Getting Nailed
All nail salons share the same fundamental essence. In a science fiction movie, you might walk into Touch of Elegance in Menlo Park and emerge at Venice Soleil in LA or Lush Nail Bar in Atlanta. Beige walls, classical music, some sort of small fountain fixture and, if you’re lucky, a silent, subtitled rerun of Gossip Girl. There is a boss lady (sometimes a man, but not a good omen IMO) who runs the show and knows the names of all of the regulars. Attention from this woman makes you feel like a celebrity and also a cozy, coddled baby.
Since moving to NYC, my spot has been Think Pink II because it’s where my friend Leslie used to go before she left the city. She was so attached to the salon that she stopped going as soon as her move-out date was set because the thought of saying goodbye was too sad. Leslie was known to come for a hard gel fill with her famed French bulldog Earl. Suzy, the owner of Think Pink II has a little dog of her own named Cookie. When I met her in January, Cookie wore a bright orange sweater and trotted around the salon with boss energy that suggested perhaps she’s the one who balances the books.
On Tuesday, I was chastised by Suzy (obsessed) for cutting my own hard gel manicure with clippers. I was impatient to have them short and reluctant to fork over another chunk of change for a fresh manicure. Also, I don’t trust someone else to really get the job done as short as I’d like without breaking skin. The problem with this, Suzy told me in matriarchal fashion (tenderness + listen up, b*tch) is that it shatters the hard gel so that it can’t be smoothly filled. Instead, my nail tech peeled back loose flakes of polish with an old Metro card. This felt very NYC.
An ongoing theme in my 10,000 nail-focused hours is color choice rumination. I flip back and forth through the color sets, pick one, wonder if I’ll regret it, and then fixate on whether or not it was the right choice until the next time I’m at the salon. Lately, the antidote to this has been to get the color Bubble Bath exclusively. I tried branching out on Tuesday, but with my first nail painted in a raspberry color, I frantically backed out and called for my security blanket: “Bubble Bath, please! Bubble Bath.”
The best place salon in Santa Monica is Secretive Nail Bar, a Russian manicure spot with highly skilled, stony-faced Eastern European women who will tell you honestly whether or not the color you’ve chosen will look like shit. This is my kink: being told honestly when I look terrible and how to fix it by someone whose opinion I trust. It’s risky territory because I trust so few people’s opinions. Unsolicited feedback from a person whose aesthetic opinion means nothing might be the surest way to elicit my icy cold shoulder. Disdain is not something I’ve been known to hide well.
Finally, a scene from my hometown spot at Thanksgiving.
At Bella Nails in San Mateo, CA, as in many other suburban salons, pedicure chairs run in parallel rows, forming a corridor. Nail technicians work in the open space down the middle. Women paying for a service sit against the walls in neat lines, heads tilted back, basking the pleasure of a Sharper Image massage chair.
Smack in the middle of the western row, couched most likely between an elementary school receptionist and someone’s favorite aunt was a Mother and Teenage Daughter, who would have gone unnoticed except for The Boyfriend.
The gawky, seventeen year old boy, drowning in sweatshirt, nuzzled his chin into his girlfriend’s neck. The Mother stayed glued to her phone—a good excuse for not looking at something you’d rather not see. Occasionally, she’d make a comment quietly enough that her daughter had to lean away from the hanger-on to hear it.
Flanked by mother and puppyish, male cling wrap, fingers in the care of one nail tech, toes being scrubbed by another, the Teenage Girl looked straight ahead, casually ignoring everyone. Confident in her entitlement to this attention from all sides.
In the eastern row, we were all watching, posturing discretion by making a show of glancing at our own nails from time to time.
The Boy stroked his girlfriend’s hair. Whispered in her ear. Showed YouTube videos that he promised were funny. We could tell that he felt lucky to be kissing a girl who had maybe never been kissed before. That he marveled at the improbability that he had landed her, unaware that he was disrupting our status quo. Our feminine gathering spot. The place we cast our spells.
But the strongest pull in the room was not pubescent sexual tension. It was that of The Mother. We could feel the clench in her jaw: broken resolutions to stop grinding her teeth. Hear her promise herself not to snap at the daughter whose time was so hard to come by, whom she’d invited to the salon in pursuit of that precious time, and landed instead in a tug of war between consistent, expected, motherly love and the Goliath that is infatuation. That is, the feeling of being the subject of another person’s infatuation.
Those of us whose hormones had settled to stasis, who haven’t scream-cried at a parent in years or panicked about a prom date in ages, all knew the truth. That the girl with long black eyelashes and an air of general disinterest, would soon regret the day missed with her mother sitting three feet away from her. That she would go to college, and the boy currently locked into the crook of her neck would get drunk, get chubby, get into bed with the girls living in his dorm. That she would go to college and get drunk, get chubby, get into new beds, new interests. Get very lonely, and call her mom.
We watched her mother dissociate from the work being done on her fingernails. She glanced at her phone to see nothing interesting and put it down again. Swore not to berate her daughter. Sighed in silent lamentation of a day squandered that could have been the two of them. Knew for certain that she would the answer the phone when her daughter called, every single time.
Love this! What happened to Smee doing her own gel nails at home?!
Esmee is the funniest gorl alive