Growing Girls by Jeanne Marie Laskas

Author:Jeanne Marie Laskas [Laskas, Jeanne Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Humor, Parenting, Nonfiction, Retail
ISBN: 9780307420695
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2009-07-22T04:00:00+00:00

a day at the mall

On the spur of a hot Saturday moment when we were killing time in the mall, flipping and flopping in our flip-flops and enjoying all that air conditioning, I stopped in to see if there were any available appointments at the Pedicure Junction nail salon. The girls were old enough for beauty treatments, I reasoned, and I knew the idea would sit well with my friend BK, who was due to join us, and whom I’d been more or less babysitting ever since she started her chemo. Actually, the babysitting started shortly after the diagnosis, a small “invasive ductal carcinoma” in BK’s left breast that sent her spiraling.

We didn’t have any prescribed mall plans so I figured after some food-court pizza we could all sit in a row and giggle together while the ladies painted our nails lipstick red and we all gossiped about underpants. To a four-year-old and a six-year-old, there is nothing funnier than the word “underpants.”

I walked into Pedicure Junction and all the manicurists were young Asian women, and so naturally they beamed when they saw Anna and Sasha, throwing smiles to one another and chattering in Chinese. I was pretty sure it was Chinese, as opposed to perhaps Korean or Vietnamese, or maybe this was just wishful thinking. Every time I meet a woman of obvious Asian descent and find out she’s from China, I feel happy and connected. We are long-lost sisters. We grew up on the same street. We fought in the same war. We share some anonymous link.

One of the women approached and opened the little gate leading back to the long aisle of manicurists. “Three of you?” she said with a wide smile. “Come pick your colors.”

“There’s another,” I said, holding up four fingers. “My friend is coming.”

“Sit, sit, sit,” she said.

“Actually, I just want to make an appointment for a little later,” I said. “When my friend gets here.”

“What color?” she said.

“No, I need to wait for my friend,” I said, pointing to my watch to suggest another time.

“We paint you now, your friend later.”

“Um, I’d like to schedule us all together.”

But she took me by the hand and already the girls were sitting with another woman who was dazzling them with her display of glitter polish, and in no time I found that I was sitting in a big white leatherette lounge chair with a shiatsu massage mechanism working my lumbar region and my feet were soaking in a pool of invigorating bubbles. Did I say I wanted a pedicure? Did I even indicate that desire?

Oh my God, China, I thought. I forgot all about this. But this was exactly how it was in China. You never walked into a shop and simply browsed. There was no time for browsing! Sit, sit, sit. And here, let me take your children off your hands, here’s a yoyo for them to play with, and here’s my aunt she loves babies, she will play with them, sit, sit, sit, do you like this? What kind of pearls do you like? You would look good in jade.

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