Free 29 by Adena Halpern Page A

more than nice. They were bend-over-backwards nice. From the second I walked up to the desk, the woman behind the chrome counter spoke louder than I know her normal volume level really was. Believe me, no one shouts or enunciates like this woman did. The sound of her voice was deafening as she told me about the benefits of an apricot body scrub (I could tell that she knew as well as I did that I never would have taken off my clothes and gotten that done). Then, anything I said to the aesthetician, she laughed a little more than she should have. If I complained just a tiny bit about the way she was poking at my pores, she apologized profusely. I’m not saying she wouldn’t have done this with any other customer; I’m just saying that she was pouring on the charm a bit more because she’d never before performed a facial on a seventy-something woman. And then, once I had paid and was getting ready to leave, I realized that I really had to pee from the aforementioned sound of that so-called soothing fountain dripping water on the stones. Both the aesthetician and the receptionist were standing there and I said, “Would you mind showing me where the powder room is?”
    “The powder room?” the receptionist shouted, still thinking I was deaf. It was getting to the point where I wondered if I should just be rude and correct her. But any way I could have said it would have sounded rude, and frankly, I was already intimidated enough.
    “She means the bathroom, the ladies’ room.” The aesthetician chuckled as if I had been speaking a foreign language, which I was: the language from the 1950s. Okay, I know the term powder room might be dated, but I still call it that. Calling it a bathroom makes it sound like a dirty stall at a gas station. So shoot me for trying to sound polite.
    But I’m getting off the track again. Apologies.
    Anyway, here’s what I’m getting at: the aesthetician said she would gladly show me where the powder room was, so we walked back into the spa.
    Well, she took me into the locker room. There were two doors for bathrooms. One door had no sign. The other door had a handicapped symbol on it. At first she opened the door with no sign on it.
    “Here,” she said, opening the door. Then she paused. She shut the door to that bathroom and opened up the other door. “Actually, you’ll probably want to use this one.”
    I always like to use the handicap stall because it’s roomier, don’t you? Still, to this day, I know she thought I should have gone in that stall because I was old. It was the kindness in her voice that tipped me off, that temperate way that people talk to children and the elderly.
    As lovely as she was, she pitied me for my age, and it hurt. I left that spa and never went back. I couldn’t even go down that street for a while. I got a little paranoid thinking that they might have laughed at me after I left. Why would an old wrinkled prune (well, an old wrinkled prune with a face-lift, Botox, and Restylane) like me want a facial? It’s a shame, too. I really enjoyed the facial.
    From then on I went back to my facialist in the suburbs. It’s lovely there. They’ve got comfy couches and powder-pink walls and I’ve known Sheila, the facialist, for years. I never even tried to get another hairdresser in the city. There are a couple of salons down the street from my apartment, but they look too overdone for me. I looked into the window of a place one time when I thought that maybe I’d just get a blowout. They don’t even sit you in normal hairdresser’s chairs. They sit you on stools! Can you imagine? Of course no one over the age of fifty goes in there. Whose back could stand sitting on that stool for so long?
    “I think it should be cut shaggy, with lots of layers,” Lucy commented as we left my apartment building.
    “Oh, Lucy, I don’t want to do anything too crazy.” I pulled my compact umbrella out of my tote in preparation to walk on such a sunny day.
    “Gram,” Lucy