Lacquer
by Susan Olding
It’s a myth our nails keep growing after we die. I remember my mother’s final manicure, a hot pink gel that didn’t even chip when she fell on her concrete porch, still looked perfect a week later when we laid her in her coffin. At the hospital, nobody told us she was dying. “Her vitals look great,” her doctor said on his morning rounds. He paid more attention to the chirping monitors than he did to her. It was as if the bandage mounting her forehead meant nothing. As if he couldn’t see that creeping bruise, didn’t notice her shattered ribs. Her hand, pale and blue-veined, lay across the mint-green blanket, crisscrossed by the tape that joined her to the IV, and limp as a broken bird.
She had always been vain about her hands. Not that she splurged on manicures until her later years. When I was growing up, her nails were always short, uneven, and bare. Polish would only have worn off in the hot dishwater or the hard-packed clay of the garden or the harsh detergent that she used to scrub our floors. In those days, if she lacquered anything, it was her toenails. I see her now, the knife-pleated skirt of her pale-yellow dress fanned open, her shapely foot propped on the bed frame and a tiny brush poised above her little toe. Sometimes, as a special treat, she’d paint my fingers while she waited for her toes to dry; my heart thump-thumping as each drop of glistening varnish found its mark.
Her bottles ranged across the rusty metal shelf of our bathroom medicine cabinet. Their names signaled romance, contradiction, delicious danger. Bravo, Everything’s Rosy, Sweet Talk, Kissing Pink, Cherries in the Snow, Strawberry Ice. Drink those cocktails of acetate, nitrocellulose, resin, iron oxide, titanium, and mica and you’d know why one was called Fatal Apple. Even the smell could make you dizzy. But apply that polish to your nails and you’d be Plumb Beautiful, ready to Paint the Town Red, Dynamite. It was a Touch of Genius. For a couple of dollars, you could transform yourself from an ordinary suburban housewife sweating over a soapy floor into a Queen of Diamonds—dazzling, impervious, and rare.
“Look at that beautiful half moon,” my mother would say as she bent over me with her bottle and brush. “Good circulation. No anemia.” Hugging my small hand with her own. Dabbing the polish in short strokes until my lunula vanished beneath the glossy paint.
In ancient Egypt, nail color signified social class. Pale tones for plebeians, red for royalty—and woe to the commoner who chose a color reserved for the higher caste. In 1934, when my mother was a child, a bottle of Cutex cost thirty-five cents and red was the only color you could get. By the 1960s, when she was giving me my baby manicures, the vogue for brights had completely reversed; even in the role of Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor’s nails looked nearly nude. These days a bottle of polish can set you back anywhere from $2 to $250,000 and the options for color are almost infinite. Whatever the balance in your bank account, nail polish is always a popular and practical luxury. You can use it to stop a run in your stockings, to help with threading a needle, to color code your keys, to seal an envelope.
Polish, to make smooth, to improve, to refine. Varnish, to cover or disguise. Lacquer, to finish. To harden over.
Holding my mother’s hand as she did the thing the doctors said she wasn’t going to do, I couldn’t see beneath the vivid pink of her manicure, so I didn’t know what her lunula foretold. I wondered if she’d left a decent tip on her most recent trip to her manicurist; if she’d booked ahead for her next appointment; if I ought to call the salon and tell them she wouldn’t be coming back.
The mummified Pharaohs of ancient Egypt were unearthed with their henna manicures still intact.
Susan Olding is the author of Pathologies: A Life in Essays, and Big Reader: Essays. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in literary journals and magazines throughout Canada and the U.S., including Arc, The Bellingham Review, Prairie Fire, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, and The Utne Review. She lives with her family in the traditional territory of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ nations, in Victoria, British Columbia.