In the Red Read Online Free PDF

peach-like fruit. The machine vibrated and then emitted a fierce series of tinny dings in a rollicking melody of joy. It dispensed two quarters into the receiving tray.
    â€œHa!” Elena said.
    â€œWe won!” Irina smiled as Elena scooped one of the quarters from the tray and immediately fed it back into the machine, yanking the lever with great gusto. A bunch of grapes. A jackpot logo. A pair of cherries.
    They waited for the machine to sing at them, but it remained silent. Undeterred, Elena put in the second quarter. Again, nothing. She looked at Irina expectantly. Irina was rooting around in her bag for another quarter when a voice shouted, “Hey!”
    They looked up. The man striding toward them was not wearing lamé or a pharaonic headdress with a snake on it. He had on a black suit and an earpiece. “Hey you! How old are you?”
    The two girls did not even look at each other before they started to run. They lost the man quickly; he probably didn’t care enough to really give them chase. It took them long minutes of panting panic to find their twisting way back onto the street. The sky had gotten completely black in the time they’d been inside.
    â€œWhy did he ask how old?” Elena said, tugging down her skirt, which had ridden up while she was running.
    â€œIn America, you have to be twenty-one to play these games.”
    â€œOh,” she said. “But these games, they look like they are for children.”
    Irina laughed. “Yes, children who feed these games entire mortgage payments one quarter at a time.”
    â€œWhat is ‘mortgage’? ”
    Irina walked with Elena, trying to explain to her the concept of a homeowner’s debt to a bank. Elena could not understand because Irina kept piling her explanation with words Elena had never heard before. Irina gave up. This concept was not important anyway. The two of them were too young to talk about adult debts, about sinking into the red to find a place in the world. But then again, they were certainly too young to be married, and Elena was as of that afternoon. They were too young for all of it, too young even to feed money to dumb machines.

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    I rina once asked Andrei what was the strangest thing about America when he got here? He said the choice. He noticed the language; the climate; the unknown plants; the inexplicable rituals and behavior of the natives; the way they shook hands with only two fast pumps and then let go immediately; their oversized straight white teeth; the way they spoke louder than necessary; the way the men sat with their legs crossed at the ankles to take up the most room possible, as if their generously sized genitals needed room to breathe; the way advertising could not be escaped; the way money was everywhere; the insincere friendliness; the forgetfulness; the way everything was so quickly and easily forgotten—he said he could get used to all those things. But it was choice that drew him, that was strangest of all.
    When he first arrived, he developed a fascination with supermarkets, the miraculous excess of well-organized foods. The way people shuffled bleary-eyed through the aisles tipping brightly colored packaged goods into their carts without any seeming awareness that this was unusual, this was unprecedented in human history, this was almost obscene. The foods for children interested him—what was a blue raspberry? How could a chocolate spread be “part of a nutritious breakfast”? Why did the cheese come in soft flat orange squares in cellophane, unrecognizable and scentless? Scentless—that was strange too, everything so clean. You could not smell the meat, the fish, sometimes not even the fruit. How could you have an entire table covered in peaches not one arm’s length away from you and not be able to smell a thing? The glossy skin of the flawless apples made him lay his finger on them to check that they were not fake, not made of wax.
    â€œThey