started in on “Walking After Midnight.” But once I finished the first verse she stopped me.
“Will you play one of your songs?” she asked.
“I thought you hated my songs.” I tried not to sound like I was pissed off about it, but I’m pretty sure I failed.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You did say they weren’t interesting.”
“Oh,” she said. “I just meant the words.”
It was true I’d never been much of a lyricist. I heard the music in my head first, and later I’d kind of match some words up to it and hope it all fit together. My favorite songs of mine, the ones that came closest to the feeling I’d had writing them, were the ones with no words at all. But I wasn’t playing those songs in public much then. People liked a story, I thought; they liked to sing along.
So I launched into “Luella.” Like a lot of the songs I was writing then, it wasn’t really about anything in particular. It had a girl with broken hands who stays inside a lot, and people wearing blue in a white room, and some stuff about sadness. When I finished, she asked me, “Is that about your mom?”
“I guess so,” I said. “A lot of my songs are about her, a little bit.”
“What happened to her hands?”
A lot of things happened to my mom’s hands. When she was born,my grandma thought she was making fists, but the fists wouldn’t open. The doctors X-rayed them and found dozens of tiny bones, all in the wrong places. I’ve seen the X-rays. For some reason my grandparents put them in her baby book, next to the first photos of her, a wide-eyed baby in a knit hat. Over the next fifteen years, she had ten surgeries to make fingers. She spent a lot of time in the hospital, and she told me things that only people who have been sick for a long time know, like that there is school in the hospital, even for kids who are going to die. My mom learned long division in the hospital. She read To Kill a Mockingbird and Jane Eyre . She told my sister that she got her first period in a hospital bed, and my sister told me that years later, when we were drunk together for the last time before she got born again and quit drinking and everything else.
And then it was over. She was in the tenth grade, and her hands were as good as they were ever going to be. They turned out to be pretty good. She could write and draw and braid hair; she could count change and wear gloves and use chopsticks. She could even play the trumpet, and she was in the school marching band for a year until she quit, not because the fingering was hard on her new hands but because she was tone-deaf. There were only a few things she couldn’t do, like play cat’s cradle, fasten a necklace, give someone the finger.
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
“Will you play one of your songs?” she asked.
“I thought you hated my songs.” I tried not to sound like I was pissed off about it, but I’m pretty sure I failed.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You did say they weren’t interesting.”
“Oh,” she said. “I just meant the words.”
It was true I’d never been much of a lyricist. I heard the music in my head first, and later I’d kind of match some words up to it and hope it all fit together. My favorite songs of mine, the ones that came closest to the feeling I’d had writing them, were the ones with no words at all. But I wasn’t playing those songs in public much then. People liked a story, I thought; they liked to sing along.
So I launched into “Luella.” Like a lot of the songs I was writing then, it wasn’t really about anything in particular. It had a girl with broken hands who stays inside a lot, and people wearing blue in a white room, and some stuff about sadness. When I finished, she asked me, “Is that about your mom?”
“I guess so,” I said. “A lot of my songs are about her, a little bit.”
“What happened to her hands?”
A lot of things happened to my mom’s hands. When she was born,my grandma thought she was making fists, but the fists wouldn’t open. The doctors X-rayed them and found dozens of tiny bones, all in the wrong places. I’ve seen the X-rays. For some reason my grandparents put them in her baby book, next to the first photos of her, a wide-eyed baby in a knit hat. Over the next fifteen years, she had ten surgeries to make fingers. She spent a lot of time in the hospital, and she told me things that only people who have been sick for a long time know, like that there is school in the hospital, even for kids who are going to die. My mom learned long division in the hospital. She read To Kill a Mockingbird and Jane Eyre . She told my sister that she got her first period in a hospital bed, and my sister told me that years later, when we were drunk together for the last time before she got born again and quit drinking and everything else.
And then it was over. She was in the tenth grade, and her hands were as good as they were ever going to be. They turned out to be pretty good. She could write and draw and braid hair; she could count change and wear gloves and use chopsticks. She could even play the trumpet, and she was in the school marching band for a year until she quit, not because the fingering was hard on her new hands but because she was tone-deaf. There were only a few things she couldn’t do, like play cat’s cradle, fasten a necklace, give someone the finger.
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
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