The Atlas of Reds and Blues Read online

  Karen starts to argue, but her mother comes to their family’s front porch and calls her inside. A car with open windows cruises by, the Bee Gees blaring on the radio.

  Leslie looks at Donny. “I won’t go with you anymore if you talk to her like that.”

  It is fine that day and the next one hundred and twenty-seven days, until Leslie moves with her family to Charlotte, until Leslie’s house with the wraparound porch is emptied of its possessions and a childless couple moves in.

  &

  The mustached man in navy blue asks her, “Do you know where your husband is?”

  She stares at him with the look she reserves for her children, when they’ve bloodied each other over a toy, a dress, or a turkey and cheddar sandwich. He cannot hold her gaze. She decides he doesn’t already know the answer to the question he is asking. “No,” she says.

  He lowers his gun from her temple so that it’s pointing, roughly, at her trachea. “You’re not afraid?”

  Although she’s still in the newspaper business, she has been out of the crime-reporting business for more than a decade. But in this moment when the man holding the gun is also wearing the bulletproof vest, she feels the hustle of the daily news deadline inside her, the telephones ringing shrill, breaking news coming over the wire, the bark of the copy editor in the distance, the unspoken demand for getting the story and getting it right. She looks at him and says nothing.

  “Do you understand me?” he asks loudly. “You should have stayed in your own country.”

  “I’m American,” she says, the sun instantly hot on her face, the sky a blue invention, the air dog-day muggy. “I am in my own country.”

  Another vested policeman steps toward her, warrant in hand. “I need to search you,” he says. “You could be packing.”

  She hesitates, for a second. “No.”

  The agent with the assault rifle takes one step closer to her, as if it were a game of Simon Says and she had lost a turn.

  &

  The slats on the shutters on the outside of the house are falling out. Every morning that he is not flying to Hong Kong or Taipei or Seoul, her man of the hour goes outside to pick up the paper and walk Greta, and every morning there is a slate-colored slat or two on the walkway or front yard. It looks like the house is losing its baby teeth, only it’s not as cute. No wisdom teeth sprout to take their places. She calls a handyman, who orders replacements. He tells her it will take two weeks for the shutters to be made, painted, and then substituted. She wants to believe that the almost-new neighbors will not bombard her mailbox until the repairman comes out; she wants to believe that they will give her time. But her hero snaps his fingers in front of her face, his blue T-shirt matching the color of his eyes, the color of the sky outside her kitchen window.

  “Keep looking,” her hero says, shuffling through papers in the kitchen. “Maybe the neighborhood covenants are in that box over there.”

  She checks the oven and sticks a fork in the pan. “Why are you so desperate for them, now?” It comes out clean.

  “I just don’t want us to get sued by the neighbors because we took too long to get them repaired.”

  She wonders if she can fashion a placard and hang it from the red flag on the mailbox: “Please excuse our dust!” like at the home improvement store. She wants to believe that a public apology will keep the neighbors at bay. “What are you going to do?” She tries to sound calm and reasonable. “It’s out of our control.”

  She stuffs her hands into the red oven mitts and pulls out the pan of brownies. The smell is making her mouth water.

  “Keep looking,” he says, his voice distant, as if he were far away, calling home, checking in. “I have to leave soon.”

  The shrill repetitive cry of an ambulance in the distance.

  But she turns back to the rectangle of chocolate goo, her need for chocolate so great her hands start to tremble.

  &

  An agent turns on the siren of his squad car, just for fun.

  &

  It is warm and will only get hotter, humid and will only get wetter. It is not quite mosquito season, but when the mosquitoes arrive they will be the size of swallows. The first of the heat waves has already arrived. From dawn until dusk, she will be hot and wet, her makeup will run, her hair will frizz, her T-shirt will cling to her like a new baby, she will stink like a ham sandwich that was overlooked when the doggie bag was emptied and stayed out on the kitchen counter all night long. That is, if she makes it through this moment, on her back, her face pointed in the general direction of heaven.

  &

  She confesses over the phone to Emily that all she really wants is for her family to leave her alone. She and Greta sit side by side on the front porch. “Not forever, not even every day. Just a few hours each week.” The words tumble out of her mouth and then she closes her eyes and ears, waiting for the rebuke. The street is empty, the neighborhood kids are at school. Tides of shame and regret crash through her for a moment and then she hears the response. It takes several moments before she understands that the gurgling chirp she hears is not her ex-roommate’s disgust or tears. Just her crazy maniacal laughter.

  “Welcome to Earth,” her former roommate says, in between gasps. “Sit down, stay awhile.” She is Californian. Her sensibilities are different.

  “Really?” Mother asks. “You’re not disgusted?”

  “For what? Wanting five minutes for yourself?” She snorts. “No.” Emily invites her to visit. Alone. “There’s a summer workshop. You should apply.”

  “Where? In California?”

  “No, Mars.” More laughter. “The shuttle is expensive, book now.”

  Mother leans into Greta, and realizes she is the problem: she cannot leave her children alone. She cannot leave Greta. She simply cannot lower the shield. The times have changed, the times have remained exactly the same, and she is the illustrated definition of timorous. Until they have shields of their own, functional shields made out of an intellectual version of Kevlar, she cannot send them outside to play unsupervised. Apparently she cannot even send one of them to school. It is not safe. She is their only line of defense. She is the wall, the river, the buffer. She is the only thing that stands between them and the crazy world and the crazy people and the crazy thoughts outside. She is the person in the movie who is pushing against the door while something big and wicked on the other side is trying to come in. As a journalist she’s been on the other side of that door. She can hold the door closed, just until they leave for college. She can, she hopes she can. She has to, somehow. Greta will help.

  &

  The end of the water slide, the moment where the body is squirted off the bright blue plastic chute, is too high off the surface of the water. Not quite the end of spring in Georgia, but already high blue of summer hot on this trip to a tropical island, she and the girls at the hotel pool while her hero is in the hotel conference room at a business meeting. She doesn’t remember the exact measurements she researches later at the library. She does remember the boy’s name, Luke, like the protagonist in Star Wars. She doesn’t remember what she wrote to the hotel management, or to the pool company, exactly. She knows it’s too high because she is a minute or maybe two behind this action. Luke is ahead of her, his body curled into a cannonball, the boy’s unexpected scream, too high-pitched—he was not shouting in celebration. The sound echoed up the tube was a warning: fear. No, that’s not quite right. The end of the water slide isn’t the problem exactly. It’s the water. No, that’s not quite right either. There’s something in the water. Yes, that’s right. There’s something in the water, one of the underwater barriers has become unlatched, and drifted—and Luke, balled up and ready for the picture-perfect entry, crashes into metal.

  &

  The pain in her stomach shifts north toward her heart.

  &

  She reads in the newspaper today that two thirds of all Americans get their daily “servings” of vegetables from French fries, potato chips, and ic
eberg lettuce. She is waiting in the car line, a doughnut in hand. She also reads that the French fries and the potato chips (and the burgers they come with) are all really made from corn, that the cows slaughtered for food have been injected with antibiotics because their living conditions are so unhygienic and diseased, that most of the corn the farmers grow in these United States goes into high-fructose corn syrup, which sounds delicious but is really poisonous, and that for one dollar, one can buy 1,200 calories’ worth of potato chips or 70 calories’ worth of celery stalks.

  She sighs, takes the last big bite of the chocolate glaze, grateful her children love celery and broccoli and zucchini. Grateful they have not yet developed the raging sweet tooth their maternal grandmother has, especially grateful they do not eat when stressed, like their mother. She looks at the clock on the dashboard; her daughter is late. Today is the worst after-school day: piano lessons, swimming lessons, karate class, tutoring in math, and a mountain of homework before the Friday pile of tests. These things—to provide structure and proficiency, to avoid the fate of their mother—present a fighting chance that when the girls grow up they will be able to avoid the most prevalent question in society today: “Would you like fries to go with that?”

  The Middle Daughter gets in the car, slowly, a bloodstain the size of a silver dollar on her forehead. “The people at my table didn’t like the fact that I ate the salad from the cafeteria, Mommy.”

  She parks the car in the emergency fire lane and smashes the hazard button; a partial chocolate fingerprint remains on the switch. “What did they do, hit you with the salad bowl? Bang your head against the table?”

  School officials walk to the car and tap the passenger window, tell her through the glass she has to move. “They waited until recess and dragged me by my hair across the playground, Mommy.”

  She must be shooting especially vile death glares from her eyes because the officials are backing off, turning around, walking away briskly. Mother glances at her hands, relieved to find she hasn’t misplaced her composure and executed a middle-finger salute. “What?”

  “They wanted me to say that I didn’t like salad, Mommy.”

  She gulps. “Did you?”

  The Middle Daughter’s grin was a lightning strike, it could have lit all of Buckhead for a week. For a long moment, it was her daddy’s long-ago smile. “No way.”

  “Can I tell Daddy now?”

  “No, no, no.”

  Mother peels away from the curb.

  &

  Her uncle buys her ice cream in a blue paper cup, a miniature spoon made of wood as a utensil stuck to the underbelly of the lid. The Kwality Store at the mouth of the Calcutta Zoo, the air-conditioning of the tiny shop leaking out onto the walkway and the zoo; the roll-all-over-the-ground smell of the elephants and the pacing tigers competing with the delicate tutti-frutti strawberry-banana-peach perfection on her lips. The Kwality sign painted bright yellow and red. On the neighboring wall, cheap posters for Sholay still plastered everywhere, though it’s been four years since the Hindi movie first opened and made Amitabh Bachchan a superstar. Her uncle offers to take her again. She’s seen it at least six times, and has visions of growing up and marrying Amitabh one day. “Before we get home, let’s stop at my friend’s place of business,” her uncle says. “I’ll teach you how to play gin rummy.”

  She offers her uncle a bite of tutti-frutti. “It’s a deal.”

  He accepts. “Don’t tell your mom.”

  She laughs and ice cream dribbles down her chin. “Don’t tell yours, either.”

  &

  “Ma’am, I know the sidewalk is public property, but y’all are going to have to wait on the other side of the street. We’re fixing to get out the yellow tape.”

  &

  In her dream, she is back at the Butterfly House with her hero, not too long after they return from their grand wedding in India. The fritillary garden is a hothouse, a greenhouse with clear glass cathedral ceilings, and they stand in silence, in awe, fingers entwined, taking in the cluster of monarchs and what looks like stained-glass wings, only they’re alive. The telephone rings in this dream, because in the real life upon which the dream is based, the telephone really does ring, at the desk in the hallway of the annex to the hothouse. It is a shrill clanging not unlike the sound of an alarm at a firehouse, and the beautiful orange is replaced by emergency red, the red of the fire engines in the nearby station house, the red ink from her teacher Sister Joan who gave her a D in the mandatory religion class in fifth grade because she couldn’t abide a non-Catholic topping the class.

  ACT II:

  LOW LIKE LOSING HOPE

  . . . in which she finally learns the definition of abattoir, what it truly means; and then wants desperately to sell off her possessions in a public auction, send the girls to live with distant relations in obscure countries with regulated cable and one government news channel, then apply for a job with the butcher down the street . . .

  &

  She does not leave the Butterfly House in southern Georgia, exactly. She is still there, only years have passed and now the girls are present, a chain of dolls holding hands, a chain of dolls dropping hands to point, and to cover their mouths as they exclaim their joy. The monarchs are still there, and also the others with the terrific names, Papilio ulysses and his twilight-blue wings, Parantica sita and her red, black, and white combination that almost looks like a drawing. Her hero bends down to speak to the Youngest Daughter and they share a laugh. Then the telephone rings, because in this part of the dream, it still follows the real life, when the Hero’s cell phone rings. He straightens up, and slides his finger across the phone screen. She raises her eyebrows at him. “Work,” he mouths to her, “have to take this,” and walks away, jovially greeting the person on the other end as he exits the hothouse through the annex.

  Her daughter’s plaintive cry for her daddy dissolves into fuchsia, the color that royalty wears in India, known as the color of queens, the color of the sash on her daughter’s dress, a sash she picks at and unravels as she is left alone.

  Mother’s eyes are slits and the sky is a thin blue line, too light to be the skin of the figurine pantheon of Hindu gods Grandmother has brought to her house over the years, statues that she prayed to; too dark to be considered pastel blue, the blue that is worn on baby boy skin.

  &

  Mother opens and closes her eyes again as the broadcaster begins to speak, he is standing on the sidewalk, no doubt looking straight into the camera eye, no doubt wearing a suit, and holding a microphone. “I don’t know if they’ll let me go up to the front door, Curtis.”

  “Gotta try,” the voice she presumes to be Curtis replies.

  The broadcaster chuckles.

  And she sees a field of sunflowers, the very ones she stopped to photograph with her hero, two summers before in California. She hears this stranger’s chuckle, and remembers her hero in the stalks of the too-tall sunflowers, yellow swaying in the wind, yellow swaying to the wind chuckling as it combed the field.

  &

  Greta vomits yellow all over the bottom of the stairs, then retreats back behind an especially tall pile of laundry just waiting to be folded and put away. Her human mother calls the vet, and after a brief consultation, puts Greta on a rather bland diet of white rice and makes an appointment to be seen. Her hero walks in from a red-eye that bled into a breakfast business meeting at the airport. Terminal E, where all the international flights dock after landing. He surveys the landscape and drops his carry-on by the stairs. He sits down next to Greta and pets her, puts his arm around her, buries his face in her part-collie coat.

  “How are the other girls?” her hero asks, his voice muffled.

  “Better than Greta,” she answers, “but not by much.”

  He doesn’t reply and she looks closely to see that he’s nearly asleep. She nudges him and he slowly gets up and steps past the wet carpet and upstairs to bed.

  Greta throws up something at once shiny and brown. Up
on closer examination, the culprit is identified: a couple of Hershey’s kisses. She wonders aloud where her beloved got the poison-to-dogs chocolate, but Greta sits like the Sphinx and does not answer.

  She cleans up the mess, and after throwing away the paper towels, she looks out the front window, to the street empty of neighbors and outside life, empty except for the white mailman who stops his postal truck at the mailbox across the street. It is the first time she sees a white mailman driving a route. The first time she lives in a place where no one waters their own plants or cuts their own grass.

  &

  She remembers her paternal grandmother’s stories from the Ramayana, she remembers Thakur-Ma’s raspy whispers when they were both supposed to be napping after lunch, how her grandmother’s voice sounded like the wind rustling through trees in the backyard, how the king and queen were banished into the forest for fourteen years; how Queen Sita was kidnapped and, upon her release, forced to prove her innocence by walking through fire; how the queen, rather than walk through the fire a second time in public, begged Mother Earth to open up and swallow her whole. She remembers that her grandmother smiled when she said the queen’s pleas were answered.