The Atlas of Reds and Blues Read online

  “I was wearing white,” her mother says. “By the time we got to the hospital, it was red-and-pink batik.”

  The Real Thing has ten stitches and a concussion, and the doll loses her head.

  &

  Maybe, just maybe, it all starts one morning in the fall semester, 1986, when she meets her man of the hour and coins her nickname for him. The starting line for the hard looks and comments that will follow them for the next twenty-four years, strangers unhappy when they hold hands or kiss in public. That Friday, the leaves burnishing gold and crimson and copper among the evergreens, the air brisk even in the afternoon. It is her turn to feed the meter, not just for her clunker, but for her roommate, Donna, as well. The meter maids on campus have been cracking down and the Real Thing knows she cannot afford yet another parking ticket. She is in danger of losing her car, her parents had warned her it would be confiscated if one more parking offense reached their mailbox, and without her car, well, she will lose her part-time job as a newbie reporter in the local bureau of the second-largest newspaper in the state of North Carolina.

  Her English professor, Dr. Shelley, had let them out late, nine and a half minutes late. An entire semester devoted to the verses of John Donne, one ecstatic poem after the other, a graduation requirement. The professor’s voice more irritating than her fuchsia-painted nails that accidentally scratch the chalkboard as she writes out her lecture during class. In her haste to reach the cars before the meter maids do, the Real Thing trips over a brick paver by the planetarium entrance and the quarters fly from her fingers into the labyrinth of rosebushes. She spies one, and scratches her left arm on the thorns as she retrieves it.

  The meter maid is six, maybe seven, cars away from her hatchback but only a few cars from her roommate’s. Her trot turns into a jog, backpack slung over one shoulder, toward her roommate’s white Chevy Cavalier. She stops at the car, and notices that beside it is its twin. The meter maid is two cars away. She dashes to the back of the car, but the license plates are virtually the same, and each car is sporting identical university magnets and business school logos.

  The meter maid is close enough that the Real Thing could reach out and touch her cap. She reaches the meter, and puts in the quarter, and buys another hour.

  “Thank you for rescuing my cadaver,” a voice says by her ear.

  “What?” She looks up to see the chiseled jaw, the brightest blue eyes, a bemused grin. “Wait, did I pay for your car?”

  “Yes,” he says, and introduces himself, tells her he’s named the car a cadaver because it often fails to start in cold weather. “Are you okay? I saw you fall back there.”

  The Real Thing feels a cinnamon-red blush flooding her face. “I’m trying to beat the meter maid, for my roommate.”

  “Allow me,” he says, and fishes for something in his pocket but comes up empty. The grin fades as he looks on the ground and on the curb. “Damn it.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asks, aware of the meter maid inching closer.

  “I thought I had an extra coin or two,” he says, then looks closely at a spot just above her shoulder. He tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and produces a quarter, tucks another strand, and produces three. “I knew they were here somewhere.”

  He feeds one of the quarters into Donna’s Chevy.

  The Real Thing laughs. “You’re the man of the hour!” She snatches the remaining coins from his hand and runs to her car, feeds her own meter as well as the meters of the cars on either side of her. She looks back to see her new friend speaking to the meter maid, a small white package in his hand, and then the maid hopping back into her vehicle and moving toward the exit. She walks back to him. “What did you say to her?”

  He shrugs and shows her his roll of quarters. “I promised her I’d feed everyone’s meter.”

  She wonders why he has this money, and remembers the arcade just down the block. “And she believed you?”

  His smile holds the glow of a campfire in the deep woods.

  She pictures herself as a moth.

  “She’s coming back in fifteen minutes, to check.” He breaks the roll in half. “You’ll keep me honest, right?”

  She takes her half of the stack.

  &

  Perhaps it’s when an older boy, Michael, follows Middle Daughter around during first-grade recess on the school playground, pushes her down in the hallway near the library, bumps her elbow in the cafeteria, calls her names that allude to the darker side of the color spectrum, calls her a coconut, white on the inside, for even wanting to attend this fancy Southern school. Michael gets on the cross-campus bus that transports the children to and from the school gymnasium and natatorium three days each week and sits behind her and taunts.

  Middle Daughter announces her decision to forgo education for a life of flight. “I’ll just go to the moon sooner than I thought,” she says, breaking open a chocolate cookie and crumbling the sweet white frosting between her fingers. On TV, news anchors are showing NASA’s photographs of the Phoenix soft landing on Mars.

  “You have to finish high school, college, graduate school, a stint in the Air Force, and then NASA training,” Mother says. She takes a sip of the black coffee and puts down the cup.

  Middle Daughter’s lower lip juts out, the cookie crumbles on the tabletop. “I just can’t go to school anymore, not while HE is there.”

  Mother’s heart crumbles too. “Can I tell Daddy now? Please?”

  She shakes her head, unable to speak.

  &

  Perhaps it is the day of the Eldest’s first bharatanatyam dance recital. Her hero is trying to fly back in time from Germany, but there is a severe snowstorm blanketing Western Europe and many flights have been delayed or canceled. The other daughters are quite small, and wearing matching red outfits in contrast to their big sister, who is wearing a blue sari, pleated and pinned just so. Everyone else is there, her in-laws, her parents, even the Baby Sister. So many hands offering to hold the babies, or fix the Eldest’s makeup or hair. Mother uses her best honeyed voice, urging them to go sit on their grandparents’ laps, play with their aunt. But the girls won’t budge off Mother’s lap, three girls refusing to concede, ignoring all the other adults, pulling each other’s hair, crying loudly when they hear their father’s voice on the speakerphone apologizing for the delay.

  In the end, the little sisters are put to bed early and miss the recital, and the grandparents stay home to care for them, two grandparents for each little girl.

  The Baby Sister and the Real Thing sit side by side in the first row, the Real Thing photographing every movement, the grace and ease with which the Eldest glides across the center of the stage.

  &

  Or when Editor Dennis sits her down for a talk, about a year after Greta dies. His homemade sweater vest stretches tightly across his nachos-and–Burger King stomach, which hangs like a precipice over his beige trousers. His hair is combed over but doesn’t hide his soft pink scalp.

  “It’s nothing personal,” the boss says.

  His glasses are dark brown like what’s left of his hair, and the lenses are thick like the glass bottom of a soda bottle. “You’ve always been able to adjust.”

  She is being demoted. As if that’s even possible, since she is already part-time and working every miserable shift that no one else wants. She tries to remain stone-faced, looks past him toward the corridor, and sees that her game is up. Everyone is coming and going, the restrooms are Grand Central Station, so many faces and bodies that should be hurrying, hurrying, but no one is actually moving. Everybody is in the corridor, looking at her. Waiting. The watcher is being watched.

  She coughs into her clenched fist. “What does this mean?”

  Dennis shrugs. “You’ll be more ‘on call’ with the news desk. I’m having to loan you out, they’re shorthanded the next couple of months.”

  She calmly points out that she has children. Their smiles are frozen on her bulletin board. Her schedule is set in concrete. They canno
t be left waiting in front of their schools. She is nothing if not religiously punctual. She has always beat the deadline.

  The boss jiggles his right leg, his particular sign that he is nervous and needs to go outside for a smoke. The sweater vest is wiggling in time. “You don’t have to work here, you know.”

  She forces her shoulders back. “I’m the best reporter you have for this job.”

  He smiles. “Yes,” he concedes. He pulls out a cigarette and a bright blue lighter. He lights the cigarette, it smells like cloves. Not his usual brand. She glances past him again, toward the corridor, and sees that the crowd has largely dispersed. Yet the assistant copy editor for the night staff is staring intently. Her golden hair is pulled back into a French braid. Mother stumbles through a corridor of memory, and tries to catch the copy editor’s name.

  Lyn. No, not quite. Lynette. Lynette, who couldn’t hold her liquor at the Christmas party two years before, who threw up in the women’s bathroom shortly before midnight, but kept drinking, kept dancing by herself to the live band, long after the couples had left.

  She waves at Lynette, and says to her boss, “I think your friend is waiting for you.”

  His face turns as pink as his scalp. “They can’t fire me for smoking.”

  “But they can fire you for smoking inside.”

  He laughs, then coughs. He stands up and waves toward the City Desk. The sweater vest is bunched up over his stomach, like a toddler’s. “You’re wanted over there.”

  She waits until he and Lynette get on the elevator. She looks into the eyes of her children, frozen on the bulletin board, and touches their sweet, smiling faces. She pushes her chair back into the desk, begins walking, past the evacuation routes posted on the wall, in case the building is on fire. The only time she’s ever seen anyone study them was on 9/11, when the national reporters crowded around the placards and pointed with their chewed-up ballpoints. “Maybe they got out, maybe they got out. Look at these directions, they’re very detailed.”

  None of their friends got out that day. She remembers that it was her last day in the newsroom before the second maternity leave, her boss at the time unhappy he had to give her eight weeks off. “I don’t know if I can hold the job,” he’d said. “There are six people here who want it.” But the job was waiting for her when she returned. She’d hung on.

  &

  Perhaps when the women in the neighborhood refuse to look at her. She remembers driving past them. She remembers them averting their heads. Before she reached her driveway she ping-pongs between the idea that she is driving to her death, and that she is a widow—that her hero had already driven to his demise. Then a short time later, the owl that has been hanging out in the backyard emitting its third hoot-hoot at the sound of the shot. She cannot open her eyes but the heat of the sun is crawling down her body, and the pain in her stomach persists. She hears the neighborhood women’s familiar-unfamiliar voices and pictures them watching the spectacle like a reality-TV show.

  She jumps to the moment years before when she was sitting down to watch an interview on the employee lounge TV, in her lap the sandwich her hero had packed that morning, Iberian ham with sharp white Vermont cheddar. She unwraps the wax paper and lifts the sandwich to take a bite, when the cell phone rings. Her hero. She answers and he is in a rush to speak, does not bother with a greeting: “Please tell me you haven’t had lunch yet.”

  She answers that she is about to take her first bite, and she can hear the relief in his laughter.

  “Don’t,” he pleads. “I forgot to take the paper off the cheese.”

  Apparently thin nearly translucent squares of white paper were inserted in between the white cheddar slices, for convenience in separation of one part from the whole.

  “My hero,” she says, “my hero sandwich.” She giggles, removes the top slice of bread, takes the white paper off the cheese and most of the mayo with it.

  “You dodged a bullet,” he says. “You could have choked.”

  She starts to laugh but stops. “Is that what happened to you?”

  &

  In this new neighborhood the wives take baths (not showers), put on pumps, and apply mascara just to retrieve the morning newspapers from the edge of the driveway or check the mail before their children come home from school. Their husbands take notice of other things, and leave curt messages duct-taped to the front door of Mother’s house. Her man of the hour is usually not home, he is usually out of town for work. But her man of the hour happens to be at home when the latest note about their failings as residents of the subdivision, on cut yellow Post-it, is posted.

  “We have to be nice,” he says, softly, as he sits down next to her on the couch. “We agreed to follow their rules when we moved here.”

  Greta is by the fireplace, and she opens her eyes. She wags her tail weakly but does not sit up.

  “A lightning strike. We couldn’t close the doors to the garage.” Mother pokes holes in the yellow Post-it with a ballpoint pen. “Everything was broken.”

  Her hero turns on the TV and finds a college basketball game. “They don’t care.”

  She looks at the box, the score is tied. “But we couldn’t park in the driveway. The repairmen were parked there.” The pen breaks the skin of the paper and goes through.

  He starts to channel surf. “They don’t care.”

  She puts her hand out and they trade, note and pen for remote. “They didn’t even check on us when we were hit! We could have had a fire. We could have died.”

  He crumples the paper into a ball and puts the cap back on the pen, and then juggles them high into the air. Greta takes notice and her head follows the paper ball like an avid tennis fan at Wimbledon.

  Mother finds The Wizard of Oz, it is the moment that Dorothy falls asleep in the field of poppies. Greta rises and wobbles to Mother’s side of the couch, sits back down again. They all watch in silence until a mouthwash commercial interrupts the film just as Dorothy and her companions enter the Emerald City.

  Her hero sighs. Maybe in resignation. “If we fight this, we’ll end up in court. They’ll have the law, and then we’ll have to apologize and we’ll have to pay a fine.”

  They trade again. She tucks the pen behind her ear, and makes a perfect shot with the Post-it into the wastepaper basket on the other side of the couch. Greta follows the shot and goes to investigate the trash can. Mother says, “I just think we should . . .”

  Her hero changes the channel back to the basketball game. Overtime. “Be nice,” he says. “By the way, I have to go out of town again.”

  &

  Mattel claims that more than one billion Barbie dolls have sold in one hundred and fifty countries—that a Barbie is sold every three seconds. In the time it takes her to close the pages of the Barbie encyclopedia and place it on the cart for reshelving, another thirty Barbie dolls are sold.

  She races through time, to her undergraduate days, to the auditorium with the red velvet curtains, to the naturalist who came to the university and spoke of butterflies and moths. He estimated there were 17,000 butterfly species in the world at that time, and that more than 300,000 butterflies came through the three Cs—caterpillar, cocoon, and chrysalis—every year. He estimated that they lived two to seventeen days, that their time on earth was spent living, that butterflies don’t sleep. He said the monarchs were the exception, that they lived about six months—that they lived long enough to make the journey home to the place where they would die.

  &

  The Bengali grandmothers’ midnight folktales, kitchen superstitions, follow her still, like birds. The cautions and precautions as she sat, feet dangling from her chair at their kitchen tables eating sandesh sweetened by khejuur guur, to now, her legs twisted awkwardly under her, blood in her mouth. How, when the butterflies in the botanical gardens in Calcutta swarmed the Real Thing but not the Baby Sister, her great-aunt predicted that the Baby Sister would not marry.

  How their grandfather, jailed for resisting the Britis
h Raj, lived through famine and Partition, always said: Never leave rice on your plate, for it will bring you hunger. The look on her hero’s face as she repeated Dadu’s words and ate every bite the girls left on their plates at the Thai restaurant, thirty years later. “Why are you doing this? You said you were full,” her hero says, signaling the waiter for the check. “You don’t have to eat this.”

  And the one admonition she’d heard from all of the elders, on both sides of the family, even her parents: Never buy a loved one a pair of shoes, for you’ll invite their departure. Her hero leaving his wallet at home one Saturday early in their marriage, before Saturday outings with her hero became rare, and her refusal to buy him high-tops at the mall near downtown Honolulu.

  “It’s just an old wives’ tale,” he says. “You don’t have to believe it.”

  But the Real Thing counters with the story of the Baby Sister convincing their parents to buy her soccer cleats, and then two years later, after high school, leaving the family, joining the church. The Real Thing is always writing down connections, however ephemeral, between the myths of her childhood India trips and her stark American life.

  Her hero fusses, and finally she relents and buys him not one, but two pairs of shoes. The receipt is chalk-blue colored and the ink on the slip is thin and red like a trickle of blood.

  And now she can’t help but believe it, how she’s driven her hero away with that purchase, now that she’s been essentially alone for years, how the prajapati and the juta conspired to separate her from her sister.

  &

  More likely, it began on the playground when Mary-Margaret Anne Moriarty expounded on her theory of love. Recess, at St. Luke’s co-ed. Last full week of April 1978. A day when the azaleas are already in bloom, when sixth grade still means elementary school, and the term “middle school” hasn’t yet replaced “junior high.” While other schoolkids embrace the Bee Gees and John Travolta, the Real Thing and her classmates argue with nuns about attending mandatory morning mass, even as non-Catholics. On the playground Sister Joan drones on about school uniforms, which look suspiciously like habits except they are an ugly green plaid, and how their souls would be in mortal danger if “boys” could see the girls’ knees or calves or shins or even ankles. She wants to know what mortal danger really means but doesn’t understand the correlation between that and her bony kneecaps—scarred by the rough tumble off her bike in the woods near the creepy cemetery managed by the Bible thumpers who want to save her soul but know better than to ring the doorbell and argue with her mother once more. The school bell rings, calling them back to their classrooms.