Red Line, 5:30pm. “Mommy, look! Blue!” howled the little brunette seated next to me, staring at my fingernails with wide incredulous eyes.
I smiled at the child and her mother, a long-haired woman with sensible clothes and an array of tote bags slung over her thin frame. All week I’ve been conscious but uncaring of my fingernails, painted a pale blue to fulfill the “Something Old, Something New” adage that brides must abide by lest they meet with an unspecified ghastly fate. I culled the idea from Modern Bride magazine, which didn’t have a suitable suggestion for updating the “sixpence in her shoe” guideline that I wound up flouting anyway because I wore sandals.
“Yes, doesn’t it look pretty?” her mother said, smiling back at me with a resigned look that said My darling child just won’t shut her pretty little yapper.
“No! Blue is for boys!” the little girl declared.
Her mom tittered dryly. “Yes, but boys don’t wear nail polish, do they?”
The little girl looked stumped, and began examining her own nails, which bore chipped glittery pink paint. I smiled at the mother, willing to pardon the politically incorrect parenting I had just unwittingly participated in, and turned my attention back to the New York Times. And then I couldn’t stop picturing Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson painting their fingernails.
