Wo-manicure

I have my mother's hands. Purely a physical rather than a metaphorical comment, the observation followed me throughout adult life. Deny as I might, as I grow older I wonder if even the increasingly prominent roadmap of veins is identical, like a fingerprint.  Watching my hands on the piano or laptop keys, they are so like hers it is alarming.  My face in the mirror-- the undeniable genetics of bone structure, expression...  I see her. The similarities are uncanny... and yet the buck stops there.

On Friday afternoons my mother had her beauty day.  She went to a salon called Ila or Isla-- many of her friends were there-- aunts, etc. They shared a hairdresser called Eleanor-- a bleached blonde with a kind of ducky upsweep who wore pancake make-up and orthopedic shoes.  Eleanor's cutting tools moved like Edward Scissorhands' and she managed several coiffes simultaneously.  Between chairs, tools were soaked in medical troughs of turquoise liquid that smelled like sulfur.  Everyone was bound up in rollers and curlers and metal pins, and sat under enormous heavy drying hoods like aliens while another set of women did manicures. 

As a small child I had to sit through this beauty day. I hated the stench of hairspray and the women chattering, and Eleanor didn't particularly like children. But there was a gift shop next door where a basket of tiny porcelain animals sat by the cash register. At five or ten cents, I could choose one for each hair-day; my little menagerie grew. One fateful afternoon I was placed in a booster seat in Eleanor's station and my long braids were transformed to imitate a shoulder-length cut with bangs my mother tore out of a Seventeen Magazine spread. I hated it, and unbelievable as it seems, I have returned to a salon only once in my life. 

Much to her horror, I have never had a manicure.  To this day I have the excuse of musicianship as the 'basis' for this, but it is also a choice.  My generation grew into puberty casting off bras, refusing makeup, embracing our natural bodies, only to find ourselves now in a world of extreme cosmetic sophistication and a ubiquitous standard of self-care we could never have predicted.  On every block it seems there are multiple nail boutiques and salons packed with women and a number of men being pampered.  I could never imagine having my feet handled by strangers--massaged, soaked, dressed, polished. It terrifies me, like a kind of public intimacy that is on display behind a storefront. I don't get it. 

The vintage scent of my mother's hands is palpable, nine years after her death. She'd clean our noses after our bath and the residue of polish and  cigarette-ghost was part of the nightly ritual. When I visualize my mother she's always on the telephone... one of those old black rotary things with the curly coiled wire. Her lovely hands with the red polish and a cigarette... as she talked and laughed with the receiver cradled under her chin so she could multi-task... sew or wash dishes or bake. She was chronically attached to another world-- a friend, maybe-- she was a girls' girl. I was so often an interruption and had to win her attention.

One traumatic night in particular comes to mind today... I'd been playing at a friend's house... one of my mother's preferred companions for me... a girl from a fancy private school-- an only-child with the name of a car who lived in an enormous house with a circular driveway.  The dining table where we lunched on Wedgewood dishes was enormous. Her Mom's hair was flipped and sprayed into a dark helmet; her father was an older man who smoked cigars.  We always played in her room.. she had pink toy horses and amazing things.  But she also taught me about sex.  She secretly read me texts about body parts and masturbation.  Dog-eared books were hidden under her mattress... where did she get these? I came home feeling guilty.

So this one night I went down to the kitchen and waited in the half-light while my mother-- her post-prandial work done, sat-- cigarette in manicured hand, on the telephone... gesturing to me to go upstairs... but I stayed... mesmerized... feeling confessional and confused.... I could not go to bed.  At last she finished speaking and gave me that look. I tried to tell her about the book. She literally did not reply.. she pointed the one perfectly painted nail toward the door and I went, feeling more sheepish and confused and guilty because not only had I committed some sort of sin, but I'd also violated my mother's privacy.

I learned not to confide things to my mother; years later I found I was a kind of self-judging pubescent prude. Not sure what she expected of me, I was eventually liberated from familial standards.  She loved to sing and was very shy but played the piano with a kind of finesse. And while she never came to a single gig or listened to anything I did, she made comments on my fashion choices or lack thereof... and continued to side-eye my bare hand.  In the end she had dementia, and all vanity and sentimentality evaporated. No one rescued my old artwork or my little beloved porcelain menagerie but I choose to think she secretly approved of our manual 'twinning'. 

Two of my boyfriends have told me they loved especially my hands. And they serve me-- they can draw a little, paint a little... they finger the bass and guitar the way I intend... I am grateful.  But my feet?  The rigors of ballet as a girl, the hazards of pointy rock and roll boots and vintage stagey footwear that didn't quite fit have taken a toll. I'm not proud. Several years ago I dated a jazz musician who obsessed over my feet.  I hide them-- I mean, the beach is one thing, but I'm not featuring them. Still... he claimed to love them.  He nagged and nagged outside of manicurists' shops for me to have them 'done'.  I refused.

One night he got me a little tipsy... we went to bed-- I passed out and woke up to find he'd painted my toe nails black.  I was horrified... angry.  He was overjoyed and couldn't stop celebrating my damn feet. Admittedly they looked edgy and cool in my platform sandals. But there was something Rosemary's Baby-like about having been foot-ravished while I slept. The polish eventually wore off, along with the relationship. 

Today I criticized my son.  We have open boundaries as far as emotional discussions but physical criticism is a little off-topic. Looking down at my ropy old hands, I immediately regretted my comment, and while  I think our bond is tough enough to weather this, the discomfort was familiar. I am not my chaste mother, although I have inherited her graceful fingers and a different brand of stubbornness.  For an instant I remembered the toe-painting-- and how it was really a kind of sexy tribute-- an unpredictable intimacy I failed to appreciate at the time. My mother may even have approved. And unpainted as they are, fretting and picking and tucked into a metal slide, I will somehow always have her hands. 

23 Skidoo

One of my cousins voicemailed me recently, apparently thrilled with news that he'd had his DNA analyzed in one of those kit-lab mail-ins and discovered that we are related to a scandal-besieged low-grade criminal art dealer.  Apologetically, I failed to be either shocked or impressed... in fact, in this facebook and instagram world of over-exposure and data breaches, why would anyone want to participate in a cellular-level scientific confess-all to God-knows-what information-bank or repository? I have already shared the maiden name of my second-grade school teacher, my first dog breed, where I met my husband (which one?  The Palladium or the Camden market one?) and my favorite author in so-called security locks on various online forms.  Not to mention my unlisted number and private email... just so they can be extra sure I am not an imposter.

We've all been warned that a large percentage of Pap smears and other tests and biomarkers have come back with false positives or negatives... so how can we trust a chromosome-mill which has no biological or genetic responsibility?  The number of people I know who are now claiming Navaho heritage from these kit-results is suspicious.  I don't think the Native Americans were that quantitatively promiscuous.  One of my friends has taken to wearing moccasins and beads.  Her daughter claimed dual ethnicity on her college application to play the diversity card.  And wasn't it a local president of some NAACP chapter that turned out to be faking her Afro-American-ness?  Not only is she a biological Caucasian but a confirmed fraudster who extracted many thousands in public assistance for which she did not qualify.  A perm and a dye-job did wonders for her-- maybe weekly time in a tanning bed.  Did anyone see Kim Kardashian on the news last night standing beside the newly-freed Diane Johnson and looking many shades darker than her previous press appearances?

So do we really need these identity kits to prove or discover who we really are?  Okay, I had to have amnio-centesis to rule out genetic disorders in my unborn fetus.  And disease-wise--  transplant candidates, biomarkers-- for these purposes tests can be useful and life-saving.  But as a teenager I'd already had a white-haired man approach me and swear he was my real grandfather.   Since my own had long since been ousted, it was enough for me.  Fake or real, he sent me great books and gifts and listened to my little demo-tapes with some kind of pride and love I never had from my own family.

My older sister as a teenager used to claim she'd been adopted.   I'm not sure my son could pick his real father out of a lineup.  What is the point?  Besides the forms we fill out and the college applications and census data, we are all mutts in this culture that seems to rather value pedigree and blue-bloodedness only where horses and dogs are concerned.  The new royal Princess or whatever her title is a mixture of things.   Even her name sounds oddly popster or like a plastic doll: Princess Meaghan.  Not historic nomenclature.  But there she is, holding hands with the Queen of England, slated to carry truly royal blood in her bi-racial American womb.

We are all one, was the great mantra of the 60's... embracing human brotherhood and diversity.  But the data-machines and marketing hoovers need to know what makes us all uniquely susceptible to bait-and-hook consumerism: how to use our genetic and acquired predilections to manipulate and influence our buying habits;  how we, as individuals, can be corralled and herded into transferring our money into huge corporate pockets.    So for all those angry facebookers who took the little personality tests and the aptitude quizzes, voted for grey or purple, circle or square, salt or pepper, Beatles or Stones.... do not be fooled by these advertisements promising they will reveal your 'ancestry', your ethnicity and heritage-- your profession suitability and athletic potential.  They are collecting more information from a speck of your spit than Cambridge Analytica amassed over years of sifting through a million posts.

My neighbor was holding court with the little dog-clan he parades around at night.  The new mutt, he was explaining, is part samoyed, part sharpei, part retriever, part spaniel.  I wondered how he was so sure about all of this.  Canine DNA testing?  I had a mongrel dog for years I'd found in Harlem-- abandoned, in bad shape.  He continued, over the years, to show marked preference for black people.  It was uncanny.  As for me?  His adoptive keeper? He tolerated me.  My black husband?  He went to the door 5 minutes before the guy came home; ditto his friends.  Love and devotion.  It was like they were brothers.  Do Not Ask.  Do Not Analyze.

A friend of mine years back had a strange phonecall from a woman he'd apparently slept with in a drunken amnesiac stupor after a party in Washington DC.  She claimed she was quite pregnant with his baby... he balked for a while, but began sending money-- child support.. even visited the baby periodically, paid for her college education.  She looked not at all like him-- went into the military (he was a 60's love-child/ardent pacifist) and married young.  Did he ask for a paternity test?  Not even.  That's the kind of genetics I'd be proud to have in my heritage.  A father.  Accountability.

We are what we eat, my nutritionist friend maintains.  She believes our blood-type determines the optimal individual dietary choices.  I can see the logic in this... but for a narcissistic culture with the flood of information available to us-- the choices and surgical options-- the supplements, treatments, neuro-biological neutralizers and enhancements-- if you don't know who you are at this point, well, I doubt an ancient family crest is going to change you much.   Get your face out of your phone and have a conversation with the person next to you.  You'd be surprised at how much you will uncover.