Thammavongsa came to Toronto as a refugee, and many of the stories in her collection How to Pronounce Knife feel like they could only take place there. “Mani Pedi” is about Raymond, a boxer who quits fighting and goes to work in his sister’s nail salon. He starts off working the phones but eventually becomes a nail technician himself.
Raymond is a dreamer, and his sister is a hilariously vulgar and cynical realist. His dreams of making it as a boxer didn’t work out, and at the nail salon he dreams of falling in love with his clients. At the end of the story, when his sister berates him for his dreams, he explains:
Raymond, not one to speak up to his sister, but this one time said, “Well, you know, maybe Miss Emily ain’t ever gonna be with a man like me but I want to dream it anyway. It’s a nice feeling and I ain’t had one of those things to myself in a long time. I know I don’t got a chance in hell and faced with that I wanna have that thought anyway. It’s to get by. It’s to get to the next hour, the next day. Don’t you go reminding me what dreams a man like me ought to have. That I can dream at all means something to me.”
First published 2013 in Ex-Puritan, and available to read here, collected in How to Pronounce Knife, McClelland & Stewart, 2020
A Personal Anthology 