It’s an internal conflict from which all women suffer - one that forms one of the basic struggles of female identity. It’s not dress size or hairstyle, career path or marital status. It’s our fingernail length.
Some people trumpet their identity via the buttons they wear on their lapels. Others have bumper stickers. When it comes to women however, fingernails are a crucial barometer of the female self. I am them and they are me: the truest bellwether of a transient identity.
In my life they've been long and polished (the "Young Business Woman" era) or short and dirty ("The Artist Years"). They've been a different length on each finger like a ragged graph of the stock market (“The Happy Gardener”). There have been periods where 9 were long and one short (snapped it using trying open a CD), or the left hand has been short and the right long (learning the guitar). They've had 6 coats of $15-a-bottle polish during some phases and gone stark naked during others. Every once in a while, I go through a period where I don't think about them at all. It doesn't last more than a week.
I have traveled extensively and bravely between the most extreme territories of fingernail length. I have explored the rugged inner realm of nails bitten-to-the-quick, and I have journeyed to the outermost regions of nail length, exploring the netherlands of practical fingernail possibility with talons extending a half inch beyond the tops of my fingertips.
In college as an art major I wore them short. I had to, of course: I was an artist. I wore overalls and clogs and wore my hair long and wild. My fingers were serious and functional and even if my paintings were mediocre, I was to be taken seriously.
A few years after I graduated however, I found myself curious about the world of women with beautifully done nails. Sometimes, wishing I were that kind of a woman, I too would get my nails done, and for a time, I would be one of those women. My posture would be better. I would toss my hair. I'd use my fingers more, to point at things that really didn't need to be pointed out; to run my finger down lists; to touch-tone dial. I would handle things gingerly, with the pads of my fingers. It affected my whole physical self: when I ran with long nails, I'd run "like a girl". Breaking one would induce dismay and anxiety. Sometimes I'd catch myself admiring them as if they weren’t attached to me: watching them twinkle as I pushed elevator buttons or set the dial on the washing machine to Permanent Press.
My fingernails have been an Almanac-like measure of my mood at various times in life. At one point in my dating past, a date could look across the dinner table at my hands and know approximately what his chances were for an extended evening (shaved legs were an equally reliable measure). If they were painted at all, that was a good sign. To know my fingernails was to know me. Sometimes, in the biblical sense.
Most women will tell you that their fingernail consciousness was raised initially by their mothers who typically guide their daughters from: “For heaven’s sake, that dog can dig his own holes!”, to our first introduction to the proper way to use a nail file. Not baked in a cake to break out of prisons like my four brothers insisted, but gently, on one's finger tips, in one direction only, at first making the nails pointed and then rounding them, carefully pushing back the cuticles so the "moons" show. That was then.
Things have changed, fingernail-wise. Like everything else that can adorn a human body, the decoration of the fingernail has come to mean something. These days you have moody colors that are mixed in blenders, mostly dark, from deep burgundy all the way to the very popular black. There are deep purples, dark blues and rich greens with glitter mixed in. You can have nails as metallic as the side of a toaster or striped like a zebra hide. If you put plain pink on your nails and still frequent the lower East side, you're saying something about who you are... and who you aren't.
Culturally, there are fingernail differences as well. Black and Hispanic women seem more likely to sport exotically long nails, painted with patterns that would make Juan Miro envious, perhaps imbedded with a jewel. There's the classic "French manicure": the white-tipped, flat-topped style which prime-time TV actresses and female newscasters seem to favor, representing both approachability and responsible journalism. And then there are the bright red claws of porn stars and men's magazine models, meant to both intimidate and entice.
I always thought having someone else do one's nails was a silly luxury -- until I had mine done. It’s like handing over one part of your body to the curators of a particular wing of a museum. Your nails become the fine canvasses a staff of experts are trained to restore.
My informal research (conducted across countless manicure tables) has revealed that most nail operations are run either by rows of small, lovely Asian girls, or in spas and hair salons by middle-aged Eastern European women with oddly smooth skin. When we sit down before them and extend our hands, what do they think? It’s a question that kept me away from the table for years. What must they think of a woman who can’t do her own nails? Now, I assume they are just waiting until I leave so they can get their own nails done.
Unlike hair salons, we don't walk in and ask their advice; generally women know what they want in a fingernail. Frankly, I've always been afraid that if I did ask for advice, the news would be bad; that I'd be nail-cast: "Honey, bright red just isn't you. You're just not the type. Here's a nice pink." You mean you don't see me with a jewel? It's that obvious I'm not a "Purple Passion" person? Can I at least have a darker shade of pink??
These days, my nails are plain: unpainted, mid-length, kind of between here and there, sort of 5'5", brunette, Midwestern average. Sort of like me. And for now, I'm content. But I see blue on the horizon. And it’s called “Midnight Sky Metallic”.
No comments:
Post a Comment