“Museum opening! That’s exciting.”
She seats herself across from me, making the stool underneath her creak. Nothing between us now but the narrow little station table. Underneath it, our kneecaps touch. And then comes the moment I pay the sixty-odd dollars for, the moment when she reaches across the table and slips my wedding ring off and takes my hands.
As usual, I apologize for how cold they are.
“Actually, it feels sort of nice.” Cassie says. She always says something like that. A friend told me once that a stripper will tell every man she gives a lap dance to that he smells really good and what cologne is he wearing anyway? And she won’t just say it. She’ll breathe him in like his rank skin fumes are mountain air, like her lungs, let alone her little bunny slope nose, can’t get enough.
“It’s always so hot in here,” Cassie says, blowing a lock of red hair off her face as if to prove it. Cassie’s hands always feel warm and swollen, like they’ve been injected with some sort of hot gel. With her fingers, she traces my cracked nail beds, my peeling cuticles, the red, rough skin.
As usual, my hands make Cassie frown. But it’s a tender frown, her sincere concern causing a small furrow to appear between her fawn-colored brows. She is concerned, rightly, that despite many Caribbean Therapy sessions, my hands are still in hideous shape. Am I not using that cuticle oil she gave me a sample of last time? I am not, but I don’t tell her this. I pretend like I’m confused. Like I don’t know what’s going on either.
“Could it be the winter, maybe?” I offer. “It was pretty dry.”
She says it could be—it was a dry one. She brings my hands closer to her face. But it’s more that they look picked at, she says. Dry and cracked like I’ve been running them under hard, hot water all day.
“Huh,” I say. “Weird.”
“Well, don’t worry,” she smiles. “We’ll get you into shape.”
“Thanks,” I say, and she squeezes my hands a little, running her thumb pads over my index knuckles, causing me to sort of sink into my seat.
We’re still holding hands over the table. And it’s always awkward, that moment when she lets go, lowers one wrist into the coconut shell of too-hot salt water.
“Temperature okay?”
“Great.”
“So,” she says, “Amuse Bouche? Hearts and Tarts?”
I pretend to weigh the options but honestly, these are Cassie’s colors. I can’t stand either of them. On my hands, so humorless, they look laughably pink. But I know Cassie hates the blood and earth tones to which I’m naturally partial.
“How about Amuse Bouche? We’ll do Hearts and Tarts next time.”
“I do love that one,” she says.
“Me too.”
She picks up a bottle of hot pink polish and shakes it, causing her copious, freckled cleavage to ripple. I try not to look since looking lights little parts of me on fire. Instead, I keep my gaze focused on how her upper arm flesh bleeds out of her cap sleeves. Not attractive, I tell myself, even though her flesh is young and firm. It won’t always be firm, though. It’ll grow old, I tell myself, just like Cassie. Whenever I’m hungry, which is often, I picture Cassie old. Her bloated body beneath a hospital bedsheet.
? ? ?
While she starts buffing and filing, we talk about what we’ve both been baking recently, even though I’ve baked nothing recently. But Cassie has always been baking something. Usually some white trash cake with a whorish-sounding name. Today, she tells me about one she made recently called Better Than Sex. “So yummy,” she says.
“Sounds yummy,” I say. When I’m around Cassie, I start using words like yummy, even though such words feel misshapen on my lips. I ask her how you make it, knowing I’ll never make it, and she says, “Oh, easy peasy. First, you make devil’s food cake. Like, from a box? Then you take a fork and just stab the hot cake all over. Then you pour caramel sauce and a thingy of condensed milk into the stab holes so the cake soaks it all up? Then you put it in the fridge for, like, three hours. Oh! And once it’s chilled? You put whipped cream on top of that. So yummy.”
“I’ll have to try it.” I’ll never try it. “I did try your slutty brownies,” I add.
“You did?!”
I didn’t, of course. But I tell her all about how I brought them to work and how everyone loved them and begged for the recipe. So I gave it to them. I really hope that’s okay with her.
“Of course!”
She applies the brown sugar exfoliant to my forearms, which will be followed by a yogurt moisture massage. The brown sugar chafes, the yogurt cools. It’s an exhilarating combination. I close my eyes.
“So what have you been up to in the kitchen?” she asks me.
I think about the boneless skinless chicken breast I pounded into a thin white strip with a tenderizer last night, adding a squeeze of lime when I took it out of the oven to make it tropical tasting.