Giving a Manicure

The woman across from me looks so familiar, but when I turn, her look glances off. At the last subway stop we rise. I know her, she gives manicures at Vogue Nails. She has held my hands between hers several times. She bows and smiles. There the women wear white smocks like technicians, and plastic tags with their Christian names. Susan. No, not Susan, whose hair is cropped short, who is short and stocky. This older lady does my hands while classical music, often Mozart, plays. People passing by outside are doubled in the wall mirror. Two of everyone walk forward, backward, vanish at the edge of the shop. Susan does pedicures, pumice on my heels as I sit on the stainless-steel throne. She bends over, she kneads my feet in the water like laundry. She pounds my calves with her fists and her cupped palms slap a working beat, p’ansori style. She talks to the others without turning her head, a call in a language shouted hoarse across fields where a swallow flew and flew across the ocean, and then fetched back to Korea a magic gourd seed, back to the farmer’s empty house where the seed flew from its beak to sprout a green vine. When the farmer’s wife cut open the ripe fruit, out spilled seeds of gold. Choi Don Mee writes that some girls in that country crush petals on their nails, at each tip red flowers unfold. Yi Yon-ju writes that some women there, as here, dream of blades, knives, a bowl of blood.