“He got me cheap,” Cheryl said at Wendy’s. In front of Cheryl sat a Spicy Chicken sandwich, a bloom of rectangular fries, and a “Biggie” Diet Coke the size of a water tower. With only a modicum of embarrassment, Ranjana loved Wendy’s (though she drew the line at a Frosty, which she found creepy in its beige ooziness). Wendy’s wasn’t as greasy as McDonald’s, and Ranjana found their fries to be perfection, as crisp and delicious as food from a cart in Delhi. “Charlie had just lost the job at Chase, and there was no more time for me to keep looking, so I didn’t even negotiate.” Charlie was Cheryl’s husband; he now worked as an assistant manager at Whole Foods.
“Why don’t you ask for a raise?” Ranjana said, spearing one of the mandarin oranges in her Asian Salad. She couldn’t imagine any instance in which Cheryl could be justified in receiving a raise.
“Can you imagine asking that man for more money? I want to make at least a little more, but instead, here I am.” She motioned to the Wendy’s, as if it were where they worked.
Despite Cheryl’s flightiness, Ranjana was glad not to have a crabby coworker. More important, Ranjana enjoyed the job. In fact, it shocked her sometimes how much she liked being confined in the small square of their cubicle, behind a ledge and sliding window. She never tired of seeing the inquisitive, concerned faces of the patients as they came into her view. She saw them as individual pieces of theater, each with its own story, although it didn’t strike her until a few months after working in the office that she was something of a theater piece to the patients, too. Everything in the office was either white or a muted earth tone—beige carpet, beige cabinets, dull silver medical implements, the white puffs of cotton swabs—but Ranjana was deep brown, her black hair streaked with gray.
Today, Ranjana watched as Cheryl put down the wrong date for a patient’s hemorrhoid operation. Dr. Butt’s directions could not have been clearer: he had come up with the woman’s chart and said in his high whine, “Cheryl, please note that Mrs. Wilson will be coming in next Friday for her operation.” Ranjana, already on the lookout for errors, saw Cheryl enter the operation into the computer for the following Saturday. Ranjana was all the more incredulous of this mistake because they didn’t even do surgeries on Saturdays. Cheryl, oblivious, clicked her bubble gum and went back to filling out her Sudoku.
It was a Wednesday, and the office was in its last appointments of the afternoon. Ranjana was in a depressed mood, still smarting from her writing group the day before. The women hadn’t been that critical, but Ranjana knew this about herself: she had a tendency to scrub away anything good in the interest of self-critique. It was like a disinfectant that burned as it cleaned.
Her melancholy vaporized when she looked up to see a very attractive Indian man standing in front of her. He had sweeping black hair and a striking face, with a trace of red in his cheeks and a pink bloom for a mouth. He was wearing a simple black hooded sweatshirt and jeans, but his looks transformed these ordinary garments into high fashion. He was gay, Ranjana could tell. Dr. Butt had a lot of gay patients.
“Morning,” he said.
“Good morning, sir,” Ranjana said.
“I have a four P.M. appointment with Dr. Butt.” He laughed, his shoulders fluttering and his hair moving with them. “Ohmigod, that never gets old.”
“You bet your butt it does,” said Cheryl from the back of the cubicle. The muffle of her voice meant that she was still nose-down in her Sudoku book.
The patient laughed as he signed in. He sauntered away and plopped himself down next to the magazines. Ranjana waited for it—the disappointment as he flipped through the available selections: Time, Popular Science, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Redbook, the last of which Cheryl had chosen. He tossed them aside and pulled out his phone.
His name was Achyut Bakshi. As Ranjana pulled up his chart, she was shocked to see that he was twenty-two. He looked so much older. Some of the gay men who came to see Dr. Butt seemed to be way beyond their ages. Some of them were HIV-positive, and Ranjana, in spite of herself, still didn’t feel entirely comfortable around them. Lately, she had heard Dr. Butt talk of HIV’s prevalence in India and how it was spreading wildly there, so Ranjana felt that she was being confronted by it in more ways than one. She didn’t worry that she would catch the virus simply by interacting with someone, but it unsettled her that Prashant was close in age to some of the young, positive men who came in. Ranjana tensed slightly as she glanced at Achyut Bakshi’s chart and checked his status. He was negative, and she felt awful for having pried—she was supposed to look only at patients’ basic information and not their medical details.
Mindy, one of the nurses, came for Achyut’s file and called him into an examination room. He hopped up excitedly and went with her. How could he be so happy? It seemed like such a difficult life, full of so many potential problems and fears and cruelties. As a Hindu, she could only assume that Achyut had done something divinely reproachable in his past life. Perhaps he had been straight, an adulterer, and here was his corresponding curse: gay life and a visit to the proctologist’s office.
Ranjana wasn’t sure if Achyut’s fate was better or worse than working in a proctologist’s office. If it were better, then in her own past life, she may have been the spurned wife of that very adulterer, due for a step up in this life. If it were worse, then perhaps she had been the hussy who had seduced Achyut long ago. From some silky underpinning of her soul, some fantastical longing that she could not position, she felt herself wishing it were the latter. She wanted to be one of the characters in the stories she read and wrote.
Dr. Butt was getting ready to leave the office. Wednesday was the day of the week when he and Mohan played tennis together. Yes, it had happened: faster than Ranjana could have predicted, Mohan had wiggled his way into Dr. Butt’s good graces and made himself a regular tennis partner at the racket club. Mohan had the odd distinction of being somewhat lazy off the court but very determined while on it, and Dr. Butt commented frequently on how his own game was improving under Mohan’s athletic auspices.
Dr. Butt rushed out the door with his duffel bag and bid Ranjana and Cheryl a quick good-bye.
“I gotta run, too,” Cheryl said. She was tucking her Sudoku notebook into her bag, from which sprouted countless gum wrappers and her own copy of Redbook. “Do you mind locking up tonight?”
“Sure.” Ranjana was debating whether or not to get some quick writing done before she headed home. The end of the workday was peaceful, free of the loud noises that Cheryl made all day—her gabbing, her typing, during which she hit the keys so hard that the noise sounded like hail, her gum chewing, her Sudoku scribbling, the general noises of an oblivious person.
But seeing what a beautiful day it was outside, Ranjana decided that she might as well take advantage of the nice weather and go for a little drive before heading home and doing her writing there.
After making sure that her workstation was powered down, she pulled out her set of keys, stepped outside, and snapped the front door shut. Locking it with a click, she realized that someone was standing right next to her. She flinched.