Because I wanted the manicure, and I’d already paid my money, I stayed, while the woman continued to, well, insult me. I left the shop in a jangle—furious, confused, a little turned on. Why was the manicurist so mean? Why had I stayed? I wrote the story to figure that out.

This Isn’t About Love

Susan St. Aubin

Ilka on the road in her yellow Volkswagen, traveling from job to job: I can see her as clearly now as I could then. Monday nights she’s at City College teaching English as a Second Language; Tuesday and Thursday afternoons she teaches two sections of remedial composition at Cabrillo College thirty miles south; Wednesday nights she’s thirty miles north at the College of San Mateo teaching self-defense; and Thursday nights it’s self-defense again at the Women’s Center, which doesn’t pay much but she doesn’t have to drive so far.

“I’m exhausted,” she says when she walks into the university gym where the Women’s Center holds its self-defense class.

We sit on the floor dressed in leotards or sweatpants. Lynne, who’s gay and wears men’s jeans, removes her heavy hiking boots reluctantly because street shoes aren’t allowed in the gym. Patty, a sophomore math major with long red hair, who says she’s sick of male logic, whispers to Louise and Janice from the Women’s Studies Program; their breasts float loosely beneath their cotton T-shirts. I sit against the wall in my black leotard, my long braid of brown hair over one shoulder. We’re the regulars; others come for a few lessons, then leave.

Ilka dumps a green shoulder bag bursting with books and papers on the floor, and pulls from it a rumpled white cotton karate suit.

“This material is so sick,” she says, shaking the knee pants and jacket. “It’ll last forever.”

She means “thick,” not “sick”; she’s Swiss-German, and though she’s taught English for years, her consonants sometimes slip.

A dozen years later I can shut my eyes and see her bend to unlace her knee-high brown boots, then pull on the heavy cotton trousers before sliding off her long denim skirt and vest. After she unbuttons her blouse, there’s an instant when she stands in her pink camisole before it’s covered by the cotton jacket she ties around her waist with a brown cloth belt. She wraps a silk scarf around her head to contain her long blond hair, except for the bangs that cover her eyebrows. She has our rapt attention when she’s ready to begin the class. I’m not gay, but my breath comes quicker, then and now.

Her green eyes, which she rarely blinks, stare intently as she leads us through our warm-up exercises.