“No! No!” Jafaris cried. Trying to be helpful, he had found a broken shower rod and was hitting Crystal with it. Arleen grabbed Jafaris and pulled him out the door. At Quentin’s prodding, Jori moved in that direction, stopping to kick in Crystal’s floor-model television.
As the family left, Crystal stepped onto the front porch and continued throwing their things everywhere. The front lawn was soon littered with random stuff: schoolbooks, a Precious Moments doll, a bottle of cologne. “Y’all ain’t untouchable,” Crystal was screaming. “This is America! This is America!”
If Arleen hadn’t been under so much pressure, she might have realized that removing the adapter was throwing Crystal’s desperation in her face. Maybe she would have been able to defuse the situation. Under better circumstances, they could have been friends. They got on when there was food in their bellies and some certainty about the next day. But Arleen was in the press of the city, depleted. So when Crystal exploded, Arleen exploded right alongside her.2
Crystal could quickly turn violent. The year before she met Arleen, Crystal had been examined by a clinical psychologist who diagnosed her with Bipolar Disorder, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Reactive Attachment Disorder, Borderline Intellectual Functioning, Neglect of a Child, Sexual Abuse of a Child as Victim, and Emerging Personality Disorder Dynamics with Borderline Features. Her childhood had left a mark. “Crystal is highly sensitive to anticipated rejection, abandonment, and harm in her relationships,” the psychologist wrote in his report. “She has immense underlying rage at significant others for their perceived unwillingness and/or inability to respond to her needs for nurturance, security, and esteem….She has limited ability to tolerate much in the way of frustration or anxiety and a proneness to act out her tensions without much…forethought or deliberation….She is still seen as being fragilely integrated.” The report surmised that Crystal had an IQ of about 70 and anticipated that she would need “long-term mental health treatment and supportive assistance if she [was] to be maintained in the community as an adult.”
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.
18.
LOBSTER ON FOOD STAMPS
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.”1
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.2
“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.