At Risk

by Alice Hoffman

  “Keep your head down so you won’t get dizzy,” Linda Gleason says.

  Linda runs water in another basin and dampens some paper towels, which she hands to Polly. Polly wipes her face. She has soiled her blouse, and as she tries to clean it off with the paper towels her hands shake.

  “Damn it,” Polly says.

  Linda Gleason takes out a cigarette and lights it. “This is against the rules,” she tells Polly. “Don’t tell anyone the principal has three cigarettes a day.”

  Polly sits down on the rim of the basin, not caring if her skirt gets wet.

  “They’re afraid,” Linda Gleason says. “They’ll do anything to protect their children. How would you feel if your healthy child sat next to someone with AIDS in class? You’d worry that the scientists were wrong, that they’d discover the virus was much more communicable than they’d thought.”

  “I’d have pity on that sick child!” Polly says. “I wouldn’t be afraid of a little girl!”

  “You’d think about the possibilities of infection, no matter how irrational. Look, it’s your child, your healthy child sitting there. You’d have to be an angel and not a mother if you didn’t worry. And that’s how many of the parents will feel.”

  Polly and Linda Gleason look at each other.

  “Whose side are you on?” Polly asks.

  “I’m on the side of my students,” Linda Gleason says.

  “I see,” Polly says.

  “And Amanda’s one of my students.”

  Polly wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “What are you, an angel or a principal?”

  “Both,” Linda Gleason says.

  “She’s staying,” Polly says. “I don’t care if she’s the only student in the school, she’s staying. I’m not going to take that away from her, too.”

  Linda Gleason finishes her cigarette, then runs it under the water and tosses the butt in the wastebasket. They go out of the girls’ room together, and as they walk back to the administration office they pass a first-grade art board that the teacher has already decorated with pumpkins and falling leaves. Don’t let it ever be October, Polly thinks to herself. Go backward, through August, July, June, May, and April. We don’t care if we ever see autumn again.

  By the time Linda Gleason gets home it is almost midnight. Her children, a ten-year-old named Kristy and seven-year-old Sam, have long been asleep. Her husband, Martin, is watching The Tonight Show in bed, trying to force himself to wait up for her.

  Linda stops in the kitchen, though she can hear the hum of the TV and knows Martin’s awake. Peepers, their cat, rubs against her legs when she opens the refrigerator. She finds a beer, gets out a container of chopped chicken liver, then some crackers from the bread box, and throws it all onto a tray, which she carries into the bedroom.

  “Hi,” Martin says groggily. He sits up in bed and surveys the collection of food. “Are you pregnant?” he asks.

  “Don’t talk to me,” Linda says. She sits on the edge of the bed and tears open the package of crackers.

  Martin slides over next to her. “That bad?”

  Linda rolls her eyes and realizes she’s forgotten a knife. She scoops out some chopped liver with her finger and smears it on a cracker. Then she is revolted. It’s not that she’s hungry, she’s sick to her stomach.

  “Which kid is it?” Martin says.

  “Amanda Farrell,” Linda tells him. “She’s going into sixth grade. Top gymnast.”

  Martin doesn’t remember hearing Linda talk about this student before; she usually brings home stories about the ones in trouble.

  “The school board’s going to raise hell,” Linda says. “I’ve got calls in to principals in Connecticut and New Jersey who’ve gone through this.”

  “You’ll do the right thing,” Martin says.

  Linda is filled with love for him; he has such faith not only in her but in goodness. She gets up and puts the tray of food on top of the dresser. If the cat does not get to it, it will still be there for her to put away in the morning.

  “What if there is no right thing to do?” she asks when she gets into bed beside him.

  “You’ll invent it,” Martin assures her.

  In the morning, when Linda goes to get the tray on her dresser, she also turns on the radio. That’s how she finds out that several protesters, calling themselves the Community Action Coalition, have begun to distribute fliers warning parents of the consequences of having an AIDS patient in a public elementary school. Linda listens to the words the announcer is saying, but she’s thinking that something must have gone wrong with her hearing; this happens in Florida, it happens far out in the middle of the country where people frighten more easily than they do in Morrow. Linda has always thought of herself as a peacemaker; she’s walked a fine line as principal and she’s done her best to make everyone happy. That will soon be impossible. Whatever decisions she makes from now on will make someone miserable, although who, Linda Gleason wonders. could possibly be more miserable than Amanda’s parents when they switch on the news and discover what’s out there?

  Ivan reacts to the protesters the best way he knows how. He throws out the newspaper and unplugs the radio.

  “Don’t think about it,” he tells Polly. “Don’t respond to it at all.”

  It’s Saturday, and Ivan plans to take them all out to breakfast. They always go to a coffee shop called The Station, which has great home fries and blueberry pancakes, but now Ivan says he wants to try a diner he’s heard about in Gloucester, famous for its French toast. He would never admit to Polly or anyone else that he just has to get out of Morrow, at least for an hour. In Gloucester no one will know them; they’ll be just one more family ordering breakfast, asking for refills of coffee and an extra order of rye toast.

  Polly gets dressed, she even puts on some blush, but once the kids are out in the car she tells Ivan she has a headache. She can’t go.

  “Don’t stay here alone,” Ivan says at the door.

  “I’ll be fine,” Polly tells him. “I’ll do the laundry.”

  “Polly, come with us,” Ivan says. He’s begging her for something, and she doesn’t have anything to give him.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Polly says. “Will you just go!”

  He lets the screen door slam. Polly waits until she’s certain he won’t come back; then she goes around to every window and pulls down the shades or draws the curtains. She can’t stop thinking about wasted time. She wants to scoop up all the hours teenage suicides give up and claim them for Amanda. The telephone rings, and Polly lets it go on ringing. It is probably that horrible group who want to keep Amanda out of school, or her father, who’s been driving her insane. Al wants to come up with Claire for a weekend, a couple of days, maybe a few weeks. While Polly is dragging Amanda to the hospital for blood tests, Al will shoot a few baskets with Charlie; Claire will cook a stew. It’s the last thing in the world Polly wants. She’s always on guard when her parents visit—if she weren’t she might tell them what she thought of them—and she doesn’t have the energy to keep up her guard. If Claire and Al came up to stay, the children would know how bad things really are, and Polly will do just about anything to make their lives appear normal. She plans each meal for high nutritional value, carefully gauging how much Amanda eats of her lamb chop, her broccoli, her butterscotch pudding. She tells the children their rooms are a mess, when she no longer cares at all, and insists they pick up after themselves. She reminds Charlie to take out the garbage, and she always stacks the supper dishes so Amanda can load the dishwasher. But all the time she’s following their daily routine, what she’d like to do is hide both of her children and build a wall of cinderblocks around them so nothing can harm them.

  The phone continues to ring, and Polly looks at it, imagining that it might explode. There’s no one she wants to speak to, but the ringing drives her mad. What if it’s Ed Reardon? What if he’s discovered that Amanda’s blood sample was mismarked at the lab and it’s someone else’s child who ha
s tested positive? Polly picks up the phone and knows in an instant that she’s made a mistake.

  Her father.

  “We want to come up for a visit this week,” Al says.

  He acts as though they haven’t been through this a dozen times before.

  “Daddy,” Polly says tiredly.

  “Your mother can pack a suitcase, including wrapping everything in tissue paper, in ten minutes flat.”

  This is no idle threat, Polly has seen her mother do it.

  “Absolutely not,” Polly says.

  “Next weekend,” Al says. “We’ll drive up Friday night.”

  “I’m going to hang up on you,” Polly tells him.

  “What have you got against us?” Al says. “What did we do to you that was so terrible?”

  “Nothing,” Polly says. “Look, I don’t want Mom to be upset.”

  It’s nowhere near the truth and Al knows it; he laughs in a peculiar, dark way. Ever since her mother took him back, Polly has not trusted Claire to be anything but weak. That’s exactly what they don’t need now, a weak old woman crying in their kitchen.

  “She’s our granddaughter,” Al says. “You can’t stop us from helping.”

  “You do what you like,” Polly says tightly. “You always have.”

  After she hangs up on her father, Polly starts to cry. When she was a child she didn’t believe in bad luck. She thought her childhood was rotten because her parents didn’t love her, and she couldn’t wait to get out of their clutches. She was all wrong about luck, she sees that now, and it’s frightening to think what else she may have been wrong about. When her parents come to visit she knows Claire will dust the night table in the guest room and then she’ll set out the framed family photographs she always carries in her suitcase. There’ll be a green garbage bag filled with the tissue paper she’s used to pack Al’s sweaters and shoes. The children will be delighted to see their grandparents, they always are. Polly cannot believe that Al and Claire lavished one-tenth of the attention on her that they give to Amanda and Charlie, but then quite suddenly, she thinks about the velvet cloche Claire made for her. Every stitch was done by hand, small stitches no one would ever see. It took a long time to make something so perfect, longer than Polly would ever have imagined.

  That night, after the children are in bed, Ivan spreads his work out on the coffee table and starts to go over his lecture. He can hear Polly cleaning up in the kitchen; he can hear the tap water running and the occasional clinking of dishes against each other. Ivan leans back against the couch and lets his arms go limp. There’s no point in going over his work; all he can think about is blood and bones and antibodies. He’s not going to Florida, and he’ll never deliver his paper. He goes into the kitchen to tell Polly, but when he gets to the doorway he sees that she’s not really rinsing off the dishes, she’s just standing there, letting the water run so he’ll think she’s cleaning up. So he’ll leave her alone. That’s what she wants.

  Ivan goes back through the living room; he grabs his jacket and his car keys and keeps on going, through the front door, which they never use. When he starts the Karmann-Ghia, smoke pours out of the exhaust pipe and the engine rumbles. Just above the sink, where Polly is standing, there is a window. She can see Ivan warming up the car; she could stop him if she wanted to, at least ask him where he’s going to. But she doesn’t, she doesn’t even try.

  Ivan drives out to Red Slipper Beach. Two small deer run in front of his car, and he has to brake suddenly.

  He parks at the observatory alongside an old beat-up Mustang, and he rolls down his window so he can listen to the ocean. It’s low tide and the odor of seaweed is strong. Ivan doesn’t know if he’s been avoiding his colleagues or if they’ve been avoiding him, but he feels as if he hasn’t talked to another human being for weeks, other than the perfunctory conversations he’s had with Polly, meaningless talk about the new clothes she’s bought for the kids or the cost of the new shocks for the Blazer. He can see one of the graduate students, a kid named Sandy, locking up the observatory. Sandy waves at Ivan as he gets into his car and Ivan waves back. He waits for the kid to leave and then he gets out of his car and walks to the observatory. In his wallet, shoved between two twenty dollar bills, is a phone number he’s been carrying around for days. Max Lyman at the institute gave him the number. Max’s cousin is a social worker who helps staff an AIDS hotline in Boston, sponsored by a gay organization Ivan’s never heard of.

  Everyone who enters the observatory is supposed to sign in, but tonight Ivan doesn’t bother. He’s not here to look at stars. He goes into the office, switches on a desk lamp, and sits down in an old leather chair he’s sat in a thousand times before. The phone receiver is cold when he picks it up, as cold as a telescope feels against the corners of your eye. When a human voice answers his call, Ivan’s throat is so tight that what comes out doesn’t sound like any recognizable language. But the voice on the other end of the line keeps talking, telling Ivan it’s all right, he doesn’t have to say anything right away, he can just go on crying. The voice belongs to a man named Brian, who staffs the phone two nights a week. The odd thing is, he doesn’t even sound like a stranger, and maybe that’s why it gets easier and easier for Ivan to call him, so that by the following week Ivan doesn’t have to look for the paper with the hotline number.

  He knows it by heart.

  SEVEN

  AMANDA AND JESSIE ALWAYS sit next to each other in class. They have been best friends for three years, and they can slip notes to each other so fast a teacher would have to have X-ray vision to catch them. On the morning of the first day of school, Jessie is already waiting when Polly drives up in front of the school. Amanda and Jessie have carefully planned their outfits; they’re wearing matching polka dot dresses identical in all ways, except that Amanda’s dress has been painstakingly ironed by her Grandma Claire, up for a visit over the long Labor Day weekend.

  It was not quite the disaster that Polly imagined, even though Claire, who has never believed that dishwashers do as good a job as she can, managed to wash the dishes by hand every time Polly turned her back and Al has sworn to return and fix the broken porch step. Al played endless rounds of Monopoly with Charlie and lost every game, and on Sunday he drove Amanda and Jessie to the theater at the mall and took them to see a movie their parents had forbidden them to see. On Monday evening, when her parents were getting ready to leave, Polly felt that she was being abandoned. She insisted that her parents stay for dinner, even though this meant they would hit the worst of the Labor Day traffic returning to New York. It is terrible to admit, or even to think about, but she’s afraid to be alone with Ivan.

  Every day he seems like more of a stranger. He disappears at odd hours, he’s been avoiding going to the institute, and he has started Amanda on a strict regimen of large doses of folic acid and vitamin C. Once, while Polly was searching in his backpack for a pen, she found a folder filled with articles about alternative therapies for AIDS patients. Startled, she dropped the folder on the floor. This is not at all like Ivan, who has always put his faith in science, in medicine, in tested and proven remedies. Amanda complains about the vitamins, she says they make her gag, but Ivan insists; he gives her glasses of Gatorade and Hawaiian Punch to wash down the capsules. When Polly suggested they talk with Ed about the vitamins and the high-fiber diet Ivan’s demanded they all go on, Ivan refused. What can he offer us, Ivan asked her. Nothing.

  So far, five children have been registered at private schools, pulled out of Cheshire before the first day of classes. Although Linda Gleason phones Polly each time there’s a parents’ or teachers’ meeting, Polly doesn’t bother going to them; she can’t waste the time better spent at home, with Amanda. She pities Linda Gleason, who has to try to keep everything under control, but she pities the principal from a distance; it’s not unlike watching a puppet show.

  From where she’s parked, in front of the school, Polly can see two people on the sidewalk, each handing out pamphlets to paren
ts. One of them, a woman in a blue cotton dress, looks familiar; Polly thinks her child may have been in nursery school with Charlie. Polly is not about to let Amanda go in there alone, but as soon as Polly starts to get out of the car, Amanda has a fit.

  “You can’t walk in there with me,” Amanda insists.

  “Is there a rule against it?” Polly says. “I see parents out there.”

  Charlie grabs his backpack and looseleaf and takes this opportunity to escape.

  “See you,” he shouts, and as he gets out Amanda shoots him a dirty look.

  “I’ll just walk you to the door,” Polly says. It is bad enough to be separated from Amanda for an entire day. Impossible to let her walk past these people leafleting against her.

  “Mother!” Amanda says. “I’m in sixth grade!”

  Amanda’s braids are so tight Polly can see her clean scalp. The back of her neck is soft and pale. Out on the sidewalk, Jessie is waiting, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

  “I’ll pick you up at three,” Polly says.

  “Four,” Amanda says.

  “Four?” Polly says.

  “It’s the first day of practice,” Amanda explains. “I don’t want you to make a big deal out of it.”

  Amanda leans over and kisses her good-bye, but Polly can feel her bursting to get out of the car. Amanda opens the door and runs to Jessie. When the girls reach each other, they cling together and squeal.

  “My mother wanted to walk me into school,” Amanda confides. She looks back and waves at Polly. Polly waves back, then forces herself to drive on.

  “Oh, God,” Jessie says with real feeling.

  “I don’t look sick, do I?” Amanda says.