Spooked

I asked for ghosts on my big toes. Any American five year old can tell you what a ghost looks like. An amorphous white blob with two circles for eyes. It’s not like I wanted one of the backup dancers from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video replicated in perfect detail. Just some ghosts to jazz up my pre-Halloween pedicure. That is not exactly what I got.

I treated myself to a pedicure yesterday at my usual salon, but when I walked in the door, everything seemed slightly off. The floor, previously tiled, was now carpeted in a beige that was so beige there was no way to tell if it was new or had been there for years. It looked pre-stained, and the way that it blended in with the beige couch disoriented me. The nail stations (are they desks? Tables?) used to have open shelving on top, like a hutch, but that was gone as well, leaving a lot more wall visible and bare. I only recognized two of the usual bored Vietnamese nail technicians, and instead of the regular bossman with thinning hair and a faintly pubic mustache, there was a new bossman with thinning hair and a faintly pubic mustache. Like there was a glitch in the matrix.

After I picked a color, I bypassed the newer, nicer massage chairs to sit in one of the older ones at the end. While the bossman filled the foot bath with water hot enough to cook a lobster, I adjusted the seat and switched on the massage remote. It was less relaxing than I remembered, but if I were going purely on memory, I could have sworn I was outside of Rose’s, about 1975, riding on the twenty five cent carousel. I grabbed a new gossip rag from the stack next to the chair and pretended to enjoy myself.

While the bossman removed my old, chipped polish and trimmed my toenails, he tried to hard sell me a manicure. I told him no thanks, but he was determined.

“I make you nails better. I file down, put pink and white set, no one know not you nail.”I told him no thank you again.

“You want special foot scrub? Four kind. $25. You like? You pick one?”

“No, thank you,” I said again, sweetly. I was planning on ghosts. That was enough of a value added nail experience.

He inspected my calluses. I learned why K-Fed is gaining weight. He rubbed generic pink lotion on the stubble of my shins. I read about how “Jon and Kate plus 8” is now called “Kate plus 8.” He shook my nail polish bottles, then stopped. I had selected black and orange. I wanted every other toe black, with a ghost painted on each big toe. I explained that to the bossman, who cocked his head to one side like a confused puppy.

I tried again, pointing to my toes, “Black, orange, black, orange, black.”

He looked over to the bored nail technician sitting in the next chair, who stopped filing her nails and sing-songed some Vietnamese back at him.

“Okay,” he said, pointing to my big toes. “Orange, then black, then orange, then black, then orange?”

“No,” I tried again. “Black, orange, black, orange, black. With ghosts on the big toes.”

A giant light bulb went on over his head. “Ohhh,” he said. And then he painted my toes as I had explained. When he finished, he got up and pointed to the seat. The bored technician sat down, holding a basket of tiny bottles.

“You want ghost?” she asked me.

“Yes, a ghost,” I answered. “On the big toes.”

“Ghost?” she asked again.

“Yes, ghost. Oooooo. Ghost. Boo. A ghost?”

She nodded and made a white dot on each of my big toenails. She looked at this for a while, and then said,” You want hat?”

Hat? No, I don’t want a fucking hat. I want a ghost.

I said this instead, “Um, no. You might be thinking of a witch. Witches wear pointy hats.” I gestured a pointy hat atop my head. “Ghost’s don’t really wear hats.”

She nodded again and started painting little ghost bodies on the round circles. Then she stared at them some more. She painted on two black dots for eyes. I was okay with it. Then she took the black and painted on more black dots down the middle of the ghost.

“Are those buttons?” I asked her.

She stared at me blankly. Perhaps all the ghosts she knows have buttons. In December. When we call them snowmen.

After she finished painting buttons on the other ghost, she looked up at me and said, “You want hat?”

I exhaled loudly and said, “Sure, why not? Hats will be great. They’ll match the buttons.”
So she painted on little pointy hats. Like dunce caps. Or witches’ hats. Or hoods.

“Want glitter?” she asked.

“Go for it!”

The other nail technicians came over and looked at my feet. “Like star at night,” one of them said to me, pointing to the glitter. Then they began conversing in Vietnamese, which I didn’t understand, all clicks and ngs, and then they laughed hard, which I did understand.

After I left, I took some time in the parking lot to really inspect my toenails. I don’t know if they are supposed to be ghosts or snowmen or both. But with the pointy hats, they do look a lot like imperial wizards of the Ku Klux Klan. Racist ghost snowmen. With stars. My Halloween pedicure is much scarier than I could have ever imagined.