The Atlas of Reds and Blues

by Devi S. Laskar

  Mary-Margaret Anne, as she likes to be called, stands two feet away from her. Dirty blond with tiny pixie freckles sprinkled across the bridge of her bulbous nose. Her father is a businessman who is never in town except on Friday afternoons, when he picks up Mary-Margaret Anne from school in a white Mustang convertible. Her mother roams in a station wagon with three boys still in diapers, rolling down the window at the curb, begging Mary-Margaret Anne to get in. And Mary-Margaret Anne never hurries her pace, and finishes speaking to Ellen and Paige and Jeanette before strolling to the car and flinging her hot-pink bag into the trunk. The Moriarty parents never offer the Real Thing a ride, but drive by as she trudges past the firehouse and an abandoned wooden structure with a caved-in porch that even animals stay away from, to the city bus stop a half mile away. Monday through Friday. Rain, shine, sleet, snow, like the postman. The boy Mary-Margaret Anne is “going” with, Eric Moynihan, has ignored his girlfriend that morning but utters “excuse me” as he whizzes by on his way back to his seat, his blurry form jostling the Real Thing’s left arm. Mary-Margaret Anne’s eyes flash green in the sunlight. “What did he say?”

  “Nothing,” she replies, wishing she knew kung fu just then.

  Mary-Margaret Anne pirouettes on her left foot, and she looks poised to do a jeté. She has the body to be a ballerina, and unlike her own mother, the Real Thing bets Mary-Margaret Anne’s has no problems parting with the money, if only to get her daughter out of the house for a short time. “You know what I heard? I heard you and Henry have been kissing in the library during reading hour.”

  Sister Joan’s head turns on her broad neck, like an owl. She stands equidistant from Mary-Margaret Anne and the Real Thing and their shadows all lie flat on the blacktop. Sister Joan’s stare through her thick spectacles is thoughtful.

  Henry and his parents had moved to town from Michigan over Christmas.

  He is the first Black boy at school. Well, his mother is Black but his father is white. And from where she sits, Henry is just another student. Hair neatly combed, pressed collared shirts, impeccably shiny shoes. Shiny copper pennies glistening from his penny loafers.

  He never raises his hand.

  He doesn’t open his mouth.

  She sits next to him, in the back of the room, watches him doodle battleships and helicopters on notebook paper during class, watches him crumple up the imperfect drawings and shoot hoops into the trash can, watches the nuns hand back perfect scores on his test papers. “I don’t think so,” she says, picturing Mary-Margaret Anne’s head in a guillotine, like the one she read about in history after an unflattering description of Marie-Antoinette. “He’s never even said hello.”

  Mary-Margaret Anne’s grin is all knowing, the way her lips spread thinly over her even teeth. It is the same smile that she produces when she talks loudly to Ellen and Paige and Jeanette about how she and Eric are one day going to “do it” when her mother isn’t at home; and that after she “did it” with Eric, he would have to marry her. She can only imagine what “it” is, and judging from the bewildered look in Paige’s hazel eyes, their classmate doesn’t know either.

  “It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me,” Mary-Margaret Anne says. “But it’s nice that you two are going together.”

  Sister Joan raises her eyebrows, and through the magnification of her glasses they look like perfectly synchronized caterpillars doing aerobics.

  She shakes her head. “We’re not going together.”

  Mary-Margaret Anne shrugs. “It makes sense.”

  It does not. “Why?” she asks, pinching her fingers together so she won’t shout at Mary-Margaret Anne in front of Sister Joan and spend another afternoon in Sister Grace’s musty headmistress office hearing about her lack of gratitude for being “taken” off the streets—although she doesn’t quite understand what streets she is being spared from, since she still has to walk a half mile every weekday to and from the city bus stop to school.

  “He’s Black,” says Mary-Margaret Anne, a coo at the back of her throat.

  No, actually the color of his skin is coffee with cream. Since he never smiles, it is coffee sans sucre. “I’m not Black.”

  “Sure you are,” she says. “You’re not white.”

  The Real Thing feels hot in her face but knows she can never cry in front of Mary-Margaret Anne, or she will never be able to come back to school again.

  Sister Joan’s head turns back to a forward position, her step takes on a definite marching intonation. She simply enters the building and disappears.

  “Nobody,” Mary-Margaret Anne says, enunciating the first syllable at twice the length it normally requires, “like Eric will ever ask you to go with him.”

  The Real Thing pinches her palm as hard as she can and the ocean of tears at the eyelid shores recede. “Why not?”

  “Because,” Mary-Margaret Anne says, suddenly touching her skin, creating a crater of shock, “this doesn’t rub off.”

  ACT I:

  THE CURTAINS ARE DRAWN, BRIEFLY

  . . . in which she resolves not to let it bother her, the loneliness, the responsibility, the nagging inner critic who uses a bullhorn to broadcast into her inner ear she cannot manage everything, that she cannot manage anything, that it is all her own doing, her undoing that is. Her hands begin to tremble . . .

  &

  Can she stop wishing for change? Can she stop hoping?

  &

  Barbie was originally conceived as a working girl, career-minded, trailblazing. For example, Miss Astronaut Barbie came alive in 1965, and Doctor Barbie was born in 1987, and NASCAR Barbie drove onto the scene eleven years later, in 1998. Not that she got to play with any of those dolls. But still.

  &

  She is three, on the cusp of four. Her birthday party is around the corner, where the neighbor’s daughter from across the street, the one who lived in a white split-level that looked a lot like the Brady Bunch house, will pull her hair. The neighbor’s daughter will also complain about the strawberry cake and the too-sweet pink frosting and her mother’s face will crumple in the bathroom once the guests leave. But in this moment, she is three again, almost four. The TV is on in the next room, a large outdoor concert, and a guitarist plays what she will come to know as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” She and her mother are in the kitchen, she is dancing on the linoleum that is printed to resemble red bricks, and her mother is cooking dinner on the front two burners. She likes the carousel feeling of twirling on the linoleum, it is so much faster in the kitchen than on the thick-carpeted floors of her bedroom or the TV room. Her mother cautions her not to get too close to the stove, the front two coils are angry and almost as red as the linoleum. Once, twice, three times. And she smiles and keeps dancing. The telephone rings. She reaches the stove, and her mother quickly turns off the burners. Her mother spins around and grabs her by the shoulders. “Stay right there,” she says, her dark eyes shining fear. “I have to get that.” Her mother goes toward the sink, the electric coils hissing slightly as they return to their inactive onyx state. They are so pretty, so shiny as she leans close. The Real Thing takes her pointer finger and gently dots the outermost coil, already black: she jumps back as the heat registers on her fingertip.

  &

  “I will never forget how she behaved,” her mother says, bitterness condensing her voice like a thick soup. “She” is the Baby Sister, now all grown up and far from home. Their mother scrubs the pan harder, the Brillo pad a scratchy percussion on the bottom of the burned pan. The kitchen smells of cumin seeds that have blackened and look like cracked peppercorn, spicy yet inedible. “Hurtful,” she says, “not even considering how we might have felt then, how we had a right to be grieved hearing the news.”

  The once-upon-a-time Baby Sister must have told their mother to stop whining and acting like a child. Another grievance. It could be a grievance from earlier in the week when a six-year-old beauty queen was found murdered in her family home in Colorado, it could be a grievance from when Saturday
Night Fever was playing at the movie theater down the street decades ago. Time was fluid in the long list of past grievances.

  “No two snowflakes are ever alike,” the remaining, acknowledged daughter says, staring out the bay window, the snow falling calm and white over the barren trees, the barren ground. An icy blanket. Winter remains the Baby Sister’s favorite season.

  Their mother twists the tap handle as if she were driving a car and making a sudden left turn. The water gushes out and runs like the wind chimes in the neighbor’s back patio. She jams shut the lever with her elbow and puts the newly scrubbed pan in the dish rack. “I have tomato soup and sourdough bread for lunch.”

  A sigh.

  Everyone in the family knows the allergies and intolerances have reared their gorgon heads, and neither tomatoes nor whole wheat are part of the prescribed foods. “I can’t eat that,” the Real Thing says.

  Their mother pivots from one leg to another. “Well, I can’t make a second lunch.” Her tone is as flat as the granite surface of the counter. She stirs the pot, resting atop a black coil. “You know that. Why do you expect me to make you a second lunch?”

  Another sigh. The Real Thing eyes the car keys on the kitchen table next to her wallet. She walks over, scoops up everything as if she were scooping forbidden ice cream onto a forbidden waffle cone, and saunters toward the front door. “I won’t be long,” she says.

  “You’re not going to eat with me?”

  “I can’t,” she says. “I forgot, I have a lunch date.” With the Baby Sister, on a pay phone at the mall.

  “In this weather?” Their mother rushes toward the window. “Cancel it! Just make do with what we have at home.”

  But the once-upon-a-time Real Thing is already out the door. She is home in North Carolina visiting, taking time off from her newspaper job in Hawaii to address their mother’s sudden new ailment, but spending every moment as far from the cacophony as she can.

  &

  The dispatcher squawks, “Hollis, come again. I didn’t hear you.”

  &

  The answer shall always remain the same. The short answer is no. It is followed by a longer answer: No way. It is followed further by a litany: No how. No chance. Not on your life. Never.

  &

  There is the extra-long answer: Not as long as she has breath left in her poor, tired, broken-down, enraged, disgraced, exhausted body.

  &

  There. There’s the first emergency exit, and there’s the metal-barred door that leads to the platform and then to the women’s bathroom. The line is snaking purposefully toward the open throat of the tunnel that leads to the ride, available exclusively inside the California theme park. Appropriately named Hell on Earth. Antigravity, multiple 360-degree turns. Guaranteed you’ll wish you weren’t born. How could the little girls want to do this? How could she have agreed? Her hero grins for the first time since Greta died, and her stomach drops down the three stories to street level, where the watching spectators already look small, doll-like. She and her family walk past the last emergency exit. “I’m going to throw up,” she hears herself whispering.

  The Eldest Daughter laughs. “You’ll live, Mom.”

  &

  The agent’s eyes are the color of a bachelor’s button, blue, but remote like the stars that make up Orion. He shows her the warrant. “I have the right to do this,” he says, reiterating his desire to search her and her car. His desire. Her body. She looks past him for a second. Her front door is busted and armed agents are already inside her house.

  She remembers her city editor Clay at the newspaper on O’ahu two jobs before, admonishing her when she had complained about a source’s rudeness, the way the source had entered the Honolulu newsroom uninvited and wagged an accusing finger in her face. Shut the hell up, Clay’s voice echoes. Do what you have to do to stay alive. Clay, whose actual voice she has not heard in years, Clay who is sick with a tropical ailment and sometimes cannot remember his own name. “No,” she hears herself spewing, as if she were spitting out a mouthful of sand.

  The female agent in charge points her finger. “We are the state police. We can do whatever we want.”

  “It’s 2010,” she hears herself arguing. “You can’t.”

  The agent with the warrant backs her up to the car door, and his hands run down the length of her T-shirt and sweatpants, palms open, slowly as if there will be a pop quiz later on every square inch that he touches. “This is for my safety,” he says, leaning close to her ear as if to whisper something tender. “What are you hiding?”

  The female agent in charge looks down at her clipboard, pretending to study.

  “It’s 2010,” Mother repeats. “You won’t get away with this.”

  From the periphery of her eye she makes out the women, white on white and peroxide blond glistening in the Monday sun, aviators reflecting as they stand guard over the clipped grass and pressure-washed concrete, chess pieces waiting for the next move.

  &

  She spies Henry on the bus, sitting in between two young women, who look like college students. Sitting on bench seats in the back of the bus, the windows tinted blue, a placard advertising the university’s collegiate apparel store in black and white above him. She does not recognize anyone on the crammed city bus except Henry, almost everyone else is reading the university newspaper on their laps, the front page showing a photograph of the now-nonexistent space shuttle Challenger shortly before takeoff. He sits squarely between the two brunettes, their white skin paling under their black jackets. The Real Thing, now all grown up, tries to say hello, she offers a smile as she sits across from him. He looks thin, all angles between his asymmetrical haircut and hollowed cheekbones, his skin especially ashy. He does not acknowledge her, his eyes are buttons on a worn peacoat.

  She says, “Henry,” softly, almost to herself.

  He turns his head almost perpendicular to his body and he stares out the window. Someone pulls the cord, alerting the driver to take the next bus stop, near the corner of Franklin Street and Columbia, across from the church for which the town is named. She cannot stop staring, but finds her eyes starting to sting with rejection, and it is hard to keep her eyes open.

  When the bus stops, the driver opens the doors. Henry takes the hand of the brunette on his left and exits.

  Real Thing gulps the air and it is laced with bus exhaust.

  She pulls the cord for the next stop, and stumbles as she gets off the bus.

  She has to sit down at the curb, put her head between her knees.

  &

  Just maybe she changes right before her tenth birthday when she is forced to watch The Pit and the Pendulum. Teachers and staff herd all of the students in the third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classes into the auditorium, turn on the projector, and then turn off the lights. The Baby Sister sits right behind her and buries her head between her didi’s shoulder blades, and whimpers. They are spellbound, the way mice are hypnotized at the sight of a snake wriggling toward them. Vincent Price. Two hours. She doesn’t recall much about the movie except for the dungeon. Oh yeah, she remembers the woman who is trapped inside the iron maiden. Her husband, played by Vincent Price, thinks her dead and buries her only to learn he’d killed her when he puts her in the family crypt. But mostly, the recollections center on sleeping with the lights on every night for a month. How unhappy their mother is with this new arrangement.

  &

  Just maybe she changes when the Baby Sister grows up and leaves the house for good. Just around the time the Mall of America opens in Minnesota and her once-upon-a-time shopaholic sister has renounced all the things found in malls. Her sister has renounced college, too. Her sister. Now a sister of God. Muslin habit. Periodic vows of silence.

  &

  In 1965, Slumber Party Barbie came with a weight scale permanently set at 110 pounds. On the “play scale,” that would make Barbie a five-foot-nine woman who was 35 pounds underweight.

  &

  Just maybe she changes the
first time (or the second or the third . . .) because she can’t save even one of them. Eighteen months since the move, her hero out of town again. Since last Thursday, the Youngest Daughter walks around with a full plastic sandwich bag held to the side of her head. At first, there is ice in it, from when the Youngest bungee jumps off the top of the couch and Mother misses rescuing her by half a second. Now, when the Youngest discovers an empty plastic baggie, she fills it with crayons, animal crackers, squishy hair bands, cotton balls. She strolls from room to room, up and down the staircase, and in and out the front door, holding an extremely used plastic bag to her temple. Once in a while, she takes the baggie off of her head to inspect it and give it a small kiss, and then forces it to resume its position.