I Feel Bad About My Neck Read Online Free PDF Page B

so. Whenever I complained about how long it took, I was told that I was lucky I wasn’t blond. Where hair dye is concerned, being blond is practically a career.
    Oh, the poor blondes! They were sitting there at the colorist’s when I arrived, and they were still sitting there when I left. Their scalps were sectioned off and dotted with little aluminum-foil packets; they had to sit under hair-dryers; they complained bitterly about their dry and damaged hair and their chronic split ends. I felt superior to them in every way. For the first time in my life, it seemed, there was an advantage to being a brunette.
    But then, about a year ago, my colorist gave me several highlights as a present. Highlights, you probably know, are little episodes of blondness that are scattered about your head. They involve peroxide. They extend the length of time involved in hair dying from unbearable to unendurable. As I sat in the chair, waiting for my highlights to sink in, I was bored witless. Hours passed. I couldn’t imagine why I had been conned into agreeing to this free trial. I vowed that I would never ever even be tempted to have highlights again, much less to pay money for them. (They are, in addition to being time-consuming, wildly expensive. Naturally.)
    But—you will probably not be surprised to hear this—those highlights were a little like that first sip of brandy Alexander that Lee Remick drank in Days of Wine and Roses. I emerged onto Madison Avenue with four tiny, virtually invisible blondish streaks in my hair, and was so thrilled and overwhelmed by the change in my appearance that I honestly thought that when I came home, my husband wouldn’t recognize me. As it happened, he didn’t even notice I’d done anything to myself. But it didn’t matter; from that moment on, I was hooked. As a result, my hair-dying habit now takes at least three hours every six weeks or so, and because my hair colorist is (in her world) only slightly less famous than Hillary Clinton, it costs more per year than my first automobile.
    Nails
    I want to ask a question: When and how did it happen that you absolutely had to have a manicure? I don’t begin to know the answer, but I want to leave the question out there, floating around in the atmosphere, as a reminder that just when you think you know exactly how many things you have to do to yourself where maintenance is concerned, another can just pop up out of nowhere and take a huge bite out of your life.
    I spent the first forty-five years of my life never thinking about my nails. Occasionally I filed them with the one lone wretched emery board I owned. (A side note on this subject: One of the compelling mysteries of the world, right up there with the missing socks, is what happens to all the other emery boards in the box of emery boards you bought so that you would have more than just one lone wretched emery board.) Anyway, occasionally I filed my nails, put a little polish on them, and went out into the world. This process took about three minutes, twice a year. (Just kidding. But not by much.) I knew there were women who had manicures on a regular basis, but in my opinion they were indolent women who had nothing better to do. Or they were under the mistaken impression that painted nails were glamorous. They were certainly not women who made their living at a typewriter, the machine that was the sworn enemy of long nails.
    And then one day, like mushrooms, a trillion nail places appeared in Manhattan. Suddenly there were more nail places than there were liquor stores, or Kinko’s, or opticians, or dry cleaners, or locksmiths, and there are way more of all of those in Manhattan than you can ever understand. Sometimes it seemed there were more nail places in Manhattan than there were nails. Most of these nail places were staffed by young Korean women, all of whom could do a manicure quickly and efficiently and not eat up the clock in any way by feigning the remotest interest in their customers.