Edith Pearlman - Honeydew - Stories

Tenderfoot was a pedicure parlor on Main Street near Channing. Two reclining chairs — usually only one was in use — faced the street through a large plate-glass window. And so customers, alone with Paige, got a kind of public privacy — anybody could see them, no one but Paige could hear them. Paige was an expert listener — rarely commenting on what she heard, never repeating it.

She was a widow, forty-nine and childless. She lived behind and above her store. She played poker with five other women every Saturday night. They called one another by their last names and smoked cigars. She had lost her husband, a talented mechanic, to the war. Carl was in favor of the war, more or less; but he’d joined up mainly to get further mechanical training at the military’s expense. She’d objected to his risking their joint future, their happiness…but she’d let the argument drop. The Marines took him despite his age. And then, three days into the desert, the tank he was riding met a mine. Each of his parts was severed from the others, and his whole — his former whole — was severed from Paige.

Paige’s practice expanded. She had always been popular with faculty wives and local lawyers and dentists, who appreciated that a footbath administered by a discreet attendant squatting on a stool could become a kind of secular confessional. Now, perhaps because of her recent sad history, she caught on with booksellers and high school teachers and nurses. They discovered how easy she was to talk to. Doctors sent patients to her, elderly women who could no longer bend down to clean their feet, could no longer clip their own toenails. Elderly men too — their joints were as stiff as their wives’.

That fall — the fall of Bobby Farraday’s arrival at the college to teach art history — other male clients began to appear, not sent by their doctors. A professor emeritus of physics was the first. Then another professor, not emeritus. The high school principal, in a fit of bravado, had his toenails painted raspberry sherbet, chattering all the while.

Bobby had rented rooms ideal for someone newly separated with no interest in changing his circumstances. He hung the engravings that had been his, not Renée’s, in the living room and the narrow one-bedded bedroom. The tiny kitchen was just big enough for him and an unseen resident mouse. These rooms and kitchen were on the second floor of a Victorian, and the bathroom occupied the whole of the third-floor turret. The house happened to be located on Channing Street near its intersection with Main, which put it more or less diagonally opposite Tenderfoot. Bobby and Paige often ran into each other in the early evening — at the vegetarian market, at the newspaper and tobacco kiosk, at the bookstore. Sometimes they talked, as neighbors do.

Secretly he considered himself more than her neighbor. He was her invisible housemate, as the mouse was his. His high bathroom had a broad curtainless window next to the toilet. The window gave him an angled view of the work space of the pedicure shop and a bit of Paige’s living area. He took advantage of his situation. Sometimes he stood to watch the pedicures, but usually he sat on the lidded toilet, like a peep-show connoisseur. He liked to see the customers relax on the chair, as if this quasi-biblical experience transported them to some soapy heaven; as if, briefly dead, they could call their sins forgiven. Or maybe they were just happy to have a chance to kick off their shoes and talk about their troubles.

He conducted his classes, showed his slides, met with students during his office hours. He found the teaching and the kids distracting. One of the blond young women reminded him of Renée — knowledgeable on the outside, unsure on the inside. But even inviting a student to take in a movie was forbidden; and so he hurried away from his office hours to watch, alone, the blameless performance on Main Street.

The days got shorter. Paige’s last customers walked under dim streetlights and entered a brightly lit shop. One dark afternoon Bobby saw the red-cheeked chemistry professor and his wife side by side on the chairs as if driving to the movies. Paige, gently kicking her stool, moved from one to the other.

Down in his study Bobby took off his own shoes and then his right sock. He had stopped attending to his feet after the accident. Now, how appalling the linty corned toes, how distressing the jagged toenails. No wonder all his socks had holes. He took off his left sock and rested the left foot on his right knee. His heel was scored with lines, as if it could reveal his fortune. Still barefoot, he returned to his unlit turret and looked out of the window. Bent over the chemistry professor’s tootsies, Paige personified hard work, like Renée bent over her briefs. Back in New York, Renée had moved inflexibly toward her goal — she wanted to be made partner — whereas Bobby had practiced indifference and inattention, writing careless reviews for short-lived arts magazines, making off-the-cuff attributions for the galleries he consulted for. This difference in attitude had led to arguments.

After her last customer left Paige often came out and sat on the store’s single broad step and lit a narrow cigar. Bobby used the toilet, reading by flashlight. He turned off the flashlight and watched her smoke. Around midnight she went to bed. He did too.

This went on for a while. He thought of buying binoculars, but she wasn’t a bird. He thought of dragging out his opera glasses, but she wasn’t a soprano. He thought of employing his loupe, but she wasn’t a work of art, and even if she had been a painting he was too far away to examine brushstrokes. After the first snowfall she wore a parka outdoors, and a fuzzy hat. She needed a fur coat — otter, maybe, like Renée’s — but the animal-rights students would put her in the stocks. Anyway, she probably couldn’t afford a fur coat. How much did you collect for a dead Marine? And even a flourishing pedicure business couldn’t make a big profit. She could always go to work in the local pharmacy, he supposed. She’d studied pharmacy, she told him once; but she preferred this work — she was her own boss, and she ministered directly to people.

Spring at last moistened the town. Impasto leaves replaced pastel buds. He considered self-improvement. He might become a vegan. Let the mouse have his cheese. “So how much does it cost?” he blurted one afternoon. They’d met in the health store, he holding a jar of prune extract plucked in a hurry from the shelf, she examining something in a bottle.

“This is a dollar an ounce. But for efficacy it has to be mixed with—”

“Not the snake oil. A pedicure.”

She looked up. Her eyes in her lightly wrinkled face were the blue of a Veronese sky. “Fifty dollars. Ten more for polishing. Tipping not allowed.”

“Oh. Can I have one?”

“Sure.”

“When?”

“Friday at eight.”

“Eight? My cubism seminar is at eight thirty…”

She smiled. “Eight in the evening.”

“Oh…I’ll see you then?”

“See you,” she assured him.

Friday night he scrubbed his feet. He put on clean socks. He snatched up a book he wasn’t reading, The Later Roman Empire.

He took the left-hand chair. When he tipped his head sideways and raised his eyes he could see the window to his bathroom, its light carelessly left on, wasting his landlady’s electricity.

While Paige was filling an oblong wooden tub with hot water and a swirl of thick white stuff, he took off his shoes. She herself removed his socks, folding them onto the top of the table between the chairs. In the old days Renée had picked them up from the floor, stuck out her tongue at him.