Note to Self: A Novel

by Alina Simone

  “You want between buttocks, too?” Wendi said, indicating for Anna to flip over onto her stomach.

  The thought of her friend sent a current of shame coursing through her. There was no hiding from Leslie; Leslie had a Google alert on her. And yet that’s exactly what she’d been doing for weeks now, wasn’t it? Hiding from Leslie. From her silence, Anna could only assume Leslie was too horrified to make the first move. She was waiting for Anna to crawl back penitent, the prodigal friend. But how could she face Leslie when even on a good day her powerful mix of good posture and orthodontics threatened to overwhelm her, send her tobogganing straight down a mountain of regret for lives not lived?

  Turning her head to the side, she found herself facing another wall, bare save for a framed certificate hanging askew from a single nail. She strained to read the loopy font, before realizing it was Wendi’s esthiology certificate from the Aveda Institute. She felt a hot stab as Wendi buttered her left ass cheek, then the reassuring pressure of her firm hand on a strip of gauze and scrrk! Anna gasped, but not from the sting. It was the action-reaction simplicity of it that left her starry-eyed. She had been trying so hard to ignore the pain that she’d failed to see the beauty of it. Waxing. In a way, it had become the most exotic of things: a job that could be described in a few short, simple words, utterly free of qualification. What do you do for a living? I remove unwanted hair.

  She mouthed it to herself: I remove unwanted hair.

  She looked around the room. It was practically a monastic cell. There was no Internet. No computers at all. It was like going back in time. From the look of the glam poster of a Chinese pop star on this new wall, it could be 1987, when things were convenient but not oppressively so. When you had to look things up in books and places up on maps and wait after sweeping your finger around a rotary dial for the chk-chk-chk sound to fade. All those forced pauses had seemed so inconvenient at the time, but the lost fermatas and lungas, they gave you just enough time, didn’t they, to change your mind. To save yourself.

  Yes, she could imagine herself passing the days here with Wendi, learning how to wax and how to be Chinese. And hadn’t Brandon spent an entire PCH lunch extolling the “manscaping boom,” the growing demand for back-, sack-, and crack-stripping skills? Maybe her clients would tell her everything the way she told Wendi everything. Because wasn’t Wendi, like Leslie, a life coach of sorts? A hair coach, at least?

  “This one gonna hurt,” Wendi warned as she pulled back an arm’s-length strip of gauze with a mighty rip. And it did hurt. Felt just like sitting down on a leaf blower, in fact. But it was a purifying pain, and when she was done, Anna tipped Wendi extra without regret.

  The door tinkled and she merged seamlessly into the foot traffic streaming up Fifth Avenue. The flag above McDonald’s was snapping hard in the wind and Anna felt a sting of color in her cheeks. She walked past a Vietnamese restaurant and a Mexican restaurant and a shop selling quinceañera supplies. A man on the corner had spread out a blanket and was selling DVDs that were probably pirated, but so what? So what! People were buying them and they looked happy. The mango lady waved from behind her stall and, on a whim, Anna stopped. With a few expert whacks, the woman transformed the mango into an orchid. She dipped it in salt and gave it a squirt of lime juice from a plastic bottle as Anna handed over her dollar. She bit into it. The mango was amazingly ripe. Hot and cold at the same time, bitter yet sweet. They should call this fucking life on a stick, Anna thought, letting mango juice drip brazenly down her chin. She pulled out her cell to call Leslie. She knew it was too soon—that she was probably just jacked up on a cocktail of mango juice and hope, high on the feeling of the wind whistling jauntily between her Formica-smooth thighs—but the need to testify was too great.

  She had a shining picture of herself asking Leslie, How are you? How is Dora? What happened with Brie? Is everything OK? And if Leslie brought up Taj, Anna would agree to everything—Taj’s perfidity, her stupidity, Leslie’s lucidity—all the idities. Leslie would tell her to look at it another way; that Taj had given this new chapter of her life a Genesis. And Anna would take the opportunity to lay out her vision in a clear and purposeful tone. She would demonstrate a newfound maturity and restore Leslie’s faith in her powers of judgment. Because a goal without a plan is just a wish, but she had a plan. She would find that long-unread e-mail from her mother, subject line: Offer. She would click on it, zeroing out the balance on her in-box. She would hit reply and compose a message. A message consisting of exactly one word.

  Yes.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to:

  My parents and my late grandmother, Irina Simon. Joshua Knobe, without whom this book would not exist, our daughter, Zoe, and Bruce and Kath Knobe.

  The wonderful and long-suffering women of FSG: Kathy Daneman, Charlotte Strick, and Gabriella Doob. John McGhee, I’ve never met you, but you sure as hell know your way around a semicolon. And especially Eric Chinski, for believing in me.

  Merrilee Heifetz, Sarah Nagel, and Jean Garnett at Writers House.

  Benjamin Coonley, Andrei Konst, Amanda & Neil, Bob Gourley, Maria Sonevytsky, and Marlo Poras, for your friendship and support. Galina Kuleshova, the best nanny on Earth. Anna Moschovakis, thank you for the CARBS. (Also, thank you, carbs. I love you.)

  And to the guys at Southside Coffee, who nicely let me sit there for a year or two nursing a cup of coffee while secretly writing a book. Your coffee is truly the best in the universe.

  Also by Alina Simone

  You Must Go and Win

  Faber and Faber, Inc.

  An affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2013 by Alina Simone

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2013

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Simone, Alina, 1974–

  Note to self / Alina Simone. — First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-86547-899-2 (alk. paper)

  1. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology) in women—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.I56276N68 2013

  813'.6—dc23

  2012048024

  www.fsgbooks.com

  www.twitter.com/fsgbooks • www.facebook.com/fsgbooks

  eISBN 9780374710132