Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

“Oh, nothing,” I say, “I just wondered.”

“Mostly German, a little English, some Dutch, some French, I should think,” my father says.

“No Italian?” I ask.

“It’s possible,” my mother says. “My side spent a lot of time in New York.”

“Have to go,” I say. I walk to school feeling my body move, trying to see if there’s a little strut in it. The truth is that in the sunshine of the day I’m a little ashamed and more than a little frightened by what I’d done the night before. Rolling in the bushes is extreme for anyone, but me? In tenth grade I wrote a paper on the invention of romantic love in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine. So now I want a genetic reason for my behavior, some dimly remembered racial memory that had awakened and pushed me headlong into lunacy.

In English, Mercy Fuller Cunningham is talking, in a breathless tone of horror, about some weird animal that rolled around in her yard and smashed hedges.

“Be careful,” I say, as I walk to my desk. “It could be the Snow Beast.” Raising my hands over my head, back humped, fingers hooked: “Arrrrrr. Ahhaarrr-aarrr.”

She looks at me, puzzled. I drop the Snow Beast, walk around her and swing into my desk in one fluid movement. As Mrs. Christiansen walks in, Ling leans over to me. “ Why are you walking like that?” I shrug.

That day, after class, I walk next to Mercy Fuller Cunningham in the hall, making conversation about movies. “Risky Business , yeah,” I say, “that was totally cool, but I liked Top Gun better.” I know, I know: I had an anxiety attack when I heard they were going to make a movie which featured jets, motorcycles, and Tom Cruise. Ling said that the average teenage boy could get his hormone level maladjusted just from looking at the ad. But now the situation was desperate, and I think I would have raved about John Wayne if Mercy Fuller Cunningham had given me half an opening. So we casually walked into the cafeteria and I casually kept up my stream of carefully middle-to-just-above-middlebrow, not-too-radical banter, and casually we stood in line and casually I got some milk and stuff, and we walked outside to the patio, and she said, want to sit here? and we sat on red-and-green concrete picnic tables, and I casually opened my milk, one-handed, and all around us heads turned.

See, I don’t know what it was like at yours, but at Hilltop, there were the Punkers and the Trendies, the Lot Dead Stoners, the Ethnics, the Jocks and the Cheers, the Nerds, the Super Nerds, the Artos, the Jesus Gnomes, and the Nobodies. Sometimes a Punker would go out with a New-Wavish Trendy, and sometimes a Nerd would sneak a smoke with one of the Dead, but mostly the caste rules were maintained with slavish obedience and enforced by vicious ridicule. You were judged for everything and could be ostracized for anything, and I mean anything, the shoes you wore, your parents, your car, your religion, your clothes, especially if you were a woman. So when I sit down to lunch with Mercy Fuller Cunningham a ripple passes among the assembled multitudes — here is a confirmed Arto Super Nerd breaking bread with the most exalted and rosy-breasted of the Cheers: Damn, I say, old man, what is this modern world coming to? Jolly bad form, what?

But I ignore the giggles and the sniggers, and actually exult in them, because for my passion I am enduring the slings and gibes of unbelievable conformity. I am able to endure anything. During the next few weeks I spend all my money on clothes, and wearing only underwear, lift weights in front of the mirror. I practice saying “Yo!” I eat with Mercy often and try to make conversation with her friends, all of whom react to me with careful politeness. Mercy always introduces me: this is my smart friend Tom, he’s a poet. I get the feeling that this just heightens their ineffable feeling of superiority. And sometimes I just cannot believe these people, and at these times I get the feeling that Mercy is embarrassed by them. Like there’s this one time, lunch again, and Salma walks by, Salma is this Pakistani girl, a power at math, solves differential equations in her head, and she has black, amazingly beautiful hair, that she lets hang in a thick coil to below her knees, and Salma walks on by, and Mercy’s friends Mary and Ellen and Bill and Steve, all of them bat their hands in front of their noses, smiling. “What?” I say, feeling this nervous smile on my lips.

“Don’t you know?” Craig says. “They never wash it, the hair.” Craig and John are these two handsome buzz-cut black guys, both football players, and now both of them are sitting there smiling at me. I have a mad impulse to lean over and grab them by the collars and shout, what the fuck are you laughing at? but Mercy puts a hand on my arm, under the table, and so I sit there and they start talking about something else.

I want to tell Ling about this, but instead I talk to her about end-of-term papers or some such nonsense. She wants to come over and pick up a reference book I have, and I try to put her off, I’ll bring it tomorrow to school, and she says, what is your problem? so I say, all right. At my house, on the stairs up to my room, her nose begins to twitch, and a full three feet before she reaches the door she bursts out, “What is that smell? Incense?”

She walks into the room and stops short. The walls are covered with Italian madonnas, sad-eyed women with pure, spiritual expressions and incredible sexual potential.

“Oh, Tom,” Ling says. “Oh, oh, Tom.”

From the next day on, she starts to leave Xeroxed articles in my desk, articles with two-part titles like The Making and Breaking of Marilyn Monroe: A Post-feminist Perspective and Men, Women, Sex, and War: Gender Politics and Violence among the Kikuyu and Complex Dream or Simple Need: Towards a Bio-genetic Understanding of the Male Sexual Impulse (the last by a woman named Emmaline Shakti Sharpstown). I want to tell Ling, thanks, but I don’t need these, I understand only too well the shoddy symbolisms of my psyche, the grunting subterfuges of my id, but I am too embarrassed to even talk about it.

So the days go by and my GPA plummets and Mrs. Christiansen gives back my papers with large contemptuous C’s scrawled across the front, and pretty soon the whole world knows I’m going mad. I actually hear a pimply little freshman tell her equally pimply friend, “That’s the guy whose obsessing over Mercy Fuller Cunningham — he’s gone crazy.” I walk down the halls in my new Reeboks and my new haircut like some grotesque marked by fire: people stop talking when I draw near, and will look anywhere but into my eyes. And while this is happening I get a sense of some weird empathy from the Ethnics — I turn around in the cafeteria one day and there’s Muhammed Ziai, a sophomore, the only kid in school of Iranian descent, and he turns away quickly but not before I see this sad smile on his face. This keeps on happening to me, Pakistanis, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Cubans stare at me absently and then flick their eyes away. Meanwhile, I wonder if Mercy Fuller Cunningham is aware of all this, and surely she must be, but every time I make some feeble effort to break the spell she does something that pulls me right back in, all these little touches and smiles and I didn’t see you today, Tommy, I missed you, all so innocent that then and now I waver between thinking of her as the proverbial cock-goading bitch and a poor misunderstood generous girl trapped by her beauty.

So on it goes. I cycle between depression and expansive happiness, and the sight of lovers, of any two people, arouses in me a morbid, hateful jealousy. Even the sight of a bleached blond Sheena of the Jungle swinging into the arms of her Great White Lover makes me sullen, even as Ling snorts: “If she actually rides that lion this thing gets an extra two points.” Noting my brooding fanatic countenance, she quiets down and pretends to watch the movie for a minute or two, then says, “I’ll bet you five bucks she gets tied to a stake by chanting tribesmen in the next thirty minutes.” When even that fails to get a response out of me she bursts out — the first time she has said anything to me directly about this — she explodes, “If it’s going to do this to you, why the fuck won’t you talk to her?”