Picture of hands, shimmering at the edges
If I cross my eyes I can see the tip of my nose. If I look down and stick out my lips, tongue I can see their tips as well. The glimpses are brief, hazy, vague, and a lot of work. Crossing my eyes hurts a little, and all of this is silly and feeling silly is for me the kind of sensation that makes it hard to hold any other thought. And so the seeing takes up so much work that I can’t think. I don’t know if this is just me or not. You tell me - try to think about the last argument you had with a loved one and what you wished you said, and do this while crossing your eyes and then looking down to see the tip of your outstretched tongue. How far did you get, mentally?
I see my hands effortlessly. They’re in my field of vision at work (on a mouse, on a keyboard, moving in the air while I talk), while I chop onions to saute as part of dinner for my family, while I hold a pencil and try to draw a cat according to the demands of my meticulous older daughter, and in the hobbies I’ve had - reading, rock climbing, playing guitar, occasionally lifting weights. It takes no work at all to see my hands. I often don’t even notice they’re there.
I think because my hands are so little work to perceive, they echo or rhyme in my memory. In her essay “Why I Write” Joan Didion writes about images she can see in her mind that shimmer at the edge. These images are where she writes from, or sometimes through. If I actually notice my hands I leap immediately to dozens of associations, dozens of shimmering pictures that bleed into each other - no they flip like cards in a deck.
While bouldering, Andrew and I compare blisters, he comments on our soft white collar hands, not like the calluses he used to have when he was young. My dad, it must be a holiday because my brother Rick is there, dad comments on my soft office hands. He came home regularly from work my whole childhood with electrical tape wrapped around split open thumbs, torn knuckles, grease and dirt worked into the pores. I remember the swelling in my hand when I woke up the next morning after breaking the knuckle at wrestling practice - “you’re fine, sleep it off.” I felt proud that he was stunned to find out I’d slept through a broken bone. My other break, same hand, different knuckle, lumber fell on me at the construction supply plant I worked at before college. I drove myself to the doctor on company’s orders - “I’m fine, I’ll walk it off” - and every time I bumped the steering wheel it was a jolt of electricity - another memory, touching the electric fence around the horse pasture before my grandfather died - that hurt up through my elbow.
Left hand on the steering wheel I reach into the backseat with my right hand, rest the back on my older daughter’s knee. She’s strapped into her carseat. She holds my hand. We sit at the stop sign that way together, not talking. The other night my wife was out, I put the older kid to bed, danced the baby to sleep, laid backward on the big bed with the baby on my chest and she started to wake up so as I lay there I rocked her by rotating my torso, holding her head with my left hand. With my right I reached over to my daughter’s bed nearby, stretched out my arm and lay my hand palm up, she put her hand palm down in mine.
Images that shimmer, and gaps too, holes that shimmer, blank-faced cards dealt from the deck. If I have held my father’s hand, I don’t remember it, either visually or tactilely. I must have as a kid, right? We crossed streets. Parents hold their kids’ hands crossing streets, don’t they? And just, like, to be nice? I do. Did mine? I know I’ve touched his hand because I recall the calluses hard and pointed like gravel.
Flip, new card. His hand splits my cheek just below the eye, sharp like a knife it felt. I’d fallen on the stairs, broken a toenail, bled all over, shouted “fuck!” That prompted the punch. I told my fellow freshmen at the school dance that night that I’d fallen, you know how clumsy I am. Later after we get drunk in the woods behind Joel’s house I fess up the truth. I remember feeling proud I didn’t cry.
“Dad beat the shit out of me the whole time we were growing up.” Rick’s at the table on dad’s back porch. Dad’s inside somewhere. I think I held Rick’s hand when we were kids, I’m about a decade older than he is, but I don’t remember for sure. As this scene plays in my memory I wish I’d reached across the table and held his hand. We’re not the kind of men, I guess, who hold hands together. I’m not around him and dad, anyway. Is he around other men? I’d like that.
Rick moved out when he was a teenager and dad threw him up against a wall and grabbed him by the neck. Dad felt hurt by the sudden departure. The last time I visited he thought I was staying overnight, I was there for two hours. His girlfriend said she had to run to the store. He made a joke without smiling, “you’re leaving me too?”
Rick’s got hard hands like dad does. I’ve never felt Rick’s palm but I’m sure it’s true, from the jobs he’s had and because they joke about it. “He’s just like your father!” my mother shouts into the phone. He’s 14. Dad doesn’t live there anymore. I come back to mom’s house. My mom insists that Rick will grow up to be just like dad, that he already is, that she doesn’t feel safe around him now that he’s so tall. She stands over Rick’s bed one morning shouting that he has to get up. He pulls the blanket over his head. She comes and gets me from the other room, repeats again the refrain about Rick being dad, and he needs to get out of bed, make him get out of bed. I lift and throw him out of the bed, he shouts “what the hell is wrong with you?” I shout back and am glad for the gap in my mental record of the audio, and the gap makes me worry this is not the only such incident.
Years later my youngest brother Tommy tells me he guesses this moment is a turning point, the reason why and time after which Rick and I are no longer close. Rick and I are at the back table, adults, the time I wish I’d held his hand. I tell him what Tommy said. Rick won’t look at me. I tell him that I am so sorry, my hands are at my forehead now like I am blocking a bright light with my hands as visor, I am trying not to cry, we are not the kind of men who cry together. “I want to take responsibility for my actions and I am so sorry for what I did, but I also think mom and dad set us up for this because of how they were and what they said, mom told me you were treating her just like dad did and asked me to protect her, and I was too young to understand that you were too young for that to really be true.” Rick’s hands are in sun visor position now too but I can still see the line of tears down his face as he says “she always told me I’d grow up to be just like dad.” “She always told me the same thing too.” “I believed her.” “I did too. I don’t anymore. And I’m sorry I believed her about you.”
I remember now as I type this, or at least I think I do, I desperately want this to be a memory and not a fantasy, Rick reaching across the table and squeezing my hand before we stand and hug. I continue, “we can’t get those years back when we weren’t on good terms. Some of that’s my fault and some of that’s more on the list of what dad and mom took from us. We have left the years left though.” “I know.” We wipe our eyes, look at our feet, our hands, not at each other. We will briefly exchange texts about this conversation, him urging me “its ok rlly” and ending the exchange “wub u big guy,” but never talk about it again, at least not so far.
When we make eye contact again Rick smiles. “Let’s go grab some eats!” That night we go to a hot wings joint, get barbeque sauce and ketchup all over our fingers while watching Kimbo Slice almost tear off James Thompson’s ear in what we all agree is a match that Thompson would have won if they hadn’t stopped the fight. After the decision, Slice and another man - referee? coach? - stand with fists raised, holding hands.