Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Then a smell came up around me, a good smell but so rich that I gagged and jerked my head away from the paper cup in front of me.

“Shake?” It was a woman in a red dress, holding out to me what looked like a small bucket. “Chocolate.”

“God, no. That’s big.”

“It is. It’ll cut whatever it is. Blow?”

“No.”

“Booze?”

“No. Actually nothing at all.”

“One of those.”

We sat there looking at each other, and she was a very beautiful woman, with long straight blond hair caught up in a high ponytail, clear blue eyes, and the fairest skin I had ever seen. The dress was made of a material shot through with something petrochemical, so it clung and stretched, and as she moved I had to look at the freckled crease between her breasts and then away.

“I’ve seen you somewhere before,” I said.

“Probably have,” she said, grinning complicity at me. Her face was very finely wrinkled, and at the elbows I could see the roughing of age.

“Yes? So what d’you do besides offering balm to lost souls?”

“Well, actually, really,” she said, “I’m an actress. A performer. Movies.”

“Right. So what did I see you in?”

“Something you weren’t supposed to see.”

“Again?”

“I make dirty movies.”

“Shit, now I know, you’re the one on television, I mean regular television. You were in a committee or something.”

“Testifying, not in. Drink the shake.”

“Kyrie,” I said, between slurps. “Kyrie, that’s you. What’re you doing here?”

“That’s a long story. I’m not really here, anyway, just going somewhere.”

“Where?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“You gave me a shake.”

“Well, I guess so. But I don’t have time. I have to get away from here.”

“Are you running from something?”

“You could say that. You’ll see it in the news today. No, I didn’t kill somebody or anything like that. Not that kind of dangerous shit, just weird.”

“You’re going to walk?”

“I don’t know. My car died somewhere out there.”

So I walked her to the car, which Tom and Amanda were emptying of wrappers and plastic bottles and crumpled cigarette packets. Amanda said, all right, with a shrug and a toss of her head, while Tom leaned back up against the Jaguar and smiled.

“Pretty dusty, this thing,” he said. So we took it through a car wash, and for a few minutes we were comfortably eggshelled in a wash of white, then we were out on the road. In a while we were out on the high desert, and the low sunlight filled the inside of the car until it felt like we were sending out a burst of light at every curve. I upended the glass over my head to lick out the last of the chocolate milk, and came out with it on my eyebrows and in my hair, and Amanda looked over and giggled. In the morning when we had woken up together we had said very little, but now I smiled at her and settled myself against the door, and after a while, without being asked, in a low voice, Kyrie told us about what she was running from, and what to.

So (she said), so, I suppose it all started with my mother. My mother — and that’s how she liked to be called, “Mother” —when she was seventeen she was the best student and pastry-baker at the St. Jude’s School for Girls in Houston. The nuns, who were mostly Texans of Irish descent, told her more than once how they had rescued her from her ragged, street-dusty father, a drunken Apache who couldn’t rouse himself to find a soup line, much less look after a child as quiet, as inward, and as thoughtful as her. “But you,” they told her in their lilting voices, their lovely broad accents, “but you will be something.” So she grew up compact and contained, very short, dark, not pretty, but very strong, with a capacity for work, physical and other, that delighted the nuns and impelled them to write imploring letters to Ivy League colleges. There was a seriousness about her, a purpose: when the other girls, confident and careless with the beginnings of beauty, dared to steal the left-to-dry host from the back of the chapel, she not only refused, but disregarded their mocking with an indifference much worse than contempt. What she silenced them with was a moral assurance that made them feel petty, and it was this essential goodness, this refusal to smile, nervously, ecstatically, or otherwise, that the nuns loved and were a little scared by. So they teased her about boyfriends, and finally when she was seventeen and a half, almost out of their care, they decided that she absolutely must have some fun, and one Saturday they sent her to the matinee at the Rialto with two girls they trusted.

These two were Janine Alcott and Carol Ann Mayberry, clean, whippet-smart, and pretty, the first the captain of the debating team and the other a star hockey player. Despite their obvious healthiness, their basic straightforwardness that had won over the nuns, they were tormented by their share of repressed late-nineteen-forties horniness, so that as soon as they reached the theater they hurried to the john and set about remaking themselves with all the desperate art of seventeen. As they colored and pulled and tucked away, Mother watched them in the mirror with the impartial interest of an anthropologist: they didn’t or couldn’t think of offering her lipstick, or even advice, she was that damned objective. Outside, they shared a glance over her head, a moment of sympathy for her, because she was walking her quick little efficient walk, her shoulders squared under her absurd dress with its round collar, completely indifferent to the gigantic wave of concupiscence that billowed out at them from the darkened pit of the movie hall.

The next day, when the afternoon newspapers announced “Girl School Heist — Star Pupil Suspect” and “Valedictorian Vamooses with Catholic Cash,” Janine and Carol Ann twisted and basked in the warm light of flashbulbs like a couple of trained seals, and said they always thought there was something a little hard about her, but nobody ever really knew what it was. Nobody knew what happened to Mother in the darkness, not them, not the nuns, not me, and maybe not even her. She never talked about it, not once, but I went back and dug up the papers, the police reports, all that, and I still don’t know what made her do it. The movie that afternoon was Top Hat , in which Fred and Ginger float weightless above the rooftops of Manhattan, but in the Rialto that afternoon the audience ignored them completely, trapped joyfully in the fetid, fragrant gravity of each other’s body, in the terrific incense of popcorn, Coke, chewing gum, sweat, exchanged saliva, and, very faint but incontestably there, the sweet smell of come seeping slowly into starched jeans. All of them ignored the angel lightness of Fred and Ginger, all, that is, except Mother, who sat bolt upright in her chair, her hands clenched before her chest, staring raptly at the glowing screen. What did she see? I don’t know, but I think she must have seen spirit freed from body, love leaping away from fornication, joy uncoupled from suffering, and — pardon my high-flown bullshit, but you see, don’t you see? — time emancipated of history. She looked up, her face stained with tears (Janine and Carol Ann tell us this, in yellowed newspapers), at the white stream of light above her head, and I know she must have felt the firm weight of her muscles weighing her down, the brown skin, the dark nipples, the flat nose, the hair. And I know she must have felt something so great, a conviction so real, that it shattered her and made her into something else, because that night she walked away from Janine’s Studebaker without looking back, and later she broke into the sacristy, jimmied open the donations box, and emptied it of every last cent. She took the petty cash from the principal’s office, and the day’s take in the bakery, and when a Sister Carmina stumbled out of a hallway door in a pink nightgown, Mother punched her so hard between the eyes that the poor sister was knocked, raccoon-faced, back into her bedroom and into a sick-bed for two weeks.