The American Dream 

Our friends at The Point are publishing a “Quarantine Journal.” Samantha Hill has an entry about how she is experiencing the plague. 

My mom turned 64 this past weekend. We spent the afternoon texting about whether or not she should go back to work as a cleaner at the hospital in two weeks. We don’t usually talk, but these are unusual times. She’s been on leave after a bout of pancreatitis which hit before the world ground to a halt, somehow, fortunately. She’s been working at the hospital for about ten years now, to make ends meet.

In 2009, after the economy collapsed she had to sell our family store. A neighborhood bodega, or package shop as we might call it on the East Coast, that sold, beer, wine, cigarettes, lotto, deli. People just called it the corner store, or the little green store. It felt like a community place. And in many ways, it felt like the realization of that elusive thing we call the American dream. My grandparents were children of German immigrants who grew up in a ghetto in Cincinnati. My father’s parents were immigrants who fled after the Potato Famine and worked on a chicken farm.

My mother bought the store in the early aughts after twenty years of waitressing. Before the Great Recession, it was actually turning a profit, and we had just expanded into a larger space. After hanging on for about a year, struggling to pay distributors, she sold it to an immigrant family from Iran who promised she could manage it and nothing would change. That lasted for about a year until a relative arrived and needed a job.

She’s torn now about whether to go back to work. If she doesn’t, she’ll have to buy health insurance on the private market, which is exorbitant. But the cost of possibly sacrificing her health insurance is contracting coronavirus and dying. I told her not to go back to work. She has preexisting health conditions, and she can find another minimum-wage job. But it’s not my decision.