Dark Screams: Volume Six

The Manicure ^{Nell Quinn-Gibney}

When I push open the door, a bell emits a piercing brass chuckle, but there’s not a single person in sight. I take a step back and double check—sure enough, the sign in the window blinks OPEN in fluorescent lettering. I hesitate for a moment, wondering if I should come back another time, but I drove all the way over here, and honestly, I’d just like to get it over with. The bell sounds for a second time as I walk inside and plant myself in front of the reception desk. Some sort of jazzy piano is playing through the speakers in the ceiling, but it sounds as if the piano needs to be tuned. I wince, wondering who chose the music.

The room is heavy with the sweet smell of floral air freshener, with the metallic tang of nail polish and disinfectant right underneath. I try to breathe shallowly through my mouth to avoid these landmark scents. The floor looks like it’s made out of the same uniform brown linoleum found in elementary schools and hospitals all across the country, and the walls are an ambiguous green. The light and shadows play on the questionable shade, brightening it into a nearly yellow color around the glowing wall lights and fading it out to a patchy grayish-green in the corners. The wall to my left is covered with shelves of polish: at least a hundred different reds taking up three shelves to themselves, and hundreds more bottles spanning the color wheel above and below. A row of lattice-metal waiting chairs with a few magazines from the early 2000s lines the window that opens onto the dark street. A line of thick brown dentist chair/foot bath combos looms against the back wall, and the rest of the room behind the reception area is dedicated to my own personal nightmare, the manicure desks.

“Hey there, honey, sorry to keep you waiting!”

A chipper young woman emerges from the back room, beaming at me. Her accent is some sort of unidentifiable New England blend. She is wearing bright red lipstick that throws her yellowed teeth into stark contrast.

“Hi. I don’t have an appointment.”

“Well, you can probably see business is a little slow right now. We’ll be able to take you immediately. What can we do for you this evening?”

“I’ve got a gift certificate for just the basic manicure package,” I answer.

“Have you ever had a manicure before?” she asks, leading me to the desk closest to the back of the room. I sit down and look warily over the array of aromatic creams and metallic apparatus in between us.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Well, we’ll start with your cuticles and then soak your hands for a few minutes. After that, we shape the nails.” All she does to my cuticles is rub something vanilla-scented around my nail beds, and the water she places my hands in is warm enough to not be entirely uncomfortable, although there’s something in it that makes it feel somehow slimy. When she dries my hands and pulls a pair of formidable-looking nail scissors from a small pouch, however, I flinch.

She notices but doesn’t remark, just takes my left hand in her own. The blades of the scissors spread, and without intending to, I’m speaking.

“I thought they didn’t actually cut your fingernails at manicures,” I say, cracking my knuckles as an excuse to take my hand back.

“Not always, but it’s the easiest way to shape them down when they’re this long. I can file them all the way down instead, if you’d rather.”

I’m a grown adult. I can handle this. “No, it’s fine. Go ahead and cut them.”

Clip.

I started cutting my own nails when I was nine years old. Until then, it was my least favorite bedtime ritual. I would sit down on my mother’s bed, tissue beneath my spread hand, and she would take the pair of curved scissors off of her side table. It was always evening, after a bath, and I would be in my pajamas. The bedside lamp would be on, casting blue shadows in the creases of my knuckles. I would settle into the bed, trying to sit as still as possible: I was never a squirmer, not when it came to my nails.

My mother would take my hand and fold all of my fingers down except one, starting with my pinkie and then moving one by one to my thumb. I would feel the cold, hard metal against the pad of my finger, wince as the pressure built and the solid end of my nail flexed upward, and then feel the clench and release in my stomach as the sharp click sounded and my nail end broke off, joining the pile of off-white crescent moons on the tissue.

I hated cutting my own nails marginally less than I hated having them cut by someone else. It was less painful in the same way that trying to tickle yourself doesn’t quite work. I no longer worried about delicate layers of skin getting caught between those two thin blades. I even found tricks to make it easier—running my hands under warm water would make my thick thumbnail more pliable, and using larger toenail clippers would make the cuts faster. Still, when I cut them myself, it had to be my own momentum to close the clippers, my own strength that stretched and snapped the stiff keratin.

“You getting your nails done for any reason in particular?” the woman asks. It’s been twelve years since anyone else has cut my nails. One down, nine to go. Only nine. Easy.

“No. Just thought… figured I should get it done.”

Clip.

My grandmother got me a nail kit for Christmas my last year of elementary school. Really, my uncle picked it out and wrapped it and wrote her name on it in his best approximation of her handwriting. That was the year that her Parkinson’s got really bad and her memory started to go along with it. The kit had three different nail polishes—pink, purple, and clear glitter—along with a pair of butterfly nail clippers and a sparkly purple file. “Thanks, Gram,” I said obediently, bending down to give her a hug. She touched my cheek. Her hand was as wrinkled as if she had just been in the shower and she smelled of toothpaste and urine. “Merry Christmas,” she replied, never turning to actually look at me.

My mother sat me down later that evening to show me how to use the file.

“I don’t want to, I don’t like it,” I whined.

“Don’t be ungrateful,” she said. “It’s easy. Here.” I will never forget the sandpaper rasp, the chalklike dust collecting on the edge of the file, no pain but pressure and the rough edge scraping across my fingerprint. I threw the entire kit away that night after my mother went to bed.

“Do you paint your nails very often?” the woman asks. “I paint mine all the time.”

I glance at her nails—they are short and unpainted and slightly discolored. I bite down against a grimace. She laughs. “Well, not right now.”

Clip.

Computer lab was right before lunch, and the students were always rowdy and the teacher never cared. The cool boys, the ones who would buy their lunch every day and always had the extra dollar to get ice cream, too, the ones who would play DS on the bus and who could do at least twenty push-ups in the PE fitness tests, were grouped around one of the chunky computer screens, laughing about something.

“Let’s go see what they’re looking at,” my friend suggested, clearly bored with the Word Art she was making. I looked at her, horrified. We brought lunch in insulated lunch bags and my mom sent me a cup with a screw lid full of milk every day. We couldn’t do even five push-ups. We didn’t talk to them.

“They don’t wanna show us,” I whispered at her.

“Why not? It sounds like it’s funny.”

She didn’t understand about lunch boxes and PE class. I didn’t know how to tell her no, and before I could think of a way, she had stood up and was walking down the aisle. My hands went all cold, but I hopped up and followed after her.

“What’re you looking at?” she asked brightly. They kept giggling as they turned to face us, and I felt fire in my cheeks.

“Come see,” one of them said. “If it’s not too gross for you girls.”

My friend pushed her way through, and slowly I followed because the only thing worse than looking at the picture would be walking back to my seat.

They were watching us from behind, laughing and talking in low murmurs. I felt tears rushing to my eyes but blinked them back as I twisted my arms around my torso. On the computer screen was a picture of a woman with greasy white hair and a bony face—and sprouting off the ends of her fingers, nails that must have been three feet long. They were painted bright pink and were curved in more than a half-circle, forming crisscross cage bars in front of her body. You could see the yellow undersides to some of them as they curved around, and I wondered how she could eat, get dressed, type on a computer, hold a pencil, touch another person. I tried not to throw up.

“You know, you really shouldn’t let your nails get this long unless you have some sort of cream to put on them to keep them stronger. We sell that here. They must break a lot. Do they?” the woman asks.

“Um, sometimes, I guess.” I’m trying to focus on something else, eyes darting around the Ikea artwork, searching for anything to grab my attention. The smell in the air refuses to let me forget where I am.

Clip.

They do break off frequently, as a matter of fact. I never cut them enough, so they grow out too long and I don’t take care of them, so they snag on things and tear holes in every pair of tights that I own. Usually I have three or four long nails and one or two jagged, short ends that are weak, pliable, and constantly driving me crazy. I’m always running my fingers over them, equally bothered by the unsymmetrical, slanted nails and the tiny stubs. When one of my nails gets half torn off and I’m out somewhere without anything to cut with, I start to make always unfulfilled promises to myself that I will cut them more frequently. These half-strips of nails hanging off, and the tiny splits that spread down the middle of the nail but leave it attached at either end, push me to face the choice: the choice between leaving the nail attached to catch on everything and for me to constantly, nervously, incessantly bend and fold, or to tear it off… or at least to try. Often when I start to pull at the loose end, the split spreads down until I have to rip off the edge of my nail that attaches to my skin, leaving the pink, raw topside of my finger exposed to the world.

“So, do you have a boyfriend? You’re very pretty,” the woman remarks. If I didn’t feel so nauseated I might laugh at the “Who’s your boyfriend?” stereotype, but there is a knowing, ironic tinge to her voice, as if she’s intentionally slotting herself into the cliché and doing it with a smile. I wish I could know what she’s thinking.

“Not at the moment,” I answer.

Clip.

I was lying on my back on my best friend’s bed. We were sixteen years old and I was in a phase where I picked at my nails, and that’s what I was doing then, pulling at the cuticles around my middle finger as she told me about the boy she was dating and how she thought she might be in love with him. I knew that her boyfriend was a scumbag, but I was trying to sound sincere with my “yeah”s and “no way”s and “really, what did he say”s and I was afraid she could hear the artificial brightness in my voice. I listened just enough to his good-night texts and favorite bands to respond to her, while focusing on trying to figure out what was creating the pebble in my throat, growing larger with each passing moment.

“Hey, stop that!” I broke into her monologue and my own reverie as I reached out to swat at her hand—she’d wrapped the long cords that dangle to adjust the blinds around her finger, tightly enough that the top joint had swollen up. The meat of her fingertip was pressing over the edge of her fingernail, turning a mottled violet. It looked almost shiny in the low lighting, practically circular and ready to pop. It turned my stomach.

“No.” She laughed, yanking her hand away. “I like it. It feels kind of cool.”

I tussled with her for a moment, then lay back in defeat. She picked up from where she left off about their Olive Garden dinner and I watch her finger fade from purple to gray, as outside the window, the sunset turned the sky the same colors.

“It’s not usually this empty in the evenings in here. I guess it’s just your lucky day,” she says, smiling broadly. I think irrationally about punching her, knocking those off-colored teeth out.

“You could say that.”

Clip.

I was seven years old and my cousin was chasing me around the house. He was older than me and bigger and my mom had told me to tell her if he ever tried to play doctor with me or made me uncomfortable. He never had, but the tone in my mom’s voice made me queasy whenever I was around him and I would never let us end up alone together. He was laughing and moaning like in the zombie movie we had watched last night—against my parents’ better judgment—and I had to get away before he ate my brains or, more likely, sat on me. The kitchen floor was patterned with sunlight as I flew across the tiles, heading straight for the back door. If I made it outside, I could climb a tree and be safe, but he was gaining on me fast. I could feel the back of my shirt stretching out as I grabbed the handle and threw the door open ahead of me. I raced through it, spinning around backward to fling the door shut, and then—

I was screaming and blood was flowing freely onto the floor and soaking into the edge of my sleeve, turning the blue fabric into a rich magenta. I went to wrap my other hand around the finger and felt the entire nail shift underneath my palm, pain pulsing all the way through the bone of my arm. I stopped trying to hold it and screamed louder.

After I got home from the hospital, I had to soak the finger in Epsom salts every night for the next six months while I waited for the nail to grow back. I don’t know what it was actually for—to keep it from getting infected, probably. At the time, I thought the cloudy, milky water was some sort of magical potion to make the nail grow back faster. It couldn’t grow back fast enough to replace the series of Hello Kitty and Toy Story Band-Aids that covered the sensitive pink flesh that stung at the lightest touch. I spent far too long staring at it, fixated and horrified by the tiny nail creeping up my finger day by day and the strange alien appearance of skin not supposed to be seen.

“Do you know what color you want when we’re done here?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it. Blue? Maybe?” My voice sounds higher than normal and cracks on the last word.

“Red would look lovely with your hair.”

Clip.

For most of my life I was meticulous about keeping my nails clean and healthy—never biting them, washing with soap to get the dark rings out from underneath the tips. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, however, I started picking. I would sit in my room with my headphones on and try not to hear the sounds of my parents fighting through the vents and study my nail beds. The tiny white peaks of dead skin around my cuticles drove me crazy. First, I would slide another nail underneath to make one stand straight up. I would press the side of that finger against my teeth and close them with a click—an echo of those dreaded scissors of my childhood—to try to bite it off. Sometimes the skin would still be soft and I’d tear it away with a tiny, tiny swell of pain as living skin came with it. Sometimes it would be hardened and would snap off, but there would always be a stout piece still rooted into the flesh of my finger. Try to bite it again, but now it was damp and flexible and too short to get a good grip with my teeth. I’d start pulling with the bitten stubs of my thumb and index nails, pull until purple welts would appear around my nail beds and it hurt to wash my hands.

“You seem a little tense,” she observes. “But I promise I won’t cut you! Five years working here and I’ve never cut anyone.”

My breathing is erratic. My heartbeat is pulsing in my ears.

Clip.

I have never been able to go ice-skating. The first time my parents took me was when I was six years old. My dad kneeled down in front of me to lace up my skates and warned me that if I fell down, I needed to move to the side and get back on my feet very quickly so that no one would skate over my fingers. I started crying and refused to go out on the ice. In the car all the way home, I kept imagining the schick of the blade, the cool spray of ice chips against my hand, the pink-gloved finger skittering away across the ice, leaving a thin red line behind like a caterpillar’s damp trail.

“Almost made it,” she tells me. “Only one more. You’re doing great.”

At some point I must have moved the hand she has finished under the table. It’s clenched in a fist, green veins pressed taut against the skin. I can feel my nails pressing marks into my palm. I want to cry.

Clip.

“See, just one more left. I don’t know why you were nervous.” She folds my other fingers down, just like my mother used to do. My head is spinning and spots flicker in front of my eyes. The small pink caterpillar is crawling away from me, a swollen purple head protruding from the end, sparkles haphazardly smeared along the back, a Hello Kitty Band-Aid wrapped around the middle… red trail smearing out behind it, red just like the puddle on the gray desk collecting underneath my rigid finger and the woman is buzzing—

“I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry, you must have jumped or my finger slipped or something, oh my God, I don’t know what happened, just wait here while I get the first-aid kit, do we need to call a doctor? There’s a lot of blood—”

My cousin reaches out to grab my shirt and rakes his nails down my spine, my grandmother touches my cheek and digs her claws in deep enough to hit my molars, the boys are watching my back but they’re doing more than watching, they’re sliding their nails across my shoulders as lightly as feathers and I can’t see them but I know they’re there, my best friend who I lovelovelovelovelove has wrapped the cord back around her finger and pulls tight, so tight that the top joint pops off with the sound of a can opener ripping the last shred of metal apart, my mother and father are tearing at each other’s tongues and throats with their fingers so they don’t have to listen anymore, I’m scratching at my own nails, scratching until I dig down deep enough and the nails spring off, chunks of meat still attached to the underside, spinning away through the air—

“Just sit still, oh my God, there’s no one else in, they didn’t tell us what to do in these situations, it doesn’t look too deep, but there’s a lot of blood, just keep breathing, all right? I have to—”

And then there’s quiet. Quiet in the store, I don’t know where she is but she’s gone, and quiet in my head. The scissors that she had cut me with are in my hands, although I don’t remember taking them. I reach out slowly and wrap my bloody finger in a pristine white towel on the desk next to me. I stand up and place my gift certificate and a five-dollar bill carefully to the side of the puddle of blood, then drop the scissors into the bowl of lukewarm water, watching the red feathers spiral through the liquid for a moment before I turn to leave. I find the switch on the top of the sign and slide it so that OPEN turns as dark as the pavement outside. The bell laughs again as I exit.