Varnish me

There's the whole manicure deal as well. This thing where I get all the nail varnishes out of the kit and carefully choose the colour; it's always the light colour first and the dark red one on top. You want to be really careful you apply some sort of base because if you don't all the dark red gets right into your nails and makes them look some yellowish shade of dead, very much the way I imagine a corpse's nails to look like. Then there's the actual painting, inhaling or exhaling only when the brush is off the surface of the nail.
There's this flash back I get of myself at a very young age, opening an orangey shade of nail varnish for my grandmother, placing her hand on the armrests of a sofa, settling myself down on a stool next to her and slowly working the brush down each of her nails with the greatest care. Each time I'd finish my job on one of them I'd look up, check for approval, get the smile and then dip the brush in the pearly dense fluid for a second coat. I guess this is where I got the habit I carry to this very day. This silence going on between two women, seventy years apart and yet this message of absolute feminine heredity going on between them. No need for words. My grandmother wasn't much of a talker either, she was more the sort of no nonsense woman. A World War I survivor, she would much rather concentrate on the things that really mattered in life. Get yourself a good education (that's what she probably tried to do with my mum, sending her to the same school she then sent me) and eat that tasty food I prepared for you, leaving nothing behind.
And amazingly enough, this working woman's hands never quite aged like the rest of her body did. And as she lay dead on that bed and I barely brushed her hands with two of my fingers, I couldn't help noticing how young they looked. There was no varnish there, but still. It's never been surprising for me to hear these stories of someone doing Evita's hands at her deathbed. My grandmother would've probably fancied something of the sort, but of course I didn't do it. Not much good with the death rituals; could barely touch her, didn't kiss her at all, didn't dare to.