Catch and Release
by Jami Attenberg
October 16 , 2006
They were holding hands after the sex. The sex had been fine. She had wanted tender, quiet moments, and he had wanted noise, and so she had waited through the noise to get to the point where they would be holding hands.
His hands were gigantic, with fingers like sausages choked with spices, like the ones that hung in the windows of the Polish butchers in his neighborhood. The base of his hand was like a thick-cut steak, the kind that really needs a good carving to get it anywhere near ready to eat. They were so big they were almost useless. Like: he couldn't do anything that needed a delicate touch, and sometimes he squeezed things too tightly. Also, he had trouble tying his shoes, for real, so he wore big slip-on boots instead. But he was good at lifting huge trays of food easily on his flat palms, so they liked him at the restaurant where he worked. Also he could take out all of the garbage to the alley at the end of his shift in just one trip. So he was always taking out the garbage.
Her hands were like little fluttery pieces of paper that you could fold into the shape of swans. But her nails were long, and she could scratch hard with them. He had asked her to scratch him during the sex, and she had. She didn't like to scratch, but it was something so small to make him happy, and so she had done it.
They worked across the street from each other. He worked at the restaurant that served fancy Japanese food but then also tacos filled with fish, a different fish for every day of the week. It was very popular with young eager people who lived in the city and worked in advertising, and on the weekends they would pile on the train to Brooklyn and walk the six blocks to the restaurant and pretend like they lived in the neighborhood for a night.
Two of his co-workers had Mohawks. Everyone was gay that worked there. He was the only one who wasn't gay. His coworkers called him "breeder" sometimes, and he thought it was stupid but he knew he wasn't allowed to say anything about it.
But the money was okay and he liked the music they played there a lot. Everyone was always fighting over who got to plug their iPod into the stereo except for him. He and his hands weren't going anywhere near an iPod.
She worked at the gallery that was really mostly a comic book store, although they were very fancy comic books printed on high-quality paper. She sat at the counter and wrote in tiny handwriting in her notebook all day about people who came into the store. Sometimes she would draw them, but she didn't think she was any good at it. Only very rarely would she talk to anyone.
She dressed in dark cool colors so that she would match the concrete walls of the gallery and her bangs were long and hung over her eyes and she often imagined that if she stood up against the wall no one would even know she was there at all.
She was sort of in school. She had a few credits to go. Go where exactly, she never knew, so she was in no hurry to get there.
They were wrapped around each other, her tiny limbs across his giant thigh, her petite hand cupped in his massive one, fingers intertwined. He noted the difference in size. He was always noticing it. He had spent his entire life noticing that his hands were bigger than everyone else's.
"My hand could totally kick your hand's ass," he said. "You will be crushed." He made a noise that sounded like, "Rowr." He opened his hand wide and then moved it in toward hers. "Here comes the giant hand." He surrounded her hand with his.
She liked to eat the fish tacos they served in his restaurant. She never got sick of them because every day there was a different fish. She had tried to eat other things in the neighborhood, but nothing ever pleased her as much as the fish tacos. The chef at the restaurant had spent summers as a child with his grandmother on an island in the South Pacific and he had a recurring dream about swimming in a school of fish, their tender bodies rubbing up against his, and he often woke with an erection. There was a respect for the fish that she could taste in the tacos.
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,
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."
©2006 Jami Attenberg and Nerve.com