Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

Once, in high school, a boy put her left hand on his erect dick while they were at the movies. My sister told me this one, too — she said he told our mom he just wanted to see if she could feel things. In college a boy told her that her hands looked like bound feet. Another called them his little meat puppets. A third gave her some expensive cashmere gloves, then asked her to keep them on during dinner with his parents. Once my mom slapped a man across the face with her right hand.

“Did it hurt?” a friend asked her, concerned.

“Him?” she said. “It sure looked like it.”

My mom got a wedding ring specially sized for her little finger, since she didn’t have a ring finger on her left hand. When my sister started first grade, my mom bought her five different kinds of nail polish and let her pick a new one anytime we went to the drugstore. When we were in Little League, she couldn’t play catch with us, but she could play Ping-Pong. Her hands ached sometimes, and when they did we fought to be the one to put her special heating gloves in the microwave for her. Once her mind started to go, she forgot about her hands and started doing things that she knew were dangerous for her, like hammering nails. We came home to find ugly pictures of flowers hanging all over the living room wall and her calmly watching The Wonder Years , and after that we weren’t sure if it had ever been dangerous in the first place.

I didn’t tell Sophie any of this. The more I thought about my mom, the more I realized what a stranger Sophie was and what a weird idea it had been for us to stay in the house together.

“She was born with a condition that made her hands deformed,” I said. “So she had to have a lot of surgery as a kid.”

Sophie nodded. “Did it work?”

It was a funny question, like there was a switch somewhere, and if the doctor flipped it just right, Mom’s hands would just turn back to normal. But even though she talked about how hard the hospital was and how hard it was to get used to life when she finally got out, she was always really upbeat about the hands themselves. She was always up for answering questions about them, especially if a kid asked. She didn’t sugarcoat — I once heard her tell a boy in my sister’s class that her hands would get older faster than other people’s and that for her fiftieth birthday she was going to ask for Velcro shoes. But mostly what she ended up telling people was that even though they looked different, her hands were a lot like theirs.

“It worked,” I said. “All things considered, it worked pretty well.”

Sophie nodded again. “Is she dead?”

It shouldn’t have been such a slap in the face. After years of being the only one, I’d finally gotten to the age where some other people I knew had dead parents. And it wasn’t like I’d been talking about my mom’s book club, or her golf handicap, or her retirement plans, things I sometimes did make up when talking to strangers. Still, I felt like I’d been giving Sophie the happy version of my mom, and I didn’t like getting jerked back to reality.

“How did you know that?” I asked.

“You talk about her the way people talk about their dead relatives,” she said, “not their living ones.”

It bothered me that she could see through me that quickly. And that phrase “dead relatives,” like my mom was some cousin in a black-and-white photo with her name written on the back because otherwise everybody would forget her. The urge to fight came back in me. Instead I said, “Well yeah, you’re right. She’s dead.”

I didn’t look at Sophie after I said it. I figured anything I saw on her face would make me mad. I thought of how late I would get back to the city if I left right now. I wondered what I would do when I got there all snarled up inside. I thought about calling Tessa, which I sometimes still did, even though she was married now with a daughter and a baby son. Then Sophie said, “Will you do something for me?”

I couldn’t believe she would ask me for a favor. I looked up at her; her face was unapologetic and completely serious.

“Will you teach me how to swim?” she asked.

I stared. For a second I wasn’t mad anymore; I was just mystified.

“You can’t swim?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “I never learned.”

I remembered how her skin had felt the night before. I decided I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I wanted whatever was between us to play itself out in a way I could understand.

“I’ll teach you,” I said.

She didn’t have a bathing suit — she wore a pair of jean shorts and a black T-shirt. She walked ahead of me into the water until the hem of her T-shirt was wet, and then she turned around, hands on her hips.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m ready.”

I realized then that not only had I never taught anyone how to swim before, I didn’t actually remember learning to swim myself. All I remembered was doing it — the water like liquid pine in my mouth, the way the cold tightened the flesh against my bones. I remembered being afraid of it sometimes — at night I used to think about something big and cold and ancient with no eyes and no name, slowly rising up from the bottom. But not being able to do it was as impossible to imagine as not breathing.

“Watch me first,” I said, buying time.

She crossed her arms. I walked to the edge of the dock and jumped in. I remembered how I used to feel as a kid in the water, like my body was smoothed out, like I was even a little bit graceful. I took a few strokes as easily as walking. When I came up, I had no better idea of what to tell her, but she was still watching.

“So that’s what it looks like,” I said. “Want to try now?”

She put her hands in her wet pockets. “I know what it looks like,” she said. “That’s not really the problem.”

“So what is the problem?”

“The problem is my feet. I don’t like to move my feet.”

I imagined her feet planted in the lake mud. I imagined them red and raw, like her hands. “Didn’t you ever float or just paddle around, when you were a kid?”

“No,” she said. “I was too afraid of the water.”

“What were you afraid of?” I asked.

She looked past me at the other side of the lake. For a second I worried she could see the old house, even though it was over in the cove, totally hidden from view.

“Does something ever just feel bad to you?” she asked. “Like it makes your hair stand on end?”

I thought of our dog growing up, how late one night he’d stood by the front door, every muscle in his body tense, making a sound in his throat we’d never heard before, and how even though my parents said everything was fine and called him a crazy dog, I could tell they were a little scared of whatever it was he knew that we didn’t. I wondered if Sophie could see or hear or smell things nobody else could. For a second I was afraid of the water too.

Then I had an idea. “Why don’t you try jumping?”

“What, like jumping in?”

“No, jumping up. Straight in the air.”

She smiled then, the first I’d seen her smile all day. “Roguish,” my mom would’ve called that smile. Then she launched herself out of the lake and came down right next to me, sending a sheet of cold water smack across my face.

“So you can jump,” I said.

“Of course I can jump ,” she said. “What I need to do is swim .”

“Well I can see why everyone was so excited to teach you,” I said. But I wasn’t mad. The splash had soaked her too. Her T-shirt stuck to her chest and I could see her little ski-slope breasts. I’d always liked curvy girls, girls who made me feel like I was normal-sized and not a weird, lumpy giant. But something about Sophie felt big even though she was small. I could see her belly button press against her shirt as she breathed.