Hands Out

By: Dianne Rudolf

Though I am always greeted like an old friend, the relationship with my nail technician is professional and transactional. My world-weary body is escorted to a massage recliner chair, and green tea is offered in a porcelain cup. It is a nearly sacred space, a shrine of sorts, where the old gets sloughed like a snake’s skin and I emerge prettier. Softer. Like a queen, I lay recumbent, a mechanical hand probing my lower back. Meditation music plays, a wooden flute with birdsong, accompanied by the whirs of hand tools grinding off the old polish.

My feet, ever-beachward bound, soak in lavender scented soapy water that is almost too hot, their dead skin cheese-gratered off in a down to brass tacks fashion. I pore over the sample nail chart, the rainbow array with pearl, sparkles, opaque and translucent finishes, as though I am choosing a colour for my apartment walls. Once my feet are transformed, Jenny will commandeer my hands. I look forward to tucking away my phone as an opportunity to practice mindfulness, as my counsellor suggested. Simply sit with your wound. Notice it, and whatever else is going on around you.

Depending on how any given set of hands is employed, nail colour can last two to three weeks, but the decision feels weighty. I am the same way standing in front of a gelato bar, on the verge of overwhelm. Is it the reluctance to accept the consequences of a wrong choice, like ending up with the wrong husband?

The decisions multiply, but it’s a relatively happy problem to solve. Acrylic or regular? The harder wearing acrylic, of course, as it will fill and smooth the nails’ tiny corrugations. Length of nail? Enough to justify a manicure, but never so long that it will render my hands useless. And the shape? There’s square, oval, pointed and stabby, or squoval--an ovalled off square.

Today, two young women at the end of the row are debating which one elongates their fingers more. I wonder why this is an advantage of any kind but don’t ask.

“I’m going to get that keyboard with the raised space bar,” the one not wearing a bra says. “It’s made specifically for long nails.”

“Yeah, great, that’s such a smart invention.” The friend’s tattoos appear to swim like sea creatures on her legs. Tattoos and no bras, their version of self-determination, of liberty.

“It’s about time.” Friends who agree on everything are friends for life, and this warms me.

To my right, a woman holds her phone like a detonator and watches Facebook Reels at double speed, the sound like helium-sucking sports commentators. It is hard to fathom the desire to consume twice as much content when my brain is oversaturated from a week of clients telling me about their thruples’ break-ups and new manifestations of anxiety. Then again, with certain clients—the cheaters seeking absolution, mostly—I wish I could accelerate them with the flick of a button.

The cuticle work is intense. It is something I have neither the dexterity nor the courage to attempt properly and requires my full trust in Jenny. Cuticles aren’t simply pushed back with a nail file, as I had been taught by my mother. They are carefully snipped away with tiny scissors, often in one tiny skin worm. Peel the mandarin orange all in one piece, I used to challenge Trevor.

Once Jenny finishes my left hand, the half moons are visible and the borders between skin and nail are the tidiest they can be. She is a perfectionist and concentrates with pursed lips and furrowed brow, as though her life depends on it. The foundational work complete, Jenny starts the ritual of three coats of some turpentine-smelling product. Gently, she places my hand into a quick dry machine as though she is placing a baby into an incubator, then switches to my other hand. In and out, in and out.

After Trevor left, and the finances were sorted, I inherited all the blue jobs. I decided to change the exterior paint of the house to get it ready for sale. I decided to use ladders, no scaffolding. It had been painted with oil-based colours of Trevor’s choosing, and at the time I acquiesced. After all, he had been the summer painter during his university years. I would later learn they were the same colours he had chosen for the house he shared with his last serious girlfriend. Light green for the main, dark green on the cedar shingles. For the window trim and door, eggplant.

“Other hand please,” Jenny orders. She deftly applies the base coat. I remember that she is from Vietnam, has lived in Victoria for nine years, and that she sends money to her family. Now she is the only one who holds my hand and rubs my feet, my surrogate mother-husband.

Like my aesthetician, I had to prepare the surface of the house properly. I pressure washed and scraped the entire exterior, wiped it down, and applied a coat of primer. It had been early summer when I started, and I grew nimble with the ladder. I had already lost weight after the separation, and then I lost more. My muscled arms propelled me up the ladder, my scrawny legs braced against rungs, tense with the fear of falling. Best workout in town.

The primer treatment had the effect of whitewash, like a house in the Greek Isles, neutralized of Trevor’s touch. I waited impatiently to let it dry completely because only then could I pop the lid off a gallon of the main colour--a warm flat tone called Kitten White. It was purported to hide the hundreds of pock marks that are common for a heritage house, and I applied it with a thick, plush roller feeling a sense of satisfaction I had not known in years. I remember thinking that it didn’t matter if whoever bought my house repainted it in their own colors, after all that work. I hoped it would be a young couple engaged in harmonious activities to cancel out the multitude of electrons that I was sure still lingered inside.

A burly man in a letterman’s jacket enters the salon and stands sheepishly where a sign greets customers with, “Life is Messy, But You Can Have Perfect Nails.” He is led to a chair and he limps, wincing. A staff member fills his foot bath as he explains that he is sore because he can’t reach his toenails to tend to them. “They’re ingrown.” Tea is offered, and he relaxes into the recliner chair, his eyes already closed.

My entire body was stiff each morning after a long jag of painting my house, but after the main colour was underway, I was energized and hardly noticed it. I was dying see the full effect, the culmination of all my hot, sweaty work. Feeling naughty for prematurely breaking out the trim colour, I stirred the velvety blue-black paint that was as languid and opaque as a piece of the night sky; for a moment I was tempted to taste it. I used an angled brush and concentrated fully so as not to bleed into the main wall colour. I was vaguely aware of human activity around me:  the passing cars, the remote drone of lawn mower, and a bird’s mating song. As I focused, I pushed my cheek out with my tongue, like I had done to communicate to Trevor when I wanted him to do the same, while he sat on the toilet and I shaved off his stubble.

“Relax please.” Jenny is finished with the colour and works on the protective coat. “Just give me your hand and let it relax. Why so tense today?”

I could tell her I’m getting used to being on my own but I worry love will never come to me again. That I steel myself to accept the probability that a new person, my special person, will not materialize to share the last decades of our lives. At the same time, I prepare for the possibility that he may come to me. Gently. Quietly. And love’s alchemy will unleash the trust, hope and faith that lies dormant in my foundation. But I say nothing.

It is impossible to know how to be. Like my polished nails that hide their thinness and discolored white spots, do I keep a veneer over my heart and mask its bruises? Or do I expose them proudly, like freed breasts and tattooed skin?

I return home with my shiny, oval, symmetrical nails that say I am done with climbing ladders and scraping down old houses. She has her shit together. The illusion of perfection, my glossy coated keratin tips will last two weeks. Then they will start to chip and peel, tearing the carefully prepared layer of my nail away with its acrylic coating, making it blotchy, thin, and more ragged than ever before. It keeps me in a cycle of having to return to the shop that smells of lavender and acetate, whose mothers nurture me back to order. Within these four modest walls, they help me conceal what I am not willing to advertise, provide the tenderness I need. And ready me, possibly, for the wild, green expanses of one final, true, big love.