Do I dare try black lacquer?

People & Places

Many, many, plus a few more, years ago, I read a book. I’ve read a good many since then, obviously, but this particular novel started an interest in me that has yet to die.

If memory serves, I was in the fourth grade, so about 11 years old. I’m not sure if I’ve written about this particular time of my life, specifically the school I attended.

Some of you might know, I grew up in rural Missouri. No street lights, gravel roads, well water and three channels on the TV. The school I attended from fourth to eighth grade was classified as a one-room school house.

It wasn’t literally one room, but man it was close. There was a front office, a couple of bathrooms, cafeteria, a gymnasium and four classrooms. Each classroom held two grades — first and second, third and fourth, and so on — with one teacher for both grades.

We moved there shortly after I started fourth grade, coming from a much larger school district. Each grade had three or four classes. We were on a whole campus, complete with a separate library. (Which had a Ferris wheel bookcase, which I still want for my house, just so you know.)

Moving to a community that housed eight grades in four classrooms in only one building, was a little disconcerting. Each of the classrooms at my new school had its own library of a sort.

There was a set of encyclopedias — mostly complete and not too old — and a couple of shelves of fiction books. There was a lot of R.L. Stine on offer.

There was also the novelization of what has become one of my all-time favorite movies, “Alien.” Yes, that’s a super-weird thing to put on a shelf for third and fourth-graders to read, but I digress.

On one of the shelves was a set of books. They weren’t really a series with a central cast of characters and long-range story arc, but rather a collection of fiction set during the same time period. Specifically, westward expansion in the 1800s. I want to say each cover was graced with a depiction of a pioneer woman standing on a sweeping plain, gazing intently into the middle distance.

These weren’t your typical bodice rippers, and seemed pitched to tweens and teens, but even at 11 there were things that made me question whether they were actually age appropriate.

Let me pause here and say, this is by no means a condemnation of books that might be considered too mature for some audiences. I was a voracious reader as a child.

After I burned through pretty much every book in the house, my mother had to petition our local public librarian to issue me an adult card just so I could check out the adult number of books from the juvenile section.

This was shortly after I’d read her entire Stephen King collection, starting with “Carrie.” She wasn’t thrilled, and this might explain a lot about me. Needless to say, I read a lot of books that probably weren’t appropriate for me, but I think I fared pretty well.

So, back to it. I don’t have a clear memory of any stories in the western books except one, and it isn’t even really the whole story but rather this one particular scene.

It’s set in a brothel and one of the women working there against her will laments she doesn’t have any black nail lacquer to match the jet earrings given to her by a customer.

As an adult, the things wrong with the above sentence are overwhelming. My 11-year-old brain latched on to black nail lacquer. Not nail polish, but lacquer. I now know that polish is a whole different creature and what we commonly refer to as nail polish is lacquer.

At the time though, lacquer just seemed like something almost mythical. Adult and unattainable. Nail polishes in the 1980s for someone of my economic abilities were pretty limited. Think rows and rows of pink and reds from Revlon and Maybelline on display at the local Walmart.

Now, a lifetime later the colors and brands are endless. I make my regular pilgrimage to the salon every three weeks, Pinterest finds at the ready for my next nail art adventure.

Blues and greens, soft pinks and vibrant violets. Stripes, sparkles, ombre, jewels and cherry blossoms. I’ve done adventurous and subtle, simple and complicated. The one I haven’t done yet? Black nail lacquer.

She crosses my mind often, that fictional woman, trapped in a life not her own and I look at my own nails, clad in soft pink. Could I? Should I? Who will that make me? Maybe I’m due to find out.