that, would the EDD care? It was to laugh.
The waiting area was packed. She counted herself lucky to have a chair. Whites, African-Americans, Hispanics, East Asians, South Asians, Samoans. . The crowd was as diverse as L.A. County. People chattered in English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, something guttural that might have been Arabic or Farsi or Armenian for all of her, and in a language or two she couldn’t come even that close to identifying. She smelled stale sweat, stale booze, tobacco smoke clinging to clothes (you got in big trouble for trying to smoke in here), and assorted colognes and hair goops.
A middle-aged woman with a long, lined face and pulled-back hair who looked like an escapee from a 1920s elementary schoolteachers’ lounge stood up and used a bullhorn to cut through the buzz of talk: “Nine-thirty appointments! Take your places in the lines, nine-thirty appointments!”
People stood up and hustled to get into the lines that eventually put you face-to-face with an EDD clerk. A baby who’d been sound-and soundlessly-asleep while Mommy sat started screaming when Mommy got up. Mommy tried to comfort the kid, but didn’t have much luck.
Louise sat tight. She was a ten o’clock appointment. She’d got here early because that was how the bus schedule worked. Trying to jump the lines was an even worse sin than lighting a cigarette. You got an Official Black Mark on your record. A couple of those would cost you a week’s benefits.
Men and women who’d been standing took the chairs of those who’d risen to get in line. The waiting area didn’t empty out; new people kept coming in all the time. The SoCal economy sucked. The whole country’s economy sucked. Jesus H. Christ, so did the whole world’s. But the USA was screwed worse than everybody else.
If the government didn’t keep printing dollars and handing them out, no one would have any. If the government did keep printing them and handing them out, pretty soon they wouldn’t be worth anything. That was well on the way to happening. The prices these days! But Washington seemed to have decided that inflation at least put a Band-Aid on disaster.
Even though Louise had major doubts that that was wise, she grabbed everything the law said she was entitled to. If she lost the condo. . She had no idea what she’d do if she lost the condo. Live in her car with James Henry? Beg money or a room in the old house from Colin? If it were just her, she would sooner have jumped off a high building and ended things in a hurry. But you couldn’t do that when you had a little guy to worry about. She couldn’t, anyhow.
The refugee from whacking kids on the knuckles with a ruler raised the bullhorn to her mouth again. “Ten o’clock appointments!” she blared. “Take your places in the lines, ten o’clock appointments!”
Louise jumped up. All the lines were long, but one she particularly wanted to avoid. A chunky woman named Maria-Anglo, not Hispanic-proved that the EDD didn’t discriminate in hiring on the basis of race, gender, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or competence. She always took twice as long to accomplish half as much as any of the other clerks. Some of the rest were better, some worse, but only fools and newbies got into the line that led to Maria. It was the shortest of them all-and with good reason.
Only a couple of minutes before ten now. So said the clock on the wall. It worked whether the power was on or not (it was this morning), which meant it ran on batteries. You got to try for your appointment at the scheduled time. You got it. . when you got it.
Slowly, she moved toward the window. The EDD wasn’t so heavily fortified as the post office on Reynoso Drive, but the windows were barred like the ones in an old-fashioned bank. The twenty-something guy in front of her wore a stingy-brim fedora that would have been ridiculously out of date when he was born but had turned hip again with the passage of the years. He also had on a loud houndstooth jacket; as far as Louise was concerned, that went beyond hip to tacky. From one of the jacket’s inside pockets he pulled out an airline-drink-sized bottle of vodka. He drained it in a quick gulp, then stuck it back in there again.
That was one way to make time in line go by. Bringing booze into the EDD office was Against the Rules, too, but Louise wouldn’t say anything unless the man in front of her got loud and rowdy. He didn’t seem likely to. He just wanted to numb the world a little. How could you blame him?
She’d got to within three people of the front of the line when the Asian woman at the window turned out not to have some bit of paper she needed. She didn’t savvy much English. The clerk, a prim white man with a neat gray mustache, knew not word one of whatever language she spoke.
The hipster in front of Louise performed a theatrical half turn. “Give me a fucking break!” he said, and then, faintly embarrassed, “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she answered. “We could all use one.”
He grinned at her. “Yeah!”
After what seemed like much too long, the clerk got a rush of brains to the head and asked if any of his fellow civil servants could communicate with the Asian woman. The EDD personnel were as diverse as the people whose employment they were supposed to be developing. Sure as hell, somebody proved able to talk with her. Then they had to figure out what to do about the paper she didn’t have. Louise didn’t know what they decided; they still weren’t speaking English. But the woman left the window. By the unhappy look on her face, Louise guessed she’d have to come back when she found whatever the hell it was. With a loud sigh of relief, the blocky Hispanic guy behind her stepped up.
“He better have
Evidently, the Hispanic fellow did. He stepped away from the window folding his check and sticking it in the right front pocket of his jeans.
“Name and Social,” the clerk with the gray mustache intoned as Louise took Mr. Stingy-brim’s place.
“Louise Ferguson.” She gave him her Social Security number, too.
He entered them on his computer keyboard. Next to it sat a mechanical gadget that let him issue checks even when the power went out. It had to date from the seventies, maybe earlier. It must have gone into a box as soon as the EDD computerized. That nobody’d thrown away the box, and that someone had known where to find it again, impressed and horrified Louise at the same time.
“All right, Ms. Ferguson, now I need to see the evidence that you’ve been actively seeking employment during the past fortnightly period,” the clerk said. Could anyone who didn’t work for the EDD bring out things like
None of which had anything to do with the price of beer (high, like the price of everything else). Louise pulled out application letters from her purse and shoved them at the clerk. They were genuine, all right. She would have done anything short of turning tricks to escape the EDD’s clutches. Christ on a crutch, who wouldn’t? The only trouble was, nobody wanted to hire her. . or, by appearances, anyone else.
He shuffled through them and noted them in her computer file. Then he did the same thing on her file card (more boxes that must have been exhumed from storage). Grudgingly, he said, “This appears satisfactory.”
“Good,” answered Louise, who would have hit the ceiling in seventeen different places if he’d tried telling her anything else.
He poked one more key. The printer on a shelf by his monitor hummed and spat out a check that would let her eat-not well, but eat-and pay some of what she owed on the condo. Some of what she owed would come out of what she’d saved while she worked at Ramen Central. Sooner or later, her savings would run dry. What she’d do then-she didn’t want to think about now.
She put her applications and the check into the purse. Then she got out of there as fast as she could. Who hung around the EDD one second longer than they had to? Nobody, that was who.
It was still raining. It was raining harder than it had when she got there, in fact. Up went the umbrella. She splashed toward the bus stop. It was nothing but a bench-no roof or anything. Not many SoCal bus stops boasted roofs. How often did you need to keep off the rain here?
Often. . now. The Retarded Transit District needed to improve the stops like this one. And where would the money for that come from? Local government agencies needed to do a million other things even more. They didn’t have the money for those, either. Back in the day, they might have got it from Sacramento or Washington. But Sacramento had been broke before the eruption, and Washington was even broker than Sacramento. If that wasn’t a measure of how screwed Washington was, nothing ever could be.
A Hispanic woman came up to stand beside Louise. She had an umbrella, too. Pretty soon, they’d both be
