Manicured Permanence

When my fingernails break, I’m reminded of the fragility of strength. The edge of a car door or a café table will send my day into a silent spiral. 

My grandmother once told me I had nails like hers: tough. Hers were long and always perfectly maintained. She’d file them while she was in bed, keeping her tools in a small carousel that would sit on the table that stretched over her. Only the necessities were kept in that table. Letters from friends, pictures of me, dollar store solar power toys that somehow still worked in her dark bedroom, and that nail file. 

She told me this in her office chair fashioned as a wheel chair that she used to move around her house in. The rotating wheels glided apprehensively on the linoleum floor of her bathroom, which had a long countertop with a massive mirror that reflected us as we were then. I, a nervous girl who read too much and spoke too little. She, a stubborn old woman, robbed of her health. 

My nails are not tough, though. They snap easily and are difficult to maintain during busy university winters and hours I’ve spent dishwashing at part-time jobs. But they do look like hers. Same terminally ivory color. Same long, thin nail bed with shallow lunulae on the thumbs. 

When I remember how ill my grandmother was for almost my whole life, I find it hard to believe. Not only because sickness, up until my young adulthood, had always been perceived as a day off of school. A temporary oasis from the world in which you felt worse than usual but you got to watch television all day instead of going to school. More so because the parts that I remember of her transcend physical signs of health. I remember her patience, her sweetness, her love, and those damn nails. 

My grandmother struck the perfect balance of toughness and sweetness. Most people have to suffer to find out how to balance that equation, and she had a fair amount of suffering in her life, but I think she was born the way she died. Kind and loving to everyone she met, even when they were cruel to her. Sequestered in her Chicago suburb home for the later part of her life, she was grateful for anyone who came to visit. I’m sure that if the devil came to her back door, she’d invite him in for a cup of coffee. 

When people are sick for extended periods of time, we remember them in glimpses. Individual scenes instead of overarching presence in memories. We want to remember them as they were, not who the sickness made them. My grandmother was too sick to travel, so she was never at any major life event for me. She was always one phone call away, staring at hospital curtains or out nursing home windows, where she’d sigh when an ambulance would pull into the parking lot.

Another one, she’d say. 

The lights were always on, but the sirens rarely were. What’s the use in making a fuss about mortality when the daily events are far worse than death itself? Out of the womb we come, fashioned with an adult identity for some number of years until we are sanctioned to homely facilities that still reek of that impossibly intense hospital stench. Back to babies we go, in need of help to eat and sleep and clean up after ourselves. 

I still take a weird pride in my nail beds. They’re my favorite physical feature because they remind me how I’ll never be entirely separated from her. Every week, I sit down and as I listen to music, pull off the layers of polish I put on days prior. The single-ply toilet paper in my apartment bathroom flakes off and gets caught in the speedily evaporating acetone. Minutes later, I’m left with my nails as they always are underneath whatever I coat them with. Bare and vulnerable. 

I take time to clip and file. Buff and shape. Paint and re-paint. Tuck and trim cuticles. Until my nails are almonds of auburn or blush. Only then, an hour or two later once I’m sure they’ve completely dried, do I feel ready to face the world. 

Somedays I go out with them bare. I’m keenly aware of what touches them, scared to chip or break what has felt like weeks of hard work, even though I haven’t done much at all. I’ll get up at a restaurant and hit my hand on the edge of the table, scuffing one. I’ll think “close call.” Then I’ll notice the edge of my ring finger’s nail has broken off entirely. 

Up to my bathroom I’ll go, where I’ll sit on the floor and tongue between teeth, meticulously coat them. Gardenia cuticle oil, keratin growth serums, quality polish and top coats. I’ll once again be reminded that toughness is only as deep as the layers we protect ourselves with. Just like the sticky polish, it’ll flake off eventually. If you don’t take care of the nails below, they will warp and discolor. 

We are learning the implications of generational trauma and the complexity of shared identities, but we do not talk about the other things that are passed down. The traits that compose our personalities and our hearts. I like to think that some part of me is my grandmother, and she makes an appearance when I wear her Revlon 535 Rum Raisin lipstick or my nails are trimmed to perfection. But these superficial details are a reflection of the traits that run deeply inside me. I see the rouge as resilience, something you put on each morning and carry in your bag. I see my nails as strength, something needing to be addressed and maintained.

For her funeral a year ago, I got a manicure. It was important that I show up to that drab funeral home where the coffee is always lukewarm and the orchards in the windowsills are fake with ten fingernails polished to perfection. I could never promise my grandmother that I would always be able to take care of my head or my heart, but I promise I’ll take care of my nails. 

I got French tips with a rose-colored glaze. For forty minutes, I allowed a stranger to hold my hands and fondle the ten details I still had left of her. My finite proof that she was here, a sort of manicured perception of permanence. That she is here, underneath the top coat and tucked behind my cuticles. 

Has anyone ever told you that you have beautiful nails? 

Yes.

Alexandra Hall is a journalism student based near Detroit, Michigan. She runs a music blog called Rocka Magazine in her free time and hopes to pursue a career in the music industry or in writing. Aside from her own publication, her work regularly appears in her college paper as well as the Wall Street Journal's Future View series.