One summer ago, I made the mistake of rooming with a woman named Mukta, an Indian-Irish beauty who was in New York without a visa. I hadn’t known her very well before we became roommates—a glorified velvet curtain being the only thing that separated us while we slept—but I liked the way she talked. Most notably, I liked when she said “fuck,” which sounded like “fook,” as in, “I’m gonna be fookin’ sick.” I liked it when Mukta swore in her merry Irish way, and she did swear, a lot, that summer we lived together. Mukta wanted to be an actress and this pursuit involved a good deal of rage and disappointment.
What was I doing? In the name of honesty, Mother, I’ll tell you: a whole lot of nothing. Specifically, I was a salesgirl at an expensive boutique on Franklin Avenue, on account of my beauty and generally docile attitude. I’d gotten the job through a man who wanted to sleep with me; his cousin happened to own the place. I slept with the man, I sold the clothes. I was thankful and also very bored.
The last time I saw you, you were holding a martini with two olives in the Marlton lobby. You looked at me like I was a dog dying in a suburban street: sad, incongruous, unavoidable. You narrowed your two thick eyebrows over your salty drink and said you were disappointed; I squandered the things people gave me, you gave me. I was “studying” hotel administration and studying it poorly. I was wearing accessories purchased for me by rich, depressive men. I was flirting with academic probation and drinking my calories.
You’d always been careful (and forceful) in reminding me: being pretty is easy and leads to nothing but boredom. Idle minds, you started to say that night in the Marlton. I interrupted you. These were the matriarchal maxims I’d heard since babyhood. Yet you repeated them once more before you left both the hotel and New York altogether, and I responded that it was best for us to take a break as mother and daughter.
And I hate to say that you were right. But now, after two years of silence, I’ve seen a little of the world—I’ve seen Mukta and me, like mirror twins—and I also hate to say that you were wrong. I’m at an impasse, now, and I’ve just got to know what you think of my life. So that you can help me change it.
You would have liked Mukta, too, at least at first. Because although she was pretty, she was also unique, which is something I know you wished I’d been more of. I met her in my last year of college. She had already dropped out by then—had gone on a wild goose chase to Los Angeles, where some noodle executive had promised her she’d be the new face of Beckel’s Noodles. (Though Mukta, like me, never ate noodles and especially not Beckel’s.) Needless to say, the pasta gig didn’t work out and she came back our senior year with her beautiful tail between her long, brown legs.
We met at a party on a concrete rooftop in SoHo. My friend Marianne had a brother who worked on Wall Street, and he liked to host parties here. Marianne—blond, short, brainy—was set to work in finance too; in just a month’s time, she’d be sitting high on the tenth floor of a skyscraper downtown, a building with honeycomb windows and a Dutch name. Marianne and I weren’t popular or well liked in school. On weekends, we mostly lurked around in corners at parties planned by and designed for people ten years older than us. We would sip margaritas and talk quietly. That’s what Marianne and I were doing that night.
“YOU’VE GOT TO BE FOOKIN’ KIDDING ME!” rang a voice demonic and musical.
“Marianne!” It was Mukta. She stood in front of us, tall and backlit by the city. She’d been brought to the party by a chubby white man with perpetually moist skin and she was trying to get rid of him.
After we chatted a while about school, the party, and whatever else came to mind, Marianne left us to rub elbows. “Duty calls,” she sighed. She was so confident. (We’ve lost touch now. I’ll acknowledge, Mother, that I haven’t spoken to Marianne in a year, and I’m afraid it might be my fault, on account of the stupidity I inherited from whatever catalog stranger sold you his sperm.)
Mukta and I slunk further into our corner and sipped our margaritas, and Mukta told me her Beckel’s noodles sob story.
“What are you going to do after college?” she asked me when she was finished. She blinked through tears. Very theatrical. She must be a good actress, I thought.
“I don’t know,” I said. “My mother and I aren’t speaking. So I can’t move home.”
“Where is home?”
“Los Angeles.”
Mukta deformed her face to indicate that even the mention of Los Angeles was enough to make her weep.
“But I also don’t have a job and I don’t want to work in hotel administration,” I said.
“Why did you study that?”
I shrugged.
Mukta opened her wide mouth and smiled. She glowed like a battery-powered crystal ball. “Live with me.”
And I did. When I graduated, I got the sales job at the boutique and Mukta begged her parents to send her more money from Ireland and we moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint with no living room and a single-burner oven. Well, is that called a hot plate? I feel, sometimes, like I’ve spent the last few years learning nothing and now I’ve got, predictably, nothing to show for it.
By mid-June, Mukta and I had been living together for almost two months. I was making good money at the boutique because it operated partly on commission, and it turned out I was talented at selling things. I sold these things by looking unattainably beautiful, and when women tried on various plaid dresses and linen pants, I stared at them blankly and said, “You look beautiful.”
I stated it deadpan and sullen: like I couldn’t believe my eyes how beautiful they were. And when it came from me, they believed it.
So that month I spent five hundred dollars on a keratin straightening treatment. The air was getting humid. Remember when, growing up, summer would come and I’d weep all day, lamenting my curly hair? It sprang from my head like a thousand wires; like snakes or poodle fur.
Do you remember when, one day, we were supposed to go to Point Dume beach for a Labor Day picnic? We were already late, and I was holed up in the bathroom screaming and crying and cursing you, for your terrible curly-haired genes, for all this muck that I’d never asked to receive, when you barged in and slapped me across the face?
“I give you the world and you hide in the motherfucking bathroom?” you said.
We went to the beach after that. I must have been fourteen, so I guess that made you fifty-seven. Someone needed to slap someone else for things to get better.
Although I was making a decent amount of money that June of last year, Mukta was not. She was rarely home when I went to sleep, as most of her sustenance came from men she met: hipsters in skate shoes and tiny beanies; Wall Street boys with chambray “after work” shirts; partial retirees who showered her in dresses and liquor. Here is how you can visualize: Mukta was the kind of beauty that crossed borders. I was the kind of beauty that just made everyone want to do “reverse cowgirl.” There’s a slight difference.
One morning, Mukta and I were eating breakfast bars in the kitchen that was also our living room. She’d returned at dawn that morning, crashing into our curtain-wall on her way to bed. Now she seemed rested. Pigeons and blackbirds watched us from the trees outside our kitchen window. She sat on the nonfunctioning radiator and looked particularly cheerful.
“Do you have pigeons in Ireland?” I asked.
Mukta nodded. She smiled at me like I was a helpless toddler, wobbling around our kitchen and bumping my head. You know I’m used to this. She sang something low under her breath. Before she’d dropped out of school, Mukta had studied musical theater.
“What’s up with you?” I said. “You seem happy.”
She looked out the window. “Oh fook,” she said. “He’s here again.”
There was a man who liked to pee on the cars outside our window. (Mukta informed me soon after that he doesn’t necessarily like to pee on parked automobiles, he just does it.) He’d been there since early May and would outlast both of us in that apartment, on that street.
“He’s doing a fookin’ job,” she observed. Then she bit into her bar and said, “Yum.”
“I am happy today, Leah,” she said. “I’ve got an audition that’s legitimately perfect. If they don’t cast me, they’ve got their heads so far up their asses that they’ll never see daylight again. They’re covered in shit and blind as bats if they don’t cast me for this. Because it’s—read this.” She scrolled through her phone, pulled up the casting call, and read aloud: “Indian woman for the part of the best friend on NBC sitcom. Ages 21–32. Must be able to do an Irish accent.”
It was, indeed, perfect for her. I told her she was right.
“Do you want to borrow any clothes for it?” I asked. We wore the same size and I owned a lot of expensive things from the boutique.
“Yes, yes, YES.” Mukta tore through my closet, which was really part of one large, shared closet divided by another velvet curtain, tossing jumpsuits and jeans and camisoles onto my bed. “Fook yes,” she said.
When we both headed out for the day, she was wearing a pair of wide-legged slacks and a pink top with princess sleeves. “I’m going to best friend the shit out of them,” she said.
Mother, I was happy for Mukta but I was also envious. Mukta seemed so alive to me. She wanted things so ardently. She writhed and raged and desired. That’s the kind of chutzpah it takes, you would have told me. Watch her, you’d say. This is how you do some shit. I could imagine it so easily, what you’d say and think.
I felt I had no desire left within me. It was like a loss of libido for the entire world. If I’d done what you told me to do when I was nineteen, taken an assortment of prescriptions and talked things out with a professional in Pasadena, one that came highly recommended by your girlfriends, virtually all of your girlfriends said that yes, this professional was the best, maybe I’d have an antidote for it. Maybe I’d be fat but at least I’d be happy. Maybe I would have had a few thought exercises to practice when the world seemed dull and still.
Mukta went to her audition. I walked to work and stood behind the counter. The boutique was small with lots of windows looking onto the street. For the past week, our air conditioning had been broken, so I often had to sneak into the back room to cool myself in front of the mini-fridge. My boss, Maritza, had tried every day to get someone to fix the AC. The landlord made excuses.
That afternoon, Maritza was pacing around the back of the store, near the dressing rooms, talking to him on speaker. The phone sat atop a package of sunglasses. She used her free hands to fan her forehead. Our landlord constantly spoke like he was screaming and so did Maritza.
“My AC guy is out of town,” he scream-spoke. “He is in CANADA. He can’t do work from Canada.”
“Get another AC guy,” Maritza said. She was about to kick a box of jelly shoes and stopped herself. She tugged at the long braid down her back instead.
Of course, the landlord did not get another AC guy and we were very, very hot. Maritza called her boyfriend and asked him to take a look. She was constantly talking about this guy, detailing the various projects in which he was involved. A man with projects, okay, you’d say. Classic spin doctor, you’d say, just watch.
Why would Maritza’s boyfriend be of any use? “I guess he’s not not handy. If that makes any sense?” she said to me.
When he eventually arrived, I was surprised to see that Maritza’s boyfriend was very handsome. He smelled like sweat. He seemed like he wouldn’t be able to name one thing sold inside our entire store, let alone date the woman who owned it. Most of the men I went out with that summer were slick-haired accounts men who took me out for sushi and wanted to have sex reverse cowgirl.
Maritza’s boyfriend expectedly had no idea what to do with the AC. Maritza growled, punched the air with her tiny fists, and sulked into the back room with the refrigerator. Her boyfriend smiled crookedly, stuck out his palms like “What can I do?,” and touched my arm before he left the boutique.
The next day, he came back. Tried to fix the AC again. Failed. Hugged me. Pressed his chest against my breasts.
Later that week, he returned while Maritza wasn’t there and pretended he’d miscalculated her schedule. He watched me with hawkish interest as I attended to three customers: a mother and two daughters, all dishwater blond.
“You look so beautiful,” I said to them. They spent $800.
Another: a big-boned brunette with a button nose.
“You look so beautiful,” I said to her. $250.
Meanwhile, Mukta was overcome with anticipation. Her audition, she said, had gone perfectly. A lightning bang of a success. It’d only been her and two casting executives, sitting together in a mirrored room. Within one hour of cold reads, she said, they all laughed, cried, and laughed again. Cried a little more. That’s what acting is.
“Drinks on me,” she said that Saturday, paying for our margaritas with the zero money she had. We sat at a new American bistro by the park. Our second and third margaritas were free. I licked the salt off my third drink’s rim, slowly. I thought I could feel the sodium rushing to my head, my feet, my fingers. Dogs cantered through the park; dawdling children in summer bonnets held their mothers’ hands; a hobo took a poop in the middle of the street. We went dancing; a man with orange hair offered us cocaine off a key in the bathroom. It was around midnight. Mukta snorted the white powder, rubbed the remaining dust all over her gums, and I was reminded of that night I first met her, on the roof: Mukta, tall and backlit. The world was still. The air was slow and we were bullets. As we walked home at dawn like ants scrambling frantically over a dirt hill, she broke out into song:
“GOOD MORNING BAAALTIMOORE.” Her voice was a bell, pinging against the building sides, clattering down fire escape stairs.
Monday came. I went to work and sold more linen things. On Tuesday, I got a message from Mukta.
“I DIDNT GET THE MTRFKN PART.”
“Why not?” I texted.
“They gave it to mtrfkn Lebanese girl from Binghamton,” she replied.
I didn’t know what to say. I stared at my phone. Maritza’s boyfriend came through the door and winked.
“Just checking up on my friend,” he said. He leaned his elbows on the counter. The friend was me.
“I. Am. Going. To. Shit. A. Brick.” Mukta texted.
We went out that night. Mukta punched a bathroom wall. A slew of beautiful boys showed up to tend her bleeding knuckles. We drank for free.
We didn’t know it at the time, but that moment signaled a certain separation between us. Perhaps you, with your wisdom, your doubt and suspicion, would have been able to predict this. As Mukta went to more and more auditions with bandages around her left hand, I started selling more and more linen dresses at the boutique. Now we called our customers “clients.” A few of them—an older woman with impeccable plastic surgery and tiny boobs; a new mother who purchased half a dozen wicker purses—even requested my personal email, for up-to-date information on sales and my work schedule.
By July, Mukta was penniless and eating nothing but power bars. She bought them in bulk, in a carrot cake flavor, and stored them in our unused microwave. She ate two a day and looked to have lost almost ten pounds: her bones jutted out of her cheeks and chest. I envied it a little, vowed to eat more power bars and less of everything else. Mother, I sound like a fool, I realize it. I realized it then. When I was eighteen, before I left for school, you gifted me The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, wrapped in newspaper and wildflowers from Elysian Park. You smiled and said, “Fuck Camille Paglia; this shit’s accurate.”
So I knew that the world was starving me. I know it still is. But I needed a goal, you see, and I couldn’t find a better one.
Mukta had tried out and been swiftly rejected for the roles of best friend, love interest, background dancer, drunk girl, model, 1960s opium addict, tomboy. She tried out for a man’s role—had argued with the casting director that she brought a distinctly feminine worldview to an otherwise limited and stereotypical character, had pled the tradition of operatic trouser roles like Prince Orlofsky, Cherubino, and Orpheus. This also did not succeed. She was trying so blindingly hard to be absolutely everybody. Anybody. She wanted to drink margaritas every night; she wanted to visit me at work; she wanted to take the train to Queens and buy illegal firecrackers.
Maritza, in the meantime, was noticing my own victories as a sales assistant.
“At this rate,” she said carefully, “we might want to revisit your title.” It was the Fourth of July, and I was working while the neighborhood laughed outside.
This meant taking me on full-time, giving me a promotion. My heart lit a little: I wondered if you’d be proud of my upward mobility. I wondered if you’d be disappointed that it all came on account of beauty and lies.
The remainder of the month, I tried to sell more: look prettier, speak more sullenly. Mukta, for her part, tried to assail directors on the sets of television shows filming in our neighborhood. The first time she did this, it was twilight and the sky was purple. The air was sticky and my dress clung to my legs. I felt heavy. I thought I’d gained weight, my slight increase in funds having created a worrisome access to things like dinner, breakfast, and snacks. We walked by the park and that same American bistro was blocked off by caution tape. Men in black jeans with walkie-talkies made an exciting barrier from the rest of us.
“Look,” I said, expecting to do exactly that and nothing more.
“Fook it,” Mukta said, and grabbed my hand.
“What the—what are you?” I said, staggering along the sidewalk. I was weak and Mukta was strong despite the fact that she moved like a jangly skeleton.
“DIRECTOR! DIRECTOR!” Mukta called. We approached the caution tape. She tugged on my hand and ducked under. “Oh director, sweetie director!”
“The fuck is she doing?” said a man in black jeans, looking to me for explanation.
“What do you want, folks?” she called. “Sing? Dance? Fook?”
Mukta had trained in ballet until she was fifteen. She did a pirouette. She leaped into a painful-looking front split.
People stared. I stared.
“Oh,” she said, straightening up. “You want me to act? Perhaps you want me to act?” She paused.
“Sad, sad, sad . . . ,” she began, in a different voice. Nasal, American. She paced around and thwacked her right hand into her left palm, crinkling her brow. She was, I figured out, acting. “. . . Whom I will not forgive for coming to rest; for having seen me and having said: yes, this will do. Who has made the hideous, the hurting, the insulting mistake of loving me and must be punished for it!”
“Muk—” I began, inching back against the caution tape.
“What? You don’t—” She gazed around at the members of the scraggly film crew, any of whom could have been the director, dismayed. “Edward Albee? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? An American treasure, motherfookers?”
Mukta and I were then, as expected, kicked off the set. Exactly who had or hadn’t seen her performance was a mystery. We walked to the next bar and I watched Mukta take a shot of vodka from her own cleavage.
I don’t know why, because it was Mukta who was sad, and not me, but I wished for you.
At the end of July, Maritza gave me the promotion. She raised my wages by five dollars an hour, raised my hours to thirty-five. The next day, her boyfriend came into the boutique and crossed behind the sales counter. He pressed himself against me and breathed his starchy, ripe breath into my face. He tensed his jaw like he was doing everything he could not to choke me.
“Congratulations on the promotion,” he said. “You could sell me anything, Leah.”
Of course, at the same time, twelve blocks away, Mukta was hurling herself onto the set of a wry, female-led sitcom set in 1950s Brooklyn. She talked in a twangy mid-Atlantic accent and tap-danced. I know this because I was called by a policeman who had been asked to escort her (forcibly) from the premises. I do really believe that I was a good friend. I am a good friend. Was that ever something you wanted me to be? By then, you and I hadn’t spoken for over a year, and I was trying to piece together what you’d wanted, what I’d done wrong. Having a beautiful fool for a daughter wasn’t what you meant when, at age forty-three, you said you’d earned the right to raise a baby on your own. You made enough to be your own husband. I think you wanted us to fight crime, kick patriarchy in the crotch, drink wine, and spit knowledge.
Is that what you wanted? One of the rare August nights that Mukta was sober (I think it was a Sunday), I confided in her about you, and me.
“Seems reductive,” she said.
“On whose part?”
“Either.” She shrugged. She stared out the window and watched the homeless man peeing on a green Ford Fusion.
“But your mom sounds like a regular, ah, firecracker.”
“Which is to say?”
“A cunt but in a good way.”
I think you would have enjoyed this. Do you? I feel that Mukta, perhaps, would have known better how to talk to you, what you would have liked.
And now here is what I’m most ashamed to tell you. It comes in two parts.
The first part is that late one afternoon in mid-August, Maritza’s boyfriend came into the boutique, turned the Open sign around to Closed, drew the window shades, and fucked me on the floor of the back room near the mini-fridge. The AC was still broken. We gulped the cool air.
Then the door opened, a muffled, harried sound emanated from the sales floor, and Maritza walked past the counter and into the back room, carrying the Closed sign in her hand as evidence of an entirely different and quotidian crime.
Maritza had a clear American accent. When she cursed, it wasn’t merry or charming. It was bad and hard and gross, and I ran from the boutique on Franklin. I scurried home like an ant running from the Biblical flood created by a child’s curious water pail, and I lost my job.
The second part was that all this while, Mukta had been applying for an artist’s visa to live in the United States. New York specifically, but Los Angeles would do. Without it she was, she said, illegal. The catch was that in order to get an artist’s visa that would enable her to stay in New York long enough to get acting gigs, she had to get acting gigs in New York to qualify as an artist in the first place.
I hadn’t known how long she had left, how precarious the situation really was, and she didn’t say. I suppose I should have wondered. I suppose I should have thought, for a second, critically. And asked. But I didn’t pay attention. Not until that August evening that I came home shocked and dirtied from the boutique, jobless, did she tell me.
“It’s over,” she said. “My visa was rejected.”
“But could your parents—?” I said.
“My parents stopped sending money two weeks ago,” she said. She looked over at our microwave full of bulk carrot cake power bars. She nodded at it, gratefully.
“So now what?”
“I’ve got to move back,” she said. “To fookin’ Ireland. What the actual fook. My parents sent me the most batshit fookin’ letter,” she said. She pulled up an email on her phone and told me to read.
It was a message demanding that Mukta return to the family home in Northern Ireland. It seemed to have been written by a father but was signed by a mother. “Or we’ll come over there and drag you back so help us G-d,” was the last line. Then, “Love, Mum.”
Mukta left, and for the next two weeks, I lived off margaritas and carrot cake power bars taken from the unused microwave oven. I did not go by the boutique. I rarely left the house, except to get margaritas.
I haven’t written Maritza’s name in the “past employers” section on subsequent job applications, am too afraid of what might happen if someone ever calls her up. In the interview for the next job I took, a server at a vegan gastropub in Alphabet City, the manager asked me why I had no prior work experience. I shrugged and looked sullen. “It’s a beautiful day,” I said.
The restaurant manager, a man with his hair combed back over his head like a fat wave of brown, looked out the window, at the sky, dumbfounded. It was gray and windy, the first day of a real fall.
“Wow, yes,” he said. “Beautiful. Yes it is.”
My hands are chapped from scrubbing the counters and cleaning the juicer. My armpits smell like garlic. I had a boy here, just after Mukta left, who cooked me food and paid half the rent. That lasted four months. But now he’s gone, too. I never heard from those people, Mukta and Maritza and her strong-jawed boyfriend, again. It’s May now, and I hate it all. And I don’t know what to do. If I had some money, I could fly home. Well, Mother. What do you think of that? Would you welcome me with open arms? Would it really be so bad?
Tomorrow, my landlord will show the apartment to new tenants. I left most of my stuff in a box on the sidewalk. The homeless man has peed on it, joyously. This morning, the landlord knocked on the door.
“When that beautiful woman left town,” he said, “I shed a tear.”
“She’s in Ireland now,” I said.
“Ireland.” He said it with a gauzy stare.
“I’ll leave both keys in the mailbox.”
Where do I go? Sometimes, when the world feels still and dark around me, I think about Mukta, what she’s doing. She once told me her family lived on a crag in a valley in Northern Ireland so unknown they simply call it Unknown Valley. She said that growing up, they were surrounded by wildflowers and twisting briars and rosebushes, all sorts of windy Irish green. There is a creek where she, her family, and the surrounding homes would swim in summer.
“Fookin’ boring,” she’d said when she first told me about it. We’d been sitting in the park on a blanket, licking salt off the margaritas we’d ordered to-go in Styrofoam cups. These specifically were the specialty of the bar across the street, which was full of large flat-screen televisions, drunken minors, unhappy Polish men. My treat. We’d just moved in together, so it must have been late May, a year ago. I want you to know that the park was calm, quaint. A dog sniffed the hem of my skirt. The sky was wide and bright.
That craggy valley sounded like heaven to me. Just what I needed. To be cradled alone in a world of green. But imagining Mukta there, now, I can’t help but think she doesn’t belong. I picture her there and it looks so ugly and wrong.
Before she left, that stinky, wet day last August, I tried to comfort her. We were waiting for the cab to take her to the airport. We stood on our front stoop. Music from the neighbors’ apartment was busting through their complex walls, bumping and bumping the same three beats over and over.
“Your home sounds beautiful, Muk,” I said. “You’re lucky. You live in a jaw-droppingly beautiful place, a ghastly beautiful place full of roses and life and history. And love. Water, trees.”
Mukta said nothing. She glared down the street.
“Maybe you just need to go back to realize how nice it is,” I said.
“Leah, my sweet, dumb Leah, I’m miserable here.” She flailed her arms around: at the neighbors’ apartment, at the scrawny trees, at the sweltering sky. “Fooking hellfire-Sodom-and-Gomorrah miserable. But I’m even more miserable everywhere else. Who the fook needs a valley or green? Not me. Do you know what I mean? Do you get that?”
I shook my head. She let out a sigh. Theatrical.
“You wouldn’t understand it because of where you’re from,” she said.
Her cab pulled up to the curb. She hugged me. Her arms were sharp, winding.
“I love you, Leah,” she said. “I’ll always think of you when I think of America.” 
Emily Hunt Kivel was born in San Francisco. Her recent fiction appears in The Paris Review, New England Review, Fieldnotes, and Guernica. She has taught writing at Columbia University and the University of Texas Permian Basin.
