Indie Girl (8 page)

As we cruised along, I started to feel peckish, realizing I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Without drawing Aaralyn’s attention to it, I rummaged in Kyle’s knapsack for something to nibble on; there were tiny bags of raisins, edamame beans, baby carrots. Where were the Mini Oreos and multicolored Fruit Loops I had grown up with? What fun was raiding his snack bag if everything in there was
healthy?

“There’s a packet of crackers in there, but I’d rather you not give them to him until you exhaust everything else,” Aaralyn instructed, obviously seeing me delving into his snack bag from her rearview mirror. “I’m trying to limit his carb intake. Childhood obesity, you know,” she said. “Early eating habits dictate how you’ll eat the rest of your life.” She glanced at me again through the mirror, her gaze briefly flitting to my stomach area, which felt even more flabby than usual. In a bid to stave off boredom the night before, I had eaten a huge amount at Uncle Mohit’s house, including twelve
gulab jamuns
for dessert. Deep-fried cottage-cheese balls soaked in sugary syrup do not a low-carb diet make. I had to loosen the string around the waist of my
churidar
pants after that. And this morning, Dinesh had commented that I was looking “jigglier” than usual.

“Is that even a word?” I had scowled back at him.

Now, something in Aaralyn’s tone felt like she was making a little dig at me, as if she were wondering what
my parents fed me when I was two. Perhaps they should have done the edamame thing, I thought, still feeling my abdomen straining against the waist of my jeans today.

I picked up some carrot sticks, handed one to Kyle and crunched away with him.

Minutes after we slid into the carpool lane on the freeway, we noticed cars backing up in front. Before long, our brisk pace had slowed down to a crawl, and the neighboring lanes weren’t much better.

“It’s pretty bad traffic for a Sunday,” I offered lamely, just wanting to make conversation.

Aaralyn ignored me, swearing under her breath and turning on the radio. She fiddled with the buttons until she hit a local news station, listening for traffic updates.

“And a sig alert on the four-oh-five North where a four-car collision has brought everything to a standstill at Olympic,”
the announcer intoned.

“How friggin’ inconsiderate!” Aaralyn shouted. “A bunch of people drive badly, and the rest of us have to suffer for it!”

Instantly her mood had turned from what had been a pretty sunny one earlier in the day to completely sullen. When Kyle started fussing in his seat, Aaralyn turned around and hissed at him, scaring me in the process. This was one frightening woman. I wondered how her
cheerful and easygoing husband put up with her on a day-to-day basis.

After another twenty minutes of inching along at a creeping pace, Aaralyn swore out loud, seemingly unconcerned that her impressionable toddler was awake in the backseat.

“Screw this!” she exclaimed. “I’m getting off this goddamn freeway!”

She placed one manicured hand on the horn and held it down, letting all the world know that she had more right than them to move ahead, that they had to make way for her. Once out of the snarling traffic, she consulted her GPS system for the correct street.

“Is the park near here?” I asked.

“To hell with the park,” she said. “I’m not in the mood now. We’re going to the office. It’s right around the corner.”

I was elated. I silently thanked the Hindu gods for throwing a traffic jam in our way—the first time I had ever been grateful for a freeway mess.

All this time, I had only imagined the headquarters of
Celebrity Style.
In my mind, it looked exactly like the place where Ugly Betty worked, all white-and-glass modernity. I had always wanted to see it. And now, as Aaralyn sulked and Kyle fussed next to me, I couldn’t wait till the moment I stepped into those offices, till I could actually see where my most favorite magazine in the whole world was put together.

Once Kyle realized there was not going to be a swing set in his future this morning, his whining turned into a droning and then an all-out wail. I rummaged in his diaper bag for his bottle, took the lid off the nipple, and shoved it in his mouth.

The security guard looked up and smiled when we walked in through the double glass doors. Kyle was squirming in my arms, the diaper bag weighed down my shoulder.

“Miss Taylor, in on another gorgeous Sunday?” he said jovially. “Oh, and who do we have here?” he asked, looking at Kyle. “My, how he’s grown since I last saw him! My boy has just turned four, and I have—”

“Have a nice day, Ron,” Aaralyn said, cutting him off and walking purposefully toward the elevator.

We rode up eight floors, my excitement mounting by the second. Not even Kyle, who was beginning to whine again, could dilute my enthusiasm.

The doors opened and we stepped out into a spacious lobby and made a right. Another set of glass doors had the words
CELEBRITY STYLE
etched on the front. Aaralyn took out a small plastic card from her bag, swiped it into a little keypad at the side of the door, and then punched in some numbers. A buzzer sounded, the door clicked open. We were in.

A semicircular reception desk greeted us, the chair behind it empty. We continued past it to a large, open space, filled with desks and computers and phones and files, Post-it notes and magazine clippings pinned to flat-screen desktops. There were charts and calendars and address books spread out over the dozen or so desks. Even in the emptiness of a Sunday afternoon, the place had a frenzied, busy look about it that just thrilled me.

Along one wall were cabinets with pretty gift bags overflowing with beauty products and other goodies, tied in ribbons and couched in confetti. This must have been the “swag” that I often read about.

Kyle was kicking my stomach, letting me know that he wanted to be put down. I turned around to ask Aaralyn if this was okay, and found that she wasn’t standing behind me anymore.

“This way,” I heard her call from a hallway.

I yanked Kyle toward his mother’s voice and realized that we were standing in her own personal office. It was huge, organized, not a sheaf of paper out of place. It was much like her office at home, although the one thing that struck me was that there wasn’t a single photograph of her family anywhere—no pictures of Kyle with drool hanging off his chin, or of her and Juno on a family
vacation, nothing to indicate that she had much of a life outside this office.

I put Kyle down and he waddled over to his mother, stooping to play with the tiny wheels under her high-backed leather chair.

“Get him out of here before he crushes his fingers,” she said, not looking up at me, her eyes on her computer screen instead, her hand on the translucent white mouse. I reached for the kid, wondering how he was going to let me pick him up without releasing one of his gut-busting screams, when we heard a voice outside.

“Hello? Miss Taylor? Back again?”

A pretty girl was standing in the doorway.

“What are you doing in on a beautiful Sunday?” the girl asked. “I’ve got everything under control. Honest, go home.” The girl’s eyes fell on me and then on Kyle scrambling by my feet.

“Look how big he’s gotten!” she said.

“Yes, he’s a kid. They grow,” Aaralyn said drily. “Meghan, why are
you
here?”

“Oh, admin stuff,” she said. “Getting freelancers’ invoices processed, itemizing expenses. The kind of things I never get around to doing during the week.”

Aaralyn nodded, although it seemed to me that she hadn’t really been paying attention.

“Indie, this is Meghan, my assistant,” said Aaralyn. “This is Indie … the babysitter.”

The title “babysitter” stung more than I’d expected. But I guess it was true.

“Nice to meet you,” Meghan said, extending her hand.

“You too,” I said enthusiastically. “How long have you been working here?”

I couldn’t believe I was asking a question, trying to fraternize. In India, as I could recall from all the times we went to visit relatives there, the help
never
tried to make conversation with anybody other than the other help. Even in my own house here, the lady who came to clean every week would never ask my parents a question unless it related to where the extra toilet paper was stashed.

Meghan more or less ignored me, turning her attention back to her boss.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with,” she said. “I’ll be at my desk.”

Aaralyn nodded without looking up. I was dying to ask her what she was gazing at on her computer screen, what fascinating features she was working on, or what kind of photographs she was checking out, deciding if they were worth putting in the magazine or not. But Aaralyn was deep in thought and certainly wouldn’t want to answer the questions of some fashion-obsessed adolescent, so I held my tongue, instead trying to distract Kyle by turning him toward the window and showing him a helicopter as it whirred by. I could see Aaralyn’s face reflected in the glass, her expression studious and almost cross.

We didn’t leave for another two hours, Kyle alternating between having fun and whining, giggling and crying. I would play hide-and-seek with him and he would have a smile on his face one minute and then burst into tears the next. Each time he made any noise, Aaralyn looked up and told me to tell her son to be quiet, as if I had any say in how he felt. When the noise was getting too much for her, I scooped him up and took him down the carpeted hallway, as far as I could possibly get from her, so she wouldn’t have to hear her son’s distress. I racked my brain to think of ways to keep him engaged.

I thought back to when Dinesh was this age and I was ten, and there were plenty of times my mother left me with him while she took a quick shower or made an important phone call. There were some things that had delighted him: swinging him upside down while holding his legs (probably the time I dropped him on his head), or chasing him around the furniture. It wasn’t a good idea to do anything with Kyle that would distract his mother, but the words “play quietly” somehow didn’t apply to a toddler.

We went into the corridor again so I could walk Kyle up and down, carrying him and pointing out the framed magazine covers on the walls.

“And look, there’s Scarlett Johansson!” I said to him in a cooing voice. “And isn’t her dress pretty? Oh yes, it’s so pretty! And look there—that’s Jessica Biel! Look at
those arms! They are toned! Yes! She’s wearing red! Say red, Kyle! Say red!”

When I realized I was sounding like a lunatic and that Kyle had absolutely no interest in a starlet’s wardrobe choices, I continued walking until I got to the end of the hallway. On a closed door was a name,
JENNIFER MITCHUM,
that I recognized; this was the lady in the Human Resources Department I had sent my internship application to! The door had glass panels on each side and I peered through, not sure about what I expected to see on the other side. Even though I knew that my application was probably not there on the surface of her pale gray desk, I was oddly comforted by the fact that Jennifer Mitchum existed, and here I was, standing right outside her office. Somehow, it made the whole process real to me.

Kyle began whining again, so I sat down against the wall, stretched my legs out, and rested him on my knees. Then, without really thinking about it, I began singing a Hindi song about a horse and carriage, bouncing Kyle up and down on my lap as I chanted “ghoda ghoda gadi” over and over again.

I didn’t hear Aaralyn step into the hallway looking for us.

“What
are
you doing?” she asked, looking a little peeved.

“Oh, it’s just a Hindi song my parents used to sing to
me and my kid brother,” I explained. Kyle had started fussing, wanting me to start up again.

“Well, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t do that,” she replied. “He’s very impressionable. I want his first language to be perfect English, not some gibberish. I’m done,” she announced, reaching out for her child and giving me her bag to hold. “Let’s get out of here.”

Aaralyn didn’t say a word all the way home. I wondered what I had done wrong, if she was still miffed about me singing to Kyle in a foreign language. Did she catch me peering into Jennifer Mitchum’s office?

As soon as we arrived at the house, she stormed out of the car and up the driveway, leaving me to bring in her son, who had fallen asleep, and all his belongings. I laid Kyle down in his room upstairs, turned on the monitor, and went into the kitchen, from where I saw Aaralyn and her husband talking animatedly in the backyard.

I knew I shouldn’t be eavesdropping, but I was helping myself to a glass of water, and the words carried across the air and through the window. I didn’t get the whole conversation, but it had something to do with an upcoming issue, the cover story of which was the recent wedding of the hot young movie actress Gina Troy.

“Her people
promised
us the exclusive!” Aaralyn yelled. “We’ve already done the interview! We were the ones to break the news! And those people, they’ve done it again! I
hate
Gossip Addict!”

My ears perked up at the mention of a particularly salacious website.

“Keep your voice down, Aaralyn,” Juno said, sounding his reasonable self. “Come on back to the clinic and I’ll give you some Bach Flower Remedies.”

“I don’t want your goddamn remedies!” she yelled. “What I need now is a good lawyer, not your feel-good crap!”

She turned around, came back in through the kitchen, and climbed upstairs, not even looking at me. Juno came in, glanced over at me with an embarrassed expression on his face, and trailed after his wife, reaching into his pocket for a stack of ten-dollar bills that he left on the kitchen table.

I took that as my cue to call my dad.

When we got home, a white cardboard box containing pizza was sitting on the dining room table. I was ravenous, but pizza dripping with melted cheese was probably the last thing I needed; I remembered Aaralyn’s sly look through the rearview mirror in her car when we were discussing eating habits. She probably never ate pizza.