Salon

by Anastasia Wasko

 

Tuesdays were good days for appointments. On the Tuesday of which I write, I sat in the salon, the so-called house of beauty, and thinking about when I was little, remembering that then too I had always painted my nails. I start to feel some worry creep in: I keep looking over my shoulder for my bag.

Should I move it off the couch? I can’t reach it in a pinch, that is, if I need to reach it in a pinch. Shit.

Then I wonder about the length of time I could squeeze out of this coat of nail polish, trying to figure out how many days it would be until I needed to buy polish remover. Then I start to think about the weather. Would it rain? Shit. If it did, the sidewalks would instantly turn into super slick walkways. When that happens, I never make it back to the rental apartment without scraping a toe. I hope the pedi I’m getting sticks at least through the afternoon. I mean, pedi chips would be tolerable, excusable, because what would kill me are messed up hands. I am convinced that people judge me by the number of uncut cuticles that I have on my fingertips; should they see that I have fingers that look like they’ve been run on graters, the disinterested party won’t think highly of my ideas. In fact, the idea of mani chips itself kills my thought process. What if I could do a story where the fate of the world rests on stashes of OPI, my favorite brand of nail polish.

“Anastasia—¿tienes afán?” my mani–pedi girl asks.

I’m jerked out of my thoughts. She wants to know if I am in a rush; I think she feels my impenetrable urgency.

“Yes, I am."

I’m sorting. I’m separating the thoughts from my creative ideas. I need to get to the stories. You know, the ones that aren’t real yet? The things I need to write about so that they can become real? I’m truly preoccupied. So nice of you to notice. Now, hurry up please,” is what I wanted to say. But I didn’t. Maybe she sees a furrow in my face or an extra wrinkle under my eyes. She would—women always inspect other women. I know first-hand.

“No,” I say. “No rush at all.” I hold the arm of the chair tightly with my free hand.

She flashes me an inquisitive look. She starts to massage my hands with lotion.

I steal my own glances at the of the people in the salon (a femme fatale man and another female). They, the people who I dub the mani–pedi girls (and even the mani-pedi man), are all so beautiful. They always are. It is the same old, same old: the lipsticked, blushed, mascaraed, brushed, tweezed, and waxed people of salon culture. I’ve sought out the people of salon culture here in Colombia. Their habitat is the standard: the padded chairs, the plastic over the tools, the rolling carts with clear plastic drawers overloaded with nail polish and files, the faint smell of acrylic and polish remover, the cheesy pictures (in this case, haircuts from the 80s on white models).

My mani–pedi girl—Patricia—cuts my cuticles. I watch her: the concentrated look on her face— it was calming to me. I had worked up to a certain level of comfort with her. She used to be full of suspicion. She hadn’t been aware that I could understand her language. I entered, she snubbed me. She turned her back toward me, started to talk about the overrunning of foreigners in the town, addressing the other salon employees, ignoring me. But I stepped forward, jumped into the conversation, told her in Spanish that we gringos weren’t like some bug invading their lush garden paradise, assuring her that we gringos, the foreigners, bring her good things like lots of business. “Don’t you like the extra tips that you make?” I had asked.

I remember the conversation well. I think of it each time that I go to the salon.

Patricia looks up at me. “Yeah, yeah, what was the name of that song?” she asks. Then she turns her gaze down, picks up a bottle of polish, shakes it. She starts painting my nails red.

She must have been mid-thought, because her question had no context.

“Um,” I start to say. My thoughts descend to small talk. Herd talk. “Which one?”

She breaks out in a grin, takes her nail, digs it in to the side of my cuticle and removes some polish that dripped from the brush tip to my finger tip: “You know, ‘atrevéte-te-te—‘”

My thought gears start kicking into action. Aha! I inhale softly, and we both look up—meet each other’s gaze, and I finish the chorus: “salte de closet, destapate, quitate el esmalte.”

“Sí, Anastasia! Eso!” She taps my thigh with the back of her hand. A warm gesture. I appreciate that. We laugh. Patricia goes back to work. I continue to watch her, the top of her head, as she quietly repeats the chorus. She clicks and chews her bubble gum. She is very, very concentrated on painting my nails. I trust her, and I trust the ritual. But I secretly find the situation very funny—the lyrics we love say to “come out of the closet, take off the nail polish”—uncover yourself.

 

Ha!

 

I repeat the same song in my head: “atrevéte-te-te …” Dare yourself to— says Residente, the reggaetonero, singer of this fallacious song.

 

Dare myself to… what? I think. What would I do?

 

He sings, but it is as if he is talking to me directly.

 

“Change your serious face; your intellectual, bookish face; I’m gonna inject you with bacteria so that you start spinning, like a carousel…”

 

I converse with him in my head, imagine I am telling him directly, “I’m not really in to injections for beauty like Botox, but I could spin for a while.” Then I think: Language, what a fucking thing. The rhymes that those words of wisdom ride out on are so true.

 

Dare myself to… what?

 

“Ay, ay, ay,” Patricia says, again out of nowhere. She shakes her head, stops painting my nails.

“Listo,” she says. Finished. She slides back on her rolly chair, looks up at my head. “Want to cut your hair today too?”

“Sure,” I reply.

I get up, and Patricia moves quickly to clear the way. I waddles over to the hair chair, and, holding my hands up, wiggle my butt, then my body into the seat. I look at myself in the mirror in front of me as she hovers over my head. No thoughts: just an image.

It’s all just an image.

She trims my hair with the razor. We swap tips on shoe shopping. She asks again where I am from. New Jersey.

“Oh, like New York City?”

“New York City is close. But not the same.”

She surprises me. How could she not be aware that New York City, the New York City was something different? Twice I explain that no, New York is not a suburb of Miami. Simple discussions, herd discussions. But I like her and her hot pink sandals and acid wash denim (even though it looks a little too tight).

She becomes quiet again: concentration. Now, she is tracing the star, a whopper of a 3-inch shape that had been razed onto the back head before I left New Jersey for this trip. She rocks back and forth, licks her lips, furrows her brow. Then she steps back and takes a minute to smile. She gives me a hand mirror to reflect the back of my head against the larger mirror. I smile too.

“Niña?” says the other mani-pedi woman in the salon, half asking, more like directing Patricia to come over. Patricia’s head turns. She walks to the front desk. They talk, point to a calendar, discuss who would take which days to work. I hear Patricia say she wants all the Tuesdays for the next few weeks.

She flashes a quick glance at me—which I see in the reflection of the large mirror—but I pretend not to notice. I giggle inside, secretly.

“Listo,” the other woman says, scribbling something on to the calendar.

“So stylish!” Patricia says, walking back over to me.

The mani-pedi man joins the oogling over me. “What a face to carry that short hair!” “She looks like a rock star with those tattoos!”

“It’s a Rihanna,” says the other mani-pedi woman.

A patron that I had not noticed before—an older woman who was reading a three-month old copy of Vanidades, wearing a tight blue dress, sitting with curlers in her hair, chirps in: “Rihanna, quien

“Una pop star,” the mani-pedi man says. “Distur-bee-a?” He arches his eyebrows.

The old woman shakes her head.

Patricia smiles. “La negra con las nalgas,” she says, improves some dance moves, and butchers a few lines in English from one of the biggest hits, Disturbia. “Bom bom be bum…”

“Aha!” says the old woman. “Asi es!” She burst out in a smile and quickly looks at me, nods her head, then goes back to reading the magazine.

Patricia ruffles the back of my hair. Touches the star one more time.

“Algo mas, Anastasia?”

“No,” I say. My look was complete.

I pay, leaving her with a generous tip and a guarantee to come back soon.

“Ciao, Anastasia,” she says, her voice trailing out the open doors. Patricia, the mani-pedi man, the other mani-pedi woman, and the old woman watch as I walk away.

“Hasta pronto,” I reply. I give a swift wave and spin around. I carefully tiptoe in my flip-flops out and start the walk back to the apartment. A sense of amazement boils up as I catch glimpses of the other women walking around the mountainous city in high heels, gracefully striding…

Stride. I need some stride. Aha! I need the Guccis. They would give me stride. I pull my giant sunglasses out of my bag and put them on. I turn on my mp3 player, stick the buds in my ears. I press play. The first song kicks in. As soon as I hear the high-pitched whine of the clarinet, I know the challenge is still right on my travelling tail: “atrevéte-te-te…”

 

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