If cow-face Jackie wanted to get married in the dead of winter, that was Jackie’s business, her bovine business, and there was an end.
Mrs. Tom Collins allowed the leather pedicure chair to envelop her. She sat on it, sat in it, resting with the unease of a ruler on a throne. Mrs. Tom gazed down at the scalp of the laborer two feet below her eyeline and its center-part pebbled hairline. The girl bent diligently over Mrs. Tom’s elephantine feet as Mrs. Tom glared. (It’s just how her face was set, not because her brain underneath her face communicated anything to her cheek muscles.)
The salon was a single room with five Mrs. Tom-holding chairs set against the far wall, facing five waist-length tables where other Mrs. Tom’s perched for manicures. Mirrors covered the walls behind the pedicure chairs and reflected back to the mirrors on the other side. Pedicure-getting-Mrs. Tom’s stared at manicure-getting-Mrs. Tom’s, an endless reflection of endless beautification.
A single curtain hid the salon from the room in back where you hid while a technician pulled hair out of your face. Cutting and painting toenails and fingernails, that was fine for public consumption, but hair on your face—please! Never. That required a little privacy, you’d never share your hairy face with the public as you plucked it, or got it plucked. A lady’s a lady, not a chicken.
The pedicurist tapped the back of Mrs. Tom’s left calf at her own eye-level. The elephant—wait, let’s extend kindness to Mrs. Tom—baby elephant—planted her left foot in the water of the once-white plastic pedicure bath. The sudden motion of Mrs. Tom’s foot splashed water on the black cotton pinafore of the nail girl, who glanced up, expressionless, before she tapped the back of Mrs. Tom’s right calf. Mrs. Tom took an ounce more care this time. She didn’t splash.
In her high chair, Mrs. Tom sank back as the foot bath water roiled. Jets of tiny bubbles shot submerged streams to the callused skin of her heels. Your heels would be callused, too, if you’d been through Mrs. Tom’s nightmare—the caterers, the florists, all kinds of labor to direct and orient and manage so that the wedding reception would be something you could talk about, not be embarrassed about.
Jacqueline had no idea at all, what it took out of a person to be at the helm of something like this. The mother of the bride always did the heavy lifting.
Cow-faced Jacqueline—she’d had that blank look about her since birth and, of course, Mrs. Tom never told her own child that she had a bovine look about her—had looked on inside the florists’ shop, alongside the scurrying wedding planner. It was Mrs. Tom who chose the right flowers (lilies) and later, the right colors (mauve and a deeper shade of mauve, what was Jaqueline thinking with green and blue, what was her wedding going to be, a coloring book?), the right DJ—the right everything.
Mrs. Tom continued to sit on high, musing while the pedicurist tended the feet in front of her. The girl had pulled out a rough sponge—Jesus, is that rocks?—to scrub away the calluses from Mrs. Tom’s heels. Bubble-lather hid the girl’s motions. Back and forth, back and forth—ouch! Mrs. Tom winced with a serpentine intake of breath, a sharp hiss—“Sssss! Watch it!”—as the nerves of her heels signaled pain to her miles-away brain.
The girl had never learned English, didn’t understand it, but she understood the expression on Mrs. Tom’s face. She nodded, mute, and continued to scrub less-scrubbingly.
Mrs. Tom sank bank again with a sigh. She allowed herself the pleasure of a pseudo-nap in the high chair, barely waking as the girl brought her left foot and then her right foot out of the bath to the long low platform of the chair. Mrs. Tom’s feet sat on high.
The girl reached into a small mobile heater next to the chair and drew out two rolled white towels. She began to swaddle one around Mrs. Tom’s left calf. The heat woke Mrs. Tom, “Too hot! Jeez, what are you doing? I don’t want this!”
“Massage part of pedicure.” The girl’s low voice stayed even.
“No, I don’t want! Can you just paint them? That’s the only thing—uff!” Mrs. Tom’s words sailed over the girl’s head and into the space of the salon. These people!
The girl nodded, mute, and removed the towel from Mrs. Tom’s partially-wrapped left calf. “OK. You pick color?” The girl reached over to the mobile pedicure cart and held the Thrill of Brazil and Big Apple Red in her hand.
Fury rose in Mrs. Tom, then sank as she realized that she could do what you did when service people weren’t up to snuff, “Thrill of Brazil.”
The girl started and finished painting Mrs. Tom’s toenails. Mrs. Tom rose, extricated herself from a leather embrace, and paid for the service, no tip. How else did you communicate what you thought of the service you were getting?
Mrs. Tom pressed the door of the salon with one hand, feet still in cheap thin green foam pedicure flip-flops. She’d let her nails finish drying in open air. Her car was close, she could walk the three feet even though it was freezing out. Next to her car in the parking lot of the salon was a singing tree. Birds, hundreds of them, had settled on its branches, invisible to an eye looking from far away. The tree sang and dropped invisible armor onto Mrs. Tom Collins. She paused underneath, then turned to her car door to unlock it. Those stupid birds were about to leave streaks of white all over the car.
Pinki Mishra holds degrees from Harvard and Carnegie Mellon and is completing an MFA at Drexel University, where she serves as Fiction Editor for Paper Dragon. Her 20-year career in mergers and acquisitions informs her understanding of how easily truth can be sidestepped. She lives outside Philadelphia.
