I get a pedicure about three times a year: once on my birthday, once when summer is beginning and my toes are about to start going naked, and once or twice on some other day when I declare myself down in the dumps. Today I got my birthday pedicure, and it was a disappointment. I didn’t get the girl I wanted, I got the mean woman instead, and I didn’t ask to wait for the girl I wanted because I don’t know her name and felt awkward about saying I’m waiting for HER and pointing like a five year old, and also the girl I wanted was doing someone else’s toes; an old lady with crazily bent toes and thick, yellow toenails . I like pedicures, but not enough to wait thirty minutes before even starting.
The mean lady is the owner I think, and I don’t know how since she’s so bad. She gave me cold water in my foot tub and seemed annoyed that I wanted it hotter, she clipped one of my toenails crooked and used the razor thing on my heels without even asking me. I hate the razor thing, it scares me. Also, she never brought me the hot towel like the other ladies do. Plus, they were playing a soap opera on four TVs and she seemed interested in that, not my feet. (I watched for a while and was amazed that there were characters named Marlena, Beau and Hope, so they appear to be the exact same characters, played by the same actors, as when I briefly watched that soap opera in high school IN THE LATE EIGHTIES. Even creepier, they do not seem to have aged.)
Also, the massage chair wasn’t relaxing this time, it did this thing where it jiggled my upper back violently, so in the mirror next to me I noticed that it looked very much like I was having a seizure. I couldn’t find the remote to try to change the settings, but I didn’t look very hard because of the mean lady. How can I be in my forties and still be irrationally afraid of the mean pedicure lady? (Incidentally, I am also afraid of my hairdresser, and I always tell her I love my hair even if I don’t.)
But then it occurs to me that from where she sits, literally below me and clipping toenails for twenty bucks even though she’s older than I am and owns a business, maybe the only way to have a little dignity is to be kind of mean and aloof. Because maybe this was not her dream.
Years ago, I used a gift card at a very fancy spa to get a pedicure while pregnant, and the eucalyptus cream they rubbed all over my lower legs caused itchy welts that made the proprietor call an ambulance, probably so the pregnant lady wouldn’t sue him. But he was also mad at me for having an allergic reaction in the first place, and he was so mean to me, in that disdainful, Frenchy way, that I cried. This pedicure wasn’t as bad as that one, at least. At nobody had to call an ambulance. Which is really a good way to think of anything mildly disappointing.
