McCarren Public Pool, Brooklyn

I want to say that you were shaving your toes “delicately” or “carefully” but the truth is there was total neutrality in the way you went about the act. The truth is, you shaved your toes non-adverbially.

It was eight A.M. on a Tuesday and the showers of the municipal pool were open to the world. Even in swimsuits, there seems something a bit outrageous about showering in the semi-outside, side by side with strangers. Men and women walked past on their way in (dry and overslept and meek) or out (dripping and smug and brisk) of the pool. Soaping your armpits or grimacing, eyes shut, against the shampoo foam slipping down your forehead feel like private acts. But here we all were, women who didn’t know one another, glancing at each other and trying not to, firing quick closed-mouth smiles if glances met, and you were doing something more interesting than soaping or shampooing.

You lifted your knee and lodged your foot against the wall and there was something quaintly, quintessentially sexy in the pose, like an ad from the ’50s, a sweetly smirking dame with scarlet lips and a nipped in waist, showing the reader how to snare a husband or something. I tried not to look, but later it occurred to me that if you were the sort of woman to shave her toes in public, you were probably also the sort of woman who didn’t care if anyone saw. But I also knew that my swimming goggles leave conspicuous, indented circles around my chlorine-stung eyes, making literal red rings around my face’s act of looking.

I noticed your swimsuit was both sporty and fashionable and that you were young. Younger than me, that was the main thing, because toe-shaving in public constituted the sort of admirable nonchalance I usually attribute to women at least twice your age. A “when I am old I shall wear purple” vibe. The walnut-tanned old woman I’d seen as a kid on a beach in Nice, standing in nothing but bikini briefs on the shore, squinting as she plucked her own nipple hairs.

Except maybe there was a tiny snagging paradox in your nonchalance. Because maybe true and absolute nonchalance would be just not shaving your toes in the first place, just Bilbo Bagginsing out—fuck you, patriarchy—and double beauty standards of hairlessness? I didn’t want to think about this because I preferred thinking about how good you and your freshly depilated toes must feel going off into your day, swum and showered by eight oh five in the morning.