nail salons, etc.

“Oh, ignore that call...”

I tried not to stare at the woman two chairs over from me, tried not to let on that I was listening to her one-sided conversation. The young Vietnamese lady barely glanced up from painting toenails, but I couldn’t ignore the awkward silence and her phone still ringing. Were the other Asians, my sister, and my mother thinking the same thing? That no matter how much you need to relax, it’s rude to ignore phone calls from your daughter and proclaim it for the whole nail salon to hear, while you sit on your massage chair throne with cotton stuffed between your toes?

My first thought was, “I’m so glad she’s not my mother.”

For the rest of my pedicure, I listened to everything that’s gloriously right about that woman’s two daughters and one son, although I imagine they can never be right enough for her taste. This bottle blonde won’t even meet her daughter’s boyfriend until she’s done with school. Between the nursing school plans and the son’s homemade robotics, I tried to make progress on the book in my hand I’d been pretending to read. Miss Leefolt ignoring her little girl, Miss Skeeter’s mother pushing her to get a job so she could find a man...

“Thank God she’s not my mother,” I kept repeating in my head, not sure if I was referring to one of the women in the book or the one in the room with me.

My sherbet-blue toenails finally dried and I practically ran outside, thanking my Mama for the pedicure and for not being that other woman. We rushed across town to a doctor’s appointment for my sister, and of course I carried my book inside, still annoyed by that blonde woman and hoping for a comfortable seat.

It took me all of three seconds to notice that we were the only white people in the waiting room, and what was I reading? The Help. There we were, three white girls in a room full of black folks in south Georgia, and I was reading about black maids in the 1960’s. Something just felt a little weird about that. I twisted the paperback cover around to hide the title, hoping nobody noticed or cared about my book.

I tried not to people watch, but sometimes I can’t help it, and then I noticed a little boy coming out of the kids’ corner with some picture books. I love a kid who likes books. He marched straight across the room to my Mama, climbed up in the chair with her, and got those books read to him.

Here was my mother, a middle class white lady, reading picture books to a little black boy barely old enough to talk, and not caring if the whole world saw them. I don’t know about you, but I thought that was a pretty funny situation to be in, considering that fifty years ago we wouldn’t even have been in the same doctor’s office. Considering that some people might think it should still be that way. Considering that I was scared to let anybody see what book I was reading, just like Miss Skeeter wouldn’t tell anybody what book she was writing.

I loosened my grip on the cover and smiled at that little boy’s Mama, because I didn’t want her getting any wrong ideas about white people in south Georgia. I didn’t want her to think we’re all like the women in my book, or worse, like that woman in the nail salon.

I kept reading and thinking about the blonde woman, and Miss Skeeter’s mother and Miss Leefolt, and my Mama reading those picture books. If I’m honest, though, all that time the real issue in my mind was never about black and white.

There are good mothers in the world and there are bad mothers. Mine is a good one.