I met Troy in a grocery store when I was nineteen. I reached for a grapefruit and he slipped a black business card into my hand and told me that I was just what he was looking for. I laughed and dropped his card into the melons. He followed me through cereal and soup and poultry telling me I was perfect, I really was. He had an endless supply of cards, and he sneaked them into my purse, scattered them in my cart, and slid them between my fingers whenever he got the chance. I dropped them all, leaving a trail through the store.
Waiting at the register, Troy sidled close, pressing his lips near my ear. I heard his capped teeth click when he whispered: “They’re perfect. Really. Just think about it.” I felt a tickle at my waist as he pushed a card into the band of my jeans.
It felt kinky there, the corners stabbing me lightly when I carried the groceries out to the car and leaned forward to turn the key in the ignition. So I left it there. It was like he was still touching me, trying to get my attention.
I unpacked the groceries quietly so I wouldn’t wake up Scott. My boyfriend, Scott, was twenty-seven and worked at a community college as a fitness coach. He’d hurt his ankle a week ago, and the doctor had given him some really strong painkillers. The painkillers helped him forget about his ankle, but they made him lethargic and whiny. He was probably trying to sleep right now. Poor baby.
Scott had let me move in with him when I left home. I slept alone in his guest room for the first two nights. On the third night, he appeared in the doorway with the light from the living room at his back, turning him into a silhouette. He was holding a bottle of beer. “Come on, sweetie,” he said. As my eyes adjusted, I saw hair dusting his chest, stomach, and shoulders. “Come keep me company,” he said. I had. That was two years ago.
Troy’s card poked me again and I was reaching back to pull it out and toss it in the trash when I heard a giggle in the bedroom. Then I heard a groan.
The carpet muffled my footsteps, so they didn’t hear me coming. The door was ajar and I could see her on top of him, wiggling around like she was being electrocuted. His hand was up against her face, and I knew he was holding her mouth shut. He always did that to me when I got too excited. The pajamas I had worn last night were still draped across the corner of the bed.
#
I called Troy collect from the pay phone outside the Gull gas station three blocks from Scott’s place. “Okay,” I said after he accepted charges. “I’ll do it. But I need a place to stay.”
#
So I went to work for Troy. My first day, he took me to get my nails sanded and my cuticles trimmed off. I spent an hour dipped up to my elbows in good that was supposed to soften my skin. Then all the hair from my arms and fingers was removed, first with wax, then with lasers. Troy gave me a spare room at the back of his house. There was a dusty exercise bike in the corner. I slept on a futon. Troy didn’t come to the door.
My first job was for a salon. I was manicured thirty times that day, and given hundreds of things to hold up in front of a screen so pictures could be snapped. I held flowers and ice cream cones and glasses of champagne and sunglasses and books bound in leather. Troy stood close by, shifting his weight and answering the chirp of his cell phone every few minutes.
For a detergent, I had to clean a greasy pan with a green sponge. There were stacks of pans and I had to clean them all so they could shoot at different angles. My hands were wrinkled and pale at the end of that day.
For a perfume called Rainforest Rendezvous, I had to reach for a white flower in a bamboo forest the props guys set up. I wore long gold nails. The nails by themselves were almost as long as my fingers and the manicurist, a fat woman with a mustache and a permanent frown, dug them into my hands like she was trying to loosen my real fingernails.
Troy stood short and polished next to the bulky cameraman, his suede shoes whispering on the cement while he fidgeted. I watched him palm his hair so it slicked smooth from his forehead to his neck. I imagined his palms slick and damp with hair gel. I imagined them unfurling for me like dewy flowers. I pressed my hand to his, my gold nails casting shadows onto his fingers.
The night after the gold nail photo shoot, he came to the door of my room. He didn’t talk to me the way Scott had. He just walked over and held out his hand. I was wearing the plastic gloves he had given me for nighttime, and started to slip them off. “No,” he said. So I left them on.
#
That night, I realized I was taller than Troy. That just made me love him more.
#
Even first thing in the morning, Troy’s breath smelled like carnations, and his hair was slick as the curl of a wave before it breaks. His chest and back were hairless, unlike Scott who was furred everywhere. I rubbed Troy’s back while he was going to sleep, in the morning before he awoke, and before breakfast while we made love. “Easy with those, honey,” he finally said. “They’re making you and me a lot of money.”
I did another shoot for a detergent. For this one, I had to load a dishwasher. When I had done that fifteen times, the dishes were replaced with clean ones, and I had to unload the dishes another fifteen times. I was introduced to the woman whose smiling face would be photographed, ecstatic over how clean her dishes were. She had dark hair and a wide smile. Her nails were crooked and I saw a blister on her thumb. I almost gloated. Then I remembered that her hands weren’t ideal, but my face wasn’t ideal, either. If it was, they would have offered to photograph my smile and probably saved some money.
For my next shot, my nails were painted the color of blood and I was wrapped in black gauze. Under the gauze I was topless. My hands were crossed over my chest. Everything inside the gauze was muffled, as if I was underwater. I could hear Troy’s feet shuffling, but all I could see was milky black.
“Close your eyes!” hollered the photographer.
I blinked shut.
You know the feeling you get when someone is watching you? The tingling at the back of your neck? During a shoot, I got that same feeling in my hands. My hands heated up as if I was reaching into a spotlight. All my nerve endings migrated into my fingers. My fingertips sizzled and my palms sang.
Everyone told Troy he’d been right: how they were lovely, great knuckles, perfect length, balanced palms (whatever that meant). Troy nodded, smug. “I know, I know,” he said, then he wrapped up one of my hands in both of his. “And they’re mine!” Then he laughed. Everyone laughed along with Troy.
I loved it when he said things like that, when he claimed me. No one had wanted to do that before. By opening up the doorway to his ownership wide enough to admit my hands, he was suggesting that there might be enough room for all of me to squeeze into the area of What Troy Wanted.
During a jewelry photo shoot, I had to sit next to a male model so the His and Hers wedding bands could be displayed in different poses. Troy was watching, his feet moving faster today. When the model scooted closer to me to line up our knuckles, Troy almost forgot to answer his cell phone.
On the way home, Troy told me I had been flirting.
“I wasn’t!” It was raining and I was the only one watching the road. I grabbed onto the door handle. “Troy…”
“Flirting…isn’t bad. Not if it can get you somewhere. But flirting with a model?” His voice was forced and patient.
“I wasn’t—”
“Don’t contradict me!” He was yelling suddenly, and his voice pounded off the interior of the car. “Don’t you ever contradict me!”
He was still yelling when we went off the road. He hit the brakes soon enough so we didn’t run into the tree head on. But we did sideswipe it on the passenger side. And my hand was caught between the door and the handle.
#
“Good as new!” said the round-faced ruddy doctor after he put three stitches on the outside of my pinky. Troy shook his head slowly, thinking I couldn’t see him.
He told me the next day that it wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t going to work between us, and it wasn’t going to work for my hands anymore, either. “It’ll heal,” I said, crying. “You’ll barely be able to see it. The doctor said…”
Troy didn’t listen. He was packing my clothes.
#
I drove to Scott’s. He opened the door and looed surprised. “Thought you were gone for good.”
“Well…”
“Listen. I’d love to invite you in but Sara—you remember Sara? The physical therapist from when I hurt my ankle?—she just got home and she’s had kind of a rough day.
Sara: the redhead Scott didn’t know I’d seen him with.
“Oh,” I said. “Sara. Of course.”
I drove to the Gull station and stared at the payphone. I thought of calling my parents, but when I thought of my father, different parts of my face heated, like my hands used to heat up during a photo shoot. My right cheekbone pulsed from a backhand, my jaw ached from the time he actually punched me and my neck stiffed when I remember how I slammed into my closet door. I couldn’t call my parents.
And there was no one else. No other friends. No other family. I stared at the stitches. Ruined. My gorgeous hands. The only thing about me anyone had wanted. The truth was, I wasn’t ever going to be desirable as a whole person. I knew that. No one wanted a whole person. There was always some undesirable part they wished they could discard. Maybe it was crooked teeth or underarm stench or unwanted facial hair. There was always something that people wished they could remove or alter.
At the same time, even in the most unwanted person, there was something, however small, that others could cherish. Even the ugliest and the most obnoxious person had soft elbows or sparkling eyes. There is always a part of a person that is desirable.
I didn’t know what my desirable part was, not anymore. But I’d learned the truth about the real world before most girls do. The truth is, the world can’t handle whole women. The world chops them up and takes them piece by piece, bite by bite.
#
I drove back to Troy’s. I held my breath while I waited for him to answer my knock.
When he opened the door, I said: “What about my feet?”
originally published in MOTA volume 1, 2002
Andrea Eaker lives in the Seattle area and appreciates good coffee and overcast days. Her stories have been published in Shooter Literary Magazine, Every Day Fiction, and Blue Fifth Review.