August 15. Mary Bliss had been avoiding the kitchen calendar all week long. She had tried to put it out of her mind. Saturday night was no big deal. A dance at the country club. No big deal. She had been to dozens of country club dances.
But not with a date. And the fact was, she had a date. She was a married woman, and she was going out on a date. She was ashamed and terrified and wild with a kind of electric anticipation she hadn’t felt since she was a teenager.
At ten o’clock Saturday morning, Katharine appeared at her house, unannounced. She was carrying a stainless-steel thermos bottle and two matching pairs of hot-pink flip-flops.
“What’s up?” Mary Bliss said warily, putting down her first Diet Coke of the day.
“Let’s go,” Katharine said.
“Where? What’s in the thermos?”
“Our destination is on a strictly need-to-know basis,” Katharine said. “The thermos contains a morning’s worth of Bloody Marys. Now put on the flip-flops. We’re on a tight schedule here.”
“What kind of schedule? I can’t just leave. Erin isn’t up yet. I want to talk to her about…tonight. About Matt.”
Katharine winced. “Maybe you should just tell her a little bitty white lie about tonight. Tell her you’re going with us.”
“No,” Mary Bliss said. “No more lies. I can’t expect her to tell the truth unless I tell it myself.”
“Have you told her the truth about Parker?”
“She won’t discuss it with me,” Mary Bliss said. “But I know she’s been spending some time at the nursing home with Meemaw. I have a feeling Meemaw’s been filling her ears with all kinds of stuff about me.”
“Isn’t she due to die any day now?”
“Katharine!” Mary Bliss said. “It’s true she’s not well. The doctors want her to go on dialysis, but she’s adamantly refused, so far. To tell the truth, the nurses tell me they’re amazed she’s lived this long without it.”
“She’s an evil old hag,” Katharine said. “She’s probably hanging on just to spite you.”
“I feel sorry for her,” Mary Bliss said. “The only person she ever really loved is Parker, and he’s gone. She’s cut herself off from all her old friends, and she’s made it very clear that Erin and I are not big priorities with her.”
“But she loves Erin, right?”
“I guess so. I think she sees something of Parker in Erin. But Eula was never the adoring grandmotherly type. You know what she gave Erin for her sixteenth birthday? An Abs-R-Cizer.”
“Like they sell on TV?”
“I swear to God,” Mary Bliss said. “She saw an infomercial for it and sent away. Gave it to Erin, no card, no gift wrapping. All she said was, ‘Here. You don’t wanna get a spare tire now, do you?’ ”
“Sweet,” Katharine said.
“And the funny thing is, Erin adores her grandmother. She calls her on the phone, goes over there, takes her funny little presents.”
“Amazing,” Katharine said. “Now let’s go.”
“Just let me leave a note.”
“Let’s go!” Katharine ordered. “Right now. My car is running, and we’ve got a lot to accomplish this morning.”
Mary Bliss followed Katharine out to the Jeep, her pink flips making slapping sounds against the pavement.
Mary Bliss was halfway through her Bloody Mary by the time Katharine wheeled into a Buckhead shopping center, the centerpiece of which was a pale-pink stucco wedding cake–looking building called Spa Serenity.
“No,” Mary Bliss said, setting her drink in the cup holder. “No spa.”
“Yes. Spa. Good,” Katharine said, ignoring her. She got out of the car and headed for the door, but Mary Bliss didn’t budge.
Katharine backtracked and yanked open the passenger side door. “You might as well come in,” she told her best friend. “I’ve booked us the full package. It’ll take three hours at least. And I’m not leaving.”
“This is ridiculous,” Mary Bliss said. “I’m going to a simple little dance. It’s not the senior prom. I don’t want all this fuss. I don’t need it.”
Katharine gave her a long, withering up-and-down full-body scan. “Have you looked at yourself lately, M. B.? I mean, please. If this were the emergency room instead of a spa, you’d be in the intensive care unit. Split ends, lackluster color, raggedy-ass nails, chewed-down cuticles, enlarged pores. And don’t get me going on your eyebrows.”
Mary Bliss grabbed the sun visor, pulled it down, and stared in the mirror there. “What’s wrong with my eyebrows?”
“One word,” Katharine said. “Unibrow. Now let’s go.”
A tiny, wizened Asian man sat behind the stark smoked-glass reception desk in the lobby of Spa Serenity, yelling nonstop into a cell phone in a language Mary Bliss didn’t recognize.
“Hon,” Katharine said politely. The man didn’t look up. “Hon!” Katharine repeated. The man looked up, held up a finger in the “one minute” gesture, and continued gabbing.
“Hon!” Katharine screamed. “Get off the phone!”
He looked wounded, but pressed a button and set the phone on the glass-top desk. “What you want?” he snarled.
“We have an appointment,” Katharine said. “The works. And we’re on a tight schedule.”
He glanced down at the open appointment book in front of him. “No. No appointment. You come back. Very busy today.”
Katharine walked around the desk, grabbed the book away from him, and jabbed her finger on the line where somebody had written “Weidman (2).”
“Right there,” she said. “I’m with Ruby, and my friend is with Pearl.”
He frowned, but walked behind an elaborate pink-and-gold dragon screen that divided the reception area from the salon.
“You were so rude to him,” Mary Bliss said. “Really, Katharine. There’s no excuse for rudeness.”
“Hon thrives on rudeness,” Katharine said. “He’s Gena’s father. She owns the place. Hon thinks everybody is out to cheat them. So if you’re not rude, you’ll never get your nails done on time. It’s expected.”
“Who are Ruby and Pearl?” Mary Bliss asked.
Katharine waved her hand. “They say they’re Gena’s cousins. I don’t think those are their real names, but who cares? Wait ’til you get your sea-salt rubdown. You’ll swear you’re having an orgasm.”
“Katharine!” Mary Bliss said.
Hon reappeared with two Vietnamese women in tow, both dressed in pale-pink Spa Serenity jumpsuits. One was tiny, no bigger than an American preschooler. The other was muscular and had a blonde crew cut and a nose ring.
“Kaffrin,” cooed the butch one.
“Ruby!” Katharine exclaimed. She enveloped the crew-cut woman in an expansive hug, saying a few words in Vietnamese.
“Hello,” Mary Bliss said, extending a hand to the other woman. “I’m Mary Bliss.”
Pearl took her index finger, spit on it, and rubbed it across Mary Bliss’s forehead. “Oh yeah. You the one with the eyebrow. Kaffrin tell us. You come.”
Before she could protest, Mary Bliss had been wrapped in a pink duster and was lying back in a chair, having her scalp massaged with something that smelled like a combination of mango and Copper-tone suntan lotion. It felt heavenly. Maybe Katharine was right. Maybe she could use a little harmless pampering.
Five minutes later, another Vietnamese woman dressed in a Spa Serenity jumpsuit entered the mirrored cubicle where Mary Bliss had been seated. This woman was also petite, but she had waist-length black hair and wore four-inch stiletto heels.
“This Gena,” Pearl said.
Gena circled the chair three times, yanking at strands of Mary Bliss’s damp hair and clucking her tongue in deep disapproval. She spoke to Pearl in rapid-fire Vietnamese. Pearl nodded several times, and Gena disappeared.
“What did she say?” Mary Bliss asked.
Pearl sighed. “She never see hair the color of yours before. Who do that to you?”
Mary Bliss stiffened. “I do my own hair color. I always have.”
Pearl shook her head. “You got job?”
“I’m a schoolteacher,” Mary Bliss said.
“Good,” Pearl said approvingly. “You stick to kids. Let Pearl do hair color. Okay?”
A few minutes later Gena was back, holding a plastic bottle of bright-orange goo in her plastic-gloved hands.
“What’s that?” Mary Bliss asked.
“New color,” Pearl said, beaming. “Gena invent for you.”
Gena lunged at her and started squirting the dye on Mary Bliss’s scalp.
“Wait,” Mary Bliss said, ducking, trying to fend off the dye bottle. “I don’t want a new color. I like my own color. Miss Clairol. Luxe Lynx.”
“Lynx stinks,” Pearl opined. “You like this. Wait and see.”
It was too late. Gena had already doused her head with the dye and was vigorously working it into her hair, muttering dire words in Vietnamese.
“What color is this?” Mary Bliss asked. “It looks awfully orange.”
Gena said something else.
“She call it Sunflower,” Pearl said, grinning broadly. “She invent for you. Big honor.”
“Sunflowers are yellow,” Mary Bliss said. “I’m a brunette. I can’t have yellow hair.”
“Blonde,” Gena said, speaking her first words of English. “You a born blonde.”
Mary Bliss shut her eyes. She was going to be blonde. A year ago she would have fainted at the suggestion. But too much had happened. Maybe it was time to go with the flow.
Half an hour later, she was seated under a massive hair dryer in the communal dryer room. The room was lined with a dozen dryers, and each of them held a pink-clad woman in its clasp.
She was given a magazine and a glass of chardonnay. She took a sip and had begun to doze off when she felt something jabbing her in the eye.
She sat up. Pearl was squatting before her, brandishing what looked like a Popsicle stick full of Silly Putty.
“Now what?” Mary Bliss asked.
“First wax, then dye,” Pearl said. “No more unibrow. No more lynx.”
Go with it, Mary Bliss told herself. She took another sip of the chardonnay. Pearl continued to poke at her eyebrows with the applicator of hot wax. After a while she gently laid little strips of fabric over the wax and patted them into place. She could get used to this, Mary Bliss told herself.
Suddenly, Pearl grimaced and yanked the fabric.
“Owww!” Mary Bliss screamed. Her flesh was being ripped from her face by this Vietnamese maniac.
The other dryer women looked up, smiled, then looked back down at their issues of Vogue and Architectural Digest.
“That hurt,” Mary Bliss whined.
Pearl smiled, nodded, and pointed to a sign at the front of the room. It was written in Asian symbols.
“What’s it mean?” Mary Bliss asked.
“Beauty is pain. Pain is beauty.”