Before the lights went out

“I’m not gonna lie,” said a bridesmaid at the bachelorette party. “I got a mani-pedi right before Sandy hit.”

I shoveled a forkful of salad into my mouth, hoping another member of the party would field this one.

“What?” she said, interpreting the lack of a verbal response from the party as disbelief. “I’m not kidding.” Then, getting closer to discerning the truth, at least in my case, she turned to the bride. “Your friends are going to think I’m so shallow. But I get a manicure every week, and we were done preparing for the storm, so I might as well get my nails done, right?”

*

“You thought that was shallow?” he asked, when I related the story. “Why?”

“Yeah, I mean,” I searched my brain for the reason a pre-hurricane mani-pedi bothered me so much.

“What did you do right before the hurricane?”

I hadn’t been on the ground helping people or dropping off items at a shelter or giving blood or anything. I hadn’t even gone out to take artsy empty New York pictures. Really, I just looked out the window and watched the tree limbs blow dangerously close to the power lines–and waited for the lights to go out.

“Nothing, really.”

“Maybe that’s the problem.”