Falling down

The theater is a landlocked version of the Island of Misfit Toys, a waiting room for those who don't have anywhere else they'd rather be. The employees are either psychically damaged or determinedly apathetic in some way, which keeps them from being in a workplace where more is asked of their intellect, their creativity. Sure, some of the 16-year-olds work there because it's after school, a simple first job. But then there are the lifers: 32-year-old Rowan, the post-goth girl who was training to be a ballerina before she burned out at 19, or 24-year-old Lynn, a fanzine writer who regularly bursts into tearful mini-rages when patrons want more soda or ask for directions to the bathroom. Cheryl, the Tufts grad, maybe wants to go into medicine and maybe wants to be a painter, unable for years now to choose and move forward.

For a while I was different from them, trapped, I was sure, only by my peculiar circumstances rather than by some choice or inability on my part, but now I know better. No one is interviewing my husband for a desk job. The country has gone through two wars, with more international hideousness looming. We watch the manic-depressive fluctuation of the financial data and markets, but there's no solid economic upswing in sight. I keep applying for other jobs, but no one is hiring me, either, so I'm also peripheral, a worker with faded expertise, whose business acumen ends with the first Bush presidency. It seems we're all "underemployed"; we're all scrambling to do a lot more, be a lot more, than anyone is asking of us.

One Saturday night I was on "post," which means ripping tickets in half, handing back the stub and pointing patrons to the correct theater, restroom, napkin dispenser -- not such a demanding task even if one is hung over or seething with barely contained hostility. A much older gentleman stopped, looked at me and said, "Young lady, did you go to college?" I smiled and said yes and handed him his stub. He shook his head and walked away. I was, to him, not just another slacker, but one with graying hair. I wanted to run after him and recite my C.V., list my accomplishments, and then push him down the stairs. I wanted to scream at him as he walked into a show, "It's not me, it's the economy!" and then shove him, hard, in the back.

I walk in the door as my husband walks out. Sixteen months ago he was a senior executive and now he's selling motorcycles, only no one's buying. He isn't trained to be a salesman and doesn't own a motorcycle himself, but this was the single job he's been offered in over a year. He's not alone -- none of his former co-workers are back in the corporate grind. It seems we're part of a new demographic cohort: the Foreclosure Generation.

What does our financial future hold, when we've lost not only our 401Ks and our children's college funds, but also our credit and soon our home and certainly our emergency savings? My parents have invited us, repeatedly, to move in with them, to weather the financial storm in their rent-free harbor. We've talked about it, moving the children and the dog and the effluvia of our lives across the country and into two rooms with bunk beds and a well-stocked fridge, but we're hovering, indecisive, waiting for that last-minute rescue call. We're faced with a host of questions brutal in their simplicity, ridiculous in their repetition: Do we sell our home, take the equity left after debts are paid, and jam in with family? Do we sell and move somewhere cheaper, so that our low-wage jobs will help ends meet until a healthier economy rolls around again? Will the economy be better by the time our money runs out, and what do we do if it isn't, when we have nothing left to sell? What sort of training can we start immediately that will help pay the bills, if not tomorrow, soon after tomorrow?

We're on either edge of 40, my husband and I. How can we concede, retreat, at what point do we label ourselves the defeated in this battle and then grimly hope to someday start anew? If 20-somethings who can't find work and return home after college are called "re-nesters," what do you call 40-something professionals who can't feed their kids on fast-food wages? Besides losers?

My neighbors in the middle-class town where I live all know our plight; several of them have confessed they are headed down the same path or are watching family members slide into bankruptcy and ruin. I wait to pick up my daughter outside her elementary school playground with the other parents; we mill on the blacktop. Folks I barely consider nodding acquaintances sidle up to tell me about food banks, lunch vouchers, clothing exchanges. It seems there is this great open secret, how broke so many of us are, and how frightened we are of where it will end.

Andrew and I work to stay upbeat around our children in between the long shifts and our late-night, last-minute financial schematics. We take pains to make sure they don't feel our stress, or just the little that leaks out when we drop our vigil, but our daughter, 8, has recently stopped her weekly wheedling for extra allowance, or any allowance at all. She has started carrying around a small wallet crammed with her few crumpled bills, "just in case I need something," she says. She offers to eat the leftover triangles of sandwiches discarded by her finicky 3-year-old brother, although it's readily apparent she doesn't actually want them. She has, suddenly, that wide-eyed worried look little kids get when they know something big is afoot, an expression I recognize from my own childhood. I was raised by a hard-working single mother and we made ends meet for a while on government assistance. Now I'm unable to replace the malfunctioning stereo system, the groaning dishwasher, the broken porcelain dental caps, the rattling exhaust system; and as the trappings of our middle-class life fall to the wayside, I see it all come full circle.

In between our gigs, we continue our search for anything better, the elusive job that will surely save us. I scan the papers and job Web sites and send out new résumés with the euphemism "customer service skills." Every evening after the children are in bed, Andrew starts his second job -- looking for work. It makes sense that I would have trouble finding gainful labor in a down economy when I was in direct competition with folks much better suited to the positions available, where being a stay-at-home mother had kept me out of the marketplace. But that doesn't apply to my husband. He was in the midst of a well-connected, cutting-edge world, in the eye of the technology maelstrom and then suddenly he wasn't. It's like watching someone try to get back on a wave when the sea has gone eerily calm, horrifyingly silent.

Roughly 25 million Americans with children will be getting one of the $400 checks we received.

I wonder how they'll spend the money.

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