Authors: Bharati Mukherjee
“Then where will Duff sleep?”
“Her room, of course.”
“Not with me?” I could not imagine a small child sleeping alone. I had trouble enough with it myself, never having spent a night alone until I got to Lillian Gordon’s. That was Lillian’s pride: that she could give me Kate’s old room, by myself, not with the Kanjobal women. I would have preferred sleeping on a floor mat. In Flushing I could at least hear the snoring of Professorji and his father. I had lain awake in the Florida cottage, watching ghosts flit across the ceiling, wrap themselves in the curtains, creak from room to room. When Kate had told me of a possible job looking after a child, I had imagined myself in a narrow bed with a baby, and the thought had brought me comfort.
“Who will I sleep with?” I asked.
“What you do on your own time is your business,” said Wylie. “But show discretion, for Duff’s sake. I hope you understand.”
“Let us check him out first, is what she means,” said Taylor.
“Who?” I asked.
Kate came over. “Can we start again?” she suggested.
On Sunday Taylor’s computer station was still by the window in the study, his racing bike hanging like art on the
wall, and his windjamming equipment in the closet. “Give me a couple more days,” he said. “There’s another breakthrough in the lab.” He was out early, back late. I prayed he was not sorting hair. Wylie put on a martyr’s face. I’d been sleeping on a cot in his room, folding it up by day. All my T-shirts and cords fitted into a plastic bag in the closet.
They thought I wanted a room of my own. I had no way of telling them it wasn’t necessary, that I worried about Duff all alone with her animal paintings and stuffed dolls. She was a lovely child, easy to look after. She was the only American, at the time, that I was capable of totally understanding. For her, I was a wise adult without an accent. For me, she was an American friend whose language I understood and humor I could laugh at. And she laughed at mine. I did have a sense of humor.
She was a pale child with pale eyes and pale hair. When she raced ahead of me in Riverside Park and I pretended to chase her, it was like chasing a milkweed parachute or a feather. I was learning about the stores, the neighborhood, shopping, from her.
Sleeping in Duff’s room was supposed to be temporary, but she and I quickly fixed that. We moved my cot in. I prayed I’d be allowed to stay. I planted the idea with her. To Wylie I said, “I don’t mind, really,” and copied her look of a put-upon saint.
* * *
If Duff had been born in Kansas, I think now, that’s where I would have headed when I was fleeing New York. Who lays out the roadways of our futures? What if! What if the Hayeses’ lawyer had taken out ads in Nebraska? In Wisconsin?
The apartment was stocked like a museum. Wylie and Taylor weren’t simple acquisitors. Unlike the Vadheras, they bought useless things, silly things, ugly things—wooden ducks, two wooden Indians, a wood cutout of Carmen Miranda—and arranged them in clusters. Some of them seemed offensive to blacks or women or Red Indians. There were slave-auction posters from New Orleans in 1850, speaking of healthy wenches and strong bucks; old color prints celebrating the massacre of an entire Indian village down to the last baby; a poster of a naked woman with parts of her body labeled choice, prime, or chuck, as in a butcher shop.
In the bathroom they hung mounted prints of flowers:
Dauphinelle elevée, Pimprenelle cultivée, Helianthe commun
. I had memorized the names and spellings before learning the words were French and they didn’t grow here. I took in everything. Every morning, the news sank into my brain, and stayed. Language on the street, on the forbidden television, at the Hayeses’ dinners, where I sat like a guest and only helped with the serving (and, increasingly, controlled the menu), all became
my
language, which I learned like a child, from the first words up. The squatting fields of Hasnapur receded fast.
My first live-in day on Claremont, Wylie showed me the powder room in the hall. “That’s more or less exclusively
for you and Duff,” she said, “but the shower you’ll have to share with us.” For a second I caught a hesitation, an opacity, in her wide brown eyes, and then the eyes brightened again. She was apologizing for having just one shower, but I’d misinterpreted. I’d even panicked, wondering where the servants’ shower was, if I was to share it with the doorman and janitor in the basement. I never showered when they were in. American showers still delighted me, despite the inevitable, daily association with Flamingo Court, with preparation for death, with the knowledge that a naked body was outside the door, waiting to rape again, perhaps to kill. Touching a tap and having the water hot-hot, and plentiful, was still a sensual thrill.
When Wylie talked of me on the phone, she called me her “caregiver.” “I don’t know what I’d do without her. Jasmine’s a real find. Not like that last one who threw the front-door keys in the incinerator when she walked out on us.” Or: “I won’t say I’ll definitely be at the fund-raiser until I’ve checked Tuesday night out with my caregiver.” Caregiver. The word sang off my tongue. I was a professional, like a schoolteacher or a nurse. I wasn’t a maidservant.
In Hasnapur the Mazbi woman who’d stoked our hearth or spread our flaking, dried-out adobe walls with watered cow dung had been a maidservant. Wylie made me feel her younger sister. I was family, and I was professional.
* * *
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 shape, 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.