was throwing tinsel all over the tree, aluminum foil that each year my mother would painstakingly remove from the tree and save for next year. She learned this from my grandmother, who had survived the Great Depression, where waste was not a luxury. In the morning, we would wake up come downstairs, and see that Santa did indeed come by our house, the floor loaded with presents and a magnificent tree illuminated like Santa Claus had placed it there personally. They did this so well, so successfully, that I didn’t know Santa was not real until seven years old.
Ezra has that same look when we open the bag at the park. As he bites into it, white frosting oozes out around the edges and covers his cheeks. I open a bottle of milk that we share.
“This is the best find of the week,” Ezra says, his excitement overflowing, his stomach filling up quickly with a variety of sweets. Using that expression I know he’s getting accustomed to this, and I’m suddenly not hungry any more.
Thursdays we go by the Salvation Army clothes drop off (dumpster) to see if we can find any clothes to wear. Thursday is a good day because they are closed on Friday and people make a point of dropping stuff off before the long weekend starts. The summer has been hot and there are plenty of fountains, lakes and rivers in the D.C. area to swim in, but winter is coming soon and I’m hoping we can find long sleeve shirts or a coat for Ezra. My clothes are threadbare, but fine. I have a suit and two nice dress shirts I keep stored underneath the folded down back seat. Ezra keeps growing and the last stuff we pulled out of the house, before the sheriff came to change the lock, is tight around his chest.
Winter worries me because things will change in our routine that I will have no control over. We’ve been able to shower in some of the public parks and campgrounds, but they’ll turn off the city water and lock the doors soon. While the Odyssey’s heater works fine, we can’t stay in there all day, every day during the winter. If we can find some winter clothes it will help. I plan on making trips to the local library, which Ezra will love, to stay warm. I worry if I bring him now, he’ll want to go all the time and people who know us will be there. I don’t want to answer the questions about how we’re doing. Ezra is a precocious boy and will always answer truthfully and directly, and the last thing I want my friends to hear is that we’re living in our van.
Most of the stuff in the dumpster reminds me of a hoarder, useless stuff that should have just gone to the dump. I find one long sleeve XL t-shirt that says, “Thong Inspector” on it, but it fits and is clean, perhaps never worn; a gift for a grandpa who found it inappropriate.
“What does that say?” he asks.
“Skinny underwear inspector.”
“Is that a good job?”
“Yes, a very good job.”
“Maybe you could do that?”
Ezra finds a couple long sleeve shirts but one is too small and the other is a bit soiled. There is one navy parka with the words “C.I.A.” on the front. I hope that means Culinary Institute of America. We decide to hold out for a better coat at Goodwill or the Lutheran drop box that serves as a homeless shelter, and food and clothing pantry but only during winter months.
Ezra finds some toys in another box. There’s an old yellow Tonka truck that’s been played with but still has all its wheels, steering wheel, and faux hydraulic arm attached to the dump trailer.
“Can I take it?” Ezra asks.
“No, we don’t have the room. There are some Matchbox cars, take one of them. It’s probably from a family whose children have all grown up. We’re running out of room in the van though so only one car.” He grabs a neon-green, superhero car right out of some designer’s overactive imagination.
When the bank foreclosed on our house, I kept a spare set of keys for the backdoor which for some reason they decided not to change. For three weeks, I came back to the house with Ezra, putting our sleeping bags down in his old room. We used an old lantern to see by, because all the utilities had been shut off. I made sure the windows were covered in black plastic so no reflecting shadows led to our discovery. None of our neighbors knew we were foreclosed on until the orange notice from the sheriff’s office appeared on our front door. I ripped it down the first night. The heat and drought kept our grass short, and other than the darkness, our house looked like any other on the street.
I went out to the city water late at night, and turned the nut to get the water back on so we could take a cold shower and flush the toilet. I tried to make a game out of it challenging Ezra to see who could take the fastest shower. The summer heat made a cold shower pretty refreshing so he took longer than I would have liked. I figured if anyone checked on the meter, a few dozen gallons of water could be explained by a simple leak.
One early evening, we drove back to the house and a realtor was putting up a sign in the front yard. Each time the hammer went down and the metal spikes jammed into my yard I felt angry. I could see the black plastic had been removed from the windows in the bedroom, as we slowly drove the van around the house. The electricity was back on, but I realized we couldn’t stay there anymore.
There were three things that wrenched my heart to the core, the first was losing Ezra’s mother Janice to the cancer. All those pink ribbons, all those dead women…and we had health insurance. Maybe I was clutching at straws, but when the insurance company told us the experimental treatment to use stem cells to create a vaccine against her own cancer was not covered I began to question humanity and the health care system. Jonas Salk didn’t look at a profit motive when he discovered a cure for polio. What is six more months of life worth? The insurance company thought ninety thousand was too much, but they never had to hold a woman in pain, hear about her disappointment knowing she would not see her son grow up.
I heard a guy on TV say if you don’t have health insurance you’ve made a choice to die if you get sick. That’s either a man who’s never held a dying loved one in his arms, never had to pay a hospital bill, or is one heartless son of a bitch. A person like that has the luxury of never having lost a loved one, or their job; and can pretend bad things, horrible things never happen to them because they’re more prepared or more religious or just lucky. They’re also the same ones that when a hurricane comes and rips their house apart are also asking the government for a handout when the insurance company refuses to pay because it was water damage, not wind damage.
I rented a storage unit for sixty dollars a month with all our family pictures and decent furniture. I’ve sold off the best furniture month by month and soon the storage locker will be empty enough to get rid of it. The personal things I will keep. I show Ezra pictures of his mom and recite the circumstances of each one, telling the story as best as I can remember. Ezra will forget his mom in the next two or three years. That was the second thing that ate away at my heart. Twenty years from now it will be the pictures he remembers, not Janice.
The third was my own sense of desperation. I knew I was in trouble the day they fired me. We must have smaller government sounds great and I might have bought into it too. I guess we’d all like our jobs to seem more important than they are, but unless you work for yourself or you’re a doctor, it really isn’t true. The final check I thought about putting towards the mortgage, but I knew the bank would only start foreclosure the next month when I didn’t pay. No sense in throwing good money after bad. At first, I started panicking about Ezra, how I had let him down, how no parent should have been so unprepared. I had to figure out a routine, a way to plan for chaos.
My whole life felt like an earthquake, the bricks from the roof already on the ground, the foundation rocking, small pieces of corner wall crumbling away. Moving out of the house was like losing a whole room, the constant rejection for job applications like another row of bricks, the begging for meals like a thunderstorm washing away salvageable pieces of lumber or stone. My memories are wonderful of our family and the good times. The nightmares are horrible Radio Head-type, ethereal intrusions of a man running to grab bits of brick and wood desperately trying to g
lue things back together, except this frantic hobo lived in a tent and every attempt at building a home was torn down by wind, water, or air.
Fridays are the best day of the week. Ezra and I have a routine that we started more by accident. The supermarkets give away free samples, the kind of stuff I normally ignored as either unhealthy or too messy to waste my time trying to cook. Our first day in the van was a Friday, and we were at a Kroger’s store north of the city. The only thing I planned on buying was juice for Ezra, but there was an array of samples in each department so delicious, so varied that it became part of our daily routine.
In produce, they had sliced fresh pineapple in a little cup.
“Wow, that’s good,” said Ezra, darting his tongue into the cup like a hummingbird to get the last of the juice.
We sampled a piece of brownie in the deli, and a miniature roast beef sandwich in the gourmet department that was hot and had Fontina cheese and mustard on it. Almost a meal in itself and one of the best things I’ve ever eaten in my life. I actually scoped out the deli counter, staring through the little dots on the shelf rack, and when they refilled the sample tray with another chopped up sandwich, I used my body to