Indie Girl (10 page)

“Indie, right?” Brooke asked, a smile crossing her face.

Her friends, all equally gorgeous and blonde, stepped back, as if allowing their queen to assert herself.

“Aunt Aaralyn—although she hates it when I call her
that, tells me it makes her feel old—well, she said you were a real help to her.”

“Oh really? That’s good to know,” I replied, hugging my textbooks close to my chest. “It was kinda fun. The kid’s cute.”

“Yes, little cousin Kyle.
Such
a darling. You know, Aunt Aaralyn keeps asking me to babysit, but I can never find the time,” she said, now sighing as if the future of the world rested on her slender shoulders. “But now that you’ve done it and seem to be having fun at it, maybe I should reconsider.”

I must have looked startled, because Brooke suddenly broke out into a fit of giggles.

“Oh please, don’t worry,” she said, a jeering tone in her voice. “I’m not going to take your precious babysitting job away from you. That would be just so
selfish!
What—and give you nothing else to look forward to on your weekends?”

Her friends all joined her now, giggling, and then together they all turned around and walked away. My face felt hot and I broke out into a little sweat all over my body. But I held my head up high, remembering Hinduism’s karmic law that dictated that any act of cruelty in this life would result in some misfortune in the next. Not that I wanted to wish anyone ill, but Brooke Carlyle was known for being mean. So in her next incarnation, she’d probably come back as a rodent.

·   ·   ·

The little ring on my cell phone indicated a message, so when class was over, I checked my voice mail.

“Indie, beti, it’s Mummy,”
my mother had recorded, feeling the need to identify herself
“You. Call Me. Please.”
Every time my mother spoke into my voice mail, she sounded like she was speaking to someone who was deaf and couldn’t utter a word of English. Something about it made her very uncomfortable. She was perhaps the least tech-savvy person I knew. In fact, it had only been recently that my mother had gotten herself an e-mail address and only at my insistence. Before that, she would stand behind me and dictate e-mails to her relatives overseas as I typed them in, using one of my handles. It was only when I told her she could download pictures of her newborn nephew in Kerala, or find reviews of the latest Hindi film online, that she finally agreed. Now, she spent a couple of hours a day on the computer; I had her hooked.

As soon as I got a chance, I called her back. I could imagine her, lounging in her favorite blue chair in the den, a cup of ginger tea by her side and a copy of
The Kite Runner
in her hands. I envied her ability to stick with all those hundreds of pages of any book, living with the characters for days or sometimes weeks on hand. She would often tell me that instead of wasting my time on the trivia inside
Celebrity Style,
it would benefit my mind more
to read some of the literary world’s great works. I knew she had a point: There really wasn’t any contest between Charles Dickens and a two-page spread on whether Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan was hotter in the past year.

“What’s up, Ma?” I asked her.

“Somebody just called for you. Junoon something. He left his number.”

I laughed. I knew my mother was trying to tell me that it was Juno. It was funny that she had confused his name with the Hindi word for “obsession.”

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“That he and his wife needed your help tonight with that baby. I don’t know, Indie. You must be having homework and all, and your whole weekend was gone working for these people. You can’t keep running there every time they call.”

“Don’t worry about it, Ma,” I said. “Let me just give him a quick call back.”

It was not inevitable, I knew, that Juno was calling me to ask me to babysit again, but I couldn’t rationally think of what else it could be.

But something else had changed too; since my father’s sobering talk from last weekend, I had been walking around with a sinking feeling in my stomach. I was beginning to realize that this thing I was doing with Aaralyn was a dead end for me. I was not much more than a passing convenience for her, and I could tell by
the way she spoke to me that she didn’t have that much regard for me.

And yet, a copy of my application for the internship at her magazine sat in a translucent folder adorned with glittery stickers on my bedside. Every night, I turned to look at it, read every word of the essay I had penned as to why I was the right person for the job, and every night I wondered if I could have said something else, something better, something different—something that would have caught the attention of the person it was sent to, who would then have sent it to Aaralyn with a strong recommendation that she hire me. Every night, I wondered if Aaralyn had ever even bothered to glance at it, and every night I considered tearing it up and tossing out the pieces.

But I had the good manners to call Juno back anyway.

There was a charity event that Aaralyn had decided to attend at the last minute, her husband was going to tag along, and their usual daytime nanny wasn’t able to extend her hours to stay home with Kyle.

Juno’s voice was pleading. “I know it’s a school night, and it’s a long way to come. And I really wouldn’t ask if there was somebody else I could call. But there isn’t. Aaralyn is dead set on going to this thing, and insists I go with her, although why she couldn’t have figured this out last week is anybody’s guess.”

He sounded exasperated for a minute.

I
did
have a load of homework and had to start cramming massively for finals, although I told myself that I could always hit the books once Kyle was asleep.

“I’ll have to ask my mom or dad if they can drive me,” I said. “It’s kind of a long way.”

“I know,” Juno said. “But if it helps, we can up your rate for today, seeing as it’s a weeknight and all. Maybe ten an hour? Will that make it worth your while? And we’ll throw in the gift bag from the event.”

With an offer like that, there was no way I could say no.

My father, on the other hand, was not exactly part of the Coalition of the Willing. He was exhausted after a long day and the last thing he wanted to do was get back on the freeway.

“Indie, you are being taken advantage of and you are wasting your time and mine,” he said when he got home, still standing in the doorway as I accosted him. “We have had this conversation already. You are squandering your talents. This is not a position you should be undertaking, and I will certainly not facilitate your ill-conceived ideas.”

“But, Dad, please …” I started to beg. “They need me.” I could feel myself tearing up again.

My mother appeared from the kitchen, holding a dishrag, a sprinkling of flour in her hair.

“Rajiv, I can take her,” she said. “This is important to her. Let her go.”

“Nanda, when will you start putting your foot down?” my father asked. “She is still technically a child. We have the right, authority, and obligation to inform her when she is making a mistake.”

“I agree with you, Rajiv. But this is something so important to her. Look at her face.”

They both turned to look at me. Almost instinctively, and completely without guile, I had on my “poor me” look, the one I had as a child when I didn’t get the Christmas present I was hoping for, the one that always surfaced when my father couldn’t take me to Disneyland at the last minute because his pager went off and he had to rush off to the hospital.

“Remember, Rajiv, it is hard in this country to have children.” My mother turned to look at me. “You know, Indie, if we were still in India when you were born, I would have given birth to you in my mother’s house. You would have had grandparents, uncle, aunties, ayahs, and cooks. So many people to love you and care for you. But instead, I had you in an American hospital. And I remember how hard it was for me, your father busy all day, me trying to manage the housework and the cooking and a new baby. So I understand the needs of your Aaralyn.”

I loved my mother.

She turned back to my father.

“You relax, Rajiv, I’ll take her,” my mother said, going back into the kitchen to put down the cloth. “You just remember, please, to take dinner out of the oven in forty minutes and then help Dinesh with his homework.”

“Nanda, I don’t want you driving by yourself at night,” he said, perhaps forgetting that it was only five thirty.

“Okay, Indie,” he said, resignation in his voice. “Get in the car.”

When my dad pulled up to the house, Aaralyn’s limo was already outside. I had to walk past it to get to her driveway. I recognized the driver from the day at the school, the day I had accosted her. If I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t be here. The driver was outside the car, leaning up against it, reading the paper under a still-bright sky.

“Hello,” I said, smiling. As I’d learned, it always paid to be nice to the help.

“Good evening,” he said.

“I’m Indie,” I replied. “I babysit Kyle.”

“Aldo,” he replied. “And yes, I remember you.” His face took on a somewhat sardonic look. He probably thought I was a bit of a loser, running after a car like that.

Aaralyn was standing at the top of the stairs, wearing a silk slip, holding up two dresses in front of her husband who was halfway down the stairs.

“What do you think? Basic black or this orange? With my hair, the orange might be a bit much. I don’t know why my stylist even bothered sending it over. Hi, Indie,” she said as an afterthought. “Thanks for coming.”

Kyle was nowhere to be seen, so I stood at the bottom of the steps, watching the exchange. I couldn’t take my eyes off the dresses; the black was a Roland Mouret, curvy and clingy, one I’d just seen in a photograph somewhere on Scarlett Johansson. The second was Vera Wang, in sumptuous satin, a fuller skirt, and a sparkling flower at the waist.

“The orange,” I said.

Juno turned to look at me, and Aaralyn was expressionless.

“It’ll look amazing with your hair. Like Marcia Cross at the Golden Globes, remember? You’d be surprised. Just remove the flower thing. It’ll break up the length, won’t highlight your lean shape. And definitely metallic gold shoes—the Louboutins I glimpsed in there the other day.”

I didn’t know what had come over me. It wasn’t as if I had consciously decided to speak. But the words just came out of my mouth, an outgrowth of the celebrity images I always carried around in my head.

“Juno, what do you think?” she asked. She completely ignored me, and I was suddenly embarrassed. What made me think Aaralyn Taylor would listen to me? Juno, noticing this exchange, looked up at his wife.

“The orange I think,” he said, smiling.

Aaralyn studied the dress closely. “You might be right,” she said to Juno. “Let me go and try it on.”

When she emerged fifteen minutes later, accompanied by Juno in a smart black tuxedo, she was ravishing. She had left her hair down, her shiny tresses tumbling to her shoulders. Her makeup was simple yet striking.

“Don’t look too impressed,” she said. “My team left right before you got here. You didn’t think that I could manage this all on my own, did you?”

She was wearing the beaded flower around her wrist, like a corsage. I thought it looked endearing, and would probably land her some space in any number of competing publications. But as she approached me, she took the flower off, and handed it to me.

“Here, for you,” she said, thrusting it into my hand. The beads felt smooth against my palm, the soft silk scrunching against my skin. I had never even
seen
anything from Vera Wang except in the pages of a magazine, and here was I, not just
touching
it, but actually
owning
it.

“That might have some value on eBay,” she said with a toss of her shiny hair. “Just in case you decide to sell it.”

“Not in a million years,” I replied, holding the flower to my chest as if it were a long-lost family heirloom.

Kyle had been upstairs with his parents the whole time, keeping himself amused as they got dressed. His
father had carried him downstairs and now placed him gently in my arms. He didn’t flinch, coming to me happily. “Dindy,” he said, scratching my leather choker with his chubby fingers. I smiled. The boy was beginning to grow on me.

“Well, we’re off,” Juno said, glancing at his watch. “We should be home no later than eleven, if you want to call your dad. Oh, and by the way, if you hear any noise coming from my clinic out back, don’t worry. It’s my assistant, Cayman. He’ll probably come in to get a sandwich.”

“Cayman? As in the islands?” I asked, smiling.

“The very same,” Juno replied. “His parents are terminally trendy. They still go to rock concerts. They went to Burning Man in the desert last year—you know, that totally radical, cultish, artsy extravaganza.”

I had seen a bit about Burning Man on the news and knew what Juno was talking about. Assuming that his parents and mine were of the same generation, I couldn’t even imagine my folks at something like that. The most radical thing they had done in recent memory was attend a barn dance that was a fund-raiser for Dinesh’s school, and even then, had spent most of the evening sitting on the sidelines, drinking free Gatorade.

“Call if there’s a problem,” Aaralyn said, making sure her cell phone was tucked inside her bejeweled clutch. “But,” she continued, tossing me a stern look, “try not to.”

I carried Kyle back into the kitchen, stuck him in his high chair, and started getting his dinner ready. There was some boiled squash in a pot on the stove, a couple of chunks of avocado covered in plastic wrap on the counter, and mushy brown rice in another dish. I put fresh water in his sippy cup, pulled up a chair and started singing to him as I fed him.

“I’ve never heard Maroon 5 that way,” said a voice behind me.

Startled, I turned around and figured that this must be Cayman. He looked like his name. There was something breezy and relaxed about him. A mop of tousled golden-brown hair came down to just below his ears, matching the color of his eyes. He had a wide smile, broken only by a tiny gap between his two front teeth. Around his neck was a leather string, in the middle of which was suspended a cowrie shell. He was wearing a beige linen shirt over khakis, a pair of Timberlands on his feet.