Nebraska, or the Implications of a Gift of Duran Duran: Chapter 2

Nebraska, or the Implications of a Gift
of Duran Duran: Chapter 2
by Dileep Rao

For the next ten summers, as the days lengthened and school was out, Ajay did three things. First, he got up in the morning and, after breakfast, did five pages of mathematics problems his mother had written over her coffee at six that morning. He then had her correct his work, teach him something new and they shared lunch—either leftovers from their Indian dinner the night before (which he regarded as subcultural, his parents need for it an affectation and weakness) or perhaps tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.

His mother ate hers with Indian pickles, spicy and sour, which the whole family used sparingly as it was a two hundred mile drive to an Indian grocery store in Iowa to fetch these ingredients. He often accompanied his parents on trips to this store, owned by Mr. Singh whose turban made him a Sikh, victims of his father’s private jokes as much as Pollacks were those of his classmate’s jabs. While Adarsh and Harish selected tamarind, mustard, and rose water, Ajay would sit in the car, regarding the whole affair as too intimate a reminder of whence his DNA came.

His mother crushed cardamom with the heel of a tomato sauce jar and sprinkled it over canned mango pulp. He ate it carefully, trying to achieve a balance between the minimum amount required to produce the taste and his desire to burn a maximum of afternoon with the eating of this dessert.

Then, when the sun had broken and the heat ebbed, his mother would take him out in their backyard to her vegetable patch. Here he would kneel among her tomatoes, their thick weed-like stems and spidery yellow flowers, and hunt for worms, the tomato horn worms whose fleshy girth defied their invertebrate physiology. He would hunt carefully in the foliage for their undulation, a flowing of pale green flesh, ending in a sharp red horn. Or he would spot them from their droppings, tiny dark green pellets that looked like hand grenades for his action figures. He would pluck them from the foliage they were munching and toss them unceremoniously in a pail where they would land with a light thump. His mother would turn her head in disgust.

After they had been gathered up, he slipped them into a plastic grocery bag, tied its handles in a firm knot and dropped them in the trash. Once, as he dumped the bag into the metal trash can, he hovered a moment looking down. The worms moved, the bag crinkling and moving gently. What moth or butterfly had laid these here? None would see their chrysalis, their pupae or the day their wet wings would come unbound as they crawled out of their cocoon and hardened into their glorious pattern.

Then, as evening slipped into the air, he was free to gather his
eleven baseballs and practice. He would begin, and after pitch black
darkness had stolen away the tire, the thump of a ball striking the
tire or the tree was still audible on Dewhurst lane.

By midsummer of that eighth year with the tire, he could find its opening with half his throws. By the end he was near seventy percent. He grew stronger too, his voice breaking, and wisps of hair appearing like uninvited caterpillars in his armpits, on his belly and his upper lip.

The fall brought a cold snap and the tomatoes died, though hundreds had been picked, eaten, thrown, frozen, canned and given away. Ajay trundled off to high school, where his mother taught, this fact replacing his father’s description of him years ago as the reason of his ostracism.

He went, pointlessly, to football games and float-building contests where he withered under the cheapest sorts of friendships that were offered: those of class council members whose ubiquitous acquaintance was both meaningless and ephemeral. They behaved as if they knew him, as if they had his whole life long. And at first, this seemed ideal. It was like a Lipton soup in a pouch. He made jokes and they laughed, they invited him by phone to weekend meet-ups to wash cars or hammer and nail together chicken wire and one by one’s in the absurd hope that they would construct a likeness of the school mascot (the Red bird) from such materials.

It was in this first weekend of building the freshman float that he first glimpsed, up close, a girl that he had seen from afar at the high school. She too was a freshman, though they shared none of the same classes. He felt his mouth go completely dry at her entrance, as she shed her coat in the Dickerson’s garage and went plaintively to work amongst her friends, seated in a knot on the concrete floor, tying off sections of crepe paper for the Red Bird’s crimson chest. At this moment, Patrick Schouff, freshman class president, whose hooded sweatshirt read “Class of ’86, we ROCK!" on its chest, stepped forward.

"Guys, we have a problem."

His tone was that of a surgeon in mid-appendectomy. All eyes, especially those of the knot of girls, were upon him.

"We have two colors of crepe paper."

He paused, his voice having risen.

"And we have to cover the whole, whatchamacallit, breast of the red bird." He flashed a smile.

"So, I think we can do either of two things. We can do it in stripes, like one red and another lighter red or we can mix it. Let’s make it democratic and vote.”

He looked at them, this assembled army of teen spirit and gawkish allegiance. By now, all the freshman there had quietly assembled in the garage, some twenty of them.

"Who says stripes?"

Two hands shot up, one quickly recoiled the other proudly stayed up.

"Who says mix them?"

Ten hands shot up. Ajay didn’t vote, and neither did the girl and seven others. He went back to work, finding that if he immersed himself in it he could ignore the fact that he had nothing to say to anyone and that he didn’t know anybody. He fastened chicken wire to wooden frame, bending it around the nails and twisting it off with pliers. He looked up and found Mr. Dickerson across from him.

"You’re Harish’s boy, yeah?”

He rhymed the word with parish, which always caught him off guard, a stranger saying his father’s name, completely mangling it.

Ajay nodded, thinking, "Of course I am, do you see anyone else here that is as brown as me or that would fit the description of my father?"

"I work with your dad," he said.

Again Ajay nodded.

"He’s a smart guy. Are you like that?"

Ajay looked at him.

"No, not really."

Mr. Dickerson rose and took off his gloves as his wife approached. Hoping not to be identified, Ajay turned and began to cut more chicken wire. To his relief, the Dickersons were too busy rekindling their marriage to bother with him.

Dileep can be reached at dileep@babblog.com.