flowing over my body, the way they say you feel if a ghost enters the room. I hadn’t known I harboured such phantoms.
I told her I probably would have taken my capital, and—
“Capital?” she said (sneered).
“Savings,” I amended. “I would have taken my savings and done exactly what I did—go to law school.”
“Poor people don’t have savings.” Still glaring.
“Chas and I weren’t exactly in clover,” I pointed out, feeling somewhat defensive by then. (She has that effect on me.) I explained about how we made do on a lot of beans and tuna casseroles and the occasional chuck roast and powdered skim milk, and how during the eighties recession when you were laid off we got along on as little as some people do on welfare.
“You weren’t poor,” Jessica said, maddeningly.
“We damn well were!”
I’m learning to stand up to Jessica. If you don’t she bullies you; but if you do she treats you with grudging respect.
“We once figured out that we were ten per cent below the poverty line,” I told her, and I went on about how we shivered through one winter with the thermostat set at sixty, and how I used to get my clothes at the Thrift Shop when I went to university.
“My dear,”Vance said, “hand-woven jute would look good on you—or, even better, no hand-woven jute.”
I groaned I was so frustrated, and Austin said there was a difference between being cash poor and poverty. “You knew you were smart enough to study law, and even though it used to be a man’s prerogative you didn’t sit still for that.”
“And,”Vance said, rather smugly, “no doubt you were able to make arrangements for your children.”
I started to say that their grandmothers had helped, but Vance interrupted before I could get the words out.
“Ha! Now picture Granny—”
“She goes ape if you call her Granny.”
“Whatever. But I want you to picture her in a welfare line-up.”
My mother? In a welfare line-up? I had to laugh. “I can’t get her mink jacket off,” I said.
They all laughed and I cheered up a bit, and then Jessica bawled, “Here’s to the poor!” and swilled down the rare burgundy in one gulp. She smacked her lips and pronounced, “Excellent appearance, not too faithful, maybe just a mite pretentious—no wonder you find it appealing, Vance. Well, thank God there’s money in poverty so we can drink world-class.”
With that she wheeled around, wound up like a big-league pitcher, and hurled the glass against the wall where it shattered and left splats of red dribbling down the white.
“You never could hold your booze, could you Jess?” Vance said in a steely voice.
The two of them squared off as though they were about to dive for their six-guns. Austin and I looked at the floor—a mistake; glass and dribbles of wine were scattered all over the pale-blue carpet—and in weird unison we shifted our gazes to the ceiling and started an inane conversation about the Third World that was interrupted by a loud belch from Jessica. She then swooped down on me and grabbed my arm—in a moment of madness I’d accepted an invitation to supper at her place—and as we left I turned and saw Vance and Austin looking thoughtfully at the second bottle of vintage burgundy. I’d have killed to join them.
“I get the feeling you didn’t approve of my toast,” Jessica yelled as she wheeled her rusted-out Volkswagen (beetle, formerly yellow) at breakneck speed down Rideau Street.
“I think you go out of your way to antagonize Vance,” I answered, sounding hideously prim. (I have scary glimpses of myself turning into Mother.) “He’s loaded, but that’s not exactly a crime.”Then I mumbled something about compassion not being a function of money, or a prerogative of the less-rich, either. I do believe all this, dearest Chas, but it sounds incredibly self-righteous written down, especially when, what with one thing and another, I haven’t given an awful lot of drought to “women and poverty” in recent years.
Now, suddenly, it’s all I’m thinking about. I think of it all day and half the night, and I’m grateful that something seems to be getting addressed. I told Jess that I’d been impressed by Vance’s response to the Single Mothers’ Association, that he seemed really concerned about poor women.
“Yeah, Van has some good points,” Jessica said, sounding surprisingly conciliatory. “Just don’t be dazzled by his fancy footworK, that’s all.”
Before I could ask her what the hell she meant by that she parked the car in front of the group home. As we got out she shot at me, “Well? Did you learn anything?”
Sometimes Jessica gets a bit tiresome, although I do enjoy a good discussion with her. I know I’ve painted you a pretty sordid picture, but Jessica’s not just an uprooted bag-lady. She has a brain. And loves a good argument. On the other hand, I think she thinks it’s good for me to see “real life”—this is twice now that she’s dragged me to her place, an ancient brick house in Sandy Hill where we wallow in Group Home Modern. Pandemonium, what with eight mothers and kids of every age, a common living room dominated by TV, common eating areas, and common God knows what else—I could never live like that. (Why not? I ask myself.)
We parked ourselves on benches at the kitchen table and she ladled up nourishing stew and baking-powder biscuits—good, but I wasn’t terribly hungry. She started in again about poverty being a state of mind. “During the Depression—”
I groaned.
“You got something against the Depression, Jock?”
“Sorry. It’s just that everyone hauls it out when they want to make a point.”
“That’s called learning from hi6tory.”
“Okay, okay.”
Her point was well taken, even by me. Intelligent, educated people then were poorer than plenty of welfare cases today, but according to Jessica they didn’t feel poor. “They never thought of themselves as belonging to a social class defined by poverty, any more than you thought that when you went to law school.” I have to admit that Jessica can be intellectually challenging, which was about the last thing I expected her to be when I first met (and heard) her. She went on about how I might be broke but would never be poor, “Because, one, you haven’t got the negative social conditioning, two, you’re educated, and three, even if your husband walked out tomorrow you’d manage very nicely.”
No I wouldn’t, Chas. I would not manage at all nicely.
“Your state of mind isn’t poor,” Jessica forged on, “ergo you aren’t poor.”
Ergo? I don’t get Jessica. I mean, she affects this awful speech and those terrible clothes, but if she gets wound up she can’t hide the fact that she’s educated. I’ve tried to find out something about her background, but she isn’t talking. I asked her if she’d ever been poor.
“Oh, I once went for a week without eating because I didn’t have any money, and in the sixties I hitched through
