Nail Biters

Conquering old habits and getting tough.

Written by Annika Harley

Illustrated by Zhijun Cheng

The garden center wasn’t much to look at, Meadow’s Farms, a small plot of land on the top of a hill, squished between a community church and Route 50. It wasn’t much more exciting to look at from the employee parking lot where I parked my creaky old minivan. And yet it was mine, my place of work for the foreseeable future. For a summer job, working at the garden center really wasn’t that bad. My coworkers were kind enough, mostly middle-aged men. Almost none of them had a college degree and pretty much all of them had a smoking problem. But they were still fun to work with, as they made a point not to take selling mulch and flowers too seriously. Having just graduated high school, I was by far the youngest person on staff, and one of the only women. I think that’s why Theresa took me under her wing.

She was in her early fifties but looked well past sixty, her skin leathery and with a deep tan after so many years in the sun. A grandmother, she made

it well known to us all that she was “too damn old to be working at this dump.” This was usually followed with a short cackle and another drag from her cigarette. She was in charge of training me on the cash register where my job was to check out customer products as I sweat through my uniform in the cramped space behind the counter. People typically paid with credit or debit cards, so my job mostly consisted of the polite, “Did you find everything okay?” as they shuffled through their wallets and purses, sometimes offering me a smile. She would nod approvingly with every successful transaction and be quick to input the manager override when I made mistakes, shaking her head with a grin when I apologized profusely.

When there were no customers in the store, we stocked empty shelves, answered phones, and filled out delivery and installation forms. We called it busy work, that time in the shop when the gossip was as abundant as the dust. Theresa could talk for hours about her daughter and her boyfriend and our “s***head boss,” all between fervent sips from her styrofoam cup of black coffee. She told me all about teenage pregnancy, her insomnia and her nicotine addiction while we stapled and highlighted forms, sweeping the leftover bits of soil and fertilizer from the break room and out onto the soil outside. “Dust unto dust,” she would say slyly. Then we would work our way around the store, checking inventory and watering indoor plants until lunch break, when she would grab her carton of cigarettes and duck out into the parking lot and out of view.

I spent my lunches at the landscaping checkout, a scrappy metal booth at the bottom of the hill, closer to the parking lot where the massive piles and mulch and soil sat, behemoths on the asphalt. Besides the occasional contractor, I was usually alone down there. But every once in a while, Theresa would finish her smoke break early and end up joining me at my solitary little station. One time, leaning her hip against the makeshift counter, she asked me if I had a habit of biting my fingernails. It was less of a question, more of a statement. I nodded, unconsciously fidgeting with my fingers as she glanced at my ragged nails.

“You gotta quit that,” she said dryly, looking at me almost expectantly. I asked if she had ever bitten her nails and, if she did, how the hell did she manage to quit. That’s when she looked at me, a knowing look on her face. “Jail.”

Whether the charges were accessory to armed robbery or drug-related, I don’t remember, but I do remember her humorless expression as she told me about her time in jail. “There’s always a b**** in jail, and you don’t want to be the b****.” She almost sighed as she said this, and I couldn’t help but picture the Theresa I had met, with her high ponytail and her pearl glasses chain, sitting in a jail cell. She went on to explain how she had bitten her nails her whole life, only to quit once and for all when she took her seat in the crowded holding cell. “You have to get tough, and everyone knows the girl that bites her nails isn’t tough.” She left on that note and ambled back up the hill to make a phone call, leaving me to consider my thoughts in the hazy summer heat.

I stopped working at Meadow’s over a year ago, and my life has looked very different since then, in many ways. I’m an undergrad now, and I spend a lot less time with middle-aged smokers and a lot more time in the soft lights of the cozy neighborhood bookstore. I’m learning how to stay close to friends and family from four states away and slowly learning Spanish. I tried and failed as a beginner plant mom, got a B in a beginner art class and I’m training to run my first 5k. I still bite my nails, notably less than I used to, but I haven’t quite been able to kick it. Sometimes, when I take out my nail file and scissors, I think of what she told me about her habit, and I wonder if this is what getting tough looks like.