Jasmine (2 page)

I am carrying Bud Ripplemeyer’s baby. He wants me to marry him before the baby is born. He wants to be able to say, Bud and Jane Ripplemeyer proudly announce …

He hooks his free hand around my neck and kisses me on the mouth, hard. “Marry me?” he says. I always hear a question mark these days, after everything he says.

Bud’s not like Taylor—he’s never asked me about India; it scares him. He wouldn’t be interested in the forecast of an old fakir under a banyan tree. Bud was wounded in the war between my fate and my will. I think sometimes I saved his life by not marrying him.

I feel so potent, a goddess.

In the kitchen, today as on all Sundays, Mother Ripplemeyer is in charge. We have gone over to Mother’s for our Sunday roast. Bud and his eight brothers and sisters were born in this house. From Baden, it’s the first livable house on the second dirt road after you pass Madame Cleo’s. Madame Cleo cuts and styles hair in a fuchsia pink geodesic dome.

When Bud and Karin’s divorce became final, Karin got their fancy three-story brick house with the columns in
front, their home for twenty-eight years. The house he bought after the divorce is low and squat, a series of addons. It had been a hired mans house. Eventually we’ll take over Mother Ripplemeyer’s house. Until then, we wait out here on three hundred acres, which isn’t bad. My father raised nine of us on thirty acres.

This was a three-room frame house. He rents out the three hundred acres for hay. We added a new living room with an atrium when we moved in, and a small bedroom when we got word from the adoption agency in Des Moines that Du had made it out to Hong Kong. The house looks small and ugly from the dirt road, but every time I crunch into the driveway and park my old Rabbit between the rusting, abandoned machinery and the empty silo, the add-ons cozy me into thinking that all of us Ripplemeyers, even us new ones, belong.

Du is a Ripplemeyer. He was Du Thien. He was fourteen when we got him; now he’s seventeen, a junior in high school. He does well, though he’s sometimes contemptuous. He barely spoke English when he arrived; now he’s fluent, but with a permanent accent. “Like Kissinger,” he says. They tell me I have no accent, but I don’t sound Iowan, either. I’m like those voices on the telephone, very clear and soothing. Maybe Northern California, they say. Du says they’re computer generated.

It was January when Du arrived at Des Moines from Honolulu with his agency escort. He was wearing an
A
LOHA, Y’ALL
T-shirt and a blue-jean jacket. We’d brought a new duffel coat with us, as instructed. Next to Bud, he seemed so tiny, so unmarked, for all he’d been through. The agency hadn’t minded Bud’s divorce. Karin could have made trouble but didn’t. The agency was charmed by the notion of Bud’s “Asian” wife, without inquiring too deeply. Du was one of the hard-to-place orphans.

He had never seen snow, never felt cold air, never worn a coat. We stopped at a McDonald’s on the way back to Baden. When we parked, Du jumped down from the back, leaving the new coat on the seat. The wind chill was –35, and he waited for us in the middle of the parking lot in his A
LOHA, Y’ALL
T-shirt while we bundled up and locked the doors. He wasn’t slapping his arms or blowing on his hands.

The day I came to Baden and walked into his bank with Mother Ripplemeyer, looking for a job, Bud was a tall, fit, fifty-year-old banker, husband of Karin, father of Buddy and Vern, both married farmers in nearby counties. Asia he’d thought of only as a soy-bean market. He’d gone to Beijing on a bankers’ delegation and walked the Great Wall.

Six months later, Bud Ripplemeyer was a divorced man living with an Indian woman in a hired man’s house five miles out of town. Asia had transformed him, made him reckless and emotional. He wanted to make up for fifty years of “selfishness,” as he calls it. One night he saw a television special on boat people in Thai prisons, and he
called the agency the next day. Fates are so intertwined in the modern world, how can a god keep them straight? A year after that, we had added Du to our life, and Bud was confined to a wheelchair.

Mother likes to cook, but she’s crotchety this afternoon. It’s one of her medium-bad days, which means she’ll wink out on us entirely by the end. She is seventy-six, and sprightly in a Younkers pantsuit, white hair squeezed into curls by Madame Cleo, who trained in Ottumwa.

In Hasnapur a woman may be old at twenty-two.

I think of Vimla, a girl I envied because she lived in a two-story brick house with real windows. Our hut was mud. Her marriage was the fanciest the village had ever seen. Her father gave away a zippy red Maruti and a refrigerator in the dowry. When he was twenty-one her husband died of typhoid, and at twenty-two she doused herself with kerosene and flung herself on a stove, shouting to the god of death, “Yama, bring me to you”.

The villagers say when a clay pitcher breaks, you see that the air inside it is the same as outside. Vimla set herself on fire because she had broken her pitcher; she saw there were no insides and outsides. We are just shells of the same Absolute. In Hasnapur, Vimlas isn’t a sad story. The sad story would be a woman Mother Ripplemeyer’s age still working on her shell, bothering to get her hair and nails done at Madame Cleo’s.

* * *

Mother Ripplemeyer tells me her Depression stories. In the beginning, I thought we could trade some world-class poverty stories, but mine make her uncomfortable. Not that she’s hostile. It’s like looking at the name in my passport and seeing “Jyo—” at the beginning and deciding that her mouth was not destined to make those sounds. She can’t begin to picture a village in Punjab. She doesn’t mind my stories about New York and Florida because she’s been to Florida many times and seen enough pictures of New York. I have to be careful about those stories. I have to be careful about nearly everything I say. If I talk about India, I talk about my parents.

I could tell her about water famines in Hasnapur, how at the dried-out well docile women turned savage for the last muddy bucketful. Even here, I store water in orange-juice jars, plastic milk bottles, tumblers, mixing bowls, any container I can find. I’ve been through thirsty times, and not that long ago. Mother doesn’t think that’s crazy. The Depression turned her into a hoarder, too. She’s shown me her stock of tinfoil. She stashes the foil, neatly wrapped in a flannel sheet, in a drawer built into the bed for blankets and extra pillows.

She wonders, I know, why I left. I tell her, Education, which is true enough. She knows there is something else. I say, I had a mission. I want to protect her from too much reality.

She says she likes me better than she did Karin, though Karin grew up right here in Baden and Karin’s mother, who is eighty-two, still picks her up for their Lutheran Mission
Relief Funds quilting group. Last year the Relief Fund raised $ 18,000 for Ethiopia. Mothers group’s quilt went for eleven hundred dollars to a bald, smiling man from Chicago who said it was for his granddaughter, but I read the commercial lettering on his panel truck.

Just before the divorce, according to Bud, Karin was agitating to stick Mother in the Lutheran Home. Mother senses I have different feelings about family.

The table is set and ready. Du’s made a centerpiece out of some early flowers and I’ve polished the display rack of silver spoons. Bud has five brothers and three sisters, and they were all born or at least christened with silver spoons in their mouths. I, too, come from a family of nine. Figure the odds on that, Bud says. He has a brother in Minneapolis and a sister in Omaha and a brother named Vern Ripplemeyer, Jr., who died in Korea, the family’s only other encounter with Asia. All the others are in Texas or California. After the divorce, Mother asked Karin to give the spoons back. “Call me an Indian giver,” Mother likes to joke. “I mean
our
kind.”

Du and Scott, whose father works down in the corn sweetener plant, are sprawled on the rug watching
Monster Truck Madness.
It’s trucks versus tanks, and the tanks are creaming them. We bought ourselves a satellite dish the day after we first talked long distance to Du. There’s no telling where this telecast is coming from.

Du’s first question to Bud, in painful English over trans
Pacific cable, was “You have television? You get?” He talked of having watched television in his home in Saigon. We got the point. He’d had two lives, one in Saigon and another in the refugee camp. In Saigon he’d lived in a house with a large family, and he’d been happy. He doesn’t talk much about the refugee camp, other than that his mother cut hair, his older brother raised fighting fish, his married sister brought back live crabs and worms for him to eat whenever she could sneak a visit from her own camp. From a chatty agency worker we know that Du’s mother and brother were hacked to death in the fields by a jealous madman, after they’d gotten their visas.

“Look at that sucker fly!” Scott shouts, crawling closer to the screen. “All right!” Mud scuds behind the Scarlet Slugger.

“Whoa, Nellie!” Du can match Scott shout for shout now. “Hold on, mama!” The Slugger is the body of a Chevy Blazer welded onto a World War II tank.

Mother wanders over to the television but doesn’t sit down. In an instant replay we watch the Scarlet Slugger tear up the center of a bog. I can’t help thinking, It looks like a bomb crater. Does Du even think such things? I don’t know what he thinks. He’s called Yogi in school, mainly because his name in English sounds more like “Yo.” But he is a real yogi, always in control. I’ve told him my stories of India, the years between India and Iowa, hoping he’d share something with me. When they’re over he usually says, “That’s wild. Can I go now?”

“Holy Toledo!” Mother is into it.

“Mom, it’s okay, isn’t it, if Scott stays for dinner?”

“If it’s okay with his parents.”

Scott grins at me with his perfect teeth. I envy him his teeth. We had no dentist in Hasnapur. For a long time we had no doctor either, except for Vaccinations-sahib, who rode in and out of the village in a WHO jeep. My teeth look as though they’ve been through slugfests. Du’s seventeen and wears braces. Orthodontics was the Christmas present he asked for.

“And if the two of you wash the beans,” I add.

“You aren’t making the yellow stuff, Mrs. R.?” I detect disappointment.

“I will if you name it.”

I see him whispering to Du, and Du’s bony shoulder shrug. “Globey?” he says.

It’s close enough. I took gobi aloo to the Lutheran Relief Fund craft fair last week. I am subverting the taste buds of Elsa County. I put some of last night’s matar panir in the microwave. It goes well with pork, believe me.

Bud wheels himself in from his study. “I can’t let the kid do it!” The kid is Darrel, whose financial forms he’s been studying. “It’s plain stupid. Gene would never forgive me.”

I’ve sent away for the latest in wheelchairs, automated and really maneuverable. The doctor said, “I had a patient once who had his slugs pierced and hung on a chain around his neck.” Bud said to throw them out. He didn’t want to see how flattened they’d got, bouncing off his
bones. The doctor is from Montana. I haven’t been west of Lincoln, Nebraska. Every night the frontier creeps a little closer.

Think of banking as your business, I want to tell Bud. Don’t make moral decisions for Darrel. It’s his farm now. He can make half a million by selling, buy his franchise and a house, and I can look out on a golf course, which won’t kill me. Bud gets too involved. It almost killed him two years ago.

“Watch him, Dad!” Du whoops. “Watch him take off!”

Bud puts away the Financial Statement and Supporting Schedules form he’s been penciling. He skids and wheels closer to Du to watch the Python.

“Can you do a wheelie yet, Mr. R.?” Scott jokes.

“Boy!” He smiles. “That thing gives the guy great air!”

The Python’s built himself a fancy floating suspension. Father and son watch the Snakeman win his class.

On the screen Cut Tire Class vehicles, frail as gnats, skim over churned-up mud. Helmeted men give me victory signs. They all plan on winning tonight. Nitro Express, Brawling Babe, Insane Expectations. Move over, I whisper.

Over the bleached grounds of Baden, Iowa, loose, lumpy rainclouds are massing. Good times, best times, are coming. Move over.

Mother paces between the windows. “Poor Vern.” Her hands pick at lint balls I can’t see. “It’s blowing so hard
he’ll never find his way back from the barn. A man can die in a storm like this.”

Bud flashes anxiety at me. His father was Vern. I calm him with a touch. He rests his head on my hip. “Kiss an old fool for love?” He grins. I bring my face down close to his big face. He kisses my chin, my cheeks, my eyelids, my temples. His lips scuttle across my forehead; they warm the cold pale star of my scar. My third eye glows, a spotlight trained on lives to come. This isn’t a vision to share with Bud. He is happy. And I am happy enough.

The lemon-pale afternoon swirls indoors through torn window screens. The first lightning bugs of summer sparkle. I feel the tug of opposing forces. Hope and pain. Pain and hope.

Mother moves around the room, turning on lamps. “Seen the quilt?” she says. “How much do you think it’ll bring? Thirty-five? Forty?”

In the white lamplight, ghosts float toward me. Jane, Jasmine, Jyoti.

“It’ll depend on the Christian conscience of strangers,” Bud jokes. “You might get more than thirty-five.”

“Think how many people thirty-five dollars will feed out there.”

Out there. I am not sure what Mother imagines. On the edge of the world, in flaming deserts, mangled jungles, squelchy swamps, missionaries save the needy. Out There, the darkness. But for me, for Du, In Here, safety. At least for now.

Oh, the wonder! the wonder!

3

D
ARREL
was looking a little out of control in the HyVee parking lot last week. He was trying to avoid me, but I didn’t read the signs in time. I called out his name and started running. He was carrying a case of Heileman’s Old Style and a six-pack of blue Charmin. He’d nearly stashed it all in the front seat by the time I got there. His eyes were red and unfocused and he was unsteady on his feet.