At Risk

  “This one’s not so great,” Amanda says.

  “Yes, it is,” Polly tells her.

  Polly tries to grab the dress back, but Amanda is too fast for her. Amanda returns the dress to the rack, and while she’s there she meets up with someone she knows, another sixth-grader ready to be outfitted for fall. Polly watches carefully to see if somehow the difference in the girls, one sick, one well, shows. This girl, whoever she is, is not as pretty as Amanda, and when her mother tells her it’s time to go she gives her mother a sour look. Then she says something that Amanda finds hysterically funny, and they both hide their faces and giggle. Some anti-mother crack, no doubt.

  Polly was never taken to shops to be outfitted for school. Her mother made everything by hand, and Polly despised every stitch. The clothes Claire made were too sophisticated; when the other girls were wearing pink plaid, Polly wore a black velvet skirt with a matching cluche. She had dropped waists when crinolines were in. She wishes now that she still had those clothes, realizes that her mother had a real talent for fashion. Nothing her mother made could have survived; Polly treated them all horribly, spilling ink on them, tearing hems as she undressed.

  “You big careless girl!” Claire had yelled once, when she found a white satin blouse she’d finished only days before where Polly had left it, jumbled into a ball on the floor. Later, Polly had seen her mother crying as she ironed the blouse. Her mother was then the same age Polly is now. Ironing, her hair pulled back with combs, Claire had seemed so old. Polly remembers thinking how ridiculous it was for a grown-up woman to be crying in the kitchen.

  While Polly is watching the girls, Charlie dumps a looseleaf notebook and a Terminator lunchbox into the cart. The crash makes Polly jump.

  “Don’t sneak up on me!” Polly says.

  “That’s Janis Carter,” Charlie says of the girl Amanda’s met. “She has a Great Dane that’s bigger than she is. It’s smarter than she is, too.”

  She’s not smart, she’s not pretty, she gives her mother sour looks. A great big careless girl who will live till she is an old woman and has great-grandchildren gathered around her.

  “Go get two pairs of jeans and a sweatshirt,” Polly says. “Meet us on line.”

  Charlie stares at her, puzzled.

  Polly reaches for two packages of flowered underpants and a nightgown with purple ribbons.

  “I don’t know what kind to get,” Charlie says.

  “Amanda!” Polly calls. “We have to go.”

  Amanda says good-bye to her classmate and starts toward them.

  “Mom,” Charlie says, “I don’t know what kind of jeans to get.”

  “Don’t act like such a baby!” Polly snaps. “Get whatever you see.”

  Amanda has reached them. “I need a really big looseleaf,” she tells Polly.

  “All right,” Polly says.

  With the air conditioning turned up so high, Polly wonders if Amanda is shivering. Amanda leads the way down the aisle, and Polly follows. On the way to the school supplies, Amanda is waylaid in the jewelry department. Polly helps her to choose three bangle bracelets, all in different shades of purple. As she turns back to the cart, Polly sees that Charlie is still standing where she left him, in the girls’ department. Polly has forgotten, this is happening to him, too. She thinks of the way he followed her everywhere when he was a toddler. The other mothers she knew used to laugh and call him her little duck. “Quack,” he would call to her when he needed her at the park, and the other mothers would laugh and Polly would too, but somehow it broke her heart to know that he would soon talk, like anyone else, that he’d stop following her and clinging to her legs.

  When he sees her looking at him, Charlie takes off for the boys’ department, disappearing into the racks of hooded sweat-shirts and windbreakers. It is much too cold in Bradlee’s. Polly cannot stand it. Amanda slides bangle bracelets onto her arm, one after another. By the time they have picked up some notebooks and pens and head for the cashier, Charlie is waiting for them, with one pair of jeans that won’t fit him till next September and a dark blue sweatshirt just like one he already has.

  As soon as they get home, Charlie goes down to the basement. He hates his mother, and his sister. In fact, he hates everyone. He can’t believe he can feel such horrible things, but he does. He doesn’t plan to steal his mother’s camera, but when he sees the open door of the darkroom he knows he’s going to do it. The camera’s a Minolta, much too expensive for Charlie to fool with. He slips it into his backpack and waits till it’s quiet upstairs. Then he goes up to the kitchen and quickly dials Sevrin, but no one answers. So Charlie goes to the pond alone, determined to get a photograph of the turtle. He realizes that no one will miss him, no one will notice he’s gone. His mother is no more interested in him than she is in her camera. Maybe, just maybe, Charlie won’t even bother to return it. He’ll see how long it takes for Polly to discover what she’s missing.

  Now that Polly’s given it up, Betsy Stafford has taken over photographing Laurel Smith’s readings herself. The new client, the skittish one, has agreed to let her sessions be photographed, but it hasn’t been working out well. When Polly took photographs you couldn’t hear her footsteps; she often wore a gray cotton shirt that seemed more like a curl of fog than a piece of clothing on a human form. Betsy’s presence is thick, like the murky grounds in the bottom of a coffeepot.

  “Go ahead, act natural,” Betsy says to the new client, but Betsy’s not exactly fading into the woodwork. She curses to herself each time she uses the camera, and she’s had to start and restart the tape in her cassette recorder twice. Laurel Smith can feel beads of perspiration on her forehead and at the base of her neck. It is the Friday of Labor Day weekend, and the beaches are so crowded there’s an echo in the usually quiet marsh. Laurel has found a great deal of resistance in this new client. She seems overly willing to please, but there’s something set about her; she’s someone who believes in only one way of doing anything at all, whether it’s how to store butter or how to reach a departed spirit. This is their second session, and Laurel has had no luck at all in reaching her daughter, a twenty-year-old Boston College student, lost last summer when a sailboat turned over in deep water.

  Halfway through this reading, Laurel begins to lie, tentatively at first, and then, when her client leans forward, riveted, with more confidence. She closes her eyes and imagines that she’s twenty again; her voice becomes breathy and higher-pitched as she describes the sunlight filtering through the clear water, through the bright white sail of the boat. As she’s describing her feeling of weightlessness, Laurel opens one eye and sees Betsy watching her. Betsy’s mouth is pursed; she knows Laurel is lying.

  “I’m sorry,” Laurel says suddenly. “I just don’t see her anymore. I can’t reach her.”

  When the new client leaves, Laurel doesn’t charge her. Betsy grumbles as she packs up her equipment, and, to avoid her, Laurel goes into the kitchen to make iced coffee.

  “I’d love some of whatever you’re making,” Betsy calls when she hears ice cubes hit against a glass.

  Laurel takes down another glass and fills it with that morn ing’s coffee. She is disgusted with herself; fakery is all over her, covering her with a layer of foul-smelling dust. She wants to take a shower. She wants to cut off all her hair with a hedge clipper and scatter it for the birds to weave into their nests. With a long silver spoon Laurel mixes cream into each drink. She can hear Betsy rattling around in the living room. Betsy soon comes into the kitchen and stands with her back against the refrigerator.

  “You don’t think you might be losing the knack, do you?” Betsy asks as she reaches for one of the iced coffees.

  Laurel’s shoulders stiffen. “It will be easier next time, when Polly’s with you,” she says.

  She is regretting this arrangement with Betsy. The idea of a book about her made her temporarily insane, fed some part of her that wants fame and money. She wonders if she’s being punished for her greed. This is not her
first disastrous reading: for weeks Laurel Smith has been lying to her clients, telling them whatever they want to hear. But this is the first time she has actually spoken in a lost spirit’s voice; she feels like an actress in some horrible nightmare of a play.

  “Polly’s not coming back,” Betsy Stafford says now.

  Laurel slips her sandals off so she can feel the cool linoleum. In the winter she puts down hooked rugs to keep her feet warm.

  “Her daughter is terminally ill,” Betsy tells Laurel. “It is truly unbelievable. She had a blood transfusion before they did any testing, and now she has AIDS.”

  Laurel Smith lets that sink in. She wishes she had moved the pink silk lamp Polly liked so much so it could be included in some of her photographs.

  “And the worst of it is,” Betsy says, “her son is my son’s best friend. They’ve shared lunches and God knows what else. Her kid has slept in my house half the summer. They may have shared the same bed.”

  Laurel realizes all this means something to Betsy because Betsy is shaking. Laurel picks up the stink of fear.

  “This is what I have to live with,” Betsy says.

  “I don’t understand,” Laurel Smith says, but she’s afraid that she does.

  “My son has been in contact with her son,” Betsy says, her voice breaking.

  “You’re misunderstanding,” Laurel Smith says. “You can’t catch AIDS like a cold. You have to exchange blood or semen. You can’t get it from any casual contact. Even if you live with that person, even if you’re in the same family.”

  “Oh, really?” Betsy says savagely. “Thank you for your medical advice. For all I know, they could have cut their skins with knives and become blood brothers.”

  Betsy starts to cry then. She walks away, into the living room, and finishes packing up her equipment as she cries.

  Laurel follows Betsy into the living room. “I think you’re overreacting. I really do.”

  “Well, it’s not your son, is it?” Betsy says. “And it’s not your worry either.”

  After Betsy leaves, Laurel Smith sits on the wicker couch in her tiny living room and looks out at the marsh. The sunlight is so bright it hurts her eyes. Laurel realizes she needs to get out, she needs fresh air. She decides to go to the small marker up the road, and Stella, the cat, follows her there. Laurel buys rye bread, a package of cheddar cheese, and three chocolate bars—Kit Kats, her favorite candy the whole time she was married and so depressed. At the last minute she asks for a box of low-tar cigarettes. She has not smoked for four years, but now, on the walk home, she takes the cellophane off the box and lights one of the cigarettes. The smell of sulfur brings tears to her eyes. She has taken the long way home, and as she passes the dirt path that leads to the pond she notices the tire tracks of a bicycle. Laurel Smith dislikes and distrusts Betsy Stafford, but she realizes that some of the stink of Betsy’s fear has rubbed off on her. That is why she had a sudden urge for a cigarette, to replace that dank odor of panic with anything, even sulfur.

  “Come on,” Laurel says to Stella. “Don’t you dare go in there.”

  Stella is poised near the path leading to the pond, ready to run off through the brambles and weeds so she can hunt for turtles and geese.

  Laurel crouches down. She stubs out her cigarette and claps her hands, then makes the hissing sound her cat usually responds to. Stella looks over haughtily, then jumps off the bank and walks down the road, ahead of Laurel. All the way home, Laurel thinks about Polly. She thinks of Polly putting in a new roll of film and mentioning a daughter, whose name Laurel has forgotten. A dancer, she thinks she remembers Polly saying, or a gymnast.

  Polly, who had never divulged anything about her personal life before, had said to Laurel, “My daughter would love your hair. She wants to grow it till it’s as long as yours.”

  Laurel turns off the road into her driveway. Here, the ferns and maples give way to sea grass and sea lavender and reeds. The sight of the plastic lawn furniture set out on the deck makes Laurel’s throat grow tight with longing. She realizes that Betsy Stafford is wrong. She has not lost the knack.

  She has simply grown tired of talking with the dead.

  All that weekend Charlie tries to phone Sevrin. Each time he’s told that Sevrin isn’t home. Charlie checks out their stomping grounds. The Pizza Hut at the edge of the common, the basketball courts behind the school, the soda fountain at the drugstore. He goes back to the pond every day, snapping photographs each time there’s a ripple in the water; and he waits there for hours, but Sevrin doesn’t arrive. Finally, on Sunday, Charlie phones Sevrin at suppertime and is told by his mother that he’s not in. Charlie knows Sevrin never misses dinner.

  “Are the newts all right?” Charlie asks, not caring if he gives their secret experiment away, but Betsy hangs up before he can find out the answer.

  “She doesn’t want Sevrin to see Charlie,” Polly says to Ivan when they’re alone. It’s dusk and she can see Charlie outside, keeping an eye on the empty street in the hope that Sevrin will appear on his bike.

  “That’s paranoid,” Ivan says. “We have better things to worry about.”

  They are meeting with the members of the school board tomorrow night, and they’re particularly wary because the meeting was called only hours after Ivan, thinking he was doing what was best for Amanda, notified the board of Amanda’s illness. This is the kind of news that travels fast, with the speed of hysteria.

  “Oh, God, yes,” Polly says bitterly. “We certainly do have better things to worry about. We have enough to worry about for the rest of our lives.”

  “Stop it,” Ivan says to her. “Don’t do this to yourself.”

  “That bitch,” Polly says.

  Ivan stirs a spoonful of sugar into his coffee. They can hear Madonna singing “True Blue” down in the basement, where Amanda and Jessie are practicing forward rolls. It is all Polly can do not to run downstairs and rip the tape out of the cassette player. She is terrified that Amanda may do something that will hurt her; even practicing forward rolls seems too dangerous.

  “That absolute bitch,” Polly says of Betsy Stafford.

  Ivan reaches to take Polly’s hand, but she moves away as if she’d been burned. Ivan cannot bear his loneliness, and he knows Polly cannot bear hers much longer.

  “Talk to me,” he says to Polly when she starts to cry.

  “There’s nothing to say,” Polly tells him.

  She drinks her coffee, though it is cold. She can’t turn to Ivan because if she did she would have to see how hurt he is. She can’t look at Charlie, sitting out on the steps, waiting for a friend who will never appear. She can’t listen to Madonna singing over and over again, “True love, oh baby,” when she knows that her daughter will never stand in the dark on a summer night and, more aware of her own heart beating than of the mosquitoes circling the porch light, lean her head upward, toward her first kiss.

  SIX

  AS A CHILD, POLLY WAS trained to be polite to adults. She was expected to smile at the rudest tenants in the building; she never talked back to her teachers. Being a good girl is a habit that’s hard to break, so when she walks into the principal’s office for the school board meeting, Polly quickly sits down between Ivan and Ed Reardon, and when anyone stares at her, she lowers her eyes. The five members of the school board already know that Polly and Ivan’s daughter has AIDS, but no one offers condolences. They don’t say they’re sorry. They just keep looking at Polly, and, in spite of herself, Polly feels as if she is guilty of something, as if she somehow let her daughter get sick.

  Linda Gleason, who has curly red hair that cannot be tamed by headbands and silver clips, has been the principal of the Cheshire School for two years. Everyone loves her, not only the teachers and the parents but the students as well. She has an enormous amount of energy, and she loves the kids, even the wild ones, who are sent regularly to her office for misbehaving. Tonight she’s got a smile on her face, but her skin looks white; it seems to be drawn too tightly
over her bones. She begins the meeting by introducing Ed Reardon. Most of the people in the room know Ed, he’s their kids’ doctor, but when he gives his short, prepared talk about AIDS, there’s suddenly a chill in the room. Polly wishes she had worn a sweater, and she hopes that Amanda and Charlie are wearing warm pajamas. She worries about leaving the children home alone, but they insist they’re too old for baby-sitters.

  Linda Gleason and the superintendent of schools, a flushed-looking man named Scott Henry, go over the Massachusetts Board of Education’s AIDS policy—children whose physicians deem them well enough to go to school may, others must be provided with a tutor—until a board member named Mike Shepard interrupts.

  “If you’re saying this child is going to continue going to school, all I can tell you is that we’re going to have big troubles. Parents are not going to sit still for this.”

  If Polly had more courage, she would say what she’s thinking. Sit still for what? My daughter dying?

  Under the table, Ivan takes Polly’s hand. Polly doesn’t pull away, but she doesn’t close her fingers around his. She wonders if Ivan remembers that Mike Shepard runs the contracting company that put a new roof on their house.

  The school board members ask Ed Reardon what will happen if Amanda cuts herself and bleeds on another child; they want to know if her saliva is dangerous. Not one of them is really listening when Ed explains that siblings of children with AIDS have shared toothbrushes and not come down with the virus. They don’t hear him when he insists their children are more likely to be run down by a truck in their own backyard than to contract AIDS from Amanda. Now Polly knows why she, Ivan, and Ed Reardon have all chosen to sit together on one side of the table. The accused.

  “I think time will tell whether or not this little girl will be best served by having a tutor at home,” Scott Henry, the superintendent, says.

  That’s when Polly pushes her chair away from the table and gets up. Ivan turns to her, concerned, but Polly walks out of the room without looking at him. She keeps walking until she finds the door marked GIRLS. Inside, everything is small: the basins, the toilets, the water fountains. Polly bends over one of the basins and vomits. She hears the door open behind her, but she vomits again.