The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (10 page)

“What is she doing?” Jane asked.

“Vomiting.”

Jane straightened up and looked at her, the skin on her cheeks mottling. “You clicked a puker.”

“It happened very fast,” Amina said. “She didn’t know I was there.”

“At a wedding. You clicked a wedding puker.”

“It was just a few shots.”

“A bridesmaid, no less. Not someone anonymous enough not to care about.”

“Well, but—”

“Stop talking!” Jane clapped loudly in front of Amina’s face, shutting her up. “Do you have any idea how much trouble that could get us into?”

“I would never have shown those to anyone.”

“Damn right you—
those
? Are there more?”

There were two more. One of the girl washing off her face, taken from the stall Amina had locked herself into, and another of her hanging over the hand dryer as it blew up at her face.

“She didn’t see you?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she didn’t. Sometimes people just don’t.”

Jane squinted. “I noticed that about you.”

Amina blushed.

“You realize how disturbing these would be to the client?” Jane asked.

“I do. I mean, I do now.”

“You didn’t then?”

“No, I just didn’t think … it just seemed like another part of the wedding until I saw the contact sheet yesterday, and—”

“It’s unprofessional and asinine.”

Amina waited for a scolding, some kind of advice, but when the silence grew until all she could hear was the sound of her own heart slapping in her chest, she understood that she needed to leave quickly. She packed her things with trembling fingers, sliding all the negatives off the light box and into her portfolio, shamed by the sight of the few pictures she’d gone so far as to print. Jane said nothing, sitting heavily behind her desk.

“Thanks,” Amina said when she was done, not knowing what else to say. She made her way to the door.

“You can never take those pictures again,” Jane said.

Amina stopped, turned around.

“And don’t let me get a call from anyone telling me I sent a goddamn voyeur their way. Weddings are about fantasies—you understand? Your job is to photograph the fantasy, not the reality. Never the reality. If I ever see another picture like that, you’re fired.”

She opened her notebook.

“Does that mean that I’m hired?” Amina asked quietly.

“No. Not until I know you can do good portraits.” Jane moved her finger down the page, scanning the schedule. “I’ve got another wedding coming up the day after tomorrow at the United Lutheran Church up in Queen Anne.”

It was a crash course, a month of weddings, two per weekend. Jane and Amina wound their way through teary parents and tense couples, using a half hour during the week to review Amina’s work. Jane could move through hundreds of shots quickly, critiquing some, dismissing some, scanning for anything out of line. At the last June wedding they worked together, she sneaked two flutes of champagne out behind the garden tent and told Amina she was hired.

“I’ve set you up with six weddings for July, and after those, you’ll need to drum up your own clients quickly if you want to survive,” she had said.

Amina had wanted to thank her but was afraid she’d do something stupid, like cry, or hug her too hard. Jane hadn’t been looking at her anyway.

“Five messages?” Outside Jane’s office with Post-it in hand, Amina stared at the pink slips the receptionist handed her. “I was only in there ten minutes.”

“Four are from the same woman. And Jose came by looking for you, too. He said something about the Lorber print being ready, but didn’t I send those out last week?”

Amina ignored the question and the look that came with it, walking down the hallway and frowning at the tight script that dotted the slips.
Lesley Beale, Lesley Beale, Lesley Beale
. “He’s in the darkroom?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks.”

Amina continued down the hallway to the darkroom, stepping into the cylindrical door and coming face-to-face with Jose’s rules. Posted on the drum, they specified that there should be no knocking any time, that no one should come in unannounced, or call on the phone between ten and six. While some in the office questioned Jose’s definition of “being at work,” all of the photographers were far too enamored of his prints to ever tell him so.

Amina knocked softly. The metal boomed around her, and she heard something drop on the other side of it, along with a long curl of something mean and Spanish.

“Jose, it’s Amina. I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Well, don’t fucking whisper now you made me fuck up!” Jose yelled through the door. “What do the rules say? Fuck Jose up, or leave him alone?”

“I know, I know, it’s just I’m going to be leaving in half an hour, so if you have anything for me, I should get it now.”

“
Puta!
In your office in ten.”

Amina eased out the door and tiptoed into her office down the hall, carefully shutting the door behind her.

Unlike in Jane’s office, where the sorted piles and color-coded Post-its gave the impression of a sort of collective organization, the piles in Amina’s office left no such impression. She had never managed to make good use of the filing cabinet, preferring to leave her paperwork on top of it, while excess napkins and packs of ketchup lined her desk drawer. A single lamp hung over her desk, and she turned it on.

Lesley Beale
. The pile of messages joined several others that lived in a heap at the corner of Amina’s desk, and when the phone rang again, she took a deep breath before picking it up.

“Amina!” Kamala shouted. “You’ll never guess what just happened!”

“Ma?”

A tumbling sounded on the other end of the line, and Amina heard her mother screeching, “Give me the phone, Thomas! Let me tell your daughter what the genius surgeon did this morning!”

There were more muffled noises and the sound of Thomas’s footsteps thundering up what could only be the stairs. He breathed hard into the phone. A door slammed.

“Amina-Amina-Amina, I stole the phone!” he shouted, voice echoing like he was in a bat cave. “I’m in the bathroom! Here she comes!”

“Thomas!” Kamala pounded on the door. “Let me talk to her!”

“No!”

“Coward! Tell her!”

“No!”

“Tell me what?” Amina asked.

“Nothing,” Thomas’s voice chimed in with false innocence. “Nothing at all. And how are you this fine summer morning?”

“He lost the car!” Kamala yelled. More pounding. “His own car!”

“You what?”

“Nothing doing!” Thomas yelled. “Don’t fill your daughter’s head with such lies!”

There was a pause as he waited for Kamala’s comeback, which did not come.

“She must be planning a sneak attack,” Thomas whispered into the phone.

“You lost the car?” Amina whispered back.

“Oh, she’s buzzing like one hornet’s nest today, I tell you.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing much, really. Your mother likes to make up stories, what else is new?”

“IN THE SHOPPING MALL!” Kamala yelled into the phone, having found another receiver, and Amina almost dropped hers.

“Bad thing, get off!” Thomas yelled back.

“And guess who had to save him?”

“Oh boy, here it comes. She’s a saint! She’s a saint!”

“
Lost
it lost it? Like you really didn’t know where it was?” Amina asked.

“And it wasn’t even at Sears like he said, it was at
Dillard’s
!” Kamala snorted. “And then the best part! Tell her what you were doing there.”

“I was shopping,” Thomas said.

“Bullshits! He was at the hardware store getting keys made because he lost them! First the keys, then the car!”

“Edi, penay.”
Thomas cut her off, slipping into Malayalam, in which Amina could only pick out a few words. Something about a goat. Something else about idiots. Amina pulled the receiver away from her ear. After a silence, a squeaky “Amina!” came from the phone.

“Yes.”

“Did you say you’re coming?” It was Kamala.

“My plane comes in Monday afternoon.”

“Hey!” Thomas said, delighted. “You’re coming?”

“She got some time off from work, so she decided to come see us,” Kamala said quickly. “Not like some people’s daughters.”

“How long?” Thomas asked.

“Just five days. I’m coming Monday.”

“Fantastic.”

Amina bit her cuticle. She imagined her father in a pool of unfamiliar cars, windshields blank as shark eyes. Alzheimer’s? Was this how it started? Thomas’s beeper went off, and she heard him fumbling for it.

“Hey,
koche
, I need—”

“I know, I know, I hear it. Talk to you later.” Amina listened for a few seconds after he hung up. “Is he off?”

“Mm-hm.” Her mother sounded distracted. “My pen’s not working; hold on. What time do you come in?”

“He lost the
car
?”

Kamala laughed. “I know! Can you believe it?”

“And you’re sure he’s safe working?”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s seeing Ammachy and then he loses the car?”

“What? No! Not at the same time, dummy. He lost the car this
morning
,” Kamala said, as though that explained everything. “This other thing happens at night.”

“But you don’t think they have any connection to each other?”

“Of course not. Pish, this girl! Always overreacting to simple-simple things!”

“I’m not overreacting! I’m just saying that if he—”

“Your father loses everything twice every month for the last twenty-five years. It’s funny, that’s why we told you. Everyone loses the car in the mall!”

Amina pulled at the phone cord. A knock at the door jerked her head, and Jose’s half-lidded, reptilian eyes slanted her way.

“I have to go,” Amina told her mother.

“You didn’t tell me your flight information,” Kamala said as Jose ducked through the doorway, a flat yellow envelope in his hands,
AMINA ONLY
written on the front.

“I’ll call you later.”

Kamala banged the phone down. Amina stared at the receiver. Jose cleared his throat.

“Right.” She looked up at him. “Sorry.”

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look okay.”

“I’m fine.” She glanced at the envelope. “What’s that?”

“A beauty. Not that you deserve it.” Jose slid the picture onto her desk. They stared down at a white-haired woman laid across a dark
tabletop, her arms extending from her sides. The view was from her feet up, her scuffed shoe bottoms giving way to the twisted root of her body. Empty chairs lined either side of her like an invisible audience, and her mouth hung open. The halo around her was barely perceptible, a lightness that made her body rise from the table. A man crouched next to her, his lips pursed.

“Jesus,” Amina said.

“That’s exactly what I thought!” Jose said, his voice betraying his excitement. “I put in a little bit of light just around her head and body. I brought out the detail of the shoes, you know, like that. And I can go heavier on the man’s face in the corner if you want. I just sort of liked it, you know, with her as more of the focus.”

“No, I like him soft.” Amina looked at the woman’s hands, her curled fingers. “The hands are nice, too. This is one of your best.”

“
Your
best. Man, I don’t know what I’d do around here if you didn’t keep me rolling in a steady supply of nasty. She didn’t die, did she?”

“No, just passed out from excitement. She was fine when I left.” Amina carefully picked up the picture and slid it back into the envelope, then into her bag. “Okay, what kind of filling do you want?”

“Veggie. Also, I need more of the green stuff.”

“Chutney.”

“Whatever.”

Amina wrote the order in her notebook. “My cousin and I are meeting someone in your neighborhood on Sunday, so I can drop them by if that works.”

Two years before, when Jose had gone out of his way to print one of Amina’s shots in an 18 × 20, he had almost gotten her fired. With just the right amount of light and shadow to enhance just-married Janine Trepolo getting cake pummeled into her face by a slightly too forceful groom, Amina had been sure that it was Jane’s version of a pink slip when it arrived in a manila envelope on her desk,
AMINA ONLY
on the front. She was on her way to her employer’s office when Jose asked if she liked it. Only after confirming that no one else had seen the picture could Amina confess that she loved it, and then, not having anything else to offer, had given him half her lunch. When the next print was ready, Jose asked for more samosas. “Trade for trade,”
he had said, a notion that so clearly pleased him that Amina saw no reason to disabuse him of it, never mind that she bought the food from a well-hidden restaurant in Magnolia.

“You and Dimple are going out in my ’hood? And I’m not invited?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Man, when you going to introduce us? Five years you’ve been here, and I still don’t know that girl.”

“You’re married,” Amina reminded him.

“We have an agreement.”

“So you say.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I believe you’d tell me a lot of things to get to Dimple.”

“Dimple,” Jose said, licking his bottom lip, “is a human samosa.”

“Stop.”

He smiled wide, his short, flat teeth making him look like a gremlin. “Go on, gimme that lecture on
sexism-racism-ismism
now, you know you’re dying to.”

The phone rang, and Amina shooed him toward the door with a hand. “Give yourself that lecture. I have work to do.”

CHAPTER 3