Jasmine

by Bharati Mukherjee

  “Does it have peas?” I am dazed by this grown boy’s desire to please.

  “Yeah,” he says, “but I used tofu instead of making the cheese myself. Is that okay?”

  “Then it’s matar panir,” I say. “Matar for peas and panir for cheese.” These are errors I feel I can correct.

  The rice is crunchy. The tofu has crumbled. The spices sludge up the bottom of the pot. That I was prepared for. But Darrel the Romantic who begins to talk to me now is a mystery. He is twenty-three. I’ve seen him grieve and rage, plant and harvest, and threaten to sell. I’ve seen him drunk, I’ve seen him with his girlfriend, his parents, with Bud. I’ve seen him tending his hogs like a registered nurse. But now he’s a shy, would-be lover with a despondent face, holding my hand in so anxious a grip that I think I must pull away before he breaks it. He’s a man transformed.

  He doesn’t want to be tied down to the farm, he doesn’t want to live poor and die rich like his father and grandfather, he wants to fly away to Tahiti, to Mars, to the moon, he wants to make love to an Indian princess.

  “He doesn’t treat you right either,” Darrel is saying, “he can’t can he?” and I am shocked, for this is the first time anyone has dared to mention Bud and sex.

  “I’m warning you. Don’t say anything more.”

  “Oh, Juh-ane, come on. I love you and we’re in this together. We can leave it together. New Mexico! I can run a Radio Shack in Santa Fe. You think Yogi’s the only electrical genius around here? I’ll even give him a job. I can make it there.” His face is twisted. Hate for Bud, love for me, vast pity for himself. With a bloody hand he’s reaching out to grab me. “Juh-ane,” he pleads. “I can’t make it here. It’s sucking my blood. And Bud’s the bloodsucker.”

  His ghastly curry has congealed on my plate. I can’t help staring at it, the whole failed, ambitious design of his evening, his life. “You’re being stupid. He’s a banker who’s loaned you thousands of dollars. Of course he wants you to succeed.”

  “Oh sure.” He looks around the kitchen, nodding to an invisible audience able to appreciate the magnitude of my ignorance. He acknowledges their silent applause.

  “Good old Bud Ripplemeyer, huh? He comes on as the friend of everybody. But we know something, don’t we?”

  He seizes my hands. “He’s in it with the big banks, isn’t he? The Eastern banks, right? They give the orders and he squeezes us, right?”

  Suddenly I can read the blown circuitry behind his eyes. Eastern bankers. Organic law. Aryan Nation Brotherhood. I think of the tattooed man, the dusty Eldorado with the Nebraska plates.

  “Darrel, they’ve gotten to you. Like Harlan. All that’s crazy.”

  “I’m crazy. That’s good. Bud’s degenerating right in front of your eyes and you call me crazy! He’s sick in the head with jealousy. He’s jealous of anyone who can farm, let alone anyone who can walk!”

  He’s let go of my hands, he’s standing, he’s shouting in his kitchen, knocking against ladles, spilling pots. “You two are a joke all over Elsa County. Those Dalton guys, they call you the Odd Couple—”

  “Darrel! Shut up!”

  I don’t wait to hear the rest. I’m out in my Rabbit worried that Bud’s gotten home and not found me or Du, worried that the frontier of madness is closer than I guessed. He’s standing at the back door, still ranting, “You can run, Jane, but you can’t hide from the truth. I’m the truth.”

  It would not surprise me to see him reach, this very minute, for the shotgun that must be near. I mustn’t show my terror, I must pull out gradually, waving. I must not raise the dust between the elders and the maples.

  26

  WHEN I get back home Du and another boy or man are on the living-room sofa talking in earnest Vietnamese. He doesn’t look as though he’s just come back from soccer practice. He looks secretive, conspiratorial, excited. The other Vietnamese—he has an ageless, tight-pored face round as a dinner plate and just about as shiny—is wearing white pants with fancy pleats and green leather shoes that you can’t buy in any mall around Baden. He’s been writing something on a page torn out of a pocket notebook. I can see the wire coil of the notebook sticking out of the pocket of his loose white shirt. The shirt’s looseness seems planned, expensive, a style statement from a different time and continent, a different sense of style and manliness.

  “Hi, Mom,” Du says, finally. He isn’t really seeing me. He looks a million miles away. This is the first time I’ve heard him speak Vietnamese. His first month here he didn’t speak when he couldn’t find the right English phrases. He’s never brought home any Vietnamese kids. I don’t know if there are any in his grade. The Hmong kids he treats with contempt. He, a Saigon sophisticate, thinks of them as illiterate mountain people, peasants. The elegant man in white, I worry, is a drug pusher. What could he be writing out for Du—in a script I can’t read—with a fountain pen?

  “This is John,” Du says.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Ripplemeyer.” Bud’s name is a real test for most Asians. His accent is hard to understand, but his manners are ingratiating. He is out the front door before I can offer him tea and get him to open up about himself.

  Du doesn’t stick around the living room either.

  I put in a call to Karin’s Hot Line, but it’s busy.

  “Come sit with me, Du.”

  He stops halfway down the hall.

  I say, “If Darrel comes over, don’t open the door.”

  “Okay.” He turns.

  “What was that guy doing? Selling you something?”

  “No,” Du says. He misses a beat. Then he says, “He was giving me something.”

  “You know to just say no to anything you shouldn’t say yes to, right?”

  “Thank you, Nancy Reagan.”

  “Is John someone you met today?”

  “No.”

  “Is that all you’re going to tell me?”

  “What do you want to know? I’ve known him longer than I’ve known you. I knew him in the camps. Look, can I have five hundred bucks?”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’ll settle for three hundred. I’m taking a bus to L. A. to see my sister.” He flashes the notepaper with the Vietnamese writing. It’s supposed to be an address, his sister’s address.

  “What sister?”

  “I only have one. Left.”

  The stories of the detention camp flood me. This is the married sister who fed him live worms and lizards and crabs so he wouldn’t starve to death.

  “I’m leaving for L.A. My sister works in a taco stand. She can look after me, she said. Thank Dad for everything he’s done. Tell him I’m sorry.” His eyes are glittery with a higher mission. Abandonment, guilt, betrayal: the boy in front of me would consider them banal dilemmas.

  “He’s got his own kid coming. He never wanted me.”

  Blood is thick, I think. Du, my adopted son, is a mystery, but the prospect of losing him is like a miscarriage. I had relied on him, my silent ally against the bright lights, the rounded, genial landscape of Iowa. I want to say—to be able to say—you’re wrong, Bud loves you, he needs you like I do, but I know Du’s right. Du has practiced without a net; he knows his real friends.

  “I love you, Du.”

  I see him duck his head. The perfect young, unblemished face has aged into a hundred jagged cracks. The face is small, wrinkled, old. He runs down the hall, slams his door.

  I have never seen him cry.

  The line is free. “Karin Ripplemeyer, please. Privately.” As briefly as possible I say that I have just come from Darrel Lutz’s and I fear for his sanity.

  “How do you know?” she demands. I tell her I’ve seen it. Murder or suicide is a fine line. A good friend of mine, a girl I once knew, has been there.

  I am amazed, and a little proud that Du had made a life for himself among the Vietnamese in Baden and I hadn’t had a clue. Aside from my Dr. Jaswani and from Dr. Patel in Infertility, I haven’t spoken to an Indian since my months in F
lushing. My transformation has been genetic; Du’s was hyphenated. We were so full of wonder at how fast he became American, but he’s a hybrid, like the fantasy appliances he wants to build. His high-school paper did a story on him titled: “Du (Yogi) Ripplemeyer, a Vietnamese-American …”

  “If you’re worried about Darrel hassling you, I can stay till Dad gets back,” he says, an hour later. The bag is packed. He moves it from the hall back to his room. “I’m okay,” he says.

  “It’s Dad he wants to get,” I say.

  He goes to the hall closet, takes down a rifle, loads it, and lays it on my lap. “This isn’t a solution,” I protest. And darkly, I think it might be. I could pronounce sentence on myself. I could finish off the fates of Du, Bud, and me, all of us marked for death and weirdly spared.

  “At least take my car to the airport,” I offer.

  “It’s okay. John’s coming for me.”

  “Write me. Think of me. I’ll be thinking of you.” I want to say to him, You were my hero.

  Suddenly I’m bawling. How dare he leave me alone out here? How dare he retreat with my admiration, my pride, my total involvement in everything he did? His education was my education. His wirings and circuits were as close to Vijh & Vijh as I would ever get. Perhaps those two drops of soldering were my assignment in this lifetime. Now I could end it.

  “At least finish high school,” I say. Brusque, maternal.

  “L. A. has schools, Mom. And my sister says Cal Tech’s a good school.”

  This time the face is smiling, confident. He’s mastered his demons. For the first time in our life together, he bends down, over the rifle, to kiss me. “You gave me a new life. I’ll never forget you.”

  I hear the crunch of gravel. He undoes the lock, announces it’s John, not Darrel, not Bud, and on a hot Iowa night, he steps into his future.

  I lower myself onto the sofa. Bud has built an ugly, comfortable house. I will be lonely here, with Bud or without him. I can feel the kick of the baby transmitted through the rifle stock.

  In Hasnapur Dida told stories of Vishnu the Preserver containing our world inside his potbellied stomach. I sit, baffled, in the dark living room of our house in Baden, loaded rifle against my belly, cocooning a cosmos.

  Half an hour later I am in Du’s room, trying to think like Lillian Gordon. She put me on the bus that Florida morning, gave me money and a kiss. She didn’t cry, didn’t even stay to wave goodbye. I want so much to be like her. Be unsentimental, I order myself. Don’t cry, don’t feel sorry for yourself; be proud of what we did. He was given to us to save and to strengthen; we didn’t own him, his leaving was inevitable. Even healthy.

  Had things worked out differently—no Harlan Kroener, no droughts—Du would have had the father of any boy’s dream, a funny, generous, impulsive father, an American father from the heartland like the American lover I had for only a year. I would have had a husband, a place to call home.

  This, I realize, is not it.

  In the America Du knows, mothers are younger than sisters, mothers are illegal aliens, murderers, rape victims; in Du’s America, parents are unmarried, fathers are invalids, shot in the back on the eve of Christmas Eve.

  Assholes.

  He came to sexual awakening outside our bedroom door. No wonder he fled into the silence of circuitry, in crossbreeding appliances, in hoarding and restoring.

  I’ll leave everything untouched. The drawers full of dead batteries—AA, C, D, E—solar calculators, coffee mugs with men’s names (Joe, Bob, Fritz, Al, Vern), new shirts with cardboard still stiffening the collars, immense balls of twine. The electronic chess set stays in the middle of the scatter rug. The Scrabble board sticks out at an angle on the bed, with only two words, “deliquesce” and “scabrous,” laid out by imaginary players. He wanted to design computer Scrabble, like computer Chess, a chance for the lonely and word-obsessed to play themselves.

  They are clues, but to what? Shadowy road signs for a phantom Columbus? I should have known about his friends, his sister, his community. I should have broken through, but I was afraid to test the delicate thread of his hyphenization. Vietnamese-American: don’t question either half too hard. I’m happy that he’s visiting his sister. I am not grieving over the loss of a son. His sister kept him alive in the camp; we only gave him tools. From the fields, hidden in the tangles of her ratted hair, she brought him gifts of life, gifts of love: rats, roaches, crabs, snails. For every gesture of loyalty there doesn’t have to be a betrayal. The star on my forehead throbs: pain and hope, hope and pain.

  I haven’t figured out the what and why of Du’s hoarding. Or maybe that’s the point: exclude no option; someday your life might depend on the length of twine you squirreled away in your desk drawer. But Du’s also like me, a striver and a saver, a prudent investor and money manager. I find mail-order catalogues in a language I can’t read and a book of order forms. He’s been filling out orders for Vietnamese greeting cards—die-cut, stand-up, fold-out beauties. Fish swim across five-panel oceans, birds wing pleated lavender skies. I will keep from Bud the two books of deposit slips stuck inside wool socks we bought him for a Colorado camping trip with Scott and his family. Du was keeping his money in CDs in savings and loans places in Dalton instead of in Bud’s bank in Baden. Over two thousand dollars. I am looking at the piggy bank of a new tycoon; also at an insult that Bud would not forgive.

  “Bud’s not here?” she asks, and I say, “He’s still at the bank. Inspectors’ visit.” She nods. “Of course. How soon we forget.” I make her some instant coffee.

  The gun is still out, propped by the door. She’s too polite to ask me about it.

  “I talked to him. He’s rambling all over the lot,” she says. She’s looking around the living room and kitchen, getting her bearings. We bought everything new after the divorce. They look familiar and dingy to me, but for Karin it’s a whole new take on Bud. Because of the wheelchair, we keep wide aisles, few tables, no bric-a-brac that he might knock over. The truth is, we’re underfurnished, in a meager house.

  When she joins me in the kitchen, she sees bottles and tubes of medicine with Bud’s name on them; she knows I’ve been decent in a difficult time. No picnic, is it? she says. Gallon jugs of white vinegar for his soaks: tubes of antibiotics for decubitus ulcers, support hose and diuretics for “dependent” edemas. The keening language, so precise yet so suggestive; blood tests for “occult” presences. Even the bacteria, when they settle in his ulcers, become “indolent.”

  We’ve paid a steeper price for our heroic love than even Karin would have set. She picks up a bottle of diuretic medicine, reads the directions. “Otherwise, the fluids gather,” I start to explain.

  She nods. “I know, I’ve done some reading. Is he in much pain?” she asks.

  “He doesn’t complain. But there has to be a lot of pain.”

  His therapist said amputees sometimes scream from the terrible pain in their absent limbs. It’s called phantom pain. Bud will suffer pain from muscle memory; the loss of function, the memory of muscles that have died.

  She looks around our living room, at the old pine table and four brightly enameled chairs from an unpainted furniture store, and at the huge wooden Cardinals mascot on a wall. She strokes the scarlet bird. “Did he tell you how he got that silly thing?” she asks, her eyes wet. I nod. He went to St. Louis when they tore down the old stadium. He fought a man for the cardinal. “A man has his obsessions,” I say.

  Karin paces, picking up things she recognizes, his old ledger books, an old leather-flapped briefcase he’d carried to work for thirty years. When they divorced, Bud packed up his awards, the framed “Man of the Year” citations, the sporting trophies. The cardinal and the citations are now our artwork. He says, What’s the use of hanging anything on these walls? Optimistically: we won’t be here that long.

  Realistically: you can’t hang things low enough for me anyway.

  “I was wrong to call you a gold digger. I don’t know if I could have nursed hi
m.”

  “We do what we must,” I say.

  “If you married him for money, you didn’t do that great.”

  “We have enough.”

  “My lawyer thought you’d adopted that Vietnamese boy in order to raise a big issue in court. Lower the settlement, something like that. I told him it was something Bud was doing out of guilt—let him pay. You can’t imagine how hurt and small-minded I was.”

  Karin is still in love with Bud. She didn’t leave Baden. She could have, but she chose to stay. The world is divided between those who stay and those who leave. “It was love. Extravagant love. He thought he could atone for something,” I say. For being American, blessed, healthy, innocent, in love. I tell her the story of John, the sister, and Du’s sudden departure, my fear of confronting Bud with it.

  “If you want me to stay, I will,” she says.

  As we drive to Darrel’s, I don’t mention his bizarre proposal to me; the talk is purely of farming or selling, commitment to the land or to the self. “Farm boys grow up guilty if they desert the family ground,” says Karin. “It’s that simple.” This is puritan country; we’re born with guilt or quickly learn it. Guilt twists a person, she says.

  I tell her something I’m expert on: I see a way of life coming to an end. Baseball loyalties, farming, small-town innocence. Most people in Elsa County care only about the Hawkeyes—football or basketball. In the brave new world of Elsa County, Karin Ripplemeyer runs a suicide hot line. Bud Ripplemeyer has adopted a Vietnamese and is shacked up with a Punjabi girl. There’s a Vietnamese network. There are Hmong, with a church of their own, turning out quilts for Lutheran relief.

  When I was a child, born in a mud hut without water or electricity, the Green Revolution had just struck Punjab. Bicycles were giving way to scooters and to cars, radios to television. I was the last to be born to that kind of submission, that expectation of ignorance. When the old astrologer swatted me under a banyan tree, we were both acting out a final phase of a social order that had gone on untouched for thousands of years.