A Touch of Sparkle

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

Her fingertips spoke to her lost beauty, the woman she once had been. Her fingernails were manicured ovals of pink polish—ten small rebellions against a life of hardship and a refusal to be erased.

As a child, I would trace the blue, sinewy veins on my mother’s hands in wonder, as if following tiny streams on a map of my world. Her hands were always moving—sewing, ironing, knitting, baking—so seeing them still was rare. Maybe they were always moving to help her avoid thoughts about all she had lost and the new world gained that she didn’t understand.

A Russian immigrant, she had fled Stalin’s atrocities for a chance at a safe, productive life. Strangely to me, she described her happiest times as being in the Displaced Persons camp in post-war Germany. She forged friendships there that lasted her entire lifetime and repeatedly related how much she had enjoyed dancing with the British soldiers.

She came to Canada on a work program as a domestic, settling in Montreal and working at the Royal Victoria Hospital. It was in Montreal that she was introduced to my father, when she was already in her third decade and worrying that her childbearing years were coming to an end. She married him to realize her dream of having children, and he relocated her to northern Ontario. She created a home and an abundant garden, but without her community or language, she never felt truly at home.

She never spoke about the war or why she had left her home while her siblings had not. When I asked, she shut me down. “You’ll understand when you’re older,” she would say. So I was left questioning and wondering, never to appreciate the events that had framed my mother’s life.

She taught me the handicrafts she had probably learned from her own mother—embroidery, cross-stitch, knitting, crochet, needlepoint. I learned to sew on her hefty black Singer sewing machine, pumping the iron treadle with my little foot, guiding fabric under the piercing needle. I scrutinized her hands, imitating their motions with a needle or a hook.

Her hands were lean and capable, with fascinating, protruding blue veins under her pale, thin skin. Yet, with all the scrubbing, laundering and dirty water, all the weeding and planting in gritty soil, a contradiction glistened at the ends of her fingers: fastidiously painted nails.

Now my parents never went out and my mother never dressed up. She cooked, waxed floors, applied bandages and dispensed medicine. So why was it important to have shaped and lacquered fingernails? Perhaps it was the only way she could assert her femininity, a vestige of the past when she had been a youthful beauty.

In old photographs taken in Germany and Montreal she had posed like a model, head tilted back with a gleaming smile. She would have revelled in the attention, no doubt prompted by a photographer who would have commented on her pretty face. But immigration, a practical marriage and motherhood took their toll, and her beauty faded away like those old black and white snapshots. The absence of her supportive network —sisters and post-war friends forever bonded by letters as they settled in different places—deepened her isolation.

She filed her nails into perfect ovals that never seemed to break. I envied them, when mine would chip and tear. I never managed to achieve the symmetrical shapes she fashioned at the tips of her restless fingers.

I would file my nails while she painted hers, then dip the teensy brush into the magical polish that gilded my much smaller fingertips. Light pinks, sparkly peach, never reds. We painted our nails while watching our black-and-white television—Tommy Hunter, Lawrence Welk, Bonanza. She would delight in the beautiful dresses and dancing on Lawrence Welk, smiling and reminiscing about her post-war days. Nail painting was our weekend ritual, a pause before the busy week resumed, a small vestige of feminine vanity. That is what my mother taught me.

My father was rarely around, his life consumed with working and trying to survive the trauma he kept locked inside, having lost his homeland and never able to return. He isolated himself in writing poetry and escaping alone on weekends to fish. He and my mom led separate lives, joined only by the necessity of sharing a roof, tolerating each other when necessary. The torment of war left an enduring undercurrent in my home, flowing through my parents’ veins and leaving their children with questions that would never be answered.

As I ran my little fingers over my mother’s hands, I enjoyed fiddling with the diamond engagement ring and gold wedding band encircling her finger—a status symbol of marriage that was so important to her. After her death, I wore her modest wedding band in a gesture of remembrance for ten years, until my own aging fingers grew and I had to remove it. Now it rests patiently in a drawer until my daughter or one of my granddaughters claim it.

After all these years, I can still visualize my mother’s hands: long, porcelain fingers, slightly bent in old age, blue veins jumping out of crepey skin. Those hands did so much and taught me so much. But most of all, I remember her carefully painted nails, gleaming in defiance of her dull, domestic days.