At-Risk (15 page)

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.

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?”

“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.