Brian Freeman - Dark Screams - Volume Six

“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.