Free The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger Page A

peculiar moods, which had started even before she left home and had no one discernible trigger. As she often did with her mother, she tried to bring Kim back around to the concrete.
    “When did you go to India?”
    “In ’99,” Kim said. “Just backpacking around with a girlfriend. We’d been cocktail waitressing together in Manhattan for a while—she’d heard you could live there on five dollars a day. We budgeted ten and figured we could stay six months at least. She went home after three, but I decided to go down to the yoga place in Mysore—we’d met this couple in Varanasi who told us about it. I got completely hooked, obviously. When my course was done I didn’t want to come back to New York, and someone said foreigners could get work as film extras in Bombay. And so I went up there.” Kim cradled her teacup in her hands and looked at the rug. “And that’s where I met Ashok.”
    Amina was fascinated. She thought about the dinners with Eileen and Aunt Cathy: in spite of their friendliness, and the satisfaction she herself took in executing such a normal American responsibility, there were always moments of strained silence in which she could tell everyone was trying hard to think of something to say. In all of those dinners, she wondered that no one had ever brought up Kim’s history in India, or the man named Ashok she now mentioned as if Amina already knew who he was.
    Because George was obviously not going to do it, Amina asked, “Who is Ashok?”
    Kim looked up at George, almost as if he had betrayed her.
    “Why would I go around talking about you? I don’t do that.”
    Kim turned to Amina. “Your husband is very moral. But this is important. And I want you to know, because I hope we’re going to be really good friends.”
    “Kim,” George said, a kind of warning.
    Kim closed her eyes and took a deep breath—her inhalation and exhalation took so long that there seemed to be something indecent about watching it—and then opened her eyes and fixed them on Amina. “I met Ashok at the Mehboob Studio in Bombay. People had told me you could get a job easily, and they were right. The minute I showed up, they cast me in something that would start filming the next day. There were about twenty of us—long-term backpackers, mostly, and also a couple of yogis—and we were supposed to be lying around this hotel pool in our bathing suits, drinking cocktails. Of course the cocktails were colored water, and they were disappointed that more of us didn’t have two-piece bathing suits, but we were allthere for long stays, trying to be really respectful of local culture—we were proud we’d left our bikinis at home. Anyway, we were supposed to be lying there when the hero came running through, chasing the bad guy, and then they were going to fall in the pool. Two of the girls had to be swimming in the pool and look all scared and surprised—but they didn’t pick me for that, thank God.” Kim looked down at her chest and smiled. “They picked the busty ones, and I’m like, a double-A.”
    Amina looked at George, who had taken out his Palm Pilot and was scrolling through his messages. For once she didn’t mind his inattention—she was embarrassed herself by the mention of bikinis and bra sizes. Still, she was eager to hear the details of Kim’s story, which she was already imagining relating to her mother tonight in the remaining forty-seven minutes on her Hello Asia phone card.
    “I remember I was disappointed when I saw the hero. He was kind of short, and he had this weird facial hair—I thought all those Bollywood stars were supposed to be really cute.”
    Amina had to keep reminding herself that Kim was two years older than she was. A certain openness in her expression, compounded by an especially earnest way of speaking, made Amina feel like an older married woman listening to the adventures of a girl.
    “And then I saw these two guys standing over in the corner. One of them was sort of thin