Stephanie, 6, shows her mom, Gloria Martin, the quarter she got when locking the grocery cart at PriceRite in Warwick. Paul Martin is at left.

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The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

CRANSTON

Gloria Martin stands over a hot frying pan, checking her watch as her 6-year-old daughter scours the refrigerator for snacks.

The voice of her other daughter floats in from the living room.

Is dinner ready, Mom?

Extra

Your turn: The Martin family has cut back on groceries and elsewhere to accommodate the rising cost of gasoline. How are you getting by?

--- Audio slideshow: The Martin family has cut its spending substantially

More of our special report on the high cost of gasoline . . .

In her old life, she’d avoid these rushed dinners, squeezed between work and sports activities, by eating out. But that’s an indulgence her middle-class family can no longer afford.

Now, Gloria fills her Whole Foods tote with produce from the cut-rate grocer PriceRite. She and her husband, Paul, canceled their family health club membership and instead work out with weights in their living room.

The Martins’ house no longer has digital cable TV or digital video recorder service. There is no more house cleaner. No more weekend trips to Maine. And no more shopping therapy.

“It’s very hard to go cold turkey,” says Gloria Martin. “It’s like getting off drugs!”

The Martins limit eating out with their three children to just once a month. If their 15-year-old son, Kevin, gets an urge for a McDonald’s double cheeseburger with fries, he has to pay for it — plus a $1 gas surcharge if his parents are driving. Their 13-year-old daughter, Julie, stashes babysitting money in a sealed cardboard box to help pay for cheerleading at the Rhode Island Cheer Academy.

The Martins have moved their older children from parochial to public schools, and next fall Stephanie, 6, will also make the switch.

All of this has shaved hundreds of dollars each month off their household budget.

And still, they worry.

If their estimates are correct (and they should be, since they’re both accountants), this year their household income may hit $65,000 — about half of the roughly $130,000 they earned in 2004. Their six-figure income plummeted along with their real estate business when the housing market went bust.

By most measures, the Martins are considered middle class, which economists loosely define as families whose income falls within $20,000 to $30,000 of the state median income. Rhode Island’s median household income in 2006 was $64,733, according to the latest available census data. For a family of five, such as the Martins, the median income was $78,592.

Nearly a decade of rising house prices, which allowed homeowners to borrow against the value of their property to finance everything from house repairs and college tuitions to paying down credit cards, has come to a crashing halt.

Now, with gasoline averaging $3.60 per gallon and the price of a gallon of milk at some supermarkets over $4, the Martins, like other middle-class Americans, are being forced to revamp their lifestyle to fit a new reality.

“They can’t take money out of their homes. The job market is softening. And the wages of most American workers actually fell during the last six months” after adjusting for inflation, said Jared Bernstein, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington and author of a new book, Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? “And there are a lot of people who pretty wisely would rather not get in any more debt.”

In February, when Gloria had stopped selling real estate and still couldn’t find a full-time accounting job, she and Paul started to talk about selling their house.

“I feel like I’m being punished,” she said then, “and I don’t know why.”

The only child of an immigrant from the Azores, Gloria says her mother worked second shift at a rubber factory for 27 years and paid off the mortgage on her two-bedroom ranch in Edgewood in just two years. Gloria can still hear her mother’s scolding words.

Why the big mortgage? Why the new cars? Why, why, why.

FOR SALE signs dot the lawns of their middle-class neighborhood in Cranston’s Eden Park.

Not long ago, those signs would have made Gloria smile. A 1993 graduate of Bryant University, she worked for three years at an accounting job, earning less than $30,000. Not satisfied with the money and looking for a new challenge, she got her real estate license in 1998. Her timing was perfect. After six straight years of falling prices, the market was on the rebound.

Each year, she sold more houses and their income went up. They put a new roof on their house, renovated the upstairs bathroom, installed central air conditioning on the second floor and bought a Chrysler Town & Country minivan. In their backyard, they installed an above ground pool and surrounded it with a high wooden fence.

They enrolled their children in parochial schools. And they started a college savings plan, contributing about $200 each month.

Gloria still shopped for her clothes on the sales racks at JCPenney and Macy’s. But for her 33rd birthday, she decided to splurge. She bought a 1998 Chevy Camero convertible. It had 12,000 miles on it. She paid $3,000 cash.

A month and a half later, she learned she was pregnant with their third child. Her belly swelled until she couldn’t fit behind the wheel of her sporty car.

“It was God telling me you’re getting too big for your britches!” she says, laughing.

In late 2003, sales were so good that Gloria left a Warwick real estate firm and launched her own “Help U Sell” business. Within a year, her husband, Paul, quit his accounting job to join her.

Gloria and Paul were working 50- and 60-hour weeks. She’d call from the office and tell Paul to meet her at a restaurant with the children. They got into the habit of eating out three days a week.

They hired a neighbor’s child to cut the lawn and Merry Maids to clean the bathrooms and kitchen. They racked up credit card balances, and then rolled those debts into their mortgage.

The monthly payments on their four-bedroom Dutch Colonial, which they bought in 1995 for $114,000, had climbed from $740 to $1,700.

Soon after Labor Day in 2005, the phones at Help U Sell Martin Realty stopped ringing. After nearly 12 years of rising house prices, the market would soon begin its descent.

THESE DAYS, Paul, 40, is back to working full-time as an accountant. Gloria, who turns 40 next week, has been unable to find a full-time accounting job. So she works two part-time jobs, which bring in about $1,000 a month, and is taking classes in education. She wants to teach high school math.

The Martins now eat out as a family just once a month. She and Paul also go out once a month for a budget dinner, at an Olive Garden restaurant, with gift cards they’ve earned from redeeming points on their credit card. Paul brings along his computer printout of their household finances, which they review over dessert.

Gloria has her own rule to limit her use of credit cards. “If you can eat it or you can wear it,” she says, “you cannot charge it.”

Her ideas about what it means to be a middle-class professional have changed, too. For years, her mother has been going to PriceRite, where shoppers stick a quarter into a slot to release a locked cart and plastic bags cost 10 cents each (plus tax). But Gloria never shopped there. Now, her children hunt for stray shopping carts so they can get the extra quarters.

Stephanie gets invited to birthday parties with her school friends at places such as Monster Mini Golf and Let’s Party! The cost of hosting those parties can easily run to $150 to $300, which is more than the Martins can afford. This year, Stephanie’s 6th birthday party was at home, with Pin the Tail on the Donkey and a home-baked birthday cake.

Gloria says she felt “almost embarrassed” about her daughter’s party being “so homemade,” but the kids had a blast.

GLORIA WAS cooking a hurried dinner for her family recently so they could attend Kevin’s induction into the Spanish Honor Society at Cranston East. They’ve decided not to sell the house after all. Prices have fallen so low, she says, it wouldn’t be worth it.

As she floured chicken cutlets, she ticked off the cost: Perdue Fit & Easy boneless chicken from Shaw’s, $5.69 per pound; a bottle of PriceRite cooking wine, $1.89; a can of chicken broth, 79 cents; a bottle of lemon juice, $1.89.

A lacquered wood painting of The Last Supper gleams on the wall above the kitchen table. It was a housewarming gift from Gloria’s mother.

Maria Ines Paiva came to America in 1965. She lives in the same two-bedroom ranch in Edgewood that she bought in 1972 for $17,000. It’s the house where Gloria grew up with her mother and disabled father.

Now, her mother lives on a small pension and Social Security but manages to have money left over for her savings account. She watches food prices go up and hears what Gloria’s family is going through and she worries.

“My mother actually made a comment that if things were like this back then,” says Gloria, “she probably wouldn’t have even wanted to come to America.”

The chicken cutlets are almost ready when Stephanie declares that she wants mac and cheese.

“You should try it,” says her mom.

“I don’t want it.”

Her mom holds up a plate with the cutlet laid on a bed of rice to show her daughter.

“See,” she says, cheerfully, “it looks like it came from a restaurant!”

larditi@projo.com