At-Risk

by Amina Gautier

  “I’m not going nowhere,” I said. We all knew this was true. Tony had been selected in junior high school to get a scholarship for that fancy school and to start in ninth grade. The only reason he had to wait was because Ralph filled out the paperwork incorrectly. Unlike Tony, I was not gifted. In my twelve and a half years, I had shown no extraordinary academic talent. Giving the needle was the only thing at which I excelled. I didn’t have Tony’s smarts or his prospects. I had nowhere to go.

  Teddy backed away from the door, but his eyes never wavered from the syringe. Occasionally, he scratched his arm, but his eyes followed my every motion as I pulled the plunger down to the appropriate line, tapped the syringe to release any harmful air bubbles, and glided the needle into the tautly held skin. After the injection, he disappeared silently and closed the door behind him.

  When he was gone, my grandmother said, “Baby, he’s got a point.”

  “What point?” I pulled the needle out. I pressed the sharp point against her bureau until it bent, then squeezed the cap back on.

  “I can’t expect you to do this all of the time. You’re becoming a young woman and soon you’ll have other things to do than sit around and play nursemaid to your old grandmother.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said. Before I began to give her the shots, my grandmother injected her insulin into her belly, her stomach the only fatty area she could reach. I’d see her sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to lift her dress out of the way with one hand and hold a section of flesh and inject herself all at once. In the year that I have been helping, I have come to love the slim little needles with their orange caps, the short and squat bottles of insulin, the perfect squares of alcohol prep pads. Teddy and Karen had their drugs; Tony had his away school; my mother had her cigarettes and her dates; my grandmother had her All My Children and One Life to Live; and I had this.

  Tony was lying on one of his and Teddy’s high-riser beds when I knocked on his bedroom door.

  “What you doing?”

  “Chilling,” he said. Before he’d left Brooklyn to go away to school, he had pronounced that word the way we all did, by dropping the final g. Now it sat there on the end of his words, making him sound foreign to me. When I closed my eyes and listened to him, he sounded like the white boys on TV. He had become a person I could no longer speak to, could no longer recognize. He had come home sneering at us and our ways; the fancy school he had left us for had changed him. No one saw it but me, but there it was—a new, subtle way he had of now carrying himself, as if impatient to be away from us.

  Some days he’d lie around the house in just his undershirt, shorts, and socks, cooling out under the fan, and no one was allowed to disturb him. Other days he was out the door as soon as he finished breakfast. He’d remain in the streets all day playing handball at the court in the park, returning for dinner, browned and sweaty. Every night, as soon as the sun went down and it became cool enough for folks to be sociable, Tony went out into the night, searching for the friends he’d left behind. He used these nights to shore up the gaps his absence during the school year had caused. Each night, as I watched him head out the door, I felt his desperation. He was working to have fun, gorging himself on his surroundings, burning the candle at both ends, trying to prove he had not lost his footing in his old world.

  “Is that what you going to be doing all day?”

  “Looks like it,” he said. Though he was old enough to have his working papers, he had not bothered to get them. Long before he’d gone away, Tony talked about getting a summer job as a counselor in the recreation center so that he could be around the pool. He wanted to be a lifeguard, but he could not swim. Neither of us could. Three years ago, my mother took us to a class, but all we learned was to dunk our faces in the water and blow bubbles. “Why do you ask?”

  “’Cause we gotta clean the kitchen,” I told him.

  He rolled onto his side, lifting an underarm toward the oscillating fan. “Have to,” he said. “Don’t say ‘gotta.’ It’s better if you say ‘have to.’ We have to clean the kitchen.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We have to clean the kitchen.”

  “I don’t have to,” he said. “I’m home on break.” He turned onto his back and folded his hands behind his head. While away, he’d grown an Afro. Now, he adjusted himself so that his head was directly in front of the fan. Every time it circulated back to him, it ruffled the edges of his Afro.

  “Ma, Tony won’t help me do the kitchen.” Lying on our bed on her stomach, propped by her elbows, my mother was just inches away from the small black-and-white TV as she squinted through the zigzagged picture and tried to make out Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones in Claudine. “Ma?”

  “Let him be,” she said.

  “But he never do nothing.”

  “He’s only home for a little time. It should be special,” she said.

  “He got the whole summer!”

  “It’s not a lot when you think about it. He’s here for the whole summer, but gone the rest of the time.” My mother inhaled on her cigarette, then held it out to me. “Go light this.”

  I plucked the cigarette from her fingers and took it to the kitchen. After three clicks, the right front burner came on and I lit the cigarette in the flame. When Teddy and Karen weren’t looking, I sucked hard on the cigarette, inhaling the life of my mother. I was not yet bold enough to sneak a whole one; I took only drags whenever she sent me to light them. These short sweet stolen puffs, infrequent as they came, mellowed me as the smoke’s effects swirled to the pit of my stomach and warmed my throat along the way.

  I brought the cigarette back to my mother. She dangled it from her lips. “Come and fix this. You have the touch.”

  I slid my fingers up the TV’s cold antennae, adjusting the rabbit ears carefully, moving each only a hairsbreadth at a time, indifferent to her directions. Just like there is a trick to giving a needle, there is a trick to fixing things. A trick of the touch. I touched the antennae one last time and Diahann Carroll appeared on the screen.

  My mother said, “Don’t be on Tony all the time. You know he’s special. We have to do what we can to help him. We have to make sacrifices.”

  “Seem like that’s all we do.”

  When Tony was a baby, my mother took him from Ralph and his girlfriend, sacrificing her youth to raise him right. While he was studying for his battery of tests and interviews, I sacrificed for him, too, washing and ironing his clothes and taking out the garbage when it was his turn. Now that he’d won, I wanted him to do his share, but it seemed that I would spend the summer doing both his chores and mine.

  “Don’t be like that,” my mother said. “We can’t stand in his way when he has a real chance to make it.”

  “Make what?” On screen, Diahann Carroll and her children scrambled around their dingy apartment, trying to hide the small appliances James Earl Jones had brought them before the welfare lady arrived.

  “Make it out of here,” she said. “He don’t have to live like we do. He won’t have to stay in nobody’s projects. My baby’s going to end up in the penthouse! And he’ll be bringing us all along with him.”

  “What if I don’t want to live in a penthouse?” My mother looked at me as if I had grown another head. Maybe it was the way she called Tony her baby even though he was her nephew and not her real son at all. Maybe it was the way she pinned all of her hopes and dreams on his brain, leaving no room for me to have a chance at saving our family. Maybe it was the way she, like him, sneered at our life, talking about leaving the projects as if it were an easy thing to just pick up and leave the only life I’d ever known.

  My mother said, “He deserves a chance to find some kind of happiness, you know.”

  “Other than this?” I had thought we were happy.

  She flicked a long line of ash into her ashtray and looked at me the way teachers do when you fall behind the rest of the class. “Some other kind of happiness, baby.”

  The next day, Teddy knocked o
n my grandmother’s bedroom door while I was preparing her injection. Everyone knew I didn’t like to be disturbed when giving the needle. Any distraction and I could miss an air bubble. “Hold on,” I shouted.

  “Can’t,” he moaned. “I can’t hold on, you hear me?”

  My grandmother said, “Let him in.”

  “When I’m done.”

  “Let my son in this room,” she commanded. “Now.”

  I laid the insulin and syringe down and went to the door. “We’re busy,” I said, standing between him and the entrance.

  “I’m sick,” Teddy moaned. He stood at the door, his eyes vacant and hollowed.

  He seemed as if he could barely stand. I couldn’t see anything wrong with him, no cuts or bruises, and yet sickness radiated from him, a palpable thing. He looked past me to where my grandmother sat on the edge of the bed. “Mama!” He stumbled into the room and headed over to the bed. He shivered and wrapped his arms around his waist so tightly he looked as if he was wearing a straitjacket.

  “Teddy, what is it?”

  He crawled across the bed and wiggled his head onto her lap. He looked up at her with a look I had never seen before. She lowered her head to him and stroked his forehead and cheek. The two of them like that reminded me of something I’d once seen on a church’s stained-glass window.

  He gazed at her and pleaded, “Mama, I need some money real bad.”

  “I ain’t made of money, Teddy.”

  “I know, Mama. I only need a real little bit.” He sniffed and wiped his runny nose.

  “Ain’t it enough that I let you stay in my home and give you a roof over your head even though you’re a fully grown man and I don’t ask you for a drop of rent money?”

  “You always been good to me, Ma,” he said. “But I feel so bad.”

  My grandmother faltered. “You need the money for medicine or something like that?” she asked.

  “Yeah, Ma,” Teddy said, fidgeting beneath her steady hand. “Something like that.”

  My grandmother helped him off her lap. She turned to her bureau and rummaged through the top drawer for her change purse where bills were folded into thick squares. She pulled two squares of money out and unfolded them, pressing them out on the bureau’s counter. “Will this help?”

  Teddy took the money without looking at it. “Yeah.”

  After he’d gone, I resumed my preparations for the injection. I laid out the alcohol pads and the insulin, but the syringe I had placed on the bed had gone missing.

  “Gram, do you see the needle anywhere?” I asked, warming the bottle of insulin in my hands. She checked the blanket to see if the syringe had rolled under a fold, but her search came up empty.

  “It must’ve fallen,” my grandmother said. She handed me another one from the box. I filled the syringe and flicked a finger against it to release the air bubbles. I took her flesh between my fingers and swabbed it with the alcohol pad, eager, wanting to pierce the too-trusting part of her the way needle pierced skin.

  “This won’t hurt,” I whispered to the skin I knew.

  She braced herself and I injected the needle. After I pulled it out, a single drop of blood surfaced on her skin. A small and perfect bubble, trembling between us two.

  held

  Kim knew better than to ask for a favor while her mother’s shows were on. Her mother sat on the love seat, positioned directly in front of the TV, with newspaper spread out across her lap. She was peeling potatoes to make french fries, routinely dropping peelings onto the newspaper without ever looking at her hands or the knife. She kept her eyes glued on the television, watching Hawaii Five-O. She ignored Kim. When Kim crossed in front of the TV, her mother didn’t even blink. All she said was, “You not made of glass.”

  “Ma, please?” Kim whined. “She’s your only granddaughter.”

  Kim’s mother turned to face her. She was still young. Thirty-five. But she was the mother of three and her face showed it. “Don’t even look at me like that,” her mother said. “I already told you no. Don’t make me repeat myself.”

  Ever since she’d had the baby, Kim had been expecting something different from her own mother. Something more along the lines of guidance and advice. She expected her mother to give her pointers and tips, to provide free babysitting, to help her along as if she was an apprentice learning under a master. She hadn’t expected the quiet censure her mother gave off without trying, the way she prefaced everything she said to Kim with “Now that you’re a mother” or “Now that you think you grown.” That was before she realized that her mother was most likely just jealous of her. After all, she had gotten her figure back quickly and naturally without having to exercise. She had rubbed cocoa butter onto her swollen belly every day of her pregnancy once her friend told her about it, and now she had no stretch marks. Kim had seen her mother walking around the house in a bra and slip, had seen the light brown streaks across her stomach stretching like a hand upwards towards her breasts. No wonder she was jealous.

  A loud cry came from the bedroom Kim shared with her younger sister.

  Her mother looked past her to the television and said, “You better go see to the baby. I don’t know why you left her alone in there with only Asha anyway.”

  Kim didn’t run; the baby was always crying and it was never over anything important. She crossed the crowded bedroom, walking past the two twin beds and toward the baby’s crib, stepping over Asha, who was lying on the floor reading comic books, oblivious. “What happened?” Kim asked her. “What’d you do?”

  “Nothing.” Asha looked up from her comic book. She had the look of her father about her, deep brown skin and owlish eyes. “What did Ma say?”

  “What you think?”

  “Told you.”

  “Shut up.” Kim looked down at the baby. She was lying on her back, staring up at Kim as she cried, naked except for her diaper.

  “When are you gonna do my hair?” Asha asked. Her thick hair was wild around her head, making her look like she’d just woken up.

  “Later.”

  “You already said that twice today.”

  “I’m saying it again,” Kim said, looking down at the baby without really seeing her, her eyes blurring with tears. Let either of her two sisters need something, and her mother would no doubt break her neck falling all over herself. But let Kim ask for one little thing, and all of a sudden it was a federal case. “Why she gotta be like that?” she whispered.

  “Who?” Asha asked. “Be like what?”

  “Mind your business,” Kim said. “Does she need to be changed?”

  Asha shrugged, turning the page. “Do I look like her nanny?”

  “Don’t get smart.” Kim rolled her eyes. She couldn’t figure out how such a small infant could be so loud. She reached into the crib and tugged gently on the baby’s fat brown leg. “Come on, now. Stop crying,” she begged the infant. “Shush, baby. Hush now for Mommy?”

  “I’m trying to read here,” Asha said.

  “Shut up,” Kim snapped, checking the baby to see if maybe she was wet. The baby was dry and well fed. Kim didn’t know why she got like this, why she cried for no reason. And she didn’t know what to do to make her stop.

  “What’s the matter with Mommy’s baby?” she asked, annoyed at how babies seemed to cry for no reason at all. There were many nights when the baby cried and Kim didn’t go to her. She would just lie on the bottom of the bunk, listening to Asha snore and the baby cry. If Asha didn’t wake up and complain, then Kim would let the baby go on until she got tired of crying and her breath got all huffed out like crying was a hard day’s work. Asha would usually wake up by then. She would kick her foot against the mattress over Kim’s head and say, “Can’t you hear? You better get up.”

  And Kim would say, “Let her go on. She’ll tire herself out.”

  Then Asha would kick some more and say, “I’ma tell Ma.”

  Kim would get up then because Asha was the youngest daughter, the baby of the family, and the ap
ple of their mother’s eye. Kim was only the middle child and not even the smart one—that was her older sister, Rashida.

  Just when Kim’s sleep would start getting good the baby would start crying to wake her up, uncaring that it was the middle of the night. The baby acted as if she was the only one that mattered. No one or nothing counted but her. Kim was sure she did it on purpose, just to prove she could.

  On the nights when Kim did get up, the baby wouldn’t even be wet or hungry. As soon as Kim peered over into the crib at her, the baby would stop and smile while her brown eyes were saying, Look what I can make you do. Neither Kim’s mother nor her sisters had ever told her that babies were sneaky that way.

  Kim rummaged around the crib and found the pacifier bundled up in the thin cotton blanket. She rubbed the lint off of it and tried to stick it in the baby’s mouth, but she wouldn’t take it. The baby cried with her mouth open so wide that Kim could see the back of her throat. Kim decided to be firm with her. “You gotta stop this noise right now,” she said, but the baby continued.

  “I hope she get laryngitis,” Asha muttered, trying to turn her pages as loudly as possible.

  “You be quiet,” Kim said. “Nobody asked you.”

  Kim wondered if what Asha said was true, if the baby really could cry her voice away. “Please don’t do that,” she whispered so that Asha wouldn’t hear. “Just stop crying for a minute. Just one minute, okay, please?” She took her daughter out of the crib and bounced her on her knee to see if that would work. The child stopped for a moment, then began anew in another fresh bout of squalling.

  Asha said, “Maybe she’s hungry.”

  “I already fed her. I did everything. Fed her. Burped her. Changed her. It’s like she don’t never stop.” Kim looked at her daughter. “You don’t never stop, do you?”

  “If she answer you, I’m calling Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” Asha said, no help at all to anyone.

  Kim took the baby down the hallway and called to her mother.