At-Risk (6 page)

I showed up late for one of the Saturday meetings. The girls were clustered around the tables in the library. Something was different. They weren't their usual sullen selves. No one seemed to be biding their time. Not one pair of eyes was watching the tedious movement of the minute hand on the clock at the front of the room. The girls were all whispering. A current of energy filled the room. After I hung my coat over my chair and sat down, I heard one of the girls say, “Wait until I tell my father. He'll probably go and buy a new suit.”

“Who are you going to bring?” she asked me.

“To what?”

“To our tea,” she said. She slid me an ivory-colored envelope from a stack off the table. While the sorority women were setting up a game for us, I opened the envelope and read the invitation. They were samples of the invitations the ladies were sending to our homes. The tea would commemorate the end of our year's program and we would all be awarded certificates for our participation. The ladies thought we would be excited about the chance to get dressed up and show off. They said the tea would give us a chance to display our social polish.

“What's the big deal about tea anyway?” I didn't understand why we needed a special event just to sit around and drink tea. Tea was what my mother and I had each day after school as we sat in the kitchen together, before we did anything else, before we turned on the
TV
or prepared dinner. Tea was how we settled into the evening. It was our private cozy shared intimacy.

All the eyes at my table turned on me. Four girls started talking at once.

“Duh. It's not just tea,” the girl to my left said.

One girl said that it was good practice for social functions we would attend in the future.

The girl to my right said that it would be like a miniature debutante ball, only without boys.

“Rich people go to things like this all the time,” the girl with the bad skin said. I could tell that they were just repeating what they'd heard before I arrived, but their enthusiasm was genuine. The women had finally gotten to them. They'd found the one activity that would make the other girls come alive. Up until the mention of the tea, our Saturdays had been boring. Each time we came, we were forced to play stupid games we hated. One of the sorority women made us play
Jeopardy!
only the questions she made up for us were all in math. Another time, we'd played bingo. Every square on the
board was a fact about their sorority. Sometimes, we didn't play any silly games. We would just gather around one table, knotting and pulling embroidery floss into friendship bracelets. In February, they quizzed us on famous black inventors and scientists. Most sessions ended with them awarding some prize to the winner. Once I won a sachet made of rose-scented potpourri, which I kept in my underwear drawer long after the scent had faded.

Everyone seemed to be excited but me. Girls who were normally despondent, who didn't speak until called upon, were chattering away and making plans that included their fathers. Those that didn't have fathers were borrowing their uncles or grandfathers for the day. I was the only one in the group without someone to escort me as I made my debut. I could see it now. Each girl would make a grand entrance into the rented hall as the ladies called her name. She would leave her father momentarily as she went forward to accept her certificate; then she would return to him and take his arm as he led her to her seat. Each girl but me. I felt sick, imagining how freakish I would look that day, all dressed up with no escort. Instead of a father, I had only the barest description.

“What will our mothers do? Do they have a special role?” the girl with the bad skin asked.

Miss Diane smiled as if it pained her and said, “Your mothers will be there to support and encourage. That's an important enough role for them.”

Another girl asked, “What if mine can't make it? She works weekends.”

This time the leader's smile was genuine. “Then we'll just have to make do.”

Fathers, or male figures, were required. Mothers were optional.

The girl with the bad skin looked at me, eyebrows raised. Neither of us was surprised. The Zeta Alpha Deltas had not been subtle in the least way about their desire to wean us from the women they
didn't want us to become. They kept encouraging us to look beyond our immediate circle, to expand our definition of role model to include women who had made real contributions to the world at large. Women such as themselves.

“Are there are any more questions?” Miss Diane asked.

The girl on my left raised her hand. “Yeah. Why do you all wear blue and red all of the time?”

Miss Diane flushed with pride. She was dressed in a blue pantsuit with a red silk scarf knotted at her throat. “That's a good question, but I can't tell you the answer.”

“How come?” she asked.

“Because only Zeta Alpha Deltas know the answer. These colors are symbolic to our sorority. Perhaps one day, when you're older, you'll join our organization.
Then
you can learn what the colors are all about.”

The official invitation arrived a week later. My mother was in the kitchen making fried fish and festival when I dropped the stack of mail on the table.

After she read the invitation, she got on the phone and called the mothers of some of my girlfriends. Nine of the original twenty-two girls had dropped the program, and my mother now called their mothers to gloat. She didn't come right out and say that she had told them so. Instead, she predicted great things for me, of which this tea was only the first. The Zeta Alpha Deltas would take me under their wings and give me a scholarship when it was time to go to college. Once I got to college, I would pledge their sorority and be connected to all the right people for the rest of my life. Doors would open for me left and right. All because I gave them a few of my Saturdays and was willing to drink tea.

When my mother got off the phone, she announced, “You'll need a dress.”

“Leave me the money, and I'll go down to Pitkin Avenue and get one,” I said. I'd been picking out my clothes for the last year because she was usually too busy to go with me.

She shook her head. “Not a dress from there. It has to be A&S or Macy's.”

“Okay.” I shrugged. “I'll go downtown then.”

“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.