The Pedicure

Published in Origins (October 2018)

The first time I visited my mother
with my fingernails buffed and painted, she sneered.
Who are you?

It had become my guilty pleasure—
The soprano vibrato of the room.
The precise sequence of things.
Polishes like potions,
painted on with such slow and careful strokes,
clear then pink then crescent moons of white.
The lavender lotion, the warm towels.

Guilty, as I’d been raised otherwise,
sitting on a stool in my mother’s studio.
The smell of damp clay.
The air warm if the kilns were firing.
I’ve never met an interesting woman with a good manicure,
a common pronouncement—
usually while wedging clay.
And we would roll our eyes,
the two of us,
deliciously defiant against the world.

Toes were another thing.
Home sick as a child,
I was guaranteed every toe a
different color.
Bottles of reds and pinks and oranges,
spread out like little pots of sherbet.
My hand resting on top of hers
while she stroked on the polish.

Her fingernails would remain insistently
rough and unadorned.
But as her body turned against her,
she began to allow herself pedicures—
more and more flamboyant, her toes
bloomed magenta, violet, indigo.

And at the end,
after she stopped eating,
after the loss of speech,
her feet, shrunken like a Han madam’s,
fitting easily in my hand,
I brushed on the Grape Pop,
Wild Wisteria, Purple with a Purpose,
toe by toe, stroke by stroke.