by Marie Sexton
“No. I’m warmer like this.”
Once I had my coat back on, with the left sleeve hiked up to match my shirt, we walked up the street again, but the other way this time. The sandwich shop was infinitely better than the Greek place. It was small but well lit, filled with plants and fish tanks. Small tables sat half-hidden in intimate corners.
Nick gestured toward the counter. “I can order for us if you want to pick a table.”
I was touched once again by his sensitivity. He was allowing me a chance to hide rather than deal with any of the employees. “Something with turkey,” I said.
He smiled at me, causing my stomach to do somersaults. “You got it.”
He brought us identical sandwiches, although he had carrot sticks instead of french fries. Always the healthier option. It was no wonder he looked so good.
“I’m sorry about the restaurant.”
I couldn’t believe he was apologizing to me. I was the one who’d made a scene. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“No.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I mean, I’m sorry about when you tried to order. I’ve never seen you struggle with your speech before, and I wasn’t sure if I should stop you and order for you or if it was better to let you work it out.”
Blunt and honest. I was beginning to get used to it. “It depends a lot on how the listener responds. When they get impatient, like the waitress, it m-makes it harder for me to speak clearly. Once p-people start to notice it, it’s l-like it takes on a life of its own.”
“Why didn’t you just point to what you wanted?”
Such a simple question, and it brought me up short. Why hadn’t I? My mother had never allowed that. “You have to learn to deal with these things, Owen, not run from them.” But still, my mother wasn’t here. It was the most obvious solution, so why hadn’t it occurred to me? “I guess I just panicked.”
“You told me the stutter used to be worse. What happened? Did you do some kind of therapy?”
I swallowed hard and took a long drink of my soda, trying to decide how much to reveal. He waited, patient as a stone. I took the easy way out and said, “A bit, yeah.”
“And is that why you get nervous around people?”
“It doesn’t help, but the real reason is my arm.”
“You don’t seem uncomfortable with me, though.”
“You’re different.”
“Why?”
It was a simple question, but the answer was complex. Because he was patient. Because he was direct yet not insensitive. Because he never laughed at me, and he made me feel safe. What I ended up saying was, “Because you aren’t weirded out by it.”
“And others are?”
“You said your sister has the same defect—”
“Don’t call it a defect. It’s a congenital amputation.”
“Fine. My point is, you’ve probably seen how people act. The way kids always ask about it—”
“And that bothers you?”
“It’s not the kids themselves who annoy me. They don’t know any better, and it’s natural for them to ask questions. It’s the way their parents hush them up and rush away, like they can pretend I don’t exist. Kids may be the most vocal, but adults are the worst.”
“How so?”
“They either get so flustered trying to help with every little thing that I end up feeling like an invalid, or they do their best to ignore it altogether, like they somehow don’t notice that I’m missing an arm.”
He cocked his head at me in puzzlement. “How do you want them to act?”
“I don’t know. Normal, I guess. I want them to act like I’m not a freak.”
He shifted carrot sticks around in his basket, thinking. “You know, most people are trying to treat you the way they think you want to be treated.”
“They think I want to be treated like a pariah?”
He looked up at me with a piercingly direct gaze. “Owen, this isn’t high school. Most people are genuinely good. They don’t want to be cruel.”
I ducked my head, feeling like a recalcitrant child. In alluding to high school, he’d hit the proverbial nail on the head. All of my insecurities went back to my teen years, but most adults didn’t act the way teenagers did. And yet, I knew how adults acted too. I knew the way they forced smiles and turned away.
He went on, unaware of my turmoil. “When people meet you, they’re not sure how to behave. That’s true. Look at the whole handicapped versus handicapable debate. Or even better, look at how I handled your stutter at the restaurant. It’s the same thing. If somebody offers to help, they worry they’re treating you like an invalid. If they don’t offer to help, then they worry they’re being insensitive. If they see you struggling with something, they don’t know if you want assistance or if you want to do it yourself. They don’t know if they should acknowledge that your arm is missing or not. They worry they’re being politically incorrect, and God knows that’ll get you crucified in this day and age. But more importantly, they worry they’ll offend you. And so they do the only thing they can think to do—they pretend not to notice, because it’s better to be oblivious than to be uncaring.”
I sat in silence, weighing his words, trying to look at it from somebody else’s point of view.
“I’d like you to meet my sister. She handles these things differently than you.”
“Better, you mean.”
He shrugged. “No, not necessarily. She can be a bit extreme. But she might help you get a bit of perspective.” He shrugged again, smiling. “Look, you’re fine. I was just making conversation, not trying to force you to reevaluate your outlook on life, you know? You don’t need to meet her. You don’t need to change a damn thing. I’m only trying to help.” He winked at me. “But only if you want it.”
Chapter Four
TWO DAYS later I met June. She was shorter than Nick and me by several inches, with wild, dark brown hair flying around her head in crazy, wiry curls. The only thing that gave her away as Nick’s sister was her eyes. They were identical to Nick’s.
“Hey, big brother,” she said. And then she turned to me. “You must be Owen.” She waved her shortened right arm at me. “Look at us! Aren’t we a pair?”
She was like a whirlwind in the small apartment, petting the dogs, talking a hundred miles a minute, playing Annoying Little Sister to Nick’s Stern Big Brother to a tee. I was immediately aware of the way she used her amputated arm. She gestured with it. She used it to smack Nick in the arm, to adjust the headband that held her hair out of the way, to hold the beer Nick handed her. My mother had always encouraged me not to use it because using it drew attention to it. “For Christ’s sake, Owen,” she’d say, “use your good arm! Do you want everybody to stare?” When I wore long-sleeved shirts, she’d tuck my cuff into my pocket, as if people might not realize something was wrong with my arm. As if they’d think I was standing with my hand in my pocket. But every time she did it, I’d end up trying to use my arm and pulling the sleeve free, and then she’d cringe at the way it flapped loose at my side.
I watched June using her arm like anybody would, and I felt a twinge of sadness. But mostly I felt angry. I’d always known my mother was embarrassed by my arm, but for some reason it had never occurred to me to blame her for that fact. I’d always subscribed to her view that I’d wronged her, or at the very least, that the universe and biology had wronged her. But I’d never blamed her. Even when I’d realized that most of my stuttering seemed to hinge upon her and her reaction to it, I hadn’t ever felt she was in the wrong.
Why was that? Partly because some of what she did really was for my own good, like insisting I learn to type. But some of her lessons had felt downright cruel. I still had a hard time facing her.
Nick and June were still talking, discussing some cousin who had come home from college pregnant, and I found myself back at Regina’s piano, idly playing as I contemplated my relationship with my mother until June bounced in and sat on the bench next to me.
&nb
sp; “Teach me,” she said.
“I d-don’t know how to play.”
“You were playing when I came in.”
I blushed. “Just ‘Frère Jacques.’ It’s the only song I know.”
“So?” she said as if it were inconsequential. “Teach me.”
I showed her the song, but sitting side by side as we were, with our good arms together, our hands were too close on the keyboard. She got up and moved to sit on my left. “Between us, we make a whole player,” she said, not as if it bothered her but as if she found it amusing.
We played “Frère Jacques” over and over again until we were in sync.
“You guys might want to consider broadening your repertoire,” Nick said from his place on the couch. “That song’s getting old really fast.”
“You know any songs, hotshot?” she asked.
“There’s music in the bench.”
June and I looked at each other, intrigued. Without saying a word, we both stood up and turned to lift the lid. The inside was full of music books.
“Intermediate, intermediate, intermediate,” June mumbled as she looked through them. “Aha! This one says beginner.”
We closed the bench and sat back down, side by side. She put the book in front of us and opened it to a page in the middle. We leaned closer to study it.
“Damn,” she said. “Somehow I thought beginner would be a bit easier than this.” She looked over at me. “You know how to read music?”
“Sort of. I did two years of band in junior high.”
“Me too!” she said. “What did you play?”
I held up my right hand. My only hand. “Guess.”
She put her finger on her chin, tipping her head as she thought. “Either trumpet or percussion.”
“Not even percussion, per se. Bass drum. On every single song.” With only one hand, I hadn’t ever been able to play the snare drum or timpani well enough to beat out the other kids. “I did get to play bells on a couple of the easy songs. But 90 percent of the time, it was bass drum. I got tired of doing nothing but hitting that big drum every first and third beat. How about you? What did you play?”
She held up her one good hand and wiggled her fingers. “French horn.”
Behind us, Nick snorted. “Yeah, she made this huge stink about being allowed to play. Talked my parents into buying her her own horn. Then she quit after only two years.”
“Brass instruments are gross,” she said, more to me than to him. “I gagged every time I had to clear the spit valve.” She pointed to one of the notes in the open book. “I know this is a C.”
“Every Good Boy Does Fine,” I recited, pointing to the treble clef.
“The spaces in the bass clef are All Cars Eat Gas.”
We both looked up at the piano in front of us. “So which one’s C?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Hell if I know.”
I slumped, feeling defeated, although I couldn’t have said why. It wasn’t as if I’d expected to pull out music and be able to play it. Still….
“Hey!” June said. “We should take lessons together like this! You playing right hand and me playing left. How hard can it be?”
Pretty fucking hard, was my first thought. “Are you serious?”
“Why not?”
“That’s enough,” Nick said, standing up from his spot on the couch. “Let’s go out to dinner before you try to recruit Owen for the London Symphony Orchestra.”
“Killjoy,” she said, but she dropped the subject.
I hadn’t thought ahead to how it would be at the restaurant, June and I both walking in together. The hostess did a fast double take but quickly recovered. It was the young man who showed us to our table who couldn’t seem to stop staring. June looked right at him as we sat down. Her gaze was as piercing as Nick’s often was.
“Shark attack,” she said. She pointed at me. “Him too.”
The kid’s eyes widened. He looked back and forth between us, probably trying to decide how seriously to take her. “Really? Like, the same shark?”
She snorted in disgust. “Of course not. Have you ever seen a shark that could eat two arms at once?” She shook her head at Nick. “Can you believe this guy?”
The kid turned scarlet and fled. I wondered if my cheeks were as red as his.
“Knock it off,” Nick said to June.
“He started it.”
We managed to order without incident. It wasn’t until our salads came that June leaned forward on the table to look at me. Her actions and her gaze were so much like Nick’s, it unnerved me. “You know what keeps me up at night?”
I looked at Nick for help. He was giving me a look that said, “You’re on your own.” I turned back to June. “I have no idea,” I confessed.
“Wondering if I’m actually right-handed.”
I looked down at her amputated right arm, which held her weight on the table. In her left hand, she held her fork over her salad bowl. “Are you serious?”
“Think about it. Hand dominance isn’t learned. It’s genetic, and only about 10 percent of people are left-handed. And this.” She pointed with her fork toward her shortened arm. “Depending on which source you’re looking at, the statistics for ABS are anywhere from one in twelve hundred to one in fifteen hundred. That means the chances that I’m actually left-handed are roughly one in thirteen thousand.”
“That’s not how probability works,” Nick said.
She ignored him completely and pointed to my right hand. “You have way better odds than me.”
I looked down at my right hand, suddenly appreciating it more than I had before. “I guess that never occurred to me.”
“She used that little ploy to talk our parents into the best prosthetic money could buy, back in junior high,” Nick said to me. “Then she quit wearing it three months later.”
“Not completely.”
“Close enough.”
“It was heavy!”
“Yes, I know. You whined about it every five minutes.”
It was strange to me, the way they could bicker, and yet it was obvious they loved each other. I didn’t think Nick was actually as annoyed at her as he pretended to be, and she didn’t seem to take anything he said to heart anyway.
“What do you miss most?” she asked me over our entrees. “I mean, of the things you can’t do, which one really drives you crazy?”
“I wish I could hammer a nail. All of my walls are blank because I can’t put in nails to hold up pictures.” She nodded in understanding, and I found myself laughing. It was a ridiculous conversation, but I asked anyway, “What do you miss?”
“I want to be able to hold my morning coffee the way they always do in commercials, you know? With both hands wrapped around it so the cup can make your fingers warm and you don’t have to use the handle.”
Such a simple thing, to hold a coffee cup. For the first time, I saw a hint of anger in Nick’s eyes, not directed at his sister, but at the unfairness of life.
“I’ve never thought about that,” I admitted.
“You’ll never be able to drink coffee and not think about it, now.”
As we were leaving the restaurant, she bumped my amputated arm playfully with hers. “You doing anything for Halloween?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Want to come to a party with me? We can tape our stumps together and tell everyone we’re conjoined twins, attached at the forearm.”
“No, thanks.”
“It’ll be fun,” she said. “I’ll talk you into it later. And I’ll find us a piano teacher too.”
Was she serious? She skipped ahead of us, and I slowed down to fall into step with Nick. He put his arm around my shoulders. Such a simple, friendly gesture, but it made my heart race. He leaned close as if he were about to share a secret with me. “She’s a force to be reckoned with.”
“I’m starting to figure that out.”
“Welcome to my life.”
“Does she ever not get her way?�
��
“Not often enough, Owen. Not often enough.”
“WAS SHE always like that?” I asked Nick after June had gone. We were back in the comfort of my own apartment, and although I’d liked Nick’s sister, I was glad she’d left.
“Always. My mom says she came out of the womb determined to make the world pay her back for her missing hand.” He laughed, thinking about it. “When she was three or four, she’d imitate Captain Hook. She’d say, ‘I’ll fight you with one arm behind my back!’ But then she’d put her good arm behind her back and brandish her stump. It never seemed to occur to her to do it the other way.”
“Maybe she really is right-handed.”
“You know what she dressed as for Halloween when we were kids?”
“What?”
“A superhero. Almost every year. Wonder Woman was her favorite, but there was also Batgirl, Spider-Man, and Superman.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Oh. And one year we were the Wonder Twins.”
“When I was in third grade, I dressed up as Superman, but when I was getting ready for trick-or-treating, my mom said, ‘Not sure what good a one-armed hero is.’ So I didn’t go.”
The minute I said it, I regretted it because he immediately turned serious. “Your mom said that to you?”
I blushed and turned away. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Like hell it doesn’t.”
“It’s no big deal. My dad took me to a movie instead.” But I’d never asked to dress up as a superhero again. In fact, I’d quit dressing up for Halloween completely after that. “Anyway,” I said, wanting desperately to change the subject and get back to the playful banter of before, “your sister’s a trip. I can see why you wanted me to meet her.”
“Don’t read too much into it. I also meant it when I said she can be extreme.”
“Like the shark thing?”
“Not that so much. But sometimes she refuses to accept that she’s different. I mean, I understand her reasoning, but it’s not always about being equal.”
“Like what?”
“Well, like when she was a sophomore in high school. She’d been playing soccer up until then, but suddenly that year, she decided she was going to play volleyball instead. Now, don’t get me wrong. Maybe there’s somebody out there with only one arm who can still play volleyball well, but I’m here to tell you, it wasn’t her. But she insisted. She made such a stink about how they were excluding her that the school finally caved and told the coach he had to put her on the team. Susan Granger got cut, even though she was a far better player than June, all because my sister had to prove a point.”