The Crazyladies of Pearl Street by Trevanian Page A

instead of giving us the money and letting us negotiate for our own accommodation. This bound every family on welfare to one of the 'designated' landlords, which made bargaining impossible. But then as now the Lords of Poverty didn't trust the poor not to squander their money. I need hardly add that slum property owners were expected to respond to the fund-raising solicitations of the party machine in return for being 'designated'. In Albany at that time, these slum landlords were not, as they would be today, large development companies squeezing a few dollars out of the poor while they waited for the tides of fashion to bring the comfortable classes back in search of inner-city re-colonization. Our landlords were petty nickel-and-dime entrepreneurs who seldom owned more than four or five buildings broken up and cheaply remodeled into apartments.
    Our three-room first-floor apartment rented for twenty-five dollars a month, which meant that we had to find five dollars each month to fill the gap between our rent allowance and our actual rent. Each week, a dollar and a quarter had to come out of our seven dollars and twenty-seven cents for this purpose. Actually, because our rent was monthly and our living allowance was weekly, there were four weeks in each year when we could put that dollar and a quarter to other purposes, and that's the kind of thing you look forward to when your budget is as tight as ours.
    So after setting our rent supplement aside, our allowance of seven dollars and twenty-seven cents per week was really six dollars and two cents, which had to cover not only food and clothing, but also hundreds of necessities that go unnoticed by those who do not have to count every penny: soap, medications, ice for the icebox, towels, clothes pins, baking powder, tooth powder, roach powder, soap powder, matches, fly paper, toilet paper, waxed paper, writing paper, lightbulbs, fuses, envelopes, thread... all of which my mother managed on less than thirty-five cents per person per day. We inched along on the tightrope of our budget, teetering from week to week, but the end of every month brought us a blow that buckled our knees and made us wobble precariously: the gas and electric bills. (In my day northeasterners spoke of the 'electric', not the 'electricity'. Perhaps they still do.) Mother kept our heads above water, or at least our upturned mouths, but making it through the week required strict planning, stretching every nickel, a Spartan diet and, above all, no bad luck. 'Bad luck' meant anything getting lost or broken, for any unforeseen need could cause our fragile financial raft to founder, leaving us no option but to economize the only place we could... food. My mother never let us go hungry, but variety often had to be sacrificed. Every month there were at least five or six days when we had potato soup for dinner and supper. Our budget was so tight that it took her all that first summer and well into the fall before she could to pay off our slate at Mr Kane's cornerstore. In fact, I'm not sure that we ever paid him off totally. Like everyone else on the block, we were always a week or so behind, and every time we almost closed the gap, something would happen to set us back. Mr Kane was gracious about extending credit and never once pressed us for payment, and he was helpful in a hundred ways when my mother was learning the ropes of life on welfare, but inevitably she came to share the block's feeling that Mr Kane profited from our poverty and misfortune.
    My mother's imagination was fertile when it came to making our money stretch. She had dozens of ways to make something 'do' for another week or month. Skillful with a needle, she could darn and re-darn our socks without making the heel or toe uncomfortably thick; and there were strict rules requiring us to think ahead when we used the icebox in summer, picturing where things were stored, then opening the door, grabbing what we wanted, and closing it quickly, so we