When I was a senior resident in pediatrics,
I discovered that if my nails were pretty on call nights,
no one on my floor would die.
Every other week I’d visit on my one day off
a female manicurist from Odessa
who quizzed me about my lovers
while she pushed back my cuticles.
When I finally admitted I lived with my girlfriend,
the Russian suddenly had no appointments available.
So I found myself a gay Greek manicurist,
who regaled me with tales of his Prince Albert piercing,
and didn’t mind touching my woman-touching fingers.

I confided the manicure’s death-forestalling power
to the other female residents.
Soon blood-red fingernails and toenails, too,
appeared on every ward. “If your nails are pretty….”
we would say, and wink on rounds.
We kept them short enough to do pelvic exams on teenage girls,
but we kept them buffed, shaped and lacquered.
In medical school we had been trained to act like men:
“Don’t smile so much, it makes you look stupid.”
“You need to be more aggressive.”
Aggressive we became,
but aggressive with colorful nails.

On my brief visit home,
my father rebuked me for not helping my mother in the kitchen.
I pointed out that my brother wasn’t helping, either.
He brought a dish his wife cooked, said my father.
My brother eyed my professional manicure.
His wife, he said, did her own nails.
Well, that’s great, I snapped,
I earned my own doctorate.

My good friend trained to be a midwife,
and her soft butch girlfriend a surgeon.
Her soft butch partner got a lot harder
in the process of becoming a doctor.
They broke up weeks before my friend was supposed to inseminate.
She asked her butch surgeon ex
if she could still use the sperm donor they had chosen together,
but the ex said, No. So my friend,
too distraught to bother with a manicure,
went down to the crossroads and found herself a man.
She squeezed what she needed out of him,
and a few days afterward, he killed himself.
Nine months later, she squatted on her own bedroom floor,
reached down and pulled her baby boy out herself.
Her nails were short,
but they were pretty.

§ § §

Jan Steckel is an Oakland, California writer and former pediatrician whose fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared in Lit Pot, Problem Child, the HarperSF anthology WomanPrayers, and elsewhere. She is currently writing a book-length collection of interrelated short stories. You can read more of her work at www.jansteckel.com.

This piece was first published in INK POT #4- 2004, a literary journal.

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