Every swipe counts

Grocery shopping with an Oklahoma mother in need

It’s a card. It’s called Access Oklahoma, an Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT)—food stamps, if you must. Will Rogers is on it, hand around the back of his neck, holding his hat, looking both bemused and amused.

(Considering where we are and what we’re talking about, Woody Guthrie would have been a better image. He would have understood.)

“I don’t feel guilty,” says Dawn, 35, walking into Sam’s. “I need it. Eve (her daughter) needs it.”

Guilty? No. 

Self-conscious? Yes.

Dawn was (is) a writer. She was (is) good at it, but she doesn’t know what tense she is anymore after getting laid off six months back. Nowadays, she sits at her desk in her apartment, looking at her resume, her career, her life, searching for the confidence to hit SEND. This particular job opening wants a mission statement; she wants to smash the computer screen. She has a degree from OSU. She’s been out of school for ten years. She’s still $18,000 in debt.

“A lot of fucking good it did me,” she says. “I want my money back.”

Her narrative keeps changing. The past, the further away she gets, is a distortion; the present, the longer it goes on, is suffocating; the future … what future? 

“I’m a loser,” she says the more she thinks about it.

She tries not to think about it.

She gets $312 a month, or about $1.73 per meal, for her and her daughter.

Eve just turned 5.

Sam’s Club at Tulsa Hills on Saturday is crowded—Mecca-during-the-Hajj crowded.

“Marie Callender’s,” her boyfriend says, picking up the eight-pack of chicken pot pies, “very fancy.”

“Leave me alone; Eve likes them,” she says. “There must be 800 ramen noodle packages in here.”

“You want?” he asks.

“No, I don’t want, but they’re cheap.”

He puts the box in the cart.

They pass bananas—three dozen. 

“Can you say ‘banana bread’?” she asks.

Sam’s is good for such jokes, but this is the safety net—twelve chicken breasts, a tub of ranch dressing, Frosted Mini-Wheats in a box the size of an end table, 300 individually wrapped saltines. With luck, it lasts a month.

The ex-husband, Willy, not in the picture.

Her mom sends her a twenty in the mail from time to time. Her father fills up her gas tank. Her landlord told her, “Don’t worry about it this month.”

That, too, is the net.

She makes a list in a small spiral notebook in purple ink of everyone she owes.

This is her mission.

Along with SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), Dawn gets health insurance from O-EPIC. She pays $32 per month.

Her insurance premium is—what—a tenth of yours? Pisses you off, right? Trade her then. Your life for hers, straight up.

83 percent of food stamps go to households with children, seniors, and non-elderly people with disabilities.¹

Dawn’s anxiety, usually a low hum, roars here.  The cart is filling up: the ramen noodles, a package of twelve sesame seed buns, vacuum-packed turkey slices, Diet Dr. Pepper, Capri Sun, soup, frozen vegetables, pizza. They’re almost done. She hates shopping. She’s given her boyfriend the card’s access code, so he can go by himself. But today, for reasons she can’t remember, she decided to come with him.  He lost the card once, but it was Dawn who had to go down to the Oklahoma Department of Human Services and get a new one. She sat, waited hours, with Eve.

“I can’t go back there again,” she says.

“I’ll go next time,” he told her.

“You can’t go. I’m the loser on food stamps. Not you.”

Dawn knows she should be embarrassed—she is embarrassed—when she pulls the card out of its paper sheath to pay at the register. But she’s worked, she’s paid taxes. 

“It’s why we have it, right?” she asks.

Why we have it. 

About one in six² Oklahomans live below the poverty line and receive such benefits—benefits Second District Congressman Markwayne Mullin thinks are being abused. He’s seen it with his own eyes³: 

So I’m in Crystal City and I’m buying my groceries … and I noticed everybody was giving that card. They had these huge baskets, and I realized it was the first of the month. But then I’m looking over, and there’s a couple beside me. This guy was built like a brick house. I mean he had muscles all over him. He was in a little tank top and pair of shorts and really nice Nike shoes. And she was standing there, and she was all in shape and she looked like she had just come from a fitness program. She was in the spandex, and you know, they were both physically fit. And they go up in front of me and they pay with that card. Fraud. Absolute, 100 percent, all it is is fraud … it’s all over the place. And there you go, to the fact that we shouldn’t be supporting those who won’t work. They’re spending their money someplace.”

Dawn looks good in a tank top and is “all in shape” too.

Mullin’s an ass.

And then luck: a friend knows someone who knows someone who remembered her, always liked her. There was a job interview.

A job. 

Hired.

First thing, she wanted a margarita. And then blackout curtains for the bedroom.

She could have milked the system for another month, her boyfriend told her.

“I’m not going to do that,” she said. “Bad karma. Besides, it worked the way it was supposed to. Oklahoma saved my life.”

She accepted the job the day before a letter came from DHS, increasing her benefit.

Karma.

Money’s coming in, but it’s not the world. Her health premium is now $200 per month. Clothes, too, she needs, and Eve likes the Avengers Assemble Popsicles—the expensive ones. 

More news.

Willie’s back, as if from the dead, and can now take Eve to Dave and Buster’s, to school, can now be part of Eve’s life again—and that means Dawn gets part of hers back.

The chicken’s gone, there’s plenty of ranch, one pot pie left.  

It’s been six weeks since her last trip to Sam’s. The kitchen now her palimpsest.

1 CHARTS: The Hidden Benefits of Food Stamps—motherjones.com

2 New Census data shows Oklahoma’s economy is leaving too many behind—okpolicy.org

3 Physically Fit’ People Commit Food Stamp Fraud, Says Rep. Markwayne Mullin (Video)—opposingviews.com