Perfect Hands

2019 Robert and Adele Schiff Award winner in prose

49 Minutes Read Time

Photo by Seljan Salimova on Unsplash

You can see them, if you look closely, in all the old photographs: my fingers flush at the knuckles and nails, squeezed tight as window blinds so no light can slip between.

It’s Christmastime in this one. We’re standing in front of the flocked plastic tree. The parcels beneath it, shiny gold with silver bows, reflect the camera’s flash. What you don’t know is that they’re empty. Well, not quite. Long ago my mother wrapped twenty boxes—small rectangles and wide squares, even one plump circle with a string—after filling each with rice and tissue paper, hefty balls of yarn. We put the boxes out after Thanksgiving every year. We put them away on New Year’s Day. The real presents aren’t as pretty because, as my mother always said, “What’s the point? You’re just going to tear up all my hard work anyway.” Over the years, her own mother had wrapped socks and underwear in sections from the Sunday Times. Nothing good to read, not even the funnies. Christmas came from my grandparents in stock-market graphs and classified ads.

“You think you have it bad?” my mother asked from time to time—always abruptly, always out of the blue. “Imagine being raised by them. Imagine what I went through.”

In this picture, my hand clamps my father’s arm like a single cuff, the thumb a shortened hem pulled taut. “Put your feet right!” my mother scolds, demonstrating third position in ballet. We are always made to stand this way: one foot turned outward in our good shoes, one heel lightly touching the other foot midway. “Say Magi!” We hold our spines straight and bare our big teeth: identical smiles. Beside our posed feet lurks one of fifteen nativities, give or take. Everyone’s white and made of brittle stuff, like us. The mock hay comes from coupons crimped with a ribbon cutter. Magi!

I want to tell you when it first began, this bracing: my fingers turned to slats, my hands two shades repelling sun. But all I can do is show you the before and hope it sheds a bread-crumb trail to the after. As in:

This is 1983, and I am four years old, tall for my age and with a spiral perm that adds another inch or more. The local YMCA offers Saturday dance: ballet for girls in first and second grade. There’s my leotard—purple with white stripes—plus soft pink tights and stiff pink shoes. Mom says, “Your dad’s going to take you to your first class. Now just remember what we said: if anyone asks your age, tell them you’re seven.”

It’s a lie, and I’ve been in trouble for lying before—just this year in Mrs. Levrington’s preschool room. I was lonely on the playground with no one to push me on the swings, so I made up a story: “All the girls put stickers in their cubbies that say they’re members of The Brat Club.They made a pact and pinky-swore they would never let me in.” Remarkably, my mother believes me. Outraged, she telephones the school. That’s when my teacher tells her the stickers don’t exist, the cubbies are clean—she empties and scrubs them every day. Still, my mother persists on my behalf. “Children are crafty. I’m a teacher too, so I know how it goes. Maybe they hid their stickers. Maybe they wrote those words on another kind of badge.”

In the kitchen, I squat below the counters, listening in, one hand cupped over the mouthpiece of the mustard-yellow phone. My fingers are messy here, not yet lined up like sausage links in their packages, but splayed. This is still before. This is when I fear my mother but love her too, for a quality I can’t yet name: loyalty in absurdity, let’s say.

“But Mrs. Wade, there’s another matter,” the teacher haltingly explains. With my held breath and my bongo heart, I pity Mrs. Levrington; it is hard to have to contradict my mother. “You see—” clearing her throat—“Julie is my only pupil who knows how to read and write.”

No one ever asked if I wanted to dance, but Mom insists it’s important—for “present poise and future grace,” she says. I study the bright brochure of cheerful girls in various states of twirl. Then: “What does in-ter-me-di-ate mean?” I broach from the back seat.

“That you’re not a beginner,” Dad replies. But of course I am! This is still before: before years of ballet at the Southwest Community Center; before tap and jazz are added to my repertoire because I “might be better suited.” This is before I’ve ever heard anyone say: “Sometimes you have to fake it till you make it.” Fake how? Make what?

“Come to the barre now,” the teacher summons. Here the girls wear ponytails, braids, or buns. My hair is a bird’s nest with a bobble like two blue eggs. “Show me what you remember,” she says. “First position.” I copy the feet in front of me. “Second position.” I am precise as a Xerox machine. “Now third,” the teacher instructs, and I marvel that we are ready for pictures. Say plié!

My father sits on a folding chair in the corner, the only man there. Some mothers cluster by the door. There is bending down and rising up, using your arms to trace a curve across the sky. I look at my father, who points to the teacher, urging me to pay attention. Everyone else wears a skirt, I see. They tie in the back like aprons. How naked I feel without one, my long flamingo legs exposed. Soon the teacher is asking for PK turns (which I later learn are piqué ).One by one, the girls unmoor, make calculated movements across the floor. When I try to do what they do, I get dizzy. I’m tall too, but different in my body, less knowing. When I fall, the teacher leans over me and asks, “Julie? Is it Julie or Julia?”

“No a,” I say.

Julie, where did you dance before?”

I shake my head, will not be fooled—scuttle away like the beetle I am. I bet none of these girls would push me on the swings either. They cluster together like their mothers. There is some talk of sugar-plum fairies and a Nutcracker play; then the teacher approaches my father. Arms again, synchronized in motion. Are their fingers splayed? Are their muscles taut? Dad calls me over, tells me we’re going home.

“Don’t feel bad, Smidge,” he says, ruffling my beauty-school curls. “You just weren’t ready.” But I will win a spelling bee on intermediate a few years later.

Another before, this one harder: We go to meet my mother’s parents in the country. I have often imagined them there—chimney puffing on their cottage in the woods, sloping roof and winding stairs my grandfather built in his long career as a carpenter.

“His name is Elwood,” my father says. “He’s no wordsmith, but he’s good with his hands.” And, for a moment, the world aligns in language—the wood of his name, the wood of his work. I picture him as the Woodsman from Little Red Riding Hood.

My grandparents live in a clearing called Black Diamond. This is before I learn about black-diamond ski slopes, before I understand the symbol as explicit caveat—to mark a place beyond which only experts should pass.

My mother rouges her cheeks in the front seat. “We’re not staying long,” she decrees. “They met you once as a baby. My sister did too. She lives next door in a house our father built for her, free of charge.” The compact snaps shut. The mirror in the sun flap comes down for a wider view. “She didn’t want kids, your Aunt Sharon, but when she saw you, she changed her mind.” I puff up a little until my mother clarifies: “I was praised—for the first time in my life—when I came here with a babe in arms. She wanted that praise, like everything else. She made her daughter into a prize.”

Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house we drove. I didn’t sing because everyone was somber. The trees pointed like swords, so tall I couldn’t see their tops. Even the daylight could barely seep through. “Stay clean, and don’t wrinkle your dress.” My mother straightened my sash. My father patted my head. We followed a path of pinecones to the door.

In one version, recall, the Wolf swallows the Grandmother whole. Later on, she is cut out of his gut by the Woodsman and somehow—miraculously—survives. In another version the Grandmother dies long before Riding Hood ever arrives. She is a casualty or, perhaps, a sacrificial lamb.

My grandma Tena Vera has silver hair and azure eyes. Her face is striking, but she seldom smiles. I appraise her hands: ghostly pale and icy cold. I wonder if she might be the Wolf in disguise.

“Come into the living room,” she summons. “Let me get a good look at you.” We study each other in the best available light.

“Are these curls natural?” Grandma asks, then tugs my hair so hard I wince in pain.

“Of course they are! What kind of question is that?” my mother replied.

“No hot rollers?”

“Just a brush and a spray. That’s all it takes, every day.”

“No permanent either?” Are my fingers fusing now? Is this how it begins? I feel my body harden like a lozenge.

“Do you actually believe I would perm a child’s hair? She’s in kindergarten!” my mother protests.

“Well, I wouldn’t put it past you. You’ve always envied the ringlets on Sharon and Steve.”

“Who’s Steve?” I ask, a little too loudly.

“He’s your uncle.”

“I thought that was Thor, like the god in mythology.” I watch Grandma cringe, as if the tin of my voice hurts her ears.

Thor is married to your mother’s sister. Steve is your mother’s brother.” We follow her now into a carpeted kitchen. I have never seen carpet in a kitchen before. At the table a bald man in a flannel shirt shuffles a deck of cards. He wears a vest with many pockets, like fishermen I have seen at the shore.

“That’s your grandfather,” Grandma says tersely, pointing.

“Do you fish?” I rest my hands—there they are, still loose—on the table beside him.

Elwood raises his eyebrows, thick as spun sugar, doesn’t reply.

“Sharon will be over in a minute. She’s not eating right now—some liquid cleanse I don’t press her about—but I’m still making lunch, and she can bring that thermos if she wants.” Grandma waves her hands like she is shooing birds. “Bill, will you take him in the den to watch a sports game or something?” My father, strangely quiet, complies.

It is a lot to remember, but I do: Sharon is one year younger than my mother and married to a man named Thor, who is two inches taller than my father. He owns a carpet business. (Is this why there are no bare floors?) Thor drives a brown van to carry all his carpets, but once, he lost control and crashed into a 7-Eleven. His blood sugar got too low, they said. He was trying to get to the store to buy some Life Savers or gummy bears, but he blacked out and drove right through the main window. In the hospital he couldn’t remember his name or his wife or Ronald Reagan in the White House, but the nurse showed him a wallet picture of his daughter, and he knew her right away. He said, “That’s my Blythe. That’s my baby girl.”

Blythe is one year younger than I am, blonde like her father and like her mother used to be. Everyone in the family is proud of this fact. They talk about her blondeness like a trophy she has won, the gold medallion of hair rippling down her back, Rapunzel-style. She could make lovely ponytails, braids, and buns with hair like that, I muse, then wonder if she has ever danced ballet.

But even before I meet my cousin, I’m swept up in the tide of vicarious vanity. Blythe’s pictures are plentiful, framed on every flat surface in our grandparents’ house, collaged with magnets on their refrigerator door. Her ice-blue eyes. Her rose-pink cheeks. Angelic enough to crown a Christmas tree. “They’re looking into modeling agencies, of course,” Grandma says. “You would too if—” But the conversation halts as she considers my presence at the pass-through. I watch my mother’s face distort into a silent pucker, and then, as if on cue, a woman in ripped jeans and an off-the-shoulder sweater pulls back the sliding glass door.

“We’re here!” Sharon announces in a sultry low voice. “The little princess couldn’t be bothered to get the lead out today. Go figure.” Her giant thermos gleams, a silver exclamation point.

In this picture, I’m six, sitting on the back stoop of my grandparents’ house in a rumpled dress and tights with holes in them; my cousin is five, mugging beside me; she looks ready to audition as a Tanner sister on Full House. Blythe is that cheek-pinchable, that made-for-TV. Behind us the blue neon light of a bug zapper lends an eerie glow to an already eerie dusk. I have never seen a bug zapper until today and am frightened by the sizzling sounds it makes. My cousin says, nonchalantly, “Mosquitoes get burned up in there.” When I ask how many, she says, “More than you could ever count.” When I ask why, she says, flinging her hair, “Because they’ll bite us if we don’t kill them first.”

I begin to wonder about things I can’t yet name, things like passive resistance and proportionate response. I begin to wonder if there is such a thing as a Wolf in granddaughter’s clothes.

A few hours before this picture is taken, Blythe leads me on a treasure hunt, or so she says. We survey the woodpile by the side of the house, the ivy that climbs the walls. We touch the handle of the hatchet our grandfather swings, all the tools in his cobwebbed workshop, even the barrel of his gun that leans like a bully in time-out, there beside the cellar stairs. “When Grandpa gets too sad, Grandma hides it for a while,” Blythe says.

The grown-ups are still sitting in the kitchen, lingering over lunch plates, coffee on the stove. I have an urge to run to my mother then, a craving for her loyalty in absurdity, but my cousin grabs me by the wrist and tugs me along. “We’re not finished with our tour yet! This floor is boring, but I have lots to show you upstairs.” She shows me where our grandparents brush their teeth at matching faucets, where they sleep far apart in a bed like a bright-orange barge. “They had to sleep close three times, though, to make your mom and my mom and Uncle Steve!”

In the office Blythe opens a hatch in the closet wall, and we gaze together into a long open space, a tunnel without a light. “That’s the attic,” she says. I can make out a few bulky box-shapes and the sound of wind rushing from an undefined source. “It’s a good place to hide, but you could fall through.” The attic is another black diamond.

The last room seems the nicest at first: twin beds with floral quilts, a suitcase of dress-up clothes, and a drawer full of gaudy jewels. “This is where I stay when I sleep over,” Blythe says. “Cousin Erin sleeps here too.”

“Who’s she?”

“Steve’s daughter. Don’t you know her?”

I shake my head.

“Well, you’ll meet her soon. They live in the boonies on a farm.”

“But I thought this was the boonies.”

Blythe laughs as she slides on a pair of white satin gloves. “You’re funny.” The gloves stretch all the way to her elbows, and I watch as she clips rhinestones to her ears. “We should play Baby. You’ll be the baby, and I’ll be your mom.”

“I’m older than you,” I say, “and taller.”

“Doesn’t matter. I know how to play, and you don’t. Get in the bed, Baby. It’s naptime.”

But I’m busy looking at pictures I found in a big sticky album. “Which one’s your mom, and which one’s mine?”

“That’s easy. Your mom is dark, and mine is fair.” Blythe stands beside me and points. “Pretty,” she calls the slightly smaller girl in knee socks; “not so pretty,” the girl beside her in matching jumper and Mary Janes.

“But they look exactly the same!” I protest. Blythe smirks, then wags her satin finger.

“Get in the bed, Baby.” When I don’t move, she pulls back the covers and pushes me down. The album thuds to the rug.

“I don’t want to,” I say, as if it matters. She shrugs her shoulders and pushes some more.

Now panic arrives with its warm heat, its oatmeal clog in the throat. I try to get up, to lurch for the door, and that’s when she bites me. More than hurt, I’m shocked to see blood trickling out of my hand, from the webbed, nameless place between pointer and thumb. Next, I’m crying, and she’s tugging at my shoes, which won’t come off unless you stop to unstrap them. She doesn’t. Blythe is younger and shorter, and prettier, too, but she’s also strong as she straddles me, forces my head back on the pillow. So many years later, and I still remember how the ceiling looked like popcorn, how I was hungry. I don’t remember if we ever ate lunch.

“You’ve been a bad baby,” my cousin says, making that tsk-tsk sound of displeased parents. “Wish I had your paci so I could shut you right up.” She’s grinning as she presses down hard on my hip bones, claws at my clothes. “Must be time to change you.”

When I scream in the bad-dream way, no one hears me. Or maybe they do, but they mistake a scream for a squeal. They think Girls will be girls, playing silly games upstairs. No one, not even the Woodsman, comes to my rescue.

After: My tights with the red rosettes and my underpants with the cotton ruffles are stuck, folded over my shoes, two miserable wads of cloth. There’s blood on the pillowcase where I wiped my hand, and Blythe has gone to get ice-cream sandwiches from a freezer in the garage. So much to do at once: cover myself, remake the bed, turn the pillowcase inside out, find Kleenex to wipe my nose, stop crying, stop shaking, go downstairs before anyone thinks to call my name, before anyone comes to blame me for what has happened.

When I appear in the kitchen, my mother says, “You look flushed. Are you feeling okay?” I flinch as the back of her hand grazes my forehead. Giving a closer inspection, she sighs, then holds her arms akimbo: “There was one thing I asked of you—just one—not to make a wreck of that dress.”

“It’s picture time!” Sharon calls from the porch, clutching a camera with a thermos-long lens. “Hurry up before we lose the light!” Blythe slides her arm around my shoulder and raises two fingers for bunny ears. We show our dimples on command. “Say cousins!” She says it. Cousins! I remember how I said nothing at all.

So maybe that’s when, if we need an origin. Maybe that’s when it started, this business with my hands. I know I felt a longing for everything to be smooth, symmetrical. No lumps or blunders, no stumbles or stutters. Purge the ums from my speech, the hangnails from my fingers. I trimmed them all with my teeth. (Perhaps I was the Wolf, with an old lady’s nightdress and a little girl’s paws?) I folded my hands so hard on the desk at school I left sweat marks in the shape of a fist. Then I saw The Sound of Music.

How perfect those von Trapp children were—all seven of them— high-stepping in time to their father’s whistle! I started marching when I set the table, marching when I cleared it. My first-grade teacher mentioned to my mother that I was always marching on the playground, even when I played hopscotch or tried to double Dutch. “Your point?” Mom demanded, perturbed.

Miss Campbell—well, I pitied her too. What could she possibly say to satisfy the implacable Mrs. Wade? It wasn’t immoral to march at Christian school—not with “Onward, Christian Soldiers!” sung at every assembly and all—yet it wasn’t quite typical either. “Well, I am not raising a typical daughter!” my mother spouted into her bedroom phone.

Later my father told a story over dinner. As a child, he had seen a man limping. “I copied him because I thought his limp was interesting. But then it became a habit, and my parents started to worry there was actually something wrong with my leg, so they took me to the doctor. He confirmed that everything was fine.” When I didn’t speak, Dad added, more urgently: “Don’t you see how I called too much attention to myself? Don’t you see how I wasted everybody’s time?”

I loved my father best, but I wasn’t buying. “A limp is a sign of weakness,” I said, hands rigidly crossed in my lap. “A march is a sign of strength.”

All my life people had told me how Jesus was perfect. “Be Christlike, and follow in His footsteps,” the elders advised. Well, I wanted to march, which felt good and strong and godly. I liked the precision of it: drumbeat of my feet, lack of twirl and curve, only firm edges. So unlike ballet. And even when I grew weary of marching, I kept my hands ever primed to salute.

We went back to Black Diamond. My mother said we wouldn’t, but we did. I was trying to be perfect, trying not to protest. “Sometimes family matters can be difficult,” my father said, in the vaguest way possible. “And in your mother’s case, it’s harder because her family isn’t Christian.”

I wondered but didn’t ask: Were we supposed to save them?

At Blythe’s house there were no stairs, only long hallways that defaulted into rooms. I feared the large dogs, Torque and Dritte—though I wanted to love them—feared the way they charged through doors, guzzled water from toilets, shoved their stiff noses against my crotch. When I asked if she had a leash, Blythe only rolled her eyes. “This is the country. We don’t walk our dogs.” Out the back door, they sprinted, into an acre of yard.

Once, Blythe showed me her homework file: all A+s, gold stars, laudatory stamps from her teachers: Keep up the great work! and You’re a superstar! “But I have a secret,” my cousin grinned. “Every one of these”—tossing the dittos and lined notebook pages on her bed—“my mother did for me.”

“You don’t do your own homework?” I asked, incredulous. “Not phonics or spelling or printing or math?”

“Nope.” Her mouth made a smacking sound as she said it. “In fact, I pity the fool who does.”

At our house my mother leaned over my shoulder, watched me scribbling a story in my speckled composition book. “I want you to start putting tails on your letters,” she said. “It looks nicer. Right now they’re just so blunt and square.”

“But we haven’t learned cursive yet,” I replied. “That’s next year.”

“Not for cursive—for printing. I saw some of Blythe’s work at your grandmother’s house. Her lowercase letters are so pretty—the a and the d curl up at the end instead of dropping straight down. Try it.” She pointed to my margin. “Oh, and Blythe crosses her zs and her 7s, which is considerably more elegant than what you do.”

When I didn’t move, my mother lifted the pencil out of my hand, demonstrated her preferences in the postage-stamp corner of the page.

“You want my printing to be . . . prettier? My letters to be . . . curlier?” There was a word for this, and I was reaching for it: the bright, ironic apple dangling from the tall, ironic tree.

“That’s right,” my mother said, deadpan. “And you better not give me any lip about it.”

Snap your fingers, and just like that, my letters are pretty. They have tails that curl like the hair of pretty girls. My zs and 7s look sharper than ever, mustachioed and dapper. Still, my mother daubs her eyes at the breakfast table, sniffs hard and looks away: “All I want for Christmas is to see your face on a Sears catalog.” She points to the current cover—a girl about my age wears a red beret and plush red sweater, her chin cupped between her mittened hands. “My mother, my sister—they get this same catalog in the mail. Just imagine if they walked down to their mailboxes, reached inside, and saw you staring back at them. Just imagine.”

I picture their long twinned driveways stretching back from the road, foxglove growing everywhere wild, the silver boxes with squeaking hinges propped on wooden posts, and the red flags that you could sometimes raise, even in Black Diamond. “How would anything be different, though?”

“Are you serious?” My mother’s eyes blaze now. Her sadness always drops soon enough down the laundry chute to rage. “If someone would finally discover you at a mall or the grocery store, they’d be the ones with something to prove, not us. And my sister, no matter how skinny she gets, could never say her daughter was a cover girl.”

You see, my hands were only ever an index, the way smoke is indexical of fire. Its presence triggers an alarm. I wanted to emulate a mechanical kind of perfection, to mimic the sleek and unerring (I thought) progress of a modern machine. Behold the rise of the microwave; my mother didn’t use her oven anymore. Behold the rise of the VCR; we rarely went out to the movies. And now they were putting computers in all our classrooms at school, sending us one at a time to train for our futures in the simulated past of the Oregon Trail. I died of dysentery more than once, but while dying I kept my spine straight, my feet poised, my hands flat as unleavened bread.

The formula for perfection was easy: Eliminate desire. (This meant stop feeling things—fluttery, hiccup-inducing things—for Liesl von Trapp dancing in the gazebo and Carmen Sandiego posing in her scarlet hat; just hold your breath, wipe your palm-sweat, close your eyes.) Eliminate fear. (This meant stop worrying about what your mother is going to say if   Just don’t do anything to make her mad. Anticipate and avoid sore subjects. Do your chores cheerfully and before you are asked.) Move your body in saintly ways. (Jesus never picked his nose or his wedgies. Jesus never tripped over his own two feet or had trouble tying his shoes. And Jesus certainly never lusted or farted, cleared his throat out of habit or spoke his mind out of turn . . .)

I started waking up very early then. I’d squint at the green numerals on the bedside clock. For some reason I could only rouse officially on a zero or a five. If it was 4:13, say, I’d have to wait until quarter past the hour to start my day. Then I’d sit up like Lazarus rising, turn at a right angle (because right angles were always right), and slide my feet simultaneously into my slippers. Symmetry was crucial to this enterprise. Five times around the bed I’d march, smoothing the blankets on either side, fluffing the pillows, pulling the bedspread from the rocking chair and draping it softly, tucking and folding—never a pleat out of place. The decorative pillows followed like a geometry lesson: squares, then hearts, then ovals. A fabric cylinder came last, and a porcelain doll in a pink velvet dress reclined against it.

My mother had selected every item in this bedroom on my behalf— “what good girls like,” she said, what good girls were supposed to like— Holly Hobbie on the wallpaper in profile; baby’s breath in perfume bottles repurposed as vases; white ceramic shoes on the window ledge, made to fit no one; a wicker-rimmed vanity mirror; a shiny baton for a future stint on the drill squad; and a cramped ballerina, who sprang up from the jewel box on musical command.

Every morning I knelt down on a zero or a five and prayed. I asked God to make me the good girl my mother dreamed I was—more automatic in my goodness, more automaton than pesky flesh and blood. After that, I switched off the night-light of a woman knitting, baskets of yarn at her tiny feet, and marched quietly toward the kitchen, where I set out place mats, silverware, and glasses. I folded the napkins and cinched them with a ring. It was dark, but I knew my surroundings.

A perfect person didn’t need the light; she was the light. Every Bible verse I memorized said as much. She could sit at a table predawn— her thumbs crossed, her fingers evenly laced—waiting with radiant patience for someone else in the house to stir.

I was listening, and I was learning. I knew my mother and her brother hadn’t spoken in many years. I knew Steve married Arlene right after college, and my parents were not invited to the ceremony. Now Arlene was pregnant with their second child, though everyone said expecting, as if pregnant were a dirty word. (Was it?)

I knew Erin, their first child, was two years younger than me and, according to Blythe, “a total bumpkin.”

“Pumpkin?” I clarified.

“No—bumpkin. You can’t even buy a lottery ticket in her town.”

I saw Erin’s picture once in our grandmother’s sewing room, at which point I blurted, “But she’s not blonde like Uncle Steve!”

Grandma’s response startled me: “Well, you don’t have to be blonde if you’re exotic.” After that, she moved the picture to a higher shelf, beside another picture I presumed was Aunt Arlene and Uncle Steve on their wedding day. He wore an average-looking suit, black and gray, while she upstaged him in a dazzling red kimono. It seemed to me that women were always upstaging men this way.

On this particular night I was scheduled to “camp out” with my cousins in our grandparents’ living room. “Your first slumber party!” my mother decreed, as she rolled my father’s sleeping bag into a thick checkered bale, then cinched it with a red hood and a series of snaps and strings. I could tell from her voice that she was forcing lilt, coercing joy.

“What will you do—the grown-ups, I mean?”

“Cards, I suppose.”

My manicured curls reached my shoulders now, and she cinched those too, with a banana clip. Mom was fond of cinching. “Whatever you do, don’t embarrass me tonight, all right? No Truth or Dare. No telling family secrets.”

“What secrets?”

Exactly.”

Say secrets! But don’t. Say Beats me! and cock your head to the side, charming and noncommittal. Say I can neither confirm nor deny that my mother colors her hair with potions from the drugstore, that my father weighs himself and waits for my mother to check the numbers on the scale. When Sharon’s camera flashes, smile wide enough to convey: We could not be a happier family, and we’re looking into modeling agencies too!

As soon as we meet, Erin rises on her tiptoes and whispers in Blythe’s ear. They point at me—at my fleecy pajamas with dancing candy canes, at the floppy antlers of my reindeer slippers. They laugh. The laugh is exaggerated, like someone drew laughter as a card in charades, then forgot to be quiet and added the sound effects. When I ask what’s so funny, my cousins only shake their heads and laugh some more.

In the dining room the adults open a new game called Trivial Pursuit and split into teams. The women are playing against the men, a battle of the sexes. “Fine by me if you want to get creamed,” a new voice chuckles—but there’s a hint of malice in his tone: this Wolf in Carhartts, waving his Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Aunt Arlene, who smiles much but says little, comes to check on us from time to time, leaning against the entry-hall wall as she pats her belly gently. She serves homemade sushi to every grown-up at the table, though it’s clear they favor the Chex mix and bologna rolls, handfuls of pretzels and chips. Later, I pilfer leftover sushi hand over fist from dark square plates in the kitchen. Who could have dreamed anything as wondrous as those soft buttons of rice and fish?

I notice also how beer cans accumulate on the counter, how eggnog-stained glasses enshrine a regal-looking bourbon bottle. Uncle Thor rattles the chandelier with his “Holy hells!” and “Good goddamns!” while my cousins continue to build their elaborate fort without me. Mostly I sit on the edge of the sofa and watch, thinking how if there were cubbies at our grandparents’ house, theirs would bear the fabled Brat Club stickers.

At some point Sharon staggers into the living room, her tall heels giving her trouble. The skirt she wears is tight black leather, well above the knee, her sweater red with NAUGHTY spangled across the breasts. My mother would not approve. My mother would call a woman dressed this way several unappealing names.

“Get out your slumber bags!” Sharon blunders. I must have smirked, because she threatens to wipe that smug look right off my face if I don’t lie down and go to sleep at once. Out go the lights, but her long shadow lingers until we turn to statues in the nearly-dark. Now the living room resembles the attic, cold air rushing from an undefined source, a bona fide black diamond.

“Don’t worry,” Blythe says after the threat of her mother has passed. The tension among us is gone at once—poof! We wriggle beneath the canopy of afghans, lie supine in a row beneath a well-crocheted sky. “She won’t remember anything tomorrow. She’s wasted.”

“My dad will be wasted too,” Erin confirms, clicking the flashlight on and off beneath her chin. She has shiny brown eyes and straight black hair cut snug around her face, bangs tiny and perfect like the tines of a child’s comb. I can see why our grandmother thinks she is the next best thing to blonde. “But the bad news is,” Erin sighs, “he’ll remember everything.”

I bet we would have told ghost stories next, played “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board” too, just as movie girls with leggings and slouch socks did. But instead a clatter arose in the dining room. Was that a chair hitting the wall, a table overturning? We couldn’t be sure. When exactly does a clatter become a commotion, a commotion something worse? I press my palms hard against my thighs inside the sleeping bag. I make of my body a zipper, the kind that sticks intractably at the top of a dress.

“Oh, Steve! My darling! It’s okay!” Arlene is cooing.

The new voice again, gone guttural, lupine: “You stupid bitches! You stupid, cheating, motherfucking bitches!” Each syllable is punctuated by a dish breaking, the china hutch shaking.

“Let’s play again, Stevie!” It’s our grandmother now, her tone as tender as a lullaby sung to a colicky baby. “I just know you’re going to win next time.”

Now the living room blazes with light. “Erin, dear.” Arlene sounds frightened but is trying to disguise it. Grown-ups always think we can’t discern. “Erin, honey, are you awake?” She squats down and peeks inside the fort.

Somewhere in the muffled distance I hear my dad say that it’s just a game and couldn’t we all calm down please. Another crash, another scream: more commotion.

“Erin, let’s wake up now. Mommy might have to take us to a motel.” Arlene removes the blankets one by one until we lie exposed like three Lincoln Logs on the living-room rug. The adults squint down at us, and we squint back at them.

Did they really believe we had been sleeping? Did they really believe anyone could sleep through such a thing?

“Julie, get up. We’re leaving,” my mother instructs. She and my father stand together, not unlike zippers themselves, their drab coats draped over sober arms.

“Stevie! Wait!” I rise in time to see my uncle charge out of the house, followed by my grandmother in her flimsy shawl. He is nothing but a large blur of belly, larger than his wife’s, a chimney of a man puffing obscenities into the night. “You’re so smart, Stevie! You’ve always been the smartest one!” his mother calls after him. Soon headlights pour through the curtains, bright as egg yolks. Steve’s truck peels down the pitted road, and Grandma steps back inside the parlor. Her eyes scan the room before they settle on my mother: “It would have killed you to let him win?”

“Steve is very excitable sometimes,” Arlene murmurs. “He just needs his space when he gets like this, or—” But she doesn’t finish that sentence. Instead she rocks on her knees like a child at story time, hugging her own child close.

“You think this smarty-pants is gonna to let anyone win?” Sharon howls with laughter. “We all know Linda doesn’t have to cheat to be a bitch!”

“Julie!” My father snaps his fingers, breaking my trance. “Let’s go now, please.”

Where was the Woodsman? I never heard him once. Never saw him either, until my father steered us slowly through the fog. Then, at the side of the house, spotlit by the motion detector, a man in a flannel shirt and a vest with many pockets raised his hatchet, split another piece of wood.

The thing about being perfect was how exhausting it was—how exhausted I was, holding my body accountable for every potential treason. And not mine only: I came to believe I needed to atone for the wrongs of others too—to put them right with my steady breath, my certain steps, and, most of all, my hands. No erratic moves, I’d remind myself. Slow and controlled, grasping the handle of a mug, lifting a fork to my lips, soaping a washrag in the tub. Perfection didn’t have to be as painful as, say, death by crucifixion, but pleasure of any prolonged sort was understandably suspicious.

Gulping and slurping—these were signs of enjoying too much. The body betrayed itself to others. Every day I hit the reset button at least fifty times. Right thumb to left wrist. Feel the pulse. Remember the purpose. You were messy. You said what you were thinking. You relished too much of everything. RESET. DO-OVER. I placed my hands right again, closed my eyes, cleared my throat. I tried to make it one hour, one meal, one recess without slipping into free and easy, unruly or grand. Keep your hands to yourself. It was such a simple rule, yet at night in the tub, alone in the dark, I trembled, reset, trembled, reset. Sometimes the body betrayed itself to itself, and then I wished for a Taser to tame what I felt, a zapper for my biting heart.

At the new dance studio, all the genres are mixed. We switch our shoes and move from ballet to tap to jazz just by listening to what the music cues. Then comes a kind of intermission—the gymnastics portion of the class—which is Preteens Gone Wild, ponytails and apron skirts awhirl. Picture them: all the girls who turned cartwheels on the front lawn for fun, who performed their floor routines in freezing auditoriums, made seamless turns on balance beams pitched high above the ground. It’s a free-for-all of backflips and roundoffs as I retreat to the corner, wanting so badly to scratch my acne, to gnaw at my nails. But if I give in now, I’ve failed—failed twice in fact. “A two-for-one special on disappointment,” as my mother would say.

“Julie,” Miss Melanie beckons. “Let’s try again, shall we?” She has a sweet face that is only newly grown, curls bleached so light they are nearly white, and crinkly black shorts she slips over her leotards. I want to please her, of course, more than anything. I also want her to stop smelling so good.

Miss Melanie extends one arm above the firm blue mat and motions for me to drape my body backward. A few girls still walk on their hands, but most have stopped; most are watching me from sideways splits or standing with one hip jutting out like an iceberg. I’m stiff and sweaty, and I can’t trust the teacher even when she says, “I’ve got you! I’ve got you! Your body’s becoming the bridge!”

I remember my cousins playing gymnastics with the sprinklers on, the backbends that seem to come naturally to them. We’re all in our swimsuits, slippery and sunned, as Aunt Sharon folds me over her arm this way, but rougher. I can smell a cigarette on her breath that no one will ever see.

“You wish you could do anything half as well as my daughter, don’t you?” she murmurs before she drops me. I come down hard on my head in the muddy grass, and everyone, even Aunt Sharon, laughs.

“Are you ready for me to let go?” Miss Melanie always asks the same question even though I never reply. As she leans over me, I watch the soft flesh of her breasts cascading toward her shirtfront, threatening to burst forth from the too-small cups in the too-thin spandex. That’s when I close my eyes, in fear and in thrall. I collapse on my own every time.

There is before, and there is after. But I am learning how most of life is during, how perhaps the during can only be endured. As in:

During this time, I wake up bloody with an unfamiliar throb, think I must have wandered in my sleep again, taken a corner too sharp. Sometimes I come to under the piano, fetal on the floor beside the damper pedal. My mother says I feel guilty for not practicing more, for not putting my “long, slender fingers to some use.” But then I remember what our teachers told us about the tide that’s coming, the way our girl-bodies will turn into their own black diamonds. Say I am my own worst enemy! Say It is never safe to uncross my legs again! When it arrives, I wash my underwear in secret. I smuggle aspirin from behind the bathroom mirror. I make do each month with pads I’ve hoarded from the dance school’s dented machine.

During this time my grandmother goes into the hospital for an emergency hysterectomy. It’s the same cancer my mother once had, but Grandma is older, weaker. They can’t get it all in time. Months later, after she dies, I tell my mother in a fit of misplaced moxie how her mother ruined my whole summer vacation: “Get the diagnosis in June, buy the farm in September. She held on until she saw those yellow buses—I know she did—petty and cruel to the very end!” My mother slaps me then, hard across the face, after which she caresses the same burning cheek. We are both confused by her gesture, and in silence we seem to agree we will never speak of my grandmother’s death again.

During this time, I bleed through a white skirt at school and have to wear MC Hammer pants from the Lost and Found. I volunteer at a homeless shelter but foolishly arrive in my B.U.M. Equipment jacket. I take a compulsory IQ test and learn I have only “slightly higher than average” intelligence. The report comes as a relief to no one else but me. I write so much and so often that the small bump on my right ring finger swells and darkens, making it harder than ever to smooth my hands. Still, I am proud of my pencil bump, name it Sisyphus for the rock it is.

During this time, I compete in a beauty pageant but find no redemption in the requisite applause. All of us contestants smear Vaseline on our teeth to keep us smiling, but my name is never called for the roses or a crown. One judge asks me as an interview question, “What does the color pink mean to you?” I think of tongues. I think of Barbie’s pink Corvette. Then: Pepto-Bismol and chewable Tylenol. I think labia and vulva and other parts I am finally learning proper names for. I think of my bedroom with its gastric walls, the tutus I was forced to wear. I say to the judge, “Is that a serious question?” and watch him twitch a little before he nods.

During this time, I hardly eat anything, but my body keeps changing anyway, reckless as a runaway car. I stop wearing swimsuits, stop going into pools with other people around—first, because I fear I am too large and later, because I know I am too small. Both conditions elicit comments of an undesirable kind. At school I take another IQ test because the old one was somehow incorrectly scored. I hide a bag of bloody clothes in my closet, too tired to wash them and too ashamed to try to explain.

The new report comes back “exceptional,” which translates to “No getting out of anything,” which means “Premed or bust” and “Your father and I would have expected nothing less.” On the day I take the expensive private high school’s qualifying exam, I accidentally—or at least I think it’s accidentally—jab a pencil through my hand.

As even average IQs know, pencils aren’t made from lead but from a nontoxic substance called graphite—notably, a prettier word. So you see, it is possible to jab a pencil through your hand and carry on quite nicely with just a cleaning and a wrap. You can still get into that expensive private school and let your parents down another day, another way.

Even during the development of Sisyphus, there were some things I never wrote down, not even in the journal I burned. For instance, I never wrote about the violence I witnessed in those two country homes—not even how Uncle Steve smashed the board game that night, flattened the box it came in, or how we kept finding tiny slices of plastic pie embedded in the carpets for years.

Once, before her death, my grandmother caught me in her living room, staring at a picture of Blythe. It was an 8 × 10 glossy, probably from Glamour Shots at the mall nearby. Say backlit! Say overblown! Say Gussy rhymes with hussy, which is what my mother thinks you are! Erin had dared me to sneak into the living room and give that picture the finger. “Do it! She’s such a snob! You know you want to.” She was right—I wanted to—but it was harder than I thought to force my middle finger to break rank with the rest of those rigid soldiers. I stuck my tongue out instead—at her Cinderella face, at her golden tresses piled high upon her head, at the glittering tiara lodged among them.

Tena Vera turned the corner just then. She was carrying a dustrag and a can of Pledge, though on seeing me, my tongue, she promptly dropped them. Erin might have been watching, or she might have fled, but our grandmother grabbed me and pressed me flush against the wall. “You’ve always been jealous of Blythe. I don’t need this stunt to tell me what I already know.” She shook her silver crown. “It’s redundant.”

Where were my hands just then? I was holding them up, like a teller during a robbery. My mother worked at a bank after she gave up teaching. She said there was a button you could push under the desk to call for help, but I didn’t have access to such a button.

“We all love Blythe, but you’ve seen firsthand that she doesn’t get away with much. She takes a licking around here, doesn’t she?” I had seen these so-called lickings, though I wouldn’t write them—won’t write them—even now. Her body is not mine to lay bare. “Why do you think that is, Miss Know-It-All? Why do you think we punish such a pretty girl?” When I didn’t answer, she pressed harder.

“Maybe you don’t—you don’t want her to get a big head, to think she calls all the shots?” I mustered.

Maybe.” My grandmother loosened her grip ever so slightly. “But you see, her parents and I—we don’t want her to be weak. We want her to grow up knowing she can take it.”

My arms were so tired, but I couldn’t put them down. “Ever wonder why you don’t have to take it, Julie? And here’s a hint: It’s not because you’re better than Blythe. It’s not because you don’t deserve a licking,” and here she showed her teeth.

“Why?” I met the Wolf’s eyes then, blue to blue, like calling a bluff in a game I’d never played before.

“Because your father won’t allow it—won’t allow his precious little girl to be disciplined properly. He says he doesn’t believe in corporal punishment.”

My father! Why did I never think of him there? How did they always manage to make him disappear?

“So as much as I’d like to help you become a strong woman one day, the kind who doesn’t skulk around sticking her tongue out at other people’s pictures, I’ve been forbidden from doing so.” Tena Vera released me then, fluffed my hair, adjusted the folds of my turtleneck. “It’s a pity, but I guess you’ll grow up to be weak, just like so many other run-of-the-mill girls.”

Once, around Christmastime, when my grandmother had been gone a few years, I heard my mother wrapping presents and weeping in the other room. I knew why. Her father never called her. Not for her birthday. Not for the holidays. Not even on the anniversary of her mother’s death. When she asked him about a will, about sentimental things Tena Vera might have left for her, he only pointed to Sharon. Sharon was in charge now—his new, “leaner, meaner” mouthpiece. She took him to the doctor, fixed his meals, sorted his mail. There was no telling what she threw away. So one week my mother just stopped driving to Black Diamond, stopped picking up apple fritters and the tin of flavored coffee that he liked at Albertsons. When I asked her about it, she said she could sit in silence and watch The Price Is Right at home.

On this particular day I took out the blue family memo book with all the seashells on the cover, and I dialed my grandfather’s number. I had to look it up because I had never dialed his number before. Soon the old panic began to singe my face as the phone rang once, then twice, then—

“Hello?” His voice was gruff but faint on the other end, unpracticed at speaking after living for fifty years with a woman who always spoke for him.

“Grandpa?” Had I ever even uttered the word before?

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Julie.”

“Who?”

“Linda’s daughter.” He didn’t say anything after that, even though I waited a respectable amount of time. “Are you still there?”

“Yes,” he sighed. Another pause and then a cough, then silence.

“Do you think you might want to talk to my mom—you know, wish her a merry Christmas, something like that?”

“Well,” Elwood stuttered at last, “Sharon is supposed to send out the Christmas cards—”

“Really? That’s what you want to say? That’s your answer?”

“Pardon me?”

“No, I won’t. I’m not going to pardon you for anything!”

“Julie, who are you talking to?” My father stood in the doorway, his brow bent with concern. I only flapped my hand at him and turned back to the call.

“You were supposed to be our Woodsman, Elwood!” I could hear him breathing, but he didn’t reply. “Our Woodsman!” I was screaming then, as my mother stepped into the room. She stood beside my father, the tears still slick on her face.

“Do you really think that because you built that world, you didn’t break it too? That it’s just one or the other? Create or destroy?” Silence. “I’m going to count to three, Elwood, and then I’m going to hand this phone to your daughter. What do you say? Think you could muster a few good tidings for your firstborn?” My hands were trembling, but my fingers were as loose as they had ever been. “One!” I shouted. The line went dead.

As I left the room, I told my mother. “You were right. I don’t want to imagine what you went through.”

I’d like to say how I “spoke my truth” or “blew my fuse,” depending on your interpretation, and how after that I began to soften into my body again, became “more myself than ever before.” I did unclench my fists more often and found myself forgetting for weeks at a time that I needed to pull in my fingers like awnings before a storm—tighten and cinch, tighten and cinch.

Also, the math teacher’s daughter smiled at me over her boyfriend’s shoulder at a Sadie Hawkins dance. (Of course, they’re all Sadie Hawkins dances at an all-girls school.) Her name was Sarah, and her skirt resembled the rainbow parachute we used to spread wide in jubilation on Field Day each year. I felt a new heat arise in me that wasn’t panic at all, as I rested my chin on the church boy’s shoulder, a date my mother had arranged for me. I made sure to grin back at her, though, at Sarah, before I looked down and away.

It turned out that Tena Vera had a sister named Rose. They didn’t speak for more than forty years because Rose’s young son once turned off the television while my grandfather was watching a game. My mother told me how he broke his customary silence then, erupting into curses at the boy. Soon after, my grandmother charged into the den and banished both Rose and Kenny from the house for good.

“Didn’t that seem like madness to you?” I ask my mother. We are decorating the tree, sorting ceramic sugarplums and keeping a lookout for the star.

“Oh, who knows? Wasn’t everything back then? I was only a child myself.” My mother is light today, giddy, because Aunt Rose is coming for a visit. “She never cared much for Sharon, but I always knew she had a special place in her heart for me. That’s why I kept up with her, wrote her letters all these years. And now we’re even in the Garden Club together!”

When I find the star, I hand it to my mother, knowing she will want to do the honors. “Look how cute you were!” she coos, pointing to my four-year-old face, emblazoned there in the center of her favorite ornament.

“Might be time for a new tree topper?” I suggest, just as I do every year.

“Not a chance! You light up our lives, and we want everyone to know! Oh, and on a related note—” pause for the stepladder, pause for the placement—“your Great-Aunt Rose is very excited that you’re going to college next year. She’s even bringing something she calls her college quiche.

Now we stand together and regard the star, my small face staring down at us with a prescient gleam in her eyes. She says, You better watch out. You better not cry. She says, You better not pout. I’m telling you why. My mother turns to me and pats my supple hand. “Now just remember what we said: if Rose asks about early admission, tell her you got in to Stanford . . .”


Read more from Issue 17.1.

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