When Claudia heard the words white trash, that is what she thought.
She never found out who that comedian was, or what compelled him to mock what was probably a large share of his audience. Poor people watch a lot of television. Claudia’s family was sometimes without water, but they always had an expensive cable package, and her mother always managed to pay that bill on time.
If Deb was at home, the TV was playing. To fall asleep she watched something monotonous, golf or C-SPAN. Every day of her short life began in the chipper company of the network morning shows, with their simpering hosts and human-interest stories and celebrity guests preparing favorite dishes, as though movie stars actually cooked. She was out the door by seven thirty, leaving Claudia to dress and feed the fosters.
The minute her mother left for work, Claudia turned off the TV.
The fosters, Deb called them—as though it were their last name, as though they were brothers and sisters in a large, multicolored （for Maine）， ever-expanding family. They had one at a time, then two, and finally three or four. Claudia was in middle school—old enough to babysit—when Deb hit on this way to make extra money. Each month, the state of Maine paid four hundred bucks per kid.
（Could that figure possibly be correct? After her mother’s death, Claudia asked her aunt Darlene. “It sounds right,” Darlene said, but she didn’t sound sure.）
Importantly, each foster increased their monthly allotment of what were inexplicably called food stamps. These weren’t actually stamps but paper bank notes, clearly labeled by the federal government: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE FOOD COUPON. The food stamps were blue or purple, to make absolutely certain no one would ever mistake them for actual money. It was important to make them look like what they were: government handouts for poor people. They were designed for maximum embarrassment. Times have since changed—single mothers on assistance are now issued debit cards—but back then, no one worried about shaming them. Shame was considered appropriate. Shame, it was felt, might teach them some restraint.
When Claudia was sent to the store for bread or milk, the cashier held the food stamps by their edges, as though they were not quite clean.
Claudia’s mother grew up poor and having kids made her poorer and yet she continued having them, first her own and then other people’s, long past the point where she had any patience for them. She didn’t enjoy them in any discernible way, and yet she couldn’t stop acquiring them. At a certain point Claudia began to see this as a sickness, her mother as obsessive-compulsive, a hoarder of children. Only later did she grasp what now seems obvious: Deb raised other people’s kids because it was one of only a few things she could earn money doing. The world was full of discarded people, sickly old ones and damaged young ones, and she was a paid caretaker. It said something about the world that this was the worst-paying job around.
Raise wasn’t the right word. The fosters were given food and shelter and more or less left to raise themselves. They were bathed twice a week—at Aunt Darlene’s, if the water was out. They were fed adequately and were never hit, which put them miles ahead of where most had started out in life. Deb said, often, that she treated them like her own children, and Claudia can attest that this was true.
The fosters, her mother called them. There was no suggestion, ever, that they were Claudia’s brothers and sisters. The fosters were their own category. At the time this didn’t strike her as cruel.
AFTER TARA, THE LINES WENT QUIET. ON WEDNESDAYS THE call volume waxed and waned for inscrutable reasons: twenty minutes of dead silence and then, suddenly, a half dozen calls were waiting in the queue. Tuesdays and Fridays were quieter, Thursdays busier. On Mondays the line rang nonstop—fallout from the weekend, its psychic detritus scattered like confetti after a parade. Women called from taxicabs, windy street corners, T stops, Dunkin’ Donuts. Sometimes they called from work. Late period, broken condom, suspicious lesion, their narratives interrupted periodically to serve a customer. You want fries with that?
“Well, that was disheartening.” Naomi peeled off her headset and took a tin of mints from her purse. In her real life she was an anthropologist at Harvard. For six weeks each summer, she did fieldwork in some developing country, where she seemed to buy all her clothes. That morning she wore a sack-like dress made of some rough fabric, like a medieval penitent, and a necklace that looked like a chicken bone hanging from a leather cord.