Single

Saira looked at herself in the mirror and grinned. She was very, very, pleased with herself. And why not? Finally, yes finally, she had pushed her annoying husband out of her life. Sigh!

What a great feeling!

He was gone! Gone!

'Yippie! Yippie!' she said in her mind, skipping to the subway station.

And what else?

Her hair -- that black silky length everyone at work practically hated her for -- it was back! She had cut it short when she went into her sudden Buddhist phase to get rid of 'all the suffering'. But, now, after a year-and-half of living like a 90 year-old frigid old woman, her hair was back to full length. And yes, it felt good to be the envy of every woman all over again.

So, with a smug smile, Saira went to the subway station, like all Philadelphians do, and in the train, as she stood lined up next to all the sexy men, smiled at everyone and no one.

The conductor, a 40 year old Black man who left her funny love-letters every summer when he hands her a new schedule, waved her his usual good morning wave, and beamed in her radiance. 'Ah! She is beautiful!' he told himself, feeling so glad he had this job. How the little things can make your day when you're down!

And for Saira, the day was even better. It had to be. She was wearing her very dangerous blue skirt -- that long slinky thing that felt like a sari and went perfectly with the gray jacket that hugged her waist like a tube. Made her look simply edible -- especially when she walked down Market Street towards the intersection and everyone noticed and sighed, 'Sexy woman, you!'

But, the cat-walk was still a half-hour away. She still had to make every man's feet buckle in the train, and she intended to.

Should she squint, pout or ignore the particular 'him' in question?

Oh, she knew it all!

An ice queen, she had developed a reputation for making men confused with desire and then insane with insecurity. All she had to do was set her eyes on a man and he was finished.

A man, a few feet away from herself on the train, the one with the nonchalance in his face and yet, had been giving her the eyes as he pretended to read a book. She decided she would teach him a few things about seduction. Mess him up.

What always worked was the' I'm angry and I'm going to ignore you' look that the man never saw coming. And then he tried to figure out of it was him who she was referring to with her dagger-like eyes, or if it was the old man beside him. And then he would laugh and realize it was him.

Now the intellectual part. "Why is she angry with me?" he would try to think. And then he would finally give up and admit to himself that he didn't know. And then he would turn to her again and see if he was mistaken. 'Are you really looking at me the way I think you are looking at me?' he would say to her in his mind but never aloud. How funny that would sound?

And then he would see that almost devilish sparkle in her eyes that he recognized from sex scenes in his favorite porn or movies and he would know he was wanted, just not taunted.

The rest is history.

Eventually, at 19th Street, she would drop the heavy stone on his foot, and get off the train and be out of his life forever.

"Poor man," she would sigh, one more kill for the day.

But that was her errands for the morning. At work, she is the perfect opposite – a professional. Putting her bag on the desk, she would avoid the glaring eyes from her colleagues, who are buying or selling something. She watches John buys futures on oil for a client in the middle of 1999, when the bull market is riding like a woman in heat, and no one but the sly-fox has a clue what's going down. But John always let Saira know what he was doing, just because he had a certain fixation for the blue skirt she wore to work and wanted, very much, to explore the skin underneath.

He dreamt about it night and day, just like Frank in the next cubicle, who just had dumped his Asian girlfriend when he heard that Saira broke up with her husband. Now, like a man reborn, he cackled as he got up from his seat to reach for a pencil he didn't need, and cackled when he sits down. And he stood up quite a bit whenever Saira passed his cubicle and smiled at her gleefully.

He had thought of giving her something on Valentines Day next, but his sister said no. 'Too early,' she said, happy he isn't dating that Vietnamese girl, but worried Frank won't settle down with a white girl from a wealthy family.

Saira kept a good distance from the boys at work who she knew had no idea about interracial dating, let alone sex. She wasn't sure it could work, in the long run. White boys liked a short fling with an Asian woman and most though Asian women were submissive too. 'How simplistic,' she laughed, with her friends, when they discussed white boys. American men, in general -- so confused, they were.

She never explicitly ignored John, however, but never pursued him because the thought of a black mother-in-law, scares her to death. And she thought it scared him a little to – to imagine her as his wife, though she knew he did. Even though he didn't fall off his chair when she walked by, she saw his gaze on the nape of her neck. On her long hair, which he longed to play with. She could see.

But it was too early to decide. She liked Frank too. He had the cutest boyish smile that you wanted to steal. And when he got tipsy at the office parties he would beg to dance with her like it was life and death if she didn't, and when she said no, he would put on the saddest face. It broke her heart. She wanted to dance with him the next party, just because it could be fun.

And all she wanted was to have fun.