The World in Your Hands

When I was little my father built me a swing set; my mother built me a dollhouse.  When I grew up, I built my happiness with my own two hands.

My parents have the hands of small town, hardworking, Midwesterners.  Where their skin is not calloused, it is still rough and dry.  My mother’s hands are not pretty.  They’re big and sturdy, almost industrious.  When I was very young she was a sculptor, using her big hands to mold clay into the shape of other people’s faces and the clay would wedge itself up under her fingernails and even in the rough life lines of her palms.  My father’s hands were the strong and steady kind that held hammers and saws, the kind that turned wood into walls and plans into foundations.

I have a writer’s hands.  The thumb, index and middle finger of my right hand are slightly calloused from how I hold my pen and on Sunday evenings my hands are almost always speckled with blue ink.  I have been told I have lovely hands.  My grandmother used to compliment my long, slender fingers.  Strangers admire the manicure that I do myself at home every week.  My hands are not strong.  The joints are sometimes swollen and even when they aren’t, it’s difficult for me to hold anything very tightly.  On certain days it hurts to bend my right ring finger, which is stiff and crooked because my little brother jumped on it and broke it when I was nine.  But the stiffly curved bone is perfect for holding in place my great grandmother’s engagement ring that my mother gave me before I moved to New York.

At the bar on Friday night, I was surprised when you and I slipped into and then out of a kiss and you placed your hand over mine and curled your fingers between my fingers as we both turned to smile at our friends.  I reciprocated your gesture by lightly squeezing your hand and you squeezed mine back like were telling a secret that we could never say with words.

You have beautiful hands.  They’re big enough to almost hide mine beneath them.  And they seem strong enough for almost anything.  But I don’t think they’ve ever held a hammer.  Your hands are the softest I’ve ever felt.  I asked you once if you lotion them.  You don’t.  You’re just lucky. 

I remember looking at your hands instead of your face as a taxi sped us up Park Avenue one night in early June.  We were having one of our silliest fights that at the time had broken my heart, but now I think was product of a love that was so big it was unprecedented and confusing for both of us.  I was trying to explain to you that I would rather do things the hard way than sacrifice my independence.  I said I didn’t have a lot in life, but I had my ability to be self-sufficient and I was proud of that.  You shouted that you hated how independent I was and that you hated that I needed to be.  And I was crying because I thought you didn’t understand me – couldn’t understand me.  I am a lot more than a woman from a middle class, Midwestern, small town and my life in New York is probably practically incomprehensible to my parents but I realize now that it matters what I come from.  I am proud of building a life for myself with nothing but my own hands and stubborn ambition.  I think you can understand that.

When I was very little I liked the Sunday school song about a god who holds the whole world in his hands.  I always pictured hands like my parents’ – big and sturdy, steady and industrious – cupped around the green and blue picture of Earth that hung on my kindergarten classroom wall.  Now I picture your hands holding the Manhattan skyline.  My world has changed.