Poverty in a Land of Plenty : Profile: In Irvine, a single working mother with three children finds her paycheck stretched to the breaking point. ‘We’ll make it,’ she insists.

The 6-year-old pleads with his mother, bouncing back and forth between her shopping cart and the colorful display of brightly packaged fruit snacks. “Please, Mommy, please,” David whines as Drew Ingram silently shakes her head.

Nearby, her 11 year-old son, Jonathan, doesn’t even try. He knows his mother cannot afford the lunchbox-size packs of chips he eyes longingly. His only protest is spoken under his breath: “That’s what my friends all get.”

Ingram doesn’t hear him. She is preoccupied with her youngest child, 23-month-old Patrick, and the calculator she uses to enter the price of each purchase, watching anxiously as the bill climbs perilously close to $20.04. For the next 12 days, the family must live on that amount, the total Ingram has in her checking account until she is paid again.

This is life on the edge, a tenuous, barely-making-it existence where any event--a child’s illness, a problem with an aging car, an unexpected school expense--can threaten to push a family out of its home and into a shelter, a relative’s house or the street.

It is a life of constant juggling, a world where income and expenses never meet. Bills pile up and are often paid under threat of service cutoffs. Rent is sent late, checks are bounced, and for each infraction there is a penalty that takes another bite from a meager income.

“I always get behind on bills and end up paying two or three months at a time,” said Ingram, 37, a single mother who takes home $850 every two weeks from her job as a medical claims collector. “Then I’m short on something else. It just kind of catapults you into more and more problems.”

Such scenes are surprisingly common in Orange County, where an image of overwhelming affluence and a tradition of indifference to the poor obscure the fact that more than 200,000 people here live below the federal poverty line of $15,150 a year for a family of four, according to the 1990 U.S. Census.

Many experts believe the number has increased substantially in the five years since the census was completed.

With the cost of living here among the highest in the nation, many residents spend as much as half their monthly incomes on housing. Little is left for other living expenses.

Ingram is more fortunate than some. Living in Irvine, she benefits from an array of services and programs the community offers its low-income residents. But being poor in the midst of such plenty can magnify the pain, said Margie Wakeham, an Irvine school board member who heads Irvine Temporary Housing, a nonprofit agency that tries to prevent homelessness.

“It is not easy to be poor in Irvine,” Wakeham said. “Many people move to this community because they are affluent and want to be near others like them.”

Ingram speaks quietly of the pain of witnessing the reactions of well-off neighbor kids when they see her children heading toward them, eager to borrow their bicycles, their toys, yet again. “It’s hard to watch sometimes,” she said.

David, an active first-grader, does not have a bike. Jonathan, now in sixth grade, struggles to ride an adult-size bike given him by a neighbor.

Last Christmas, Ingram finally yielded to six months of pleas and bought Jonathan a pair of in-line skates. But when a part wore out a few months later, she could not afford to fix it. Jonathan still tries to use the skates, but often they sit idle on a shelf in the living room.

Each month, Ingram pays $890 in rent for the two-bedroom apartment she shares with her three sons, plus $35 in late fees. Because she cannot pay the bill until she receives her check on the 7th, Ingram is late with the rent each month. The extra fee, which the apartment manager says cannot be waived, all but negates a $45 rent break Ingram receives through an Irvine program for low-income residents.

That will change Saturday, when Ingram moves off a waiting list and into a more heavily subsidized apartment in the same complex. Her monthly rent will drop to $738.

For now, Ingram’s rent leaves her a few dollars, a handful of quarters set aside for laundry and what little she might have saved from her previous check. That money must last until her next bimonthly paycheck, covering food, clothing, transportation, utilities, medical bills and school supplies.

Too often, it runs out.

In September, three days before payday, with her refrigerator and cupboards almost empty and no one able to help, Ingram gulped down her pride, took two hours off work and picked up a package of emergency food from Irvine Temporary Housing. The agency runs a food pantry along with its housing assistance.

She parked her battered 1984 Toyota outside the agency’s office and hurried inside, out of breath. She had not eaten that morning.

Ingram filled out a form, then picked up a package of diapers and two bags of food that included tuna, chili, beans, soup, canned vegetables and a treat for Patrick: “blueberry buckle” baby dessert.

“Can you use a cake at all?” asked Elizabeth Chand, the agency’s program services coordinator.

“I could use anything you have,” Ingram said, her eyes shadowed with worry and fatigue. “I am, like, out. And David would love a cake.”

A woman with a pleasant face and short, curly hair, Ingram works full time for a receivables management company in North County. She works Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., arranging payments on overdue medical bills. The irony of her job, in light of her own situation, has not escaped her.

Two years ago, when she was 6 1/2 months pregnant with her third child, she left her husband, a man she says was abusing her and their children, and took refuge in a women’s shelter near her home in Richmond, Va.

A month later, with $1,000 contributed by her parents and siblings, she drove across the country with Jonathan and David, then 9 and 4, and moved in with her oldest sister, Cathlynn Morse, in Irvine.

One of six children of a carpet designer and a speech therapist, Ingram had never been on welfare. In Virginia, she and her husband both worked to support their family. But with her life in disarray, she turned to the social services system, collecting food stamps, Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Medi-Cal, until her newborn was 3 months old and she found her present job.

“That’s the way the system’s supposed to work,” Ingram said. “I had three interviews, I got three offers and I went back to work.”

Since then, Ingram has been assisted by programs for the needy and for abused families provided by the city of Irvine and by nonprofit agencies throughout the county. The Children’s Home Society, a statewide organization that offers family and adoptive services, is helping her pay for child care. Friends In Service to Humanity, based in Newport Beach, has given her occasional food bags, along with housing and utility assistance. For Families, a referral service run by the city, and the respite care program of the Orangewood Children’s Foundation have helped as well.

Ingram says she has been treated largely with compassion. But the agencies cannot always provide all the assistance the family needs.

These days, living in an Irvine apartment furnished mostly with donations from her sister and several caring neighbors, Ingram is struggling to be both mother and father to her sons, to keep them fed, clothed and sheltered.

“They get really angry sometimes,” she said of the two older boys. “They’re angry at their dad for what he did, they’re angry at me for leaving and that we’re not together as a family. Then they get angry at me because I can’t give them everything their friends have.”

As Ingram frets about her sons, her sister worries about her. Throughout her adult life, Ingram has suffered from bouts of depression and from panic attacks that have twice led to hospitalization. With so much stress and so little money, Ingram these days often skips the medication prescribed for her, says her sister, a systems analyst for a health-care organization.

“She’s trying so hard and she’s so tired, every day,” said Morse, 39, who lives about two miles from Ingram and buys groceries and lends her small amounts of money as often as she can. “She gets very low and depressed.”

Sometimes, perhaps too often, Ingram admits, she gives in to the boys’ entreaties, buying them crayons, tiny action figures or other small toys as they tag along on harried weeknight shopping trips that leave her stressed and exhausted.

One recent night, David sobbed among the racks of children’s clothing in a discount store, lying on the floor as he begged his mother to buy him a pair of Superman pajamas for $14.95. She resisted, for a while, then wordlessly placed the red and blue garment in the cart.

Until this year, neither David nor Jonathan had ever played soccer or baseball in any of Irvine’s numerous kids leagues because Ingram could not pay for the uniforms and entry fees. This fall, after a neighbor offered to pay $60 of the $100 cost, Jonathan is playing soccer for the first time.

Ingram has not bought clothes for herself in seven months. Her newest pair of shoes was purchased in Virginia more than two years ago. Most of her children’s clothes and shoes are donated by co-workers, neighbors and groups like Operation SchoolBell, a program for needy children sponsored by the Assistance League of Irvine.

The family does not have a telephone. Service was cut off in July because Ingram could not pay the bill, although she hopes to pay off the $175 she owes soon and have it restored. She worries about her children being unable to call the 911 emergency line from home.

One night recently, Ingram stood at a dimly lit public telephone near her apartment, trying to persuade gas and electric company officials to give her more time to pay overdue bills before cutting off the family’s service. Yes, she promised each one, she would try to come up with both the past due and current amounts by the 22nd.

“So that’ll be OK?” she asked, turning sideways to keep an eye on David, who played with his shadow nearby. “We won’t be cut off then? Yes? Thank you.”

One reason for Ingram’s difficult circumstances, she acknowledges, is that she chooses to live in Irvine, where half her income goes to rent. She knows there is less expensive housing in Orange County, neighborhoods where the sting of being unable to give her children skateboards, bikes and the latest clothing styles might hurt considerably less.

Ingram cannot miss how clearly she and her family stand out here. “You can tell by my clothes,” she said, looking down at her polyester stretch pants and flowered, short-sleeved top. “There are just subtle attitude differences you get in the stores here because you’re not like [other Irvine residents]. You’ll never be like them.”

Still, Irvine’s family atmosphere, low crime rate and good schools make it critically important for her to raise her children here, she says. Equally important is the proximity to her sister, who is a source of incalculable support.

Ingram receives only occasional child-support payments from her husband. The two are still married; she says she cannot afford the cost of getting divorced.

In August, 1993, soon after she left her husband, Drew Ingram was granted custody of the children and he was ordered to pay $300 a month to help support them. But her husband, who earns less than she does, sends payments irregularly, his wife says--sometimes $300, sometimes $40 or $50, sometimes nothing at all. Ingram’s husband declined to comment.

“I think he does, in his mind, the best he can do,” she said. “I wish he would see the kids, but he says he can’t afford to come out. I wish he would pay the child support, and he does, sometimes. It’s just that it’s not anything I can count on.”

An official with the family support division of the Orange County district attorney’s office said confidentiality rules prevented her from commenting on the status of Ingram’s months-old request for help obtaining child support from her husband.

But Ingram said the DA’s office recently told her its attorneys will write to Virginia officials seeking an update on the case. They also told her it might be possible to garnish her husband’s wages, she said.

Ingram’s fragile financial foundation is always in danger of collapse, but her situation has been especially difficult since June, when the timing belt of her car snapped on the San Diego Freeway in Costa Mesa. The repair cost $500, which set her back ever more in her effort to pay the bills.

Beginning last month, Ingram’s monthly take-home pay dropped by $160 when she began paying for medical insurance coverage. Until then, her family had been covered by Medi-Cal, through a transitional program offered to those who have been on welfare.

The family can’t go without medical coverage--all three boys have asthma and Ingram needs help paying for her own medication.

Meanwhile, her dream of one day finishing the college degree in vocal music she started nearly 20 years ago seems to drift farther and farther away.

“We’ll make it,” Ingram said, running a hand through her hair and trying to assume a confident expression. “We always do. I’ll just have to figure something out.”