Does jotting thoughts in a small orange Rhodia notebook while getting a pedicure count as Finally Writing? Okay, that is a rhetorical question. I don’t want to get distracted by equivocation. For example, you might reply, “ Does writing ‘Wash Me’ with your finger on a the dusty rear window of a dope dealer’s Hummer parked in front of Ukiah Natural Foods count as Finally Writing?” This is not a conversation. This is me with a renewed determination to fill those spaces of time when I am sitting, hands free, with a pen and a small notebook, items you can count on finding in my purse.
Right now, the habit of writing is my point. It’s 6:20 p.m. in this nail salon in a small strip mall in the same part of town as Wall Mart and Staples. There is only one other customer and she is about to leave. If I had my camera, I’d take a picture of the rows of life-sized, flesh-colored plastic index fingers, bent like swan’s necks, showing all the design possibilities for acrylic nails. They are grotesque, but you get used to it.
Here’s what is unusual. A middle-aged Vietnamese man prepares to give me a pedicure. In my experience, the guys stick to doing the acrylic nails, and they are usually younger than this man, who, with his wire rimmed glasses, seems scholarly. I can imagine him working in the public library. I watch him sitting in the low-backed black chair removing the dead skin from beneath each of my toenails, concentrating on the job with the same diligence as the women do. He wears surgical gloves, a white t-shirt beneath a white smock. He could be a druggist. Although his head is bent in the direction of my feet, he joins in the desultory conversation with the other employees—another man and three women.
If I had some kind of recording device I would capture the sounds they make. I don’t have the slightest idea how a writer would put those alien phonemes into English. I want to say, “It sounds like Navajo,” but what the hell does that mean? I wonder what they are talking about. Me? Are they saying critical things about me? Is he making some kind of comment about my feet? Is my reaction normal paranoia, a normal egotism: it must be about me.
The other day I listened to an NPR interview with a man who has written a book about what annoys us and why. It turns out that other people talking on their cell phones in public is our number one annoyance. No surprise. The author had a scientific term for this specific kind of annoyance. Basically, it’s annoying because we are only getting half of the communication. For some reason, we are compelled to try to fill in the other side of the conversation. I would say it’s the urge to make sense. Literally, “create sense” of our experience. That’s why I write, want to write, need to write: Man’s (and Woman’s) search for meaning, and all that.
Abruptly, the pedicurist stands up, nods at me, and leaves. A Vietnamese woman in a plaid shirt with a button missing takes over. She explains in fairly good English, “He’s going to the grocery store.” Maybe that’s what they have been talking about, collaborating on a grocery list. I don’t know and really don’t care. I go back to writing, and then—I don’t know why—I say to her, “You know something interesting. When people laugh, it all sounds the same.”
She looks at me, nods in agreement, and says, “people only have three laughs, ‘ha, ha’; ‘ho, ho’; ‘hee, hee.’” She repeats the three forms of laughter, motions for me to stand up and go sit at the nail-drying station. That’s pretty much it.
