Jasmine (20 page)

Until Harlan. Always, until Harlan.

“I feel crazy tonight,” Darrel says on the phone.

I’ve called him, after talking to Karin. It’s seven-thirty. He should be working on his hog house before the light goes. “How crazy?”

He whistles a song I don’t recognize. “Crazy enough to hold up a bank, for instance.”

“Stop right there.”

“Hijack a school bus. Take hostages. I feel ready for massacre and mayhem.”

“Tried calling Karin’s Hot Line?”

“Karin’ll get her chance if you fail. I’m giving you the chance to save me first.”

I still think of myself as caregiver, recipe giver, preserver. I can honestly say all I wanted was to serve, be allowed to join, but I have created confusion and destruction wherever I go. As Karin says, I am a tornado. I hit the trailer parks first, the prefabs, the weakest links. How many more shapes are in me, how many more selves, how many more husbands?

“Come over and say a mantra,” Darrel goes on. “Hold my hand. Keep me sane. And if
that
doesn’t work, dial Karin.”

Karin and Jane, wives of the wounded god. Who will say a mantra for us?

I smell the cumin, coriander, and turmeric even before I push Darrels back door open. We don’t lock, though we should. After three years in Iowa, I still take Manhattan security as the norm. I never belittled Taylor and Wylie’s three locks with three separate keys. Many things, even disparate things, are reminding me of Taylor. Has he found Duff another day mummy, a Letitia, some Caribbean make-over to replace his Jase? I whisper the name, Jase, Jase, Jase, as if I am calling someone I once knew.

Darrel stands in the middle of his kitchen, wearing a
butcher’s apron and holding a bottle of Bombay lime pickle in a hand that’s bleeding from where he cut it on the jagged edge of the bottle’s tin cap. Third World packaging.

“Welcome,” he announces, and guides me to the kitchen table still cluttered with cereal boxes, dirty mixing bowls, and Baggies of spice.

“I’m ready to serve us a banquet fit for an Indian princess.”

“Darrel,” I protest, smiling, “I came to save your life, remember? I didn’t come to pig out.” Bud’s and my pot roast is drying in the turned-off oven. A good Hasnapur wife doesn’t eat just because she is hungry. Food is a way of granting or withholding love. I lift lids off the two pots on Darrel’s stove. He hands me a ladle. “Pilaf,” he boasts, “and motor pan. Did I say that right?”

“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

W
HEN
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 Flushing. 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.