At-Risk

by Amina Gautier

  “I’m going to go with you,” she said, surprising me.

  We took the three train downtown on a Sunday afternoon. Once inside A&S my mother passed by the Juniors section and took me straight to the dresses in Misses.

  She scrutinized rack upon rack of formal gowns. All the dresses were meant for evening wear and looked expensive and uncomfortable. My mother didn’t let me select any dresses, nor did she ask my preference on my choice for style, color, or length. She made her decisions silently, rubbing her thumb across one dress’s material only to frown and hang it back up. She pulled dresses off their racks and held them up against the side of my body—long dresses with satin tops and velvet skirts, sequined dresses with spaghetti straps, dresses that were concoctions of lace, dresses that came with gloves, dresses with the back exposed—dresses that all seemed way too formal for an afternoon tea.

  “Here, try these on,” she said, pushing me into the fitting room, after narrowing her choices down to three.

  I came out in them one by one, with an ever-growing sinking feeling. Not only were the dresses way too formal for my event, but also they were hard to get into and each dress cost between sixty and one hundred dollars.

  “Well? What do you think?” my mother finally asked, once her choices were back on their hangers and lying across her arm. I didn’t know how to tell her I thought she was making a mistake and that I needed a simpler dress.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Which do you like the best?”

  None, I thought.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “They all seem, well, kind of dressy,” I said.

  “Of course,” my mother said.

  “Just to drink tea?”

  “It’s much more than just tea, Dorothy,” my mother said. “It’s not like what we do at home.”

  “They cost a lot,” I said.

  “You get what you pay for and quality costs money,” my mother said, choosing one for me when I still couldn’t pick. The winner was a cream-colored dress with a satin bodice and lacy skirt that ended in long points. Once we got to the register and my mother paid, she said, “Anyway, you’re worth it. This is your chance to make an impression on them.”

  For just such a chance my mother had been waiting, each year growing more and more frustrated and disappointed in me as I let golden opportunities to advance myself pass me by. I coveted no plum roles in school plays, won no medals at the annual field day competition in Betsy Head Park, and could not sing well enough ever to get a solo. I made good grades, but there were other students who scored higher. In short, I was adequate, and she had been despairing I would forever stay that way.

  The rest of our Saturday meetings at the school were devoted to preparations for the tea. The Zeta Alpha Deltas were using the tea as a chance to teach us how to put on a social program, and so we spent our three hours learning about hall rentals, going over seating charts, ordering flowers, debating band choices and menu selections. They wanted us involved in every aspect of the planning. The day of the tea, we were supposed to show up two hours early in our work clothes to set up the room. As the tea drew nearer, it was all the other girls could talk about, and images of my own father haunted me.

  Neither my mother nor I had yet to mention what I could do since I didn’t have a father to escort me. When I finally reminded her, she said, “We have more than enough family. I’ll find you a father. No worries.”

  I didn’t want a substitute father. I wanted my own. Or at least enough information about him so that I could re-create him and pretend, but my mother lived in a private world of memories she did not share.

  I know he must have been handsome for my mother to love him. Handsome and big with very black skin. This is as much as my mother has told me, but not as much as I know. I pieced together images of him from what I knew of her. She wouldn’t have liked him at first. It wasn’t her way. She must have met him and loved him against her will. She wanted to love a safe man, preferably an older one that didn’t have many demands. She wanted to bear children, cook meals, keep house, and be left in peace. She wanted something simpler than what she’d grown up with. She didn’t want servants around her or a house that took more than two people to clean it. She wanted comfort, but not luxury. My father must not have been any of these things. She couldn’t know that I often wondered about him. I didn’t even know if he still lived in Jamaica. It seemed most likely that he never knew about me. My mother left her family’s country home for America when she was two months pregnant with me. I never understood why she left him, but I guessed it was because he had the power to make her change her mind.

  Still, she must have suspected that something like me could come about. Used to being protected and cosseted her whole life, she must have thought herself immune and panicked upon realizing that her body was just as human as every other woman’s. I used to fantasize that my father had been one of the servants in my grandparents’ house. I imagined feverish and clandestine meetings between my mother and him in closets and bathrooms. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized it would have been impossible for her to love him had she met him in her home. For the most part, my mother was a proper girl. Raised in a house with servants her whole life, she would have no more noticed one than she would the wallpaper, let alone run off with one or let one drive her out of her country. Unlike here in the States, where we were all lumped together regardless of status, there class made a world of difference. Kinsmen or not, in those days, he would have been beneath her.

  My mother didn’t say anything else about the tea. Whenever I asked her if she’d found someone, she told me not to worry.

  The night before the tea, she came home from work excited. “I finally found a father for you!” she said.

  “Who?” I asked between mouthfuls. I had microwaved the previous night’s escovitch fish and started eating dinner without her.

  “Leon!”

  I almost choked. There was my mother, standing before me, telling me that she’d gotten the laundry man to pretend to be my father, looking at me like I should be happy. She said he would meet me there. I could see it now. The other girls would laugh me right out of our rented hall.

  “Leon?” I asked. I had been secretly hoping that she wouldn’t find anyone and I wouldn’t have to go. I hated taking pictures and being looked at. “What happened to all of our family?”

  Everyone was busy that day, she said, or else too young or too old to pass for my father.

  “He’s not even related to us,” I said. “We don’t even look alike.”

  “You don’t resemble your father anyway, except for the height. You look most like me.”

  I wondered if Leon had a real suit, or if he would just throw a blazer over his outdated jeans. Years ago, it had been the style to have artwork spray-painted and graffitied on the front and back pants legs of jeans. The fad had come and gone but Leon still wore his. Every other day, he wore a pair of stone-washed blue jeans with Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck spray-painted onto the legs. He would embarrass me with his tight jeans and his gold teeth. “But people will see. Everybody will see us!”

  “And so?” my mother said. “Leon’s a hard-working man and he’s always been good to us.” Her focus on class had gradually eroded but I wasn’t as accepting as my mother. Leon was nice enough, but I didn’t want anyone to believe he was my father. Not Leon with his outdated jeans and his camel suede shoes and his loud patchwork shirts in multicolors. He was everything I was trying not to be.

  “But Mommy, he’s so—”

  She made a sucking sound with her teeth to silence me. “Hush. What’s done is done. I already invited him and he said yes. I can’t take it back now. Besides, it’s only for the one day, Dorothy.”

  My mother waited silently for me to nod or do anything to show that I agreed, but I remained still. We had never had an argument before. I had never talked back, disobeyed, or sassed her before. Neither of us knew what to do now.

  By an uns
poken agreement, we didn’t yell. Instead, we retreated into separate corners of the kitchen, fighting with brooding silence. In the silence between us, my mother began to make our tea, lashing me with her careful, studied indifference. She had no words for me. My mother’s anger hung in the air. In the clang of stainless steel against aluminum as she fitted the opened neck of the kettle to the faucet as if choking it. In the kettle she filled and banged down on the burner. In the three clicks it took before the gas came on. In the hiss of the tiny beads of water at the spout as they evaporated into the heat of the flames.

  When the water was ready, I fought back with my own sounds. The accidental slam of the cabinet door after I’d pulled down my cup. The dull clanging of my silver spoon hitting the ceramic bottom of the cup as I stirred too hard. The spill of sugar into my cup as I made my tea just the way I liked it—too too sweet—and dared her to say something.

  The day of the tea, I showered, dressed in street clothes, and wrapped a scarf around my head to keep my hairstyle in place. I took my new dress and put it into a bag, along with my shoes and stockings, and headed out the door.

  I passed the Laundromat when I turned the corner. Leon was open early this Saturday. He was bent over in the doorway, sweeping dust from the welcome mat. On either side of him, by the door, there were barrels and barrels waiting to be sold and shipped. I wished, for the moment, that I could climb into one and hide, that someone would seal me up and send me far away, that the ceremony could go on without me.

  I walked quickly by before he could see me and caught the three train at Saratoga. I didn’t switch to the four at Utica like I should have. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, but I got off at Grand Army Plaza, a stop that wasn’t mine. I don’t remember doing it on purpose, but I found myself far from where I was supposed to be.

  There was a small Caribbean store on the corner by the train station. I went in and ordered a beef patty and a cola champagne and took it to one of the three small tables in the back. It was early still yet and not many people were in the store. No one bothered me as I sat in the back and ate the flaky yellow patty and tried to make myself disappear.

  I never showed up for the tea.

  Later, I would regret this act of rebellion. On college campuses, I would see sorority women like the ones who tried to mentor me. I would go to their step shows and social programs, watching them hungrily as they all dressed alike and wore the same colors and melded into each other, distinguished only by their hair styles. I would see them pass each other on campus and call out special greetings, see them cluster together in lines in the cafeteria, see them never being alone. And I would think of how I missed my chance to know their secret ways, how I had closed myself out. I would watch them as if through a window of thick glass and I would want to break through and get in. But for now, I was satisfied to thwart their attempts to mold me into someone else.

  I sat in my corner of the shop and I imagined the other girls in their finery being led into the banquet hall on the arms of their tall and strong fathers or grandfathers and thought of how I had no one. I blamed my father, whom I had never met. I didn’t blame him for leaving us because he hadn’t known about me. I blamed him for loving my mother in the first place, for loving her so much and so hard that she felt compelled to flee him across an ocean. I blamed him for forcing us to be alone, for leaving my mother emotionally paralyzed, scared to meet another man because she might find that same intensity again, the kind that could take her away from herself, and scared to meet another man because she might not. Had it not been for that, I could have had another father. There were plenty of men willing enough. They flocked to my mother wherever we went. They watched her as she carried bags, knowing she would not allow them to help. I watched them eye her when we rode the subways and buses, and whenever we went to visit relatives, there was always a new man, a friend of so-and-so’s waiting hopefully to be introduced. But she would not entertain any man’s company. And I was left with Leon.

  I killed the hours in the back of that tiny shop. The woman at the counter didn’t bother me. After I finished my patty I bought a bun and cheese and played with it. I wasn’t ready to go home just yet, but eventually I would have to face her. I didn’t know if my mother was still at the rented hall, out somewhere looking for me, or already home and waiting. I had no idea what would happen between us when I finally made it back.

  But on any other day, I knew how it would be when I got home. After a day of family duties that it would never occur to her not to perform, my mother would go through the house and head for her bedroom. There she’d undress in front of the mirror, revealing herself slowly.

  A tissue from a box of Kleenex would take away her outside smile, leaving her house lips in its place. She’d pick up the brush off her dresser and pull it through her hair, not one hundred times, but just enough to quell the itch in her scalp and to direct the thick, unbending hair into order. My mother would shrink in front of the mirror as her shoes came off. She wouldn’t bother to get her slippers. The rest of the afternoon and evening would see her barefoot. Small curling toes with fading paint would guide her to the kitchen, where she’d fill our kettle with water and would light a flame under it. All this would be done without sound. She would have had enough in the street and in the living rooms of all the relatives she had visited. She would leave the kettle to its own devices and settle on the couch in the living room. There she’d sink into the couch as if dissolving, feeling at this moment that she could leave the world and never look back. Then my mother would think of me. First she would wonder what I was up to and hope I was minding myself. She would wonder if I was behaving well. Maybe, for one moment, she’d think of my father and wish she hadn’t left him. She’d get up and walk to the kitchen to turn off the kettle. And that’s where she’d be when I returned. When she heard me enter, she’d call out and ask me how my day went, and I would tell her fine.

  pan is dead

  Blue sent letters, begging letters, meant to soften a small space in our mother’s heart. The letters were frequent, relentless, more punctual than bills. They slipped in with the gas and electric bills, the phone bill and the rent reminder, long number-ten envelopes mixed in with the short fat ones the credit card people sent. For months, Blue’s letters came from a rehab center in upstate New York, all addressed to our mother. Then one came from Brooklyn addressed to my brother, Peter. Blue thought he was being slick, but our mother knew what he was doing.

  “I’m supposed to believe that all of a sudden he wants to see his son? What about all those years before? He must think I’m all kinds of a fool,” our mother said, finally deciding to read the last of the letters. She would have us know that she was not all kinds of a fool. She was no longer a foolish young girl willing to let Blue lead her by the nose. “I was a fool for him once and look what it got me,” she said, looking at Peter.

  A few days after opening the first one, our mother softened. We came home one day to find her slowly going through them. They were stacked on the kitchen tables in two piles. She didn’t look up when we came in; she didn’t even notice us when we turned on the TV in the living room and glued ourselves in front of it. She just sat there reading. She burst out laughing in the middle of one letter, put it down, and shook her head at it. Much later, when I turned back to look at her, I saw that she’d gone through a whole pile of Blue’s letters. She was working on the second pile, her hand covering her mouth, crying silently.

  After some time, she remembered us. “What do you think?” she asked Peter. “Says he’s back in Brooklyn now. You want to see him? You’re old enough to decide for yourself.”

  “I don’t care,” Peter said. Blue wasn’t the kind of father any boy would want to claim. A high school dropout. A heroine addict, a former one if his letters could be believed. A love from our mother’s wilder days, Blue belonged to our distant past. According to Peter, he used to come by regularly. By the time I was old enough to have remembered him, Blue had stopped co
ming. He’d gone away to nobody knew where.

  “Well, he checked himself into that place all on his own. I guess that says something,” our mother said.

  She invited him for dinner, saying that it would do him good to spend some time with his son.

  “Look at you,” Blue said, when I opened the door to let him in. He showed up in denim work overalls and a lumberjack shirt, carrying a small leather bag. His overalls were covered in grease spots, his hands stained with car oil. “I remember you when you could barely walk. Cute little thing in your walker, running all over the house, tearing stuff up.”

  I let him in and followed behind him, hoping he would tell me more stories about myself. Blue fascinated me with his skin so black it was blue, his hands so dirty his palms were black.

  “Where’s your mother?” he asked, looking around hopefully.

  “In the kitchen,” I said. “Dinner’s not ready yet.”

  “That’s all right. I need to clean up anyway. I came straight from work,” he said. “Mind if I use your bathroom?” he asked.

  I pointed down the hallway. Blue took his little bag and disappeared into our bathroom.

  Our mother came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. “Did I hear the door? Was that Blue?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Peter came out of his room and joined us.

  “Well, where is he?” she asked me.

  Peter said, “I bet he’s in the bathroom.” He said it slowly, enunciating each word. He and our mother shared a look, but all she said was, “Hmm.”

  Blue stayed in the bathroom over twenty minutes. Peter timed him. He was relaxed when he finally came out and sat down to eat with us. Both our mother and Peter watched him guardedly, as if waiting for him to vanish.

  “So how’s school?” he asked Peter.

  “Don’t get this boy to talking about school. We’ll be here all night. That’s all he do. Eat, sleep, and breathe school. Read everything he can get his hands on. I can’t get him to take his head out of the books sometimes. He scores the highest out of everybody in his grade at that school. They’ve already skipped him twice.” The way she said it was a complaint. Because he scored the highest on all the standardized tests and finished assignments in five minutes that took the other kids more than an hour, Peter was what teachers called “gifted.” He’d skipped two grades, tested into an enrichment program, and was about to receive a full scholarship to a private school in Manhattan for the following year. These things did not make her proud, only perplexed. Our mother didn’t like a lot of fuss. She’d wanted to raise a normal boy, not a gifted one.