Jasmine (3 page)

Bud always says, of young farmers or the middle-aged ones with shaky operations, Look out for drinking. I don’t know if Darrel’s a drinker. I do not count off-hours drunkenness a sin. I invited him for dinner that night, but he politely refused. That is, it started politely, with a decent enough excuse, but then he saw me watching him and he
knew there was no good excuse except that he was drunk and intending to stay that way.

Since his father died, Darrel’s had no time for fun. No dates, no movies, no vacation weekends. In the spring, that’s understandable, but not the winter. Iowa farmers pamper themselves in the winter if they can afford it. Gene and Carol always did. The blond girl who visited for a while didn’t seem too helpful. We had her over with Darrel. She was sullen, cut out for nobler ventures. “It’s the hogs” is his usual excuse, “you have to
baby-sit
hogs.” He has a hundred and fifty Hampshires; Gene had wanted to build up to three hundred.

Bud says, “It takes a good man to raise hogs.” Gene was a good man. Bud’s talking discipline, strength, patience, character. Husbandry. All of that is in short supply. Maybe Darrel doesn’t have it, in which case a golf course isn’t a betrayal. Most people in Elsa County have lost it. Just look at all the dents and unpainted rust spots on the cars in front of the Hy-Vee.

“I couldn’t go another round with Bud,” Darrel finally admitted.

“He’s just trying to make you see both sides, that’s all.”

“Jane, his mind is closed against me. He’s just dead set against non-ag uses for anyone’s ground, especially Gene Lutz’s ground. But then he turns around and won’t lend me enough to get my crops in and still expand my herd. He thinks he’s my goddamn father.”

I felt awful for him, and worse for myself. I didn’t want to be disloyal. But what he said is true. The First Bank of
Baden has survived in harsh times because Bud can read people’s characters. Out here, it’s character that pays the bills or doesn’t, because everything else is just about equal.

“Bud’s trying to tie my hands and pin my ears back. He thinks I’m a lousy manager. He thinks he has all the answers. Well, tell him something from me, tell him to bring me rain if he’s God.” Then, almost immediately, he said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been drinking. I apologize.”

We’re dry right now. The rains will come. “Let me drive you home,” I say.

He lets himself be led, fumbling with his beer and toilet paper, to my Rabbit. He’s drunker than I thought. He drums his fingers on the case of beer. He’s like my brothers, with their scooter repair. They work and drink. It’s the only life they know, and I wouldn’t call them flawed.

All alone he’s backhoed a 40,000-gallon pit for his hogs’ nightsoil, and with sewer men and electricians on the weekends, he’s built a self-sufficient city for hogs. Once the pump is working, they’ll fertilize two hundred acres automatically, organically, and perpetually. A farmer’s dream. I’ve told Bud that financing this project is his best hostage against the golfing boys from Dalton. No farmer could walk away from it. But he thinks it’s too big for Darrel.

Darrel’s right about the bottom line. Bud doesn’t trust him.

Most nights, when Bud and I head to the Dairy Queen after supper, we can see Darrel up on the crossbeams of his hog pen. It’s already bigger than Gene’s old barn, and a lot more secure. Last week when I drove him home down his
access lane between the rows of maple and elder, he sobered up as he just stared at the roof skeleton rising high above the poured-concrete floor and the metal sidings. The sheer scale of his achievement! You could smell the hogs and hear their squealing. That unfinished building looked like a landbound Ark. Big sloppy Shadow came out to greet him.

He was slow, more reluctant than drunk, in getting out. “I’d like to invite you in someday,” he says.
In
seems to be saying something different from
over.
More exclusive. “I’ve been practicing with some of your recipes. Need an expert to tell me how I’m doing.”

4

B
UD
calls me Jane. Me Bud, you Jane. I didn’t get it at first. He kids. Calamity Jane. Jane as in Jane Russell, not Jane as in Plain Jane. But Plain Jane is all I want to be. Plain Jane is a role, like any other. My genuine foreignness frightens him. I don’t hold that against him. It frightens me, too.

In Baden, I am Jane. Almost.’

Last week on our favorite cable channel, Du and I saw twenty INS agents raid a lawn furniture factory in Texas. The man in charge of the raid called it a factory, but all it was was a windowless shed the size of a two-car garage. We got to hear agents whisper into walkie-talkies, break down a door, kick walls for hollowed-out hiding places. They were very thorough.

Du snickered, but he gives no sign of caring, one side or the other. He’s very careful that way. There were only two Mexicans in the shed. They ducked behind a chaise longue that was only half-webbed. One minute they were squatting on the floor webbing lawn furniture at some insane wage—I know, I’ve been there—and the next they were spread-eagled on the floor. The camera caught one Mexican throwing up. The INS fellow wouldn’t uncuff him long enough for him to wipe the muck off his face.

I thought I heard Du mutter, “Asshole.” And I realized I didn’t know who were the assholes, the cowboys or the Indians.

A woman in a flowered dress said, “I don’t think they’re bad people, you know. It’s just that there’s too many of them. Yesterday I opened the front door to get the morning papers and there were three of them using my yard as their personal toilet.”

The reporter, a thin, tense man with razor burns, stopped a woman in an Olds. “To tell you the truth,” she said, “I don’t know what to feel anymore.” The reporter got ready to move off to somebody else, but she stopped him. “Steve, my husband, lost his job. That was last November. We were doing so good, now we can’t make the house and car payments. Are you listening, Mr. President?”

I wanted to shout to the lady, Mrs. Steve, Two years ago Bud got shot and will never walk again. Are
you
listening? What kind of crazy connection are you trying to make between Mexicans and car payments? Who’s the victim here? And what about Du? Mr. President, what about Du?

The officer in charge flat-handed the mike away, but I
thought I heard, “The border’s like Swiss cheese and all the mice are squirming through the holes.”

So they got two. Which meant that there had to be scores more who scampered away at the start of the raid. Du and me, we’re the ones who didn’t get caught. The only mystery is who’ll get caught and who’ll escape. Du made it out of the refugee camp, and his brother didn’t.

I visit Du in his room. He’s sitting over his typewriter. I smell tobacco, nothing more serious. A mother, even one no older than a sister, can be forgiven if she looks in because the door is open a crack, because it gives a little when she leans her shoulder on it.

“Try me with your homework? I used to be pretty good in my day.”

He laughs, but something is wrong. I can see it in the stiffened neck. “Thanks, but I don’t think you know much about Teddy Roosevelt.” He gives his history book, jacketed in brown paper as demanded by Mr. Skola, an irritated shove. “Speak softly but carry a big stick. I bet that’s all you know about Teddy Roosevelt.”

Truth is, I didn’t know that. I know a little bit about one of the Roosevelts, and about his wife, who was a friend of Indian freedom. At least, Masterji said she was.

At the last PTA meeting Mr. Skola sought me out by the coffee urn and said, “Yogi’s in a hurry to become ail-American, isn’t he?” I said, “Yes. He doesn’t carry a dictionary around anymore.” And then he said, “He’s a quick
study, isn’t he? They were like that, the kids who hung around us in Saigon.” He didn’t make “quick study” sound like anything you’d like to be. We’re all quick studies, I should have said. Once we start letting go—let go just one thing, like not wearing our normal clothes, or a turban or not wearing a tika on the forehead—the rest goes on its own down a sinkhole. When he first arrived, Du kept a small shrine in his room, with pictures, a candle, and some dried fragrances. I don’t know when he gave it up.

“I tried a little Vietnamese on him,” Mr. Skola went on, “and he just froze up.”

I suppressed my shock, my disgust. This country has so many ways of humiliating, of disappointing. How
dare
you? What must he have thought? His history teacher in Baden, Iowa, just happens to know a little street Vietnamese? Now where would he have picked it up? There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams. All this I should have explained to the red-faced, green-shirted, yellow-tied Mr. Skola. Instead, I said, “Du’s first few weeks with us, my husband thought we had an autistic child on our hands!”

I apologize to Du. “I won’t bug you anymore, then. You’ve got your Big Stick to learn up. I’ll leave you alone.”

“Before you go …” he calls to me. He hunts for something in the top left-hand drawer of his desk. It is a drawer he keeps locked with a mechanism he improvised out of tossed-out farm equipment. He’s an inventor, a little like Prakash, exceptional and impatient. We’re getting him a
computer this summer, and sending him to Iowa City for college-credit training.

“I got something for you.”

He’s a magpie, or a fence. Soon he won’t be able to close that drawer. He’s a materialist, no question, and his room is a warehouse. He’s hoarded things, big things like road signs and Drug Town posters, medium things like record players and radios thrown out even by Goodwill, and little things like nail files. What he owns seems to matter to him less than owning itself. He needs to own. Owning is rebellion, it means not sharing, it means survival. He ate bugs and worms and rodents. He lived. He’s a quick study, all right.

A rhinestone ladybug winks in Du’s cupped palm. “Du!” I stare at the ridged and calloused skin welted by thick brown fate lines. “They look like diamonds!”

“What if they were?”

He pins the ladybug on my shirt. For a moment his face glows and I think he will kiss me. “You were meant to have pretty things,” he says.

Secrets roll like barbed wire between us. I don’t ask where he bought or found the pin that glints on my Madras shirt. But as I lie awake this night, the first night that gives signs of not cooling down, Du joins the ghosts of men. He is a phantom lover, he watches me; perhaps he has been watching every night, in his secret, inventive ways.

5

T
WO
days ago I was sitting in the Gynecology Annex of the University Hospital down in Iowa City waiting for Dr. Mrs. Jaswani to get off the phone and call me in, when the woman next to me on the sofa started sobbing into a book she held pressed tight to her face. There was a man’s picture on the back of the book, just about the right size for the woman’s head; I almost laughed out loud. I couldn’t tell her age because of the book, but she looked fitly scrawny in sweat pants. Frizzy gray hair spewed out on either side of the dust jacket, not that gray hair meant that she had come to see Dr. Kwang in Infertility instead of Dr. Jaswani. The University Hospital’s gotten into infertility and gerontology in a biggish way. I know this from Bud, because he’s processed home mortgages for three of the Infertility guys
and they’ve all bought properties for over two hundred thousand.

Kwang, Liu, Patel, I’ve met them all. Poke around in a major medical facility and suddenly you’re back in Asia, which I find very reassuring. I trust only Asian doctors, Asian professionals. What we’ve gone through must count for something. “It’s going to be all right,” I said to the woman with the book over her face. “Can I get you some coffee?”

We were the only two people in the waiting room. I could hear the nurse but I couldn’t see her. She was reporting on somebody’s endometrial biopsy results in her broad booming voice. The girl at the reception desk was scrolling information on her computer screen. She had her Walkman on, anyway.

“Thanks, no,” the woman said. She had a striking face, all sharp angles. Crying didn’t puff it up. “Caffeine and I aren’t friends.”

“I’ll get some water, then,” I said.

“I don’t know what happened,” the woman said. “One minute I was thinking about the Ricky doll I used to love to death and the next minute I’m this wreck.”

“I’m so sorry.” I got her water from the fountain. The Dixie cup was tiny to begin with, and even the water it held I managed to slosh on the way. These mornings my fingers feel quite swollen.

She shrugged her thanks. The sip she took was out of politeness. “You probably don’t know what a Ricky doll is.”

* * *

She must have been an older student, or a professor. Educated people are interested in differences; they assume that I’m different from them but exempted from being one of “them,” the knife-wielding undocumenteds hiding in basements webbing furniture.

In Baden, the farmers are afraid to suggest I’m different. They’ve seen the aerograms I receive, the strange lettering I can decipher. To them, alien knowledge means intelligence. They want to make me familiar. In a pinch, they’ll admit that I might look a little different, that I’m a “dark-haired girl” in a naturally blond county. I have a “darkish complexion” (in India, I’m “wheatish”), as though I might be Greek from one grandparent. I’m from a generic place, “over there,” which might be Ireland, France, or Italy. I’m not a Lutheran, which isn’t to say I might not be Presbyterian. About which they’re ignorant; farmers are famously silent, and not ashamed.

Taylor’s friends in New York used to look at me and say, “You’re Iranian, right?” If I said no, then, “Pakistani, Afghan, or Punjabi?” They were strikingly accurate about most things, and always out to improve themselves. Even though I was just an
au pair
, professors would ask if I could help them with Sanskrit or Arabic, Devanagari or Gurumukhi script. I can read Urdu, not Arabic. I can’t read Sanskrit. They had things they wanted me to translate, paintings they wanted me to decipher. They were very democratic that way. For them, experience leads to knowledge, or else it is wasted. For me, experience must be forgotten, or else it will kill.