Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,65

as food stamps or cash assistance, were a common sight at cash registers. Take-and-bake pizza shops now accepted EBT cards, but I rarely used my allotment of food stamps for that. Mount Vernon, Skagit County’s largest city at thirty-three thousand people, became home to a large population of migrant workers through the growing season, and many of those families decided to stay year-round. But as the migrant population increased, the conservatism of the area was exposed.

Donna seemed to have a lot of grievances about this. I’d come to depend heavily on the $20 an hour with a ten-dollar tip she always left for me, but driving back and forth to her house would steal an hour from my workday. About half of the time, she was there when I arrived. One day she was on her way to the store to purchase ingredients for smoothies, since she’d just bought a special blender. “It’s for a new me!” she cried. “But I’m going to the co-op this time. I don’t like the big grocery stores anymore.”

“Oh, really?” I asked, feigning interest. Donna enjoyed Mary Kay oils, which left a film that stuck to the side of the bathtub like Velcro, collecting every hair, every dead skin cell that came off her. It was hard to have conversations with her without seeing flashes of it. I never knew if she expected me to stop and talk or continue cleaning while having a conversation with the person whose pubic hairs and leg hair stubble I’d have to scrub from the ring of her jetted tub.

“Last time I went to the big store, I got in line behind a Mexican family,” she said. “They used food stamps to pay for their food. And those kids were dressed to the nines!”

I continued to dust a windowsill in her front sitting room full of little angel statues with their hands together in prayer. Her words were sharp. I bit down on the tip of my tongue. I thought of how much Mia loved her fancy dresses and shiny shoes, which I purchased with credit from the consignment store. Maybe Donna didn’t realize I was on food stamps, too.

I wanted to tell Donna that it wasn’t her business what that family bought or ate or wore and that I hated when cashiers at the supermarket said, “On your EBT?” loud enough for people in line behind me to hear. I wanted to tell her that undocumented people couldn’t receive food benefits or tax refunds, even though they paid taxes. They couldn’t receive any government benefits at all. Those were available only for people who were born here or who had obtained the documents to stay. So those children, whose parents had risked so much to give them a good life, were citizens who deserved every bit as much government help as my daughter did. I knew this because I’d sat beside them in countless government offices. I overheard their conversations with caseworkers sitting behind glass, failing to communicate through a language barrier. But these attitudes that immigrants came here to steal our resources were spreading, and the stigmas resembled those facing anyone who relied on government assistance to survive. Anyone who used food stamps didn’t work hard enough or made bad decisions to put them in that lower-class place. It was like people thought it was on purpose and that we cheated the system, stealing the money they paid toward taxes to rob the government of funds. More than ever, it seemed, taxpayers—including my client—thought their money subsidized food for lazy poor people.

Donna left for the grocery store, oblivious to my emotional reaction to her words. Grocery shopping made me feel twice as vulnerable after that. With the added posts on social media, I was certain that people watched my every move. I worried about buying items that were either too nice or too frivolous. In the chance I would ever need to get Easter candy or chocolates for Mia’s stocking at Christmas with food stamp money, I’d go late at night, using the self-checkout. Even though I really needed it, I stopped using WIC checks for milk, cheese, eggs, and peanut butter—I never seemed to get the right size, brand, or color of eggs, the correct type of juice, or the specific number of ounces of cereal anyway. Each coupon had such specific requirements in what it could be used for, and I held my breath when the cashier rang them up. I always screwed up