Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

“We’ll look,” said Tom.

“What, police stations, public records?”

“No, just around here. We’ll ask.”

So they got up and started working the bar from one end to the other, leaning down to people’s ears, over the music. Every now and then somebody would stare after Kyrie, as if they were trying to remember her, identify her among the vague memories of childhood.

“They’re crazy,” I said. “It’s impossible.”

“Yes,” Amanda said.

I took a deep breath, and said, looking at my glass, “When are you going to call your parents?”

“My parents?”

“They’re here, right? In Houston?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not going to go, visit them, I mean?”

“No.”

“Amanda, they’ll know you’re here. When the credit card bill gets there, at least.”

“So?”

“So? So you’ve got to go there.”

“Why?”

“Pay your respects.”

She blinked, looking at me as if 1 was speaking a language she didn’t understand. The words felt foreign and strange even to me, in the light from the red plastic — encased candle between us.

“You have to,” I said. “You really do.” I kept on saying this, and we gaped at each other until finally both of us burst into laughter. But I kept on at her, while Kyrie and Tom went from bar to bar, and finally at some hour of the night so late that it was actually cool, she broke and drawled, “All right, all right, we’ll go,” and I slept in a strange happiness, as if I was to meet somebody I’d been looking for a long time.

We went the next morning, leaving Kyrie and Tom at the motel with Amanda’s credit card. It was a Sunday morning, and the roads were empty and quiet. The car turned a corner, and it seemed all at once that we had left behind the malls and the condos and the straightforward seediness of motels. Now the houses were two-storied and lawned, ivied and crenelated, the street was suddenly smooth and was no longer a street but an oak-lined boulevard.

“Amazing,” I said. “Where are we?”

“River Oaks,” Amanda said.

“Where’s the river?” I said, but she didn’t reply. She was spinning the wheel, and in a quick turn we faced a very large building, built on a slight rise at the center of the plot, that was unmistakably the same house I remembered from dozens of Classic Comics set in another-century England. “Wow,” I said. “Wuthering Heights, man.”

Amanda opened the door with a gold key on a chain. Stepping inside, I had the sensation of being transported to another time: the parlor was full of fussy Victorian chairs, all curlicues and massive feet, hunting prints, a quizzical deer head on the wall. Inside, the corridors were white and high-ceilinged, and the rooms were as gleaming and brown and perfect as film sets. Amanda walked ahead of me to the kitchen, and it was only here the dizzying illusion was broken, because she picked a sparkling glass from the shelf and held it under a tap inset into the fridge, which was enormous and white.

“Wow,” I said. “Running cold water.” That tap in the fridge fascinated me, and I gulped down my water quickly just so that I could stick my glass in and watch it fill under the gleaming tap. “This is so amazing.” She looked at me, a faint grin on her face. “No, really, it’s like really so damned elegant because it works.” I drank another glass of water. It was funny tasting, clean and flat but impeccably cold. I took another glass and now I had to sip it. “You know when I got obsessed with America? It was a damn long time ago. It was when I was really little. This was when I was so little I hadn’t even gone away to boarding school. I must have been five or six or maybe at the most seven. From somewhere or other there showed up in our house a nineteen-sixty-seven Sears catalog. It was quite thick and big and I used both hands to pick it up. I think one of our neighbors brought it over to show my mother dress patterns for her daughters. But I found it one winter day in the drawing room when I came home from school, when my mother was asleep, and I carried it up on the roof, where I sat and started to go through it page by page. I started with the men’s wear, with all the blond, blue-eyed guys wearing checkered shirts tapering to their bodies. Then the men’s underwear, then the women’s dresses, then the women’s underwear, then the whole family groups, the mothers and daughters wearing the same dress and same bell-shaped hair, then the garden tools, all these slick hedge cutters and long lengths of green pipe, and, amazing and unbelievable, drivable grass cutters, little too-much too-deadly tractors that you drove around the lawn and the grass came out packed in bags. But best of all, at the back, saved for last, whole working and usable and immaculate swimming pools! Swimming pools you could order through the mail, that would come to your house in boxes, that could be assembled, on your large and expansive back lawn, into what it said, into goddamn amazing swimming pools, so that your pretty daughters, your crewcutted sons, your bloody stunning wife could paddle and float gently under the best sun in this best of all worlds. I mean it felt as if the top of my seven-year-old head had come off, that I had seen heaven, no, not that exactly, but that this, this in front of me was what life must be. This was bloody it. So when my mother called for me I jerked up and hated her, felt instantly angry at the un-neatness of our house, how weathered and cracking all over it was, old and old in everything. I wanted to chop down the old peepul tree that hung its branches over the roof and scattered its leaves in our court-yard. I was so desolate with the feeling of who I was and where I was and how stuck I was in the whole untidy clutter that I started down the stairs with the catalog still in my hand, and only when I was halfway down did I think to go back up and hide it under the water tank. I kept it there for years and years until it fell apart. I used to go up there all the time to look at it. I kept it for years, until all the pages were curling and some of them had fallen out and blown away, and the families were faded, but still the pictures, the idea of them, were bright in my mind.”

So Amanda took me out back to the swimming pool, which looked like a highland grotto, with a waterfall, and artificial picturesque rocks, or maybe real picturesque rocks artfully fitted and arranged to look like a scene from Lorna Doone , complete with a gnarled oak tree on a knoll.

“Who made this house? I mean who designed it?”

“My parents,” she said. “Who else?”

“Where are they?”

“They must be at church.”

For a moment I tried to imagine the church, but my mind swung wildly from one thing to another, from French Gothic to rural English, and realizing it could be anything, anything at all, I gave up. I sat eagerly by the pool, my mind a blank, waiting for Amanda’s parents. We took off our shoes and dangled our feet in the water and waited.

“Are you bored?” said Amanda.

“I’m bored,” I said. So she brought out a little color TV, and some vodka, and we drank Bloody Marys by the pool and watched Star Trek . Drinking Bloody Marys, I felt witty and cold, and Amanda and I talked back to Kirk and Spock, we made cutting, ironic remarks, and laughed at our own cleverness.

“TV is so fucking stupid,” Amanda said.

“Bloody right,” I said. “Stupid as all hell.”

Amanda’s mother was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen: she had curly blond hair, green eyes, broad shoulders, and taut legs. She strode in through the sliding doors like a vision out of a glossy magazine and the sight of her daughter and me floating around in her pool didn’t pause her for a second.