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It wasn’t even the nice trailer park.
That one was further down the road, full of homes with wheels under them like mine, but with owners who built nice porches, who built up a fake foundation to make it look like the wheels didn’t exist. Who had cute little potted plant gardens with gnomes or fairies scattered about.
No.
I lived in the one that was wedged between the liquor store and the small old car parts junkyard where the mangy dogs roamed listlessly, barking at everything and nothing both day and night. It was a sad little lullaby for me as a girl – those snarling dogs who I could picture jumping up against the flimsy chain link fence, jaws snapping, next to nothing preventing them from barreling through and sinking their predator-sharp fangs into the throats of whatever they spotted.
Kids maybe included.
There were only eight trailers in all, each older than the people who owned them. Some, mine included, older than the generation who had owned them before the current owners did.
There were no decks, no fake foundations, no black-eyed-susans or marigolds or lavender growing in pots. And there certainly weren’t any gnomes or fairies.
Not even fake fairytale creatures would be caught dead in my little dirt road neighborhood where the skunky smell of pot was a constant in the air. Where screaming matches were hardly kept private thanks to thin tin walls and open windows.
I hated the idea of going on the school bus for the first time when I was in first grade, somehow already knowing the kids would laugh at my neighborhood when the bus pulled to a stop in front of it, the stop sign and bar moving out so I could cross into it, red-cheeked and feeling bad for being embarrassed of the only home my parents could afford.
The linoleum in the kitchen where I ate store brand Spaghetti-Os in plastic bowls after school were lackluster with age and wear, chewed up in spots from furniture or who-even-knew-what.
My bedroom was a living room couch in a hideous mauve and robin’s egg blue floral pattern, the material singed through with cigarette holes, spaces I would stick my finger in when I was trying to fall asleep, comforting myself with the idea that somehow, someday, someway, I would get out of this trailer, this neighborhood, this town.
I would live somewhere where trailer parks didn’t even exist. Where no one knew that all my clothes came from the Good Will, that my mom cut my hair in our cramped bathroom because we couldn’t afford a six-dollar haircut, that there were some nights in lean months when I went to sleep with my belly empty, woke up and went to school with a grumbling stomach, only getting lunch because the school provided it for low-income families like mine.
I promised myself as I got older and the behind-my-back snickering became in-my-face taunting, humiliation because my jeans were the wrong brand, because my backpack was the same one three years in a row, because my notebooks and school binders came from the dollar store, that someday, someone would look at me and would never know that sometimes my mom would make me steal cans of soup in my backpack when she went in to supposedly check the price of milk. And I would do it because if I didn’t, there would be no food for any of us that night.
I was going to be someone who no one could associate that kind of poverty with.
Jenny Eames was just going to be like every other girl. Not the one with a daddy who had a hard time finding work to keep us fed because he had been to jail and no one liked hiring ex-cons.
I didn’t know how I would make it happen since I wasn’t a good enough student to get scholarships that would take me to fancy schools where I could learn things that could help me make good money, let me get a leg up in the world. And there weren’t many opportunities in my little western Pennsylvania town to allow me to rise the the socio-economic ladder even with a good education.
But I knew in my heart that I wasn’t meant to be poor forever.
High school was the worst, those in-between years when I was old enough to be acutely aware of the soul-crushing poverty – when everyone around me had cellphones and computers and secondhand cars to drive. While I didn’t have any of them, not even when I managed to get a little after-school job and save some money. Because when the heat got cut off, and my parents didn’t have the money, really, what could I do? Say no? I needed the heat too. I managed to get a couple new pieces of clothes in my wardrobe, but that was about it. A bill always came up.
