Evicted (22 page)

And yet there she stood alone, in an empty apartment. Crystal picked through the things Arleen had left behind. When she wandered into the kitchen, she discovered that Jori hadn't been able to remove the stove piece, but he did cut the electrical cord. Crystal told herself she wasn't planning on eating that day anyhow. Pastor had called a fast.

The line around the welfare building spanned the length of Vliet Street and wrapped around the corner. Barricades had been erected and extra police officers summoned. The governor had announced that food vouchers would be given to households affected by storms that had flooded parts of the state, including Milwaukee County, and by seven a.m., thousands of people had lined up, jostling for position and even trying to get inside by taking a door off its hinges.

The Marcia P. Coggs Human Services Center was massive. Three stories of cream brick, it had 170,000 square feet and 232 large windows. The building had originally held a Schuster's department store. But the store, along with the surrounding neighborhood and city, had fallen on hard times around midcentury. It was finally shuttered in 1961 and the building sold to the county. When the building was renovated in the early 2000s, it consolidated 450 county employees under one roof. A California-based artist was commissioned to install bright, multicolored ceramic tiles above the windows that displayed words like “contemplation” and “dance.” She called her installation “Community Key.”
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A little past eight a.m., Larraine walked past the crowd and made her way inside, hardly looking up to notice the strolling security guards or escalators transporting people between floors to fill out forms and meet with caseworkers. She took a number (4023) and waited. Larraine was there to get her food stamps reinstated. Soon, not a seat was empty, and Room 102 filled with the sounds of children and chatter. An older woman leaned on her umbrella and tried to sleep. A mother spanked a toddler. Another was engrossed in
Women Who Love Too Much
. After one hour and forty minutes, Larraine's number was called. Not bad, she thought, having spent entire days in the welfare building.
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“I had an appointment on the twentieth of this month,” Larraine explained to the multitasking and manicured woman behind the glass. “But I got, between the time of my scheduled phone call, I had gotten evicted.”

“You have to reschedule your appointment,” the woman replied. It was another missed meeting and another canceled benefit, both the result of an eviction that threw everything off course. The woman handed Larraine some papers. “Here is a list of things you need to bring with you.”

“I don't have anything with me,” Larraine replied, reading the list. Most of the necessary paperwork was in storage.

“Well, if you don't have anything, then you can't bring anything.” The woman smiled.

Larraine looked confused. “But will I still get my benefits?”

“That's why you have to come in for the appointment….I can give you a food pantry referral. Would you like to go to the food pantry?”

Larraine took an escalator downstairs to the food pantry, walking out with two grocery bags filled with canned beef and kidney beans and other things she hated. Sometimes, family members who didn't know any better would ask Larraine why she didn't just call to schedule her appointments. Larraine would laugh and ask, “Oh,
you
want to try the number?” She had never once gotten anything but a busy signal.

At her follow-up appointment, Larraine managed to get her $80-a-month food-stamp allowance reinstated even without all the necessary paperwork. Leaving the welfare building, she shuffled past throngs of bored, tired people and street alcoholics congregating outside and into a nearby furniture store with bars over the windows. Inside, experimental jazz was playing over an organized clutter of plump recliners, dark wood dining-room sets, and brass lamps.

A salesman with a Middle Eastern accent approached Larraine, who asked to see the armoires. She inspected a seven-piece bedroom set. She gawked at a sixty-two-inch television.

“I have TVs smaller than this,” the salesman said.

“No, but I want this one!” Larraine smiled.

“Why don't you do it layaway, then?”

“You have layaway? I love layaway!”

Larraine was participating in a kind of cleansing ritual, swapping the welfare building's miasma of unwashed bodies and dirt with the smell of a new leather sofa. She was also entertaining a fantasy of making a good home for herself and her daughters. Jayme was finally out of prison and staying with Larraine and Beaker until she found an apartment; and maybe Megan would come around. She used to put the girls' clothes, new clothes, on layaway.

To Larraine, putting something on layaway was saving. “I can't leave money in my bank,” she said. “When you're on SSI you can only have so much money in the bank, and it's got to be less than a thousand dollars. Because if it's more…they cut your payments until that money is spent.” Larraine was talking about SSI's “resource limit.” She was allowed to have up to $2,000 in the bank, not $1,000 like she thought, but anything more than that could result in her losing benefits.
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Larraine saw this rule as a clear disincentive to save. “If I can't keep my money in the bank, then I might as well buy something worthwhile…because I know once I pay on it, it's mine, and no one can take it from me, just like my jewelry.” Well, no one except Eagle Moving.

Before her eviction, Beaker had asked Larraine why she didn't just sell her jewelry and pay Tobin. “Of course I'm not going to do that,” she said. “I worked way too hard for me to sell my jewelry….I'm not going to sell my life savings because I'm homeless or I got evicted.” It wasn't like she had just stumbled into a pit and would soon climb out. Larraine imagined she would be poor and rent-strapped forever. And if that was to be her lot in life, she might as well have a little jewelry to show for it. She wanted a new television, not some worn and boxy thing inherited from Lane and Susan. She wanted a bed no one else had slept in. She loved perfume and could tell you what a woman was wearing after passing her on the sidewalk. “Even people like myself,” Larraine said, “we deserve, too, something brand-new.”
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Larraine didn't put anything on layaway that day. But when her food stamps kicked in, she went to the grocery store and bought two lobster tails, shrimp, king crab legs, salad, and lemon meringue pie. Bringing it all back to Beaker's trailer, she added Cajun seasoning to the crab legs and cooked the lobster tails in lemon butter at 350 degrees. She ate everything alone, in a single sitting, washing it down with Pepsi. The meal consumed her entire monthly allocation of food stamps. It was her and Glen's anniversary, and she wanted to do something special. “I know our relationship may not have been good, but it was our relationship,” she said. “Some things I will not ever get over.” But the lobster helped.

When Larraine spent money or food stamps on nonessentials, it baffled and frustrated people around her, including her niece, Sammy, Susan and Lane's daughter.
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“My aunt Larraine is one of those people who will see some two-hundred-dollar beauty cream that removes her wrinkles and will go and buy it instead of paying the rent,” said Sammy, a hairstylist with her own shop in Cudahy. “I don't know why she just doesn't stick to a budget.” Pastor Daryl felt the same way, saying that Larraine was careless with her money because she operated under a “poverty mentality.”

To Sammy, Pastor Daryl, and others, Larraine was poor because she threw money away. But the reverse was more true. Larraine threw money away because she was poor.

Before she was evicted, Larraine had $164 left over after paying the rent. She could have put some of that away, shunning cable and Walmart. If Larraine somehow managed to save $50 a month, nearly one-third of her after-rent income, by the end of the year she would have $600 to show for it—enough to cover a single month's rent. And that would have come at considerable sacrifice, since she would sometimes have had to forgo things like hot water and clothes. Larraine could have at least saved what she spent on cable. But to an older woman who lived in a trailer park isolated from the rest of the city, who had no car, who didn't know how to use the Internet, who only sometimes had a phone, who no longer worked, and who sometimes was seized with fibromyalgia attacks and cluster migraines—cable was a valued friend.

People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season the suffering with pleasure. They would get a little high or have a drink or do a bit of gambling or acquire a television. They might buy lobster on food stamps.
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If Larraine spent her money unwisely, it was not because her benefits left her with so much but because they left her with so little. She paid the price for her lobster dinner. She had to eat pantry food the rest of the month. Some days, she simply went hungry. It was worth it. “I'm satisfied with what I had,” she said. “And I'm willing to eat noodles for the rest of the month because of it.”

Larraine learned a long time ago not to apologize for her existence. “People will begrudge you for anything,” she said. She didn't care that the checkout clerk looked at her funny. She got the same looks when she bought the $14 tart balsamic vinegar or ribs or on-sale steak or chicken. Larraine loved to cook. “I have a right to live, and I have a right to live like I want to live,” she said. “People don't realize that even poor people get tired of the same old taste. Like, I literally hate hot dogs, but I was brought up on them. So you think, ‘When I get older, I will have steak.' So now I'm older. And I do.”

The next month was August, and Larraine used some of her food stamps to buy instant mashed potatoes, ham, and creamed corn for a hard-luck family that had moved into the trailer next to Beaker's. The family of six had recently lost many of their things in an eviction and were sleeping on the floor. Once dinner was ready, Larraine led a prayer. “
Dear God in Heaven, thank you so much for this food. And thanks for all the people in my life who have blessed me. Thank you for Jayme. And thank you for my brother, Beaker. Even though he makes me so angry sometimes, I still love him, Lord. Please take care of my brother. Amen
.”

Two days later, someone knocked on the door. It was a tall white man with a mustache and a tucked-in collared shirt. He was holding a bright-yellow piece of paper.

“Good morning. We are going to have to shut your gas off this morning,” he said.

Larraine took the paper. “Oh, okay,” she said sheepishly.

“There's payment information on the back there. Have a nice day.” The man went behind the trailer with his toolbox.

“So Uncle Beaker hasn't been paying the gas?” Jayme asked, working her mascara brush.

“I guess not,” Larraine said, looking down at the yellow paper reporting a debt of $2,748.60.

“When do you finally grow up and start paying your bills? Uncle Beaker needs to grow up and stop living like a child. You too, Mom. You have a real problem with living above your means. You need to really, just, not do that.”

Larraine looked at her daughter. “I don't know when you got so cute,” she said.

As fall bled into winter, warmth began seeping out of the trailer. The thin walls and countertops and water and silverware in the drawer grew cold. Larraine and Beaker burrowed under blankets, doubled up on sweaters, and plugged in two small space heaters. They both slept more to keep warm. If Larraine fell asleep on the couch, Beaker would put an extra blanket over her. Early morning was the worst. Beaker would put on his heavy coat, but Larraine's winter clothes were sitting in Eagle Moving's bonded storage facility. They were not the only tenants in the trailer park who couldn't afford to reinstate their gas before the first snow fell. As for Tobin, he hated the snow. He traveled to warmer climates during the winter.

One fall day, Beaker told Larraine he was moving to a federally subsidized assisted-living facility for the elderly and disabled. The following morning, he did. This caught Larraine by surprise. They had never really learned to talk to each other.

After Beaker left, Larraine knew she had to come out of hiding and make new arrangements, if not with Tobin, then at least with the new management company. She worked up the courage and walked down to the office in sweatpants and a stained black fleece.

“I need to get emergency assistance as soon as possible,” Larraine told the college kid who had replaced Lenny. “I'm so cold….The heat. All I know is I need the heat on.”

“Oh my goodness,” the college kid said without looking up. He was nonplussed. He was learning. The college kid dialed the number to Bieck Management and put Larraine on the phone with Geraldine, the office manager. Geraldine told Larraine that Beaker owed almost $1,000 in back rent. The gas bill was not the only one he hadn't paid. Larraine sat in the office chair, resting her forehead on her palm. “Please, Geraldine, I need your help. I need your understanding.” After a few more minutes, Larraine hung up the phone. Her best hope of staying, she believed, was to convince Beaker to pay his back rent.

Beaker's new place was in the Woods Apartments, on College Avenue and Thirty-Fifth Street, across the street from Mud Lake. It was white-wall clean and new-smelling and warm. Larraine asked Beaker to settle his debt with Bieck. He said he could not pay two rents. Larraine said she couldn't pay last month's rent because her money had already gone to storage. At this point, Larraine had paid Eagle Moving $1,000.
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Ruben had room to store Larraine's things, and Lane had a truck. But both said no when Larraine asked them for help.

“Well, I hope you go live with your storage because that's all—”