Jasmine

by Bharati Mukherjee

  What I’m saying is, release Darrel from the land. There are different mysteries at work. Bud thinks it’s a conflict between farming and golfing, but he’s missing the point. Darrel is a romantic, just like him. The banker who steps out of marriage to live with an Indian is the same as the Iowan who dreams of New Mexico. They’ve been touched with the same virus.

  By the scratchy light of a summer sundown, we see Darrel walking the rafters of his hog house. He’s rigged strong night-lights with long extension cords, as though he intends to work through the night. Shadow gives us both a good pawing as we make our way to the construction.

  “Roof goes on tomorrow. Just getting the last studs in tonight,” he shouts down.

  No evidence of drinking, of disturbance. He’s the appealing kid with the floppy hair. Only a sober man could walk those boards in the dusk, hammering as he goes. “I’d come down and offer you kind ladies a beer, but I’m behind schedule as it is. Plus, if I stop I might never start up again.”

  Karin shouts up at him, “We just wondered if there’s anything we could do.”

  “The two of you“—he’s smiling—”seeing’s how you know Bud so well, might work on him for about fifty thousand bucks real quick. Got a lead on a couple-three champion boar hogs down in Burlington.”

  He executes a jaunty hop to the next joist and begins his hammering all over again. Echoes like rifle cracks roll across the fields.

  “Come by tomorrow. Everything’s hooked up and I’m letting the hogs loose in here tonight. I reckon we can bank on it not raining.”

  On the drive back, we can hear the hammering out to the highway, and nearly to our property. “What do you think?” she asks, and I have to say maybe I panicked. He looked like the Darrel of old.

  * * *

  Bud calls to me. “Jane, hon,” he shouts, “it’s one of my clumsy nights.”

  I run out to the living room. Bud’s dropped the Financial Statement and Supporting Schedule forms he’d been working on. I collect and sort the papers before I give them back. He looks miserable. It is oppressive in the living room, bugs ping against the black squares of windows. “Honey, I’m a little cold.” I throw an afghan on Bud, over his bathrobe. It’s his circulation. Bud has changed my life. I am grateful. I am carrying his child. I want to tell him that when I was a girl in Hasnapur only playboys in Bombay movies wore bathrobes. That meant, in shorthand, they had a bathroom, they had modesty, and they had air conditioning. Bathrobes, dark glasses, whiskey, cigarettes: these were shorthand for glamour that we Hasnapuris were meant not to have. I have triumphed. But how can I explain such small odd triumphs to Bud? He’s always uneasy with tales of Hasnapur, just like Mother Ripplemeyer. It’s as though Hasnapur is an old husband or lover. Even memories are a sign of disloyalty.

  Bud has accepted my explanation. The sister had just been discovered and had just arrived; she sent out a call for Du and he’s answered it. It might take a few months, but he’ll be back for school in September. He worries that we’ll never really have Du to ourselves, that he’ll always be attached in occult ways to an experience he can’t fathom, and as I take off Bud’s shoes, I admit there can be no other way for some of us. He is so exhausted he only mumbles, “But not you, Jane, that’s what I love about you,” and he’s asleep even as I unbutton his trousers.

  Bud says, “Okay, feed me the numbers under ‘Breeding Stock.’What’ve we got?”

  I check the column he wants me to. “Forty sows at two hundred and fifty, which makes ten thousand bucks, and three boars at four hundred, which makes another twelve hundred, so that makes eleven thousand two hundred.”

  All over Iowa I hear such eerie love calls. Twenty thousand bushels corn @ two-fifty per bushel: make that fifty thousand bucks; four thousand bushels beans @ six even per bushel, so another twenty-four thousand bucks. The Prince of Baden woos the Indian Maiden. I should be swooning by now.

  Scaled back, triple-mortgaged, with stipulations to sell off some land and forgo a few improvements, Darrel’s loan gets approved. It’s well after midnight; the lights are off at Darrel’s, and Bud is exhausted. I help Bud to bed. The call to Darrel will have to wait until breakfast. This is a call for Bud, not me, to make. I worry that Bud’s call will come too late. Darrel’s already imagined himself in New Mexico selling Tandys: his will has muscled out his guilt, or his destiny. He might say take your thirty thousand and stuff it.

  Crazy, Darrel wants an Indian princess and a Radio Shack franchise in Santa Fe. Crazy, he’s a recruit in some army of white Christian survivalists. Sane, he wants to baby-sit three hundred hogs and reinvent the fertilizer/pesticide wheel. Once the old chemicals have leached from the ground, he talks of cleaning the ponds and raising catfish and giant prawns, of cultivating fancy vegetables on the organic strip, charging premium prices in “Lutz’s Corner” of the Hy-Vee.

  We call, early enough, but Darrel’s not in. Bud decides to deliver the news in person, so after breakfast he rolls down the ramp to my Rabbit, we make the transfer—his arms around my neck as I lift him to the front seat, chair folded in the rear—but he raises his hand before I can start the engine.

  “What’s that noise?”

  There are so many competing farm noises in late July, all of them rising into a single high-pitched whine like the whistling of semi-trailers on the Interstate three miles away, that I’m about to wave it off, until I catch it, too: a skip in the whine, the generalized form of something familiar and specific, as though I had confused something still-voiced and close with something loud and remote.

  I remember suddenly the screams of a baby girl thrown down a well in Hasnapur, her cries for two days being taken as prowling jackals across the nullah.

  “Hogs!” says Bud.

  * * *

  Unfed hogs are like unfed babies. They set up the most pathetic wheezing and whining. Animal abuse of any kind is the one thing a farmers reputation just doesn’t survive. “He better have a good explanation,” Bud is saying as we make the turn by the row of maples. The chorus breaks into grunts and squeals. “I told him there’s something about a hog that resists all this automation. Cows, yes, they’re stupid. But your pig’s a plenty smart customer. He wants contact, he wants to see the farmer out there winter and summer, morning and—”

  We stop at precisely the same moment. On the road lies Shadow, the halves of his body practically perpendicular. Straight ahead, a boiling sea of pink hogs: their heads, their backs, their legs jump above the open cinder-block wall.

  Bud is staring straight ahead at the hogs. I find my eyes slowly rising to the roofs pinnacle. The frail man who is still slowly twisting and twisting from the rafter with an extension cord wrapped around his stiffly angled neck isn’t the Darrel, would-be lover, would-be adventurer, who, only nights ago in a cumin-scented kitchen, terrorized me with the rawness of wants. This man is an astronaut shamed by the failure of his lift-off. He keeps his bitter face turned away from the galaxies that he’d longed to explore.

  In the car Bud keeps muttering, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” and pulling hard at the steering wheel as though he wants me to speed into a U-turn and get us quickly out of earshot of the crazed, carnivorous hogs.

  “Tahiti,” I sob. “He wanted for us to see Tahiti.”

  “Jane!” Bud’s voice rises harsh above the greedy grunting in the hog house. “Don’t fall apart on me!”

  “His feet. Bud, look at his feet.”

  Karin would keep her head. Karin would get the sheriff, fast. She’d phone the family. And comfort Bud. Most of all, she’d comfort Bud. It’s Bud who needs Karin’s Hot Line now.

  Bud’s freckled hand closes over mine. Together we turn the key in the ignition. “Good girl,” he says. “That’s my girl.”

  I hear gravel chunk against the sides of the Rabbit, but it’s not rural routes in Baden I’m racing through. I am deep inside a crater on the moon. Before me huge, lunar hogs leap and chew on Darrel’s bloodied boots.

  “Jane,” my would-be h
usband begs as I stand by the kitchen window spooning cornbread batter into a baking pan, “light of life, my sweetheart, tell me you love me.”

  An early ice crusts potholes and crisps the shrubs in our yard. My stomach domes under my skirt. A whole new universe floats inside me. I must not sink. As soon as the cornbread comes out of the oven I’ll squeeze into Du’s old ski sweater and pace the frosty fields. I shall not think of Taylor and Duff, of what might have been if they really had shown up in our rutted driveway as they’d promised. The last postcard I got from Taylor—his third—said, STILL PLANNING TO COME YOUR WAY. STILL WORKING THROUGH THE CUSTODY COMPLICATIONS. STILL NEGOTIATING WITH BERKELEY. Simplicity is what I envy. It’s been two months since Darrel was buried.

  “Jane.”

  Maybe things are settling down all right. I think maybe I am Jane with my very own Mr. Rochester, and maybe it’ll be okay for us to go to Missouri where the rules are looser and yield to the impulse in a drive-in chapel. I’m three months away from what the doctors assure me will be, in my wide-hipped way, an uneventful birth.

  Du is not coming back. He’s even dropped out of school to get a job and help settle his sister, and her husband, and her children. “Last year a boy, this year a man,” he writes. He’s working in a hardware store, learning electrical repair at night. Carol Lutz wasted no time selling the farm. She came back to Baden for the funeral, the signing of papers, and left with a curse on our collective heads.

  The first of November, an Alberta Clipper brings a cover of snow, and with snow come thoughts of Taylor and Wylie and the trips they took me on. They had met at Stowe. Taylor had been on a ski team in college, but on our trips he stayed with Duff on the beginners hillocks. Wylie was on the master run all day. One day he outfitted me, child of the Indian pampas, in a lavender ski suit and led me through the beginner’s run. He said I had the right stuff. “Next year, Jase conquers the perils of intermediacy,” he promised, but next year never came. My first winter in Iowa, right up to the eve of Christmas Eve, Bud and I took up cross-country skiing. We still have those long, lean, elegant skis stored in Mother’s basement.

  The moment I have dreamed a thousand times finally arrives.

  I am in the kitchen, looking south through the dripping icicles. We’re no-till, we conserve our topsoil, and we’ve got a phantom crop of dead corn stalks poking the snow in orderly rows. Trash in the fields has brought the pheasants back and I have a freezerful from generous neighbors. The First Bank of Baden was founded because Bud’s grandfather took one look at his son’s farm and said he’d fail because he didn’t “till to black.” He counted trash in the fields as a moral indictment. Bud’s grandfather, like most of the old-timers, practically shaved his fields, once in the fall and again in the spring. Totally unnecessary, but looked very businesslike. We’re puritans, that’s why.

  A strange car turns in. It’s not the old Eldorado. And it’s not a government car—that’s still my first anxiety—immigration cops don’t come in Toyotas. I see two faces inside. After a few seconds and the unbuckling of the harness, one door flies open and a stretched-out version of a little girl I knew, now in blue jeans and a ski jacket, without mittens or a cap, the girl I carried from the parks, that I held on buses, turns to her dad, questioningly, and I see hand gestures from inside, Go on, go on, they say, and she disappears from my view as the buzzer goes.

  I’ve rehearsed this scene so many nights.

  The driver’s door opens and Taylor is standing just under my window. He’s a giant. On Claremont Avenue he had seemed tall, not gigantic. In the last two years my perspective on things has changed. I have felt tall because the back of Bud’s head in the wheelchair comes up only to mid-thigh. I have grown accustomed to the extraordinary.

  The giant notes the ramps as he strides toward the front door.

  Duff hits the buzzer again, but I wait for Taylor to get to the door before I open it.

  Taylors eyes take me in, the full globe of me. You came too late, Taylor.

  “I was wrong,” he says, “Iowa isn’t flat.”

  “You came.” My voice is hoarse with crazy new longings.

  Duff grabs my hands. “Daddy,” she says, laughing. “Ask her.”

  Taylor looks dazed.

  “Oh, Daddy, really,” Duff giggles in my direction. “He was practicing his lines all the way from home.” She glides past me into the kitchen.

  I wait for Taylors crooked-toothed grin, but his teeth don’t look so crooked anymore. The smile says, Why not? “We’ll be an unorthodox family, Jase.”

  He folds me in a hug. It’s a cautious hug—I’m too bulky for a full-scale body clasp. Then comes a quick, urgent kiss. “Don’t pack,” he says. “This is the Age of Plastic.”

  Duff pretends she’s spotted field rats scuttling in the driveway and runs out the door. In her rush, she leaves the door slightly open. Cool winds prickle my face.

  “I can’t go back with you to New York.” Suddenly I know why I haven’t married Bud.

  “New York’s over. We’re heading west.” Taylor shoulders the door closed.

  I lead the way into the living room. “I’ve never been west of Lincoln, Nebraska.”

  “We’re going all the way to California.” He moves around the room, reading Bud’s citations.

  What am I to do?

  I back off toward the window. The window’s caulking crumbles as I pick at it. The chilly sparkle of afternoon light tempts. “I have family in California.”

  Taylor stops in front of the wooden cardinal. “That’s quite a prize,” he says. Then he says, “You never told me. That you had family in California.”

  “I didn’t have him then.”

  Taylor bears down on me, confused. “You’ve already brought a relative over?”

  “I can’t leave. How can I?” I want to do the right thing. I don’t mean to be a terrible person.

  “Why not, Jase?” Taylor says. “It’s a free country.”

  Bud’s face, gray, ghostly, bodyless, floats in narrowing circles around me. It’s the anguished face of a man who is losing his world. I squeeze my eyes so tight that Taylor rushes again to hold me.

  Just pull down an imaginary shade, he whispers, that’s all you need to do. I remember the thick marking pen in his hand printing a confident RETURN on packages of books, records, knife sets I’d thought I wanted. The cord feels dusty.

  I am not choosing between men. I am caught between the promise of America and old-world dutifulness. A caregiver’s life is a good life, a worthy life. What am I to do?

  “I have to make a phone call,” I tell Taylor.

  From the bedroom I call Karin. “I have to see Du,” I announce.

  “You’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you?” Karin disapproves, I can tell, though she’s trying hard not to sound judgmental. “You’re leaving Bud.”

  Karin stayed. Du and I are different. “I’m not leaving Bud,” I explain. “I’m going somewhere.”

  “You know what you can live with, Jane.”

  The smell of singed flesh is always with me. Du and I have seen death up close. We’ve stowed away on boats like Half-Face’s, we’ve hurtled through time tunnels. We’ve seen the worst and survived. Like creatures in fairy tales, we’ve shrunk and we’ve swollen and we’ve swallowed the cosmos whole. “Yes, Karin.”

  Karin comforts me. “Don’t blame yourself, Jane.”

  It isn’t guilt that I feel, it’s relief. I realize I have already stopped thinking of myself as Jane. Adventure, risk, transformation: the frontier is pushing indoors through un-caulked windows. Watch me re-position the stars, I whisper to the astrologer who floats cross-legged above my kitchen stove.

  “Ready?” Taylor grins.

  I cry into Taylors shoulder, cry through all the lives I’ve given birth to, cry for all my dead.

  Then there is nothing I can do. Time will tell if I am a tornado, rubble-maker, arising from nowhere and disappearing into a cloud. I am out the door and in the potholed
and rutted driveway, scrambling ahead of Taylor, greedy with wants and reckless from hope.