Jasmine (22 page)

Authors: Bharati Mukherjee

BOOK: Jasmine

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“Jane,” my would-be husband 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, S
TILL PLANNING TO COME YOUR WAY
. S
TILL WORKING THROUGH THE CUSTODY COMPLICATIONS
. S
TILL NEGOTIATING WITH
B
ERKELEY
. 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.

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