Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Ling’s my best friend since seventh grade. Taiwanese, her full Chinese name is Ling-Ling Lee, both her parents are doctors, and Ling’s going to Stanford — early decision — and then medical school, then surgery. Ling even had her specialty, right, what she’s going to do as a doctor, when she was a junior. She’s incredible. She works harder than anyone else I know, and is pretty funny when she wants to be, and wears her hair cut short and wears round gold glasses, with her dark eyes behind. So Mercy — the blond — has her hair over the back of the chair and I’m leaning forward a bit to get a good look and Ling’s got her lips together, like she’s on the verge of a smile.

Now I guess you could smile at Mercy. Her full name is Mercy Fuller Cunningham and that’s how she writes it on her books, she’s got all this hair, teased and brushed and whatever till it falls like the proverbial cascade, and she’s got blue eyes and pale skin and these breasts that gently swell the Saks shirts she wears, you get the idea. When she walks through the parking lot in front of the school all the little freshmen sitting on the back of cars fall silent and a hush follows her as they watch her legs working the back of her skirt. But in any case she twisted around in her chair and stuck her hand out at me, and gave me this big awful bruising smile and said, “Hi, Tom. I guess we’ve seen each other around but we’ve never really met, so I’m Mercy Cunningham.”

So it takes me a minute before I can get up a smile and grab for her hand, because I’m so stunned and charmed that here’s Mercy Cunningham actually introducing herself, as if anyone in the whole school doesn’t know who she is. Then Mrs. Christiansen starts in, but I sit there and watch the hair for the whole hour, and miss whatever Mrs. Christiansen and the others say about poor old Rip Van Winkle, who had to go off into the mountains. So now you’re thinking I’m already a goner, but actually I’m sitting there kind of admiring how Mercy Cunningham can be so perfect and yet so incredibly sweet, and I’ve heard other people say this at school —“She’s nice, really, she is!” —but I never really believed it before, because she hung out with the really snotty crowd, the kids with the magazine good looks and the perfect green sweaters and the whatever-it-takes-to-wear-them and the parties you heard about after they happened. And Ling and I, we were always the ones on the edges, we did the theater club and we won the scholarships and we were going to go to great colleges, but in high school we walked around together and nobody really knew us except our friends. So when Mercy Cunningham shakes my hand I just sit there thinking it’s true, it is, but I’m not imagining anything else, and anyway I don’t like blonds. At this point I’ve had one girlfriend, Sarah Nussenbaum, and she’s Ling’s best girlfriend, and is dark and cute and small and very Jewish — Princeton, early decision. Sarah and I went together for six months, and we nearly did it twice, and the second time she jumped up from the couch (her parents’ house), trying to rehook her bra and turning away, crying, saying we had to be friends. I said all right, okay, no really it’s all right, very comforting and sensitive even though I was throbbing painfully inside my jeans, so Sarah and I are friends now.

Mrs. Christiansen is going on about Rip, and Mercy Cunningham is bent over her notebook, writing industriously. I notice Ling watching me watching the hair, and at this I feel a little embarrassed for Mercy. See, Mrs. Christiansen has a gift for stating the obvious, and most of the kids in AP have read Poetics about sixteen times, and some of them like to talk semiotics, so it’s like a point of honor never to write down anything Mrs. Christiansen says. And now Mercy suddenly perks up and says, “So, you mean, like, Rip is an artist?”

Mrs. Christiansen flushes with pleasure and I hear a snicker or two, and Ling rolls her eyes. Then the class is over and I stop at the door to let Mercy by, and she says with another one of those smiles, “See you around, Tom,” and reaches out and touches me very lightly on the wrist as she passes. This time that fleeting touch really paralyzes me, I’m left standing by the door staring, preferring brunettes but still feeling a hammer on my heart. Then Ling grabs me by the elbow and pulls me outside, along the corridor.

“She must shampoo that hair every single day,” Ling says. “My grandmother, in Taiwan, says that modern shampoo destroys hair. All the chemicals, you know. She’s going to lose it someday.”

“Don’t be bitchy, Ling,” I say. “She’s nice.”

“Uh-huh, and one of these days she’ll be doing one of those cheerleader leaps and it’ll all fly off and she’ll come down bald,” Ling says, so I punch her on the arm, but I’m laughing, and all the way home we make up this story about a bald cheerleader who lives in the Appalachians and kills innocent hiking teenagers by strangling them with her incredibly muscular thighs.

We go to Ling’s house, walking through the shady avenues — Elm, Green — standard American upper-middle-class suburbia, in this case a few miles from Cincinnati, but indistinguishable really from a thousand other places anywhere on the continent. In Ling’s living room, her father is seated in front of the television, a just-opened bottle of Johnnie Walker Black by his side. When we come out later that night, he’ll be sitting there, his wife next to him, and the bottle will be half empty. They both wear gray suits and tend to get quieter as the evening goes on.

So Ling and I walk past him, and he smiles politely at me, and we get ourselves some soda and some cheese stuff and go into Ling’s room and settle down in front of the VCR. Now Ling and I, despite our grades and our good schools and our obvious precocious eighties sophistication, share a ravening taste for bad movies. We had our own grading system and we kept records — we would joke about writing a book someday — and according to our system some grindingly pretentious crap like Paris, Texas would get a 2, out of a possible 10, while our all-time high was a movie called The Snow Beast . The Snow Beast was this guy in a jazzed-up gorilla suit who terrorized a ski resort, only I guess they couldn’t afford to hire a whole gorilla suit, so for the whole movie you saw what can only be described as Buxom Babes being massacred by a gorilla hand or a gorilla head that descended on them from out of frame. The Snow Beast also got two whole extra points because its blond Aryan hero was named “Yar.” The first time somebody said, “Yar, there’s a durn snow beast out there on that there mountain, Yar!” Ling and I fell off the couch and made ourselves almost sick laughing.

So now we load up Afterwards and Ling punches the right buttons and immediately we are in a post — nuclear-holocaust, post — ozone-depletion, post — polar-cap-meltdown, post — chemical-disaster, post — raging-sexual-disease shopping mall. Scabby radiation-burned zombies, hair falling from cracking scalps, fight over food and designer fashions and wigs and lipstick and base, while the normal leads, unscarred and golden-fleshed, blow them away with full-automatic combat shotguns and worry if any of their small, trusty band is really a zombie in deep Elizabeth Arden disguise. It is quite calculatedly gory and awful, but we don’t enjoy it as much as we’d thought we would, maybe because I sit there, a little absent and distracted, not laughing at the proper cues. I say good night and walk home, skipping a little in the darkness. That night I dream of thighs pressing my ears into my head, and my tongue dipping into gold and pink. I wake up laughing.

So now you’re thinking I have a normal adolescent crush on the school sweetheart, but the truth is I find this ridiculous. The truth is that the woman is boring: in the next few days I talk to her and discover that she is “bright,” which is to say that she is capable of putting a sentence together and that Mrs. Christiansen litters the margins of her papers with “Good!” and “Exactly!” which is all very well, but I have absolutely nothing to say to her after “How’re you today?” and “What’s the reading for Friday?” Worse, she thinks Third World poverty is “sad,” that a strong defense posture is “necessary,” and Hawthorne is a “depressing” writer, and me, I’m the kid who sits at the back of the History class and insists, insists , that we use the word genocide when we talk about the Dakota and the Cherokee. I write turgid poetry, after Svetayeva and Pavese, which the editors of the Hilltop High Viewpoint accept for publication in a sort of cowed, abject manner just reeking of incomprehension. When I was nine, my father gave me the facts on sex, then turned back, adjusted his gray English cardigan, and said, “And another thing. The three greatest monsters of this century have been Joseph Stalin, Joseph McCarthy, and Margaret Mitchell.”