Pretty (5 page)

“I am so sorry. So sorry. I had the much traffic. Take your notebooks out because we are too late.”

Miss Mary-Jo is a stocky Armenian woman who barely comes up to my shoulders. When she reaches to give me a hug I feel like Godzilla. She wears rhinestone pins on her green teacher's smock: scissors on the left and
I Love Jesus
on the right. Her short, eggplant-colored mushroom hairdo bounces all as one unit as she begins the day's lesson, earnestly looking out at us from behind globs of mascara.

“Yesterday was the one for the plain manicures and we had a great success with this one. Today we will learn the oil manicures. Oil manicures are the very good ones. It is called to upsell.”

Miss Mary-Jo writes “upsel” on the board, breaking the chalk in two, the errant piece flying into the room and bouncing off a table.

She goes on, “You can upsell the regular manicure to the oil manicure and it is for the more money. Always you want to make the more money, but only for a good one. Only for to help people.”

With her remaining chalk stub, she begins to list on the board the steps for manicure preparation, copying painfully from the book that we all have in front of us already. She quits after about three words, exasperated, and instead has Violet read aloud:

This list of instructions continues for twelve pages, mercifully ending with:

There is another whole page on “Cleanup and Sanitation.”

I look around at the faces of my classmates. The fluorescent lights illuminate everyone's most damning qualities: lines and blackheads and brassy bleached hair and greasy skin and heavy features. We're none of us very pretty in this light. Maybe Vera almost makes the grade, but not even Vera looks all that hot in here. Pretty requires a more forgiving context.

There's this thing I do when I'm anxious or bored. Like now, for instance, when I'm near catatonic. I don't know why it goes like this or how it started even. I've always done it, since I was a little girl. I did it even before I joined Zion. Like a mantra or a counting game or something, except I use Jesus. I don't talk about it too much because I know it sounds religious and most people I meet around Los Angeles at least think that religious means creepy. Anyway, it's not religious. It's just a list of what I see around me.

Miss Mary-Jo always switches her words around and says the opposite of what she really means.

She says, “It is very important that you contaminate your instruments after the using. Everything on the sanitary maintenance area must be contaminated or exposed of or you will translay the fungus.”

The mention of fungus elicits a somber nod all around. We've all been subjected to the photos of the yellowed, grossly twisted toenails going black around the edges and digging into the bright red, tortured toes beneath them. The word itself seems to carry infection in its wake. Mention it and I want to take a bath in Barbicide.

“We have now a quiz from the yesterday lesson. What are the five nail shape?”

As a group we easily get the first four: round, oval, pointed, and square. Then the rest of the class is stumped, but I remember.

“Squoval,” I say.

“Yes! Squoval! It is the trick question! Good work, Bebe. Now everyone go and get your instruments and begin oil manicure with the partner.”

Violet is my manicure partner, and she wants to mope about Jimmy the whole time. Javier sits next to us, partnered with Shrek and cheery as usual. I listen in as he chats with her about a recipe for a string bean salad with a touch of orange zest and about the wonders of Accutane. I forget my cuticles are soaking in oil and absentmindedly run a slimy hand through my hair. Now I am greasy on top of being eyeball-aching tired.

Valley Blonde #1 breezes by our table and nearly upends my oil tray with a sweep of her denim-encased hip.

“Oops, sorry,” she says and reaches to steady the tray at the same time I do. She sees my hand and startles, her neon blue eyes (lined in neon blue eyeliner) widening with horror.

“Oh, my God! I think you got a fungus.”

“Honey, are you high?” Javier asks Blonde #1. “You've been sitting in class with Bebe all year and you don't know yet that she has a few teensy scars on her hands?”

“Oh, my God, I forgot. I'm sorry. It just scared me.”

“Well, at least it's good for something,” I say.

“Huh?”

“Never mind,” says Javi. “On your way now.”

When people express horror at my mummy hands it hardly even bothers me anymore. Months ago I gave up on trying to incorporate gloves as a fashion statement. But the interaction with the Valley Blonde makes me think of Jake and our lunch date today. Jake is a lousy boyfriend for a lot of reasons, but he's a freak who thinks my hands are beautiful and that makes up for a lot.

At the end of the morning we bring our cards to Miss Mary-Jo, who sits at the front of the room like St. Peter at heaven's gates. She holds a felt-tip pen and signs out everyone's points. Violet and I hold out our poorly manicured, shiny-skinned hands for her to judge. One point each, practical manicuring. Three points' credit for manicure/pedicure theory. Pedicures come later in the week, the high torture of vocational school purgatory.

Miss Mary-Jo looks at my hands and adds an extra point to my card. Then she rubs my hands between hers.

“Your hands,” she says. “There will be the healing.”

This is what Miss Mary-Jo knows: beauty school is a doorway. It's not a school so much as a test. I envision a real job, or a career even, at the end of these sixteen hundred hours. And, more important, I imagine a life. One where I have a skill people pay me for and I wake up in the morning in my own little apartment and make coffee in a sunlit kitchen and maybe I have a cat or something. A sunlit kitchen in San Francisco. I don't know if there is that much forgiveness in the world, but that's the truth of why I'm here, in spite of nasty pedicures and regulation smocks and words like “squoval.” If you want to know.

1532 hours down. 68 hours left to go.

J
ake comes to meet
me for lunch. He picks me up in the Ghetto Racer, which is the shittiest car you've ever seen in your life. No, really. When he pulls up to the curb a general giggle erupts all up and down the sidewalk. People actually turn and point. Jake has to carry a book of vehicle codes around with him on the floor of the passenger side because he gets pulled over by the cops at least once a week and has to prove the car isn't in violation of anything but taste.

The Ghetto Racer is missing its front bumper. In the rear windows float demented doll and stuffed animal heads that stare out at you. The stick shift is a doll arm, tattooed with a Sharpie. Stickers for bands with names like Maggot Pus and Alien Sex Fiend cover much of the body of the car. The few parts of the paint you can see are badly rusted. Once it was a black hatchback Honda.

Jake looks as nuts as his car, if a whole lot more handsome. A wave cap with a grandpa hat over it covers his head. A still-pink, angry scar travels diagonally down the left side of his cheek from underneath his eye to his jaw. He has as many stories about how he got the scar as there are people who ask him about it, but I'm pretty sure I know the truth. I'm pretty sure he did it himself in order to let the poison out from beneath the spot where he was convinced he was kissed by Judas. That was during the psychotic episode that got him slapped into the detox where we met.

Today, he wears a filthy white T-shirt, covered with car grease and paint, and his jeans are stained green and brown from dirt and grass. There are multicolor brush marks all over everything, from his shoes to the ceiling of the car. He's wild-eyed and muscular and he moves like a spooked animal. He's the same age as me, but in the bright afternoon sunlight he could be forty. His twenty-five years on this planet have been long ones.

It's important with Jake to make the distinction between when he's going crazy, like clinically, and when he's just being Jake, which means eccentric in the impale-a-doll-arm-on-your-stick-shift way but not crazy as in you can literally see the fiber optics in the air that connect you to God. It's important to know the difference, but it can be hard, even for me, who might know him best. Even at his sanest, Jake still shines with an otherworldly quality. Talk to him for long enough and you may start to believe that he really is periodically privy to the conversations of angels and not just a victim of some faulty wiring in his brain.

“Hello and much worship, Divine Angel,” Jake says as I get in the car. He takes both of my hands in his and kisses them. “To where do we travel?”

Jake's smile kills me, wide and sweet, with a chip in his front tooth. Like a little boy who went over the handlebars on his bike.

“We travel to the California Pizza Kitchen three blocks down on the left, unless you have a better idea.”

I never meant things to get where they are with him because he's an obvious impossibility and also because I am not looking for love. I have no place left in me for love. But here we are.

Jake is the wild card in my mundane existence. He reminds me that things used to be more colorful than the ten-minute drive between Moda and Serenity, sliding by on barely enough gas in my tank. There has to be something in between that grayness and life in the Ghetto Racer, but I haven't figured it out yet.

I'm still kind of pissed off about last night but I can tell he doesn't even know he stood me up. I don't mention it. I'm too proud to admit that I was forgotten, even to the guy who did the forgetting.

California Pizza Kitchen is hideous, of course, but all the spots around here are like that. Everyone is on their lunch hour from the surrounding office buildings. Men with sunburned faces and too much gel in their hair lunch in their shirtsleeves. Women who wear nude hose and navy skirts like flight attendants pick at salads. I feature the ever-present, ever-humiliating school uniform. The purpose of uniforms, I figure, is to keep you from feeling confident. If you always feel like shit, you are more malleable. Or maybe that's only true for certain uniforms, because military uniforms seem like they would make you feel sharp. I've seen pictures of Jake in his dress blues and it's enough to make even me want to wave a flag.

After he was discharged, Jake made his way to New York, where he started doing these mega guerrilla public art projects. He erected statues overnight in corporate sculpture gardens and painted over commercial billboards with sci-fi worlds of zombies dressed in high fashion, incredibly crafted, criminal explosions of color. He paints like a deranged angel, so you can imagine that those New York socialites couldn't get enough of him—his rare talent, his genuine insanity, his incongruous military bearing. You know, very real-life. He spent his summers at swanky beach pads in the Hamptons and his winters in Central Park penthouses or chic SoHo lofts. He beat the husbands at chess, graffitied the bathroom walls, and fucked the rich wives. He stole the prescriptions out of their medicine chests and the jewelry out of their drawers and they ate it up. Where is there to go from there? That kind of success can ruin you. Lots of things can, I guess.

People stare at us when we walk into the restaurant, but not directly. Rather, they stare out the corners of their eyes, then quickly avert their gaze the minute I look back at them. Jake looks like what he is: a guy who took too many psychedelics and periodically thinks he is Jesus. He has
J-e-s-u-s
in Cholo script tattooed on the top of his hand, wrapped in a snarl of vines that travels up his forearm. He got it when he was shooting acid intravenously. I didn't even know it was possible to shoot acid, but it is. Not recommended, but possible. He once told me he had gotten the tattoo when being God still felt good.

I order a salad, trying to make up for the milk shake binge last night. Life is a constant series of cleaning up the last mess.

“How is your day going in the palace of beauty?” Jake asks.

“You mean the pit of boredom? It's swell.”

“It is a box inside a box for you, Angel. You're a princess in a tower guarded by zombie gorillas. But you'll prevail.”

This is how Jake talks. You get used to it, kind of.

“Only sixty-eight hours left. Tomorrow we start the joys of pedicures. After your friend's gotten way too intimate with your feet, you get to put your closed-toe shoes back on your freshly painted nails.”

“Surely the princess has some stockings or lovely lace ankle socks or, better yet, knee-highs with stripes she could wear to remedy the tragic problem of smudged toenails.”