America for Beginners

She thought of Time magazine photos she had seen of women in white saris weeping while tossing the ashes of their husbands into the Ganges. One image had stayed with her, a woman, mouth open, tossing the ashes into the water. She wondered if she should, in fact, take the job. After all, it wasn’t like anyone would cast her for anything anyway. She scolded herself for her self-pity, but the damage was already done, and she thought more seriously about this trip, now considering it less a death sentence for her career and more an escape from her dull and unrewarding life.

Rebecca decided to call her mother, who she knew might give her good advice by virtue of recommending the thing Rebecca least wanted to do. Arguments with her mother solidified Rebecca’s resolve on a number of issues and she looked forward to them as a kind of reinforcement against her own fears.

The phone rang twice.

“Yes?” Cynthia barked, her usual greeting. This alternately amused and annoyed Rebecca, depending on her mood. Today, she found it soothing.

“Hey, Mom.” Rebecca heard an audible sigh from her mother.

“Well, it’s good to know you are alive, Rebecca,” her mother said briskly, her words clipped, “although I wish I received proof more often.”

“Sorry, Mom. I’ve been busy.”

“You got a thing? Some show or something?”

Rebecca gritted her teeth.

“Not quite.”

“Ah. So what do you have to be busy about?”

Rebecca counted to five slowly, a trick some daytime talk show had implied was good for uncontrollable rage. It never worked.

“Rebecca? Are you still there? It’s gone quiet. Stupid phone. I keep telling Morris—”

“Yeah, I’m here, Mom. Listen, I have something I want to talk to you about. You remember my boss?”

“You have a job?” Rebecca gritted her teeth again at this and waited. “Oh, the map store. Yes. Right. He’s Saudi, right?”

“Persian. Anyway, look, through him, it doesn’t matter how, basically someone needs a companion for a cross-country trip, and he asked me if I would want to do it. And I’m just wondering what you think.”

“A companion? Is that like, what is that?”

Rebecca smiled at her mother’s worried tone, realizing what she feared this job might entail. “It’s not an escort thing. It’s not, like, sexual. The person who needs the companion is a woman—”

“That doesn’t preclude sexuality, Rebecca.”

“Mom, she’s an Indian widow from Kolkata so even if she swings that way I think it’s going to be pretty latent. She wants to go on a tour, and she has a guide, but he’s a man, so she wants a woman to come along for, I guess, modesty? Safety? I don’t know. It’s all expenses paid and it’s three thousand dollars in my pocket. Two weeks, cross-country, New York to L.A.”

Rebecca waited for her mother’s opinion, sure that it would come pouring out of Cynthia like a geyser.

“Why isn’t she going to San Francisco?”

“What?”

“Indians love San Francisco. She should go. Your dad had these Indian clients—they lived here, obviously, but both from India—and that was their favorite place to go.”

“But they got a divorce, obviously, right?”

“Yes. But they still loved it. She should go.”

Rebecca held the phone away from her face for a moment and hissed. She would have screamed but her apartment was too small and the phone too good at picking up her voice. She had few ways to express her frustration with her mother, and she had found that hissing was satisfying, in the absence of a good scream.

“What was that? Did you get a cat?”

“No, Mom, maybe something outside. Listen. What do you think I should do?”

“Don’t get a cat, that apartment is too small, you will never stop smelling litter.”

“About. The. Trip.” Rebecca wished her mother didn’t drive her to such rage but she always did. It was why Rebecca didn’t call.

“Ah. There’s no need to shout. We were talking about cats.” Rebecca had started thinking about how to end the phone call when her mother surprised her by asking:

“What do you want to do? Really want, not just what you think you should do. Because, Becky, you’ve never been across the country. She sounds a little bit amazing, this widow, traveling like this alone after her husband’s death, wanting to see the world. It might be worth it to go, get out of New York, clear your head, think about things, but only if it’s what you want to do. So what do you want?”

This thoughtful response from her mother startled Rebecca, and tears sprang to her eyes. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother had acknowledged that what she wanted mattered. She knew her mother loved her, and wanted what she considered to be best for her, she did, it was only that what her mother considered best and what she considered best often lived in two separate worlds, and Rebecca could never seem to connect the two.

“I did something like this once,” said her mother, interrupting Rebecca’s thoughts. “There wasn’t the whole widow thing, but I took a trip across the country alone to visit your father when he was at Stanford for law school. I had the summer off at Princeton, I had a car and some money saved from whatever job I was working to pay my rent, and I thought, Screw it. I got lost so many times and ended up in so many places that by the time I got to Palo Alto I had to turn right back around and go home. But it was great. I hated every minute of it, and it was great.”

Rebecca smiled, imagining her organized and compulsive mother as a young hippie on the road alone.

“If you want to do this, do it. It’s a few weeks of your life. Why not?” Rebecca couldn’t think of a single reason.

And so, the next day in Ronnie Munshi’s office, his sweat dripping off the end of his nose, his staff craning their necks to see her, she agreed to accompany Mrs. Sengupta across the country. The happiness in his eyes briefly obliterated her doubts. She knew that the doubts would return, furiously pinching at her mind through the night, but for now, she would bask in the sense of relief this would give her bank account and the knowledge that Mr. Ghazi would be pleased.

Rebecca watched Mr. Munshi leave Mrs. Sengupta a message in a strange mix of English and what she assumed had to be Bengali, informing her that everything was all prepared and the trip would begin with its three New York City days as soon as she arrived. That gave Rebecca three days to prepare and one perfect excuse to politely end things with Max. Part of her was terrified, her doubts already rising like mosquitoes out of a swamp, but the time for dithering was over. She had wanted something in her life to change, and now, albeit briefly, it would. Besides, at least it was another role to play.

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