On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Read online

  I won’t stay here long, we might say. I’ll get a real job soon. But more often than not, sometimes within months, even weeks, we will walk back into the shop, heads lowered, our manicure drills inside paper bags tucked under our arms, and ask for our jobs back. And often the owner, out of pity or understanding or both, will simply nod at an empty desk—for there is always an empty desk. Because no one stays long enough and someone is always just-gone. Because there are no salaries, health care, or contracts, the body being the only material to work with and work from. Having nothing, it becomes its own contract, a testimony of presence. We will do this for decades—until our lungs can no longer breathe without swelling, our livers hardening with chemicals—our joints brittle and inflamed from arthritis—stringing together a kind of life. A new immigrant, within two years, will come to know that the salon is, in the end, a place where dreams become the calcified knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones—with or without citizenship—aching, toxic, and underpaid.

  I hate and love your battered hands for what they can never be.

  * * *

  —

  It’s Sunday. I am ten. You open the salon door and the acetone from yesterday’s manicures immediately stings my nostrils. But our noses soon adjust, like they always do. You don’t own the salon, but it’s your task to run it each Sunday—the slowest day of the week. Inside, you switch on the lights, plug in the automated pedicure chairs, the water gurgling through pipes under the seats as I head to the breakroom to make instant coffee.

  You say my name without glancing up and I know to walk over to the door, unlock it, flip the Open sign back out to the street.

  That’s when I see her. About seventy, her hair white and windblown across a narrow face with mined-out blue eyes, she has the stare of someone who had gone beyond where she needed to go but kept walking anyway. She peers into the shop, clutching a burgandy alligator purse with both hands. I open the door and she steps inside, hobbling a bit. The wind had blown her olive scarf off her neck, and it now hangs on one shoulder, brushing the floor. You stand, smile. “How I hep you?” you ask in English.

  “A pedicure, please.” Her voice is thin, as if cut with static. I help her out of her coat, hang it on the rack, and lead her to the pedicure chair as you run the air jets in the foot tub, fill the bubbling water with salts and solvents. The scent of synthetic lavender fills the room. I hold her arm and help her onto the seat. She smells of dried sweat mixed with the strong sweetness of drugstore perfume. Her wrist throbs in my grip as she lowers herself into the seat. She seems even frailer than she looks. Once she eases back in the leather chair, she turns to me. I can’t hear her over the water jets but can tell by her lips that she’s saying, “Thank you.”

  When the jets are done, the water warm, an emerald green marbled with white suds, you ask her to lower her feet into the tub.

  She won’t budge. Her eyes closed.

  “Ma’am,” you say. The salon, usually bustling with people or music or the TV with Oprah or the news, is now silent. Only the lights hum above us. After a moment, she opens her eyes, the blue ringed pink and wet, and bends over to fiddle with her right pant leg. I take a step back. Your stool creaks as you shift your weight, your gaze fixed on her fingers. The pale veins on her hands shiver as she rolls up her pant leg. The skin is glossy, as if dipped in a kiln. She reaches lower, grabs her ankle, and, with a jerk, detaches her entire lower leg at the knee.

  A prosthesis.

  Halfway down her shinbone, a brownish stub protrudes, smooth and round as the end of a baguette—or what it is, an amputated leg. I glance at you, hoping for an answer. Without skipping a beat, you take out your file and start to scrub her one foot, the puckered nub beside it shaking from the work. The woman places the prosthesis at her side, her arm resting protectively around its calf, then sits back, exhaling. “Thank you,” she says again, louder, to the crown of your head.

  I sit on the carpet and wait for you to call for the hot towel from the warming case. Throughout the pedicure, the woman sways her head from side to side, eyes half-closed. She moans with relief when you massage her one calf.

  When you finish, turning to me for the towel, she leans over, gestures toward her right leg, the nub hovering above the water, dry this whole time.

  She says, “Would you mind,” and coughs into her arm. “This one also. If it’s not too much.” She pauses, stares out the window, then down at her lap.

  Again, you say nothing—but turn, almost imperceptibly, to her right leg, run a measured caress along the nub’s length, before cradling a handful of warm water over the tip, the thin streams crisscrossing the leathered skin. Water droplets. When you’re almost done rinsing the soap off, she asks you, gently, almost pleading, to go lower. “If it’s the same price anyway,” she says. “I can still feel it down there. It’s silly, but I can. I can.”

  You pause—a flicker across your face.

  Then, the crow’s-feet on your eyes only slightly starker, you wrap your fingers around the air where her calf should be, knead it as if it were fully there. You continue down her invisible foot, rub its bony upper side before cupping the heel with your other hand, pinching along the Achilles’ tendon, then stretching the stiff cords along the ankle’s underside.

  When you turn to me once more, I run to fetch a towel from the case. Without a word, you slide the towel under the phantom limb, pad down the air, the muscle memory in your arms firing the familiar efficient motions, revealing what’s not there, the way a conductor’s movements make the music somehow more real.

  Her foot dry, the woman straps on her prosthesis, rolls down her pant leg, and climbs off. I grab her coat and help her into it. You start walking over to the register when she stops you, places a folded hundred-dollar bill in your palm.

  “The lord keep you,” she says, eyes lowered—and hobbles out, the bell chime over the door clanging twice as it closes. You stand there, staring at nothing.

  Ben Franklin’s face darkening in your still wet fingers, you slip the bill under your bra, not the register, then retie your hair.

  * * *

  —

  That night, bellydown on the hardwood, your face resting on a pillow, you asked me to scrape your back. I knelt beside you, peeled your black T-shirt over your shoulders, unhooked your bra. Having done this hundreds of times by now, my hands moved on their own. As the bands fell away, you grabbed the bra, pulled it out from under you, and tossed it aside. Heavy with sweat from the day’s work, it landed on the floor with the thud of a knee brace.

  The chemicals from the nail salon rose from your skin. I fished a quarter from my pocket, dipped it into the jar of Vicks VapoRub. The bright eucalyptus scent filled the air and you started to relax. I dunked the coin, coating it with the greasy ointment, then dabbed a thumb’s worth across your back, down your spine. When your skin shone, I placed the coin at the base of your neck and pulled it outward, across your shoulder blades. I scraped and rescraped in firm, steady strokes, the way you taught me, until russet streaks rose from under the white flesh, the welts deepening into violet grains across your back like new, dark ribs, releasing the bad winds from your body. Through this careful bruising, you heal.

  I think of Barthes again. A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother, he says after the death of his own mother, in order to glorify it, to embellish it.

  How I want this to be true.

  And yet, even here, writing you, the physical fact of your body resists my moving it. Even in these sentences, I place my hands on your back and see how dark they are as they lie against the unchangeable white backdrop of your skin. Even now, I see the folds of your waist and hips as I knead out the tensions, the small bones along your spine, a row of ellipses no silence translates. Even after all these years, the contrast between our skin surprises me—the way a blank page does when my hand, gripping a pen, begins to move through its
spatial field, trying to act upon its life without marring it. But by writing, I mar it. I change, embellish, and preserve you all at once.

  You groaned into the pillow as I pressed along your shoulders, then worked down through the stubborn knots. “This is nice. . . . This is so nice.” After a while, your breathing deepened, evened out, your arms slack, and you were asleep.

  * * *

  —

  The summer I turned fourteen I got my first job working tobacco on a farm outside Hartford. Most people don’t realize tobacco can grow this far north—but put anything near water and it’ll green itself to the height of a small army. Still, it’s strange how some things come into practice. First cultivated by the Agawam, broadleaf tobacco was soon planted by white settlers as a cash crop after they drove the Natives off the land. And now it’s harvested mostly by undocumented immigrants.

  I knew you wouldn’t let me ride my bike the eight and a half miles out into the country, so I told you I was doing yard work for a church garden on the city outskirts. According to the flyer outside the local YMCA, the job paid nine dollars an hour, which was almost two dollars above minimum wage at the time. And because I was still too young to be legally employed, I was paid under the table, in cash.

  It was the summer of 2003, which meant Bush had already declared war on Iraq, citing weapons of mass destruction that never materialized, when the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where Is the Love?” played on every radio station but especially on PWR 98.6, and you could hear the song from nearly every car on the block if you slept with the windows open, its beats punctuated by the sound of beer bottles bursting on the basketball court across the street, the crackheads lobbing the empties up in the sky, just to see how the streetlights make broken things seem touched by magic, glass sprinkled like glitter on the pavement come morning. It was the summer Tiger Woods would go on to receive the PGA Player of the Year for the fifth time in a row and the Marlins would upset the Yankees (not that I cared or understood), it was two years before Facebook and four before the first iPhone, Steve Jobs was still alive, and your nightmares had just started getting worse, and I’d find you at the kitchen table at some god-awful hour, butt naked, sweating, and counting your tips in order to buy “a secret bunker” just in case, you said, a terrorist attack happened in Hartford. It was the year the Pioneer 10 spacecraft sent its last signal to NASA before losing contact forever 7.6 billion miles from Earth.

  I got up at six in the morning five days a week and rode my bike the full hour it took to get to the farm, crossing the Connecticut River, past the suburbs with their suicidally pristine lawns, then into the sticks. As I approached the property, the fields unfolded all around me on both sides, the telephone wires slacked with the weight of crows dotted along the lines, the sporadic white almond trees in full bloom, irrigation ditches where more than a dozen rabbits would drown by summer’s end, their corpses stinking the hot air. Verdant swaths of tobacco, some high as my shoulders, stretched so far that the trees standing at the farm’s edge looked more like shrubs. In the middle of it all were three huge unpainted barns, all lined in a row.

  I rode up the dirt drive toward the first barn and walked my bike through the opened door. As I adjusted to the cool dark, I saw a row of men sitting along the wall, their dark faces moving over paper plates of runny eggs, talking amongst themselves in Spanish. One of them, seeing me, waved me over, saying something I couldn’t catch. When I told him I didn’t speak Spanish, he seemed surprised. Then a flare of recognition flicked over him and he lit up. “Ah!” He pointed at me and nodded. “Chinito. ¡Chinito!” I decided, it being my first day, not to correct him. I gave him a thumbs-up. “Sí,” I said, smiling, “Chinito.”

  His name was Manny, he said, and gestured toward a table where a large sheet pan of sunny-side-up eggs sat over a butane heater beside a glass pot of room-temperature coffee. I settled among the men, eating in silence. Not counting myself, there were twenty-two other workers, most of them undocumented migrants from Mexico and Central America save for one, Nico, who was from the Dominican Republic. There was also Rick, a white guy in his twenties from Colchester, who, it was said, was on the sex offender list and tobacco was the only steady job he could get. Most were seasonal workers and followed various crops across the country as they ripened for harvest. At this farm, the men slept in an encampment comprising four trailers set a few yards beyond the tree line at the edge of the property, hidden from the road.

  The barn rafters, where the picked tobacco was to be hung to dry, were now empty. By September’s end, each barn would house almost two tons of tobacco, two times over. In between bites of runny eggs, I examined the structure. To encourage faster drying, every other wood panel on the barn’s siding was raised up, creating rib-like slits, allowing air flow, where the day’s heat now ran its hot breath across my neck, carrying with it the sweet-bitter scent of tobacco and the iron of red dirt. The men too smelled of the fields. Before their boots met the soil, their bodies, even after morning showers, exuded the salt and sunbaked underscent from the previous day’s work. Soon the same smell would permeate my own pores.

  A forest-green Ford Bronco pulled into the drive. The men rose in unison and tossed their plates and cups into the wastebasket. They put on their gloves, some poured water on rags and stuffed them under their caps.

  Mr. Buford walked in. A tall, lanky white man of about seventy, he wore a Red Sox cap pulled low over a pair of aviators and a cheddar cheese grin. Hands on his hips, he reminded me of that maniac sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, the one who got his brains blown out by one of his own privates for being an asshole. But Buford was cheery enough, charming even, if only a bit forced with it. He grinned, his one gold tooth sparking between his lips, and said, “How’s my United Nations this morning? ¿Bueno?”

  I walked up to him and introduced myself. I shook his hand, which was rough and chapped, which surprised me. He patted me on the shoulder and said I’ll do fine as long as I just follow Manny, my crew leader.

  The men and I piled in the back of three pickups and we drove out to the first field, where the crop was tallest, their heavy heads just starting to tilt. We were followed by two tractors, on which the plants would be loaded. By the time we got there, there was already a crew of ten men crouched over the first five rows of tobacco. That was the cut team. Armed with machetes sharpened in the day’s first light, they would set out a hundred yards ahead of us and chop down the stalks in quick slashing sweeps. Sometimes, when we worked fast enough, we’d catch up to them, the sound of their blades louder and louder, until you could hear their lungs working as they cut, the stalks falling in bright green splashes around their hunched backs. You could hear the water inside the stems as the steel broke open the membranes, the ground darkening as the plants bled out.

  I was on the spear crew, where the shorter workers were. Our task was to pick up the fallen crop, their leaves already shriveled in the sun. We split into teams of three harvesters each, two pickers and one piercer. As a piercer, all you had to do was stand by the spearing horse (a cart with a removable spear attached to it) and run the plants through the spear until the plank filled up. Then you’d remove the spear tip, and one of the pickers would carry the full plank to an idling tractor, where a loader would rack the plank. The piercer would then take another plank from a holster, attach the steel spear tip, and continue filling the new rack.

  When the tractor was at capacity, it would be driven back to the barns, where dozens of men, usually the tallest ones, would pass the racks, one by one, to each other up the rafters to dry. Since you could fall from as high as forty feet, the barn was the most dangerous place to work. There were stories the men told, from other farms, how the sound won’t leave their ears, the thud of a body—someone humming or talking of the weather or complaining of a woman, the price of gas in Modesto, then the abrupt silence, the leaves shifting where the voice had been.

  That first day, I stupidly refuse
d the pair of gloves offered by Manny. They were too big and ran nearly to my elbows. By five o’clock, my hands were so thick and black with sap, dirt, pebbles, and splinters, they resembled the bottom of a pan of burned rice. The crows floated over the field’s wrinkled air as we worked the hours bare, their shadows swooping over the land like things falling from the sky. The jackrabbits dipped in and out of the rows, and once in a while a machete would come down on one and you could hear, even through the clink of blades, the shrill yelp of a thing leaving the earth we stood on.

  But the work somehow sutured a fracture inside me. A work of unbreakable links and collaboration, each plant cut, picked, lifted, and carried from one container to another in such timely harmony that no stalk of tobacco, once taken from the soil, ever touches ground again. A work of myriad communications, I learned to speak to the men not with my tongue, which was useless there, but with smiles, hand gestures, even silences, hesitations. I made out people, verbs, abstractions, ideas with my fingers, my arms, and by drawing in the dirt.

  Manny, brow furrowed, his mustache almost grey from dried sweat, nodded as I cupped my hands into a blossom to indicate your name, Rose.

  * * *

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