t whether the lady was okay or about the little girl. I just hoped Jamie wouldn’t hear about it. I lived in fear that anything bad happening around Mia, including at the Early Head Start day care she attended, would reflect badly on my fragile permission to mother her full-time.
I’d immersed Mia in a world of poverty, surrounded her with some who tried to cope with it in sometimes tragic ways; some who had gone to prison or rehab long enough to lose their homes, some so angry from never getting a break, some who suffered symptoms of mental illness. A mother had chosen to give up completely. A choice so tantalizing, for a flash of a moment, I felt a twinge of envy.
4
THE FAIRGROUNDS APARTMENT
Is Julie around?” I asked, waiting for the woman behind the glass to write the receipt for my rent check. Each month’s rent amount was different, depending on what my reported income was, and remained around $200.
The woman squinted at the whiteboard on the back wall of her front office. “No,” she said with a sigh. “She’s out with a client. Do you want to leave a message?”
I did.
“I’m having trouble settling into the apartment,” I said to Julie the next day in the conference room.
Julie, much to my relief, didn’t ask why.
It was all overwhelming: wondering if there’d be a knock on my door by the housing authority or tiptoeing around the apartment afraid of the woman yelling at us from downstairs, pounding on the floor with her broom handle. I had even asked Jamie over for dinner once because my loneliness had started to consume me. I hadn’t been out, seen my friends, or invited any over. I felt isolated. This was no place for me.
“Wait here,” Julie said, then returned a couple minutes later with some packets. “We can sign you up for TBRA.” She pronounced it tee-bra, which stood for Tenant-Based Rental Assistance. “It’s a lot like Section Eight. You’re on the waitlist for Section Eight, right?”
I nodded. Section 8 felt like the unicorn of government assistance—you always heard about it but never knew anyone who had it. It’s a rent voucher that pays for any housing costs beyond 30 to 40 percent of the tenant’s income. So, someone working minimum wage, who brings home $1,000 a month, with a voucher would pay only $300 rent, and the government would pay for the rest as long as it followed what the tenant qualified for—usually two or three bedrooms. The building had to meet Section 8 standards, which are pretty basic—like no lead paint, working plumbing, and things like that. Once someone has it, it’s honored—as long as you can find a landlord who’ll accept it—anywhere in the state, and it never expires.
I was on waitlists in three different counties. Jefferson County, where Port Townsend was, had the shortest at only a year, but most places I called had a waiting period of five years or more. Some weren’t even accepting new applicants, the need was so high.
Julie introduced me to a new caseworker who worked specifically with the Section 8 and TBRA programs. This woman sat behind a large desk, her short, dark, wavy hair framing her unsmiling face. She had me fill out several applications with questions about my plans for the next year and beyond. With detailed proof and calculations of my income, plus the $275 monthly child support, the amount of rent I’d expect to pay for a two-bedroom, $700-per-month apartment would currently be $199.
“That amount will go up or down depending on what your reported income is,” Julie added, who I was thankful had sat with me through the appointment.
TBRA also required me to go to a class or seminar, where I’d learn about the program, but mainly how to approach potential landlords about using TBRA (and eventually Section 8) to pay my rent. “Most landlords have some experience with Section Eight,” Julie said on our way out. “Or they at least know about the program. But some of them aren’t aware that it can be a really good thing.” I wasn’t sure what she meant and wondered why it would be a bad thing, but I didn’t ask.
We stopped in the parking lot, where she wrote down the time and directions to the class on housing assistance. “You’re lucky, there’s one tomorrow,” she said optimistically. “You should be able to get into a new place pretty fast!”
I gave her a smile and nodded, but I was not holding onto h
ope that any of these programs would be able to help. The trauma from the last six months since we’d been homeless, and dealing with Jamie always fighting me, had paralyzed my whole system. My brain, stomach, nerves, everything was on constant high alert. Nothing was safe. Nothing was permanent. Every day I walked on a rug that could be yanked out from under me at any moment. I watched people smile at me, nodding their heads, again telling me how lucky I was to have this program or place available to us, but I didn’t feel fortunate at all. My whole life had become unrecognizable.
Caseworkers told me where to go, where to apply, what form to fill out. They’d ask me what I needed, and I’d say, “A place to live,” or “To eat,” or “Childcare so I can work,” and they’d help, or find someone who could, or not help at all. But that was all they could do. Recovering from the trauma was also vital, maybe the most critical, but not only could no one help me with that, I didn’t know yet that I needed it. The months of poverty, instability, and insecurity created a panic response that would take years to undo.
* * *
“You’d think landlords would appreciate it,” the man standing at the front of the room said to about twenty people sitting around two tables in a narrow room. He was Mark, the same guy who’d taught the class for LIHEAP (the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program). It’d been a year since I’d attended a three-hour seminar on how to use electricity most efficiently. The information was so redundant and common-sense, I tried to find humor in it, separating myself from my situation, that learning how to turn off the lights was required in order to receive a grant for $400 of heating fuel. More and more, I got the feeling that people who needed government assistance were assumed to be a very uneducated bunch and were treated accordingly. How degrading, to learn that since I needed money, I must not know how to keep my utility costs low.
Now I had to sit through several hours of learning how a rent assistance program paid landlords so I could assure them they’d get paid. To the government and everyone else, it was inherent they shouldn’t trust me. All of it seemed so counterproductive. I’d taken time off work to be there and had to arrange for childcare. I sat there, glaring at Mark, who stood at the front of the room. He wore the same long-sleeved flannel shirt and high-waisted blue jeans pulled up to his abdomen he’d worn when he taught the LIHEAP class. His thin ponytail had gotten a little longer over the year since I’d seen him. I smiled at the memory of his suggestion to save money on the electric bill by not preheating the oven and by letting it cool with the door open. He’d said, after a bath or shower, to never immediately drain the hot water because the heat from the water could go into the house and heat it.
“Section Eight is great for landlords because it’s guaranteed rent payments. They just don’t like to rent to the people on Section Eight,” Mark said. “It’s your job to show them how it’s worth it.”
I thought of how many times the police, firemen, and paramedics had come to our building in the last couple of months; of the random checks to make sure living spaces were kept clean or to make sure broken-down cars in the parking lot had been repaired; to patrol us so that we weren’t doing the awful things they expected poor people to do, like allowing the laundry or garbage to pile up, when really, we lacked physical energy and resources from working jobs no one else wanted to do. We were expected to live off minimum wage, to work several jobs at varying hours, to afford basic needs while fighting for safe places to leave our children. Somehow nobody saw the work; they saw only the results of living a life that constantly crushed you with its impossibility. It seemed like no matter how much I tried to prove otherwise, “poor” was always associated with dirty. How was I supposed to present myself to landlords as a responsible tenant when I was faced with a wall of stigmas stacked so high?
“Those of you with TBRA will have to explain how that program transitions into Section Eight, but make sure you highlight the benefits of both equally!” Mark insisted. “What these wonderful programs do is break down rent into two payments—yours and the portion paid by the program.” He looked thrilled by this statement. You would have thought he was auctioning items, not talking to Section 8 applicants. “Landlords don’t like that the Section Eight payment comes on a set day; they want it to come at the first of the month, but you can convince them!” He picked up another pile of papers to hand out. “Section Eight is guaranteed money,” he repeated.
There were more hurdles to jump over after you broke through the walls of judgment and convinced a landlord to take you on as a tenant. Though it was supposed to be the landlord’s responsibility to get approved for funds from the program, the house or apartment had to meet several safety standards, including working smoke detectors and other safe living conditions, and most of the time that meant if a house or apartment didn’t meet the standards, it wouldn’t be available for a family with a voucher to rent. Which set us up for a conundrum, since landlords in the nicer neighborhoods didn’t want to rent to “Section 8 people.” We had to look for housing in places that were run-down and where we risked not passing the move-in inspection.
“Landlords are required to meet Section Eight standards, but a lot of them just don’t want to do it,” Mark pointed out. “It’s their choice. It’s not illegal or anything like discrimination—”
“It’s totally discrimination,” the girl next to me shouted.
I knew her from Waterfront Pizza. We’d smiled at each other. I thought I remembered her name was Amy, but I wasn’t sure.
“My boyfriend and I found a great little house,” she said, “but my friend ended up getting the place. The landlord said he didn’t want to rent to Section Eight people because they’d end up trashing it.” She rubbed the base of her pregnant belly. “He said he didn’t want to be a slumlord.”
Everyone’s heads turned to Mark, who just stuffed his hands into his pockets.
Somehow, it took only a week for me to find a place. Not only that, it was available right away and passed the safety inspection. We could move out of transitional housing immediately. The apartment was in a building that faced the fairgrounds, just a few blocks from North Beach. Gertie, my landlady, shrugged when I told her how rent payments would be made. She’d get my portion on the first, I explained, but the other part wouldn’t come until the tenth.
“Yeah, I guess that’s fine,” she said, then smiled at Mia, who tucked her head into my shoulder. “Does she need a crib or anything?”
I wanted to say no. My instinct was always to turn things down when people tried to help us. Someone else would need it more. But then I thought of the hole in the side of Mia’s Pack ’n Play.
“Yeah,” I said. “She does.”
“Oh, good,” Gertie said. “The last tenants left some things, and I didn’t know what to do with them.” She walked around to the back of her truck and took out a white crib like the ones they had at Mia’s day care. Inside the crib was a little red shirt. I reached down to pick it up and handed it to Gertie.
“You can have that if you want it, too,” she said. “It’s a costume or something.”
I shook it out with my free hand and saw the hood had a couple of eyes sewn on, and there was a stuffed tail coming off the back. “Is it a lobster?” I said, smiling a little.
Gertie laughed. “I guess that’s what it’s supposed to be.”
Mia didn’t have a Halloween costume. It was September, and I hadn’t given it any thought yet. My mind had been totally preoccupied with finding us a different home.
Gertie helped me get the crib inside, then left us to it, keys in hand. We had the ground-floor apartment, with a porch that led out to a little strip of grass. Beyond that was a large field. The dining room off the kitchen had wrap-around windows. My brother had built me a computer, and I set it up on the built-in desk off the kitchen counter, then dropped a CD into the disk drive. Mia danced a little, then ran around the table, to the living room, face-planted on the couch, then ran down the hallway before running back to do it all over ag
ain.
My books filled up shelves in the living room. I hung a few pictures and artwork my mom had given me—the paintings of snow-covered fields by Alaskan artists that I’d grown up with. I’d just hung up my last painting, a birch tree, when I saw that Jamie was calling. I’d left him a message earlier.
“What do you want?” he said when I answered.
“I, uh, I have a chance to work on Saturday and wondered if you could take Mia for a little longer?”
“How long?” He had her for a few hours on Saturdays and Sundays, except the last weekend of the month.
“It’s far out of town,” I said. “The job will take forever, so as much as you can do.”
Jamie didn’t say anything for several seconds. I heard him take in a sharp breath. He must have been smoking a cigarette. I’d asked him to take Mia for longer periods of time a lot lately, in an attempt to get as much work done as I could before the season ended.
“No,” he finally said.
“Why? Jamie, this is so I can work.”
“I don’t want to help you out,” he blurted. “You’re taking all my money; you don’t send her over with diapers. I have to feed her dinner. So no.” I kept talking, trying to change his mind.
“NO!” he yelled again. “I’M NOT HELPING YOU WITH SHIT!” And he hung up.
My heart started racing in the irregular, pounding way that it did after these types of conversations with him, the ones that ended in him yelling the way he used to. This time my chest started to get even tighter, making it hard to take in a full breath. My therapist at the domestic violence program, Beatrice, told me to breathe into a paper bag when it happened. I closed my eyes and breathed in through my nose for five counts, exhaling through my mouth for the same amount of time. I tried it two more times before I opened my eyes to see Mia standing in front of me—staring at me. “Whadddssssdddttt you doing?” she asked me, her voice garbled through clenched teeth that held her binky.
Maid Page 4
