Such Small Hands Read online

  “Everything stopped moving, and we all turned to stone and I felt how my hands and my eyes and my legs were all stone, and everything around me was stone, even the car was stone, and there was a wizard who turned us all to stone.”

  “A wizard?”

  “Yes.”

  But the girls’ breathing made it impossible to lose herself in that illusion. Marina didn’t pull the stick out until the fourth caterpillar stopped moving completely, and when she did they saw that she’d split it in two, that the fourth caterpillar was now two caterpillars. The circle was closing in. The procession, too. A notion was traveling from one to the next, a message being passed through their skin, through the almost transparent fibers on their necks. Maybe the caterpillars were deliberating before the cadaver, mourning the fourth caterpillar, trying to convince the dead one that they weren’t callously abandoning it.

  “And what did the wizard look like?”

  “Oh, I didn’t see him.”

  “Well, then how do you know he was a wizard?”

  Marina now felt she was surrounded by mouths, felt that each girl was a mouth and each mouth filled with fangs. And each fang was hard. The other caterpillars crowded in so close to the fourth caterpillar that they almost covered it completely. From where the girls stood, from their shocked expressions, it looked as if the procession had decided to devour the fourth caterpillar, as if the living were suddenly possessed by a violent covetousness of the dead one’s peace. What was it? Whatever it was, for a second something fierce had flashed in each of the living caterpillars’ eyes. Marina felt the unmistakable presence of the girls’ bodies above her. The circle had closed ranks.

  She tried to escape. Petrified, she was convinced they were trying to block her way, forcing her to lean in over the circle with them. The girls’ words reached her, muffled. Humiliated, she assumed they were taking revenge on her for spying on them at night. She panicked, pushing them frantically, feeling the wall of flesh close in and grow solid.

  “I know he was a wizard because it’s always a wizard, because only wizards can turn things to stone.”

  “But you didn’t see him.”

  “Well, I saw him a little.”

  “And what did he look like?”

  “He was big and black, like the statue.”

  The girls’ solid mass was big and black, like the statue. Now that she was closed in, trapped in the caterpillars’ circle, now that they wouldn’t let her go, she felt the closeness of their faces for the first time, much closer than at night when she spied on them. The olive tone of their skin. Seen in the light of day, they had tiny black spots by their eyes and mouths, like the black spots on the caterpillars’ faces. Marina stopped shoving and drew back as much as she could. She closed her eyes. The girls talked about the caterpillars, picked the stick up off the ground, poked it at each other, examined the blood of the fourth caterpillar as if trying to solve a mystery. Her only thought was this: “Don’t let them touch me.”

  Then, slowly, they filtered away.

  They dropped the stick by the tree and almost immediately she heard their voices on the other side of the playground, jumping rope once more, shouting. When Marina opened her eyes, the caterpillar procession, too, began to fall back. Slowly they surrounded the shattered beauty of the fourth caterpillar and then began their majestic ascent towards the fig tree once more. If she were their size, she’d see the fig tree the way they did: a rutted, mammoth precipice.

  But they hadn’t all left. One of the girls had stayed behind, was still there beside her. To Marina she looked like the survivor of a catastrophe; she couldn’t tell if her face registered joy or sorrow.

  “Are you the one who killed the caterpillar?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Marina said.

  From up close she looked the same as the other girls. Everything about her was anonymous. The girl leaned over and picked the stick up off the ground, examined it carefully, held it out to Marina.

  “Did you kill it with this stick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I just thought of a number. I said, ‘Four.’ And then I counted to four and I killed the fourth one.”

  Now that the two of them were together, it was as though the caterpillar were dying all over again, just for them. It was too devout to be a common carcass, still enshrouded by the crawling community that had abandoned it; the black liquid that had bled out turned almost clear.

  “Should we bury it?” Marina asked.

  “Okay.”

  They sat down together and began to dig. Every once in a while their hands touched, and they flinched, as if suspecting how brutal love can be, as if aware of the viciousness of its physical expression and afraid to sense it in the touch of their hands as they dug a tiny grave for the caterpillar. Maybe the beginning was no more than that: something that brought them together. With their eyes open, they pitied the caterpillar more, wanted to make it a pretty grave, a grave to express everything the caterpillar had been: the fourth in the procession, the favorite of another caterpillar who was now mourning.

  “My father died in the accident and then my mother died in the hospital,” Marina blurted out. She wanted to feel closer to the girl, and to the caterpillar. The girl turned and looked towards the orphanage door.

  All that was black and full of grace: the statue.

  The girl stiffened. Marina had hurled the words like stones off a cliff. Now she was waiting to hear them drop, to judge their depth. But the stones didn’t hit bottom, they just kept falling, into a void.

  The stones were suspended.

  And slowly, as if she’d fallen asleep there, it got late. And they had to go back to class.

  THE BUILDING HAD GONE DARK, but we hadn’t. Not yet. They put movies on for us at night and we were still happy then; we lived them so intensely that sometimes we cried and got scared and the adult had to come and tell us that it wasn’t real, that it was just a movie, and so our feelings couldn’t be real either.

  Slowly, for no apparent reason, we started to wonder:

  “What about Marina?”

  Marina never got worked up. We watched her out of the corner of our eye. “What about Marina?”

  We shivered and the cold seemed to come from her; and when we opened our eyes up we realized that we’d actually been thinking, and that it was Marina who was our thought. And just as the movie was over, Marina was over.

  After the movies we always talked; we told each other which parts we’d liked and which parts we hadn’t, and talking was an act of love, something that united us, because it kept the movie alive. Recollecting was almost like watching it again, there, vibrant, the pleasure almost throbbing.

  “What did you think, Marina, did you like it?”

  “Well, I already saw it in the theater, so I already knew who the bad guy was and I didn’t like it as much, because you never like a movie as much the second time.”

  And we didn’t know what to do with that. It was as if Marina had already seen all movies, already gone on all field trips, already played all games; there was something terrible in her past. She’d already lived so many things. She buried her head in the pillow and saw everything, she rested her head and it was heavy as a rock, filled with memories, she pressed down on her pencil (How many pencils had she had? Thousands? Millions?) and even the pencil was a little envious, wishing she would use it to write all those things that Marina had already lived.

  “So tonight when I saw it I knew right from the very beginning who the bad guy was; I said, ‘That’s the bad guy,’ and it wasn’t the same as the first time.”

  We’d been happy until Marina showed up with her past. We held it in then. But later, when we went out to play, we didn’t know what to do with that thought; we were plagued by a feeling of rage and surprise, and we wanted to gnaw away at her, little by little.

  “Hey, Marina, come here,” we said.

  And when she did, we pulled her hair. Nausea made us salivate and
the saliva was like blood: how easy it was to humiliate. But she had humiliated us, too. She was so serene when she approached; she was happy. So without a word we pulled her hair. Maybe Marina had already had her hair pulled, too, but not the way we did it.

  “And then, one summer, we went to the beach, and I had a ton of friends there, and one day we went out on a boat.”

  Feeling her hair yanked again, her face screwed up, a strangled echo flashed across her face. Like prey with its mouth open. And then she kept walking, moving in the shadows like a vampire; now she was afraid to remember and hunched down into herself a little and made a little-girl face, and at recess she started wandering off on her own. She’d lie on the ground and braid grass.

  We loved her furtively then. Her eyes smiled sadly, the house relaxed, and we had to be very still and wait, to watch her again. It was a little like falling in love with her, with her body, with her memories. She couldn’t understand our love. She could only consent, that was all; if we went to her, she could nod her head and accept her happy fear because we were finally there, and there were so many of us, and we held our hand out to her. The ball was round and bumpy. A dark brown, flat Adidas basketball that hardly bounced, its letters worn. Mystery girl, mystery girl bouncing the ball very hard and moving toward the basket, and us shouting:

  “Here!”

  She turned and passed the ball forcefully, body tense, thin legs, sweat on her temples. It was all so easy when we were playing basketball. We’d go in tired, enter a place full of emotions, a deep space; the ball bounced against the rim three times and then, very slowly, did not go in, and we had to shout, “Oh!” as loud as possible, feeling it swell up from our stomach, because Marina was there, and she’d shot and almost made a basket. It was ten-twelve. Marina became a little more coarse, a little less serious and pretty, and her laughter when the ball didn’t go in was both gleeful and frightened. Was it her, or us? Were we forgiving her? Was that what love was? That desire to watch her play forever, play until the end of time, an eternal tie, or maybe almost always a tie, to make it more exciting. But then the game would end and we’d have to go back to class. In the time between laughing and eating, we grew serious again; we traced Mickey Mouse drawings against the window because it was easier that way, and Marina’s always came out the best, it was almost like the real Mickey Mouse, like hers was actually full of time, of memories, of things she’d seen and touched. A new Mickey Mouse that bore no resemblance to ours.

  “Once I went to Disneyland Paris.”

  Suppressed secret of Disneyland Paris. Suppressed secret a thousand times repeated, taken for granted in the hands and eyes of Marina, going to Disneyland Paris. Again, the rumble of dull thunder off in the distance, the thunder of her life without us. We wanted her to tell us about it but didn’t want to ask.

  “I got my picture taken with the real Mickey Mouse, and there was a huge castle, and then I got a Mickey Mouse notebook, and some Mickey Mouse pencils, and an eraser that smelled like strawberries when you squeezed it.”

  She couldn’t see that the memory was too delicate for us; we didn’t know how to grasp it. Those castles, that colored glass, the balconies Mickey and Minnie stood on, none of that could ever be ours. We ambled awkwardly alongside Marina’s memory, always parallel, always tired, always hungry, but the urgency of our desire wasn’t enough to bring it to life and then we tired of trying, and desire turned to rage against that girl who seemed too old.

  “What do we care about Mickey Mouse and Disneyland and your stupid vacation?”

  We stuck our tongue out at her.

  “And there was a roller coaster, and I went on it three times.”

  If the adult wasn’t watching, we hit her. Never very hard, usually just softly. She’d crouch down to pick something up and we’d stab her butt with a sharp pencil. She’d flinch and we’d laugh. Like a glass, her face filled up with humiliation. So full of thoughts we couldn’t guess, so proud. Warm and dark, her eyes filled with tears she never cried, she’d yank at her dress and pull it hard, as if she were trying to stay here with us and not go back, not return to Disneyland Paris, to her vacation, to the roller coaster, as if keeping her memories and deciding not to share them ever again, domesticating her anger. Then she’d go back to her doll, that hateful doll—and she loved it—she’d stay away from us at recess with her doll in her hand and she’d love the doll. She’d go home, to her memories. Did she tell the doll what she remembered? Maybe. She talked to her, and we felt her hanging around our neck, that tiny little thing that was Marina’s doll, that thing she loved instead of loving us.

  “Don’t you want to play basketball?”

  “No.”

  “Go to hell.”

  But that’s not what we meant. What we meant was: tell us about your trip to Disneyland Paris again, and about how you got your picture taken with Mickey Mouse; tell us about the roller coaster and what it feels like when you go down the hill, and how you got a notebook and an eraser that smelled like strawberry, tell us if it seems strange or if it’s just normal, and if you want to eat the strawberry-smelling eraser, if you crave it, tell us about holding the real Mickey Mouse’s hand when you got your picture taken with him and how you think it’s the real Mickey Mouse, who any minute now is going to go off with Minnie because the two of them live in that castle, and it’s real because it’s right there and it has doors and windows you can touch.

  “No.”

  We suffered her anger like a curse; it was cast on us suddenly. The curse of an evil, resentful witch. Maybe the evil witch loved us, too, and just didn’t know what to do with her love, and wandered off crying; maybe beneath her hatred, too, was a little orchestra singing its love and suffocating her; and maybe she saw the darkness of her love as if from the window of a train. Poor evil witch, poor lovesick evil witch.

  “And the evil witch’s castle was at Disneyland Paris, too.”

  Tell us about it again, and tell us about how you had parents, and a room of your own, and a wall with a poster of Alice in Wonderland. Without understanding, she just stared at us and asked:

  “Why?”

  Then she stood back and dark red shadows covered her shoulder. Saving herself for the doll, she’d wander off again, to the black statue. “It’s my secret, all mine.” When we leaned over her we wanted to kiss her hair; it didn’t smell like ours smelled, and that was something you couldn’t fake. Tell us about how you were driving along with them when they died. Her eyes were open. It was a hard, shiny memory, like the crickets we heard outside when we went to bed. Tell us.

  “No.”

  “Go to hell.”

  But of that violence was born a dark, gurgling pleasure, the supple feeling of having won, or being on the verge of winning.

  One Wednesday night we stole Marina’s doll without her realizing, and she woke up in a panic. Now she was unprotected, like us. Now she tried to love, and her hunger had no object. For a minute we thought she was going to tell on us, but she didn’t. She could hardly even move.

  “Give her back, give me my doll back,” she said.

  So we gave her a leg. We broke it off.

  “Here.”

  And we wanted to say: this is so you’ll look at us. It was easy to love her again then. Love was ancient, the way things had always been, even. She threw the doll’s leg down by the tree and forgot about it. But we wanted to know what it felt like; what was left, between the doll’s leg and the whole doll, and what was missing now. Something inside Marina had gone slack, as if she’d lost her strength. Now she’d come to us, we thought.

  And so the broken head, and the rest of it—the body, the arms, the remaining leg—we took it all and buried it in the playground, with the dead caterpillar.

  THIS IS THE MOMENT when Marina realizes something: I’m different. And as always, the realization itself outshines the symbolic event that led to it, the realization emerges from the sludge of reality preformed, round and irrefutable, something that had always been t
here: I’m different.

  Marina insists on fingering the realization constantly, the way a newborn touches its body to prove that it’s there. What if the realization suddenly grew so big that Marina was overwhelmed by it? Then she’d have to impose it on the girls. There would be no more day. There would be no more night. She would have to become what providence, through that realization, had imposed on her. It was like carrying everything she knew with her at all times, like carrying something haughty and cruel, like a flag. I’m different.

  Faith in that belief, even just for a moment, is all it takes for everything to change.

  Delivered from fear by the realization, now all she wants is to prove it, so when they go back to class, back to their language lesson, she is the only one who seems happy; she raises her hand every time the teacher asks a question, even if she doesn’t know the answer. She wants to make clear that she’s come to a realization, but doesn’t know how to do it. She’d have liked not to have to show it, have liked to be able to will the girls to sense her realization, and for it to make them all turn and gaze at her in amazement, as if she were a dazzling vision.

  So when they go to the cafeteria and lunch is served, she knows exactly what she has to do. It’s as though she can feel the scar on her shoulder once more, as though the scar is sovereign and burning her, like a sign engraved into her. Exactly like that.

  They’re having soup and cheese omelets for lunch.

  The girls stare longingly at the food. They’re sad and food momentarily frees them from contemplation, that’s why they pounce on it. One girl has a noodle stuck to her face, by her mouth; a tiny white noodle, like a headless little worm, sleeping there. Marina stares at that noodle as if it were a slow plague, stares at the mouth opening and closing as the girl spoons in more soup. She has just realized that the mouth is a hole, that things can be introduced through it. If she could explain what she saw, she would say it all starts with that girl’s mouth-hole with the noodle stuck to it, that everything begins right there; on that dark mouth that won’t stop opening and closing.