Indie Girl (11 page)

It looked to me as if he had inherited the “terminally trendy” gene.

“Hey, I’m Cayman,” he said. “Juno’s part-time assistant.”

“Indie,” I replied, extending my hand and half standing up. “Kyle’s sometime babysitter.”

“I like the song,” he said, referring to what I’d just been warbling, terribly out of tune.

“
She will be loved.
Great thing to sing to a kid, even if he doesn’t understand a word of it. But I like that you changed the ‘she’ to ‘you.’ Sweet.”

He grinned again.

“I was going to order in some Chinese food. Hungry?”

Cayman Roos was, by far, the coolest kid I had ever met.

As we munched on Szechuan chicken, fried rice, and egg rolls, and drank from huge tankards of Diet Coke filled with ice, he told me all about the fascinating things he was doing during his year off, before starting college. As Kyle slept upstairs, Cayman filled me in on the scuba diving instructing he had done off the Cayman Islands, which made me laugh when he talked about it. He had worked for a company that gave hot-air balloon rides over Temecula wine country. He had spent a month teaching surfing in Molokai in Hawaii.

I was amazed by it all: The farthest I had ever gotten was to Calcutta, which my parents and I would visit every two years, my father cashing in all his frequent flyer miles for four tickets. I always longed to do something else—even travel around India a little bit. But between two sets of grandparents and more aunts and uncles than I could count, our summers always came to an end, and we’d be ready to return to the hills of Agoura, loaded down with so much luggage that we’d often be scrambling at the airport, removing big jars of pickles and wooden statues from our suitcases and sending them back to my grandparents’ place with the driver. Even so, we’d end up using every pound of luggage allowance we had, and would carry on so many bags that my father used to say that we looked like refugees.

Cayman was telling me that his adventures had to stop after a while. “My parents are pretty open, but they thought I was wasting a lot of time. Which I was, of course.” He smiled.

They suggested he do something more constructive, something to help prepare him for medical school. So he scrolled through Craigslist and came across an ad placed by Juno for a part-time personal assistant.

“There was something about the way he phrased the ad, something that was honest and to the point, so I thought I’d check it out,” Cayman recalled. “When I met him, I figured it would be a great way to spend the rest of my year. My parents have always been interested in alternative healing—Dad hasn’t taken so much as an aspirin in five years. So I come in for several hours a few times a week, plan Juno’s schedule, take appointments, deal with his billings and the insurance companies, that kind of thing. It’s great. I’m earning my own money so I don’t feel so bad still living in the bedroom next to my
parents. And Juno is a really nice guy, even though his wife is a bit crazy.”

I realized that this was the longest I had ever spoken to any boy before. At fifteen going on sixteen, I had never had a date. My father, a year earlier, had given me a really awkward “there will come a time” talk, about boys and girls and love and romance, never quite making any points, just meandering aimlessly through examples and anecdotes I didn’t understand.

“I know we are in America, where everyone dates, even as young as you,” my dad had said. “I want you to know that I am not against such a concept. But I do wish that you wouldn’t do it.”

My father didn’t have much to worry about in that regard. While there had been a couple of boys in school that I had liked and one that I had even had a huge crush on last year, none of them had liked me back. This was a vastly different scenario from the other girls in the school, the Brookes and their ilk, who talked about the boys they had made out with, giggling as they recounted all the details of a frenzied night of passion in the back of a car. I could only imagine what that felt like. To me, “first base” was actually a sporting term. It didn’t surprise me then that these girls tended to keep these conversations to themselves, lowering their voices in the changing room as I walked by, knowing that there was no way that I could even understand.

They were probably right. Where they had all done God knows what with a boy, I couldn’t even get someone to slow dance with me. At a dance a month earlier, where the theme was eighties disco, I sat on top of the stage, twirling the pendant that hung from a red silk rope around my neck, hoping and praying someone would ask me to dance while, fittingly, ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” played out of the DJ booth. But the only person who I hung out with was Kim. So we hung around and dissected everyone’s wardrobe and I pretended not to care that not a single boy had come to talk to me, while I secretly wished that I could dance and jive and have the time of my life.

So if there ever had been an ideal boy for me, Cayman would be it. He was funny and smart and not boisterous like so many other guys his age. He didn’t sit there and chew gum and unconsciously twirl a pen in his hand as he made a phony attempt to have a conversation with me. He had a direct gaze, asked me great questions about my life, and really seemed to listen. He was seventeen and planning to go to medical school. If only he was Indian, my father would love him.

Just as we were polishing off the last of the egg rolls, Aaralyn and Juno walked through the door.

“Hey, Cayman, you’re still here!” Juno announced. “I see you found some company,” he said, smiling in my direction.

Aaralyn ignored both of them, asking me immediately what time Kyle had fallen asleep, if he had finished is dinner, if he had had a bowel movement.

“Okay, I think that’s my sign to leave,” said Cayman, gathering the boxes of Chinese takeout and carting them to the trash can in the kitchen.

We left at the same time, Cayman getting into his white Mazda parked outside.

“Great meeting you,” Cayman said, as I walked toward my father.

“Maybe I’ll see you around?” he said.

“That’d be amazing,” I replied.

My sixteenth birthday cake was in the shape of a clothes hanger. I could see what my mother had tried to do, but wished she could have been a little more inventive, maybe seeking out a confectioner who could render a spun-sugar version of a Balenciaga bag or an Elie Saab gown, or a chocolate cake in the shape of a pair of Marc Jacobs ballerina flats.

But a clothes hanger it was, painted in bright red food coloring atop a vanilla surface, my name on a tag where the price might be, a
1
and
6
candle put together.

My birthday was on April 12, a date that I was thrilled to share with the ever-stylish Claire Danes, although my father was far more excited that some ancient Bollywood actor and director called Kidar Nath Sharma was born on the same day as me.

But this birthday was special. For two weeks, the fact that I was turning sixteen was about the only thing anyone in my family talked about. If I ever felt the need to sulk, my mother would tersely remind me that I “was about to turn sixteen, and it was time to start acting like a grown-up.” In my father’s mind, it was when I would have to start getting serious about my plans for college, indeed for the rest of my life. In my family, the age marked a rite of passage in a way. It was the age, my mother loved telling me, that her own parents started to talk to her about how she would marry someday and have a family of her own. The day she turned sixteen, she was allowed to wear lipstick, to go out to the coffee shop down the street with her friends without a parent chaperoning them. It was when she was allowed to watch more adult-themed movies, when she had permission to shut the door to her bedroom when she was in it, knowing that her parents had to knock if they wanted to come in.

Being in America and going to a private high school filled with the mostly spoiled children of pretty well-off families, I was a bit beyond all that. I had been wearing lipstick—okay, lip gloss—since I was twelve, and Kim and I often hung out at the local food court at the mall on our own. Here in America, we grow up early.

But still, I was excited about going out to dinner with my family. While we dined together at home almost every night, going out to a restaurant was still a special occasion. That was a throwback to life in the old country.
My parents had grown up with enough money, but not a lot, and eating out was a luxury rarely indulged. They had brought that with them when they moved to America, my mother loving to tell us that whatever it was we wanted, she could make at home for next to nothing.

Most of my friends who had already turned sixteen saw it as another milestone; it meant that they could drive. Oddly, that had never been on my list of priorities. I had thought that might change given my new “situation” with Aaralyn, that I would no longer have to rely on either one of my parents to drive me back and forth.

But something about getting behind the wheel of a car had always scared me a little. Every time I had seen someone make a dicey left turn, or merge into a busy freeway, I had felt terrified. And it didn’t help that my parents had not necessarily encouraged me toward driving either. My mother had waited two full years to get her license after coming to America. She had never understood why it was so important in this country for a child to drive at sixteen or to move out at eighteen.

“You will do what you need to do when you are ready,” she had said. I had felt comforted by that.

We had a tradition in my family which I had always loved, and that was that on a person’s birthday, no voices should be raised at them, no tone used other than one of love and reverence. My brother and I could rob a bank or set the school on fire, and my parents would gaze at us
lovingly and smilingly. I should probably take more advantage of it.

So my mother had driven me to the mall the day earlier and had allowed me to spend up to fifty dollars on a new outfit. To me, that was a relative fortune. A lot of the girls in school were routinely given hundreds of dollars by their parents to buy whatever they wanted. But I was on a strict budget, my father wanting to cultivate in me an innate value for money.

“But
Dad,
a girl in my class was wearing these
really hot
Candie’s wedge-heeled shoes,” I told him once.

“You know, your grandfather, my father, had
no
shoes at all!” he would reply. “Nothing! Barefoot he walked to school!”

The inevitability of the response always made me giggle.

But now, fifty dollars for a birthday ensemble? He was only too happy to oblige.

While my mother had waited outside the changing room, I tried on several dresses and finally settled on a white halter-neck with a pretty black lace print all over the front. It was under twenty dollars, leaving me money for a pair of shoes and new bag. I went with flat gladiator sandals and a framed clutch that had a lovely vintage feel to it, my mother reminding me that her own mother used to carry similar clutches back in the day in Calcutta, and they could be found for pennies at
the local market. I realized then that I would most likely be forever haunted by examples of my simple, earthy, unassuming grandparents.

After I had finished getting dressed for dinner, both my parents had beamed in my general direction. I even thought that my mother would start crying.

“You look all grown up,” she said as if she hadn’t seen me since I was in preschool. “Sixteen! Where have the years gone?”

My mother had carted along the cake in a huge white box, wanting to surprise me with it, but knowing it was impossible because I was riding along in the car with them.

“It’s nothing!” she laughed, when I asked her what it was, knowing full well. “Mind your own business, birthday girl!”

I thought about all this with gratitude as we got ready to go to Paulie’s Kitchen, a restaurant near our house, a place that we always went to for family celebrations—birthdays, anniversaries, reunions with relatives visiting from India. It was our special event place.

It was at times like these that I was at my happiest: when the restaurant staff would emerge from the kitchen, carrying the cake with its lit candles, singing “Happy Birthday” in off-key voices, my parents joining in and sounding equally off. Everyone’s eyes glowed beneath the red-covered lamp above our table. For that one moment,
we were all together, wishing for the very best, everything else pushed aside. They were times that spoke of family, about more than clothes and fashion and who was wearing what. They were, I supposed, the only times in my life when I didn’t even mind if anyone called me Indira.

Gina Troy wasn’t on the cover of the next
Celebrity Style.
Instead, there was a story about Reese Witherspoon moving on with her life post-Ryan, something I had read and reread everywhere. Inside, in the pages where I gathered there would have been a blow-by-blow on Gina Troy’s wedding attire, on the Badgley Mischka gown and the Stuart Weitzman shoes that I had seen photographed on GossipAddict.com, there was instead a feature on the resurgence of the clog, which I had to admit was only mildly interesting.

Who cared about clogs?

It was one of the least interesting issues of the magazine I had ever read. Instead of the latest and hottest news, everything seemed old and rerun.

I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on with Aaralyn. I hadn’t heard from her or Juno for a couple of weeks. I had babysat Kyle for three weekends in a row, and when I had mentioned that my birthday was coming up, Aaralyn had handed over a bag containing beauty products from Pout and Fresh and Bliss, which I knew that she probably didn’t buy and were most likely sent to her by the companies, but I loved them anyway. She probably kept a stash at home, for occasions just like these.

But then two weeks had passed, and nothing. I had considered calling her, to make sure everything was okay with them and Kyle. But part of me felt that was intrusive. I was, after all, the hired help. I wasn’t a friend, right?

As I lounged around at home on a Saturday morning, every time my phone rang on a weekend, part of me hoped it would be Aaralyn or Juno, asking me to come by and watch Kyle. I thought I had been doing well, was slowly getting into their good graces. I had also tried to forget what my father had said to me weeks earlier. That whole conversation seemed to have faded into the background. Or perhaps my father simply assumed that Aaralyn and her family had moved on and no longer required my services. For my part, I didn’t know what to think. But the silence was disconcerting, especially since there were barely six weeks left before the intern would be announced and school was out. I still didn’t know where things stood for the summer.