It’s time.
I’ve been carrying around a story for awhile now and have finally come to a place where I’m ready to tell it. It happened over three months ago and I’m still not fully recovered. But I think telling my tale my help. Be forewarned: it involves a nail salon, my eyeball, and multipurpose cleaner.
On December 22 of last year, I had a full day of family events planned. One side of my family was hosting our annual Christmas caravan. We travel from house to house to house to house stuffing our faces and bellies with a four-course meal, each house serving up a portion of the four-hour eating event. After that, our plans included meeting up with the other side of my family at my dad’s house to see my sister who had come home from Florida.
My daughter and I headed off to French Tips, our local nail salon staffed by men and women who speak limited English—some more limited than others. I’m always self conscious at such establishments. I can’t understand what they’re saying and feel stupid for not being able to communicate better.
It’s the same thing that Ms. Fishman was talking about in our 9th grade world history class when she wrote the word Nacirema on the board, a crazy country with bizarre customs and rituals that had to be in some faraway place without running water or NetFlix. Fortunately, the girl who would eventually become our valedictorian was a friend and sat next to me in that class. Before the lesson had even started, she wrote “America backwards” on the open page of her red Mead notebook and slid it in front of me. I looked at her in agreement with a slight nod of my head and raise of my eyebrows, like I had known the entire time, even though I had just found out when I read what she had written.
Just like Ms. Fishman tried to teach us, we were an ethnocentric culture and nothing reminds me more of that lesson than the French Tips nail salon.
Three hours before our Christmas caravan was to start, I sat in my chair getting my cuticles cut by the polite lady who kept asking me random questions about my daughter. I could barely understand most of what she was saying. Mostly I would agree or give the same nod or raised eyebrow look I gave my friend in 9th grade. So when she asked if I’d like her to do my eyebrows, my initial reaction was to say, “Sure.”
I immediately wished I hadn’t. Everything about me—my gut, my intuition, my watch that said I needed to get going—all were telling me to let my nails dry and head home. But my brows were ghastly, and like Edward John Smith, the Captain of the Titanic, said, “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Taking me over to the eyebrow waxing chairs, which also happens to be the chairs in front of the salon where you wait your turn, I turned to my waxer and said, “I only wax the bottom of my brows, not the top.”
She nodded…the same nod I had given her a hundred times while she painted my nails. “Just underneath,” I repeated.
(If you’re wondering why I don’t get the tops waxed it’s because once a long time ago, somebody told me you lose your eyebrows from the top as you age…waxing the top leaves you with a thin, thin line of hair above your eye once enter AARP-dom. Whether this is true or not, I have no idea.)
My 4-year old daughter sat two chairs down admiring her own polka-dotted nails while I leaned back to have my brows waxed. She gently applied the wax underneath my right eyebrow and placed the small fabric-like piece to yank off my unwanted hairs. Not so bad I thought, lying there with my eyes closed. And then I felt the warm wax being applied to the top of my eyebrow.
I opened my eyes and raised my hand, “No, please don’t do the tops. Just the bottoms.”
My waxer looked at me with a startled look. I can’t quite remember her exact words, but I think she said, “I finish. I finish.”
I was stuck in eyebrow waxing limbo. Not sure whether she understood my request or if she was going to finish what she had started. I returned to the somewhat reclined position with my head leaning slightly off the back of the chair. And then it happened.
Flustered and unsure what to do with the wax she had applied to the top of my eyebrow, the lady pulled a bottle of what I would later learn was Multipurpose cleaner, the type you’re NOT supposed to use on skin. She poured the cleaner onto a cotton ball while holding it over the general area of my face…and thus, right into my eye.
It burned like HELL.
I jumped out of the chair and yelled, “What the hell are you putting in my eye.” Seriously, it felt like liquid fire.
She freaked. I freaked. The guy doing nails at the table near by came over to calm us both. I immediately ran to the sinks in the middle of the salon and threw my head under to let the water flush out whatever it could…holding my daughters hand the whole time. After a few minutes, the pain subsided; but I still couldn’t see or even keep my right eye open. No one who worked in the salon approached me.
I asked to use a phone and called my husband to tell him that I couldn’t see out of my right eye and that he would have to come pick up me and our daughter. Then I asked to see the bottle of whatever it was that got poured in my eye. I took out a random business card from my purse and with my left hand over my right eye, wrote down every ingredient listed on the lavender colored bottle of multipurpose cleaner.
The lady who poured the cleaner in my eye was obviously upset. She eventually came over and kept apologizing. I had chilled out by then and didn’t want to be that woman, the crazy woman in a nail salon who’s loud and obnoxious and throwing threats around like a ball machine in a batting cage. I told her as kindly as I could that it was an accident and that I was okay, but no I didn’t want the wet wash rag she was trying to get me to take.
The multipurpose cleaner turned out to have the exact ingredients as your everyday rubbing alcohol. It had simply dried my eye out to the point that I was unable to use it for the next 12 hours. I could see by the next morning, but it was still swollen and red, like I had been up all night crying about my boyfriend breaking up with me.
I never contacted the shop afterwards. I had thought about calling to tell the owner what had happened, just so they knew, but I didn’t. Instead, I walked around with a lingering sense of guilt and shame about the accident. It was a funny if not self-depricating story I could tell my sisters that night and my colleagues during our Monday morning meeting. But deep down I couldn’t stop thinking, “That’s what I deserved. Why should I expect someone who I can’t understand to understand me?”
For weeks I struggled with what had happened and why I felt responsible: I shouldn’t have insisted on my no-wax-on-top-rule. I shouldn’t have been so blase about what I was getting done. I shouldn’t have gotten my eyebrows waxed at a nail salon.
But really, it wasn’t about any of that. It was a language barrier. That’s all. This woman was doing her job and doing it well. She had upsold me from a manicure to an eyebrow wax.
I went back there for the first time since the incident today. I got a pedicure and my daughter got her nails painted pink with white polka-dots. The lady who tried to wax my eyebrows months before gave me my pedicure. It was a very pleasant experience.
Posted by amyg 
Posted by amyg 
Posted by amyg 
