Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [18]
And when getting a life is your goal, why put off till tomorrow what you can do this nanosecond?
Pursuing bliss, I took the very next exit ramp off the highway, and called San Francisco information for Finders/Keepers. “Nothing under that name,” the operator said.
“Maybe I’m spelling it wrong,” I pleaded, “anything under Ph instead of F, Qu instead of K?”
“I don’t show anything, ma’am. Check the spelling. Have a nice day.”
Debby DiMartino died and Devi Dee birthed herself on the Donner Pass at the precise moment a top-down Spider Veloce with DEVI vanities (driver’s blond hair billowing around a clamp of expensive speakers, cigarette cueing imaginary music) cut me off in front of the Welcome to California Fruit Inspection Barrier to take the only open slot.
Of course, the Fruit Inspector waved DEVI through and stopped my sensible Corolla with its New York nonvanities and went through its yeah-I-left-in-a-hurry-but-I’m-intending-to-stay-no-matter-what backseat jumble of clothes, cardboard boxes, garbage sacks, CDs and tapes. The Fruit Buster sniffed for suspicious odors and pounced on a plastic Baggie I’d been spitting orange peels and tossing banana skins, crumpled tissues and candy wrappers into the last three days. I have a fast metabolism, and back in New York I’d have shriveled the Fruit Buster with a hey!-you-metabolism-chauvinist! glare, but at the California border I cringed.
I’m a disgrace to California, I deserve to be turned away. That was my last true Debby-thought, all wrapped up in ash, sackcloth and guilt.
“Okay, cool,” the Fruit Buster waved me on, “I’ll dump this stuff in the right recycling bins.” He had two silver rings piercing his left ear rim, and an official cap perched on an explosion of black, bristly hair. He was Asian, but not Chinese. My time with Frankie and his Chinese-intensive labor force at FHP had made me intuitive about who wasn’t Chinese. Chinese was just the beginning. Frankie got scary specific: Chinese out of Singapore, he’d pronounce; Malay Chinese. Filipino Chinese, Sumatran, Javan. The Fruit Inspector was American Chinese; he probably wouldn’t have appreciated Frankie’s detection skills.
I thanked the Inspector with smarmy gratitude, I was that touched by his laid-back California efficiency. I didn’t forget that he’d treated me differently from the blond in the top-down Spider Veloce. Humiliation by the broccoli police didn’t happen to blondes who lived inside their sound-designed universes, who ran through snow flurries with their long hair flying, whose cigarettes sent messages of assumed immortality. Of course I knew I’d been discriminated against, but nicely, so why not treat it as a learning experience? Hello California.
“Whoa, no problem. Have a nice life!” The cool Inspector launched a perfect jump shot. Old Baggie of trash and guilt disappeared into the Dumpster.
“Yo,” I shouted back, “you too.”
Reborn, admitted, launched into clean, conquerable gravity-free space. Even the air felt young, innocent, healthy. A few fat midsummer snowflakes danced like spit on a griddle off my Corolla’s sizzling hood. Was it a cold day with warm sun, a New York April sort of day? Or upstate October, a warm day with icy winds?
Devi arm-wrestled Debby. I was quicker, stronger as Devi; my intuitions were sharper, my impulsiveness rowdier. As Devi, I came into possession of my mystery genes. Thank you, Clear Water. And you, too, thank you, “Asian National.”
And thank you, Baby Fong, and what the heck, Frankie, too, for forcing me to deal with my not being a real DiMartino. Like Angie, or like cousin Nicole. Nicole graduated from Hudson Valley Community, and she’s now assistant-producing for some crack-of-dawn cable channel and living with a painter in an illegally converted loft in West Chelsea. Nicole’s a true DiMartino. She can afford to be hooked on Danielle Steele and fairy tales, because she has a family, because she has a family history that’s corroborated by uncles,