Curse of the Starving Class

Lights come up on a plainly furnished kitchen with mismatched chairs and faded curtains. On the floor are fragments of a broken door (pieces of wood, a torn screen). Wesley, a young man in jeans and cowboy boots, diligently gathers the debris and puts it in a wheelbarrow. Ella, his mother, enters in a bathrobe, as if having just woken up. She tells him that his father broke the door the previous night in a drunken rage when he found it locked upon returning home from the bars. She admits that she locked the door and called the police when she heard it being broken down. She claims she didn’t know who was breaking in, but Wesley contradicts this, saying he could hear the two of them arguing. He says she shouldn’t have called the cops on his father because the presence of police in the house made him feel as if the family was in “trouble.”

As Ella cooks breakfast, Wesley delivers a long monologue, seemingly to himself, about the previous night: the nocturnal sounds and smells, and how he could feel “the presence” of all the people and animals outside, whether sleeping or awake. Soon, his thoughts become nervous and fearful, as if he were an “enemy” about to be invaded. He describes hearing his father drive up in his car, intoxicated, and start kicking wildly at the locked door of the house. In short, impressionistic sentence fragments—“Fist through door. Man screaming. Man insane” (138)—he describes the violent row that followed, ending with his father driving off into the night.

His soliloquy over, Wesley pushes the wheelbarrow offstage. Ella, still at the stove, offers rambling advice to her daughter, Emma, who enters from stage right, about the onset of menstruation. Ella’s prattle mixes tall tales (e.g., that swimming during your period can kill you by “drawing out” your blood) with her personal terror of germs. Searching the refrigerator, Emma discovers that her raw chicken is gone. Shouting that she raised (and killed) that chicken herself so that she could cut it up as part of a presentation for 4-H, Emma accuses her mother of eating it, calling her a “spoiled brat.” As Wesley looks on wearily, Ella and Emma scream at each other, Ella offering the excuse that she was “starving,” and Emma shouting, “WE DON’T BELONG TO THE STARVING CLASS!” (142). Ella counters that “hungry” is “starving enough” for her. Wesley, exasperated with Emma’s shouting, opens his fly and urinates all over his sister’s handmade 4-H diagram about how to cut up a frying chicken. Enraged, Emma storms off, vowing to leave for good. Wesley says her father “spoils” her and cites her desire to run away from home as proof that his peeing on her chart has improved her life.

As Wesley rifles through the refrigerator’s meager contents, Ella reassures him that the family is “not poor.” In fact, she adds, they’ll soon be rolling in money, enough to go to Europe. Wesley reminds her that “Dad” recently got fired, but she says, coyly, that this money has nothing to do with him. She adds, irrelevantly, that Wesley’s penis is “almost identical” to his grandfather’s, scandalizing him. Emma reenters, looking for her jodhpurs—since she intends to use the horse to run away—and then leaves again. Ella urges Wesley to stop her, saying the horse is “crazy” and Emma will likely be hit and killed on the “freeway.” Wesley scoffs at her worries and again asks about the “money” they’re coming into. Finally, Ella says she’s selling the house, the orchard, the stock, the tractor—“everything.” Shocked, Wesley reminds her that his dad co-owns the place and it’s still mortgaged, but Ella says she’s not telling him anything about it. Her “lawyer friend,” she says, is handling the sale in exchange for a “small percentage.”

Dumbfounded by the thought of losing his home, Wesley tells Ella that any money she gets for it won’t even pay her way to San Diego, let alone Europe. However, Ella says the land is what’s valuable: “Land will double its value in ten years. […] Land is going up every day.” (146). Wesley implies that she’s wrong, adding that he and his father put a lot of work into the place and don’t deserve to lose it. Ella jeers at him, claiming that when his father is home, he spends most of his time at home drinking to oblivion. Wesley storms off, saying his dad will “kill” her when he finds out what she’s doing.

Ella opens the refrigerator and stares into it, moaning, “Nothing.” Suddenly, Emma reenters, her white 4-H uniform stained with mud. The horse, she says, almost “killed” her, ruining her plans for escape. Ella blurts out that it doesn’t matter, because the whole family’s going to Europe—except the paterfamilias, probably. Emma says that sounds “awful” and will change nothing, since no matter where they go, they’ll still be the “same people.” Nevertheless, Emma says that being dragged through the mud by the horse made her into a different person; earlier, she’d planned to go to Baja California, learn Spanish, and pursue multiple trades: deep-sea fisher, auto mechanic, short-order cook, and novelist. Minutes later, all these dreams went up in smoke as the horse dragged her.

Telling Emma that she’s “too young” to leave the family, Ella exits stage left. Moments later, Taylor, Ella’s “lawyer friend,” enters from stage right and asks Emma if her mother is in. Emma stalls him, telling him he’s “creepy.” Seeing through his “business” with Ella, she sneers that her mother is a “sucker” who will fall for anything. When Taylor insists on sitting down to wait, Emma tries to scare him, saying her father, who has a “terrible temper,” will be coming home soon. She says he almost killed a man her mother was fooling around with; both her father and brother, she claims, have a “highly explosive” chemical (“nitroglycerin”) in their blood that makes them violent. Describing it as “hereditary,” she says it’s also what makes her father drink.

Undeterred by Emma’s hostility, Taylor continues to wait, albeit awkwardly, while Emma stares steadily at him. Nervously, he rambles to her about the fine setting of their property, how “it’s a shame to see agriculture being slowly pushed into the background in deference to low-cost housing, but that’s simply a product of the times we live in” (153). Soon, Wesley enters from stage right and sets up a small fence enclosure in the kitchen, as if for an animal. Hearing from Emma that Taylor is a lawyer, Wesley refuses to shake his hand. Wesley leaves and returns with a sick-looking lamb, which he places within the fence pen. He says he has brought it inside to keep it warm, since it’s infested with maggots, and Taylor opines that they shouldn’t keep it in the kitchen. Scoffing, “That’s nothing,” Emma points to her brother’s “piss,” still on the kitchen floor from when he urinated on her 4-H chart.

Aggressively, Wesley asks Taylor if he’s the lawyer who’s trying to sell their house, to which he freely admits. Shocked to hear this, Emma shouts for her mother. When Wesley tells the lawyer that their father would never sell the house, Taylor responds that the family may have to sell because the father is deep in debt. This surprises Wesley, who thought everything was “paid for.” Ella enters from stage left, wearing a formal dress and white gloves. Refusing to discuss her plans for the house, she orders Emma to change out of her muddy clothes. Stomping offstage, Emma tells her mother she’ll never “see” her again if she sells the house. As Ella and Taylor leave for their “business” lunch, she tells Wesley to keep an eye on Emma, since she has the “curse” (menstruation). Again surveying the empty refrigerator, Wesley tells the lamb how lucky it is to be living in a “civilized” household, rather than Korea, where someone who’s “starving” would probably butcher it for meat.

An offstage crash of metal heralds the arrival of Weston, the man of the house, who screams drunkenly about how someone left garbage cans in front of the door. Wesley avoids him by exiting stage left. Weston wears a rumpled overcoat, baggy pants, tennis shoes, and a baseball cap, and he carries bags of groceries as well as a big laundry bag. Perplexed at seeing a lamb in the kitchen, Weston ponders whether he’s “inside or outside” (156). Loading the groceries into the empty refrigerator, he rants loudly that his family left “everything” up to him again, always hoping for a “miracle.” Wesley comes back onstage, and Weston proudly shows him the groceries: a bunch of artichokes he bought in the desert for “half price.” He was in the desert, he says, to check up on a piece of land he bought from a smooth-talking salesman, who told him it was ideal for development—“golf courses, shopping centers, banks, sauna baths” (158). Not being “stupid,” he says, he didn’t pay the whole amount but put down a large deposit, which he borrowed. Unfortunately, the land is apparently worthless, just a strip of wasteland in the middle of nowhere, far from any water. Turning to leave, Weston orders his son to get Ella to do his dirty laundry, which he has piled on the kitchen table, and also to nurse the lamb back to health. He adds that he’s been thinking of selling the place and buying some land in Mexico. Wesley shows little reaction to the news but agrees not to tell his mother.