Hands

After they gutted my mom, yanking out her uterus and ovaries, she was never the same, more like a trout with wide, circular eyes. Her hands, once plump and caressing, became gaunt with veins pulled taut and tendons twisted around her gnarled knuckles.

She had her hysterectomy when I was ten. Four weeks later, my father left. I could hear her gravely screams through the vent as I sipped tart orange juice. I tried to focus on my English homework, but the words kept blurring together.

"Why can't you?" she kept screaming at my father.

Their bedroom door slapped against the wall as he threw it open. The stairs moaned as he scrambled down them. She followed him; her eyes bulging, strands of greasy hair stuck to her slobbery face.

"I can't do this, I can't...." he kept muttering.

"Why can't you?" she cried after him, as the front screen door slammed behind him. She crumpled to the floor, her fingers pulling at her mangled hair.

I took my homework upstairs, but never finished it.

The next morning, when I spilled a glass of orange juice, she hit me for the first time. I fell onto my side, more out of surprise than because of the strength of her fist. The side of my cheek lay in the sticky juice. I stared at her.

"Anne, why can't you ever stop spilling things?"

"Anne, why can't you ever..." was how it always began. She stared at me with her broad, glossy eyes and I thought of a fish desperately flopping, its mouth opening and closing as it suffocated. But then I watched her veins flex as her thin hand came down. She was always careful to bruise me where the suspicious eyes of our small-town neighbors wouldn't notice.

When I met Jack, I looked at his hands first. They were thick with grease dried into the crevices. His fingernails were cut straight across so they looked square. On our honeymoon, I traced the smooth, broad lines of his veins as his hand lay, fingers spread, on my abdomen. I wiggled the gold band on his finger; the ring felt warm and smooth.

When I called my mom to tell her I was married, I heard her breath hiss as she sighed.

"You're twitterpatted," she muttered and quickly continued, "Mrs. Earlson has a new garden...." And we didn't speak of him again.

We rented a studio in the city, and I taught myself how to cook, a talent my mother lacked. He didn't get angry with me for the first six months, and even after that he never hit me. But his veins flexed when he ground cigarettes into my arms. He never shrieked like my mom when he was hurting me. The creases around his eyes deepened, and his mouth opened and closed as if he were suffocating with realization.

Once his anger passed, he fell asleep and the house was quiet. This time, I walked out into the dusk, where muggy clouds drooped low over the pale sun. Raindrops quivered on the gutters and sprinkles trailed down my arms and neck. It stung where the rainwater pooled in the fresh cigarette burns.

I huddled under an eave, and the water thudded onto the concrete from above me. Men and women, their heads tucked under hoods, shuffled through the puddles. Cold rain trailed down between the bricks and seeped into my shirt, making it stick to my back.

I stared at the people until they became a blurred mass of wet, dark shadows. I was shaken out of my trance when someone called my name.

"Eishta." He called me by my first name. The name my husband didn't call me. The name my mother had cussed over when she filled out my school paperwork.

"I was drunk when I named you," she had mumbled to me.

It was the name only he called me.

I smeared the rain out of my eyes to make sure it was really him. "David?"

He peered at me from under his drooping hood. His dark hair was heavy with water and sagged onto his forehead. He reached out a long, trembling hand to touch my arm, as if testing to see if I was real. I flinched as his fingers touched the burns.

He inhaled sharply through his teeth before he asked, "What happened? Was it your mother?"

His nimble fingers brushed my hand and he felt my wedding ring. He stared at it and ran his forefinger over it. Then he looked up at me. His eyes, a soft green smeared with gray, stared mournfully at me.

I shuddered and looked down at the cracked concrete, slick with rain and street oil. I folded my arms tightly across my stomach, trying to hide the burns and the ring.

He stepped forward; water from the puddle he stepped in splashed onto my jeans. Rather than look at his eyes – I didn't know what emotion I would see – I stared at the mud splattered on his boots.

His fingers, their tips rough, traced my jaw line. "Eishta, look at me."

I glanced up. His black eyelashes had tiny drops caught on them. He curved his hand around my neck. I curled my fingers through his and brought his hand down to look at it.

We had met seven years before, when I was in the city going to college. I had accidentally collided into him at a grocery store and dropped a can of green beans on his toe.

I flinched and kept repeating, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

He never cussed at me, he only laughed, asked for ice, and later my phone number. I was so flabbergasted, I gave it to him.

On our first date, he did most of the talking. I twisted my napkin around my fingers and stared at my silverware. Whenever he asked me questions, I whispered a quick response and didn’t look up.

I rubbed my cold arms as we strolled back to my apartment that night. When he put his coat over my shoulders, I cringed. After we dated for two months, I looked at him when we talked, but I still cowered whenever he touched me.

One night, we sat on a park bench. The moon and the shadows shifted restlessly. He cupped both my hands between his so I couldn't shrink away. He leaned forward. "You don't have to be afraid of me."

That was the first time I had looked him in the eyes. After that, whenever I was afraid of him, I looked at his green eyes and remembered what he had told me.

On Christmas of that year, he gave me a small, circular diamond suspended from a silver chain. I told him I didn't think a girl like me could wear something that pretty. He shook his head and put it around my neck anyway. Later, I went to visit my mother and she noticed the necklace.

"What rich boy gave you that?" she asked.

"None."

"You can tell your mother who's in love with you."

"No."

"You're just like me," she laughed. "I was too stubborn and embarrassed to tell my parents when I was in love."

Three months later, he proposed. I was about to exclaim, "Yes!" but my mother's words came back to me: You're just like me.

I looked down at my hands. They were gaunt with veins pulled taut and tendons twisted around gnarled knuckles.

Now I looked at his hands again. I traced the wet creases of them with the edge of my thumb.

He sighed – a long, shaky breath. "Eishta, why did you leave? You don't have to be afraid of me."

"This time I'm not afraid of you."

"Then what is it?"

I dropped his hand. "You can't understand."

He cocked his head and looked at me out of the corner of his eye. After a moment, he whispered, "Or do you not want me to understand?"

Tears felt like grit in my eyes. I looked at the concrete again. He always knew the things I never told him; the things I never wanted him to know.

"David..." I extended my fingers to reach for his hand again. I wanted to ask him to take me to his home and help me forget.

But in the florescent light of the streetlamp, I saw my hand. The veins flexed as I extended it towards him. I yanked it back.

"No, David," I whispered. I backed away from him, but he stepped forward, his hand reaching for mine.

I stumbled backwards, towards the main street. "No," I whispered again.

He lowered his hand; it hung limply at his side. I turned away.

His were the only hands I did not fear. But I looked at my own and knew he would come to fear them – just as I had.