The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

  Nor could she compete with the slender women, who received flirtatious attention from the assistant manager. “You notice a lot of these young girls get these jobs,” Caroline declared. “My age shows on me terribly. I’ve had people think that I’m Amber’s grandmother, I’ve had such a hard life.”

  The people who got promotions tended to have something that Caroline did not. They had teeth. Caroline did not have teeth. If she had, she would not have looked ten years older than she was. But her teeth had succumbed to poverty, to the years when she could not afford a dentist. Most of them decayed and abscessed, and when she lived on welfare in Florida, she had them all pulled in a grueling two-hour session that left her looking bruised and beaten. Under the state’s Medicaid rules as she understood them, a set of dentures would have been covered only if she had been without any teeth at all; while some of them could have been saved, she couldn’t afford to do less than everything. In the end, unfortunately, the dentures paid for by Medicaid didn’t fit and made her gag, so she couldn’t wear them. An adjustment would have cost about $250, money she didn’t have.

  No employer would ever admit to passing her over because she was missing that radiant, tooth-filled smile that Americans have been taught to prize as highly as their right to vote. Caroline had learned to smile with her whole face, a sweet look that didn’t show her gums, yet it came across as wistful, something less than the thousand-watt beam of friendly delight that the culture requires. Where showing teeth was an unwritten part of the job description, she did not excel. She was turned down for a teller’s position with the Claremont Savings Bank, which then hired her for backroom filing and eventually fired her from that. Wal-Mart considered her for customer service manager and then promoted someone else, someone with teeth.

  Caroline’s was the face of the working poor, marked by a poverty-generated handicap more obvious than most deficiencies but no different, really, from the less visible deficits that reflect and reinforce destitution. If she had not been poor, she would not have lost her teeth, and if she had not lost her teeth, perhaps she would not have remained poor. Poverty is a peculiar, insidious thing: a cause whose effects then cause the original cause, or an effect whose causes are caused by the effect. It depends on where in the cycle the analysis begins. Like most of the forgotten America, Caroline was a bundle of causes and effects.

  Depression, a frequent companion of poverty, afflicted Caroline in paralyzing bouts of self-neglect, according to Brenda St. Laurence, the caseworker and home visitor who helped Caroline for years. “A lot of times she doesn’t wear her deodorant and really needs to, doesn’t take a shower, her hair will be really messy,” Brenda said. “She’s a heavy smoker; her clothes will smell smoky at times.” I never saw Caroline in that condition during five years of interviewing, but Brenda came from the same world as her clients and easily moved into their lives. Brenda was not a graduate-degree professional from an affluent upbringing; she had a high school diploma and a working-class background. She did not condescend, but she did judge, and with enough affection to be regarded warmly by those she tried to assist. At Caroline, she directed more understanding than blame. “When you are a depressed person,” Brenda observed, “you can’t get motivated.”

  Like many laborers stuck at low levels, Caroline was the victim of many factors: appearance, yes, but also a heavy burden of childhood, marital, and educational handicaps that included difficulty reading and writing. All her deficiencies intertwined with the injustices and the ruthlessness of the free market. At times, personal trials distracted her so intensely that she could not concentrate on her work. And so, as the country’s economic power rushed forward, she was caught in a back eddy of stagnant wages and limited horizons. The recession that followed the boom made little difference at her lowly position; she continued to move laterally among her modest jobs, from store to factory to store. Her pattern mirrored the broader experience of low-income single parents nationwide, whose employment rate and hourly wages barely changed during the recession.2

  Caroline’s father had been a school janitor and her mother, an occasional factory worker. “We didn’t have a lot of love and security that kids need,” she remembered. Nor was there material plenty. “When I was a kid, I never had much.” Long after that early void, neediness remained. “I always wanted things,” she admitted. “I can get spending and overdo things sometimes.”

  Even in her late forties, she was like a teenager craving instant gratification, said Brenda, who worked with Caroline on budgeting and tried to rein in her spending. “She likes her credit cards,” Brenda remarked. “She said that she deserves these things. She said she works hard, she wants nice things before she dies. Of course,” Brenda added, “I come from a family of eight where you just bought the necessities. Food was the most important thing, paying the rent was the second thing, keeping light and heat.”

  After Caroline bought her house, Brenda saw her mature. But it was hard to break the patterns of childhood, and the debts of the past did not disappear easily. Caroline’s family had moved repeatedly and disrupted her education. She spent first and second grades in a four-room schoolhouse in Meriden, New Hampshire, then repeated second grade there because of reading problems. “I’m a slow reader,” she confessed, “and I have to have it quiet, and I read word for word. I’m self-conscious about it.” She didn’t remember her mother or father ever reading to her. “With us kids, she was not really a mother.” In third grade, she and her family lived over a shoe store in downtown Leominster, Massachusetts, with sirens and traffic and no place to play. The following year they moved to a trailer park in Keene, New Hampshire, where she spent fourth, fifth, and sixth grades.

  One day as a sixth-grader, walking home from a playground, she was slapped with terrible news. A sympathetic friend of her sister’s said how sorry she was to hear that Caroline’s dad was leaving. What? Caroline had been given no hint of this. “And I ran the rest of the way home,” she recalled, “and I remember opening that trailer door, and I just looked at him—we had a double-decker—and I ran up the stairs, and I cried and I cried.” And the seed of distrust was planted.

  “There was really no communication in that family, and it was very hard. And my dad come up and tried to talk to me and things then, and he said he was really surprised that it bothered me the most, because I used to be the tomboy one, you know. But I think underneath I was never really happy, but I would always smile, and I think I was puttin’ on a front making people think I was, when I really wasn’t.”

  From then on, she wrote in a college essay, she felt like “nothing but a piece of furniture being shoved around in all directions.” The rootlessness made her friendships transitory. She spent seventh and eighth grades with an aunt back in Meriden, while her brother and sister were farmed out to other homes. Her mother remarried. “My stepdad drank a lot,” she said. “He tried to get fresh with me and things like this, and I was scared and never told my mom, you know? And I got to the point where I hit him.”

  Then, since Caroline did not want to live with her stepfather, every year of high school was spent in a different place. As a freshman, she stayed in Lebanon, New Hampshire, with a woman for whom she had been a baby-sitter. She did most of her sophomore year back in Keene, then went to live with her father, first in Woodstock, Vermont, in her junior year, then as a senior in Northfield, Massachusetts, where she proudly graduated. “I’m the only one out of three kids that actually ended up graduating from high school,” she boasted. “My brother ended up going in the service, and my sister got married at fifteen. And I’m not trying to brag, but I felt good ’cause my mom and dad never graduated from high school neither. It took me an extra year ’cause I stayed back in second grade.”

  Two months after her commencement in 1969, Caroline got married. “And now there’s times I wished I hadn’t,” she declared. “I was young, and I think it was because I wanted that security, and I thought I loved the guy, maybe at the time. I had a strong belief t
hat when you get married it’s supposed to work; I had real old-fashioned, strong beliefs. And I think it was so easy for me to latch onto people because I haven’t had lots of love and security and communication and things. It was almost like if a guy gave me affection, I’d latch onto almost like the first one that come along. And that’s not good. I’ve learnt over the years, it’s not good.”

  The marriage produced three children, lasted fourteen years, and finally sank into a swamp of suspicion created by her husband’s infidelity. She worked night shifts in factories to put him through engineering school, took care of the kids and the animals they raised, and in the end caught him out all night with another woman. The relationship was then corroded by distrust until it disintegrated.

  Because she could not afford a lawyer and just wanted out of her mar- riage, she ended up with only $400 a month in child support and no share in their house. “It was a nice place,” she said sadly. “It was a log home that we had built when I was pregnant. We had to put in our own bridge, and I had always wanted a covered bridge made out of logs. Never did get one. But at the time I couldn’t afford the taxes and everything.” Immersed in the memories, she was quietly weeping.

  Proudly and foolishly, Caroline rejected an offer from her ex-husband’s parents to put a trailer on their land for her and the kids. Taking care of her was not their responsibility, she felt. So she took a small apartment and bounced between welfare and dead-end jobs, supplementing her income by scavenging for cans. “We’d go and watch a ball game at school, and I’d take bags and stuff them in my pocketbook,” she recalled. “After the ball game I’d be going around poring through the garbage cans pickin’ out five-cent cans.” Her older daughter would ride her bike as far ahead of her mother as possible to avoid any hint of association. “I figured, that few cents buys some milk, buys some bread, things that you need, you know what I’m saying? It all helps. But it embarrassed her. She hated it as she got older.”

  Alone and scared, Caroline married again, and this time it was worse. Vernon Payne insulted her, hit her, flew into jealous rages—once when he thought he saw her talking to a young man outside the nursing home where she worked. The “man” was actually a woman with her hair cut short. The marriage lasted two years. “At times I hated men,” she said. “Men were no good, they just lied, and you’re not gonna tell me no different.” On the rare occasions when she voted, she made a point to vote only for women.

  Yet she remained hungry for a man in her life and duplicated the pattern so often seen among single mothers who carry the wounds inflicted by men. Women of limited means who crave and cannot create loving partnerships dominate the ranks of the poor, for they are not just single mothers. They are also single wage-earners.

  Amber, Caroline’s fourth child, was born into the troubled second marriage. Except for a clubfoot, the petite, dark-haired girl seemed healthy. Only gradually did telltale signs of trouble emerge. She was late walking compared with Caroline’s other children, and a little later to be potty trained. That struck her mother as nothing more than a normal variation among children. “She could watch TV and remember a lot of things she saw,” Caroline recalled. Then, a test in a preschool program found some learning “delays.”

  After the divorce Amber spent every other weekend and a week or two in the summer with her father, Vernon. She once came home with a burn on her finger, and someone filed a complaint with Vermont’s child protective services. “They came right there and took me in a room right at work and threatened they were gonna take Amber away from me even before I got home from work,” said Caroline. The authorities had both the wrong crime and the wrong culprit, as it turned out later, but their suspicions were kept alive by persistent anonymous reports. Caroline suspected her own mother, “a back stabber,” in Caroline’s words. “Even if I just grabbed ahold of Amber, like her arm like this, she would say, ‘Oh, don’t hurt that kid!’ ” The state pursued the matter, and Caroline found herself in a fight for her daughter. “I had to go to court, I had to go to parenting classes, to keep Amber.”

  Family turbulence can rarely be walled out of the workplace. An employee with desirable skills or a powerful position may have enough value to be tolerated through a difficult time. But Caroline had so little capital of that sort that she could not purchase an employer’s patience for her personal trials. When her life at home got stressful, her life at work got perilous. That meant marginal performance, no advancement, and a rolling career of short stays in jobs with no accumulation of seniority.

  “You’re all nerved up, you’re stressed, you don’t know what somebody’s gonna pull on you next,” she said. Even at the factory in the middle of the night, she would cry and cry, “and people would know things were wrong.”

  Amid the struggle, Caroline somehow did a training program in office skills, got off welfare, and landed a decent job as the front-desk receptionist in an insurance company. (She still had her teeth.) She answered phones, sorted mail, typed up initial files for insurance policies. “It was quite an experience,” she said, and she would have continued if the pressures over Amber hadn’t damaged her work. “They were giving me some warnings,” she said, “that I wasn’t doing so good, and I think it was being upset at all these problems.” She was obviously going to be fired, so she quit—“got done with the job,” as she put it.

  She searched intensively for good office jobs, applied for one after another, and heard nothing. She would call to find out why. Again and again, she would be told that another candidate had a college degree. So she decided to get one, and enrolled at Vermont’s Johnson State College. She obtained a student loan and began classes in business and accounting.

  And then she noticed that Amber, who was nearly five, was masturbating. “Kids experiment anyway, but she was doing it excessively,” Caroline said. “It was more and more obvious. I’d give her a bath and she’d be touching herself. There was these little signs, but it was hard to prove anything because she was not old enough to come out and tell me, and it would be my word against theirs. But I had this funny feeling.” Often, at the end of a weekend with her father and his wife, “she’d come right to me real quick, you know? And I’d say, ‘Give your father a kiss,’ and she’d kind of back away.”

  So, one day when her father brought her home, Caroline took her into the bathroom. “I noticed she was red, front to back. And this was not right.” Alarmed, Caroline asked a college friend, Tina, to talk with Amber alone and see what she could learn. “And Tina said, ‘You won’t believe the things she told me.’ ” They took the little girl to the hospital, where a doctor confirmed that she had been penetrated. The police were called, Caroline’s welfare caseworker was summoned. As Tina and the caseworker questioned Amber, Caroline and a police officer watched and listened from behind a one-way mirror. The girl repeated what she had told Tina, and a restraining order was issued against Vernon Payne. To escape, Caroline moved with Amber to Florida for several footloose years that disrupted Caroline’s education, and Amber’s as well.

  Nearly a decade later, when Caroline told Amber that her father had died, the girl, then fourteen, said in a sudden burst of relief, “Good, good.”

  Amber’s “delays” became more pronounced in Florida. Further testing when she entered first grade measured her IQ at 59, in the low range of mild mental retardation, a handicap more prevalent in lower-income households. But she did not get the consistent special schooling that might have helped her, because Caroline repeated her parents’ syndrome of uprootedness by moving from place to place: a tiny apartment, a trailer with a woman friend, a filthy trailer of her own, a place with a male friend, and another trailer—all in New Port Richey, Florida—then to a cousin’s in Winter Haven and back to New Port Richey. In three years, Amber attended three or four different schools. Caroline then headed north to New Hampshire, where she moved a few times from one school district to another. Altogether, she estimated, Amber had been in seven or eight schools. “She was probably like this
little rag doll that just got brought any- where,” said her caseworker, Brenda, who pressed Caroline to settle down and resist her urge to keep moving; otherwise, Brenda told her, teachers and counselors could not get to know Amber well enough to provide fruitful help. The argument took hold after Caroline became a homeowner, until that achievement was reversed by misfortune and miscalculation. “She’s very good with Amber,” Brenda said then. “I work with so many families. Sometimes I wish I had another Caroline.”

  There was no clear evidence on the extent to which educational stability might have aided the girl. Her middle-school principal called her condition “a language-based learning disability.” She could barely read and write, could not easily tell time from clocks with hands, and was unable to understand that she had enough money if she gave a storekeeper $10 to buy something for $4. Yet she could play the flute if her mother wrote the letter for each note on the musical score. She took gymnastics lessons at a dance school, for which her mother paid by cleaning the school’s studio once a week. And Amber could give a lucid verbal account of a class trip to Montreal, for example; if you heard her talk, you wouldn’t suspect retardation. With sweet courtesy, she eagerly helped her mother around the house, and she could cook for herself in a microwave. But she also had epilepsy, and the risk of a seizure prompted doctors to advise that she not be left alone. The logistical maze of arranging care for Amber around constantly shifting hours of work had Caroline tangled in anxiety.