Janesville

by Amy Goldstein

  Kristi’s mother is jolted from sleep by Bob screaming, “Kristi, wake up! Kristi, wake up!” Kristi’s son, Josh, sleeping in the finished basement, awakes from the commotion, too. He sprints upstairs, notices an empty pill bottle, calls 911, and starts chest compressions on his mother until an ambulance arrives.

  On April 28, 2008, five weeks before General Motors announced that it intended to close the assembly plant, the company said that it planned to end the plant’s second shift. That day, a sixty-year-old worker on that shift for twenty-seven years took his own life.

  Since then, suicides in Rock County have doubled, from fifteen in 2008 to thirty-two last year. The county’s crisis hotline has been getting more calls. A volunteer in the county coroner’s office has been speaking out lately about suicide prevention to any community group willing to listen.

  This has not been happening just in Janesville. Across the United States, the suicide rate has spiked. The rate is not as high as it was during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Still, compared with the few years before, the rate increased four-fold during the couple of years after the recession began.

  In Rock County, Kate Flanagan manages a shrinking supply of public mental health services. She can see that, when a community is under stress, some people have less hope. People who were barely managing their addictions, their depression—their fragilities, no matter the form—sometimes lose their grip when they lose a job.

  Running the Parker Closet, Deri Wahlert sees the stress and its effects. Last year alone, seven of her Closet kids threatened suicide—a few even attempted it. She notices that her Closet kids who have grown up poor, always been poor, tend to be tougher, better at coping with it. The fragile ones are new to being poor, with parents fighting about how to live without the money they used to have.

  With her brood of homeless teenagers, Ann Forbeck, the school social worker, sees the stress, too. One girl’s mother—distressed that her daughter was pregnant and time was running out at the shelter where they were staying—confided to Ann that she was thinking about killing herself by driving her car into a tree. Ann tried to line up psychiatric help. She contacted the motor vehicle department and made sure that a boot was put on the woman’s car, so that she couldn’t drive until the situation calmed down. Not long after, the family left Wisconsin. Ann never did hear how things turned out.

  The ambulance arrives and speeds Kristi to Mercy Hospital. She is wheeled into the emergency room at 5:50 a.m., a half hour after Bob found her. A medical team tries to revive her, even though she arrived without a heartbeat. At 6:32 a.m., the team stops trying.

  Seven minutes later, Rock County’s coroner, Jenifer Keach, hears her pager go off, telling her to come to Mercy. Another suicide.

  The coroner’s autopsy finds that Kristi died by taking a muscle relaxant her doctor had prescribed for back pain. She took more than ten times the daily amount safe for an adult. And she took nearly twenty times the safe amount of Benadryl.

  Kristi’s mother had been thinking about throwing out the bottle of muscle relaxants. Kristi didn’t like to take them, because they made her sleepy. And her mother didn’t want Josh, on his medicine to treat his PTSD, to be tempted. But her mother hadn’t gotten around to it, so she feels guilty. She feels guilty for having come up with the idea that maybe Kristi, with her love of TV crime shows, should study criminal justice.

  Beyond the pill bottles and the crime shows, her mother sees that everything ran downhill from jobs in town going away. If the recession hadn’t come, she figures, Kristi still would be at Lear, with a little market for the work aprons she designed. She wouldn’t have been at the jail, and she wouldn’t have met her new guy. Just one big spiraling down until her daughter—her best friend—is gone.

  Over at the Job Center, Bob Borremans is shocked when word reaches him that a client has killed herself. Not just any client but one the center singled out in its publicity as a success story. This makes Bob think hard about a fact that he already knows: It isn’t simple to take someone with a high school degree and a factory job and to help lead them into new work.

  Late on this Wednesday afternoon, Barb’s cell phone rings while she is at the group home where her disabled client lives. The call is from a woman she had worked with at Lear who had also gone to Blackhawk.

  She isn’t sure, the woman tells Barb, but she heard from someone else that Kristi might have committed suicide.

  “What????” Barb says into the phone.

  It seems impossible. Lately, they haven’t been talking too often. The last few times, Barb urged Kristi to go back to school for her bachelor’s degree, as Barb has done, as Kristi said she wanted to do. Barb has had the impression that Kristi is hooked on the pay at the jail, always bringing up something that she needed to buy.

  But suicide?

  Less than five minutes later, her phone rings again. This time, she can see, it is her husband, Mike. Mike never calls her at work.

  She answers. At first, he doesn’t say a word.

  From his silence, Barb knows it’s true.

  Then Mike starts to tell her that Kristi’s son, Josh, couldn’t find Barb’s phone number but found his. Barb is having trouble listening. Right now, she just loses it.

  As soon as she gets off work, she goes over to be with Kristi’s mother, Linda.

  For much of their friendship, since their first nerve-racking days at Blackhawk, Barb accepted that Kristi was a few steps ahead of her. Edging her out on grades. Getting hired first at the jail. Barb was okay with that. She accepted that Kristi was the smarter one, the stronger one. Except maybe, Barb is realizing tonight, she wasn’t.

  Kristi’s mother is beginning to think that, after losing one job, she couldn’t deal with the idea of losing another one—getting fired, this time. Her mother can understand that. What she can’t understand is why her daughter worked so hard for a second opportunity and then threw it away.

  More than anything else, what she can’t understand is why Kristi didn’t tell her she was thinking of killing herself. She would have stayed up with her all night. Kristi was such a planner. They told each other everything, she always thought, so it seems totally unlike her not to have left a note. She and Josh will hunt and hunt, but one never turns up. Linda can’t believe that, either.

  The next Monday, a few hundred people turn out for Kristi’s funeral. On the way from Schneider’s funeral home to the Maple Hill Cemetery, off Route 14 in the little town of Evansville, northwest of Janesville, Linda notices that they drive past the County Jail. She wishes they had gone a different way.

  Kristi is laid to rest in a casket that Josh picked out. Her mother has chosen her burial clothes—the new, size 8 jeans she was proud to fit into—with a Green Bay Packers blanket wrapped around her.

   46

  Circle of Women

  The Holiday Inn Express banquet room is transformed this evening into a glittering space. Fifty-three round tables have been adorned elaborately, each with a different centerpiece and place settings in a competition for best decorations. In the center of the room, a long buffet table is laden with mounds of strawberries, grapes, and fresh pineapple; bowls of crudités and dips; platters with dill sprigs surrounding whole smoked salmon.

  This is the Circle of Women, the biennial gala and a main fundraiser for the YWCA of Rock County. “Celebrating the giving spirit of women,” its motto goes, “and the ways in which they lift up other women in our community.” The Y may be getting less help now from the United Way. It may be unable to afford to sponsor Project 16:49 for homeless teens. But none of that means that the Y is not trying hard to keep its programs going. And if there were any doubt that Janesville’s philanthropic heart is still pumping as best it can, proof lies in the 450 women from across Rock County who have dressed up to mingle and admire the table decorations and donate to the Y on this Thursday evening, the 1st of November.

  The goal tonight: $50,000. The Circle of Women will come close.

  Fill
ing this festive space are Janesville’s professional women and its do-gooders. The Y’s staff is here, of course, including its director, Allison Hokinson. So is Ann Forbeck, the school social worker whose disappointment with Allison over Project 16:49 is now in the past. Each table has a captain, and each captain’s job was to have invited eight women to share her table. Of these fifty-three tables, one toward the front, on the right side of the podium, has as its centerpiece an oversized glass vase filled with silver and gold balls. The little balls are scattered, too, across an ecru tablecloth set with golden plates and matching fabric seat covers. This is the table at which Mary Willmer is captain, because BMO Harris Bank is one of the Circle of Women’s corporate sponsors.

  The bank that Mary leads in town has a new name. Four weekends ago, the signs on all of M&I’s banks were replaced, the Marshall & Ilsley name originating in Wisconsin and dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century suddenly gone. The signs on all the banks, including the one on Main Street, were changed to BMO Harris, for the Canadian-based Bank of Montreal and the Chicago-based Harris. Last year, BMO took over M&I, because, during the recession and afterward, M&I, Wisconsin’s largest bank, suffered three straight years of financial losses. The losses were mainly because of ill-advised real estate and construction loans it had made, many of them in Arizona and Florida. When BMO took it over, M&I still owed the federal government $1.7 billion for having bailed it out. Now, some employees of the old M&I are uncertain whether their bank branches or their jobs will continue. Mary, however, has come out of this fine, with an expanded role as regional market manager as well as community bank president for BMO Harris.

  Tonight, she is looking lovely, in a lacy black blouse and black skirt. With several of her employees of what is now BMO Harris, she sits through this evening’s video depicting the good that the Y does in the community—for children who have been neglected or abused, for women struggling back onto their feet after domestic violence, for immigrants who need someone to reach out to them. She sits through the presentation to tonight’s honorees: two charity-minded women who formed a business selling keepsake lockets to help remember loved ones who have died. Finally, Mary rises and walks the short distance to the podium.

  In her many leadership roles with nonprofits in town, Mary often talks up Janesville’s virtues—the strength and character of its people, the community’s generosity, the hard times it has been through with General Motors, the way it has endured. She begins tonight, too, with these themes. And yet tonight is different. It is the day after her fifty-second birthday, and, standing at the podium, looking out at the sea of table decorations and well-dressed women, Mary reaches back to grasp her past. She tells the Circle of Women about having been a scared girl with a widowed mother who had a piece of a farm and not enough to live on. It is part of her fund-raising pitch, a tool for touching the Circle of Women’s empathy, an illustration that you never know who might need help, so generosity is the best policy. It also is a revelation. Mary has never talked of this part of her girlhood in public before.

   47

  First Vote

  Before she goes to sleep on Monday night, November 5, Kayzia Whiteaker posts a message on her Facebook page: “Off to bed when I wake up I will be 18!”

  The next morning, the first day that she and Alyssa are old enough to vote, happens to be Election Day. By now, they both have used Chevrolets that they are paying for themselves—Alyssa’s a white Impala and Kayzia’s a red Aveo. They begin their birthday by climbing into their cars. They need to drive separately to get to classes that they each take at U-Rock some afternoons of this, their senior year at Parker High, and to get to their jobs. But before their school day begins, they first meet a mile from their house at Madison Elementary School. This is their neighborhood’s polling place.

  When they arrive at 8 a.m., Madison has a line out the door—a big turnout, because of the presidential election. They get in the line. When they finally are handed ballots to fill out with black markers, they vote for the reelection of President Obama and for every other Democrat on the list, none of whom they have ever heard of before, including a Democrat named Rob Zerban from Kenosha who is challenging Paul Ryan for his seat in Congress. Their parents vote for Democrats, Kayzia figures. And this year, watching the presidential debates and being old enough to understand, Alyssa decided that Obama sounded more for the working class than the Republican, Mitt Romney. Besides, no way they are voting for anyone who has anything to do with Scott Walker’s viewpoint on unions, since their parents used to be union members, or with the cuts the governor has made to money for public schools, which have caused Parker to have bigger class sizes now and not as many Advanced Placement courses.

  After filling out their paper ballots, Kayzia is nervous about whether they are feeding them into the machine the right way for their votes to be counted. They manage to get the thick paper fed properly. It is a big moment on the day that they come of age. Alyssa remembers that their parents have taught them that people can’t complain about any outcome if they haven’t done their part. They have now done their part. Kayzia updates her Facebook page: “Only took a half-hour to vote today. A great way to start this chapter of my life!”

  They have completed this first rite of adulthood before 8:45 a.m., the time when, two miles east of Madison Elementary, a caravan of shiny black SUVs pulls up to the curb alongside Hedberg Public Library on Main Street. Secret Service officers emerge and scout the sidewalk. And then, from the third of the SUVs, Paul Ryan hops out in a dark suit and pale silver tie and helps his three kids step down to the ground. Paul, with Janna and the kids and the Secret Service in tow, shakes a few hands and greets reporters and camera crews waiting inside the library entrance. This little entourage Paul is leading walks past the line of people waiting to vote that snakes through the library’s first floor. The entourage walks right up to the front, and the Secret Service hangs back a few yards, scanning the crowd for anything untoward, in the unlikely event that anything untoward would happen inside the public library in downtown Janesville, while Paul and Janna give their names to poll workers and are handed their ballots. Two of Paul’s children lean in toward the voting booth with him. When he is done, he points on the ballot to Liza, his eldest, who is wearing a butterfly headband and smiles at the sight of his name. Then, the entourage walks through a door, where the press corps is waiting, and one of the reporters asks: “How do you feel today?”

  “I feel great today,” Paul replies. “It is a great tradition. It is Election Day, so I’m really excited to be here. I’ve been voting here for a long time. It felt good waking up in my hometown. This is the neighborhood I grew up in. I went to junior high about 60 yards that way.” He points with his index finger to the right. Paul’s past still meshing seamlessly with his present.

  He is already on the move when a reporter shouts out: “Are you going to get a win today?” Paul turns his head back and nods. “I think we are.”

  Paul is not spending much of today in his home state, much less his hometown. He is heading to Cleveland and then to Richmond—cities in swing states with more electoral votes than Wisconsin—before joining up with Romney in Boston tonight.

  Still, Wisconsin is one of nine swing states in this 2012 presidential election. And the closeness of the contest has drawn Obama yesterday to a stage forty miles away from Janesville, in front of Madison’s City Hall—and drawn eighteen thousand people to see the president and his warm-up act, Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen came on holding his guitar and, when he reached center stage, slipped his harmonica over his head. He wore jeans and a vest over a gray shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his elbows despite the 42-degree temperature. Working-class clothes. He had a view of the statehouse with Scott Walker’s office inside just one and a half blocks up the hill. He sang a campaign anthem he had written and debuted a couple of weeks ago, playing off Obama’s 2012 reelection slogan—“Forward,” same as the Wisconsin state motto—and filled with rhy
mes that the Boss admitted were pretty strained. And then he could have been talking straight to Janesville, when he said that his dad had worked on a Ford assembly line. “For the last thirty years, I’ve been writing music about the distance between the American Dream and the American reality,” Springsteen said, punctuating the end of that thought with a guitar strum. “I am troubled by thirty years of increasing disparity in the wealth between our best-off citizens and everyday Americans. That is a disparity that threatens to divide us into two distinct and separate nations. We have to be better than that.” Another guitar strum.

  “Finally, I am here today because I have lived long enough to know that the future is seldom a tide rushing in. It is often a slow march, inch by inch.” Strum. “Day by long day.” Strum. “We’re in the midst of one of those long days right now.”

  And then Springsteen sang “Land of Hope and Dreams” before he introduced Obama, and the troubadour and the beaming president hugged, clapping each other on the back.

  And after the president called his opening act “an American treasure,” who “tells the story of what our country is, and what it should be,” Obama settled into his speech for this last day of his final campaign. He ticked off victories from his four years in office—among them that “the American auto industry is back on top.” Words that would have been hard to say in Janesville.

  Whether it is faith that this president can lead Janesville’s once sturdy middle class back to its heyday, whether it is the tradition of unionism and Democrats that Kayzia and Alyssa have inherited on the first day they are eighteen, the voters of Janesville by tonight choose Obama over the Republican ticket of their native son.

  It has been five months and a day since the spring evening the city’s Republicans sat outside on the Speakeasy patio, celebrating that Wisconsin’s voters—if not Janesville’s—had repelled the drive to recall Walker from the governorship. Tonight is the Democrats’ turn to celebrate, over at the UAW Local 95 union hall that Mike Vaughn’s grandfather, Tom, the first of the union Vaughns, helped to plan.