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Purple Nails
by Alison Luterman
A feminist, I have always had hard-used hands with short stubby peasant fingers and bitten-down nails. No
elegant lotus petals here. They are the hands of an aged 10-year-old who hunts for worms under rocks, fishes
yucky decaying vegetable matter out of the sink-drain, twists her hair and chews her finger thoughtfully while
reading.
I have yearned for grown-up lady hands, smooth opals, that would look good playing piano or holding a
wineglass, with long seductive red nails as if the fingertips had just been dipped in the blood of sex and been
transformed into rubies.
With my own stubby grubby tough little hands I have made exuberant acrylic paintings that left streaks of wild
color embedded in the wrinkles of the knuckle. I have been attacked by rosebushes I was trying to weed, I have
chopped innumerable onions for innumerable dinners, I have spread oil in the cup of the palm and prayed a
moment before touching someone with AIDS. One young woman I gave a massage to died just a week later.
Her skin was so fragile she couldn’t bear any pressure, so I simply laid warm hands on her. I love my hands
when I am giving a massage. They glisten with oil and redden with exertion, and the blue veins pop up like the
ones on weight lifters’ biceps, but could anyone call that beautiful?
So I had this date. He was going to take me to a nice restaurant. At the words Nice Restaurant, my dead
grandmother popped back to life and repossessed my body. She was glad to see a little action after six years in
the grave and a few before that when her brain, sharp as a steel file for ninety years, didn’t work so well all of a
sudden. She drove me to the mall—a treat for her, in real life she never touched a steering wheel—and bought
me a short purple dress, all the while humming “I Enjoy Being a Girl.”
“Grandmother!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t even know you knew that song. You hate those tacky musicals. You like
opera.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know,” she said. “The piping on this dress is cheaply stitched. I got a suit in Filene’s
Basement—it was originally 190, marked down to 140, I watched it for three weeks, when they marked it down
again to 120 I made my move. Snatched it from under the nose of a Lithuanian lady. Now that suit had detail
work. But this, it’s shoddy, it’s cheap goods.”
“Grandmother, it was made in a sweatshop with practically slave labor,” I said, turning the label over. “See here
where it says made in Sri Lanka?” Now what do you suppose they pay those Sri Lankan women to sit all day
next to a pile of these stupid dresses? How often do they let them go to the bathroom?”
Grandmother looked at me with a cloudy exasperated look combining age, death, anger and love. “Oh yes, I
know, I remember. The Lower East Side was full of those shops. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire. But still, they don’
t have to use such lousy rotten thread.”
From the dress store we proceeded seamlessly to the nail store. The smell inside could have melted the paint
off a car. Wearing surgical face masks, a dozen young Vietnamese women bent over the hands of their
customers, buffing and polishing. I sat myself down before a sweet-faced woman. A photo of two toddlers was
taped to the side of her work-station. I suppressed the worry over what would happen to these two children
when their mother died at age thirty-one from ovarian cancer brought on by inhaling toxic fumes eight hours a
day. Hesitantly, I handed her my rough little paw.
I did not say, Here is my hand in trust, hand that wore a heavy gold wedding ring for seven years, hand that slit
open the envelope with the divorce papers inside; here is the hand that eats breakfast in the car while steering
with one hand, and then applies lipstick with one hand while driving through the tunnel, brushing away crumbs
with one hand, and balancing the water bottle between her knees. Here is the hand that points to the word to be
read aloud by the child, scarred hand, hand that has oiled pummeled and smoothed the bodies of strangers,
hand that pumped gas into the car this morning. Here is my forty-year-old hand with its raggedy cuticles,
yearning for love after all this hard usage, here is my hand that knows how to love, but does not yet know how to
stop biting her own fingernails.
I did say, “I’ve never done this before.”
Her smile grew wider. “Really?” Then she said something that sounded like, “Would you like a blwerripp?”
“Excuse me?” I asked politely.
Again she repeated, “Would you like a blwerripp?”
We went around like this a few times until I finally gave in and said yes. I put myself entirely in her soft hands.
Across from me, a middle-aged African American woman, with a natural fade, and an air of regal solitude
wrapped around her like an invisible cloak, gazed out the window while a worker painted her nails gold.
Enthroned on high padded seats, two middle-aged white women gossiped and received pedicures.
“He doesn’t have a job, no ambition, content to push a broom and that’s it. I tell her she could do better. I know
my daughter, sooner or later she’s going to get bored. But what are you going to do, she loves him, she’s
twenty-five, it’s her own life.”
The woman bent over my hand dug into the cuticles with a vicious sharp little instrument, wincing sympathetically
along with me when the ragged strips of skin started bleeding. Still she kept going till they were clean little
ovals—“little” being the operative word here; they were like chipped pebbles.
Then she scored the surface of the already fragile nails with an instrument like a miniature floor-buffer—vroom,
vroom. Evil-smelling, industrial-strength rubber cement, then the smallest size of fake, acrylic nail had to be
trimmed down to fit, making her giggle. It was like playing dolls with a real woman’s fingertips. Then, at last, the
purple polish. Deep purple. It was shellacked into place with the same sealant they use to protect the paint jobs
on cars. I walked out of the salon, waving my fingers this way and that way in front of me so the setting sun
would catch them, admiring the intense rich artificial shine.
I had a hard time tearing my eyes away from my hands, which no longer seemed to belong to me. Inside, a
warm feeling welled up in me. What was that about? And why had I submitted to such a violent and toxic
procedure and why did part of it feel good?
Beauty and care, pain and exploitation; that was the paradox. “Pain before beauty,” my mother used to say as
she attempted to comb my bushy kinky hair into submission and I cried and struggled under her strong hands. I
had been rebelling against what I perceived of as a bum deal for females since I can remember. I didn’t want to
be like my mother, burdened, angry, responsible.
Did. Not. Want. “But I don’t care about that stuff!” I wailed when she came after me with all the weapons of
female shame, domination, and This Is What Is Right. If being female is somehow linked to fastidiousness I
found myself missing a chromosone or two. I was born a natural-born slob, and while this is endearing in a guy,
it is not how ladies are ‘spozed to be.
Looking deep into my psyche, I discovered more gender incorrectness. While I am capable of gentleness, I can
also be very aggressive. Even competitive. Get me on a basketball court and I’m Mrs. Foul, butting my
opponent with hips and elbows, making up in pushiness what I lack in athletic skill. Not a pretty sight. The truth
is, I want money and power and someone else to do the laundry and cook dinner and figure out where to put the
couch. I don’t care about the damn couch. But now all of a sudden I found myself focussing on…my
fingernails? How did that happen?
Maybe it has to do with turning forty and the imminent demise of my babe-dom. Not that I ever had tons and
tons of it to start with, but still…now that my breasts are heading South, cops are beginning to look like my high
school students, and cashiers call me ma’am, I find something in me wants to make an effort, where I never was
willing to before.
Because here’s the thing about all that woman-stuff: it’s a huge effort. Even women who are good at it, even
women who are addicted to it will tell you, it’s costly, it’s exhausting, it’s work. They should give us a tax break
for it or something. Yeats understood. He must have observed women very closely. In his poem, Adam’s
Curse, he compares the labors of poets with the labors of beautiful women. He says it’s as hard as going down
on your marrow bones to scrub a kitchen pavement, or breaking stones like a pauper to make a beautiful poem
OR a beautiful feminine appearance—and, in each case, the work must remain invisible.
In the poem the woman says, ‘‘To be born woman is to know--/Although they do not talk of it at school--/That we
must labor to be beautiful.”
No, they didn’t talk of it in school. And I, so quick to pick up on the assigned curriculum, had been blind and
deaf to the unassigned one, although large parts of my happiness and misery throughout my school years were
tied to issues of beauty. Now I was wide-eyed and wondering, So this is it. So simple and yet it does feel
different.
At home, I slipped the short soft purple dress over my head. It matched the nails perfectly. Using my hands was
different now—awkward. They had these hard things at the ends of them that got in the way. I clumsily applied
a little make-up and drove off, spending more time admiring my hands on the steering wheel than watching the
road.
The moon hung full and low in the gathering indigo sky. Berkeley in February was undergoing the second or
third of its thousand springs. The purple princess was flowering, with deep violet petals, the cherry trees
paraded their pink bridesmaid costumes, festooned all over with little pom-poms—a little over the top, but that’s
the goddess for you.
At dinner, I was soft-spoken, laughed a lot, didn’t delve immediately into the deepest possible level of
conversation the way I usually do. It was somehow easy to let my date pull my chair out for me, wait politely
while he served me first, nod and smile and graciously sip my wine. When I did talk, my fingertips floated and
flashed in the air in front of me, trailing invisible purple sparks. I have no idea what either of us said.
Who would guess that so small a thing as ten acrylic nails and some polish would produce such a shift in
concentration and awareness? It wasn’t only beauty I had been hungry for, though beauty was the necessary
top layer. It was the deep, deep feminine. Being instead of doing. Letting things happen instead of making
them. Relaxing into sensuality rather than sitting up on the roof in the thunderstorm, trying to catch dangerous
zings and zaps of inspiration in a butterfly net.
Striding along to the concert in my characteristic long-legged loping walk, I stopped to smell every dew-wet tree
and flower. Listening to the music, coccooned in a cradle of sound, I softly caressed my date’s hand with my
own impeccable fingers. I wasn’t in love with him. I was in love with myself. Or at least, the guy in me, the
headlong-rushing, world-chewing and spewing, freeway-driving, money-earning guy in me, was kind of
enchanted to encounter this new creature inside. Such a heady feeling.
It didn’t last. By the next day or the next, I was tired of typing with splayed fingers, at half my normal speed. I
needed to cook, to clean, to write and perform all the innumerable hand-tasks I always had, and that extra bit of
time managing those nails took was…well…tiresome. I didn’t want to have to stop and contemplate my hands as
beautiful objets d’art, I just wanted to get on with it.
Those acrylic nails are supposed to be semi-indestructible—that is, they’re supposed to last at least two weeks.
God knows the materials they are made of have a half-life that is probably infinite. I am here to report that they
can be chewed off, if strategically weakened by a continuous rocking and biting motion, in about three days,. It
probably took me a week to demolish the whole set. They didn’t give up easily—they broke off like jagged
purple mountains at first, like the Smokies in Tennessee, causing potential danger to my swingdance partners.
But yes, within a week I had managed to chew my way out of my new feminine consciousness, not unlike an
animal gnawing its leg out of a trap. By the end of the second week, not even a trace of purple remained.