Hands

CHAPTER ONE

If mountains and rivers were one thing together, that’s what Amber’s got on the backs of her hands, faint flowing vessels that protrude and meander in soft peach topographies. Her knuckles seem elastic, and her thumb, when pushed back counting money at the register, looks more like a crescent moon than anyone’s. The pads of her fingers are pliant and hydrated and the flesh bordering her short, crimson nails is full, almost plump. The first time we worked a shift together I was struck by the similarity of her hands to those of a piano teacher I know named Rhonda. They are at once commanding and accommodating; they wield pencils and spider through papers with dexterity and ease, and seem exceptionally true to the utility God or nature or whoever had in mind when human beings were given hands. Later, when I learned Amber was in massage school, it all made sense. Just as a pianist’s soul passes through her hands on the way to the keyboard, Amber’s flows like the blue blood in her soft river veins into the backs and shoulders of the prostrate geniuses who enrolled in massage school. That’s what it is about them. They are the vehicles through which her soul commits acts of somatic generosity.

CHAPTER TWO

In Scarlett’s hands lies the component of delicacy in her personality which elsewhere remains unseen, except maybe in her small physical stature, and in her name, which, despite its Biblical association with sin, always sounds to me innocent and dainty. Her hands are small and surprisingly pale, and she grows her fingernails out sometimes. When she counts money at the register, her thumb moves in a way that is decidedly feminine. Her hands seem to have an extra give to them, an extra pliability almost like Amber’s knuckles, only the softness in Scarlett’s hands seems to inhabit the bones themselves, as though each link in each finger were cut from a plastic coat hanger or a slightly solidified oblong styrofoam peanut. I feel this give during every shift I work with her, in unprovoked jabs to the kidneys whenever she passes behind me.

CHAPTER THREE

Jessica’s hands are also a little like Rhonda’s, soft and full, though a little less curvaceous, and the skin surrounding her pared fingernails looks padded with moisture from the inside. I don’t know all the functions her hands perform, but I don’t think she uses them for sharing her soul like Rhonda and Amber. That, I gather from her fondness for singing, is what her voice is for. I think she just got lucky with hands. (It should be noted, though, that her hands have been known to emit a pleasant fragrance, which is surprising, even to her.)

CHAPTER FOUR

Tara’s hands I think have a good, healthful color, but I don’t know for sure because the ends of her fingers always hog my attention whenever they are close enough to be examined. They are swollen, sometimes reddish, with fingernails frightened into submission by her perfect teeth. Sometimes it looks like her tiny fingernails are burrowing to hibernate for the winter. Small speed bumps brow her cuticles, something I’ve never seen before and which seems to come from a savage sort of nail-biting, which suggests a savage sort of something else, a savage sort of whatever it is that causes nail-biting. Sometimes I think a dark spot on her brain has hijacked her jaw, trying and failing to make a beautiful girl ugly. Or maybe her hands are damaged from clawing the walls of whatever she feels she’s stuck in (the trademark sign, a T inside a circle, has, for me, somehow come to signify Tara trapped in something round). Maybe her angry boyfriend is telepathically forcing her to gnaw them into an embarrassment. Maybe she’s trying to downgrade her beauty to justify his criticisms. Or maybe she tastes so good her own mouth has turned cannibal on her.

EPILOGUE

I don’t get to see these hands very often anymore. I haven’t seen Jessica’s in over a year. But every morning, immediately following my bowl of sugar-coated children’s cereal, I kneel before my window wearing only a loin cloth, stare into the sun and remember feeling, on cherished occasions, each of these hands on my face, all eight of them, warm and wet and dry and cold, and I put these memories in a compartment which I can reach into the rest of the day, whenever I feel alone or tired or like there is no goodness in the world. It is a useful thing to have.