Nail Biter

I don't bite my nails.

My husband yells at me to stop biting my nails. I don’t bite my nails. My nails are just bad. They are weak and chip easily when I go swimming and grab the edge of the pool. They get banged up and break because I’m not careful with them when I do things like clean the house or garden in the yard. I really don’t garden much. But I also don’t bite my nails. I bite my cuticles. They split and tear easily, and so I bite them away. I grab the loose piece of skin in my teeth and try to nip it back flush, but it doesn’t always work. It sticks up. It gets snagged on things, like fabrics, and I can feel it rubbing up against my other fingers. Sometimes its hurts because it keeps getting bumped and pulled back even more, so biting it away helps it feel better. Unless biting it away makes it feel worse. This happens when I tear the skin back away from the nail. I pull it too far down into the finger. Then it quickly turns bright pink and bleeds.

I keep band-aids everywhere. In my desk at school, in my book bag, in my purse, at least four boxes of them right now in the house. Sometimes I go through three or four band-aids per finger each day. I hate it when they get wet, and I wash my hands regularly throughout the day. Maybe a bit irregularly. Often. I don’t like to touch things other people touch or may have touched with their hands. Unclean hands. Hands I don't know where they have been. I don't like to touch other people, doorknobs, food, anything. If I do, I wash my hands as soon as I can.

I lie to people when they look at my bandaged fingers and ask what happened. I say I burned myself. My friend Angela is a nurse. She said, “The pads are on the wrong side.”

“What?” I asked.

“The pads on the band-aids. If you burned yourself, they would be on the other side. On your finger tips. They’re not. They’re on your finger nails.”

Leave it to a nurse to notice this.

“I have bad cuticles,” I tell her, deciding, of all people in my life, she would understand. “They rip easily, and sometimes I pick at them.” Truth. “I’m trying to get myself to leave them alone.” Lie.

“Oh,” she nods.

It’s not just little bites and bits of skin that I pull away. I pick and pull and nip and shred at my fingers regularly, sometimes tearing away layers of skin in fleshy sheets. I played the upright bass for over twenty years, so some of my finger pads tend to callous up, then shed anyway, so some of it just happens; I can’t do anything about it. Like on my index fingers. The skin there will regularly slough off and pull away easily.

Once, while driving through town, I saw an old woman fall off her bike. She didn’t really fall so much as she had sort of almost stopped, lost her balance and tipped over. She was wearing carpi pants, leaving her ankles exposed. As she landed on someone’s grassy lawn, the bike came crashing down on top of her, the pedal slamming into her ankle and pulling backward as the momentum continued rolling its wheels away from her. The edge of the pedal, a kind of serrated edge to help the foot stay on, caught her skin and I watched as it pulled a layer of flesh back and away from her thinly muscled bone. She was old. I don’t know how old, but she had grey hair and spindly limbs with wrinkly skin. Her skin, the pedal just pulled it back like tissue paper. She had a horrified look on her face. I was only just driving by, but it all happened so quickly that I saw it. I don’t know if skin getting pulled away like that heals or not when you’re that old. It must still heal, it just must take a while longer.

That’s how my skin comes off my fingers. In sheets that I pull away with my teeth. It comes off pale, sometimes white, sometimes translucent. I shed. Sometimes it bleeds, sometimes the skin needed to come off, was ready to come off, so there is no blood. Not hardly even pink beneath it.

Last night, in the bar, I’d had maybe a bit much to drink. I was picking at my index finger on the left hand with my right hand, but fingers don’t always do it. So I chewed on it. I got some skin to come away. A small piece. I picked at it some more. I grabbed a small flap of skin in my teeth and pulled it away. It hurt, but I was buzzed, so I wasn’t feeling much to make me stop. I wouldn’t have stopped anyway, even if I hadn’t been drunk. I feel the pain and know it’s only going to hurt more, but I can’t make myself stop, because I would be left with a flap of skin just hanging there. I continued to pull. The place where the top flesh was being pulled away from the tender flesh beneath it tingled down my fingertip, following the transient line of separation. A large flap of skin came away, peeling all the way down the front of my finger, down the full length of the pad to the borderline of the first digit, then it ripped away completely. I sat there with the large piece of flesh in my mouth.

It was near the end of the night. I was alone at the table. JodiAnn had left, Shawn was in the bathroom, and Casey just wasn’t paying attention this time, or he would have yelled at me. I held the skin between my front top and bottom teeth. I ground my teeth back and forth, but the piece was too thick for me to break through it. Normally I could sit and nibble down bits of skin, cut them up between my teeth over and over again until they became a fine kind of fleshy gravel, then I would spit it out. Sometimes. Sometimes I don’t spit it out. Sometimes, I’m a cannibal. I couldn’t break this piece up into smaller pieces.

I looked at my finger. I had a bright red spot where the skin had been. It was the shape of Lake Michigan, my normal, unscathed flesh on the left, Wisconsin, and on the right, Michigan, with Ohio and Indiana down below the digit border. It wasn’t bleeding, but it hurt. I blew on it. It felt cold in the air, as though I were touching ice. The lines of my fingerprint went below that top layer (or was it two or three I had pulled away?); they looked like plump, juicy cells in a slice of fresh, ruby red grapefruit. I put my finger in my mouth. My tongue felt like sandpaper against the raw pad and it stung like a new burn when exposed to air.

The ball game ended. Our beers were empty, except for JodiAnn’s. She left some. Casey stood up to leave, and I took the hunk of flesh out of my mouth. It was a prize piece, that’s for sure, but I had to leave it behind. I dropped it on the floor and put on my coat. I had to hold my finger out straight and not use it. Like the hands in the Michelangelo painting, only I didn’t want to touch another person. I didn’t want to touch anything.