Jasmine. Bharati Mukherjee

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.

      But the other girls in the building, the other day mummies—sorry, “caregivers”—who descended on the lobby at eight o’clock every morning, down from Harlem or over from Brooklyn, and took over the children while the mothers went out to teach or study or edit or just do what they do, assumed only that I was from “the islands,” like they were. That was democratic, too.

      They assumed I had a past, like them, about which I didn’t tell too much. Most of them had children back in Jamaica or Trinidad or Santo Domingo. They assumed I did, too. I didn’t have a child, but I had a past that I was still fleeing. Perhaps still am.

      “Little Ricky Ricardo,” she said. She squeaked her nails up and down the spine of the book. I could tell she was hurting. “It can’t mean much to you.”

      “You’ll be okay.”

      “So I waited too long,” she said. “I wrote poems. I was going to be the next Adrienne Rich. I mean, it isn’t the end of the world or anything.”

      She got me there, too.

      “You have nice hips,” she said. But she gave the “you” a generic sweep. You teeming millions with wide hips breeding like roaches on wide-hipped continents. “Wide. Nature meant you to carry babies.”

      “Thank you,” I said. What else could I have said?

      “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?” I didn’t deny it. “It was easy, wasn’t it? You didn’t wait, you’re lucky.”

      The truth is, I am young enough to bear children into the next century. But. I feel old, very old, millennia old, a bug-eyed viewer of beginnings and ends. In the old Hindu books they say that in the eye of the creator, mountains rise and fall like waves on the ocean.

      It wasn’t hard to get pregnant, but it wasn’t very natural, either. It shames Bud that now, for sex, I must do all the work, all the moving, that I will always be on top. I will do this. But for having this baby, I required Dick Kwang’s assistance. Bud was very nervous, made jokes about “Dick and Jane” that Dong-jin Kwang and I didn’t understand. Bud said he’d watched the inseminators do their job a thousand times, but he never thought he’d be so intimately involved.

      It was Mother who got us together. Professionally. The first time she met me, she asked if I was good with numbers. Passably, I said. She assumed I was a student at the university; I didn’t disabuse her.

      “My son is always looking for smart, reliable tellers. Let’s take a trip over there.” She thought we’d hit it off. The hours were flexible, good for a student. I took her up on it.

      He came running out of the office that day. “Mother! Who have you brought us, a maharani? I hope you haven’t eaten, Your Highness, because I’m just headed out the door.”

      * * *

      “Oh, God, I love you so much,” he says. “I have never seen anyone so beautiful.” He doesn’t often make these pronouncements, they are part of his abject position, his helplessness. We are back home from Mother Ripplemeyer’s. Du in the living room watching television, Bud and I are in the bedroom. Bud may no longer be a whole man, but desire hasn’t deserted him. Lust deprived of spontaneous fulfillment: that’s what shames him now. Once he had been in control; once he had been an impulsive pursuer.

      After I prepare him for bed, undo the shoes, pull off the pants, sponge-bathe him, he likes me to change roles, from caregiver to temptress, and I try to do it convincingly, walking differently, frowning, smiling … I take off my Sunday clothes very carefully in the bathroom, with the door open, the light on. I am to linger there, and act as though I am alone. I brush my teeth, a long, long time; I rub myself against the lavatory’s edge. When we first met and began making love in my rented room and in the motel rooms of neighboring towns, he was active and inventive, very sure of himself, he loved games. Now I must do all the playing, provide the surprises. I don’t mind. His upper body is enormously strong, the bench press of love. It isn’t the preparations (for all their awkwardness and crudeness) that I rage against. What kills me in this half-lit bedroom is the look of torture, excitement, desperation on Bud’s face as he watches me.

      Desire can end only one way, tonight or any other night. I come to bed, crawling over the covers, until a pair of immensely strong, blond-haired arms enfold me. He can lift me, even from his prone position, lift me and center me and keep me in the air till I feel his arms trembling, and as my legs, my breasts, my face dip to touch his chest, I can feel the ripple of his heart; our flesh makes loud slapping noises. Then it is my turn to take charge. There are massages I must administer, pushing him on the prostate, tools I must push up him so that, at least on very special nights, he can ejaculate.

      Bud’s eyes are closed, face contorted. “Sweet Jane,” he mutters. “I’ve brought you to this. The old big beads trick.”

      I hush him with my lips. I do not know the pain he suffers, if any, if bliss lies this close to agony, if he is on a different plane. When love collapses, I let myself fall to his chest and his heart is like a fist beating me wherever we touch.

      Tonight, as Bud’s breath shivers back to normal and the hard thumping of his heart softens to a beat, I can almost follow, a sliver of blue television light exposes two small pools of darkness at the base of our bedroom door. Our bedroom door is open, just a crack. The shadow pools gather into one, and disappear. A line of blue light edges our door, then snaps off.

      A few seconds later we hear, “Night, Mom and Dad.” He moves so quietly.

      It is still spring, hot days, cool nights, Iowa’s gentlest month. Bud is already in the first flutterings of sleep. The house is dark, full of unacted drama. Lying awake, trying to regulate my breathing with my heart, with Bud’s light snore, trying to put my head back on the pillow, I watch the patterns on the ceiling, framed photos on the dresser, my lover falling through layers of private pain. I get up, briefly, and move his wheelchair back to the corner, and fold it. On nights like this, with a full moon beating down like an auxiliary sun, the farmers say you can practically hear the corn and beans ripping their way through the ground. This night I feel torn open like