The Atlas of Reds and Blues

by Devi S. Laskar

  The more astute, like the gentleman who shared a last name with a president in the 1970s, but nothing else, will say, “I can say the same. The consequences of that one day in 1963 and that one man’s actions changed me and my family and my community and my city and my state and my nation forever.” Oscar is not on the list of who to ask. He is on the street corner at a kiosk selling cigarettes and magazines.

  What she wants to do is ask this man, with the aquiline nose and russet-colored skin, where he was three years earlier, in 1960, when those students refused to relinquish their seats at the lunch counter in Greensboro. She wants to ask Oscar what he does now when they look past him at the deli checkout counter or the movie theater, when the young zit-popping punk behind the glass booth tells him all the seats are taken when he knows that they are not.

  Instead she dutifully asks him personal identifying information and thanks him for taking the time. She asks his name and age and hometown, but she already knows all of these things about him.

  Still she asks.

  “It’s always good to see you,” Oscar says, this man who used to drive a city bus in small-town North Carolina and watch a little girl transfer all by herself every weekday morning, then walk, rain, sunshine, or sleet, the last half mile to school. “You’re still the same.”

  She smiles, and shrugs.

  &

  Until 1997, Barbie was 38-18-24.

  &

  Prisoners of technology, that’s what people are. Chained to their personal digital assistants, their iPods, their BlackBerry devices, and, of course, their cell phones, their smartphones, their ability to videoconference, to see each other when they really shouldn’t be able to see each other. Her man of the hour, her hero, is definitely in the loop. Unfortunately, he is allergic to the cleaning solution that came with his new contacts, and he has just lost his glasses.

  “I can’t see,” he says, stretching his hand out in the general direction of the bathroom.

  She guides him to the door, but her ears are still tuned to the Sunday talk-show discussion about minority rights, voting rights, incarceration rates, mortality rates, literacy. A group of middle-aged well-educated white men talking about women and people of color.

  What does it mean truly, to be invisible? Her stillness, her ability to remain calm while high-decibel insults are hurled inches from her face and ears. To pretend nothing has been said. To pretend deafness. Or her chameleon’s ability to blend in, a nondescript body in a dark blouse and black jeans leaning against the pay phone at the hospital waiting room, or standing outside the courtroom’s double doors or by the fire engine at the crime scene, yellow do-not-cross tape isolating one place from its larger context. To pretend the oak tree across the street’s steadfast patience, to pretend paralysis. To watch but pretend blindness. Never look anyone in the eye. Or maybe restraint. Knowing her lack of reaction is the only thing keeping her alive, over and again. Knowing the first time she hits back is the last time she’ll ever have the opportunity to do so.

  &

  “Come again?”

  “She looks nothing like her license photo.”

  “Are you sure it’s her?”

  “Oh, it’s her, all right.” The agent laughs. “Looks like she knocked over the Krispy Kreme and ate everything in sight.”

  “Oh, Hollis.”

  &

  Her mother-in-law comes to visit, notices the hair Greta has shed on the carpeting and her son’s absence at the dinner table, the brigade of repairmen traipsing through the garage and basement after the lightning strike, the boxes that remain unopened from the move to suburbia. She is smartly dressed in a monogrammed Italian black pantsuit and casually wears a thick strand of glossy pearls; her caustic red nail polish and her lipstick match. She is the working mother of an only child. She runs a small Fortune 1000 company, and weaves tapestries in her spare time, some of which hang on museum walls across Europe. Her blond hair is fashioned into a beautiful chignon.

  Mother is conscious suddenly of her “mom uniform”: jeans, T-shirt that daughters use as a napkin after a jelly-toast breakfast, and greasy hair put up in a limp ponytail. Her mother-in-law waits until the children are finished with their meals and run off to complete their homework, carrot-cake cupcake and cream-cheese frosting in hand. “My god, you’ve gained weight.” Mother-in-law helps herself to a cupcake, licks the frosting from her fingertips. “Why are you even looking at the dessert?”

  &

  The Middle Daughter enters the car after school, slams the door, hurls her book bag into the back, straps on her safety belt, all in one fluid motion as if she’s been practicing this moment all day in her mind. She crosses her arms and commands, “Drive. Please. Just drive.”

  &

  She ventures into the city. She is stopped outside the Indian grocery. An older female acquaintance she has not seen since her second child was born and she discovered she was pregnant. Again. After more than a moment’s hesitation, Mother finally remembers she used to sit next to this older woman every first Tuesday of the month during book club. The acquaintance is a very smart woman, with a Ph.D. in chemistry, whose in-laws decided it would be too shameful for them to have their only son’s wife work. Remembering all this about her, but not her name.

  “I feel so tired just hearing about your daily routine.” Uneasy laughter from the friend, her Bangla a smooth stroke of lapis on a painting of a bright sea. “I am just so grateful my children are grown.”

  “Surely you remember what it was like?”

  “But you have so much more going on. Three kids, traveling husband, dog. My situation was a little different: one less kid and a husband who never left the city, even overnight.” This woman could model face cream on TV; she resembles someone who has never experienced the true anxiety of parents who are outnumbered by their children: youthful, with perfectly pressed linen slacks and matching tunic-blouse, a smart shoulder-length haircut with dyed ebony hair to hide the gray.

  “What does the dog have to do with this?” And then she remembers: this woman’s name is Shangamitra Gangapadhay. She used to go by Sue Ganguli, but changed everything back to the original precolonized name once she hit suburbia. Each person of color pushing back against the dominant culture in her own way. The government of India was doing the same: she’d read that the Anglicization Calcutta was to be replaced by the precolonized pronunciation and spelling: Kolkata. “She’s the only one who’s consistently housebroken.”

  &

  Apparently not. Greta, or Greta Girl since the very moment of her rescue from a shelter the decade before, defecates upstairs on the white carpet.

  &

  “Did he resist arrest?”

  “Well, the way Doug tells it . . .” But a dog’s warning bark drowns out the rest of his answer.

  &

  “What’s their problem? Do you not go to the right country club? The right church? Do your kids not go to the right school? Or is it that they’ve already sensed that you’re not only the last screaming liberal in Georgia but that you’re also probably the last socialist left on the face of the planet? That you’re actually willing to pay extra so that everybody gets to go to the doctor when they need to? You know, you have the look about you of a girl who once climbed up the side of a water tower just to paint the anarchy symbol.”

  Sigh. “They hate me because I leave the garage doors open too long sometimes.” Mother smiles into the telephone receiver. “It’s against the rules.”

  Emily laughs. “That is a serious infraction. They should pelt spoiled eggs at you.”

  “Don’t give them ideas.”

  &

  Mother hears the rain, percussion like the ocean, synchronized; cracks open one eye to be confronted by clear sky. She closes her eye again when the neighbor across the street two doors down on the left yells out “oops” and Mother hears her walk away, possibly to turn off the sprinklers that have been forbidden since the drought started years ago. The policemen are too busy at Moth
er’s house to issue her neighbor a citation for breaking the rules.

  &

  Raining the day she becomes smitten with Weatherman John. Day off. It has rained for weeks without end, and it continues to rain, and the weatherman looks positively bored every time he has to deliver his soggy predictions and wretched forecasts, sound his warning bell. “I don’t know why I’m even bothering,” John says, pointing to another wave of storm systems moving through the Midwest, heading straight for Georgia. “Yes, it’s going to rain more, and no, it will not impact our drought, because it’s raining too hard. The ground is saturated as much as it can be in this drought and everything is running off, and yes, there will be more flooding, and no, there’s no way to avoid it.”

  She is light-headed, a little dizzy, but attributes it to this new crush and not to the fact she has skipped breakfast and perhaps lunch. She cannot recall. She also can’t remember how long she has been manning the house all by herself, how long her husband has been away, how much longer she’ll be solo. The weatherman’s pretense is gone, as well as his optimism that the sun will shine tomorrow or the next day. John tells it like it is going to be. His tone is as flat as the Midwest whence he came. There is no hope in his voice, just resignation. His acceptance of the inevitable is happiness coursing through her veins. Not only is he consistent, this weatherman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Clark Kent, glasses and all, but also he’s on every night, same time, same channel. She could set her Swiss watch to this man, the Swiss watch her mother-in-law gave her for her birthday the week before, when she turned forty.

  &

  “. . . Not like this woman here,” the agent says. “Very stoic . . .”

  &

  “Just think of it as a game,” she tells the Middle Daughter, who is crying in the backseat, because she wasn’t invited to her classmate’s birthday party. Everyone else came to school on Monday wearing the tie-dye T-shirt they’d made over the weekend.

  “What game is that? Pick on the girl who looks different?”

  Mother moves her brand-new copy of Half a Yellow Sun off her lap and to the passenger seat. “No, it’s called Stiff Upper Lip,” she says, making up some “ancient” British history along with her faux British accent. “You’re actually playing it right now.”

  “Right, I’m losing,” Middle Daughter says, wiping the tears away with her fingers.

  “No, you’re not,” says Mother, handing her a box of tissues, “because you didn’t cry in front of them all day. Right?”

  Middle Daughter stops crying. “What do I win?”

  Mother can’t help but smile. Chip off the old block and all that. “Their respect, eventually. In the meantime, you can wallow, the way a pig wallows in mud, in the satisfaction that they won’t ever see you cry over anything they did.”

  Middle Daughter blows her nose with a tissue. “Did this happen to you?”

  Mother nods. “Can I tell Daddy now?”

  “Nope.”

  She sighs.

  &

  In 1997, Mattel produced a Barbie that needed a pink wheelchair. A high school student in Tacoma pointed out the wheelchair couldn’t fit into the elevator of the Barbie Dream House and Mattel had to redesign each dream house to accommodate the chair.

  &

  She closes her eyes and a kaleidoscope appears, the blue of the sky giving way to the red pulse of pain near her stomach. She opens her eyes and the sky is a clean slate now, the little wisps of cloud are all but gone. The sky is the color of her alma mater: she thinks of the bumper sticker she put on her first car when she was exactly half the age she is today: If God Isn’t a Tar Heel Then Why Is the Sky Carolina Blue? The pain is less when she doesn’t give in to the light show. But the light show is hard to ignore: every time she opens or closes her eyes, the blues and blood reds are reinvented; she is witnessing the continents shifting, the tectonic plates of years shifting and crashing into each other. She spies the steeple of the neighbor’s pine tree at the bottom corner of her line of sight. The owl is no longer hooting, and the neighbor with a lawn mower starts his engine. The shadow of the policeman crosses her face, and she closes her eyes, shutting them tightly as if she had never opened them at all.

  &

  “Why is it necessary for them to be in so many activities?” Grandmother asks, her voice tinny in the crackling phone connection. The landline always crackles when the weather is bad. “Why do you have to overdo everything you do? Why can’t you just do what I did? You didn’t turn out badly.”

  Mother grits her teeth and wills herself not to answer. She wants to tell her that growing up in the shadow of maternal depression and homesickness for India made her neither confident nor accomplished in anything except reading books. She wants to remind her that all she ever wanted to do was run—cross-country, sprints, marathons, whatever—but she couldn’t convince Ma to drive her to practice, couldn’t convince Baba to allow her to wear shorts in public, or buy her decent shoes that were made in America. It is a little more than a year before the agents are in her driveway.

  She wants to tell her mother about the vow she takes every day never to speak to her parents again only to break it when either parent calls. She wants to express regret, she desires to practice forgiveness, and she wants to wish aloud for change. None of these things will materialize, no matter what she says, so she decides to make a game of it, she plays the girls’ “Quiet Game” in her mind.

  She offers herself a reward if she can just get through the next ten minutes without talking back, a trip to the bookstore, a hardback of her choice. Gandhi remained silent one day each week, and look at the change he effected: He set a nation free.

  “I know what you are thinking,” Grandmother says, “even if you don’t have courage to say it.”

  Mother grins, smiles, laughs even, but silently. The receiver is covered and all either hears is static on the line.

  “What’s become of you? You never lacked courage before.”

  Sigh. Tears of laughter are unexpectedly sliding down her face but still Mother doesn’t utter a sound until Grandmother abruptly hangs up.

  Mother wins. Later that day she stands in front of the new-fiction shelf at the bookstore near the girls’ school and sees Beloved, now out in the twentieth-anniversary-edition paperback. She’d missed the author’s appearance the week before but there on the neighboring shelf is an autographed copy. She snatches it up and heads for the cashier.

  &

  She attempts to practice forgiveness every day. Most days, when she sneaks in a telephone call to her presently nonexistent sister and they’ve shared a giggle or two, she’s successful and moves through the hours with ease, finds humor and practices smiling. Even to the people at the Middle Daughter’s school. She can almost forget Greta’s absence, she can almost forgive her Hero’s. Sometimes, when the nonexistent sister takes a temporary vow of silence, Mother is adrift, not so lucky. Then every act is laborious: working, eating, reading, writing, cooking, driving, breathing. The Baby Sister, who is now a sister of God’s, has been silent for the past month, and Mother is faltering. Nowadays, smiling is simply out of the question.

  IN MEDIA RES

  . . . in which she realizes her arms are beginning to tire, that the cold she’s been nursing for weeks is really an allergy of the worst sort: all the things she’s ever loved to eat, garden Roma tomatoes, chickpea-and-potato curry, ice cream, corn pudding, are making her stomach turn. Turn like a cluster of butterflies in the hothouse at first, and then a roller coaster, Curtis the TV news reporter beginning his report by naming her hero, and then the whirling dervish of a tornado touching down very close to her heart . . .

  &

  “I didn’t want that for you,” Grandmother says, recounting how her own natal family in India was never alone.

  Too many people. Too many voices trying to speak at once, too much pollution, too much noise. Grandmother says they started out in a joint family, and although Mother knew what she meant, that Dadu�
�s brothers and their wives and children all lived in the same house for a time, what the American-born daughter pictures is a room empty of furniture, family skeletons sitting in a circle, elbow to jaw, hip to bony hip, banana-leaf fronds for plates, steam rising from the hill of rice on each plate, cogwheel-shaped slices of fried bitter gourd on the side, waiting for someone to serve them sour red lentil soup. Too many people in one tiny space. Not enough privacy. Then she pictures the construction-paper cutouts that her first-grade teacher was good at making, faceless naked dolls all holding hands, waiting for someone to draw in their smiles, and their black-ink eyes.

  “Look what I got instead,” Mother says, hand stretching out like a game-show hostess over her empty living room. “A life-size dollhouse with a crazy mortgage and a husband who’s never at home.”

  &

  Her father says soon, when the Real Thing asks the first time, and soon enough by the time she asks the sixth time. It wasn’t as though he had to order the bike, even. They had picked out the violet-bodied two-wheeler with matching streamers at the handlebars, and somehow shoved it into the trunk of the green Nova that Saturday. But the seat needed adjustment, and so the bike languished at the bottom of the steep driveway, in pieces, waiting to be made whole. Now Wednesday. The girls in the neighborhood, the nice ones like Leslie and Karen, let her take short rides down the street, in exchange for a turn on the future promise of the purple bike. Tammy and her horrible brother Donny laugh at first, sitting atop their bikes, zooming down the street like hall monitors, with helmets and black gloves. Donny tells her that her father is too stupid to know how to adjust the bike. Tammy smiles but the smile doesn’t leave her lips and transform her unhappy face. “There are rules, you know, where someone like you can ride.”