O My America: Let Me Tell You about My Daughter

by Lawrence Bush

She’s 25 and her name is Zoe. She lives in South Carolina (!) and works as a social worker with the victims of sex crimes. She called tonight and this is what she said:

“You know, I just about never go to Wal-Mart because they’re such an evil company, but Brian [her husband] broke his water bottle and I couldn’t find one anywhere else so I went to Wal-Mart for him. The people there, I don’t know why, but I find them so scary . . .”

“Scary, like threatening?” I asked. “Or scary, like, poor and sad?”

“Scary, like a 500-pound grandmother who’s threatening her grandkids that she’s going to call the police if they don’t behave. Scary, like, ignorant, and overweight, and poor, and angry, and I wish they would know better.”

“And our work,” I said carefully, “is to make a world in which they can live, too, and find their own fulfillment, whatever they’re capable of. And to remember that there are some among them, probably quite a few, who are just astounding people . . .”

“I know,” she said.

“The Jewish tradition,” I continued, “says that poverty is like death. I’ve thought a lot about that metaphor. Death as in a coffin: narrow, confined, having to measure everything so carefully. And invisible to the most of the world, until you go to Wal-Mart.”

“There was a guy in Publix, where we shop,” she remembered. “He was also obviously poor, from how he was dressed, but he was there in a motorized scooter or whatever, and he was on food stamps, but he was buying healthy food, you know, whole wheat pasta and stuff, just measuring it all very carefully.”

“Good for him,” I said. “But he maybe doesn’t have children to feed . . .”

“I know! There was a single mom ahead of me on line at Wal-Mart, with two kids? She was, like, 22, really stressed out, making sure she had enough on her food stamps card to pay for everything, and her kids keep asking, ‘Can we have that?’ ‘Can we have this?’ And she has to say no, no, we can’t . . . It’s weird, Daddy, but I never, ever carry cash. I just use my debit card. This one time I had cash. And she didn’t have enough to pay for her groceries. She’s totally stressed out, trying to figure out what to put back — so I dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the floor. I said to her, ‘I think you dropped that. Didn’t you drop that?”

“Oh my God, Zoe.”

“She looks at me, like, confused and not sure what to do. So I winked at her.”

“Oh my God.”

“Then she’s all, like, ‘God bless you.’ ”

“Zoe, you really should write a blog, or some poetry. This is the stuff of poetry.”

“Yeah . . . I’m too busy.”