Read Online The Working Poor by David K. Shipler - Free Book Online

Of the $560,000 remaining of his income last year, $44,000 was required for the apartment’s monthly maintenance fees; $116,000 for the house on Old Drover’s Mooring Lane in Southampton ($84,000 for mortgage payment and interest, $18,000 for heat, utilities, insurance, and repairs, $6,000 for lawn and hedge cutting, $8,000 for taxes). Entertaining at home and in restaurants had come to $37,000. This was a modest sum compared to what other people spent; for example, Campbell’s birthday party in Southampton had had only one carnival ride (plus, of course, the obligatory ponies and themagician) and had cost less than $4,000. The Taliaferro School, including the bus service, cost $9,400 for the year. The tab for furniture and clothes had come to about $65,000.… The servants (Bonita, Miss Lyons, Lucille the cleaning woman, and Hobie the handyman in Southampton) came to $62,000 a year. That left only $226,200, or $18,850 a month, for additional taxes and this and that … garage rent for two cars ($840 a month), household food ($1,500 a month), club dues (about $250 a month)—the abysmal truth was that he had spent
more
than $980,000 last year. Well, obviously he could cut down here and there—but not nearly enough—
if the worst happened! 13
    In real life, the numbers were lower for Willie and Sarah Goodell, but the pattern was similar. They were barely out of their teens, with three small children and their own missed childhoods to make up for. Both of them had inherited destructive behaviors from their upbringing—he drinking, she violence—and were busily reenacting them in their young adulthood.
    They lived upstairs in Sarah’s grandmother’s beaten-up house. As if the weathered building had no purpose but to fade and sag, it stood sadly among the tightly crisscrossed streets of old homes in the center of Claremont, New Hampshire. The grandmother had no money to repair the place, so nothing much worked: the shower, the washer and dryer, the kitchen sink. Windows were broken, and the living room had no carpet— only bare linoleum—but plenty of toys were stacked along the wall, and a tall rack of music CDs adorned a cabinet containing a stereo and a large television set. The two oldest children, ages three years and eighteen months, wore no clothes, only diapers.
    Like many New England mill towns, all that is left of Claremont’s quaintness are the pretty sounding names: Sugar River, and streets called Summer and Pleasant and Pearl. Most of the decent jobs in mills and factories have disappeared, leaving a gritty struggle to find work that barely pays a living wage. Willie and Sarah, who lived on Pearl Street, were luckier than most because Willie got a job through Sarah’s stepfather installing sheet metal roofs on candy factories and pharmaceutical plants being built in Massachusetts. Although it took him two and a half hours to drive each way every day, he could make $13 to $20 an hour, which added up to $31,000 in his best year. The trouble was, they spent it all, scratching little pleasures out of a constant, grinding, and unsatisfying chore of buying:$50 a week on cigarettes alone; clothes, shoes, CDs here and there; almost every dinner out at McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, or Taco Bell. They had no bank account.
    Willie was lanky, mild, easy, with glasses and a mop of light brown hair. He often wore a slight smile that made him look a bit lost, as if he had suddenly awakened to find himself in a mysterious mess. His kids were hellions, and Cody, the three-year-old, already had wild anger in his eyes, already shouted with a rage that sounded as deep as a man’s. He hit his younger sister, who in turn hit the baby. Cody actually looked like a good buddy of Willie’s, and sure enough, turned out to be the buddy’s son. But Willie was an honorable man, and he adopted his wife’s firstborn.
    Sarah had short, spiky, reddish hair; a ring through her right ear; and another through her right eyebrow. Her face was