The Atlas of Reds and Blues Page 9

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  In 1997, Mattel tried to cross-advertise Barbie with Nabisco’s Oreo cookies. The public pointed out that Oreo is a slur for African Americans—and forced Mattel to recall this particular campaign. Oreo dolls are now a collectors’ item.

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  “Textbook execution today, fellas.”

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  An advertisement appears on television most weeknights after the children are in bed. It plays on most channels, from sports to news, from classic movies to cooking. An ad for cars, with a middle-class Black family. A husband and wife, with several children, driving somewhere together. From California, Emily calls to read her an excerpt from an online newsletter which asserts that the ad is not intended to entice minority families into buying suburban vehicles, but rather to make white families feel good about themselves for being drawn to an ad that has people of color prominently featured. And, she guesses, to make them comfortable with the idea that these people will one day become their neighbors.

  “Some people didn’t get the memo,” Emily says.

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  “Yeah, I saw the ‘Beware of the Dog’ sign, too. But I didn’t see the dog or his water bowl or anything like that. I think it’s a hoax.”

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  A week after the summer drought begins her hero gets home from the airport, and she watches through the window as he goes out to the front of the house to see 1) the sickly greyhound that belongs to the neighbors on the left in the Queen Anne–style throw up on his highly anticipated morning paper and 2) the pit bull, which lives with the neighbors on the right in the fake English Tudor, march over, unleashed, to the mailbox and lift his back leg.

  Her hero, her man of the hour, runs back inside the house. “Did you see that?” he asks her.

  She is standing at the sink, sluicing purple nontoxic paint from a throw blanket. There is a colander filled with peeled shrimp that still needs rinsing at her side on the counter.

  “Where have you been? Their dogs go unleashed and poop in our yard since day one.”

  “Who made us the doggie poop palace?”

  “I tried telling you but the phone connection to Kyoto really stinks.”

  “Shouldn’t we lodge a complaint?”

  “To whom?”

  “Can’t we do something? Did you ever find the copy of the covenants?”

  She shakes her head and points with a paint-covered finger to four boxes of “Important Papers” marked as such in the kitchen. “I’d start there.”

  He opens the boxes with a steak knife to find Star Wars figurines, the Eldest Daughter’s homework from the previous school year, and some manuals to kitchen appliances they left behind when they moved. “Wow.”

  She laughs. “Let me point out that almost every other box is marked in this way.”

  “Where do we go from here?”

  “We don’t go anywhere,” she says. “I stay here to clean and cook, and you forage, with the knife, to the basement, where all the other unopened boxes are.”

  Still she follows him and watches from afar, so she can make a story out of it one day. While in the basement, her hero decides aloud that he doesn’t like her jotting down everything he says, likes it even less that she’s writing a story about him, about the kids, about their life in Southern white-sheeted suburbia. He cannot talk to her when she’s working; she has forbidden it when she takes those few minutes to scribble down their stories. He decides aloud to send her an e-mail, from his smartphone. He tries many different approaches, from angry to wheedling, cranky to crying, erases each and every one, gets up from the children’s miniature pink sofa, where he is Gulliver in a Lilliputian land, paces, finds the remote. He adjourns to watch television on his man-cave big screen for a few minutes, sees a political ad, gets an idea, and sits back down to compose his thought. He sends it off, and his phone expels a swishing noise. In the distance, he can hear her phone announce a message, a bell tinkling, as if another angel got its wings in It’s a Wonderful Life.

  He turns up the volume of the game, but looks down at his phone. A copy of the message scrolls across the tiny screen: “The story you are writing is not approved by the people you are writing about. This message is paid for by your family who pays your bills.”

  The helmeted player from his favorite team runs effortlessly into the end zone, pigskin in hand, and scores. Her hero drops the phone onto the leather cushion beside him, bounds off the couch, and runs a victory lap around the room, arms stretched over his head as if he were Sylvester Stallone in any of the later Rocky films; really, though, if he had to admit it even just to himself, he more closely resembles a man who is trying to surrender, but in the dark cannot find anyone with authority.

  She tiptoes back upstairs and gets her phone off the charging station. She laughs at the message and startles herself with the sound of her own cackling. She sounds like Snow White’s stepmother. She is glad she is nowhere near a mirror. She stares off into the block of light from the kitchen window, just above where the sandwich press is kept. She sees the next-door neighbor direct a half-dozen shabbily dressed men in hats toward the invisible line that separates her backyard from his. And then she knows, he is constructing a wall.

  Separate, and not equal.

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  In 2005, a professor from the University of Bath in England published research suggesting that girls ready to cast off childhood would often harm their Barbie as a rite of passage: decapitation and placing Barbie dolls in the microwave were considered “normal.”

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  Thank God the girls are at school, out of their line of sight, out of the line of gunfire. Thank God Greta is long gone and out of their line of sight, she knows Greta would have bitten them if she were alive, she would have bitten them and they would have shot her.

  Her hero, her man of the hour, she’s not sure about him. He is out of her line of sight, but not theirs. It is more than probable that he was not out of range of their fire.

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  She and Greta walk around the neighborhood, and Greta stops to smell the azaleas, each and every bush, pink, white, hot pink, almost purple. The sun is setting, but the day is still brightly lit, unfinished, the sun not quite on its way down. On the way back they sneak up on the girls, holding a mock “book club” meeting to help the Youngest prepare for a school skit the next day. The gazebo where they sit is open to all and empty but for them. They discuss The Very Hungry Caterpillar, faces serious. They each balance their own copy of the book open on their laps, for reference.

  “Well, I like the book a lot because you finally have allowed me to read the book aloud to you,” the Eldest says.

  The Middle nods. “I like it because it’s cool to put my fingers through the holes on each page,” she says. “The caterpillar is a hungry girl.”

  The Youngest takes a deep breath. “I like it because it’s a board book, and I can read it in the bathtub,” she says. “I can put soap on it and nobody gets mad.”

  The Eldest says, “The caterpillar is actually a boy.”

  The Youngest puts a hand over her mouth, to stifle a scream. “No, it isn’t.”

  The Middle nods as if she were the one to deliver the bad news.

  The Eldest says, “Turn to the page with the big sun on it. See? It says it’s a he.”

  Pages are flipped, rapidly. “Oh dear.” The Youngest says, “I think Mommy always changes it to a girl.”

  The Eldest says, “That’s good.”

  The Middle clamps shut her copy. “Yeah, that’s better.”

  Mother laughs and finds a receipt in her pants pocket, uses a short pencil from the same pocket to scribble down their comments.

  “Are you writing about us again?” The Eldest glares at her, and the mother is practically blinded by all that scorn.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Let me tell you that if you ever put this in a book, I will make little cards and stand outside the bookstore, and on the cards I will tell people not to buy your book.”

 
Mother carefully returns the paper to her pocket. “With daughters like you, who needs critics?” She tugs on Greta’s leash and they retreat.

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  She’s pretty certain her sister would break her vow of silence if she were witnessing this.

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  The federal census agency released data unexpectedly today: she lives in a nation modeling obesity. People watch too many sitcoms, spend a disproportionate amount of their money and time eating junk and fast food, cannot locate their home states or even the United States on a map, complain about the fact that historically theirs is a nation of illegal immigrants but don’t want any more people of color to come in, work harder than every other industrialized nation (in number of days) for less money and less vacation time, and then waste all their resources at the emergency room since most can’t afford adequate health care. It is only Tuesday. But it’s the first Tuesday in November, and Barack Obama looks poised to win the presidency. She calls her presently nonexistent sister but the Mother Superior who answers the telephone says the nuns in the convent are carrying on their vows of silence longer than originally planned.

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  Her years of experience as a reporter inform the data, the instructions, what’s expected of her, what she is supposed to do. What she is supposed to do is stay silent, a statue. Statue, impassive face, body stance so quiet and unobtrusive. As if she wasn’t there, letting that man touch her in a way a lover might. She knows she is supposed to be thinking of the Buddha, his trials, how this moment is just that, a single moment. All she has to do is count: One Mississippi. Two Louisiana. Three Alabama. Then it’ll be over and she can think of her hero, and the girls.

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  A lonely only, her hero has always wanted to emulate the TV series The Brady Bunch. When the third daughter is born, he says, “Look, we have half of the Brady family. We just need to produce three boys and it’ll be really close.”

  She attempts to be patient. Shivering from the third C-section in four years and under a pile of blankets thrown over her in an attempt to raise her body temperature, she misplaces her temper. “Do you know the premise of the show?”

  Her hero shakes his head.

  She realizes her sharp tone has rendered him afraid. No one in the labor-and-delivery room, save them. Even the baby is taken to the nursery to warm up in a warming tray. “The lady has three girls, the man has three boys. Their respective spouses die, and they marry each other.”

  To say he looks crestfallen would be to say that Jacques Cousteau is fond of fish. “Oh.”

  September 11 is still practically new, thirteen months have inched by, and yet the general discussion these days is whether the Pledge of Allegiance should continue to carry the phrase “Under God” as in “One Nation Under God.” “So, I’m set.” She nods and that is that.

  He never brings up The Brady Bunch again; in fact, he changes the channel whenever he hears the familiar theme music. Another fact: for the past eight years, he waits to see her put a bite of dinner in her mouth, chew, and swallow before he picks up his fork and starts to eat. Of course, he rarely eats with her anymore, it is hard to have dinner with your family when you’re flying across the International Date Line and do not know if it is tomorrow or yesterday.

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  But instead of ice flowing down like a waterfall from her brain, it is lava. The anger bright red and so neon blue; all she can do is start to shake.

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  Perhaps she sinks into the muck of life the day she has to find an alternate dry cleaner’s, the day before her man of the hour is set to board a business trip that’ll take him across three continents and eight time zones, and far away from her bloated, bleeding pregnant body.

  She is six months pregnant with her third, far enough to know it’ll be another sweet girl. She goes to her OB every week because of the bleeding. Her doctor tells her to relax, to make her bed an island and not to leave it except to eat and pee. She laughs each time, but never promises. She laughs aloud just then, thinking of her doctor’s instructions as she takes the soon to be Middle Daughter out of her rear-facing car seat and places the baby on her hip, then helps the Eldest, not yet four, out of her restraint and onto the curb.

  Her usual dry cleaner’s, run by a lovely Indian couple from Bombay, is closed because of a religious holiday. A holiday she should be observing, but cannot because of her chores. She takes a chance on a big operation in an adjacent shopping center, one that she notices has a fair number of patrons. She walks in with the girls, the baby in utero hanging especially low, blood trickling down the inside seam of her maternity pants, the other baby pushing aside the sling to get a better look at the world, the preschooler holding one hand while the other hand clings to a black garbage bag full of her husband’s work shirts and pants, a maternity dress upon which she had spilled brown mustard and a pink denim jumper that the Eldest Daughter had somehow smeared with acrylic paint over the back, as if she’d made a snow angel wearing that jumper—without the snow, of course.

  A brunette with bottled-blond streaks in her hair is behind the counter, stares at them, unmoving, as she struggles through the door. “May I help you?”

  “Yes, I’m here to drop these off,” Mother says.

  The blonde grunts. “We’re a dry cleaner, not a day care.”

  “Yes, I know . . . what?”

  “The day care is two doors down.” Her tone is cold enough to rival the icebox at home, where the pint of forbidden mint-chocolate-chip ice cream is stored.

  “I’m here to drop off the clothes, not the kids,” Mother says, as her eldest squeezes her hand tighter, and each of them looks at the woman’s robin’s-egg-blue eye shadow and bloodshot eyes.

  “If you’re seeking employment, you’ll have to come back when John, our manager, is here.”

  Mother sighs as the baby grabs her earlobe and swats her tiny gold stud, the one she put in her ears for the first time in two months, to look pretty in a moment when she felt anything but. “I don’t want a job. I just need to have these clothes back within twenty-four hours.”

  “Let me see that bag,” the salesgirl says, then shuffles through the material, missing the crimson-colored maternity dress and the denim jumper. Her stare is piercing, and as they lock eyes Mother can feel her heart racing, and the baby kick. “Where did you get these?”

  “They’re my husband’s.”

  The shopgirl stares. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

  She clenches her jaw to keep from laughing aloud. “Why would you say something like that?”

  “Where’s your ring?”

  She shows her the left hand, a discolored band of flesh where the ring should have been. “I’m swelling,” Mother says. “I’ve tried to put it on but it keeps cutting off my circulation. My finger was turning blue.”

  The woman nods. “You should buy a fake one at Walmart, ma’am. People are going to talk.”

  She wants to reach over and slap the salesgirl’s face, but feels her daughter’s small hand in hers. She pretends the shopgirl’s face is a dartboard and that her own eyes are darts. She was once a bull’s-eye dart thrower, back during President Reagan’s tenure, the year Orwell’s dystopia predictions did not come true, when the legal drinking age was not quite twenty-one in North Carolina and she was not quite twenty-one. “That’s ridiculous,” she says.

  “Bless your heart, I’m just concerned for you.”

  She looks behind the salesgirl, at the carousel of clean clothes, all wrapped in plastic, and each piece hanging neatly off its own wire hanger. “That’s lovely. Please return the bag to me.”

  The woman rolls her eyes. “There’s no need to get snippety, ma’am.”

  A headache forms like a funnel cloud at the back of her neck. “I need the bag back,” she says, her eyes suddenly tired.

  The brunette-blonde drops it back over the counter, near where she is standing. After switching the clothes to the other hand, she takes the Eldest Daughter’s hand once more, and says to her
, “Tell the lady goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, ma’am,” her daughter says, waving politely.

  In the car, this daughter says, “What is Daddy going to do? He needs clothes.”

  Mother drives and drives, the traffic signals mostly green and yellow but construction equipment like chess pawns, obstructing any clear paths. Finally a mall, in the distance, orange construction cones like a field of poppies before her—the shop signs shiny like the Emerald City. “Let’s go in,” the Eldest says, hope in her voice.

  The next stop they make is at the department store, where they buy her hero a blazer, two new shirts, a couple pairs of trousers for work, and a new tie. The saleswoman is African American, middle-aged, with the kindest expression in her brown eyes, YVETTE printed on her plastic name tag. She coos over the baby, gives the Eldest a grape sucker shaped like a giant amethyst ring, and never asks a word about Mother’s marital status.

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  She is watching herself suddenly, from the other side of the driveway.

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  Clay introduces her to a surfer whose six-pack is as shiny as his longboard. The Banzai Pipeline is at the end of its annual rage, still only the experts are out at sea.