A Safe but Humiliating Life in Irvine

“I’m just like anybody else out here,” Jenny says, as if she really needs to, but then again, they wonder about her out here, about her kind.

“The reason I moved to Irvine is my kids,” she says. “I want them to be in good schools. I want them to be safe. It’s humiliating here, but at least it’s safe.”

It is humiliating, Jenny says, because she is poor--poor in a place where the have-nots aren’t really part of the urban plan.

We are in the living room of Jenny’s apartment now, sitting on old couches that a friend has donated from her garage. The room’s focal point is the TV--Nintendo has taken over the screen--and two of Jenny’s three children hold the game controls in their hands.

The children might be playing somewhere else, the day is cloudless and warm, except that, well, they say they don’t have many friends.

“In Fullerton I liked it better because nobody cared if you had any money or not,” says the daughter I’ll call Jacqueline, who is on the cusp of 13.

“At school, you go up to them and start talking to them and they say that they have to go or something.”

“Well, I have friends,” says her brother, almost 7. “Or sort of a friend. We go to baseball games. And I’m going to play Little League next year. Mom said . . . . “

Jacqueline interrupts.

“We’ll see if she has enough money,” she says.

Jenny has been on the phone. Someone had returned her call from the morning, in search of work. The caller was nice, Jenny says. Except there is nothing now.

There hasn’t been for 14 months.

“Do I sound angry?” Jenny asks me. That isn’t exactly how she wants tmo sound. She is frustrated, certainly, sometimes depressed, often wondering when it will get better, why doing all the right things doesn’t seem to be doing enough. She is 37 years old.

Jenny shows me her latest degree, issued this April, a master’s in counseling and psychology from Pepperdine University. And then there’s her membership card for Psi Chi, the national honor society in psychology. There was a B.A. in sociology, from Cal State Fullerton, before that.

Jenny escaped from her husband--who beat her one too many times--with nothing but her purse, a car and her kids. The law says this man must stay away from them now or he will be subject to arrest.

Jenny has been on welfare for six years.

“That’s a long time,” she says. “And not that I wanted it to be. It is an embarrassment. I find it embarrassing to be an intelligent person and have an education . . . .”

Her voice trails off. Jenny takes a long drag on her cigarette. She calls smoking her only vice. She lights up when she is nervous; she is doing that a lot.

Jenny says there is another family “like” hers in the apartment complex, only these people don’t really seem like Jenny at all. The neighbors have complained that these people are coming and going all the time, that people hang outside of their apartment and drink. These people, like Jenny, have qualified for a low-income home.

Under a federal program administered by the Orange County Housing Authority, Jenny pays only $167 in rent. The government pays the remainder of the $1,025 monthly cost directly to the landlord. Jenny and her children have been here in Irvine for three years. The waiting list for the program in Orange County ranges from two to five years.

“I’ve had other neighbors complain to me about this other family,” Jenny says. “They say that they shouldn’t be here. I had another neighbor say to me, ‘Well, if I’m a taxpayer who has to pay for low-income housing, then they should be in Santa Ana.’ So I told her, ‘Well, I’m in the program too,’ and she said, ‘Well, you’re probably one in a thousand.’ ”

Jenny says that landlords think this too.

“I would call up places and ask if they took housing certificates and they would say no,” she says.

So Jenny changed her tack; she stopped mentioning the certificates over the phone. She and her children, dressed in their best, would simply set up appointments to visit the places for rent. Then Jenny would explain the housing program once she was there.

“Because people have this image that if you are on housing, you are trashy-looking, your kids are trashy and everything is unkempt,” Jenny says. “This way, we would go, and it was like normal . Like if you went and looked at a place to rent.”

The implication here is understood. Normal is somebody like me, with a job, a mortgage and a car. Jenny has none of these now. She is not like us .

Jenny and her children see this too. It hurts down deep, even as they might dismiss it as something that really doesn’t count.

How do you explain to everybody that, really, you are trying, you’re trying like hell, except that the bootstrap you’ve been pulling yourself up by seems to have gotten stuck?

Jenny did a funny thing earlier this year. Jacqueline was graduating from the sixth grade, a pretty big deal around here. Jenny took her to Robinson’s and bought her a beautiful silk brocade dress, in peach, with a sprinkling of sewn-on ivory beads.

She had never done anything like this before.

“It’s because these kids had been tormenting her for three years,” Jenny says, embarrassed, yet determined, a trace of anger forming into the start of tears.

“And I paid to have her hair done, $18, plus I gave her a $2 tip. Then I walked to the graduation, a mile, in high heels. I was carrying the dress, because I didn’t want anything to happen to it. Then when I got there, she put it on. She looked beautiful. No, it didn’t make her any friends and I hate to say this, but it was almost like revenge, like the grand finale, ‘See, I can be just as good as you.’ ”

Jenny is still paying off the bill from that dress. It was $141, plus interest now. The sum still makes Jenny gasp.

But it causes her no regrets.