Manicure: One of the prompts from Writers Write last week.
Title: As Long as You and I Are Here
WC: 700
It is the least I can do. It’s also the most I can do. I am not built for these palaces of femininity. I am not made for gossip and surrender to the will of someone who indubitably knows better than I do. The shiver-inducing delights of being worked on are completely alien to me. I have no store of small talk at all and a stranger’s touch—any stranger’s touch—calls up the wrong kind of shiver.
But decades ago, all at once, I made an effort for reasons I cannot recall. I shelled out money for make-up of my own, guided by the only behind-the-counter person at the Michigan Avenue department store (Saks? Bloomingdales? I honestly cannot remember.) who’d take pity on me with twenty minutes to go before close on a Sunday evening.
I made appointments for real haircuts—salon haircuts—that cost far too much and did nothing to tame my hair’s untamable sea witch vibe. I had one and only one pedicure. I clutched the magazine tight enough to leave its edges ragged and tried to focus on the story about people obsessed with having sex up against the windows in the ladies room of the 95th floor of the Hancock Tower, just across the street. I wanted to slither out of my skin and leave it entirely behind.
None of it took, though. On the rare occasions that I wear makeup and catch sight of myself in the mirror, I jump in genuine fear and lack of recognition. After a brief stint with a taciturn, capable stylist who gave a great cut and believed me when I said I was never, ever going to blow dry my hair regularly—or indeed do anything other than wash and brush it—I’m back to putting off appointments until a special occasion rolls around and I can co-opt someone else’s labor to make whatever is going on with my head look deliberate, if not good.
I’ve settled on the manicure when absolutely necessary. As a bride, as a bridesmaid, whenever there is a summons to femininity en masse, I hand over my hand and let someone else tease order out of chaos. I stick to something short and simple, a nude color and a square tip, for preference.
I hate it. It’s still a stranger’s touch. It’s still an occasion when I’m apt to be found out—to be outed as having no enthusiasm for pampering, for preemptively being annoyed by the first chip, which I’m sure to suffer before I’ve awkwardly handed over a tip that’s almost certainly the wrong amount. But it’s the least I can do.
It isn’t the last manicure that I remember the best. My memory wants to insist it must be, but the math doesn’t agree. My aunt was getting remarried, a happy occasion that drew far-flung family back together. There was a girls afternoon planned—a command performance with the bride, my sisters, another aunt, and my grandmother. I think about her a lot this time of year. I have a red sequined cardigan I pull out almost exclusively for Christmas. I call it my Mimi cardigan, and I miss her among all the sparkling things.
At not-the-last manicure, the young woman who got stuck with me was quiet. It was at least as much a matter of her reading my vibe as the two of us having very little language in common. But the silence seemed to suit her as well as it suited me. I was surprised when, as she was finishing up, she seemed to want to say something to me quite urgently.
After a few false starts and comically exaggerated sidelong looks, I realized she was asking something about Mimi.
“Your grandmother?” I eventually worked out this is what she was asking.
“Our grandmother.” I nodded to my sisters. “Their mother.”
The young woman asked Mimi’s age. I gave my best guess, shaving off a few years, I think, partly out of uncertainty, partly because I thought she might want me to.
The young woman shook her head, awed. “She is beautiful. You have nothing to worry about.”
MTZQ Telecommuniculturates 