You're a Pisa Work, Lady Godiva

By Anne Chudobiak

My beloved hairdresser Mathilde makes the appointment. Nails. Three o’clock.

We take her car. A Mercedes. I don’t know how old.

The shop is small. I squeeze in beside a guy--“What’s he doing here?”--and a lady who is drying her toes.

A woman takes my hand, asks me what I want (something that I had once years ago?). This must be the boss. Tami. “Rose et blanc,” she asks, incredulous. “En poudre?”

Mathilde is a teeny bit jealous. “Can I get that next time, too?” she asks.

A phone rings.

“Honey,” says a woman, her hands laid out, freshly lacquered, temporarily disabled.

The guy beside me unzips a purse. “Hello?”

I am guided to a place by the window. I smile at the woman at the next table. She blushes. I know her. She co-owns a health food store, where she mans the cosmetics, non-toxic, of course. I feel as though I’ve caught her out, which only makes me feel more warmly towards her.

“Come by the store, tomorrow,” she tells me when she leaves. “I want to see how your nails turn out.”

An exaggerated woman bursts in, already tall, gigantic in heels, a shock of make-up, electric blond extensions. The braces on her teeth don’t help.

I gasp and Mathilde gives me a look.

“C’est pour un party d’Hallowe’en,” the woman insists. She says hello to everyone in the room. She’d kiss us if she could. I grin fiendishly by way of apology.

“How long?” a woman with clippers asks me. I call her Silent Bob.

“Not too long that I can’t type,” I say, tapping my fingers on the table, wishing that I could get my pen from my bag. If that guy with the purse was my boyfriend, would he take dictation?

“Encore?” asks Silent Bob.

“Encore,” I say.

“Ok,” she says. “Lavez les mains.”

I make my way past a nail-polish display (You’re a Pisa Work: pink; Lady Godiva: red), to the back of the shop, where an elderly Vietnamese lady, a friend of Tami’s, shoves me into a bathroom, saying, “Si vous voulez!” By this, I understand that I too will soon lose the use of my hands. I am already somewhat compromised. I struggle with the paper towel.

“It eez better if you pay now,” says Silent Bob when I emerge, my hands held out like a five-year-old’s, awaiting inspection (“Did you use soap? Let me smell.”)

Beside me, a customer prepares to leave. One of Tami’s minions helps her with her coat, doing up the buttons, wrapping the scarf around, once, twice, tenderly. “Is that how you like it?” she asks, before holding the door open and easing the woman onto the sidewalk. A rainy afternoon on the Plateau Mont-Royal. Pas mal gorgeous.