Leave It to Me by Bharati Mukherjee

Author:Bharati Mukherjee
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Humorous, Fiction, Literary, California, Birthparents, Young Women
ISBN: 9780307792297
Publisher: Bt Bound
Published: 1997-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Ham and Larry. Larry and Ham. I spent a lot of time with each of them, because I wanted to. It wasn’t about sex, and it wasn’t about self-discovery as it had been with Frankie. Frankie’d looked exotic, but acted familiar. Ham and Larry were harder for me to read. They were the true exotics, coming of age as they’d done in contrary times. Larry’d napalmed villages; Ham’d impresarioed love-ins. And Bio-Mom? She’d embroiled herself and me in messy mysteries.

Like Ham and Larry, she would be in her fifties now. She must have started out romantic, must have floated into the sixties in a haze of sex, drugs and the sanctity of rebellion. Then the war had snuck up on her as it had on Larry and Ham, an apocalypse segregating hawks from doves, cynics from idealists, setting up areas where women couldn’t follow. Vietnam had plucked a slow, shy kid from a Central Valley farm and provided him paranoia and cheap arms. Peace had coarsened a draft resister to deal maker on the minibudget Bay Area film circuit. We know how our men had reacted. Vietnam had been their central experience—you couldn’t escape their blasted faces on the streets—they’d coped or they’d been gutted. War had blessed them with terrible clarity.

But what about the women? What about that flower fräulein, Bio-Mom? Should I envy the mother who had put her bad karma behind her in an Indian prison, dumped her bastard child on Hindi-speaking nuns and moved on? She’d done what’d felt good, what’d felt right at the time, and consequences be damned.

For her and Ham as much as for Larry, Vietnam ended on the roof of the U. S. Embassy in Saigon. Scramble into choppers, then pull up the ladders! Teach the Statue of Liberty to catch up to speed!

But what about us, Vietnam’s war-bastards and democracy’s love children? We’re still coping with what they did, what they saw, what they salvaged, what they mangled and dumped on that Saigon rooftop that maniacal afternoon.

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