“There you are!”
“Oh! Hello, beta. How are you?” my mother cooed at Prakash. It was a frighteningly instant transformation.
“Hello, Auntie. You must be Vina’s mother. It’s very nice to meet you. That’s a lovely sari you’re wearing. Is it organza? It must have been made in Delhi, right? My mother says that you can’t find such good quality anywhere in New York, Jackson Heights or otherwise.”
He was shameless. She was beaming. I was at a loss.
“Thank you, beta. Thank you. I’ll go and say hello to your father.” She smiled. I tugged at my eyelid, which made a sucking noise. Glaring at me before she spun on her heels, my mother bounced giddily away. I rolled my eyes and gave up on the coat check girl, opting instead to search for a concierge.
Prakash whispered, while he watched my mother depart: “Vina, we have to talk.”
I paused, and twisted my neck toward him. “We? There is no we, you lunatic. Meanwhile, you and I have nothing to say to each other.” I pivoted away from him.
“You have to listen to me!” He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me backward through the doorway of the coatroom. My cheek spasmed, my eye twitched and I struggled for breath. Being half-blind, half-drunk and immobilized by my four-inch heels, I forgot all my fight-or-f light instincts. So rather than reacting I chose to hyperventilate, while trying to remember the protocol. Was I supposed to poke himin the groin? Knee him in the eyes? Kick him in the gut? Twist and pull? Scream for help? Stop, drop and roll?
“Vina, you don’t understand!” he said, cornering me in the small room.
Hoping for an emergency exit nearby, I lost balance and fell into a pile of coats. Prakash collapsed on top of me. The snapping of my left heel was practically expected, but the groping by the coats I landed on was most certainly not. Rolling Prakash off of myself, I struggled to my feet, and sprang into a defensive judo-stance. (Note to self: Stay away from Austin Powers reruns on cable.)
From below the pile of coats, a giggle and a pair of heads emerged. And one of the heads had something to say for itself. “Heeeeeey baby, don’t be like that. There’s always room for one more person at this party.”
I blinked to confirm what I was witnessing: the missing coat check girl grinning over a bare shoulder while straddling the bartender, who raised an eyebrow as soon as he noticed that I wasn’t alone. And I could’ve sworn I heard him add, “Or room for two more, should I say?” as I darted for the door.
With one hand to my forehead, I sprinted across the lobby, slowing only to throw the broken shoe into the trash. Soon enough I tripped on the other one, and crashed into the lobby’s glass doors, badly skinning my knee. Rather than taking the moment to feel sorry for myself, I remembered that Prakash was close behind. I clambered to my feet, threw open the doors and leaped into a waiting taxi, with just enough time to hurl my other heel out the window before the cab driver gunned the gas.
“My parents don’t know that I’m gay,” Prakash yelled at the window as the cab began to pull away.
“I don’t know why he thinks that’s my problem,” I told the cabbie, who grinned and whisked me safely home.
4
“Chica, who has time for a four-hour Sunday brunch and still manages to pay their rent in this town? That’s what I want to know.” Cristina dragged a chair over to our table at Starbucks. She paused to lay her cell phone and her BlackBerry beside my own, and then checked her pulse on a wrist sensor before acknowledging Pamela. “Oh, no offense, Pam.”
Cristina had an obsessive relationship with her physical fitness, but she also had a point. She and I had spent the better part of our Sundays during the last four years hidden in our offices, catching up on work before Monday morning. In our industry, that didn’t make us competitive; it made us competent. And in an effort to burn off some of the resulting stress, Cristina had become a genius at self-defense. She mastered everything from model-mugging (assault scenarios simulated by mock-attackers in padded suits) to Krav Maga (hand-to-hand combat training based on the principles of the Israeli national army). An even more unfortunate habit of hers was using Spanish words and phrases when trying to convince me of something. She was reminding me of that additional camaraderie all ethnic women supposedly shared. It was unforgivably manipulative. Sure, I had thrown in the occasional Schmoopie or Honey when trying to steer a steak-loving boyfriend toward a Thai restaurant (because the variety would make him a better man), or to convince him that rubbing my feet could stave off the effects of carpal tunnel (I swear, I had read that somewhere). But I would never have stooped so low as to use any of these tactics on my girls.
Pam, on the other hand, hailed from a very different school of thought; a school that didn’t bear the burden of rent. Her father—still guilt-ridden over leaving her mother for an au pair twenty years ago—bought her a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side as a college graduation present. The arrangement kept her in clothing that Cristina and I wouldn’t dare buy for ourselves, even though we each earned roughly three times Pamela’s salary. But I guess Pam needed it more than we did; Chanel, Gucci and Polo were standard dress code at Windsors, the devastatingly upper-crust art auction house where she worked for pennies, and the occasional invite to some of the swankiest social events this side of the Riviera. It was a good arrangement for Cristy and myself, too, since some of those invitations trickled down to us. Each event held the promise of champagne and the company of international aristotrash who probably assumed that our presence meant we were royalty ourselves.
“None taken.” Pamela waved the comment away like so many pesky fruit f lies, and then scrunched up her nose and peered suspiciously into the whipped cream covering my Caramel Macchiato. “Is that decaf?”
“Yes. It is.” I stirred the caramel carefully, trying not to risk whipped cream deflation. Then I realized I should probably have resented the judgment in her tone. “So what?”
Despite the god-awful preppy clothing Pamela had seemed to know it all nine years ago, when she strolled into my freshman dorm room. It was day two of the fall semester. She breezed in, made herself comfortable among my unopened boxes, pointed to a literature textbook and asked if I was taking the Friday class with Professor Feineman. I nodded. It was a bad idea, she told me, unless I wanted to miss out on Thursday-night parties just to be awake in time for the only 8:00 a.m. class requiring attendance. As effortlessly as she said it, she lifted a heap of Ramen noodles neatly into her mouth, using chopsticks. Never having seen anyone my own age handle them properly before, I naturally assumed this was a woman from whom I could learn. Time cured me of that misconception, but Pamela’s perspective had narrowed while her opinions had sharpened with age.
“So…you never drink decaf.” Cristina sided with the enemy.
“Yes, I drink decaf.” I scrolled through old messages on my BlackBerry.
“When?” Pam asked, picking imaginary lint off of my shoulder. “When do you drink it?”
“I don’t know…sometimes. Who cares when I drink it? Why does it matter?”
“Hijole…because you’ve been acting weird lately, and we’re worried about you.” Cristina thrust her chin out at me.
“Why?” I asked. “What’s the problem? Maybe I don’t want to get myself all riled up.”
“All riled up…with coffee? Most of your blood has already been replaced by it, Vina. And do you even hear yourself? You sound like you’re about sixty years old.”
“Decaf is not like you, Vina,” Pam interrupted, “any more than letting your parents set you up on a blind date is. And you know that I don’t have anything against you meeting potentially compatible guys. However, we want to talk about what’s really been going on with you. You’ve been frazzled lately.”
Frazzled? I thought. If they had any idea what I had gone through before I arrived at Starbucks that morning, they would consider me incomprehensibly composed.