Cobb's Anatomy

by Irvin S. Cobb

To which you reply in what is meant to be a jaunty and off-hand tone:

"Oh quite some little while. I've—I've been out of town."

"That's what I thought," she says with a slight shrug. It isn't so much what she says—it's the way she says it, the tone and all that, which makes you feel smaller and smaller until you could crawl into your own watch pocket and live happily there ever after. There'd be slews of room and when you wanted the air of an evening you could climb up in a buttonhole of your vest and be quite cosy and comfortable. But shrink as you may, there is now no hope of escape, for she has reached out and grabbed you firmly by the wrist. She has you fast. You have a feeling that eight or nine thousand people have assembled behind you and are all gazing fixedly into the small of your back. The only things about you that haven't shrivelled up are your hands. You can feel them growing larger and larger and redder and redder and more prominent and conspicuous every instant.

The lady begins operations. You are astonished to note how many tools and implements it takes to manicure a pair of hands properly. The top of her little table is full of them and she pulls open a drawer and shows you some more, ranged in rows. There are files and steel biters and pigeon-toed scissors and scrapers and polishers and things; and wads of cotton with which to staunch the blood of the wounded, and bottles of liquid and little medicinal looking jars full of red paste; and a cut glass crock with soap suds in it and a whole lot of little orange wood stobbers.

In the interest of truth I have taken the pains to enquire and I have ascertained that these stobbers are invariably of orange wood. Say what you will, the orange tree is a hardy growth. Every February you read in the papers that the Florida orange crop, for the third consecutive time since Christmas has been entirely and totally destroyed by frost and yet there is always an adequate supply on hand of the principal products of the orange-phosphate for the soda fountains, blossoms for the bride, political sentiment for the North of Ireland and little sharp stobbers for the manicure lady. Speaking as an outsider I would say that there ought to be other varieties of wood that would serve as well and bring about the desired results as readily—a good thorny variety of poison ivy ought to fill the bill, I should think. But it seems that orange wood is absolutely essential. A manicure lady could no more do a manicure properly without using an orange wood stobber at certain periods than a cartoonist could draw a picture of a man in jail without putting a ball and chain on him or a summer resort could get along without a Lover's Leap within easy walking distance of the hotel. It simply isn't done, that's all.

Well, as I was saying, she gets out her tool kit and goes to work on you. You didn't dream that there were so many things—mainly of a painful nature—that could be done to a single finger nail and you flinch as you suddenly remember that you have ten of them in all, counting thumbs in with fingers. She takes a finger nail in hand and she files it and she trims it and she softens it with hot water and hardens it with chemicals and parboils it a little while and then she cuts off the hang nails—if there aren't any hang nails there already she'll make a few—and she shears away enough extra cuticle to cover quite a good-sized little boy. She goes over you with a bristle brush, and warms up your nerve ends until you tingle clear back to your dorsal fin and then she takes one of those orange wood stobbers previously referred to, and goes on an exploring expedition down under the nail, looking for the quick. She always finds it. There is no record of a failure to find the quick. Having found it she proceeds to wake it up and teach it some parlor tricks. I may not have set forth all these various details in the exact order in which they take place, but I know she does them all. And somewhere along about the time when she is half way through with the first hand she makes you put the other hand in the suds.

Later on when you have had more practice at this thing you learn to wait for the signal before plunging the second hand into the suds, but being green on this occasion, you are apt to mistake the moving of the crock of suds over from the right hand side to the left hand side as a notice and to poke your untouched hand right in without further orders, hoping to get it softened up well so as to save her trouble in trimming it down to a size which will suit her. But this is wrong—this is very wrong, as she tells you promptly, with a pitying smile for your ignorance. Manicure girls are as careful about boiling a hand as some particular people are about bailing their eggs for breakfast of a morning. A two minute hand is no pleasure to her absolutely if she has diagnosed your hand as one calling for six minutes, or vice versa. So, should you err in this regard she will snatch the offending hand out and wipe it off and give it back to you and tell you to keep it in a dry place until she calls for it. Manicure girls are very funny that way.

Thus time passes on and on and by degrees you begin to feel more and more at home. Your bashfulness is wearing off. The coherent power of speech has returned to you and you have exchanged views with her on the relative merits of the better known brands of chewing gum and which kind holds the flavor longest, and you have swapped ideas on the issue of whether ladies should or should not smoke cigarettes in public and she knows how much your stick pin cost you and you know what her favorite flower is. You are getting along fine, when all of a sudden she dabs your nails with a red paste and then snatches up a kind of a polishing tool and ferociously rubs your fingers until they catch on fire. Just when the conflagration threatens to become general she stops using the polisher and proceeds to cool down the ruins by gently burnishing your nails against the soft, pink palm of her hand. You like this better than the other way. You could ignite yourself by friction almost any time, if you got hold of the right kind of a chamois skin rubber, but this is quite different and highly soothing. You are beginning to really enjoy the sensation when she roguishly pats the back of your hand—pitty pat—as a signal that the operation is now over. You pay the check and tip the lady—tip her fifty cents if you wish to be regarded as a lovely jumpman or only twenty-five cents if you are satisfied with being a vurry nice fella—and you secure your hat and step forth into the open with the feeling of one who has taken a trip into a distant domain and on the whole has rather enjoyed it.

You stand in the sunlight and waggle your fingers and you are struck with the desirable glitter that flits from finger tip to finger tip like a heleograph winking on a mountain top. It is indeed a pleasing spectacle. You decide that hereafter you will always glitter so. It is cheaper than wearing diamonds and much more refined, and so you take good care of your fingers all that day and carefully refrain from dipping them in the brine while engaged in the well known indoor sport of spearing for dill pickles at the business men's lunch.

But the next morning when you wake up the desirable glitter is gone. You only glimmer dully—your fingers do not sparkle and dazzle and scintillate as they did. As Francois Villon, the French poet would undoubtedly have said had manicures been known at the time he was writing his poems, "Where are the manicures of yesterday?" instead of making it, "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" there being no answer ready for either question, except that the manicures of yesterday like the snows of yesteryear are never there when you start looking for them. They have just naturally got up and gone away, leaving no forwarding address.