BILLERICA – If you drive slowly up Heritage Road, looking from one side of the street to the other, from one house to another, what you see at first glance is the look of satisfaction. You see a garden hose neatly wrapped up on its caddie. You see front lawns that are not just a flat plot of grass but that have benefited from a few years of careful attention to the plantings. The setbacks are generous enough that the mail carrier is relieved of the duty to approach each front door: Every house has a mailbox at the end of a driveway. Some mailboxes are improvised-one with cinder blocks and wrought-iron-others are off the shelf of a Home Depot, and some are more elaborate and individual, with the family name posted prominently in silver metal lettering.

Heritage Road takes you into a subdivision known as Heritage Heights. There are several others like it in Billerica, and there are thousands more that are similar across Massachusetts, and thousands again across America. Heritage Heights is designed to be a comfortable enclave, and it is. The first houses went up in the early 1970s, on about 65 acres that generations ago had been farmland but had since become grown over with woods. There are about 100 homes now in the subdivision, none of them grand, but some with backyard pools and decks, some flanked by trees of respectable height.

Politically, Heritage Road is in the Massachusetts mainstream. Among registered voters in 1992, there were twice as many Democrats as Republicans, 26 to 12, but there were 36 who were independents. About a fourth of the eligible voters were not registered.

In short, if you happen to find yourself at the corner of Heritage Road and, say, Homestead Lane, and if you forget for the moment that you are only 20 miles from the Eastern Seaboard, you can imagine yourself standing in the middle of America. In economic terms, it seems plausible. Half the households in the country, you would surmise, are doing better than families here and half are doing worse. From outside appearances this looks to be a representative tract of Middle America, or at least Middle Massachusetts. “The American Dream” is probably not the cultural heritage that the developers had in mind when they named the place Heritage Heights — or maybe it is — but the American Dream is why places like this were created and why the houses and the driveways and the personalized mail­boxes don’t stand empty.

FAMILY FORTUNES

The families that I spoke with in the Heritage Heights neighborhood during several visits this winter did not strike me as a discontented lot. And why should they be? Their homes are comfortable, their families intact, and there was at least one full-time wage earner in every household. People here know that life can get much worse than this, with a little bit of recklessness, laziness, or a stroke of misfortune. There is an embar­rassment, almost, about sounding ungrateful. Nobody wants to be a complainer.

But when the conversation turns to economics, it is not hard to find a reservoir of anxiety or, at the very least, disappointment. Just about any family that has young children and both parents in the work force will provide testimony about the frustration that is a part of modern living — the worries about the children, the exhaustion… These days, there is something else. There is a willingness to ask questions about some­thing that has long been understood to be part of the promise of a hardworking middle-class life: upward mobility. Getting ahead. Is it even possible anymore? Is it more a matter of luck than effort? Has something changed in the American economy that means preventing a slide backward is the best we can hope for?

Lisa Mader is one who thinks about such questions. With her husband Donald, she moved to Heritage Road about three years ago. The Maders have two daughters, Kristen, age 2, and Megan, 1. Donald, 39, is an engineer with a company that develops robotics in Wilmington. Lisa, 35, works about 24 hours a week as a registered nurse. “I consider myself lucky, because a lot of mothers work full time,” she says.

The two incomes don’t seem to stretch quite as far as Lisa would like. “We always think we’re getting ahead, and every time you pay the bills it’s like you’re falling behind,” she sighs. With consolidation in the health care field, Mader has seen nursing salaries drop. “I haven’t had a raise in, I think, over four years now,” she says, “and with everything else going up…”

Lisa is quick to concede that she has it easier than some of her friends — she is thinking especially of one who is a single woman who owns her own home. But when she assesses her economic standing she puts it this way: “I would say the quality of, not the quality of life but, what do I want to say? The level at which we live has gone down. I used to think I was higher mid­dle class and now I think it is lower middle, or middle middle.”

Five homes up the street in the Timmins house­hold, those sentiments would sound familiar. Debra and Joseph Timmins are also raising two children, Ben, 5, and Kelsey, 3. Debra sees her family as “strug­gling to stay in the middle class.” They bought their house in 1991 for around $150,000, which was better than the $190,000 price it had at the height of the Massachusetts real estate boom, but perhaps still not a bargain. “We were able to buy here based on one salary,” she recalls. “I immediately had to go back to work, because the house started crumbling.”

Debra, who has a degree from UMass Boston in management of information systems, worked as a sys­tems analyst until last August. Now that she is out of the full-time work force, her husband is “basically working two jobs” if you tally up the overtime. Joseph puts his computer science degree from Bentley College to work at GTE in Needham.

Debra admits that when she was a salaried worker, she felt the frustration of trying to win in the rat race. They put $10,000 into improving the house, but whether it would improve the market value was uncer­tain. She looked at her parents, who had done pretty well for themselves, and it seemed that the economics of middle-class advancement were harder now. “I was getting into that cycle where I was very resentful,” she says. But she also looked around and saw some who were doing well financially and realized it didn’t neces­sarily make them happier. She’s come to the point now, she says, where she is more interested in fulfill­ment than riches; she is hoping to enter the Christian ministry this year.

Joe Timmins can’t help realizing that a minister will not make as much as a systems analyst. Having grown up poor in Watertown, Joe looks at his improved standard of living with pride. “At a very early age, I said to myself I didn’t want to live in the projects when I was in my 20s and 30s,” he says. Now, with a decent job and a decent house, he is willing to consider Debra’s pursuit of her calling and her chance to spend more time with the children as part of an improved quality of life. “We’ve made a decision that it’s better for her to be at home with the kids, especial­ly with the high cost of daycare,” Joe says.

Debra admits it will be an adjustment not being able to buy all the usual goods associated with subur­ban life. During the heavy snows this winter, neigh­bors with snow blowers came by to help as the Timminses labored to shovel their walks the old-fash­ioned way. “And I would really love to have a cam­corder,” Debra says. “It’s a constant struggle to remind ourselves what’s important,” she says.

William and Kathleen Jenkins live at the other end of Heritage Road, with their son William, Jr., who is 4. They bought their house in 1987, when “the market was going through the roof,” Kathleen says. “Ev­erything was $200,000, $210,000 on this street.” They purchased theirs for $118,000. “It was one step from being condemned,” William said. “It was a shack.”

For a few years, “We were the definition of ‘house poor,'” Kathleen recalls. “Every paycheck it would be, ‘What should we buy with this? A door? A window?”‘ Both were working full time. On weekends, William did the renovation work. Today the house is comfort­able and attractive, on a par with the others on the street.

Kathleen now works part time in a doctor’s office, while William works in the information services department for a mid-sized Boston cleaning company. “We find ourselves just working to survive, to pay the bills,” Kathleen says. The couple wouldn’t mind mov­ing to a new house, and they’ve looked off-and-on over the last year. But for now they’ve concluded “It would be more money, and a move down.”

The Jenkinses are impressive for their optimism, perhaps partly because they have already done better than the families they grew up in. They have achieved a comfortable living standard with neither one of them having more than a high school degree. “I can’t believe how lucky we are, to have gotten as far as we have without a college degree,” William concedes. They also take joy — it is easily apparent — in their ebullient young son and in each other.

THE HIGH COST OF EDUCATION

There are, in fact, several families on Heritage Road that have made it as one-income families in which the mother has been able to stay home. They are almost without exception the families that bought their houses in the ’70s, before prices bal­looned. They might be seen as the last of the genera­tion that had a fairly easy time getting a house in the suburbs at a young age. Now those who have stayed put don’t feel the same pinch the younger families do. It makes a big difference if you are 20 years into a $30,000 mortgage or three years into a $150,000 mortgage. But there is a common concern that has to do with another part of the American Dream: providing a good education for your children. Some families have adjusted to a less ambitious college plan than they might have hoped for.

The Davenports are one such family. They were one of the first families to move to Heritage Road, buying their house in 1974 for about $39,000. Keith Davenport has supported his wife Mary and their two sons on his salary as a probation officer in Cambridge. Mary has had time to run the household and to become one of the town’s better known community activists.

But Keith looks at his own education, four years at Suffolk University in Boston, and believes he could not provide to his sons what his father, a Cambridge police officer making $8,500 a year, provided for him. Keith remem­bers his college ex­penses as $800 a year for the first two years, $900 for the third, and $1000 for the final year. Today it would cost more than $17,000 a year for his son to attend Suffolk, he figures. Running a quick calculation in his head, he concludes that for the scale to be equivalent to what it was for him and his dad, “My pay would have to be in excess of $140,000 a year.” “That’s just one example of the way things have gone crazy,” Keith says. His sons, Scott, 22, and Ryan, 18, are work­ing and attending state schools.

Around the block, on Eastview Avenue, Joanne and Tony Giovino have some of the same concerns. Like the Davenports, they bought their house in 1974, for about $40,000. Tony owns a service station in Medford and Joanne held a job when they first bought the house. In recent years she has stayed home, raising their two daughters, Katelyn, 14, and Leslie Ann, 11. Like Mary Davenport, she has been an active commu­nity member, serving on local boards and commissions. She and her husband both have college degrees, and they’d like their daughters to have the same advantage. She has friends whose children are now in college. “When I hear what they’re paying for a semester, I think, ‘Oh my god,”‘ Joanne says. Saving enough for their daughters’ college costs is “our primary con­cern,” she says. “I do worry about it.”

When Joanne Giovino looks at the younger families in her neighborhood, she feels little envy for their challenges. “I don’t know how the young couples are doing it now. I really don’t,” she says. “If we had to start out now, it’d be a tough struggle.” Having two young daughters, she sometimes finds herself wonder­ing what economic life will be like for the next genera­tion. It seems that a lot of children in their 20s are moving back in with their parents, she observes. Asked if she can imagine her daughters achieving a higher standard of living than she and her husband have achieved, she says, “No, I can’t. And that’s sad. It makes me very sad.”

“It’s too bad,” Joanne Giovino says, “because that’s just something you take for granted as the American way.”

WHAT HAS CHANGED

It is, of course, a commonplace now that future generations will not see the rapid rise in living standards that the early post-World War II gener­ation saw. But has anything really changed for America’s middle class? Hasn’t it always been difficult to improve one’s standard of living? Didn’t those who grew up in the Depression and prospered in the ’40s and ’50s make it because they worked steadily and saved religiously? Or is the anecdotal evidence of hard­er times for today’s families borne out by economists?

“In the last 15 years, there’s been no growth in real wages for the average worker in the country,” says Andrew Sum of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. Sum and his colleagues Paul Harrington, Neal Fogg, and Neeta Fogg, prepared a comprehensive look at the New England economy that was released earlier this year. (The study was com­missioned by the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, the publisher of CommonWealth.)

Entitled “The State of the American Dream in New England,” the study confirms that much has changed for today’s families. The CLMS economists looked at the change in family living standards primarily by examining the real (inflation-adjusted) median incomes for families over time. (The median family income is the level at which half of the families are above and half are below.) In New England, the study points out, the median family income went up 55 per­cent from 1949 to 1959. In the 1960s, families saw an increase of 39 percent. During the 1970s the advances slowed: real family incomes rose only 4 percent in that decade. Recent years have brought actual decreases: from 1989 to 1994 New England experienced a 9 per­cent decline in median family income.

What has made the sudden slide even more dra­matic in New England is that it came after the kind of strong economic performance in the 1980s that the rest of the country didn’t experience. New England families saw a 25 percent boost in real incomes during the ’80s (families in the census tract including Heritage Heights in Billerica experienced a 28 percent gain), while the United States as a whole saw only a 4 percent gain. The regional boom in the ’80s made the sudden recession from 1989 through 1991 all the more a rude awakening.

As the “State of the American Dream” report makes clear, Massachusetts and New England families have yet to regain the ground lost in that recession. The median real family income in Massachusetts had risen to $53,330 by 1989. By 1994, median income in Massachusetts was $49,949, a decline of 6.3 percent. (Income figures are expressed in 1994 dollars.)

So when Heritage Road families talk about going through the first half of the 1990s without a raise, they are part of an aggregate of workers who have had the same experience. If it feels as if they are running faster on the economic treadmill just to stay in place, they are not imagining it: The $20 an hour that Lisa Mader was making in 1991 and is still making today is worth about $18 an hour, adjusted for inflation. Faced with a cut in real wages, Lisa sees clearly what is necessary in order to keep up: “The only way is to work more hours.”

That is exactly what most families have done over the last 15 years, according the Center for Labor Mar­ket Studies. In 1994, 75 percent of married couple families in New England had both the husband and the wife employed at some point during the year, up from about 65 percent in 1979. The median number of hours worked by all wives grew substantially — up from about 810 hours a year in 1979 to about 1,560 in 1994. That amounts to an extra 21 weeks of full-time employment.

In married couple families with no children under 18 years of age, wives now work about the same num­ber of hours per year as husbands. In families with one or more children, most wives log fewer hours of paid employment than their husband, but the share of fami­ly employment hours for mothers has been going up in New England: from 21 percent in 1979 to 33 percent in 1989 to 37 percent in 1994. When you look at the real median incomes of husbands separately from wives, you see that husbands saw median incomes grow somewhat in the 1980s, as did their wives. But from 1989 to 1994, husbands’ median incomes fell while wives’ increased. The overall improvement in family income that occurred during the 1979 to 1994 period is attributable mostly to increased earnings by wives. (Families are also having fewer children, which tends to cause per capita income statistics to rise more rapidly.)

Working more hours has been, in some ways, a successful strategy for married couples over the last 15 years. But as Sum and his co-authors point out, such a strategy may have reached its limit. There are not many more additional hours for working parents to contribute, short of having both parents working full time, or overtime, and footing astronomical child care expenses. Future growth of family incomes will be dependent on higher wages and salaries, the study concludes. “Higher real wages, in turn, will be dependent upon a sustained rise in labor productivity and the ability of work­ers to more fully share in the fruits of increased productivity,” according to the authors.

The families in Heritage Heights are, for the most part, the ones who have succeeded in assembling most ingredients of success in the new economy. Having two parents in the household has been one of the most consistent guarantees of income gains. Married couple families in New England, for example, saw an increase in median income from $45,539 a year to $57,427 during the 1980s, a 26 percent gain, while female headed families went from $23,804 to $25,636, a 7.7 percent rise, over the same peri­od. (In the recession and recovery years, 1989-1994, married couple families had real incomes decline by 8 percent; female headed families saw a 14 percent decline.)

Educational attainment is also important. Families such as the Davenports, the Timminses and the Maders, in which the main income earner has a college degree, have advanced faster than those in which the main provider has only a high school diploma. In the 1980s, for example, the Massachusetts boom brought income gains to most workers; but the median income of high school edu­cated employees only rose by 11 percent, while the col­lege educated saw a 25 percent gain. Not only that, but a college education became more of an advantage as the economy changed. In 1979, New England families headed by a holder of a bachelor’s degree had a medi­an income that was 40 percent higher than that of a family headed by a high school graduate. In 1989, the higher educated family had a 62 percent greater medi­an income.

When the recession hit in Massachusetts, those who had done best in the ’80s also took less of a hit. From 1989 to 1994, the median income of a family headed by a college grad dropped from $73,658 to $69,652, a 5.4 percent decline. The high school educated family provider saw median income fall from $46,842 to $41,336, a 12 percent drop. As might be expected, the trend was even worse for high school dropouts: Their median income dropped from $27,510 to $22,664, nearly an 18 percent decline.

Two things have changed: “You’ve got a change in the job structure matched with a change in the wage structure,” says Sum. One factor that has been especial­ly important in the New England economy is the diminishing number of manufacturing jobs — which used to serve as a ticket into the middle class for blue-collar workers without advanced education. New England suf­fered a net loss of 339,000 manufactur­ing jobs from 1983 to 1994 — about a fourth of the region’s manufacturing jobs vanished. The region saw an increase of 645,000 jobs in the same period, but about 90 percent of them were in professional, managerial, tech­nical, or high-level sales fields. Generally, the new jobs weren’t open to those without advanced education or training.

The result has been an increase in inequali­ty in the nation and the region. The widening gap between rich and poor has received a good deal of attention over recent months, and it is something that seems to be casually accepted by families such as those in Heri­tage Heights. Joanne Giovino mentioned “the CEOs you hear get these decadent amounts,” but her disapproval was matter-of-fact. Lisa Mader puts credence in reports that the middle class is shrinking: ”The trend is there’s not going to be any middle,” she says. “There’s going to be the rich and the poor.”

There is some exaggeration to that, but when econ­omists examine the changing size of each income group’s share of the total income pie, their figures show those at the bottom getting less and those at the top getting more. From 1979 to 1994 in New England the bottom fifth of families went from a 5.8 percent share of the pie to a 4.6 percent and the second lowest quintile went from a 12.4 percent share to an 11.1 per­cent share. Those in the top fifth held a 39.7 percent share in 1979 and a 42.4 percent share in 1994. This top fifth had a share of total income equal to that of the entire bottom 70 percent of the region’s families.

This does not exactly mean the middle class is disap­pearing: If by middle class you mean those families with 1979 incomes between the 20th and 80th percentiles of the family income distribution, the middle class includ­ed 60 percent of New England families that year, and only 51 percent in 1989, due to upward income mobili­ty. By 1994 the New England middle class was back up to 53 percent, as a rising number of families were bumped back out of the upper income class.

When the demographics of families at different income levels are examined closely, what you see is the emergence of two different groups in the middle class. On the upper end are the well-educated families whose job skills mesh well with the changing economy. On the lower end are those who don’t have two wage-earners, who have less education, or who do the kind of work that either doesn’t command high wages or that can be eliminated by new tech­nology.

THE SPLIT-LEVEL SUBURB

Some of the forces that shape the lives of families on Heritage Road and so many places like it can be explained by labor market economists. But there is, of course, more to middle-class life than what kind of pay­checks people are drawing.

As I was driving up and down Heritage Road, I was wondering what an anthropologist, or a poet, would make of a place like this. The homes are as different, in a way, as the families in each of them; the houses are different colors, with different types of shutters and front doors. But when you look carefully you see the same architec­ture from house to house. Each has a driveway leading to a garage that is under the main floor. Each has a set of windows on the garage level and more prominent windows above. These are all split-level houses. You walk up a few steps to get to the front door and, inside, a few more steps take you into the living room. The bedrooms are down the hall, the playroom or den is on the lower floor along with the entrance from the garage.

What symbolic meaning can be read into this split­-level living? One of the things you realize after talking to families in Heritage Heights is that there is a dual reality to this place, as there is to many places that have not been inhabited by residents of prominence and power. It is a good location: It is close to the center of town, and just beyond the backyards of Heritage Road is the Orland Marshall Middle School, the most desir­able sort of buffer zone for young families. But it has not been an ideal location: A couple of miles to the north is the Iron Horse Park and Schaeffer Landfill site, which is on the federal Superfund list of hazardous waste sites. Pushing for the cleanup of that site and another industrial site nearby were the causes that pulled Mary Davenport into community activism. Mary is forthright about revealing that she is one of several in the area who is coping with “a cancer,” as she puts it­ — she has had two major operations due to a brain tumor. She believes the pollution was the cause of health problems she has been fighting for almost 15 years.

Joanne Giovino mentions, as well, three neighbors on her street who have died of cancer. Could Heritage Heights have been affected by the nearby Superfund site? Who is to say? The young families who have moved in tend to look at the problem as one that “has all been cleaned up now.” And Mary Dav­enport herself told her husband she would not want to leave the neighborhood she has fought for, and come to call home. “We cleaned up our town both politi­cally and environmentally,” she says. “I love this community. This is where I want to remain.”

The conservative critique, however, has another dimension. Perhaps, some suggest, middle-class Americans are the victims of their own rising expectations. Houses are bigger, appliances more advanced and more expensive, and more people demand things that used to be luxuries, such as central air condition­ing, or two cars. “Our appetites are growing rapidly,” wrote Karl Zinsmeister in The American Enterprise, which is published by a conservative think tank. “We expect much more than earlier generations did.”

Among the families I met on Heritage Road, I found that, as people look at their parents’ standard of living and compare it to their own, there is a willingness to admit that expectations have a lot to do with it. “The demands are different now than when our par­ents were young,” says Debra Timmins. “It’s unpopu­lar to have money be that tight now. In our parents’ generation I think it was more common.”

Lisa Mader doesn’t consider her family to be living lavishly. They haven’t bought a big-screen TV, making do instead with a 12-inch Sylvania. They use the furni­ture they bought when she and Donald got married. But even with lower wages in the new economy, she says, “I think our generation spends more, too — and uses their charge cards more freely.” When Kathleen Jenkins con­siders her parents, she says, “They still pinch pennies the way they did 30 years ago.” Says William Jenkins, “Our generation is a wasteful generation.”

There is an ambivalence that some middle-class families express about the very importance of a rising standard of living, and in younger families perhaps a resignation. “I think it’s probably always been diffi­cult,” Heritage Road resident Anne Marie O’Neill, 30, told me. “It’s tough to save money and it’s tough to raise a family.” Anne Marie and her husband John, also 30, have a small child and are expecting another. “To us, family values are important. We don’t care about two cars or a huge television set,” she says. “We’re not too concerned with what the Joneses do.” Asked if she expects to achieve a higher standard of living than her parents did, she answers simply, “Probably not.”

A QUESTION OF EXPECTATIONS

Before ending my interviews with Billerica fami­lies, I turned to two especially thoughtful mem­bers of the wider community. Gil Moreira is the deputy town moderator of Billerica’s Town Meeting and Mickey Ouelette is a teacher at Billerica High School. I wanted to know their views on whether “the American Dream” is a dead letter in places like Heritage Heights and in towns like Billerica.

The night I caught up with Mickey Ouelette, he was working what he calls his “third job.” By day he is the high school’s guidance counselor. He also handles dri­ver education for the school. And at least one evening a week he staffs the Century 21 real estate office in Billerica. Ouelette and his wife Carol have three daughters: Moira, 23, Danielle, 21, and Nicole, 16.

Having just paid for Moira’s wedding, and with Danielle at Merrimack College, Ouelette says of his current income, “I’m sure I probably have gained, but it feels like I’ve lost.” He talks about teachers getting raises in the single digits through the ’80s — and some years no raises at all — but he does not count that a major factor in his general satisfaction. “I knew going into my profession I wasn’t in it for the money,” he says.

I asked Ouelette about the high school students he talks to. “The American Dream,” he says, is not in their vocabulary. “They don’t see the opportunities,” he says. “Maybe we did get hung up on that term in the ’50s, the American Dream, and seeing all that we could do. The kids today don’t have that sense. There’s so much distraction.”

When he looks at his daughters’ economic prospects he wonders if they will see upward mobility. “I don’t think they ever will. I’ll tell you why: I think we’re mov­ing toward a service-oriented economy. Working for other people, you’re not going to do it now.”

“I see so many young kids opting for jobs that are not as well paid as when I got out of school,” he says. He tries to emphasize the importance of education and training to high school students. “Sometimes it takes some of these kids one or two years working at a Burger King. Then they come back,” he says, with more interest in continuing their education.

Gil Moreira could be seen as one of the winners in the new economy. He lives in one of Billerica’s “newer older subdivisions” and considers himself to be in the upper middle class, which he defines as in the $70,000 to $100,000 a year range (he says he is “on the lower end” of that range). He has a masters degree in business administration from Suffolk University and works as vice-president of finance and operations for The Kraematon Group, a consulting company in Wellesley.

Moreira’s parents, who were Portuguese immi­grants, moved from Somerville to Billerica in 1964, when Gil was in high school. In the 1970s Gil and his wife Susan moved to Billerica, where they have raised twin sons, Doug and Greg, 22, and a daughter, Cynthia, 15. Moreira tends to see the trends in the Massachusetts economy in terms of how they’ve affected his neighborhood. In the 1970s, he says, “we all grew socially and financially together.” In recent years, “our aspirations hit a plateau.” Job security be­came a bigger concern. And with his sons in college and other expenses going up, “It seems like all the advances we made in the ’70s and ’80s are being eaten up,” he says. He is not where he expected to be, eco­nomically speaking, as he approaches his fifties.

Moreira says he’s seen the same discontent among his neighbors: “They’re saying, ‘I’m not making as much as I thought I’d be making, or that I planned on making.'” It’s not that he or his neighbors have a problem affording the necessities, he admits, “It’s more a sense of frustration.”

Moreira traces his own uneasiness to the rocky times he endured in the ’80s: The Waltham-based company Gil worked for was bought by another com­pany. Moreira and a group of other managers tried to make a go of it on their own, buying a division. But when Digital Equipment later decided to move into the same field, they lost the battle of market share.

Moreira has seen the new economy and doesn’t much like it. “During the ’70s and early ’80s,” he says, “there was a contract almost, between business and employees: ‘You take care of me, I take care of you. You give me loyalty, I’ll give you a reasonable salary.”‘

Working for a small company that is struggling to get by is one thing, he says. “But when you have com­panies that are profitable but not as profitable as they’d like to be, or not as profitable as their share­holders would like it to be … or the company decides it’s too expensive to produce in Taunton and moves to Taiwan … That’s when you begin to chip away at that contract. That’s when people begin to feel frustration.”

“Everybody has their own American Dream,” Moreira says. “Mine might be different from my neighbor’s across the street.” But in either case, “We don’t have it. Neither one of us has hit it.”

I pressed Moreira on whether conservatives might be right in saying middle-class Americans are enjoying a high standard of living when you take into account the range of consumer goods and conveniences that are a part of modern living. To Moreira that was all beside the point. When there is a diminished sense of opportunity in the economy, he says, the disappoint­ment has little to do with consumer goods. “I had expectations,” he says. “I didn’t get there. That’s what people who say it’s not that bad don’t understand.” Gil Moreira had a way of putting it that seemed perfectly in step with the economic times: “You downscale your hopes and dreams.”

That’s a phrase that stuck with me as I left Billerica. I thought back, too, to what Kathleen Jenkins had said: “That’s really a luxury to be able to stay home with your children.” Are our dreams becoming smaller? Is the chance for a parent to stay home with a child now considered a luxury? Somewhere in the territory between those two comments are important clues to what we are becoming –as telling in their own way as the economic statistics they confirm.

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