The Atlas of Reds and Blues Page 12

  Without hesitation, Mr. Patel greets his customer. “Mr. Jackson, thank you for coming.” A smile begins its long journey from the lips to the cheeks.

  Mr. Jackson grunts. “My wife said to leave it alone, but I told Missy I had to be ready the next time I got called into work.”

  Mr. Patel turns his back and walks into the fog, disappears.

  Mr. Jackson stares straight ahead, his right hand jangling his car keys. It sounds like a dinner bell, but it is only noon. He will not look at Mother’s face, he will not acknowledge Mother’s very pregnant body.

  Mr. Patel reemerging, with three starched button-down shirts, Oxford blue, and two pairs of khaki trousers, pressed sharply as if cut with a knife. All wrapped in plastic. The reflection from the American flag casting a red-and-white-striped sheen over the plastic and everyone’s faces.

  “Here you go, sir,” he says, his voice calm amid the broken glass.

  “I’ll come back later,” Mr. Jackson says in lieu of thank you, snatching the hangers from Mr. Patel’s hand. “Missy’s got the checkbook. Like she’s going to be able to buy anything today.”

  “The grocery store in Marietta is open until two o’clock,” Mother finds herself saying aloud.

  Mr. Jackson turns toward her. “Where are you from?”

  She opens her mouth.

  But Mr. Jackson rushes in to answer his own question. “It doesn’t matter. You need to get on home, girl.”

  Mother puts her hand on her distended stomach, the baby kicking. The due date is weeks away, and the airports are shut down. She must remain calm and free of labor before Grandmother can fly down to help. She cannot have a baby today. She looks over at Mr. Patel, God Bless America reflecting in his watery eyes. She digs the fingers of her free hand into the bundle of keys on the counter, and uses the other hand to smooth her pink maternity blouse over her stomach. “I am home,” she says as softly as she can.

  Mr. Patel’s head barely shakes a frightened no.

  Mr. Jackson grunts and walks back to his car, unlocks the trunk using his remote. He lays the plastic-enclosed clothes down carefully.

  Mr. Patel reaches below the counter and places a couple of cheap American flag stickers on the counter, near her hand. “You need this,” he says, pushing it toward her. “It’ll help.”

  Mr. Jackson closes the trunk and quickly enters his car, presses the gas, and squeals away from the curb, exhaust smoke curling in the air.

  She pushes them back toward him. “Not at my house,” she says.

  “Please take it,” Mr. Patel says. “Just one for you, then.”

  Mother goes home and finds her hero perched on the arm of the couch, unable to stay seated for long, unable to stand for long, his eyes never leaving the screen, the towers in an endless cycle of crumbling and then standing upright as an airplane flies into one of them, and then crumbling again.

  “Mr. Patel says we should put flag stickers on our cars.” She takes the sticker out of her handbag.

  “We’re American,” her hero says, waving her sentence away as if it were a mosquito.

  She holds it out to him. “No one can tell when I’m driving.”

  He stops, sits, stands up. “I am not going to,” he says.

  “You don’t have to,” she whispers, tucks the sticker back in her bag, and points at his dirty blond hair turning gray. “But I have to.”

  He punches the throw pillow, blue with tiny red flowers embroidered at the edges, with his tight fist. “You shouldn’t have to prove anything,” her hero says. “This is not the America I know, this is not the America I recognize.”

  The baby kicks. She looks at the screen, after the towers have crumbled, survivors covered in white ash and dust walking away, and she touches her stomach.

  &

  Perhaps it is the spectacle of Mother Nature. The special science field trip in the eleventh grade, on the very day her sister misses school because of food poisoning (someone had laced the brownies with Ex-Lax at the neighborhood picnic the afternoon before). A moment of unparalleled beauty. Their physics teacher consults the newspaper, puts sixty of his students on the yellow school bus, finds his driver’s cap. After lunch on a given Monday they are driven for an hour to a particular field of tall grass just outside Greensboro. Like a master magician, he pulls out sixty special Mylar glasses from a black canvas bag. His students use the special devices to track the moon as it crosses over the sun, the last lunar eclipse in the late twentieth century. Even without the glasses, she knows something is happening: as the sky darkens, the birds fall quiet and the air takes on a strange stillness, a second midnight. It is as if each of the clocks in the world folds hands together.

  Namaste.

  The divine light in me sees the divine light in you.

  Several minutes later as light returns, the birds make a furious noise, heralding the day for a second time. Then a whole swarm of them abandon their trees by the edges of the field and fly away. She is sixteen, and almost believes she will never again see anything quite so beautiful.

  &

  Mother stares at the policewoman through dark sunglasses, and watches her lips purse and then give birth to a frown. “It’s for my safety,” the young officer says, pulling out the cuffs. They are standing face-to-face in front of the entrance to the newspaper where Mother chronicles the dead.

  She pauses a second. “You’re going to arrest me for wearing shades?”

  The policewoman shakes her head slightly, and a strand of mouse-brown hair escapes the untidy bun at the nape of her neck. “Stop playing. You know why I’m here.”

  She did not. “I’m going to be late for work.”

  Another officer, a tall, slim man with hair shorn close to his pink head, turns the corner and reaches the two of them—several people glide in and out using the sliding glass doors of the news building and glance at the scene before walking away. She knows none of them, and wishes she could call Editor Dennis.

  “You work in there?” The policewoman laughs. “That’s rich.”

  Her partner pulls out a flyer from his coat pocket and unfolds it. “You’re wanted on three counts of solicitation, and one count of forgery.”

  The muscles in Mother’s face try to rearrange to form a grin, but she knows that humor will not solve this problem, that to laugh would cause them embarrassment, that to laugh would put her own life in danger. “Are you sure?”

  “Well, you’re Angela Wallace, aren’t you?” The policewoman slaps the cuffs against her own palm.

  “No,” she says as calmly as she can, and pronounces her full name slowly. She looks at the partner. “I have my license in my purse.”

  The policewoman stares. “I’m not falling for this again. You’re probably carrying.”

  She sighs. “May I see the flyer?”

  Her editor’s girlfriend, Lynette, walks out of the building for a smoke.

  The policeman turns it toward his partner. On the flyer is a poor-quality color photograph of a dark-skinned woman in an orange jumpsuit, her hazel eyes dead, her skin severely freckled. The only thing Mother has in common with the woman in the picture is the haircut, the feathers and layers.

  The partner barks, “Take off your sunglasses, girl.”

  She takes off her glasses and holds them in the same hand as her car keys.

  Lynette leans in for a look at the flyer. “Are you kidding me?”

  Z IS FOR ZENITH

  . . . in which she teaches herself to make a fist and then with her free hand, thumb through the pages of her dog-eared paperback copy of Siddhartha. Metaphorically speaking . . .

  &

  After prolonged goodbyes, the girls reluctantly allow her hero to drive them to school. He will join later, at the vet’s. Mother takes Greta on her last walk, past the forget-me-nots and late summer roses, to a meadow of wildflowers, one of the last few left unspoiled in the county. The sun rises like a bullet train on schedule. They take a good many steps inside the boundary to take it in, raw life
sashaying red, indigo, and orange; bees practicing scales in the trees on the edge of the field; birds flying in formation as they journey on the super wind highway; butterfly bombardiers, nose-diving into the variable blooms. A cabbage butterfly lands on Greta’s nose, and for the first time in ages, Mother closes her eyes and smiles.

  BRAVE NEW ORDINARY WORLD

  . . . in which she stops to see an extended family of geese flying atop the tree line. The hunters’ guns go off in the distance, the hunters’ horses are re-creating with their synchronized hooves the thunderous heralding before the end-all squall. The dogs are closing in, and she hears a man’s voice call out from behind her, “It won’t be long now.” She is startled awake by the tapping of her shoulder by the red-shirted flight attendant who has Greek blue eyes, asking her to put her seat upright and check her seat belt, in preparation for landing . . .

  &

  She is flying, the air is cool but starting to heat up as she gains speed. She circles the globe so quickly, looks in on her favorite uncle outside Kolkata just sitting down to a cup of tea, mosquitoes hovering just out of range of the incense sticks burning at the religious altar a few feet away, the faces of her maternal grandparents and great-grandparents unsmiling as they peer from their place among the mantel photographs, dots of sandalwood paste ringing each pane of glass—denoting their passage to the next life.

  She is flying and visits the Taj Mahal at night, circling the marble wonder under the light of a pearly moon. An older couple on a bench enjoy the wonder of the world, and she smiles to see her parents sitting side by side.

  She is flying and sees her sister in church, listening to morning mass, her face calm, her eyes clear, crow’s-feet beginning to form at the corners of her almond-shaped eyes.

  She is flying through time and space and at once in the newsroom sitting at her desk watching her editor yell into the telephone and then stagger to the bathroom to cry.

  She is flying and then she is picking up the Middle Daughter from her former school, consoling her for the classmates’ hate. She is flying and taking that daughter to the emergency room, and much later to the soccer supply store, for a brand-new jersey when she makes the team.

  She is flying but getting pulled over for failing to yield at a stop sign that was removed years before, but not losing her dignity as she accepts the citation.

  She is flying and walking her beloved Greta for the first time after the rescue from the shelter, on the sidewalk near her old house; Greta stopping to sniff every bluish hydrangea, every fire hydrant, and every cluster of daffodils at the base of street signposts. Greta, emaciated from neglect but swallowing medicine-laced scrambled eggs without complaint, and living another eleven years.

  She is flying and Clay is smiling and handing her a spatula and telling her to cut herself the biggest slice of her own goodbye cake, since she is leaving that newsroom and the islands for graduate school.

  She is flying and running as fast as she can through the new house, and this time she has caught the Youngest as she bungee jumps off the couch, this time she is successful and gives that sweet girl an extra hug, and later brushes her hair as the Youngest reads aloud The Very Hungry Caterpillar in her soft earnest voice.

  She is flying and bringing home her first child from the hospital, swaddled in a pink blanket and hat, smiling through the pain from emergency surgery, smiling that after eight years of trying she has a baby to bring home.

  She is flying and watching the Eldest flit across the stage at the civic center, a graceful and poised ballerina—the sequins from her costume glisten like stars.

  She is flying and she sees each of her daughters take their first steps, and say their first No!

  She is flying and she and her hero are at the park and she is watching her hero push each of the girls on the swings, and then he puts them on the merry-go-round.

  She is flying and seeing herself, a red-gold bride doll, sit next to her hero, in front of a priest, red thread joining their hands as they marry. Their parents beaming for the cameras.

  She is flying and she sees Henry doodling in the margins of his science notebook, and she marvels at how shiny the copper is in his penny loafers.

  She knows she is still on the driveway, but there she is too, hovering in the doorway to the music room, watching the children take their places on the mini-stage, her girls in matching pink blouses and headbands assuming their positions, smiling at each other. She sees they are looking for her, and for their dad, and she is grateful and calm as the lights are brightened on the stage and lowered for the audience, as if in a movie hall just before the show is set to start. She waits for the teacher to wave her baton, like a conductor, and then she hears their voices—pitch perfect. On key.

  “We’ve Got the Whole World in Our Hands.”

  Someone closes the door midway through the second refrain and she is back on the concrete.

  She is flying and sees her parents at the breakfast table of her childhood, green plastic tablecloth covering the wood, everyone’s faces crease-free.

  She is flying and then walking Greta the last time in that nearby field, the sun shining warmly, and butterflies floating without flight plans.

  &

  She is flying and then she is not. She opens her eyes, sticky with sleep. The sky looms blurry blue and the driveway pavement is already warm to the touch. A tornado near her chest sucks out the oxygen from her lungs, making it harder and harder to breathe. Her body stops its tingling at the pelvic bone, she is rendered a clothed, unmoving torso. Still the keys are cold in her hand. Her phone ringing near her ears. Special wind-chimes ringtone: her hero calling. He is alive. She wants to answer the phone but finds that she cannot. She has never been so thirsty as she is now, as if her mouth has been pulled into a vacuum of sand. The cicadas resume their patterned chirping after the shock of the shot wears off. The trees in the backyard rustle and she imagines the owl turning in for a good day’s sleep. The women in the neighborhood are disappearing; rather their laughter, from the moment before the bullet leaves its chamber, is muted. She hears a dog’s bark grow sharper and louder with each second. Greta bounding toward home. But that cannot be. The agents’ voices are muted and their bodies are just out of her vision though one agent’s shadow dances on her chest.

  The dispatcher on the radio repeating that her hero has been released and is on his way home.

  “Copy that,” one policeman says, his voice dispassionate as if he were reading aloud an entry from an encyclopedia, or from the pages of a telephone book.

  The dispatcher drawls: “The ambulance is a minute out, Hollis.”

  The shadow passes over her face like an eclipse. Its voice says, “It won’t be long now.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Namaste for your love & encouragement. I am inspired by your fearlessness & buoyed by your friendships.

  Many thanks to my agent Reiko Davis & to Meredith Kaffel Simonoff & Adam Schear at DeFiore. Many thanks to Counterpoint Press for embracing this experiment & for inviting me in to their family: my editor Jennifer Alton, and Lena Moses-Schmitt, Megan Fishmann, Miyako Singer, Yuki Tominaga, Jennifer Abel Kovitz, Dory Athey, Hope Levy, Katie Boland, Olenka Burgess, Kelli Adams, Sarah Brody, Nicole Caputo, Elizabeth Yaffe, Wah-Ming Chang, John McGhee, Ian Gibbs, Dan Smetanka & Jack Shoemaker. Special Mahalo to Jane Vandenburgh. Many thanks to Little, Brown UK & Fleet, Ursula Doyle & Rhiannon Smith & the many folks who championed this book across the pond.

  My gratitude to the sea of storytellers with whom I’ve had the pleasure of journeying: please forgive me if some of your names have escaped my memory. Mahalo (in no particular order): My wonderful friends at the Book Writing World, and especially the early birds who sifted through the sand with me: Jan Nussbaum, Maureen Fan, Robert Ward, Bree LeMaire, Julie Rappaport, Jacqueline Luckett, Felicia Ward, Claudia Royal, Lea Page, Sabina Khan-Ibarra, Janet Thornburg, Melanie Lee, Thais Derich, David Woolbright, Vijaya Nagarajan. Thanks to Emily Fernandez, Molly Fisk, Lise G
oett, Ashaki Jackson, Wendy C. Ortiz, Ruth LeFaive, Nina Rota, Leila Sinclaire; and thanks to all of Las Lunas Locas. Many thanks to my friends from Under the Volcano, a special shout-out to the 2013 food writers. Mahalo Claire Calderon, Vanessa Martir & her WOL class; Connie Pertuz-Meza, M. C. Gee, Merna Dyer Skinner, Ewa Chrusciel, Deborah Krainin, Jensea Storie, Dawn McGuire, Jenny Liou; Panorama’s David I. Osu & Amy Gigi Alexander; Tupelo friends, especially Kirsten Miles & D. G. Geis. Merci beaucoup to FMWG + B: Sejal Patel, Barbara Ridley, Catherine Linn, Diane Demeter, JoAnne Tompkins, Sue Granzella, Mark Nassutti, Stan Berry, Kim S. Rogers, Chivvis Moore & Blaze Farrar. Thanks to Lane Mitchell, Beth Lyon, Vicki Ferris, MAG Alumni & Friends, Kathy Scruggs, Ellen East, Laura W. Lessnau, Scott Marshall, Maria Lameiras, Lea McLees, Helen Bhattacharyya, Lance Cleland. Special love to Angie Powers, Nanou Matteson, Dorothy Hearst & Lucy Jane Bledsoe.

  Thank you so much Jean Kwok, Victor LaValle, Ken Foster, Laura Juliet Wood, Kiran Desai, Julie Otsuka, Sylvia Foley, Janet Harvey, Joanna Greenfield, Raul Correa, Andes Hruby, Jennifer Lucas, Emmy Perez, Jennifer Franklin, Desmond Barry, Molly Shapiro, Crystal Reiss, Christian Langworthy, Linne Ha, Jill Bossert, Mike & Sylvia McGregor, Tzivia Gover & most especially Amanda Gersh. Thank you CWSV Crazy 8s & Alex Espinoza, Julie Bolt & Al Young’s fiction class, Colleen Morton Busch & Gill Dennis’s morning crew, Annette Schiebout, Lisa Alvarez & Brett Hall Jones. Mahalo HSB family & especially Terry Luke, Cynthia Oi, Rod Ohira, Melissa Vickers, Becky Ashizawa, Greg & Norene Ambrose & especially Linda Hosek. Mahalo Bahbra Boykin & Larry Smith in Illinois, Louise Windsor & Anne V. Martino in Florida.