How to Pronounce Knife - Souvankham Thammavongsa Page 0,16
wouldn’t have that, him not calling her back, so one night she came over, worried about what he was becoming, what he was doing with his life. She was real dramatic about it. She had a key to his apartment and kicked open the door and beat him on the chest, her small fists hitting him like water droplets in the shower. She told him that even if he didn’t want better for himself, she did. She brought up their dead parents—she always did that when she was desperate to make a meaningful point. She said they didn’t leave Laos, a bombed-out country in a war no one ever heard of, “on a fucking raft made of bamboo to have you asking, ‘You want sprinkles with that?’” She slapped him across the face. “Raymond, what you cook at the mall, I can vomit up shit better than that!” So he agreed to join her at the nail salon just to get her to calm down. Not long after that, he was answering the phones and saying, “Hello, Bird and Spa Salon. We do nails. Cheap! Cheap!”
At first he mopped the floor and refilled the bottles with nail polish remover, cuticle oil, or whatever was running low. He cut paper towels into neat little squares to save everyone time. He turned on the switch to keep the waxing oil hot. When all that got to be easy for him, his sister asked him to sit in and watch whenever the girls did manicures and pedicures or waxed an eyebrow or upper lip. It amazed him to see clients transformed. It was like what happened in the ring, but in reverse. They came in looking like they’d been through a few rounds, sad and exhausted, shoulders slumped, but left carefree and happy and refreshed. He thought of the injuries that happened to guys like him and what it did to the lives they had outside the ring—if you could even call it that. There was the guy who didn’t wake up from a fight until a year later, and the guy who never got back his confidence, stopped training, ate doughnuts all day, threw away his whole career. Then there was the one who died. Raymond thought of seeing only the black light and waiting for the little flickers to disappear. Waiting for the bell to ring so he knew they were into the next round. Boxing, the way he knew it, didn’t do the kind of good that he saw happen every day at the salon.
When one of the girls who worked at the shop suddenly quit on his sister because of a bad cough that wasn’t going away, Raymond was given his own station. The first thing he did was put the plastic basket of supplies and lotions to the left of him. His sister didn’t like that. “What the fuck, Raymond. You going southpaw on me now. You a right-hand. All your supplies go on the right. Fuck! Maybe you shoulda thought of that when you were boxing. You know how fucking hard southpaws are to fight—they do everything backwards. It’s too late, isn’t it. To go southpaw now.”
Raymond didn’t say anything. He just moved the basket to his right. He didn’t like arguing or talking back to his sister. She’d always taken care of things, and of him. She talked tough and was for real tough, but she had a good heart. It was possible to be both.
His sister had him practise on a plastic hand. Thing was, it wasn’t attached to anything. It was severed at the wrist and stood straight up in the air like it was waiting to give you a high-five. The plastic hand could be moved around for a better angle to paint a heart or put on dots. His sister watched him without saying a word. When he was done, she picked up the plastic hand and waved it in his face and said, “But hands come with fucking bodies! You can’t be turning a client’s hand three hundred and sixty degrees to draw a fucking heart! And is that what this is supposed to be, Raymond—a fucking heart? Looks to me like a stinking blob of disgusting shit.”
She plopped the plastic hand down onto the empty station behind her, clearing Raymond’s small surface area for him, and then held out her own hands. “Here,” she said. “Try on me.” For someone who did manicures all the time for other people, his