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The
following is a story originally published in Juked
#5.

The
Hand
Marianne Villanueva
She had been married quite a long time, almost 18 years,
to a man who, in the last year or two, had begun to spend
most of his time watching TV. When they were first married,
when they were both in graduate school, they had started
out with a small black-and-white. Eventually, after perhaps
the 6th year of their marriage, her husband had agreed
to buy a small colored TV. Finally, just two years ago,
they had gotten another TV so that she could watch her
favorite shows without having to wait for her husband
to finish watching a football game.
In the last couple of years, time seemed
to be moving very fast, seemed almost to be accelerating,
and the more she tried to hold on to it, the less of it
there was to hold. This was a frightening feeling, a feeling
she tried over and over to analyze.
On this particular Monday evening, a light
rain was falling. She could hear the gentle sound of the
drops against the trees outside her window.
This morning the rain made her happy,
since it reminded her of her childhood in the Philippines,
when the yellowish glow from the low-watt bulbs made the
rooms look unearthly, and everything in them blurred,
as though she were looking at her surroundings from underwater.
She remembered sitting at the round table in the kitchen,
which was her favorite room in the house, where she sat
surrounded by the bustling maids, the sound of people
entering and leaving.
All day the question had been inside her,
waiting.
Her husband was sitting on the couch.
She could just make out part of his nose in profile. He’d
come home only an hour earlier., his hair slick with the
rain. He had his face turned toward the TV, which this
evening was showing an episode of 24.
When was it that she had noticed the hand?
The hand that was just a hand, nothing else, reaching
out to tap him on his shoulder.
Now she recalled seeing it for the first
time the Friday before. She’d given herself a shake,
rubbed her eyes, looked again. Yes, there was most unmistakably
a hand, reaching out just above her husband’s right
shoulder. The index finger was extended, pointing downwards.
She anticipated the moment of physical contact and held
her breath. But the hand—a woman’s hand, she
realized suddenly—remained suspended, frozen, as
it were, just above and behind her husband.
She tried to circle around it, to observe
it more closely. When she got to within a foot, she stopped,
fearing she would alarm her husband, who was absorbed,
as usual, in some TV show that involved many people running
around and shouting.
The hand had a faint tracery of blue veins
spreading, fan-like, from a narrow wrist. It was preternaturally
white, a white like the bellies of the dead fish piled
up in front of the stalls at the wet market back home
in Manila. The pearl-colored nails were oval in shape.
She mused about who the hand’s owner might be: perhaps
a young woman, someone 10 or even 15 years younger than
herself. What was it being communicated to her husband?
Why was she here? Teresa didn’t know. The need to
know, however, was like an ache. So palpable, she could
almost feel it behind her teeth when she went to bed that
night.
Later
that afternoon, she had the accident. She was making a
slow right turn onto El Camino Real when she felt the
thud on her rear bumper. Everything in the car went flying:
CDs, books, her handbag. Her head hit something—hard.
She lay on her side for what seemed like long moments,
looking upwards at her feet. A trickle of something wet
ran down the right side of her face. From far, far away,
she heard indistinct voices. “An accident,”
she thought. “Something has happened.”
She
tried to say something. “Please help me.”
And, a little later, “Am I dying?” But there
was no one to speak to. Her gaze was entirely directed
now on a square of cracked window through which she saw—smelled—hot
asphalt and, occasionally, a glimpse of running feet in
heavy soled boots.
“Wait,”
she told herself. “Just wait.”
She
could taste blood in her mouth—salty, not unlike
tears. Her face was wet. A hand appeared at the window.
Lined and creased, with dirt along the grooves of the
palm. It gestured, implored.
“I
can’t,” she said. “Can’t.”
Can’t move, was what she wanted to say.
If
only she had been able to speak.
The
hand continued its pleas. It was moving faster now, up
and down, as if trying to communicate a matter of great
urgency.
“I—“
she said. “I---“ She could see her own hand,
palm upraised, lying on the street. But she felt nothing,
not the asphalt underneath it, which looked rough and
hot, or the thing someone -- a passer-by? -- had placed
into her limp fingers, which she recognized as a simple
wooden rosary.
Finally,
she managed to say, with great effort, “My husband.”
“What?”
A disembodied voice. A male voice.
She
couldn’t think anymore. She let her head drop and
closed her eyes.
She
felt movement now, around her. Someone was lifting. Or
she was being lifted. A great groaning. How awful that
sound was. Metal grinding against metal.
There
was a rush of air. She opened her eyes. She saw sky. Blue.
Grey. She was free! She tried to wiggle her fingers. She
felt nothing. A strange lassitude came over her after
the effort.
She
was not going to die here, right now, on this street.
She wanted to taste—ice cream. Something. Cold.
Sweet. Her tongue probed ineffectually at the roof of
her mouth. Impossibly dry. Again she tried to work her
fingers.
She
found herself looking down at her skirt, which was stained
with great swathes of purple dye. Purple dye? Hadn’t
this been a beige skirt when she’d put it on this
morning? What did this mean? What did this all mean?
Was
she dying?
Or
was she, in fact, living, and was that what the purple
dye all over her beige skirt was trying to tell her. That
life was living. Was going on. Even though the white hand
on her husband’s shoulder this morning had seemed
to say: Die. Die. I want you to die.
Fate,
luck, chance had put her in the way of the car that had
so conveniently hit her bumper. Hit her hard enough to
kill her. But, unlucky as always, she had survived. She
was now alive. This was the unintended consequence. This
was life.
And
so what to do now? She thought this even as they were
putting her on the gurney (which bumped terribly over
the uneven asphalt of the street, she nearly cried out
but stopped herself just in time, just as the scream was
about to escape from between her teeth), even as she felt
the straps come down on either of her arms, saw a swaying
bottle of fluid on a flexible pole affixed next to her
arm.
She
wondered what it all meant: the hand over her husband’s
shoulder, the gray clouds spitting rain, the accident
…
She
recalled her husband’s last words to her, spoken
only this morning, before he’d left for work: Tell
your son we’re not going to get him a new car. Their
only child was at college in Los Angeles. The weekend
before, while driving up for her birthday, he’d
had an accident. His car, an old Civic with nearly 200,000
miles, was irreparable. Or so the nearest mechanic, the
only one he could tow the wreck to, had said. The car
was so old, so decrepit, that she’d secretly been
glad at the news. Perhaps now her husband would consent
to help son get a better car. One with a more durable
body that would not crumple at the first impact with another
vehicle.
But
all her husband said at the news was no, no, let him take
the train up. We can’t afford to get him another
car.
Teresa
had not anticipated the hurt that arose in her at these
words. She herself would have given anything – her
right arm – to help her son have what she knew he
desired most of all.
But
she had been unable to summon the right words. She had
kept silent, and eventually her husband had left, toting
his heavy briefcase and walking toward his car the way
she imagined someone might who was only marking time.
And
now this scene was playing over and over in her head,
as the ambulance raced through traffic.
“What
did you say?” said a young man in white who happened
to be sitting next to her.
She
stared at him. Shook her head.
He
came closer.
No,
no! She wanted to yell. Keep away! The smell of him was
almost overwhelming—a smell of sweet aftershave
and sweat. It brought her back, almost all the way back.
To the present moment—what was she doing lying flat
on her back in this crazily swaying vehicle—where
she had no intention of staying, not if she could help
it.
“You
will—“ she said, after a while.
“What?”
he said again.
Was
he completely stupid?
She
shook her head.
“Can
you speak up a little, ma’am? What do you want?”
he said.
This
time she was angry. The anger was pulling her mouth down
at the corners, she could feel it. She could also imagine
her face, as she stared at this young man, the lines deepening
on either side of her jaw. What a sight she must be. What
a fright she must look. What—
Now
the man reached over and brushed something cool and wet
over her face. Ahhh, she thought. Do it again.
But
he’d sat back. Now he was simply staring at her.
“My
fingers?” she asked him.
He
looked at her hands.
“They’re
fine,” he said.
“Rub,”
she requested.
She
could see him put his hands below. But she felt nothing.
Tears came spilling out of her eyes. Her mouth opened
helplessly.
“You
will be fine, all right? Ma’am?” he said.
He was impatient with her. Because she was old. She knew
this in her heart. The old were like residents of another
country. Here they were treated like children, to whom
everything must be explained.
What
she wanted, what she had always wanted, if she’d
had the sense to know this, when she was alive, before,
was to go to that place she knew existed, if only in herself.
It was so long ago, but she’d been there. She’d
inhabited this magical realm with all of her being. During
a time before her son was born, before her marriage, even.
Sunlight moved there. And talahib. Wild grass. Outside
her bedroom window, while she watched, in the late afternoon—birds,
snakes, little boys.
The
house that was to have been built there had never been
built. So a pile of rubble had been left in the vacant
lot—a small hill of rubble. Then, the rains had
come, and the grass had come, and after that the birds,
and still after that the snakes, and last of all were
the little boys with their slingshots and their makeshift
pellet guns and then the bringing of small animals to
her, the daughter of the big house next door.
Once,
they brought a downy chick. “Where is the mother?”
she asked her yaya to ask them. The yaya asked. The boys
only covered their mouths with their hands and giggled.
And
when she was in high school and had to do science projects,
when she needed specimens to dissect in the lab, they
gladly brought her black snakes which she poured into
glass bottles, covering their inert forms with formaldehyde.
Once the little boys brought her the carcass of a puppy
and she almost screamed. White and still, its long silky
white hair matted with mud. That, too, she eventually
put in a bottle and stuck in the freezer, behind the milkfish
and the frozen cown innards.
The
boys—their soft, whispery voices, their large dark
eyes—had looked at her with awe. All because she
wore the uniform of the girls’ convent school and
spoke in perfect English. Because she had a yaya and lived
in a two-story house with a tiled roof.
The
yaya, a girl of 16, had come straight from the provinces.
She never questioned what Teresa asked her to do. She
was supremely patient, and kind, and Teresa had never
understood why in the end her mother had fired her. Teresa
had seen the yaya sobbing as she packed her meager things
into a plastic case, so perhaps the girl had committed
some great shame.
That
was a long time ago. In fact, until this very moment,
she’d forgotten all about the yaya and the boys
who brought her animals. She’d grown old, and had
left that sleepy island, that small city —was this
why she had grown old? Yes, perhaps —and it had
been a long time since anyone had looked at her that way.
Maybe not since she had taken up residence in California.
But now she suddenly remembered the yaya’s name:
It was Juliet. A smile broke out on her lips. Yes, her
name was Juliet.
Why
was she thinking of this now, while lying in the madly
swaying ambulance, while looking at the profile of the
young man who was looking, seemingly bored, out the window?
She was a carcass on a gurney. She had known this feeling
many times before, and now it had truly happened.
They
released her from the hospital after a week. They wheeled
her to her husband in a wheelchair. He looked down at
her with something like impatience. Slowly, gingerly,
she lifter herself into the car. The air was hot; dust
speckled her eyelids. She felt as if little needles were
stinging her eyes. She clutched at her husband’s
arm but after a while she released her fingers.
He
drove her home. She looked out the window, at the bare
trees of a cold day. It’s November already, she
thought. Neither of them spoke.
“Can
you make it up the stairs by yourself? I’m late
for work,” her husband said. She nodded, yes. He
helped her up to the front step but then turned to go.
Slowly, very slowly, she ascended the stairs. Now and
then she stopped to rest. She became short of breath.
Her weakness frightened her. She stopped halfway up.
In bed at night, sometimes, after her husband was asleep,
she would get up on one elbow and look at him. Her husband’s
eyes were closed, his breathing even, but now and then he
would shudder, and this shudder was so deep, so seemingly
from somewhere mysterious and hidden, that it made her afraid.
In
the morning he would give no indication that he was aware
that anything had passed between them in the night.
Since
the hand had appeared, it usually lay on her husband’s
chest when he was sleeping. She hated the sight of it,
like a white dead thing, in the moonlight from the window.
Now,
where was her husband now? He was far away, in a glass
building next to many other glass buildings, so many close
together that it was impossible for her to tell them apart.
In these buildings, engineers worked, and technicians,
and other people associated with industry, and they were
all very busy preparing reports.
Even
if it was a beautiful day, and there were many, in this
part of the country, no one, she was sure, would be able
to leave for more than an hour, to have lunch. She thought
that it was a great waste, a great pity. She would hate
to die after having lived for years in such a life.
And
now the thought came to her that her husband would not
even know who to call, on her behalf, if some further
mishap befell her. Unless she told him. There was her
son, of course, and her mother in the Philippines, but
who else? And what if she were hurt in such a way that
she could not speak, could not get the words out? Her
husband would have to look in her wallet, or her checkbook,
and even these would tell him nothing.
If
she needed to be brought again to the hospital, someone
might notice her ring and say, “She has a husband.”
How would they find him? Would he eventually come, looking
disheveled and confused, and be angry with her ? She could
imagine him sitting across from her and asking, “What
have you done now?” in that familiar, exasperated
tone of voice. Even though he could see her lying with
tubes affixed to both arms and perhaps her throat. The
hand might still be with him, and she knew by now that
no one else could see it, only herself.
Hours
later, it really did happen the way she had imagined,
with only slight differences. That is, her husband did
come home, looking fairly disheveled, and he did sit across
from her on the bed, and that very same question she had
imagined he would ask did come out of his mouth: “What
have you done now?” And yes, there it was, hovering
behind his shoulder, the hand, the hand which now bore
a faint trace of scent, not “White Diamonds”
exactly, more like “Charlie” or “Je
Reviens”, something girlie and cheap.
Her
husband’s face was guarded, he was wearing a green
sweater spotted with rain. His hair was wet.
He
was talking about the accident now, asking how did this
happen, how did you manage to get yourself into such a
situation? Really, it was too funny. She had slipped,
she had knocked her head on something sharp, there was
a swelling above her right eye. This was the face she
presented to her husband when he arrived home, later that
night.
She
had to keep looking over her husband’s shoulder,
she couldn’t help it. She wanted the hand to go
away but it was resting on her husband’s shoulder
and playing with the hair at the back of his head.
Can’t
he feel it pulling? Doesn’t it tickle his ear?
She
couldn’t answer him, of course—there was a
tube in her mouth hooked up to a large machine. The tube
was stretching her lips apart and flattening them and
she imagined she must look ugly. The doctor had held a
whispered conversation with her husband—right in
front of her! But in a voice so low she couldn’t
make out the sense of the words. Now something leaked
out of the corners of her eyes but her husband didn’t
seem to notice.
He
was rubbing his forehead and saying, “I will have
to call the insurance agent. The car—completely
totaled…”
And
yes, she knew this was a terrible thing. The money, the
insurance, the higher premiums… She couldn’t
help it, she was so easily distracted. It might have been
a movement out of the corner of her eye, some gust of
wind shaking the trees by the side of the road. Or a girl’s
red sweater, flashing brightly as she sailed by on a ten-speed.
Something that looked like happiness. Yes, she was so
easily distracted.
When
she looked up again, the chair where her husband had sat,
seemingly just moments before, was empty. The room had
a strange light; eventually she recognized it as sunlight
streaming weakly in through the drawn curtains. She thought:
I must have fallen asleep. A whole night must have passed,
therefore, in this strange state. Now it was morning.
Her husband had probably gone home. An image flashed through
her mind: her husband getting into his white car, impervious
to the light rain speckling his graying hair. And now
it would be close to the time for his alarm clock to go
off. He would be getting up soon, getting his things together
to go to the office.
It
seemed amazing to her that she had managed to fall asleep,
in that state, in that place. Where she knew no one.
She
recognized in herself a terrible thirst. But there was
nothing within reach—no glass, no water. Mingled
with the great thirst was a feeling of abandonment. She
knew this feeling; it had been common enough throughout
her marriage. The sight of the empty chair bothered her.
She turned her head to avoid looking at it.
And
then she saw the little thing. How could she have forgotten--?
It was close to her now, snuggled on the sheets by her
right hip. It lay quite still.
She
looked at it again. So still it could have been a spider,
resting there. There was nothing she could do.
She
groaned. The sound, so deep, startled her. A machine with
blinking red lights began to beep softly. She stifled
any further noise.
She
determined to get up, right that instant, to undo the
tracery of tubes that fed her veins with a colorless liquid,
to escape the softly beeping monitor. “All right,”
she whispered. Manfully she threw her legs over the side
of the bed. She positioned her hands, palms downward,
on either side of her. As if preparing for a final effort.
A
young nurse was standing at the foot of the bed, staring
at her.
The
nurse’s expression was cold, even hostile. She said
nothing, however. The nurse might have been made of cardboard,
so stiffly did she stand there, a clipboard cradled in
her right arm.
The
hand beckoned her forward.
Marianne
Villanueva grew up in the Philippines and now lives and
teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author
of the short story collections Ginseng
and Other Tales from Manila and Mayor of the Roses:
Stories, as well as co-editor of the Filipino women's
anthology, Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas.
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