House of Sticks by Ly Tran

Author:Ly Tran [Tran, Ly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Hey, Beautiful

I SUPPOSE NOT BEING able to see affected my ability to perceive beauty. From a young age, what made things beautiful—what made a girl pretty and a boy handsome, what made an outfit stunning and a hairstyle cute—was lost on me. All I could see were blurry shapes and faces, so I thought beauty was nothing more than an artificial construct. In that, I was supported by the Buddhist notion that nothing in the physical world exists, that all things in this three-dimensional realm are illusory. So when friends asked me if I thought someone was hot or sexy, I didn’t know what to say. At some point, people started calling me asexual. Which bothered me, mostly because it was just proof of yet another thing that I lacked.

But I couldn’t escape thinking about it. Working in the nail salon, I was surrounded by women and men who spent a lot of time and paid a lot of money to be beautiful. Beauty was something to strive toward, something to possess, something that could elevate one’s position in life. Was beauty something even I could possess? I asked myself. When there weren’t any customers around, I would examine myself in the mirror, standing so close I would fog it up with my breath. I wondered about what others saw when they looked at me, and I wished that I could see myself through their unbroken eyes.

By now, the summer after my freshman year at Bronx Science, our nail salon was overflowing on weekends: mothers and daughters, boyfriends and uncles, grandmothers and grandchildren, career women and partygoers, all crowding into the cramped room.

Seeing how overwhelmed we were as the only manicurists in the salon, even my father started to help us with a few mani-pedis, though having received no formal training, he wasn’t very good at it.

On one busy Saturday afternoon, I was working at the second manicure desk from the entrance, my father at the first. He was carelessly slapping thick layers of acrylic onto his client’s nails. His glasses had started once again to slip off his face because they were held up by only one temple arm, the other having broken years ago. So he had positioned himself in a way I’d come to associate with him—face up, chin jutting out, to try to keep the glasses on his nose. The girl he was working on turned around to her friend to mouth the words “What the fuck?” as she gestured with her other hand in my father’s direction.

Meanwhile my mother was at the pedicure station working on someone’s feet, the nails turned upward with a thick yellow layer of fungus between the nail and the nail bed. All ten of her toenails were infected.

“I want you to fix my toes,” the woman said with an accent thick and slow as molasses. She wiggled a set of ten very long and elaborate fingernails my mother had done for her the previous week, showing off. She was a regular.

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