At Risk (12 page)

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.

“Keep your head down so you won’t get dizzy,” Linda Gleason says.

Linda runs water in another basin and dampens some paper towels, which she hands to Polly. Polly wipes her face. She has soiled her blouse, and as she tries to clean it off with the paper towels her hands shake.

“Damn it,” Polly says.

Linda Gleason takes out a cigarette and lights it. “This is against the rules,” she tells Polly. “Don’t tell anyone the principal has three cigarettes a day.”

Polly sits down on the rim of the basin, not caring if her skirt gets wet.

“They’re afraid,” Linda Gleason says. “They’ll do anything to protect their children. How would you feel if your healthy child sat next to someone with AIDS in class? You’d worry that the scientists were wrong, that they’d discover the virus was much more communicable than they’d thought.”

“I’d have pity on that sick child!” Polly says. “I wouldn’t be afraid of a little girl!”

“You’d think about the possibilities of infection, no matter how irrational. Look, it’s your child, your healthy child sitting there. You’d have to be an angel and not a mother if you didn’t worry. And that’s how many of the parents will feel.”

Polly and Linda Gleason look at each other.

“Whose side are you on?” Polly asks.

“I’m on the side of my students,” Linda Gleason says.

“I see,” Polly says.

“And Amanda’s one of my students.”

Polly wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “What are you, an angel or a principal?”

“Both,” Linda Gleason says.

“She’s staying,” Polly says. “I don’t care if she’s the only student in the school, she’s staying. I’m not going to take that away from her, too.”

Linda Gleason finishes her cigarette, then runs it under the water and tosses the butt in the wastebasket. They go out of the girls’ room together, and as they walk back to the administration office they pass a first-grade art board that the teacher has already decorated with pumpkins and falling leaves. Don’t let it ever be October, Polly thinks to herself. Go backward, through August, July, June, May, and April. We don’t care if we ever see autumn again.

By the time Linda Gleason gets home it is almost midnight. Her children, a ten-year-old named Kristy and seven-year-old Sam, have long been asleep. Her husband, Martin, is watching
The Tonight Show
in bed, trying to force himself to wait up for her.

Linda stops in the kitchen, though she can hear the hum of the TV and knows Martin’s awake. Peepers, their cat, rubs against her legs when she opens the refrigerator. She finds a beer, gets out a container of chopped chicken liver, then some crackers from the bread box, and throws it all onto a tray, which she carries into the bedroom.

“Hi,” Martin says groggily. He sits up in bed and surveys the collection of food. “Are you pregnant?” he asks.

“Don’t talk to me,” Linda says. She sits on the edge of the bed and tears open the package of crackers.

Martin slides over next to her. “That bad?”

Linda rolls her eyes and realizes she’s forgotten a knife. She scoops out some chopped liver with her finger and smears it on a cracker. Then she is revolted. It’s not that she’s hungry, she’s sick to her stomach.

“Which kid is it?” Martin says.

“Amanda Farrell,” Linda tells him. “She’s going into sixth grade. Top gymnast.”

Martin doesn’t remember hearing Linda talk about this student before; she usually brings home stories about the ones in trouble.

“The school board’s going to raise hell,” Linda says. “I’ve got calls in to principals in Connecticut and New Jersey who’ve gone through this.”

“You’ll do the right thing,” Martin says.

Linda is filled with love for him; he has such faith not only in her but in goodness. She gets up and puts the tray of food on top of the dresser. If the cat does not get to it, it will still be there for her to put away in the morning.

“What if there is no right thing to do?” she asks when she gets into bed beside him.

“You’ll invent it,” Martin assures her.

In the morning, when Linda goes to get the tray on her dresser, she also turns on the radio. That’s how she finds out that several protesters, calling themselves the Community Action Coalition, have begun to distribute fliers warning parents of the consequences of having an AIDS patient in a public elementary school. Linda listens to the words the announcer is saying, but she’s thinking that something must have gone wrong with her hearing; this happens in Florida, it happens far out in the middle of the country where people frighten more easily than they do in Morrow. Linda has always thought of herself as a peacemaker; she’s walked a fine line as principal and she’s done her best to make everyone happy. That will soon be impossible. Whatever decisions she makes from now on will make someone miserable, although who, Linda Gleason wonders. could possibly be more miserable than Amanda’s parents when they switch on the news and discover what’s out there?

Ivan reacts to the protesters the best way he knows how. He throws out the newspaper and unplugs the radio.

“Don’t think about it,” he tells Polly. “Don’t respond to it at all.”

It’s Saturday, and Ivan plans to take them all out to breakfast. They always go to a coffee shop called The Station, which has great home fries and blueberry pancakes, but now Ivan says he wants to try a diner he’s heard about in Gloucester, famous for its French toast. He would never admit to Polly or anyone else that he just has to get out of Morrow, at least for an hour. In Gloucester no one will know them; they’ll be just one more family ordering breakfast, asking for refills of coffee and an extra order of rye toast.

Polly gets dressed, she even puts on some blush, but once the kids are out in the car she tells Ivan she has a headache. She can’t go.

“Don’t stay here alone,” Ivan says at the door.

“I’ll be fine,” Polly tells him. “I’ll do the laundry.”

“Polly, come with us,” Ivan says. He’s begging her for something, and she doesn’t have anything to give him.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Polly says. “Will you just go!”

He lets the screen door slam. Polly waits until she’s certain he won’t come back; then she goes around to every window and pulls down the shades or draws the curtains. She can’t stop thinking about wasted time. She wants to scoop up all the hours teenage suicides give up and claim them for Amanda. The telephone rings, and Polly lets it go on ringing. It is probably that horrible group who want to keep Amanda out of school, or her father, who’s been driving her insane. Al wants to come up with Claire for a weekend, a couple of days, maybe a few weeks. While Polly is dragging Amanda to the hospital for blood tests, Al will shoot a few baskets with Charlie; Claire will cook a stew. It’s the last thing in the world Polly wants. She’s always on guard when her parents visit—if she weren’t she might tell them what she thought of them—and she doesn’t have the energy to keep up her guard. If Claire and Al came up to stay, the children would know how bad things really are, and Polly will do just about anything to make their lives appear normal. She plans each meal for high nutritional value, carefully gauging how much Amanda eats of her lamb chop, her broccoli, her butterscotch pudding. She tells the children their rooms are a mess, when she no longer cares at all, and insists they pick up after themselves. She reminds Charlie to take out the garbage, and she always stacks the supper dishes so Amanda can load the dishwasher. But all the time she’s following their daily routine, what she’d like to do is hide both of her children and build a wall of cinderblocks around them so nothing can harm them.

The phone continues to ring, and Polly looks at it, imagining that it might explode. There’s no one she wants to speak to, but the ringing drives her mad. What if it’s Ed Reardon? What if he’s discovered that Amanda’s blood sample was mismarked at the lab and it’s someone else’s child who has tested positive? Polly picks up the phone and knows in an instant that she’s made a mistake.

Her father.

“We want to come up for a visit this week,” Al says.

He acts as though they haven’t been through this a dozen times before.

“Daddy,” Polly says tiredly.

“Your mother can pack a suitcase, including wrapping everything in tissue paper, in ten minutes flat.”

This is no idle threat, Polly has seen her mother do it.

“Absolutely not,” Polly says.

“Next weekend,” Al says. “We’ll drive up Friday night.”

“I’m going to hang up on you,” Polly tells him.