For her 40th birthday, Cindy Lowe received one gift, from her son, 16-year-old Anthony: a big Danish pastry. He had managed to earn a few dollars by washing cars, so he bought the pastry for his mother. The gift from Anthony was especially sweet because the boy has been in trouble lately, out of school, out of work and under arrest. When Cindy Lowe`s coworkers realized the lack of fanfare greeting her on her birthday, they arranged for yet another gift, a cake and some cologne. At the Old Cutler branch of the Miami Cerebral Palsy Residential Services, where Cindy Lowe is a nurse, she is something of a cause. It is a place where most of the patients are white and most of the workers are black, and of those workers, many are poor, but among them, Cindy is probably the poorest. Her boss, Helaine Dominquez, says that almost all of the others have a little something extra going for them; maybe they are married or they live with other relatives who help with the rent, but usually there`s some source of money solace somewhere. Not for Cindy Lowe.
Cindy awakens sometime around 4 in the morning so she can drop her daughter, Robin, at day care and be on the job by 6. She has a decent job. It is perhaps the brightest spot in her life. She earns $7.40 an hour, and her take-home pay averages about $540 every two weeks–enough to make her ineligible for most government programs.
But not really enough to get by.
Cindy is aware of the irony and somewhat bitter about it. But when she thinks about her problems, she does not think about them in terms of the thousands of other women whose hard work is the sole support of their families, who are less and less likely these days to qualify for federal assistance. She thinks of her problems as a private burden. She thinks of herself as a woman entirely alone.
”For the average poor woman,” Cindy says, ”every door is open, all kinds of government programs. Many women on welfare lie, many women cheat. They often have a man living with them who`s working a full job.
”But I`m not making it.
”Every cent I make goes into necessities, and there is not a cent left for anything else.
”I`m honest.
”I don`t lie.
”I`m trying to work.
”And you know what?
”I`m being punished.”
— — —
”Are you Anthony`s mother?” asks the judge.
”Yes.”
”Do you have anything to say?”
Cindy Lowe stares at the judge.
Her son is facing charges of burglary, and this is her third trip to court. So far the only progress in the case is that Anthony has spent two weeks in Youth Hall, which his mother thinks of as vacation for her son. He got to see three first-run movies, more than she could ever afford to take him to, play Ping-Pong and eat well. She, on the other hand, lost a day`s pay because of having to go to court and had to give her friend Cora, who has a car, money for all the gasoline it takes to get to Youth Hall from Homestead and back, and that`s some money. Ten dollars a shot.
The two public defenders who represent Anthony, both young white women, think it is appalling how little Cindy seems to care about her son, and one of them even wonders, based on Cindy`s appearance, which on this day includes a slightly out-of-it dress, one that doesn`t quite fit right and has buttons missing, and a strangely overwhelming wig, if maybe the mother is a prostitute.
”Do you have anything to say?”
Cindy Lowe stares at the judge and shrugs. She might well mention how they have been evicted from one apartment because of Anthony and now they are facing eviction from another. She could mention his love of the video arcade and how he plays 30, 40 games at a time. But, finally, she offers as much apologia as she can muster. Her voice is soft and despairing. ”Coming back and forth,” she says, ”is really eating my paycheck.”
— — —
When asked to define poverty, she is at a loss. She stammers, she lights a cigarette, she looks down and up and around, as if the answer lurks in the air. She is not poor. Not finally:
”To me, poverty is . . . well, really, poverty is less than what I have. Poverty is nothing. No job, living on the street, not knowing where your next meal is coming from. I`m surviving, but barely.”
Cindy Lowe does not fit the government`s definition of poverty, either. She is in a group that Diane Kelly, Dade County (Fla.) Health and
Rehabilitative Services program analyst, calls ”the ones who are really trying.”
Five years ago, when the Reagan administration`s major welfare reforms took effect, ”there was a lot of consternation in here because some of the ones who were really trying lost their eligibility,” Kelly says.
An unemployed single head of a household with two young children now receives $264 a month in Aid to Families with Dependent Children, plus food stamps and possibly rent-subsidized housing. The family would also be covered under Medicaid–state medical insurance.
If someone in the home finds a job paying more than about $350 a month, he or she will no longer be eligible for the welfare payments. ”Given all the complications and difficulties,” Kelly says, ”there are a lot of people who would rather not have a job.”
The place where Cindy Lowe works offers a clean caring haven for adults fixed forever in misshapen infancy. The patients are called clients, but really they are patients, in the root sense of the word. They are people waiting, and suffering. Cindy Lowe`s job is to check their vital signs, administer medication and see that they are fed. ”You love the ladies, don`t you?” she says to Robert. His expression can be opaque and distant, but for some reason, at these teasing words he always brightens, and there is a faint trace of connection.
Then she sees Alex, head bent, hand clutching the tube that leads into his stomach. She strokes the back of his head, eerie in its flatness. ”Here, feel this if you`re not the type to get cold chills or whatever. Alex was Siamese, and this is where he was separated. His brother got everything. Everything.” Then she admires Maureen`s eyes, set in an otherwise inert face, for being so blue and shining. She motions to one sagging form after another. She points out how one patient endlessly studies her twisted hands, how another forever tugs his hair. The noise is like a deranged symphony. The patients keen, they whine, they foam, they drool. Yet Cindy Lowe moves among them with an air of glad, almost improbable grace. He`s a favorite, says Cindy, and so is she, patting one, then another, then another. The room quickly fills with her favorites.
— — —
”Judge,” says one of the public defenders, ”I just want to remind you that this is Anthony`s first referral.”
”Don`t talk to me about first referrals,” says the judge. ”I want to make sure it`s his last.” She looks at the defendant, a handsome young man, slouched in his seat, his face a study in neutrality.
”Are you going to stop causing trouble and start staying home?”
”Yes.”
” `Yes, Your Honor,` and please sit up. That`s better. Something about your expression isn`t ringing real true with me. That`s better. I want you to know I take a dim view of home invasions. You are a lucky young man, lucky someone didn`t die of a fatal heart attack as a result of your performance, and then you`d have that to remember, that to account for for the rest of your life.”
The judge turns to the mother, who appears weary, skeptical. ”Ma`am, you`ve got a healthy young man here. If he`s not in school, he should be out working and helping you. I have a copy of the psychologist`s report right here, and I find one sentence that`s very impressive. `He has a good intellectual endowment and will have no problems being trained in a variety of vocational skills. If he were to change, he could even go and expand intellectually to a college level.` ”
”Young man,” says Judge Adele Faske, with the magisterial flourish that is her trademark. ”This is your chance to join the human race.”
The counselors at the Juvenile Justice system also have noted in Anthony a certain amount of artistic talent, and they find it remarkable, and heartening, that Anthony can admit he is compulsive about his stealing: ”He is different from most of the children that we see here in this clinic because he readily admits to his weakness in relation to taking other people`s property.”
Anthony is released into the custody of his mother. Outside the courtroom, waiting to sign the papers agreeing to take her son back, the mother begins to cry. ”Nothing`s changed. Anthony isn`t going to get any help. I am tired. I am so, so tired.”
Away from work, Cindy Lowe is continually heeding the vicious calculus of her fate, continually rehearsing finances of an unyielding and humiliating nature. For a year she worked at Old Cutler as an on-call nurse. She was, says her boss, the best-prepared substitute nurse ever; she was given her schedule a week ahead of time because she was so eager and so dependable. Her loyalty was rewarded when she was offered a permanent position. Back home in Kentucky, she was used to what she called fast-track nursing, coronary and intensive care, but when she moved here and heard about United Cerebral Palsy, she was attracted to the slower, more congenial pace. In her bedroom in the apartment she had in suburban Homestead until recently, she had three items on the wall: a picture of ”Miami Vice`s” Philip Michael Thomas, another of Jesus and a framed service award from work.
Cindy Lowe on her past:
Her sense of it is sketchy and dispassionate, lacking all generosity of anecdote. In a way, her present is too impoverished to be enriched by anything, even her past. It is as if huge chunks have detached from her and are now mostly submerged in some cold foreign ocean far away.
She came to Miami from Kentucky about three years ago, enticed by her boyfriend at the time and by the hope of a good, decent-paying job. Her mother still lives there, though her father died in 1977. Her father was a career man in the Army, and she was the first-born. To this day, she feels he never recovered from his disappointment that she wasn`t a son, despite the five boys that followed. ”I always felt kind of shut out. He took up with them more than with me.” She remembers a man who was ”military everything; even the time of day was military.” One son died of asthma-related complications when he was 6; another grew up to become a minister. The three others all joined the service. Two managed to rebel by picking branches other than the father`s beloved Army. As a child, Cindy Lowe wanted to be an artist, and after graduating from high school in San Antonio, she studied at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. She not only doesn`t draw anymore, she is not sure she even remembers how.
When she was in school, she worked part time in a medical lab. It created in her a passion for medicine, for the crispness of the process of healing, the efficiency, the unambiguous sense of worth.
That was when Anthony`s father, a childhood sweetheart, re-entered her life. They moved to Peoria, Ill., and she had her Anthony at the age of 23. She and the father never married. He continued to come around for a few years, but then he ”went to Vietnam and came back changed.” She remembered one lesson from the infant-care instruction she learned at the hospital: If a child is crying, feed him, change him, bathe him. Anthony was constantly crying, and she was giving him constant baths. When he was a few months old, she gave him to her parents to rear. For a young mother to send an infant out of town to the home of an older relative is common in her circle; baby-keeping, it is called.
Her father was an everyday drinker, a quart or fifth of bourbon. ”Old Foster,” and just the thought of its odor, that violent sweetness, sickens her even today.
Four years later, she became pregnant again by another man, whom she did marry. They lived in Peoria, and he was working for Caterpillar, although eventually he left that for some kind of mine job and finally he left that for drinking. When her second son was born, she could not name him for several days because she had wanted a daughter so much. Finally, the doctor who delivered the baby suggested the name of a friend of his. Dwaine is now 12 and lives with Cindy`s great-aunt in Kentucky, next door to her mother.
It was around the time of Dwaine`s birth that Cindy signed up with Manpower, a government-run job-training program, and enrolled in nursing school.
Robin arrived six years later. Her father is the same as Dwaine`s. Cindy Lowe says there was never any question of letting someone else keep Robin. She was better situated for Robin`s birth than for the birth of her sons. She had a job, and she found a sitter for the child even before she was born. ”I`ve always wanted a daughter. I really did.” Even her mother says, ”For some reason, Cindy wanted to keep Robin herself,” and she did.
Cindy Lowe left Robin`s father when the girl was about 2.
”Some people might question if my life would be easier if I didn`t have children. To me, being a woman, having children is a way of life. It`s sort of like, you love, they love. You need, they need. To me, children fill the spaces.”
Besides, birth control was always a quandary. The Pill caused high blood pressure; an intrauterine device lodged incorrectly and had to be removed surgically. After that the doctors said she couldn`t get pregnant. Robin resulted from that diagnosis. Since then Cindy has had her tubes tied.
About three years ago, when Anthony first started stealing and his grandmother found him to be ”too much,” he rejoined the mother he had known only sporadically and moved with her and his baby sister and his mother`s boyfriend to Miami.
For a long time, Cindy Lowe has had what women often code among themselves as bad luck, meaning trouble with men. A sense of chivalry keeps her from calling the name of the most recent ambassador of bad luck, the one who talked her into leaving Kentucky, but, oh, she could tell some stories about how he beat her and tried to give Anthony drugs and threw Anthony on the ground once and started kicking his head. There`s a simple explanation for all this: crack. ”For some reason, all the men I pick end up being like my father. They are all everyday somethings.”
Late last spring, when they were evicted from where they were living, one of the reasons was Anthony`s thefts.
Anthony, whose shyness might at times be unfairly mistaken for sullenness, has a lost, disorganized air. His shirts are never quite tucked. He likes to draw pretty letters, which he calls graffiti. If he could do anything, he would go into commercial art. At the moment, his hopes for his entire future hinge with a boggling lack of realism on somebody he has heard about, a friend`s cousin or something in Los Angeles who needs a drawing to advertise his waxing business. ”He waxes Mercedes.”
The other reason for the eviction was the behavior of Cindy`s boyfriend.
”Drugs was messing him,” Anthony says. ”He hit a lot, but mostly just with his fists, and he always apologized the next day. He was the only person in my life who ever took me fishing. Twice, as a matter of fact.”
This man took everything, sold it for nothing, even the china cabinet that someone nice had sold to Cindy Lowe along with a bedroom set for a few hundred dollars when she first moved here. ”That`s what hurt, what really hurt. At night when I couldn`t sleep, I used to sneak out of bed and turn on the lights inside it and just look at the dishes. These were dishes not for eating but just to look at. They were blue and white, called Old Willow. If I ever get enough money for more furniture, I know I have to buy Robin`s bed first. She sleeps with me in my bed, and she`s too attached. She needs to learn how to sleep in a bed by herself. And I would love some end tables and maybe a lamp or two, but more than anything I want a dining-room table and china cabinet. To me, your dining room, that`s your family.”
Cindy Lowe thought she would be in her new apartment for a long time. Out front there was a swimming pool, a cool chlorinated jewel that shimmered with tropical promise, and at first, she says, ”I was impressed. Very.” It was later that she discovered how thin the walls were and that the hot water rarely worked and how a leak in the air conditioner would flood the floor, dampening the current pride of her life, a sofa and love seat purchased on time when she moved in.
”That was something. When I went to buy it, the man said, `Sure, you can buy it with payments and take it home that day.` He wanted to know how much I make on welfare. When I told him I had a job, he said he was sorry but it would take several days to make sure everything was okay. Sometimes I wish I was on welfare, I really do. It`s not my nature to sit around all month and wait for a check. I have worked every day of my life since I was 14, every day just about. But if you`re on welfare, you can open up a charge account anywhere. You get food stamps, and they have this thing called commodity and you get butter and rice and meal and flour. You qualify for free cheese when they are giving that away. You can get into low-income housing, and, of course, there`s free medical. When you have an income, that`s all anybody thinks about, income, income, income, and they don`t pay attention to how easily that money disappears. When Robin has an asthma attack, I pray it comes close to paycheck time so I can pay for her medication.”
They moved in on June 2, Robin`s birthday. That was Robin`s birthday present, a place to sleep. At Cindy Lowe`s job, employees are allowed to borrow a week`s pay a week ahead of time once a year, and, by doing that and then taking one complete check, she was able to move into a first-floor two-bedroom apartment in Homestead.
”Robin got nothing. I still feel bad about that.” The mother says it in capital letters: ”NOTHING.”
When she moved in, she had grand plans for staying there, one year, two years, who knows, maybe forever.
Eviction arrived in less than six months.
”Believe me,” she says, ”it was no palace.” At night she could hear the explosions of men who by day seemed caged in their silence. Her bedroom window was on the parking lot, so her ears were constantly racked by the clogged and angry roar of cars as they squealed off to their fake freedom. The cars in the parking lot tended to be big and hulking, and, as always seems to be the case with out-of-luck cars, many had rear-view mirrors from which were hung, dangling and hopeful, foam dice. But what gave away the essential sorrow of the place was not the tawdry walls, not the snarling cars and not the tight-drawn expressions of the grown-ups. For Cindy Lowe, it was something about the children. She watched them play unattended for hours in upside-down shopping carts converted through sheer imaginative derring-do into thundering jets. She saw the hollowness around their eyes and the way they sported wounds like a somewhat ratty piece of clothing they were forced to wear.
”That looks terrible,” Cindy says one day to one of Robin`s friends, a little boy. ”How`d you get that big bump?” He winces as she fingers the skin next to it. ”Did you go to a doctor?” No, he shakes his head. ”You didn`t go to a hospital?” No, he shakes his head again. It is Cindy`s turn to nod, and permitting herself a rare moment of parental oneupmanship, she mutters, ”Some people . . . if he was mine, you can bet . . . hematoma like that.”
”You know how I judge a neighborhood?” she says one day. ”I judge it by how old the children are when they are allowed to cross the street by themselves.” She points to Campbell Drive, a main whizzing thoroughfare a block or two away, and points to a gaggle of children darting in and out of traffic like panicked fish fighting a lure. Some of the children are out of diapers, and some of the children aren`t.
But for a while, the apartment was home.
Cindy`s take-home pay may seem more than it actually works out to. By the end of the first week, she has nothing but a few cents left and tends to descend into nickel-and-dime debt while she waits for the next check to materialize. One day she takes a piece of paper and lists her expenses.
FIRST PAY PERIOD
Take-home pay……………….$540
Rent……………………….$200
Furniture loan………………..56
Ride to work………………….15
2 trips to Youth Hall………….20
Baby-sitter for Robin………….40
Medical (dentist)……………..50
Food………………………..100
Total expenses……………….$481
What remains of her paycheck, about $60, goes to what she calls the
”less ills” as opposed to the ”more bills,” light and phone and clothing purchases or the whole family. Also, emergencies, like when 6-year-old Robin, normally the soul of solemn-eyed preternaturally well-behaved dependability, managed to lose er crayons. $1.29.
From this sum Cindy also gets the $2 that pays for Robin`s hot lunch at sch ol, down from the normal fee of $5 in the one and only federal giveaway program or which Cindy has qualified. She tried to get food stamps, but was told her in ome was too high.
”It`s amazing what food stamps can buy. People sell them in the street to buy drugs and buy liquor. I can`t even get them to buy food.”
