The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (40 page)

“This keeps happening,” Amina said.

Mindy nodded. “So you’re back visiting?”

“Yeah. Parents.”

“Oh, nice. I live here. Obviously.” A slight blush rose to her cheeks. “Remember Nick Feets from school?”

Amina didn’t. She nodded.

“We got married a few years ago. We live in the valley.” Mindy took a quick breath. “Yep, three kids, dogs, the whole nine. Our oldest is probably going to start at Mesa next year. They’ve opened a middle school, you know.”

“Wow.” Amina had the distinct feeling she was supposed to say something more. Congratulations? Hallelujah?

“What about you? Last I heard, you and Dimple were in New York or something?”

“Seattle,” Amina said, distracted by that funny, bubbling-up feeling of thought rising from her subconscious. “We moved to Seattle.”

“Oh yeah? You like it?”

“Mostly.”

The girl Akhil lost his virginity to has a hen face and three kids
. This was the thought, whole and uncharitable, and with it came the subsequent thought that Akhil himself might have looked old by now, which was so obvious that Amina felt stupid for never having thought of it before. And yet she hadn’t. The tiny corner of her imagination reserved for what-ifs had always brought him back more or less as he was, maybe a little taller, or broadened in the chest and waist, the way boys tended to be after college.

“Oh no,” Mindy said. “You look upset. I didn’t want to upset you. I just thought …” She was really blushing now, red patches blooming on her cheeks and chest like an allergic reaction. “I mean, I didn’t know if you recognized me and were just being nice or something.”

“Oh,” Amina said, backing away from the counter. “No, I didn’t.”

“I mean, it’s a job, you know?”

“Yeah, sure. And you’re really good at it.”

Mindy’s eyes narrowed, and for a split second Amina thought she saw the old Mindy, the one who would shred her with a sentence, but then she just shrugged. “Thanks. Well, we’re having a thirty-three-percent-off-all-red-tag-items starting Wednesday—everything except housewares.”

“Okay.” Amina raised the bag awkwardly in salute and backed away. She walked quickly down the aisle in front of her, taking one turn and then another, racing through the golden-hued jewelry/perfume section until she was finally, thankfully, spat out into the dark cavern of the mall. On one side of her, a few bodies pummeled at unseen forces in a video arcade, and on the other, a collection of massage chairs were entirely empty, save for a lone, undulating salesman. At the farther end of the mall, a shoe store specializing in designer names for less promised relief. Amina walked toward it.

CHAPTER 3

J
amie Anderson was with another woman. Why this should feel so bad was not anything Amina wanted to dwell on, though she was sure that the shower and the shirt and optimistic leg shaving had something to do with it. She stood in the doorway of Jack’s Tavern, her breath lodged in her chest as Jamie smiled at a pretty redhead, the kind of girl who turned playing with her hair into performance art.

“You going in?” A pie-faced guy behind her asked, and Amina stumbled into the bar, trying not to feel self-conscious as the girl watched her approach.

“Hey,” Jamie said, catching sight of her and standing. The suit had been replaced by a shirt and shorts and flip-flops, giving him the air of a surfer.

“Hey.” Amina turned to the girl. “Hi, I’m Amina.”

“Hi.” The girl regarded her coolly.

An awkward second passed.

“So I’ll see you soon, Maizy?” Jamie prompted, and the girl looked from Amina to him and back again before slowly standing up. Her
hand tugged Jamie’s T-shirt briefly, and she leaned into him. “You didn’t tell me you had a date.”

Jamie backed up. “Have a great night.”

“You got it.” She turned her head in Amina’s direction, not quite looking at her before walking slowly back to the bar, where, Amina now saw, a small group of girls was waiting for her, the corners of their eyes taking in everything. She slid into the vacated spot. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“You didn’t. She was just a student in my Intro to Anthro intensive.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” Jamie shifted in the booth seat, his knees knocking the table. “I kind of forgot that this was a student hangout.”

“Is it weird for you?”

“Nah.” He rubbed his head a little, looking around the bar. “Yeah, maybe a little.”

The girls at the bar were making no secret of looking at her now, and Amina tried to relax, or at least to look relaxed. Of course he had a female following. Was there anything college girls found sexier than being told what to think?

“What do they call you?” she asked.

“Professor Anderson.”

“Wow.”

Jamie raised an eyebrow. “Was that sarcasm, Amina Eapen?”

“No, not at all,” Amina laughed, crossing and uncrossing her legs. “I’m impressed.”

“Yeah, you look impressed.” His eyes fell to her collarbone. “Nice shirt.”

Her face blossomed with heat. “Thanks.”

Just then, the group of girls at the bar erupted into laughter, the redhead the loudest among them. She laughed with her head thrown far back, her hand nestled into her cleavage, and even without looking around the room, Amina could sense collective relocation of the male gaze, the beery, smitten hunger behind it.

“Hey.” Jamie leaned in, his foot bumping hers. “Do you want to get out of here?”

“What?”

“Go to another place down the street? Or maybe just on a walk? There’s actually a pretty nice park a few blocks away if you—”

“Yes.”

It was much better outside. Deep-blue evening was settling over Albuquerque, erasing the mountains and bejeweling the traffic lights running up Central. The air smelled sweet and diesely, like the promise of a road trip. Some minutes ago there had been a decision that involved leaving her car where it was, buying beer, and heading to the park, and since that time they had been walking steadily uptown, Jamie filling her in on details about his life that she wanted to know but was too nervous to absorb.

His walk was the same. Not that there was anything so remarkable about the way he leaned back on his heels, hands jammed into his pockets, talking to some midpoint in the sky like it was a floating amphitheater, but it did give Amina a déjà vu of sorts, the newness of him (definitely bigger out of the suit, with an equal amount of stubble lining his scalp and jaw) cut by an unnerving familiarity. He still had that weird, slightly dismissive tone, and that funny way of squinting while she talked, as though he couldn’t quite hear or believe what she was saying.

“So it seemed like the right time,” he was saying now, wrapping up the trajectory of his last twelve years, the highlights of which included graduate work at Berkeley, a few years living in South America, the offer of a tenure-track position at UNM, and a divorce.

“You were married?”

“For about three years.”

“Oh.” Amina felt strangely embarrassed about this, though less for him than herself. What had she been doing with her life? She’d never even tried hard enough at having a relationship to have it fail.

Jamie pointed his chin ahead. “There we go.”

There
was a 7-Eleven, replete with red-orange glow and shelves of brightly colored products that looked like they could survive a nuclear winter. Jamie held the door open and followed her in, tagging her hip when she started walking down the wrong aisle.

They stood in front of the glass case, sizing up the beer options.

“So, Rolling Rock?”

“Yeah.”

Two minutes later they were back out the door, corn nuts, beef jerky, and M&M’s thrown into the bag. (“Trash picnic,” Jamie had said approvingly of her last-minute additions.) They turned onto one side street, then another, winding through a residential neighborhood where small stucco houses hovered behind dusty-looking lawns.

“Where are we going?” Amina asked.

“It’s a surprise. Hold up a sec.” He stopped at a station wagon and fished his keys out of his pocket.

“Wait, this is your car?” Amina asked.

“Yep.” He opened the hatchback and pulled out a blanket. He handed it to her, along with a small cooler.

“You just park it here?”

“In front of my house? Yeah.”

Amina turned around. The house that greeted her was not particularly different from the others, though it did look like someone had recently swept the porch.

“Wow. Don’t look so disappointed,” Jamie laughed.

“No! I’m not.” But she was, a little. Somehow, all the talk about tenure and anthropology had given her visions of a thick-walled, libraried adobe, the kind of place that was covered with kilim rugs and fertility sculptures. The white stucco in front of her looked only slightly more substantial than a roadside weigh station. She laughed. “So the surprise is that you’re taking me back to your place?”

Jamie looked confused for a moment, then alarmed. “Oh, no! We’re not! I just, uh, I wasn’t thinking that, actually, I just …” He shut the trunk, walking quickly away from both the house and car, as if to shed them. “C’mon. Follow me.”

Amina followed Jamie’s lumbering back down a tiny, dirty alleyway, growing more curious with every step until they stumbled into a bowl of green. Old, tall trees that were rare anywhere that far from the river rose up to greet them, the tops of their branches inked with night.

“Oh. Holy shit,” Amina said.

Jamie flashed her a sly look of pride. “Hidden Park.”

Amina turned back to the houses that spun a ring around the park, no fancier-looking than their fronts, but now infinitely more charming because of the secret they guarded.

“So this is your backyard?”

“More or less.” He walked a few paces and set their bag of goods down, reaching for the blanket. He unfurled it, and Amina, feeling pleasantly chastened, helped settle the edges, slipping her sandals off before stepping on it. “Not bad, huh?”

“It’s beautiful. I’m a little jealous.”

“Yeah, Corrales sucks as far as outdoors goes.” He handed her a beer. “Here you go.”

“Is that a …?”

“Beer cozy? Sure is.”

“You keep them in your car?”

“I keep a lot of things in my car. What?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you knocking the cozy? Because I’ll take it right back, you know.”

Amina smiled, clinking her bottle to his and taking a sip. Jamie slipped off his own shoes and scooted back until he was even with her, his legs hanging off the blanket into the grass.

“So you never did tell me what you took pictures of,” Jamie said.

“Oh. Right. Well, I used to be a photojournalist.”

“No kidding. Like wars and jungles?”

“Eh … more like street fairs and methadone clinics, but yeah.”

“That sounds like fun.”

“Was that sarcasm?”

“Only a little bit. The rest was me being impressed.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t be.” Amina shook her head. “Anyway, I’m kind of on a break. I’m doing events now—weddings, anniversaries, quinceañeras. So do you just teach, or do you …” Jamie looked at her oddly. “I mean, not
just
teach,” she corrected hurriedly. “I’ve always heard that teaching is really hard. I just meant, do you work in the field too or something?”

He took a sip of beer, and it left a little foam wake on one side of
his mouth. “It’s part of the reason I moved back, actually, to study the effects of the Sandia Casino and gaming culture on the authority of tribal elders.”

“Is that as sad as it sounds?”

“Not always. You’d be surprised. Either way, I try not to let it get to me.”

“And does that work?”

He leaned in and whispered, “I’m a trained anthropologist, you know.”

Soap and saltines. That’s what he smelled like, and something else, something she couldn’t quite name, but wanted to, the want itself such a persuasive force that she found herself guzzling half her bottle of beer to keep her face away from his neck.

“So what does it mean, you’re on a break from photojournalism? Was it a planned thing?”

“Uh, no.” Amina shifted.

“You got fired?”

“No.” She cleared her throat. “Actually, I kind of fired myself.”

“What do you mean?”

What did she mean? Amina looked at the grass beyond his shoulder, surprised by the foreign feeling of wanting to tell him the truth. Like many people whose lives had formed around a particularly painful incident, she had grown used to providing ellipses around the event of her brother’s death to keep conversations comfortable. At some point, the subconscious logic of this had spread to the rest of her life so that she rarely talked about things she had been deeply affected by. It wasn’t hard to do. She’d certainly never felt bad about it before. And yet sitting here with Jamie, she had a pressing feeling she would miss out on something important if she didn’t at least try.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said. “Or, at least, I didn’t think it would be such a long time. I just took a picture … some pictures … they were hard for me. I guess I needed a little bit of a break afterward, but then the longer I didn’t do it, the harder it became to start again, so, you know.”

“But you’re still taking pictures.”