Steven Millhauser - We Others - New and Selected Stories

In the hall I nodded casually toward the glove. “So what’s that all about?”

“It’s nothing,” she said. “Just some minor surgery. No big deal. He wants me to keep it covered.” She shrugged her right shoulder. “Nothing to worry about.”

I waited for her to say more, as though she’d stopped in the middle of a sentence.

“Then I won’t worry about it,” I said, and in my mind I heard my father saying: “Case closed.”

Emily said nothing. I shrugged and said, “Case closed.”

And as I walked home with her that day, wearing thick blue gloves of my own, I didn’t worry about it. I didn’t worry about it when I stepped into the warm yellow kitchen and greeted Mrs. Hohn, who smiled radiantly at me and said, “Welcome back, Will — this place hasn’t been the same without you.” I was back from exile, back in the peaceful place, after Emily’s minor surgery that was already a thing of the past, though recent enough to require a protective covering; there was probably a bandage of some sort underneath, which would have attracted its own kind of unwelcome attention; already the white glove seemed less strange, like a new hairdo that took a bit of getting used to.

Upstairs in Emily’s room I straddled the wooden desk-chair, with my forearms resting on the back, while she lay on the bed against two pillows. Her white-gloved hand rested beside her on the pink spread. I tried not to look at it. She wanted to know everything she’d missed in English and Problems of American Democracy, and I went through the classes day by day, after which I told her about Larry Klein’s latest antic: he had skipped class and was found seated in the empty auditorium, and when he was brought to the principal’s office he said he thought seniors could skip class at their own discretion. “That’s what he said: ‘at their own discretion.’ Sanders just stared.” The glove didn’t move. There was a knock at Emily’s door. Mrs. Hohn entered, with a tray of chocolate chip cookies and two glasses of lemonade. “Now you two just relax and enjoy yourselves,” she said. “And if you want anything, just holler.” At 5:30 I heard the opening of the storm door and the wooden door. The glove shifted slightly. I stood up and gathered my books. “See you tomorrow,” I said, and glanced at the glove, which had moved from the spread to Emily’s lap.

Mr. Hohn drove me home. The streetlights had come on, though there was light left in the sky; on one side of the street it was nearly night, and on the other it was still late afternoon. Through lamp-lit porch windows I could see parts of couches and table lamps and shimmering television screens. Mr. Hohn gripped the wheel with a pair of yellow-brown leather gloves that had a pattern of little holes on the back of each finger. “I was wondering,” I heard myself say, as I stared at the bent fingers, “about Emily’s hand.”

“The operation was successful,” he said, with his eyes on the road, “which is one good thing, let me tell you”—and at the word “operation” I imagined Emily’s hand streaming with blood.

“Mr. Hohn,” I said as we entered my neighborhood. “What exactly is wrong with Emily’s hand?”

“Now that ,” he said, keeping his head motionless but swinging toward me his melancholy gaze, “is a good question.” He swung his gaze back. “A very good question.”

We returned to our old ways, Emily and I. It was as if nothing had changed. But I was aware at every moment of the white intruder, drawing attention to itself, demanding awareness. At the wrist it was fastened by two small white buttons. They looked like ordinary buttons, with a glimmer of iridescence when they caught the sun. On their left was a small overlap of cloth, which formed a shadowy opening that revealed nothing. The glove seemed tightly bound, as if it were meant not to slip out of place, so that I imagined Emily had trouble bending her wrist, or even moving her fingers. I wondered whether she took the glove off at night — whether she took it off at all.

In class I watched her sit down at her desk. I noticed that she rested her gloved hand very carefully on the writing surface, where she left it motionless for as long as possible. Once, after a pencil rolled off the edge and struck the floor, she bent over to retrieve it, leaving her left hand in place. Her body, for a moment, was twisted unnaturally.

It struck me that the glove was harming Emily’s grace of movement, penetrating her with a slight clumsiness. When she walked with her books cradled in her arms, she was careful not to let her gloved hand touch them — she supported the weight a little awkwardly with her left forearm. Now and then I saw a red mark on the underside of her forearm, from the edge of her notebook. At home, when Mrs. Hohn brought in sugar cookies and lemonade, Emily would lift the glass with her right hand, take a sip, set down the glass, and pick up a cookie. Her gloved hand, with the slightly curved fingers, lay rigidly in her lap.

I quickly came to know every detail of that glove. It fit snugly over the thumb but less tightly over the fingers. The left edge, where the white glove often rested, was faintly darkened. A triangle of small creases was visible in the place where the thumb joined the forefinger. A spot of blue-black ink showed on a knuckle.

Sometimes, staring at the glove in class, I could feel, on my own hand, the white cotton binding me. Then I would wriggle my fingers rapidly, or massage the back of my left hand, over and over, with the palm of my right.

But there was something else about the glove that troubled me, beyond the sharp fact of its presence. Ever since I’d become friends with Emily, I had felt an easy flow between us, an openness, a transparency. This restful merging, this serene interwovenness, was something I had never known before, something that reminded me of her porch in sunlight, or the night of the snow shining under the streetlights. The glove was harming that flow. It was, by its very nature, an act of concealment. Emily herself, by eluding the question of her hand, by refusing to reveal whatever it was she was hiding under the white cloth, was forcing me to think about her in a secretive way. It occurred to me that the glove was changing her — turning her into a body, with privacies and evasions.

But if the glove was creating a new Emily, a hidden Emily, it was also doing something to me. The peace I’d always felt in her presence was being replaced by wariness, by an almost physiological alertness, as if my body were warning me to watch her closely. At the same time, I was no longer able to look at her whenever I wished. Before the glove, I could turn my head frankly in her direction. Now, I felt compelled to throw furtive glances at her, like a stranger yielding to a forbidden desire.

One afternoon as we were making our way along an aisle of the auditorium, where someone was scheduled to bore me to death with a speech about career choices, I noticed Emily’s white glove knock lightly against the back of a seat. Her body stiffened; for an instant she closed her eyes. Then she continued forward, holding her left hand in front of her as, with her right hand, she smoothed back her hair, in little quick movements, again and again.

Now and then an image would surge up in me, of her hand under the glove — the skin a burning red, or purple and yellow, as if recently crushed by a rock. Maybe there was some sort of scar, a harsh red line slashing across the back of the hand like a trail of fire. Maybe it was worse — a raw shiny pink wound sunk into the flesh. I understood that I was fastening my attention on Emily Hohn in a way I had never done before; that what drew me was no longer her stillness, or her gentleness, but the thing hidden by her glove; and I imagined myself tearing off that white disguise and beholding, in terror and exhilaration, her mangled hand.