I Wasn't Ready
1:21 PM
I laughed it
off but I wanted to die. I wanted to cry. Maybe it was too soon for me to be
diving right in but I smelled the acrylic and saw the sign MANICURE
hand-painted in the window and I went in.
" {Insert
some Spanish for how may I help you?} "
It was a
really wide and desolate room - no sign of any nails or toes. Maybe I was
expecting to see some little Asian women.
"Hi, I
want to get my feet done..."
"QUE?!"
She looked
like a regular older Black lady from Baltimore. Dark and very frail, with a
strong attitude in her tone. I sat right next to her on the bench like I'd known her all my
life. I was comfortable.
"I don't
speak Spanish."
I still have
no idea what she was saying to the lady next to her but it wasn't nice. She was
talking enough sh't to make us all laugh, while mimicking my words in an attempted pretentious
American accent. She yelled up to a younger woman that was sitting upstairs. I
thought maybe it was the owner of the shop. I thought maybe she could speak
English.
I walked up
the stairs and felt like I was on the Grand Concourse or Fordham Road. Lots of
their nail shops are on the second floor too. But when I got to the top, it
looked just like Yanira's Dominican Salon that Facey and I used to go to every
other Saturday in the Bronx. Foggy vanity mirrors with dim yellowy light bulbs
and tattered red leather chairs were waiting to be filled with the healthy wide
hips of the whispering colored women whose eyes moved simultaneously with each
of my moves. There was one big metal fan pointing at all of them. I wondered
how they hadn’t passed out yet. I knew it was scorching under that dryer
because they were wearing towels, held up with those tie-up hairnets – the only
defense for protecting ones ears from melting in the heat. Those dryers are not
made for skin. Just a few moments ago, when I was walking alone down the
streets of Havana, I felt like I was home in the Heights. But when I got to the
top of those stairs, I was a black sheep. Everyone heard what the woman
downstairs yelled and all at once, they began to shower me with more "Que pasa mami?”
and “Que tu quieres?" than I could reply to...
"I want
to get my feet done." I pointed down at my feet. Trying to compensate
for my inability to utter any of those words in Spanish.
She was
lost. She didn’t even respond.
"I don't
speak Spanish..." I felt dumb.
"Tu no
Cubana?" She balled her face up so tightly. This was my first language
immersion lesson: Cubans speak with their entire faces. She was pissed with me.
“No. I’m
American.” I hated that I had to admit that.
“I’m Ah-merrr-ee-cahn…”
She mocked me but she sounded ridiculous. The shop laughed. I didn’t. I looked
down at my feet, wanting to race out of there with the speed and silence of a Manhattan
mouse but I couldn’t get out of there now, not even if I tried.
My feet were barely
soaking in a transparent jade-green bowl – about the size of the bowls that my
Aunt Barbara and the Pentecostal mothers used to wash and pray over each
other’s feet just before the Friday night shut-ins at Jasper Roll’s church over
on 3rd in the Bronx.
One foot by
one foot, she took her time removing my old polish, scraping the dead skin, and
filing each toenail. There were no filing machines, no cotton balls, no massage
chairs, nor were there any rapid-hydro pumps to give my feet that extra clean
feel. The chair I sat in was more like one you would find in a high school
classroom and she did all of the work on my feet underneath her desk. She showed
me a small basket of colors to choose from. They looked pretty old, like the
ones your grandmother has under the sink in her bathroom from back when Ray
Charles was poppin’. A thin oily substance floated on top of each color –
colors that had no liquid flow at all. It was tiramisu behind the glass of
those bottles. I chose the closest thing to white but it looked more like
silver when she began painting it on. She went the extra mile and added a white
French line that I didn’t ask for but didn’t mind.
When it was
time for her to put on the clear topcoat, she lifted my foot to her lap. It was
then that I could really see her Indian-brown face, long and lustrous black
plaits, and the cutest curly-bracket shaped nose. She appeared to be between 16
and 18, no more than 21.
“Que tu
nombre?” I hoped I asked that right.
“Yareesa.” It was such a pretty name. She was such a pretty
girl. But she still didn’t smile.
“What es you
naym?” Her English was decent enough for me to understand.
“Valencia…”
“Balencia?”
She bawled her face up again. “{Insert some Spanish here}”
They all
started yelling from under the dryers. I didn’t know what anyone was saying
until finally someone hollered,
“Where you
fruuh?” Rolling the r but missing the ending m.
“New York… I’m
from New York.” I was excited that they were interested in me but still felt
stupid for not knowing that that’s what they were trying to ask me the whole
time.
“Ayyy… Nueva
York…{More Spanish that I didn’t know.}”
“Dias.” She
finished my toes and I handed her a twenty. Once again, that face scrunched up
so hard and this time, I just knew it would get stuck.
Using my
context clues, I figured out, she was upset because that bill was so big. She
didn’t have any change. No one in the shop did either. It was so weird. She
told me to wait while she ran across the street to get change for the money.
When she came back, she passed me a 10, without even looking me in the face. I
tried to say thank you but she was gone. She disappeared into a room in the
back of the shop by the time I looked up. I didn’t get it … Why was she so
hasty? I couldn’t even tip her. Everyone was still looking at me like I was
some freak-show so I did what I had been waiting to do since I got there.
“Gracias!
Adios!” I left as fast as I could.
“Adios,
chica!”
I made a right
and then a left on San Francisco to get back to my hostel. I sped past Paola, my
new friend from Chile and dove behind my twin bed. I could not go back outside
until I knew enough Spanish. I never wanted to be embarrassed like that again. I
needed to get my Spanish-English dictionary as fast as I could. I could never
leave the house without it! But to my dismay, when I looked through my unpacked
bags, it was gone. Damnit! I lost it in the airport!
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