O ne summer ago, I made the mistake of rooming with a woman named Mukta, an Indian-Irish beauty who was in New York without a visa. Mukta wanted to be an actress and this pursuit involved a good deal of rage and disappointment. What was I doing? Specifically, I was a salesgirl at an expensive boutique on Franklin Avenue, on account of my beauty and generally docile attitude. I slept with the man, I sold the clothes. I was thankful and also very bored.
The last time I saw you, you were holding a martini with two olives in the Marlton lobby. You looked at me like I was a dog dying in a suburban street: sad, incongruous, unavoidable. You narrowed your two thick eyebrows over your salty drink and said you were disappointed; I squandered the things people gave me, you gave me. I was wearing accessories purchased for me by rich, depressive men.
I was flirting with academic probation and drinking my calories. Idle minds, you started to say that night in the Marlton. I interrupted you. Yet you repeated them once more before you left both the hotel and New York altogether, and I responded that it was best for us to take a break as mother and daughter.
And I hate to say that you were right. So that you can help me change it. You would have liked Mukta, too, at least at first. I met her in my last year of college. We met at a party on a concrete rooftop in SoHo. My friend Marianne had a brother who worked on Wall Street, and he liked to host parties here.
(mh=lwdH-7ki74-yyg4x)13.jpg "Call girl in Binghamton")
On weekends, we mostly lurked around in corners at parties planned by and designed for people ten years older than us. We would sip margaritas and talk quietly. She stood in front of us, tall and backlit by the city. After we chatted a while about school, the party, and whatever else came to mind, Marianne left us to rub elbows.
