Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

In Manhattan Mother took a job as typist in a medical insurance company, where there was some hesitation at first about hiring her, but once they had seen the relentless regularity of her fingers against the typewriter keys, her amazing speed, they engaged her quickly and soon began to depend on her. She worked without breaks, except the regulation hour to eat lunch, and showed, even at the end of the day, no signs of exhaustion. The other workers, mostly stiletto-heeled Hispanic girls, started to call her “La Machina,” and spent many coffee breaks making up horrifying stories about what Mother did after work. But what she did was simple enough — with her first paycheck she bought a set of dumbbells, and with the next another, and she spent her evenings alone in her small, yellowed room, lifting weights. This was long before the health boom, but I remember her very clearly, standing before a cracked mirror, regarding her body with a distant hostility, paying intelligent and unswerving attention to each small part, working on it, bit by bit, bit by bit, sweating and groaning until each curve, each dip, was firmly sculpted, until it all shone in the dim light like a brown statue tortured and polished by a thousand years of sea.

How do I enter this picture, you ask? Where did I come from? I think I was necessary because she never herself believed that she could fly, and so every Saturday she put on a loose green dress that flattered her skin and walked the bars, protected by that seriousness that had marked her from the start. It took her a long time to find what she was looking for, because in those days it was hard for a woman like her to meet a man, say a Yalie, down to Manhattan for the weekend, weightless and windswept in white flannels, perhaps a navy sweater, fine blond hair a sweep over a thin forehead, long delicate hands and half-mooned fingernails. That’s what she wanted, and after a year and a half she found him in a jazz club on Amsterdam in the upper nineties. She seduced him not by feminine simpers or coy fluttering, but by looking at him very directly for half an hour, and then walking up to him: ‘Come home with me.’ He went, winking over her head at his friends, and was confident all the way into her apartment, until she turned to him and pushed him onto her bed, straddled him, and whipped off his belt in one movement. She refused to kiss him, and what frightened him more than the rocky strength in her biceps and shoulders was the way she looked at him in the darkness. After he had fled, she took a long shower, and slept a very deep sleep.

So I grew within her, cell by cell, washed in her blood, a body of her body. For the most part, she ignored the fact that she was pregnant, and worked just as ceaselessly, acknowledging all the half-snide inquiries with a curt nod. She typed, “On the afternoon of February 3, Mr. Hardin was struck in the facial area with a baseball bat, resulting in avulsion of three permanent teeth from the upper jaw,” and I think I heard, somehow — I know it sounds crazy, but it’s the only way to explain what happened later, what I did. “Mr. James stepped into a hole at a construction site and fell onto his left hand. He sustained a rotary subluxation of the scaphoid, and soft tissue damage of the left wrist and hand, including the metaphalangeal joint of the thumb. He subsequently developed de Quervain’s disease and carpal tunnel syndrome.” “There are small areas of increased signal intensity posterior to the C4–5 and C5–6 intervertebral spaces, with mild extradural impressions upon the thecal sac and the anterior aspect of the spinal cord at these levels — representing possible bulging or herniated intervertebral discs, or degenerative posterior osteophytes.” “Mrs. Quevado was struck by small pieces of glass from the windshield, resulting in lacerations of both corneas.” I grew with this knowledge of the fragility of the body, of its brittleness, of how it breaks and where it mends, of how it twists and mortifies, its strange humors and expulsions, its stenches and its ugliness, its suffering, and yet after all I was unable to regard it as she did, with such fascination and with such grief.

As I learned this, inside her, she exerted her will on me: by clenching her insides, by looking, for an hour every evening, at thousands of postcards of pearly eyed infants and at the society pages of Harper’s Bazaar and the New York Times and Look , she made me pink-skinned, blue-eyed, blond. As I formed inside her, Mother erased herself from me. Believe me, it happened, it can happen, more powerful than science, the strongest magic in the world is the will, it makes miracles. After she made me she spit me from her like a peanut and never touched me again except to wipe the insides of my ears or tie my hair back in a ponytail. The nurse said, it’s a daughter, look, such lovely hair, and she said, yes, I know, and turned over and went to sleep. I never cried, either.

So I grew, and she took a second job, night accountant in a hotel, then a third, weekend organizer and tax-consultant for truck stops and small restaurants. All this so I could have eighteen-dollar haircuts in Second Avenue salons, little peacoats from Charivari’s, ballet lessons and perfect shoes from Stein’s to go with, so that people could exclaim as I emerged from some dark glass door, letting a cool breath of luxury and just, how to talk about it, just rightness out onto the sidewalk, so people could say how lovely, how darling she is. At these moments Mother would stand a modest two paces behind me, and people would take her for a starched and blessedly efficient maid. They would look at her brown, blunt face, her hands clasped in front of her, her flat shoes, and with a trace of covetousness they would ask who she worked for, and she, with a quick, tight smile of delight would shake her head and whisk me off. On those evenings she would mix me an extra teaspoonful of Ovaltine, and would take my hundred-stroke brush and pinch away coiled hairs, looking at me now and then, that secret smile on her face.

I grew up and never thought we were strange. I knew Mother worked hard for me, and so I worked back for her, and the other things I accepted naturally and thought nothing of them. I was vain, I understood why mother was vain of me, and I pitied her a little for the way she looked, and this made me even more eager to bring home those perfect report cards, to be more buoyant in my jetes. But when I was twelve I came home one afternoon and found Mother, in her between-jobs housecoat, watching, on her new twelve-inch television, a feathery puff of white smoke that trailed away into the sky. I sat next to her and watched with her as she flipped channels, moving from image to image of a thin sliver of white riding a huge column of vapor, finally leaving a drifting stain in the sky and a memory of a roar drumming against the ears.

“Look at it,” she said. “Just look at it.”

“Neat-o,” I said shortly, dismissing it with my too-usual and too-casual accolade. I started to flip through a copy of Life, a little scared and yet a little pleased to see the quick snap of her eyes in my direction. She had gotten angry at me before, but always about things I had done or neglected to do, it was always me, but now it seemed she cared about this other thing enough to be hurt about it. So now, in the weeks and months afterwards, I pretended that there was nothing weird going on, but there was: she collected every picture, every scrap of print she could find about those rockets that tore themselves free of the earth. I had to pick my way over stacks of Popular Mechanics and cheesy plastic models of Gemini II , clear my sofa bed of NASA publicity flyers at night, and stumble over paperback biographies of John Glenn in the bathroom in the morning. In the bathroom, on the pot, sleepy-eyed and fuzzy-mouthed, I abandoned my act and studied this John Glenn, his hopeful upturned face and clear blue eyes, and tried to figure out the connection. But I was young, and too attached to scientific fact myself, and so, unable to come up with a coherent explanation, I was forced to face the idea that my mother was strange. Always, my contemplations — made somehow comfortable by the smells of my body — were interrupted by Mother, who pounded rapidly on the door, saying, “I don’t understand how you can spend all that time in there.”