(12) Exercise: “What Was That Like?” Or, How to Find a Subject
What was it like having a man hold your hand for the first time?
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A Love-hate Relationship
He still sees it as unsociability.
It happened when I was fourteen that he came to my school for the first time in years, late, and still with the same kind of crossed look on his face that ultimately looked to me the most handsome; and I felt, on that same afternoon, when I saw him at the door, that having waited for forever had never in my life felt more satisfying. I sat with my classmates, waiting, and watching different kinds of men take their seats beside a classmate. I waited in anticipation, or fear, for him to come, or not to come; and so when thirty minutes had since passed, still with the seat beside me empty, I recalled his miffed bravado the night before: “It feels taxing to go to school events like this one; I’d rather not.”
Thus, I held my own hand, the one hand against the other, cold against cold, trying, curbing an entire bucketful of blubbering inside the nutshell thing I made with two hands, both mine. At that age, I’d already mastered the art of the nutshell: “keep a really, really wide grin, and don’t cry.” I played it exceptionally well. But f*ck nutshells when he came. Right away, when I caught a glimpse of a familiar, missed face, I dropped the nutshell, dashed toward him, and flung my arms around him as to an embrace—and that, for sure, had been the most powerful thing I had ever done in my long fourteen years of perfecting the nutshell. For the whole afternoon after, I just wanted never to leave my seat. We said nothing, but that was when nothing meant everything, to me at least. If only to keep staying by him like that, I knew, rewind seven years back, that I wouldn’t have had it any other way as well.
But it also happened that day that they, my classmates, wanted to have me with them on the other side of the big room. “Come, join us.”
I shook my head, a show of apathy at that, and remained where I was, where proximity had never felt in the least bit as comforting, and confining, as when I was seated beside him. I liked my place beside him. It was like having to choose between watching TV at home and going out to see an Il Divo concert, except that he was Il Divo, and my classmates were TV at home. “No thanks.”
Until today, he still knows it as unsociability.
“You never learn,” he would say; and I am, after all, a difficult girl.
And a difficult girl it is: on my fifteenth year, that same statement, out of a different cause, would come to me as a holler that would also come with loud, grimacing freeze-time hands on my cheek. “You. Never. Learn.” Unfreeze time and unbeknownst to all humans, it is a slap on my face. Three, actually; and I would be down on the floor receiving two more jolts of his shoe, a ruthless onslaught and a way for one to have me hanging on for dear life, clinging onto anything kind, like a kind doorknob or a kind chair, while pleading with the words, “I’m sorry… I’m sorry that I had to be the kind of girl I am... I’m sorry for being myself.”
I was always sorry for being myself. It’s funny, pathetic, and miserably unbelievable, but it seemed the only words he always liked to hear, from me, that is. Some years ago, I proffered the same kind of detachment from people. I refused to play with my cousins. Do not get the wrong idea. I’d always played with them—boring was never in my book.
I was seven, seven years before that, when my whole family went out for lunch; and I could still vividly remember that fantasy—that one moment when a man held my hand for the first time since forever. As we crossed the streets, he took me by the hand my hand, he and I, his against mine, a first nutshell, as like the kind of nutshell thing I would soon be learning to form with my own hands seven years after. But because I was still so new to the nutshell game, I had no way of holding back my tears. In my head, I gave a teary yelp: “I love you, daddy!!!”
Sitting beside him on the table that afternoon, I understood that some things were just relatively more important than playing with cousins or than being that one nutshelled, behaved little girl I was.
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