Laleh, Grandma, and Oma were sitting around the kitchen table with bowls of warm water in front of them. A pile of towels lay between them with nail files and clippers on top, and next to that, a little basket of fingernail polish.
“We’re doing manicures!” Laleh announced when I came in. She held her pruny hands up to show me.
“That’s great.”
I leaned down to kiss her head, then Grandma and Oma on the cheeks.
“How was school?”
“Good. Miss Shah is so cool. You know her family is from India?”
“That’s great.”
“She said my name right and everything.”
My sister was practically effervescent.
“Are you hungry?” Oma asked. “We can clear out.”
“No, it’s okay.”
Laleh looked up at me. “Want to do manicures too?”
“Um,” I said.
Grandma and Oma looked at me.
I looked down at my hands, and my shredded cuticles. I’d never had a manicure before.
“That sounds really nice.”
Oma pulled out a chair for me. “Have a seat. I’ll get you a bowl.” She added a few drops of tea tree oil, the most deceptively named oil I’d ever heard of, since it didn’t actually come fromcamelia sinensis.
I soaked my hands while Laleh told us all about her day: the reading they did, and Bloom’s Taxonomy, and “doing algebras.”
I smiled at that.
I hoped algebras would be easier for Laleh than they were for me.
Oma took my right hand and started pushing my cuticles up.
“You’ve got to stop chewing on them,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“You get nervous. Like Stephen.”
I nodded.
“You like this?”
“Yeah. It’s nice.”
“When I was your age, guys could never do this.”
“Some guys still won’t.”
Grandma snorted and said, “The patriarchy at work.” And then she went back to painting Laleh’s middle finger a violent and excellent shade of pink.
