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He squeezed her hand tighter. "Aw, what are you going to do now? You are powerless."
He had wanted to get a job in an office after college, but his hands were too big for the keyboards. He had tried to register with a temp agency, but he had failed the typing test. It hadn't mattered in college how slowly he had to type, one finger at a time, just to make sure he didn't hit two keys at once. But the woman at the temp agency, a brittle older woman with lines around her lips, her hair upswept and colored an uncomfortably bright red, her trim, cheap pants suit making a scraping noise as she walked into the room, his test results in hand, had suggested maybe he would be better at working on mailings than data entry. But that was even worse, the way all of the thin envelopes stuck together. He spent hours dabbing his fingers on a sponge, his gigantic fingers on this little sponge. By the end of the day, the sponge was shredded.
She squirmed a bit, flitted her fingers against the inside of his hand, like a dying bug caught inside a zapper on a back porch. There were so many bugs in the summertime where she grew up in Pennsylvania. Moths beating against the back window. Catocalas. Her father had collected them and then mounted them in shiny glass cases. The basement had been full of the cases. Stacks of mounted moths with white wings and dark lines that snaked through them, so they could blend in with birch trees and never get caught, at least until her father got his hands on them. Some people caught and released, but not her father. He was a collector. He collected them and then mounted them on tiny pins. She had always wondered if that hurt.
When she finally talked to him at the restaurant, she found herself pushing her bangs up with her hands so that he could see that she was paying attention to him. He liked her bangs, he liked the way her hands moved and he liked that she might just be exactly the same as him. Trapped on this street.
So they went to a bar around the corner from where they worked. They drank two drinks, then they went to another bar, then they drank three more, then he had two more, and just water for her, until they found themselves at his place, in the room at the very end of the hall,
It had been quiet and nice and gentle, at last, after all that moaning and thrashing and scratching and biting and pounding, it was finally calm and he was ruining it. |
past the posters his roommate had screenprinted for his band, and the torn carpeting that met the edge of the bathroom, and the chipped paint on the front of his door, and the anarchy sign written with a Sharpie by some guy who had crashed in their living room a few months before, inside there, past the pair of socks in a ball, and a stack of old hip-hop CDs he had bought in college, and a box of books he had been meaning to sell, and an ashtray filled with Marlboro Reds stubs, at the end of the universe in Brooklyn, that is where they fell together on a mattress lying on a floor.
"My hand rules," he said.
"I get it," she said. She was becoming annoyed.
"And your hand sucks," he said. He squeezed a little harder. "Say it," he said.
He had an intense wide smile on his face. He couldn't stop smiling. He suddenly wanted to, but he couldn't stop. All of his teeth were at the ready, like a wolf before striking.
"Say 'My hand sucks'," he told her. He laughed. He was kidding. Was he? He didn't know anymore. He just really wanted her to say it.
"Let go of my hand," she said, but he didn't. He didn't get it. Her hands were precious to her. She liked to use them to punctuate sentences while speaking. On Sunday nights she cleaned under the tips of her nails, then filed them. And then rubbed a fancy hand cream she bought once on her birthday all over them. And she liked the way they felt on the back of her neck after she put up her hair in a ponytail before she went to bed at night. He didn't get it. Her hands didn't suck.
It had been quiet and nice and gentle, at last, after all that moaning and thrashing and scratching and biting and pounding, it was finally calm and he was ruining it. And he knew he was ruining it, and she knew he was ruining it, and no one could seem to stop it.
And also he was hurting her hand.
If only her hand had been bigger, if only his had been smaller. If only he was not the kind of man who felt the need to crush the world around him because he felt crushed by it every single day.
"My hand sucks," she said, finally.
"I knew it," he said. He let her hand go, raised both fists in the air, and then said it, said it out loud: "I win."
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Jami Attenberg is the author of The Kept Man and Instant Love. She has written for Jane, Print, Nylon, Salon and The San Francisco Chronicle. Her novel, The Melting Season, will be published by Riverhead Books. Visit her at jamiattenberg.com.
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©2006 Jami Attenberg and Nerve.com
Title Photo Courtesy Neil Meka
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