Ryan reminds me often of our Pick ’n Savings and Loan Crisis, named for our local grocery store, Pick ’n Save, and for the poorest period in our early parenting. Ryan was a first-year associate making $40,000 for our family of four. I was not teaching, as the cost of day care canceled out my earnings. As we struggled to pay down debt and survive on Ryan’s wages, he wrote checks at our grocery store, Pick ’n Save, every other Wednesday night, to replenish our bare cupboards, knowing a thirty-six-hour delay in the transaction would coincide with payday. For months we kited checks, our private payday loan operation, a so-called victimless crime that helped to sustain our diet of eggs and toast. Pick ’n Savings and Loan was a compound problem, having been primed by our yet earlier financial mistakes.
When Ryan was still a law student, in fact, we’d preemptively bought our modest Oshkosh house, assessed by the city at only $139,000, with what is known today in the mortgage industry as a “liar’s loan.” I was sole breadwinner at the time. In addition to teaching adjunct at the local university, making $25,000 a year, our only real source of income, I agreed to our mortgage broker’s suggestion that I exaggerate additional earnings from odds-and-ends tutoring, and signed off on my falsely inflated bankroll. If we could stretch thin without snapping until Ryan graduated from law school, we could make our little saltbox work, or so we deceived ourselves. To make ends meet, we avoided paying property taxes while Ryan earned his JD, and this debt matured quickly, our tax backlog ultimately generating a Notice to Delinquent Parcel Owners from some computer system in Winnebago County shortly after Ryan opened Ulrich Law Office in 2008.
We needed to pay $1,837.18 of a more than $8,000 debt by the New Year to prevent foreclosure. By the time our hens came to roost, we lived permanently in our house on Hazel Street with three small children under the age of five. Irelyn, nicknamed Irie, was four; Leo was two. They both still adored their baby sister, Fern, not yet aware of the bleeding-heart knockoff she’d grow into by the age of four, jotting down 1-800 numbers off infomercials about starving children or abused dogs. “She’s so annoying,” they’d quickly learn to say. “She tries too hard to be nice.” Fern collected pennies in envelopes and donated them to a hospital. Her heart hemorrhaged for people in need, as she became family mediator and defender, any outsider guessing correctly which child’s birth coincided with Ryan’s criminal advocacy work. If Irie or Leo were sent to their bedrooms for bullying Fern, she’d lobby for their immediate liberation.
As Fern offered to post bond for her siblings, we kept our own financial woes a secret; nothing was more embarrassing for us, supposed middle-class professionals, than practicing the etiquette of deadbeats. By skimping on groceries and eluding debt collectors seeking past-due balances from Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, we paid our delinquent taxes, but we remained in a deep, dark hole. The next September, I’d returned to teach, and as we awaited my first paycheck of the new academic year, Wisconsin Public Service cut our power for failure to make regular payments. As our refrigerator warmed and our beds grew cold, we cursed our house and our educations, which were not yet paying off, beginning to wonder if childbirth and childrearing were upper-class luxuries we couldn’t afford and didn’t deserve.
Our house ripened into our biggest regret when Irie began kindergarten at our neighborhood school, and Ryan realized his clients and their children lived a stone’s throw from us. At the kindergarten open house, an entourage of hard-bitten women—a mother, a grandmother, and a couple of aunts, perhaps—ushered one of Irie’s classmates into the classroom, her face iridescent blue, glinting like metal. “She ran into a flagpole at the park yesterday,” the oldest caretaker said. The girl began to vomit and was rushed outside. Later in the year, Ryan pulled up at school to drop off Irie’s lunch, only to discover a used hypodermic needle alongside the curb, in plain view of the front entrance. The secretary, unfazed, made a routine call to the custodian for cleanup.
For months, while on campus at UW Oshkosh teaching, grading, or enduring meetings, I’d agonize about my children’s safety, imagine them hanging upside down from monkey bars over infected syringes. We hated ourselves for buying our house on the old side of town. The historic sweetness of our character home did nothing to mitigate our anguish. The size of our domicile could be calculated as the inverse of its growing number of occupants—it was the incredible shrinking house. We referred to our basement as “the laundry project,” heaps upon heaps of stinky clothes mounded on concrete. The most critical part of washing clothes was the return trip, scaling the steep stairs and latching the basement door. Irie once fell down the breakneck steps and landed forehead-first with a goose egg. Afterward, I developed the habit of slapping and locking the door as soon as I emerged, but one morning Ryan stood guard over the precarious ledge as I muscled up with a full load of clean clothes. When I ripped the door shut, Ryan yowled. I’d slammed his fingers in the hinged side of the door. Miraculously his hand was bruised, not broken, but our frustration deepened. Why should everyday tasks be so treacherous?
Broken squares of glass on our multipaned windows were time-consuming to fix; glass needed to be cut to variable size and then caulked. Lead paint bubbled up and flaked off in chunks we’d vacuum away before they were optioned as candy. We lived literally on the wrong side of the tracks—an ambulance might wait ten minutes at the railroad crossing on Broad Street. When a police officer stopped
