Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  This seemed true enough for most students. Residing in that arboretum on the hill, most didn’t have to notice what was obvious to a town resident who drove up Elm Street or down the road overlooking Paradise Pond—to Hispanic boys from Hampshire Heights looking for a party to crash; and to people whose grandfathers used to earn some extra money by carrying the steamer trunks of heiresses up dormitory stairs; and to residents whose daughters went to state schools but were just as smart as any Smithie, only not as lucky. Within its safe confines, protected by their own police force, Smith students could imagine themselves in a world of a more perfect equality than any world outside. Unless they were on welfare.

  Smith, personified, was like the rich elderly person who is both spendthrift and cheap, both indulgent and utterly insensitive. It had corrected some of its former snobbishness. It sought out minority students and had programs designed, on the surface anyway, to make them feel at home. It searched for what Jefferson had called “youths of genius from among the classes of the poor,” and gave them scholarships. And it spent about $3 million a year on its Ada Comstock scholars.

  Not that Adas were a complete financial loss. They had become some of the college’s best advertisements. The administration constantly paraded them before alumnae to tell their sad, inspiring stories. Smith’s endowment now approached $700 million and was rising fast. The college spent lavishly on its grounds. And yet it had rules it wouldn’t bend, rules that obliged some impoverished Adas to go on welfare or forget their dreams of coming here.

  Shortly after she’d arrived in Northampton, Laura had gotten in her little car and driven toward the welfare office in Florence, smoking Kools incessantly. When she saw the sign MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF WELFARE on the door, and the linoleum-clad waiting room inside, she felt she’d left another life behind.

  The caseworker told her she’d have to bring in documents—car registration, rent receipts, electric bills, statements from the college.

  If she did, would she get welfare? Laura asked.

  They’d have to wait and see, the caseworker said.

  Laura imagined a room far away, and in it a committee of disapproving faces peering at her documents. Her laugh, which wrinkled up her face, camouflaging the little scars around her chin, her way of reaching out to touch the arm of the person she was speaking to—all the warmth she sent out seemed to dissipate before it reached the caseworker. Laura found herself gazing at the woman’s mouth. “She doesn’t like me,” Laura thought. She was surprised. She was happy that Smith had accepted her. She thought others would be happy for her. What were Laura’s “career plans”? her caseworker asked. Months went by before Laura felt there was more than formal curiosity behind the question. No one ever said so directly, but after a while she felt she was being told that a person on the dole should go to a community college, not Smith. In America’s precariously, contentiously maintained social welfare system, there are officials and petitioners, and petitioners are not supposed to surpass officials. But Laura had never been on welfare before. And she didn’t imagine she was breaking any unwritten rules at first, because she really didn’t feel she had surpassed anyone.

  About a month after she began receiving welfare benefits—the food stamps, cash grant, and medical insurance were worth about $10,000 a year—she got a phone call saying that someone from the department was coming over. “For a home study.”

  She cleaned her apartment twice on the appointed morning. The man from welfare looked large in the doorway. Then she noticed his yellow work boots. He didn’t wipe his feet. He left a trail of mud on her white carpet remnant. She told herself not to stare at it. It wasn’t impossible, she thought, that he’d come to arrest her.

  He was businesslike at first. He looked in all the rooms and the closets. Laura guessed he was searching for evidence of a man who might turn out to be the father of her son. Then he filled out a form and handed it to her. It stated that he’d found no evidence that she was hiding anything. She sat down on her sofa, and signed the form gratefully. She gave it back to him. But he didn’t leave. He settled back on her sofa, an arm, the arm closer to her, draped over the back of the couch, and he started chatting. In her twenty-eight years Laura had done a lot of research on men, much of it painful. She felt she knew the difference between friendliness and flirtation. He told her, “One way to get off welfare is if you can find yourself a sugar daddy.” He laughed jovially.

  Laura’s head began to throb. She glanced at her soiled little rug. She wanted to clean it right now, and he kept on talking. In her mind she kept asking him to leave. Didn’t he have any other appointments? He stayed for over an hour.

  She scrubbed the rug, but the patch in front of her sofa came out looking gray. She tried some bleach. Finally, she threw out the rug and used part of her next welfare check to buy a new carpet remnant.

  One day at the supermarket, pushing her cart past the checkout lines, Laura noticed that a woman, trailing infants, was paying the cashier with food stamps. She stopped and watched. In the line behind that woman, heads moved sideways, necks craned. It was obvious: everyone felt entitled to see what a person with food stamps bought. What a vast difference between getting help from family or friends and being on welfare. To be poor on welfare was to be poor publicly. It had never occurred to her before that privacy and money were inextricably connected.

  That wasn’t as clear in her other world, at Smith. A friend she’d made invited her to tea at one of the houses. They didn’t have teas at her Smith-owned apartment building, but Smithies had been having tea parties for at least a hundred years, she’d heard. “Do they wear gloves?” she wondered. She tried on a dress. “No, that isn’t right.” She pulled out some clothes she used to wear as admission clerk at the hospital in California, a tan pair of pants with a crease in the legs and a blouse. She got there right on time. She looked around. She thought, “I could have worn sweat pants, but only if they said ‘Smith’ on them.” She thought she might save up for a pair of those. She looked at the refreshments and she was astonished: silver trays and silver teapots, pretty sugar bowls and cream containers. And the cookies! There were shortbread cookies, plain cookies, cookies covered with sugar sprinkles, cookies with tiny dollops of jam in their middles, cookies with one end dipped in chocolate. “So tidy the way they’re arranged, and they’re nice, too.” There were miniature cakes decorated with icing. “I’m pretty sure someone did that by hand.” She didn’t take anything until she’d watched a few young students and had an idea of the right procedure. She took one of each variety of cookie. And finally, she realized that no one was watching her.

  She listened to the voices of the young women around her. They talked about boyfriends and soap operas. In a little while she found herself in a lively discussion about one of her courses. She relaxed, but still she wondered which students were on scholarships. Maybe she’d know which were wealthy if she lived in a dorm and knew their last names. She wondered if anyone could tell she was on welfare.

  Laura often felt as if her place here wasn’t exactly real, especially when she found herself at college functions at one of Smith’s grand ceremonial places, where chandeliers glistened and she could see her face in a silver vase or pitcher—was that really her, reflected in silver, a gilt mirror over her shoulder?—where, peeking into the kitchen, she saw uniformed men and women moving fast and quietly, preparing feasts. It was disconcerting afterward to find herself in her car, which was beginning to make ominous noises, with her pack of Kools on the dash, her outfit altered to jeans and T-shirt, which felt more natural and also safer on those errands, making the short drive out past the houses of Elm Street and the hospital and the Smith Voke fields, then walking into that blank-looking building in Florence, and the clean and barren world of the welfare office lobby. She brought Benjamin with her to that office once and sat there wondering what had possessed her to do so.

  Two men sat nearby, in dirty, shabby clothes, leaning over their knees, looking at the flo
or. One glanced up and she saw Benjamin smile at him, and the man looked surprised, then looked away. A girl, a literal girl—she’d learned not to call regular Smithies girls, but she couldn’t help it sometimes—played with her baby on the floor. Benjamin, the chatterbox, was silent. He looked as though he were having long thoughts. He wore his favorite shirt—red with stripes—and suddenly she noticed he had entered that time of life she’d heard described as “arms-legs-teeth.” She wondered, “Where have I been while he was jutting out? Those teeth. Where will I get the money for braces?”

  Laura stayed in Northampton that summer, after her first year at Smith. She worked for $6.50 an hour as a receptionist at a local realty office. She neglected to tell her caseworker about the job for a couple of weeks, instead of within the prescribed ten days, and received $200 more than she should have from the state. But she wasn’t trying to trick anyone. She reported all her income, thinking that it would be deducted from her cash welfare payments. She discovered that, as a general rule, the state also deducted one dollar more than she had made. Was that supposed to make people want to get off welfare? Or the opposite? She heard someone on the news call women on welfare “bon-bon-eating gimme girls,” and felt personally insulted. She was making friends now, some at Smith and some in town, mostly other women, some of whom she could call up late at night and read a paper to. One of her town friends was studying to be a social worker. This friend talked passionately about the rights of welfare mothers. The state intended to institute “workfare”—to require that people on welfare perform community service—and Laura’s friend had learned that some of the state legislators planned workfare hearings at the county courthouse. The public was invited to testify.

  “Laura, your story is great. You’re articulate, you’re intelligent. It would be very empowering for you to do this,” her friend said. Laura guessed she should. When she visited the welfare office and when she saw fellow citizens examining the contents of her grocery cart, she often felt guilty, and angry afterward. “Wait a minute. I have a right to have certain things,” she’d think. And then she’d tell herself, “It’s not just about rights.” She had read Aristotle back in community college. “For each right there is a corresponding duty,” he had written. But the process didn’t have to be humiliating. She planned to talk about that at the hearing and about the disincentives in the system. She wondered if it wasn’t arrogant of her to talk about welfare publicly, as if she were an expert. “I wasn’t raised on welfare. How can I claim to have authority about welfare?” But she went.

  The state legislators sat beneath the judge’s high bench, at a long table in the well of the old courtroom. Senator Therese Murray from Plymouth, the chair of the Subcommittee on Welfare Reform, caught Laura’s eye. She looked tough. She sounded tough when she announced, “Each speaker will be allowed three minutes to summarize their issue.” Citizens, mostly women, filled the gallery. Laura sat near the back, beside the friend who had talked her into coming.

  One of the first speakers, a woman from an organization called the Alliance for Economic Justice, sat down at the microphone and said, “I have been abused and terrorized and starved in this country with my children for twenty years.” She told the legislators, “We still have a tremendous amount of misogyny in our country because the white men who live in it sent all the jobs out of it.” She declared, “Poverty is hereditary because wealth is inherited.” She said that a woman who succeeded in America was merely lucky. “Her husband didn’t beat her, didn’t pee on her, didn’t shoot at her.” Evidently, she was telling some of her life story.

  “Good for her,” thought Laura. “But I wish she didn’t seem to be enjoying this so much.”

  Up at the speaker’s table, that woman was saying to the legislators, “I will let you know what is wrong with the welfare system as soon as I let you know what is wrong with you.”

  Laura had a familiar feeling, of wanting to grow smaller.

  “I believe you’re racist, I believe you’re classist, okay?” the woman said. “That’s all.”

  Some of the audience applauded. They applauded every fiery speech. Laura looked around and saw her own caseworker sitting in the audience, on the other side of the gallery. Her caseworker wasn’t applauding.

  As the speeches went on, Laura realized she was waiting for someone who resembled her to take the microphone, and then a welfare advocate, not a recipient, sat down and read a letter that sounded like Laura’s speech. But the advocate explained that the welfare mother wasn’t here to testify because she was afraid of what the department might do to her. She wouldn’t even let her name be mentioned.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” Laura whispered to her friend.

  “Oh, yes, you can. You just go up there and you just be honest.”

  Laura wore a skirt and a sleeveless blouse. She fidgeted with her hands, wringing them as she sat before the microphone. “My name is Laura Baumeister. I’m a student at Smith College and I’ve lived in Massachusetts for a little over two years. I’ve been on AFDC for two years as well. I have a fourteen-year-old son. I had never been on AFDC until I moved here to go to school, at Smith College, and I, uh, I have a lot of mixed feelings about AFDC and welfare because I’m very grateful for it and yet countering that gratitude is I guess some embarrassment and some shame. I know my son feels it.” She lifted her hands toward herself and, at the mention of her son, burst into a smile. “When I shop with food stamps, he walks ten paces behind me.”

  Laura told the legislators that, unlike a lot of speakers, she didn’t have any problems with her welfare worker. “She’s great.” But in everything else, Laura took her friend’s advice and was completely honest. She merely shortened the speech she’d planned. She put on what she hoped was a winning smile. “Um, I, uh, I guess that’s all.”

  She was turning in the chair, about to stand, when she heard Senator Murray, in a very pleasant voice, say, “Can I ask you a question?”

  Laura turned back to the microphone, smiling.

  “Were you a resident of Massachusetts before you moved here?”

  “No, I wasn’t,” said Laura. “I was a resident of California. I moved here specifically to go to school, and I had always worked, and when I came here it was recommended to me that I go on AFDC, and …”

  The senator interrupted her, her voice a little different now. “Who recommended that to you?”

  “The school where I applied.”

  “The school did,” said the senator.

  Laura knew something was wrong, but the thought confused her more. “I know,” she said. “I know many other women at Smith College who are on AFDC as well.”

  “Thank you,” said the senator. She smiled slightly.

  Laura heard a smattering of applause, as she retreated to the gallery. She was about to sit down, when the senator called to her, “I’m sorry. Are you in the Comstock program?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  The senator made a note.

  When Laura appeared in Ellie Rothman’s office, fretting about the mistake she’d made in testifying, abject, apologetic, Ellie told her that she’d gotten some calls but that only a few were negative. This was true. Ellie didn’t say that those few calls carried a lot of weight.

  One had come from a state senator. “I think that you should know that one of your students spoke at a hearing we held in Northampton and it’s causing a lot of trouble. The commissioner is really angry that you’re bringing women into the state and telling them to go on welfare.” Looking back, Ellie said, “It was devastating. It’s not good to roil up the commissioner. He has a lot of power.” In the end, Laura’s testimony inspired the commissioner to issue a new edict: any person who came to Massachusetts in order to go to college would never be eligible for welfare. The policy affected a couple of new Adas, though Ellie was able to get the bureaucrats to reverse their position on one.

  Ellie had learned—the hard way, as she put it—that she could not become more than friendly with
Ada Comstock scholars. For one thing, friendship cost her credibility when she had to plead an Ada’s case with administrative colleagues and professors. But she’d had to smile the day when Laura had burst into the office saying that she’d gotten an A on an anthropology paper. And she couldn’t avoid the hug that Laura had suddenly administered, a fierce and thorough hug that revealed both how thin and how strong she was.

  Laura had told her that even though she was passing everything now, she’d like to keep meeting with her every week.

  “Well, maybe once every two weeks,” Ellie had said.

  Laura wasn’t one of those Adas—there were always a few—who arrived at Smith shy and brimming with gratitude and a few months later decided that they knew much better ways to run the Ada Comstock program. And it is, of course, a compliment when a student puts herself in your hands, a compliment to your trustworthiness, which success enriches. A couple of times last spring Laura had come in asking Ellie to intercede with professors and get them to give her extensions on papers, and Ellie had refused, and later, Laura had actually come back to the office and thanked her. On top of that, not long ago, Laura had called the office saying that she was in a class with an Ada who seemed very troubled. “Bring her in,” Ellie had said, and she’d thought, “So there’s another side of her to like.”

  Ellie would have forgiven Laura anyway. Laura was an innocent in front of a Massachusetts politician. She reminded Ellie of the pretty waifs in Charlie Chaplin movies. Ellie figured that the welfare issue would have gotten aired sooner or later. Laura didn’t need to know about the trouble she had caused. She was having a hard enough time already.

  One day not long after the hearing, Laura went to her mailbox expecting to find her welfare check inside, and it wasn’t there. Every day she hovered downstairs in the lobby, waiting for the postman. After she made several worried calls to the welfare office, her caseworker finally explained: the local office had decided that the vendor payments Laura got from Smith should be counted as income and deducted from her check. She would have to wait for Boston to rule on the matter. It might take six weeks before she got another check.