The Atlas of Reds and Blues Read online

  In her hero’s absence: too many channels on the radio and television but nothing really worth watching or listening to, too many news stories about wars and famine and desolation, too many flora and fauna reaching extinction, too many thoughts, too many good intentions, too many regrets, too many words left to write. Not enough hours. There’s all that.

  Then there’s the black hole in her stomach expanding every time she hears or reads about the wars and famine and the extinctions, the road rages, the police state emerging, routine traffic stops that turn into massacre, the Bible Belt expanding at the waistline of the data-obese nation, a cacophony of voices rebuking. The voices are inside her mind but sound suspiciously like her grammar teacher in the seventh grade, Mrs. Griffith, who failed her for correcting the teacher’s aide’s grammar; and then her ninth-grade science teacher, Mrs. Whitfield, who did not like her and made a point of telling her so every class period. “When are you going back to your own country? When?” She wonders what circle of Dante’s hell the world will resemble when her daughters are grown.

  She turns the page of the borrowed book and begins to read.

  &

  A dog’s sharp bark reverberates. A dog that is hungry.

  &

  She wants to write, and does. She turns down the volume on the radio, so she can concentrate. All that flows from her pen is a memory, a moment that she can appreciate only now that she’s miles and years from it:

  Quiet as the forest in the heat of the day. A long moment of respite from the toys and the games and the preparations and the activities and the cleanups. This house, this old house, cool in the summer and cooler in the winter, the babies all sleeping, their stomachs slightly distended from their midday meals, the bottles of milk they gravitate to the way sunflowers do every morning, as they stand tall and face the sun. She listens on their monitors and hears their gentle snores and puts a finger to her lips as her shepherd smiles; shepherd’s teeth showing as she shakes herself awake and wanders through the doors shaped like Old West saloon doors, and sniffs her bowl, looking for something else to eat. Her hero home from another overseas journey, snoring in his bed, shades drawn. She follows her shepherd into the kitchen and pulls out a bowl of cut fruit from the fridge, a bowl of leftover brown rice and chicken curry out of the beeping microwave. She shares with her shepherd, laughing as she tosses a cube of cantaloupe high into the air and Greta leaps perfectly and swallows her prize whole.

  &

  The wind rubbernecks and she shivers on the driveway.

  &

  He is helping her into the white dress with eyelet flowers. The hospital room walls are white, too, as are the bars of fluorescent light overhead. “It doesn’t matter.” He zips her up.

  She cries as she steps into the matching sandals, and bends down ever so slightly to pick up her purse from the foot of the raised bed. “It means everything.”

  He shakes his head. “No,” he says, his blond hair uncombed, blond stubble on his cheeks. “It’s just one thing.”

  Children are the most precious gifts a couple can give to each other, she can hear her grandmother’s voice echoing in Bengali from long ago. Don’t wait too long. “Our families,” she says, counting to herself more than six and a half years since their grand wedding in India. “Everyone will be disappointed.”

  He shrugs. “We have Greta.”

  She laughs and her stomach hurts. “I don’t think our parents had that in mind as a legacy.”

  He smiles. “We’re happy, right?”

  She shivers, she nods.

  “Then we have everything.” He holds open the door. “I’m not worried.”

  She swallows. “My hero.”

  &

  An owl hoots a second question, then falls silent as the armed agents stomp on the grass and through the front door, their boots unsynchronized percussion.

  &

  The Youngest Daughter, who says she wants to live in the backyard under a pair of presently perished and pulped cedars, asks, “Can I go back to my room now?” It is a muggy July 4, and the mosquitoes are the size of monarch butterflies. Never mind that the Youngest throws the mother of all temper tantrums twice a day—a package deal complete with shouting and pelting objects, like her Queen of Hearts deck of cards, across the room, pegging the Eldest Daughter squarely between the eyes. Never mind that she wakes up the Middle Daughter from a much-needed nap and causes Mother’s brain to explode in a migraine. Never mind that she takes a sticky note with important phone numbers out of her father’s hands, balls it up, and pops it in her mouth for a quick snack. Never mind that her parents are ready to put each other up for adoption rather than listen to their child complain once more.

  Never mind that five days after the move into the new house lightning strikes the two cedar trees in the backyard, jumps the electric fence that was especially installed to keep the dog from running away (once she is brought home from the kennel), and leaves a gaping wound in the garage—no power, no telephone, no TV, no Internet, no way to close the garage doors, no way to keep things cold in the fridge, no way to wash clothes, no alarm, no normalcy until a brigade of repairmen complete their tasks and everything sort of looks like it did before.

  Except for the trees.

  &

  She cannot see, her eyes will not open. But her ears work overtime, and she listens: the sound of the policemen’s bodies walking past her toward the smooth asphalt street. “Sir? Sir? Yes, you. What’s your name? Kurt? Curtis? . . . Okay, Curtis, please set up your equipment right over there. Sir? On the sidewalk. That’s public property.”

  &

  The new neighborhood, a subdivision gated by iron and brick, is shaped like a Picasso body. Two dozen houses make up the cubist form. It’s the esophagus, a cul-de-sac with a small man-made lake that is the scene of a strange fire one Tuesday night.

  Three separate fire trucks come as well as two ambulances. Yet only a wisp of smoke and no official fire. No one at home and no indication that anybody actually lives there full-time—no clothes in the closets, no toys or books in the children’s rooms, no crumbs or untidiness to indicate a day-to-day existence. Some wooden furniture, a few cups and dishes in the kitchen cupboards. But the inside looks like a Barbie time-share condominium by the beach, not a family home in the neighborhood. Of course, the neighbors turn out for this spectacle. No one says anything, no one answers her question, asked in a myriad of ways: What happened here? All avert their eyes as she turns her head from one side of the crowd to the other, to gaze upon them, to see them, to be seen. Yet no one sees, no one chooses to see.

  &

  The question can be stripped bare, a striped white line on the highway separating those stuck in traffic from those who are flying down the road: Has anything of significance changed in the last forty-three years?

  &

  The family is at the new park on Sunday afternoon. All three girls are side by side on the swings and her man of the hour, who has made blueberry pancakes for breakfast and homemade extra-cheese pizza for lunch, is also a master swing pusher. He pushes all three girls while she holds up Olympic-style scores for each push on the back of her notebook paper. Every push is scored a 10. He is leaving for a two-week stint in Japan the following day.

  “You’re easy to please,” he says, laughing.

  “My hero,” she says. “Every push you give is one less push I have to give.”

  A couple with a toddler boy walk by, put their child in the last baby swing on the end. The woman turns to her hero and says, “What pretty girls you have.”

  He winks at his wife. “Thank you.”

  Mother asks the other woman, “How old is your child?”

  “This one is almost two, and we have an older boy over there,” the other mother says, pointing with her pale hand, a diamond glistening on her ring finger, matching the studs in her ears.

  A game of playground math. “How old is he?”

  The other woman says a number then laughs, and corrects
herself. “Well, he’ll be that old next Tuesday when he has his birthday party.”

  “She’s that age,” Mother says, pointing to the Youngest.

  “She’s so petite,” the woman says. She looks over all of them, again. “They’re all so petite. I bet it’s all tea parties and dolls and sugar at your house.”

  Her hero smiles. “We do have our share of trucks and blocks and robots,” he says, continuing to push.

  “You’re so outnumbered. Are you going to try for a son now?”

  “No,” he answers. “I like being the only king of the house.”

  “You say that now, but don’t you want to play football with your son one day? Don’t you want to be able to watch him play?”

  He smiles slowly, and the smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Thanks to Title Nine, I can watch my girls play the other futbol, I can cheer them on.”

  Mother feigns a yawn to mask her smile. Her hero is so unlike everyone else in her personal and professional orbit.

  INCITING INCIDENTS

  . . . in which the narrator attempts to decide which particular incident set her on the path of this particular life story, concrete driveway and all, without sprinkling regret and bitterness over everything upon which she stews, without uttering the word no . . .

  &

  Possibly the exact moment the mustached state policeman, in monogrammed Kevlar and matching navy pants, stands in her driveway and points his assault rifle at her head on a cloudless morning in May, right after she took the girls to school, before she has her shower, and while she is still wearing her brown “Hard Work Never Killed Anyone But Why Risk It?” T-shirt and gray sweatpants.

  Possibly one minute later when she counts the number of police and the number of automatic guns on her front lawn: all weapons at the ready as if she would cower before them or be impressed at the demonstration of force or be more inclined to listen to their list of demands.

  Possibly a moment not too much later when the firecrackers are unexpectedly displayed, and she finds herself on the ground, bleeding.

  &

  Perhaps it is in the space of the moment two years before the men in bulletproof vests show up, when the vet stares at her directly in the eye and says, “You have to put her down.” Dr. Graham’s tone is quiet the way her subdivision remains hushed during the school day when the neighborhood kids aren’t around yelling at one another about who cheated whom in some sketchy game of chance.

  The three of them in a room the size of a broom closet. Chilled by the AC like the morgue.

  As if she could ever kill Greta.

  As if she could ever have her killed.

  “It’s not that bad,” she says. She is Greta’s human mother. She and her hero rescued Greta a decade before.

  The vet’s face is pale and her eyes drop down to the tired Mother’s thighs as the German shepherd inches closer, panting in the cold room, the cold tip of her nose touching the pant leg. “Just look at her,” Dr. Graham says. “Really look.”

  She, the human mother, the rescuer, drops down to her knees and catalogs what Greta endures without sound—paws curling in from a degenerative disease, toenails bleeding, naps longer and longer, coat shedding in large clumps, meals imaginary.

  Greta licks her lips and plants her mom a kiss.

  &

  Or, years earlier, the moonless night before she goes into labor for the first time, the air thick with mosquitoes. Hands, face, and feet swollen from gestational diabetes. She wears flip-flops everywhere, the police precincts, the courthouses she covers, and the newsroom where she works as a journalist. For months, all jewelry had been off her hands, ears, and neck to quell the tide of swelling, the tide that never ebbs. The dangerous pregnancy and its forty daily admonitions and precautions always looping in succession in her mind. Labor Day weekend, 1998. After work, she lives in black stretch pants and a maternity T-shirt that has a cartoon picture of Garfield on it because those are the only two comfortable things she owns.

  It is close to midnight and neither her husband nor she can sleep. So humid that even the crickets in the Georgia thickets stop chirping to conserve personal energy. They decide to watch a movie, but notice there is no popcorn, her only ob-gyn-approved snack, left in the pantry. She volunteers to go to the 24-hour grocery a few miles away to lap up the hyper-air-conditioned air, while her husband, her hero, tries his luck at renting Titanic.

  A beached whale trying to navigate the aisles with a shopping cart, she remembers to take advantage of her human hands. She enjoys the forced air-conditioning, relishes the empty aisles and stocked shelves. She picks out her popcorn, and for her husband she chooses a variety of tasty garbage including a pint of ice cream that is called, appropriately enough, Coma by Chocolate.

  One checkout lane open. Manned by a man named Manny who, according to his name tag, is the night manager. She looks like she is carrying some sort of obscene food baby ex utero, chips and popcorn for the torso and legs, chocolate chip cookies for the pair of arms joined together, and ice cream for the head.

  He gawks. “Ma’am, do you know about prenatal care? There are some vitamins on Aisle Twelve, next to the baby wipes.”

  She turns around but finds herself alone. “Excuse me?”

  He cocks his head. “Hables español?”

  “What?” She gulps. “Yes, but . . . no.”

  “Ma’am, you need to put back the chips and the ice cream, and drink some milk.”

  She attempts to clamp shut her jaw but fails. “It’s for my husband.”

  “Are you kidding me?” He pounds his fist on the price scanner. “What kind of man allows his pregnant wife to go to the store in the middle of the night?”

  “I didn’t want to go to the video store.” She swipes the credit card. “It smells in there.”

  He grunts. “Are you sure you’re married?”

  A small hiccup of laughter escapes. “Why?”

  “Where’s your ring?” His stare almost a glare. “People will talk.”

  “At home.”

  “Where’s your house?” His finger wags near her face.

  “Three miles that way,” she says, pushing away his hand.

  “Do you have a doctor?”

  “Actually, I have two.” She signs the promissory note and waits. “And I have a medical condition that prevents me from eating anything after dinner, except for this popcorn I’ve bought.”

  “Bless your heart, ma’am,” he says. “I’m just concerned for you.”

  Huh. “That’s excruciatingly touching.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Can I have my receipt now? Please?” Nothing has changed. The dolls are still judged. She is thirty-one years, ten months, and six days old.

  &

  Perhaps it is the last day she is a resident of Manhattan. Two glorious years in New York, graduate school, she and Emily and Lydia practically inseparable. She leaves the last two boxes of books—poetry, biography, some novels, a coffee-table book on the history of art—on the doorstep of another classmate, Sarah, who is lucky to live near the Seinfeld diner year-round. Emily waits at the nearby coffeehouse, for the final goodbye, to cement the promise that they’d always be sisters, that they’d stay in touch. Her flight to California is later that night. Lydia is leaving the following day, for Chicago; and she is heading to Georgia, with the official designation as trailing spouse. The Real Thing walks into the shop, and finds Emily alone at the table set for three. “Where’s Ly?”

  Emily grimaces. “She couldn’t stay.”

  “What? She’s not going to say goodbye?”

  “Not everyone is good at goodbye,” Emily says. “Not everyone is as practiced as you.”

  &

  Or, years later, after she moves them from the city to homogeneous suburbia, cookie-cutter identical for everyone but her. No one answers their doors when mother and daughters march up and down the cul-de-sac and ring the doorbells, homemade brownies in hand. Not only do the new neighbors not come o
ver to see if they are all right after the lightning strikes the new house, none of them bother to say welcome. No chicken casseroles forthcoming, no chocolate chip or oatmeal cookies, no smiles. They, the family, wait patiently, every day, like maiden aunts at a charity dance, waiting to be asked to waltz.

  No one calls.

  &

  Or the inciting incident might have begun when the Real Thing was really young. No one else in that part of North Carolina wants a brown-skinned doll with big brown eyes and black curls soft as silk ribbons. “She looked just like you. You were the same size,” her own mother says. “I had to get her.”

  It is 9 p.m., Tuesday night. Her father behind the wheel of a used Chevy Nova, metallic green. Her mother riding shotgun. No car seats back then. So the Real Thing is sitting in her mother’s lap and the baby doll is sitting in the Real Thing’s lap. Dawn-pink dress, dusk-blue sash.

  Inverted nesting dolls.

  “Green lights all the way home,” her mother likes to say. Her parents congratulating each other on their good fortune, a quick trip home. Except that the traffic light at the intersection of Franklin Street and Estes Drive turns yellow and then bright red before her father can react. He presses the brake hard, hard, hard. All the dolls fly. The Real Thing and her doll springboard from laps to crack the windshield.