It’s my guilty pleasure, seeing Cammie over at Aria Lifestyle Salon during lunch hour for the Caribbean Hand Treatment. The salon’s out of my way, south of the city center, and I can’t really afford the treatment on my temp salary. Also, I don’t know why but after Cammie’s done with me, the skin around my nails peels and bleeds for days. Then there’s the shoddy polish job that I further destroy, sometimes within minutes of walking out of there. Still. Every week, like clockwork, I’m compelled to call behind a closed door, like I’m calling for a sex worker.
“Hi,” I whisper. I try to make the whisper easy breezy. “I’d like to make an appointment with Cammie.”
“Cassie,” the receptionist corrects.
“Cassie, right. I’d like to make an appointment with Cassie.”
“What service?” Is there accusation in her voice? I can’t tell.
When I tell the receptionist it’s for the Caribbean Hand Treatment, there’s silence, then a lot of typing. Too much typing. Heat creeps up the back of my neck. I grow nervous when she puts me on hold, when I’m forced to listen to the sound of Zen-like chimes encouraging patience. I am not patient. I begin to chew on my nails, which still bear traces of Bastille My Heart, from my last tryst with Cassie.
When at last she comes back on the line, she tells me there’s a time issue. The thing is I like to schedule the Caribbean during lunch hour. I request noon in a tone that implies I have the full and important schedule of an executive and I’m squeezing it in between meetings, like it’s my moment of Zen on a busy day in the financial or some such district. I’m told this is a busy time for Cassie. I’m reminded that Hattie, the other esthetician, is usually pretty open at this hour. Do I want Hattie? I remember Hattie, a pointy-faced young woman with bangs like Frankenstein’s creature who looks like she’s composed entirely of tendons, whose chest, under her smock, is almost completely concave. I tell them, No, I don’t want Hattie, I want Cammie—Cassie, right.
Hunger yawns in me as I enter the salon on the appointed day. I am on nothing but oats and anger consumed over the sink at six a.m. But this is good, I think. I will not have lunch today. I will have Cammie. Cassie. Where is she? Panic seizes me, briefly, by the throat when I do not see her among the billowy-bloused, asymmetrically haired spa workers. Then I remember it’s early. I am seventeen minutes early by my watch.
I tell myself I’m early not because I’m eager to see her but in order to enjoy the spa’s many amenities. I sit in the waiting area and contemplate the crystalized ginger in its bowl. The toasted almonds and dried apricots in their respective glass jars. I watch other female clients partake of it all with tiny wooden tongs. Many of these women are in mid-treatment, some with their heads covered in tinfoil, from which tufts of colorless hair sprout. They leaf through magazines like Shape and Prevention, sipping complimentary licorice root–sweetened tea from handleless, dirt-colored cups. I flip through Self without really seeing, and feel as if I’m drowning—What if Cassie has forgotten me? What if she couldn’t make it in today?—until I hear my name called like a question and I look up and there she is. Spilling out of a zebra-print maxi dress. Grinning crookedly at me between red corkscrew curls. My eye runs worriedly over her frame for any signs of weight loss. Seeing there are none, I breathe out. That Cassie is even fatter than I remember sates me in ways I cannot explain.
“Hi!” she says. “Elizabeth?”
“Liz.”
“Liz, right. Follow me. They’ve got us all set up!”
I follow her broad back as she waddles over to the nail station.
“So what are we doing today?” she asks me. “Chocoholic? The Crème Br?lée?”
“The Caribbean.”
“Ooh. That’s my favorite.”
At the station, the implements of the treatment lie at the ready: the edible ingredients in receptacles made to resemble cleaved coconut shells; the pointy silver instruments that she will employ clumsily, causing the aforementioned peeling and bleeding of my cuticle area; the stone bowl of hot salt water in which she will soak my hands—long and thin like Bela Lugosi’s—one by one; Cassie herself, her bra straps digging into her shoulder flesh. An Olga? Freya, maybe? One of those brands with a Nordic-sounding name, which thank God I don’t have to wear anymore. I can tell just by looking that Cassie bought hers too small.
“So is there an occasion we’re getting ready for or . . . ?” Cassie asks me, leaving the question hanging.
Cassie likes there to be an occasion. There never is, but I pick one out of the air anyway.
“Museum opening,” I say.