Jasmine

by Bharati Mukherjee

  Taylor called me “Jase” as he stumbled around the kitchen in his wrinkled kimono and ate Grape Nuts cereal standing at the counter. I can still see him smiling his goofy smile at Duff and me, and managing to spoon some of the cereal into his beard. At the time I told myself that it was his goofiness and his clowning that I loved. He was the only man I knew who didn’t mind getting caught looking silly. Prakash’d wanted to be infallible, and Professorji’d acted pompous. Taylor was fun. Could I really have not guessed that I was head over heels in love with Taylor? I liked everything he said or did. I liked the name he gave me: Jase. Jase was a woman who bought herself spangled heels and silk chartreuse pants. On my day off I took my weeks salary (every Saturday night Wylie put the $95 in cash in an envelope with a Happy Face and a “Thanks!” Magic Markered on it and propped it against the Cuisinart) and blew too much of it in stores along Broadway and even in the big department stores.

  I should have saved; a cash stash is the only safety net. I’d learned that if nothing else from the scrimping Vadheras. Jyoti would have saved. But Jyoti was now a sati-goddess; she had burned herself in a trash-can-funeral pyre behind a boarded-up motel in Florida. Jasmine lived for the future, for Vijh & Wife. Jase went to movies and lived for today. In my closet hung satin blouses with vampish necklines, in my dresser lingerie I was too shy to wear in a room I shared with Duff. Profligate squandering was my way of breaking with the panicky, parsimonious ghettos of Flushing.

  For every Jasmine the reliable caregiver, there is a Jase the prowling adventurer. I thrilled to the tug of opposing forces. I prayed my job as Duff’s “day mummy” would last forever.

  Day mummy: this is how the name came about. One weekday morning in my first month, Wylie came out into the hall ready for work in the little black skirt and the biggish checkered jacket with the mannish padded shoulders she felt good in, and heard Duff beg me, “Mummy, can you finish that story about Nachos and Yama when we go to the park?” Duff had climbed into my lap and locked her fists around my neck in a wet hug.

  “Nachiketas,” I corrected, “not Nachos.”

  In the hall I heard Wylie’s briefcase close with a pained click. All the stories I told Duff were about gods and demons and mortals.

  Duff took my face in her hands and begged again, “Mummy, can we go to the park right now and feed bread to the birds?”

  Wylie said, without looking at me, “I have to leave for work now. But we need to talk. After dinner let’s talk. Taylor’ll be here, too.”

  I said, “Duff thinks of me as her day mummy. Day mummy takes her to the Y, to the park, to the market. You’re her mom. Why do we need to talk after dinner? Talk makes trouble, it doesn’t solve it.”

  “I should know how to handle this, but I don’t,” Wylie said as she went out the door. “The main thing is not to confuse a child. See you tonight.”

  But I didn’t see her that night. She called Taylor at seven to say that one of her Sob Sisters was about to be sued for having defamed her subjects character (“The creep beat his wife to death with a metal bar, for god’s sake”) and that she was having to meet with a lawyer. I put Duff to bed, which was something Wylie liked to do herself, and Taylor read Duff and me a paper he was writing on weak gravity, in a room that was dark except for the yellow glow of a table lamp and the purple glow of the fish tank. He made it funny, choosing neighborhood and household examples for anything technical. “Weak gravity is what keeps your dreams inside your head so they don’t go flying out,” he said. “It’s what keeps Jase and Duff together,” he said, smiling sweetly, “so they don’t fly off the bed at night. When you look around, weak gravity is everywhere.”

  We didn’t have our talk. We didn’t have to. Fish rippled their phosphorescent stripes inside the tank. The water gurgled, always clean, always warm.

  The next morning I put my arms around Wylie. She cried. She said, We’re family; in a family don’t sisters sometimes fight? Duff cried, too. Then she said, “Mummy go to work now. Day mummy light her sticks and drive out ghosts.”

  There were other day mummies in the building. We were a sorority that met in the laundry room and in the park. Two of them I got to know quite well, Letitia from Trinidad, and Jamaica from Barbados. Letitia was a grumbler and Jamaica was a snob. Lettie would say of her boss, the interior decorator who’d traveled all the way to Paraguay to adopt a baby, “What she t’ink? Slavery makin a big comeback? Jassie girl, minute my sponsorship come t’rough, we gotta unionize.” Jamaica said in her haughty Britishy voice, “Do I look like someone who guzzles vodka or steals pork chops? Do I look like a common person?” Every night, Jamaica claimed, she cried her heart out. I imagined a polyester-filled pillow squelchy with monsoonsful of tears. She’d been promised a groom. She’d come to Brooklyn with the best of intentions, and then the low-life scum had deserted her. She was too proud to return. She wasn’t born to be a maid, that was her refrain. Her mummy and daddy’d die if they found out she was cleaning up dirt, especially white folks’ dirt, in America.

  I felt lucky. My pillow was dry, a launch pad for lift-off. Taylor, Wylie, and Duff were family. America may be fluid and built on flimsy, invisible lines of weak gravity, but I was a dense object, I had landed and was getting rooted. I had controlled my spending and now sat on an account that was rapidly growing. Every day I was being paid for something new. I’d thought Professorji out in Flushing was exceptional, back when I didn’t have a subway token. Now I saw how easy it was. Since I was spending nothing on food and rent, the money was piling up.

  * * *

  In the second year, with Duff in school full days, Taylor arranged a part-time job for me at Columbia in the Mathematics Department, answering phones. I worked six hours a day, at six dollars an hour, suddenly doubling my caregiver salary. I offered to move out, which seemed the American thing to do, but Wylie begged me to stay.

  With Columbia employment I was eligible for free tuition in Columbia extension courses, if I could convince them to overlook the fact that I was a sixth-grade dropout. There was nurse’s training at Columbia-Presbyterian. There was English as a Second Language, but they told me my English was too good. When I flipped through the General Studies catalogue, I saw a thousand courses I wanted to take, in science, in art, in languages. There was nothing that seemed too exotic, nothing that did not seem essential to my future.

  The Indian Languages Department used me as a Punjabi reader (“Perfect Jullundhari!” The instructor beamed. He was making a linguistic atlas of the Punjab); they asked if I wanted to teach a beginning section someday, or tutor some graduate students. I chose the tutoring. A man with a Ford Foundation grant to study land reform in the Punjab came to me. Executives being sent to Delhi came to me. They asked if forty dollars an hour was too insulting, given Berlitz rates, and I said no, not for a good cause. One executive brought me flowers and wine, another took me out to dinner and asked me if I was… otherwise engaged. I paid back Professorji in a single check.

  * * *

  In America, nothing lasts. I can say that now and it doesn’t shock me, but I think it was the hardest lesson of all for me to learn. We arrive so eager to learn, to adjust, to participate, only to find the monuments are plastic, agreements are annulled. Nothing is forever, nothing is so terrible, or so wonderful, that it won’t disintegrate.

  In the early summer of my second year, Wylie fell out of love with Taylor and into love with an economist named Stuart Eschelman who lived two buildings up the street. She told me her problem before she told Taylor. “It’s all so messy. Taylor’s such a sweetheart, and there’s Duff and Stuart’s three kids, but this is my chance at real happiness. What can I do? I’ve got to go for it, right?”

  They had met caroling on Claremont before Christmas, and love had taken its slow, sweet course. The economist’s wife was a professor at NYU, but on leave to the World Bank, somewhere in West Africa. Wylie showed me Stuart’s book, on the measurement of poverty. I looked through the charts and figures. Poverty had s
hape, clarity, its own crystalline beauty.

  “He’s wonderful, Jase,” said Wylie. “It’s the real thing this time.”

  She stuck a mug of black coffee in the microwave and stared at the oven’s lit-up door.

  “Does Taylor know?” I asked.

  “He must have guessed by now. He’s absentminded but he’s not stupid.”

  I realized for the first time in at least a year that America had thrown me again. There was no word I could learn, no one I could consult, to understand what Wylie was saying or why she had done it. She wasn’t happy? She looked happy, sounded happy, acted happy. Then what did happy mean? Her only chance? Happiness was so narrow a door, so selective? The microwave pinged its readiness, and I started crying for my own helplessness and stupidity, but Wylie grabbed me and hugged and started crying herself, telling me it was okay, I would stay on here with Duff and Taylor; Taylor loved me and needed me, needed me even more now that there was Stuart. She said she needed me, too, and on weekends or whenever they arranged Duff’s visits, I’d go to her with Duff. They weren’t about to abandon me.

  “We love you,” Wylie said, simply.

  I crushed my face into her sweatshirt. If I let go of her, I’d be losing everything.

  “Taylor loves you,” Wylie said, “but you must know that.”

  “Don’t go,” I begged. “Don’t leave. Please.” What was it that Taylor had explained about weak gravity? Batwinged nightmares flapped frantically; I didn’t want them flying out of my skull.

  Two weeks later Wylie left, for Paris. She let Taylor think she might be back, might not. He asked what I thought. What are the odds on four years and a kid together lasting into five or ten? He acted forbearing even when aggrieved. Prakash would have slugged and raved. Prakash would have been impossibly possessive. He would have put in new locks and bars on the outside of the front door to the apartment. The Claremont codes still bewildered me.

  The odds on Wylie coming home again were nonexistent, but I didn’t tell Taylor. Wylie’d confided before she left that Stuart was joining her. Ten glorious days without children on the Continent.

  “It’ll be okay,” I comforted Taylor. “Everything’ll be okay. Wait and see.”

  Taylor let himself be comforted. “It won’t be okay by itself. But you’ll make it okay, Jase. If you hadn’t been here, I’d have gone crazy.”

  Maybe Wylie, who could see more clearly into people’s hearts than I did, was right. Maybe Taylor was very fond of me. Even a little bit in love with me. But in love with me in a different way than he was in love with witty, confident Wylie. On the nights that he had time to help tuck Duff in bed—a ritual that Wylie’d cherished—he wanted me to stay in the darkened room, to sit on my cot with him so he could lay one of his big pale hands on Duff’s and the other on mine and spin long bedtime stories about the muddles and mysteries of physics. On those nights, we—Duff, Taylor, and I—became a small, self-sufficient family, and I told myself, guiltily, that everything might really work out all right. I prayed that Wylie and Stuart would take all the time they needed in Europe, because I, the caregiver, was eager to lavish care on my new, perfect family.

  Wylie’d wanted me to meet Stuart, and so I did. I think now that in the smart magazines that she read there were probably articles on the dos and don’ts for introducing your live-in caregiver to your live-out lover. Claremont Avenue was a brave new world for me. Our first meeting was in Stuart’s apartment, and I know I acted awkward and bashfully formal. Stuart was tall and pleasant and extremely thin. He ran six miles a day along Riverside Drive—he’d even noticed Duff and me playing in the park. He had been to India several times as a guest lecturer in Delhi, as a World Bank consultant, as a U.S. government aid officer. He spoke Hindi passably and owned so many Indian paintings and tapestries that his living room looked to me like a shop or an art gallery. His wife was an Africa specialist, so the walls were hung with spears and masks that competed with mirror-work cloths and Moghul miniatures. Their three sons were in private schools in Massachusetts. If there had been no Taylor, Stuart would have been perfect. Knowing Taylor, I found Stuart too secure, too vain, too solicitous.

  I carried on. So did Taylor, who sunk himself in his lab and made sure he was always home at the right hour for Duff’s dinner and bedtime. Though Taylor’s grin had stiffened into a pained and patient smile, he didn’t seem bitter about the reduced size of the family. The truth is, we were happy, happier than when Wylie’d been around filling up the apartment with her restlessness and unspoken guilt. Now the rooms seemed warmed by a mute intimacy. My life had a new fullness and chargedness to it. Every day I made discoveries about the city, and in the evenings, when I listed my discoveries to Taylor he listened carefully, as though I were describing an unmapped, exotic metropolis.

  Wylie, too, would have been proud of me. I took Duff to the Asia Society to watch an Indian potter. I took her to a fishmonger’s display window on Broadway, so she could see fish dressed in leather ties and dark glasses to look like rock stars. I asked Duff the enriching questions Wylie wanted me to, and let Duff find the answers for herself. I wondered if anyone had asked Wylie enriching questions, if I was creating the foundations for impossible yearning later in Duff’s life. We rode the buses up and down and across our frantic borough to the Muzak of “And what do you call that, sweetheart?” and “Where did we see it before? Did it look different yesterday?”

  Taylor took us to Mets games. Only the National League, he said. We don’t do DH. In his growing up in an academic family, there was a secular trinity: NBC, the National League, and the Democratic Party. Anything else was reactionary, racist, anti-intellectual. But when I told Wylie about the trinity, she hooted, What about Edward R. Murrow? Wylie’s point was that teaching me baseball was Taylor’s unthreatening way of courting me. Maybe. At the time I thought he was consoling himself with teaching me.

  Taylor didn’t want to change me. He didn’t want to scour and sanitize the foreignness. My being different from Wylie or Kate didn’t scare him. I changed because I wanted to. To bunker oneself inside nostalgia, to sheathe the heart in a bulletproof vest, was to be a coward. On Claremont Avenue, in the Hayeses’ big, clean, brightly lit apartment, I bloomed from a diffident alien with forged documents into adventurous Jase.

  In the first weeks of my adventurousness, when Duff and I decided we’d like some of the merchandise advertised on television, I sent away for it. First came a Japanese knife set. Then a radio-controlled Lamborghini. A cassette car stereo for the car I meant to buy someday. A triple-beveled, herringbone, 14-carat-gold neck chain. By the time a spring mechanism for doing sit-ups arrived, I’d grown afraid of the mail. The mailman was a terrorist delivering small explosive objects that wouldn’t go away, every month new classical recordings and new history books. I was turning over my entire paycheck for things I couldn’t use and didn’t know how to stop.

  Taylor rescued me. “America, America!” Taylor said one day. Duff probably told him that I was afraid to go outside. He wrote on a package in thick marking pen RETURN TO SENDER. That’s all you need to do, he explained. If something gets too frightening, just pull down an imaginary shade that says RETURN on it and you can make it go away.

  Could I really have not known that I was head over heels in love with Taylor Hayes?

  One Sunday we took our supper in a basket to the park. Duff rolled on the grass. “I’m a puppy,” she squealed. “Tickle me behind the ears. Pick me up by my scruff.” Taylor and I tickled; then Taylor, too, rolled over on the grass.

  “Jase,” he said.

  He was licking the last of the mango pickle off his fingers. “What would it take to make you stay on?”

  “If Duff needs me, I’ll stay.”

  “Sure Duff needs you. That’s pretty obvious.” We each had our hands on her, idly tickling.

  “I want a hot dog,” she said. “There’s a man over there.”

  Taylor peeled off a dollar and sent her on her way.

&n
bsp; “I think maybe I need you,” he said. He scrambled for my hand. “I know you think that Wylie is terrible for walking out—”

  I started to protest.

  “—but that’s not the whole story. She was on to something I wasn’t even aware of.”

  He reached for my hand. “She said I’ve been in love with you since the first morning I saw you. Since you came in afraid to talk, not knowing much English …”

  “… afraid to sleep alone,” I said. I did not want this conversation to end. It was not like the businessman who wanted to take me with him to India, who would have paid me thousands. Not like the men in shops along Broadway, the doormen and the street vendors and the repairmen who knew I was a day mummy and fundamentally helpless, or at least available. This was a man I had observed for over two years, who had been unfailingly kind, never condescending, always proud of my achievements. I would listen. And then I would do. I twisted over to keep an eye on Duff, who was already coming back to us, hot dog in her hand.

  “Ah, about this sleeping-alone stuff,” he said. “Jase? Jase—you listening?”

  I acted annoyed. “When have I not listened?”

  Duff offered a bite of her hot dog first to Taylor, then to me. She was an instinctively generous, loving child. If we could have stayed like that forever, my world would have righted itself. Fishermen wouldn’t have needed their fish.

  “You know what the hot-dog man said?” asked Duff. “He asked me, ‘Is that lady your mummy?’”

  Taylor laughed. I squinted across the open field where children were playing whiffle ball, to the dark-skinned hot-dog vendor sitting under his umbrella.

  “Jase? What’s wrong? You’re shivering. It’s something I said, isn’t it? Jase, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  He pulled me to my feet and I couldn’t let go of him. I couldn’t look behind me, couldn’t open my eyes. I could hear Taylor’s voice from a long way off saying, It’s okay, she choked on something, she’ll be all right.