Gabe’s hands were tugging my shirt down, and I knew that in a minute they’d be working the latch of my bra, but I didn’t stop him. In the dark of Heather’s closet, I tried to see what Gabe saw. I pictured an image of myself that was Heather’s body and face, only it was black and it was me. I saw how much of me would change; I saw the girl I would become. And I decided to go ahead and miss myself right now, knowing that the girl I would become wouldn’t know how to appreciate me at all.
girl of wisdom
Fifteen and too shy to do anything on her own, Melanie waits for Chandra to come down. Waits at the large, wide window—the thin curtains Bernice has hung do not cover the width of it—for just a glimpse of Chandra, because Bernice will not let her come over. Will never let her come over. And so she and Chandra must meet here outside on the stoop, in full view of the wide window and the neighborhood, where Bernice can, as she is fond of saying, “keep an eye on things.” Bernice is in the kitchen baking, though it is much too hot for that and Melanie hardly ever eats anything. Bernice has the radio going in the kitchen. The music, which Melanie tries to ignore, has her mother moving in time as though she were still young and still slim. It is the Isley Brothers. Or the Whispers. Or some such quartet or quintet of men with outdated hairdos.
Chandra emerges from their building, sunglasses perched on her head, holding a small brown bag and a section of newspaper. “I’m going outside!” Melanie calls, as she steps into her shoes, glad to be away from her mother, who she always calls Bernice, even to her face, just to show that she feels no closeness.
They spread the newspapers out on the hot concrete steps and sit down. Chandra passes the bag of sunflower seeds and Melanie grabs a handful, cracking them open between her teeth and spitting the shells onto the stoop. Chandra waves at a boy across the street, motioning him over. “Watch this,” she says.
“You know him?”
“I’m about to,” Chandra says. She calls out, “Hey boy! Give me a dollar, and I’ll give you something in return!”
Once he gets closer, she wrinkles her nose in disgust. “Phee-eew! Your breath stink so bad I can smell it from across the street!” The two girls laugh at the boy’s retreating back.
As they sit, Chandra makes a game of it, teasing the boys, selecting them at random, rewarding some and ridiculing others on a whim. After a while, she turns to Melanie and says, “You next.”
“Not me.”
“Scared?”
“I just don’t like young boys,” Melanie says. “They immature.”
The boys are the same age as Chandra and Melanie. Melanie is tired of these kinds of boys. Boys that dress in oversized but expensive fashions, boys without a dollar to their names, or as Bernice says, boys “without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.”
Music blares from an opened window on the third floor of their building and down into the street. The two girls listen to it and idly watch the traffic slow to a stop at the light. Chandra pushes Melanie, pointing to an old black Oldsmobile three cars behind the light. “That’s what you need.”
“That old man?”
“You said boys too immature.”
“If I give him some, he probably have a heart attack.”
“Let’s see.” Chandra calls out to him, “Hey Pops! My friend says she likes you.”
“Stop,” Melanie whispers.
The man looks at them, shaking his head in annoyance.
“For real!” Chandra cries.
“Then let her say it herself,” the man says, his voice carrying.
Chandra turns to Melanie, waiting.
“I got something you might like,” Melanie says, not knowing she is going to say it until it comes out.
“And what’s that?” he asks. The light changes and he lets the cars behind him go around.
“I can’t show it to you here,” she says. “It’s private.”
“You young girls playing games with me?” he asks.
“Age ain’t nothing but a number,” Melanie says.
“That’s right, you tell him,” Chandra encourages.
He parks in front of the hydrant. When he starts to get out of the car, Melanie shrinks back and retreats up her steps. “You better go get you some Viagra first before you think you can handle me, grandpa!”
One week later, Melanie is outside on the stoop, enjoying the early fall weather that still feels like summer, still thinking of the afternoon when she’d teased the old man. Feeling a thrilling rush of pleasure at the thought of him. Days after she had humiliated the man, she found herself thinking of him. More than once, she thought—hoped—she sighted his car. She’d even offered to run errands for Bernice. Taking her mother’s clothes to the cleaners, Melanie found herself staring into the faces of the older men she encountered, sure that each one was him, following her, watching her, waiting for a chance to take her away.
Children rush out of the apartment building and Melanie grabs the railing to avoid the swinging door and to steady herself. She looks up at the sound of a horn, sees the black car idling alongside the hydrant.
It is him. The old man from a week ago. She quickly smoothes her denim skirt and crosses her legs at the ankle, partly afraid, partly brimming.
He watches her alertly, almost daring. “Not so brave without your girlfriend? No one around to bolster your courage?” he taunts.
She doesn’t like the way he says it even though it is true. When Chandra was with her, she was fearless, not her mother’s daughter. She was a different girl, invincible. The kind of girl that expected men to notice her and then acted like she didn’t care when they did.
But Chandra isn’t with her now and Melanie doesn’t need her to be. She shifts on the stoop, parts her legs wide beneath her skirt. “I don’t need courage,” she says.
The man waits, not getting out of the car.
Melanie rises from the stoop and steps carefully around the sections of dirt and weeds between the cracks of the sidewalk’s broken pavement and walks to the man’s car.
He pushes the passenger door open. “Get in.”
The man doesn’t speak for some time after she gets in the car. He doesn’t reach over and try to grab her or do anything to make her un-comfortable. He turns the volume down on the stereo; he is listening to an oldies station. Melanie sizes him up on her side. He doesn’t look as old up close. He smells of Old Spice, safe and comforting. It was the smell that the men from Bernice’s hometown wore when they used to visit. It was the smell that came to Melanie whenever those men crouched to press a dollar into her hand, sending her to play while they sat in the living room with her mother. It was the smell that lingered in the house long after the men stopped coming.
Finally, he asks her, “Do you do this a lot?”
“What?”
“Pick up old men?”
“You the one that came back looking for me,” she reminds him.
“I just wanted to see what you would do,” he says, looking at her. “I’ll drive you back now.”
“No.”
“What will your mother think about you disappearing?”
“Bernice won’t notice.”
“Bernice?”
“That’s my mother.”
“You shouldn’t address her so. That’s insolence,” he says.
He seems angry, but Melanie doesn’t know that word so she nods as if she understands, not wanting to disappoint. She doesn’t like him talking about disappearing, though. For the first time, since meeting him, her actions seem foolish to her. “Anyway, I’m not disappearing. I’m just hanging out with you for a little while. Then I’m going back home,” she says, with more confidence than she feels.
“I should take you home now,” the man says, but Melanie knows he won’t.
“You smell the way my father used to.” She touches the sharp crease in his pants leg.
“How’s that?”
Like Old Spice. Like good times. Like Sunday mornings. “Your cologne.”
&
nbsp; He peels her hand off him. “I’m not your father. I have children older than you. I don’t need a daughter. You’re a foolish little girl; I’m only interested in women.”
“I am a woman,” she says, though tears fill her eyes.
The man looks at her, unspeaking. He reaches over her, pulls a handkerchief out of his glove compartment, and hands it to her silently. She dabs at her eyes. “Don’t cry. You’ll sog my whole car with those tears,” he says. “You don’t know what a woman’s tears do to me.”
“I don’t want to go home yet.”
He considers her. “You have a name, girl?”
Melanie stares straight ahead and refuses to speak. She holds her hands out in front of her to count the calcium deposits on her fingernails, imagining one boyfriend for each white splotch.
“My name is Milton. As in Paradise Lost.”
“What’s that?”
“A famous book written by a blind poet.”
“If he was so blind, then how did he write it?” Melanie asks, doubting.
“His daughters wrote it down it for him.”
Melanie thinks of how Bernice tries to make her do things she doesn’t want to and feels sorry for those daughters. She sees them sitting in a dusty parlor. Hovering over papers and desks, scribbling, squinting, and straining in the dim, mote-filled light. She wonders why they didn’t write something else instead. Their own stories. Or love letters. Why they had not fooled their father, tricked him, made him pay. If it had been her, she would have at the very least lain his clothes out in the most outrageous combinations and told him that they matched.
He asks, “How old are you?”
On a good day, she thinks she can pass for twenty. “I’m old enough to do whatever I want,” she says, reveling in her power.
“And what do you want to do? Nice girls don’t get into cars with strangers.” She catches him eyeing her again. “Then again, you don’t look like such a nice girl.”
He waits for her to answer, but Melanie only shrugs. He can think whatever he likes. She can be anything she wants in his car. Anything at all.
Milton flicks on the lights and throws his keys on a nearby table. Melanie wanders into his living room, drawn to the framed portraits hanging on the wall. He is a widower, he tells her, having survived two wives. Their portraits flank his own; they hang above an old TV against the center wall. The women aren’t identical, but their ample figures and full faces that are more handsome than pretty make them look like kin. Melanie feels slight in their presence. They remind her of Bernice.
“You hungry?”
Melanie shakes her head.
“You should eat something. Put some meat on your bones.”
Melanie smiles at his concern, thinks it is his way of covering his nervousness. She will have something, just for company. She follows him into the kitchen and sits at the table.
Milton microwaves leftovers, some sort of stewed chicken that Melanie thinks too spicy. “What’s insolence?” she asks, to hide the fact that she is not eating.
He answers, “Girls like you.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. You call your mother by her first name and you run with strangers. You’re probably worrying her to death right now.”
Melanie doesn’t bother to respond. It is still early in the afternoon; there is no reason for Bernice to be worried. She is easy to fool. Melanie doesn’t tell him that she has sworn never to become her mother.
No one ever calls for Bernice anymore, but Melanie remembers the visitors. Men who wore suits with hats to match, transplants from the South like Bernice. These men dropped the names of old acquaintances Bernice had known back home and pretended they were just dropping in to check on her. They sat by Bernice’s side as close as they could, watching her as if they were hungry and could never eat enough. Melanie would hide in the kitchen and spy, angry when Bernice brushed off their compliments and missed the meaning behind their words, angry that her mother had the power but foolishly refused to wield it. The way Melanie saw it, Bernice had thrown all of her chances away.
“We don’t need to talk about my mother,” she says.
Melanie finds his bedroom on her own. She doesn’t wait for him to follow. She goes to it, undresses, peels back thin cotton sheets and climbs into his bed. What courtesy he shows when he turns his back to her while he undresses, before climbing in beside her. He doesn’t pounce on her the way a boy her own age would. His legs are wiry and strong against hers, his feet bony and cold. How gentle it is when he parts her legs, how silent when he enters her.
Melanie lies next to his sleeping body, thinking that she’ll have to work hard to keep her affair a secret. She’ll make Milton park around the corner when he comes for her. She won’t give him her phone number. She’ll have to think of something to tell Chandra. Bernice, of course, can never know.
Melanie turns onto her side, curving against his back, resting her cheek against his shoulderblade. She was right to tell Chandra that boys their own age were immature. Milton seems to know about things she has never even thought of. He will take care of her, make her feel welcomed, cherished, loved. Here she is his woman, but as soon as she leaves, she will be just Melanie again, lost and needful. “Not yet,” she whispers, wrapping her arms around his back.
Bernice is in the kitchen, paring apples for pie, when Melanie comes home. Melanie thinks her mother should know it at once. That it should be obvious. A difference in her walk and her bearing. She thinks there is now an air about her that exudes woman. But her mother is blind to it. Bernice drops an apple core into the trash and greets her, noticing nothing.
some other kind
of happiness
No one holds the syringe but me. My mother could if she weren’t so squeamish about blood. There was a time when my cousin Tony could have learned to, but he came home to Brooklyn that summer a stranger. He’d been away all year at a boarding school in Connecticut none of us had ever seen. This left only Teddy, and even a blind woman could have seen that he coveted the hypodermic for his own.
Teddy, my grandmother’s youngest son, and his newest girlfriend, Karen, were at the kitchen table playing backgammon.
“What you doing?” Teddy asked.
“Nothing.” I opened the refrigerator door and bottles of cloudy insulin jostled in the built-in depressions meant for holding eggs.
“You about to give it to her?”
“Throw the dice,” Karen said. “It’s your turn.”
“Want me to help?” he asked.
“No thanks,” I said, warming a bottle of insulin between my palms. “How long you all gonna be in here? I gotta clean the kitchen soon.”
“I still say you’re too young to be doing this,” he said, shaking the leather dice cup. “You could accidentally stick yourself and get hurt. You don’t even know what you’re doing.”
“I’m real careful,” I said, willing to say anything to keep him away from us.
My grandmother waited in the back bedroom, watching soap operas until time for her injection. She kept the box of syringes in the top drawer of her bureau so no one could get to it without going across her bed. She removed one from the box and handed it to me.
Giving her the needle has taught me to be patient and gentle. You need to be in order to handle someone else’s flesh. Daily handling has taught me well. I have been giving my grandmother her insulin twice a day for over a year now; I know her skin better than my own. I know when to move on before her skin gets sore; I know when to let her skin lie fallow. The outer upper arm, where even the most toned woman jiggles, is the best spot. There is always enough there to grasp, always extra meat to cushion the needle’s prick.
“This won’t hurt,” I whispered, talking to her arm and not her. I pushed my grandmother’s short sleeve up her arm and held a piece of flesh. “Don’t you worry. This won’t hurt a bit.”
I swabbed the skin with alcohol. By now Teddy was in the door-way, watching, eyeing the syringe
as I pulled the orange cap off and filled the hypodermic with insulin.
“What you want?” I asked him.
“I don’t have to want nothing,” he said. “I’m in my mama’s room, in my mama’s house.”
Teddy moved in with us more than a year before Tony went away to school. After his previous girlfriend kicked him out, Teddy ended up outside our door, begging for a place to stay just until he could get himself back on his own two feet. His mother, my grandmother, was the only one who would take him in. No one else in our family trusted him; his older brother, Ralph, had stolen from too many family members to support his habit, and our relatives were wary that Teddy would do the same. He was given Tony’s room to share and in Tony’s absence he had painted it electric blue and hung his ten-speed bike from the ceiling. He showed no signs of getting back on his own two feet or of leaving anytime soon.
“Now cut it out you two,” my grandmother said. “This baby’s got to concentrate. Don’t want her to give me the wrong amount.”
“Gram, you know I wouldn’t do that,” I said, wounded.
My grandmother patted my hand. “I know, I know,” she said.
“But she could, Mama. You could go into some kind of shock or diabetic coma or something. Naima could send you right into the hospital.”
“You shut up!” I screamed.
“Ain’t nobody going to no hospital today,” my grandmother said. “If you’re going to talk that kind of talk, you can leave us in peace. I don’t need to be riled up before my shot.”
“Sorry, Mama. All I’m saying is that it’s better if more than one person knows how to give you your needle, that’s all. No harm done. That’s all I came to say. After all, Naima could go away to a school just like Tony. Then where would you be?”
At-Risk Page 11