When she told Sid she was going to be in Delhi for a week, he had immediately said he would come from Bombay to see her “just to touch base.” Tina was dreading seeing him on this trip, dreading looking into his handsome, eager eyes and telling him that there was still no show and no other talent. It was easy to feed Sid fake hope over email but she knew she would have to tell him the truth this week. She would put him in touch with everyone she knew in Bombay in case they wanted to hire a personal trainer, she decided; it was the least she could do for him.
Since she was meeting Sid, Tina could have tried to expense this trip as well but her boss, Rachel Sanders, knew the bride and knew Tina would not be doing any work. But maybe it was time to talk to Rachel about booking her business class for all her future work trips. Sheryl Sandberg said she should lean in, after all. Not that Tina had read the book but really the title told her everything she needed to know. Was Sheryl Sandberg still an appropriate role model or was that over now, Tina wondered. It was hard to keep up sometimes.
It was nearing 11 P.M. and the lounge was gradually emptying out and Marianne and Tina were the only ones sitting at the round tables close to the bar. A bored bartender was leaning behind the bar playing on his phone, and a few others, mostly men in business suits with laptops open in front of them, sat at the tables or on the large armchairs near the floor-to-ceiling windows that spread across the entire far wall. Across the lounge and the empty tables and dirty dishes and folded newspapers, in one corner near the food station, sat Tina’s mother, Radha Das, and her boyfriend, David Smith. Tina’s mother looked exactly like Tina was likely to look in twenty-five years—her hair, still thick, was in a low bun, carefully colored to hide any hints of gray, and she wore no makeup except a dark brown lipstick. She was slim and had a long neck and looked like she could be one of those “real women” models for the Gap or Uniqlo, a younger Rekha maybe—her mother had that Bollywood glam even though she never watched any Bollywood films. David looked like he belonged in a catalog for eyeglasses or high-end sweaters, maybe Viagra—he was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, a black jacket on his carry-on suitcase next to him, and Tina could never get used to how all-American David looked. How on earth was her mother, her Indian mother, dating a man like this all of a sudden, Tina wondered. Not quite all of a sudden—two years—but Tina still wasn’t used to it. David was the kind of man you took a hiking selfie with, maybe with a big golden dog included.
“Have you noticed that all mixed-race couples are forever taking hiking selfies? What’s that all about?” Tina asked Marianne. Marianne was white, as white as could be. Marianne and her blond hair and light blue eyes, but her last name—Laing—threw everyone off even though it was Scottish, and seemed to confuse Marianne herself.
For the last four years Marianne had worked in a test prep kitchen for Five Senses magazine. She worked with a team that developed and tested recipes, plated them, photographed them, named them, and wrote the recipes. She had initially been the one hired to write the recipes but now she largely focused on the plating and display of the dishes for shoots. Marianne had a confident aesthetic when it came to her work, and she always seemed to have a strong preference for exactly which way the asparagus should point. Her mother had dedicated the walls in one room of Marianne’s childhood home in Bethesda to a collage of pages from the magazine that featured Marianne’s work.
Marianne had grown up far more comfortably, with a swimming pool in her backyard and annual summer holidays at their home in Mallorca. Her father was one of the original creators of IMAX films and her mother was a columnist for the weekend section of the Bethesda Herald, and now her parents did little other than travel the world wearing pastel-colored linen.
Being blond and from Bethesda would have been so much easier than being brown and from Ohio, Tina thought.
“And it’s usually the brown person who posts the picture online because you just know they wouldn’t generally go hiking—no Indians go hiking—but the minute they go slightly uphill with a white person, they feel so fit and outdoorsy, they have to post pictures online,” Tina said.
“Are you being pissy about David coming to India?” Marianne asked. “Because you and I went hiking last summer and you took a thousand pictures.”
Tina looked over at David again. The worst part of this all was that Tina found him attractive. She looked away.
“He’s like what I imagine Colin Wrisley turned into,” Tina said.
“You remember his last name? That was so long ago! He has three kids now and they all play lacrosse,” Marianne said.
“You played lacrosse that entire spring too! Didn’t you even try out for Yale’s team?”
Marianne shook her head and laughed. She had. She had fallen head over heels for Colin Wrisley and started playing lacrosse—she hated it and was terrible at it—and going to ice hockey games and wearing sports jerseys. That was sophomore year, and that summer he was hiking to Everest base camp, and Marianne said her goodbyes and left her jerseys at the Salvation Army in New Haven and returned to Bethesda and her books for the summer, and only ever saw Colin Wrisley again when they crossed paths in the hallway after her Monday-Wednesday class on women and literature in traditional China. In fact, she remembered, that was where she met Tony Wei, for whom she taught herself how to make soup dumplings. But that ended quickly when he said nothing could ever compare to the soup dumplings at Din Tai Fung, and her heart sank when she realized she had no idea what Din Tai Fung was, and since this was before iPhones she couldn’t even excuse herself to the bathroom to google it quickly. And of course, on the heels of that, was Riyaaz from Pakistan—the ultimate international romance, the one who still crossed her mind, the one for whom she had once, late at night, alone in her room, tried draping a scarf like a burqa, leaving nothing visible but her eyes.
Outside, the tarmac glistened black and she could see into the oval windows of parked airplanes. A Singapore Airlines plane taxied slowly toward the runway.
“My father is on this flight too. He’s obviously avoiding the lounge,” Tina said. “My mother said David’s looking forward to going to India because he loves doing yoga. I really wish America had never discovered yoga.”
She was folding a page of today’s New York Times into an origami swan. Three smaller origami swans—one made from a napkin, one from a discarded boarding pass, and one from a Time magazine cover—lay on the table in front of her.
“Don’t you do yoga at that place across the street from you?” Marianne asked.
“I used to but I think I’m done,” Tina said. She also watched the Singapore Airlines plane reach the main runway and thought about all the people in the plane, jostling into position, not yet feeling cramped and annoyed and exhausted. She thought about the young families in the front row with their babies in their laps waiting for the bassinets, hoping the children would sleep through the flight. She thought of the couples off on holiday or returning home after a trip through America. Maybe an Indian family with two parents and two children in high school flying home to Singapore after visiting family in Rochester and going to Niagara Falls. Maybe the mother was flipping through the in-flight magazine to find a Bollywood film to watch.