Hot Little Hands (2 page)

“Okay,” he said. “Don't tell anyone.”

“No.”

He shut his bedroom door. I heard him walk across the room, and then the music got louder.

Downstairs I went the wrong way and ended up in the kitchen, a big, bright room with blue marble countertops and a pretty girl standing in the center. She was shorter than me, but she was wearing a twelfth-grade sweater, and even through that I could see her arms were as thin as a child's. Her eyes were brown like Bradley's but her hair was curlier, and her cheeks were long and gaunt.

“Are you Brad's tutor?” she asked, looking me up and down.

“No,” I managed. “Just from school.”

“Oh, okay.” I stared at the ball of bone pushing against the skin of her wrist as she pulled open a cheese stick. “Want one?” she asked when she noticed me watching. “There's another box in the fridge.”

“Oh, no,” I said, walking backward out of the room. “Thank you.”

As I rushed through the foyer, I knocked a porcelain bluebird off a table with my backpack. It fell on the carpet but didn't smash. I left it there and hurried out.

When I got home that day, the windows were closed and the house was silent. I found my mother in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub, leaning over with her head in her hands.

“Mama?” I said. She lifted her face, which was paler than I'd ever seen it, her eyes rimmed in pink.

“Where were you?” she asked in English. It sounded so strange I almost laughed. “I've been vomiting, and sick with worry,” she said, this time in Russian.

“I was at a friend's house,” I told her, glimpsing a slice of my reflection in the mirror above the sink. My ponytail was loose in its hair elastic and my right cheek was rosier than the left.

“Which friend?”

“Rachel Hoch,” I lied. “A girl from school. She wanted help with homework.”

“How was I supposed to know that? You've never been late before. I thought someone took you.”

“Who would take me?” I asked. But she turned her face away and I understood, without knowing why, that I should shut the bathroom door behind me and go to my room.

My mother's student has gone home now, and my father is back from work. He's sitting at the table in the kitchen, his blond curls tight on his head, the armpits of his shirt wet with sweat.

“They call this autumn?” he says. “It's over eighty-five degrees out there. These people don't know autumn.”

“You're telling me,” my mother says from the sink. “The postman was wearing shorts today. Tiny blue shorts with knee-high socks. It was almost obscene. I had to look away.”

“Did you have that test?” my father asks me.

“Friday,” I say.

“It's maths, isn't it?” my mother says. “You're good at those things.”

“Yeah, if you study a little, you'll have no problem.”

“Smart girl.” My mother hands me a bowl of soup and puts one in front of my father. She sets a smaller portion on her own place mat, then goes back to the sink.

My mother is tall, a full head taller than my father, with a thin nose and light-blue eyes, and a waist so small she has to tie her apron straps around it twice. When she was my age, growing up in Russia, she thought one day she would be a famous concert pianist. My father as a boy, growing up just two towns away from her, dreamed of marrying the most beautiful girl in the world.

“At least one of us got our wish,” my mother says bitterly whenever this topic comes up. Then my father always laughs, and she lets him pat her hand.

Back at the table now, she places a plate of fish and a kugel on the doily in the center, and takes her seat. “Well?” she says. “Eat.” My father has already finished his soup and is reaching for the kugel, but I push my own bowl away. I get up and go to the fridge, holding the door open with my hand and sticking my head right deep inside where the air is cool and quiet. I close my eyes.

“What are you looking for, Anyishka?” my mother wants to know. From where I am, her voice sounds far away. The fridge is full of jars and bowls of leftovers from other dinners, all covered neatly in aluminum foil.

“Why don't we throw some of this food away?” I click my tongue in irritation. “Don't we have any apples? Or cheese?”

“What? You're not hungry? My food's not good enough for you?”

“All those years going without,” I hear my father say. I know without looking that he's slowly shaking his head. “Cordial instead of orange juice.”

“And newspaper instead of toilet paper,” my mother joins in.

“Uch, don't remind me,” he says.

“Is that true?” I ask, standing up straight.

“You don't remember?” my mother asks. “For years our backsides were black from the ink. We left fingerprints on everything we touched.”

“Wait one second,” I say. “Let me get my notebook.”

My father refuses to get a cordless phone. He says they're too expensive and that by the end of the 1990s, everyone who has a cordless phone will have brain tumors or ear cancer. So when Yulia calls after dinner, I have to pull the cord from the kitchen out into the hallway, past the bathroom, around the door frame where my mother marks my height in pencil once a month, and into my room.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Homework.” I push the door shut and lean back against it, sliding down to the floor.

“Maths?”

“Jewish History.”

“Can you believe that Bradley guy?”

“I know,” I say. “Those Japs were silent for the rest of the lesson.”

“And I thought Maya was his girlfriend.”

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Why?” she asks. “Do you like him or something?”

“Who? Bradley? No. Why, do you?”

“No.” We sit in silence for a moment.

“What's that noise?” I ask her.

“My mum's crying.”

“Is your dad drinking?”

“No, she's watching
90210
. They're closing down the Peach Pit. She loves that crap.”

“Hey, Yuli?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you planning to write a testimonial?”

“No, I'm doing the ESL questions, then I'll study for maths. And then I'm going to sleep to dream about Rachel Levine's face when she got told to shut up.”

“It's Rachel Hoch,” I say. “Rachel Hoch and Maya Levine.”

“Who cares? Both their faces went pale. You could see it happening, even under the fake tan.”

In school the next day, I feel so nervous I think I might be sick. After lunchtime, I go to the toilets, cover the seat with paper, and sit down. I take out my notes and read through them. A group of girls come in and stand by the sinks. Under the cubicle door, I can see their Airwalks and Clarks crowding around the mirror.

“I'm starving,” one of them says.

“I know. This diet sucks.”

“Apples and cheese were okay. But I could
not
do chicken for breakfast.”

“We should go to McDonald's for nuggets after school.”

“Totally!”

“I can't, I'm going shopping for my brother's barmi.”

“Why don't you wear the dress you wore to my brother's barmi?”

“I can't. It's, like, too small and so Russian. Anyway, how do we even know the diet works?”

“Have you ever been to Israel? Those soldiers are, like, hot.”

When the bell rings, I come out of the stall and wash my hands. One of the girls smiles at me in the mirror. It's the one from Bradley's kitchen.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hi.”

“You haven't come around again.”

“No.”

All the other girls are staring at me in the mirror now, too.

“I wouldn't take it personally,” she says. “I mean, I love my brother, but he has pretty boring taste in girls. Maybe when he's older, he'll want someone, you know, a bit different.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay. See ya.” She gives me a little wave in the mirror, and then she leads the other girls out of the bathroom.

“Who is that?” one of them whispers. I don't hear her answer.

Bradley Ruben is giving his testimonial when I get to class. He glances up when I come in, then looks back down at his notes.

“Sorry,” I mutter. This is the first thing I've said to him since the day at his house.

“In January 1946, my grandfather found out that his first wife and daughter had perished in Majdanek. By May, my grandmother had received her own bad news. They got married the following year and by 1949 they were in Australia and my dad was born. Thank you.” Bradley folds the piece of paper he's holding, and goes to his desk. It feels like we should clap but no one does.

“Right, thank you,” says Mrs. Kansky from the back of the room. “Anyone else?” The class sits in silence. “No?” I hold my breath and imagine I'm a different person. Then I raise my hand.

It takes her a minute to see me. “Anya?” The class turns to look. I stand up, swaying slightly.

“What?” I hear Irina say under her breath. I push my chair back and move to the front of the room. My throat feels dry and chalky. Everyone is watching me now, except for Bradley Ruben, who is bent over his notebook, pen in hand, drawing something in the margin.

“After Jews were allowed from Russia in 1989, my mother, my father, and I lived in a flat in Vienna for eleven months, waiting for a visa for here. We were eight people in one small flat, all from Russia or Ukraine, and the toilet was often not working so were sometimes very sick.” I hear a rustle in the room then. Someone coughs, or maybe laughs. I don't look up. “We had food given to us, not very much, but we made it so it could be enough. My mother in this time got pregnant two times. She had to have abortions because there was no moneys or room for babies.”

“Anya,” Mrs. Kansky says.

“Once, the abortion came wrong and my mother had an internal ha—ham—hemorrhage.” I stutter over the word and when I finally get it out, Mrs. Kansky is by my side.

“Anya,” she says again, her hand on my arm now, her bracelet cool against my skin. “This story is from more recent years. That's not what we're discussing this term.” Her voice is quiet and she's looking right into my eyes. “Maybe you can tell it later in the year, but I think right now you should go and sit down.”

So I do. There is nothing else to do so I go back to my seat and put my hands on my desk and stare at them. Yulia passes me a note but I don't feel like reading it. I leave it there, folded up next to my pencil case. And though the class continues, I hear nothing for the rest of the lesson but a low humming noise in my ears, like an airplane stuck in midair.

After school, Yulia walks with me to the buses. There are discarded chicken bones on the quadrangle and they crunch under our feet as we go. In the sports hall kids are arriving for detention, and on the oval the football players are already doing suicides. At the bus park, we stand outside the gate. Yulia lets me drink some of her chocolate Big M while the rest of the school files past.

“Why did you do that?” she asks me finally. “We never talk in Jewish History.”

I shrug and just as I do, I feel a hand on my arm.

“Hey,” Bradley says. He has a cigarette tucked behind his ear. For a second my heart feels like it's trying to escape my body. “Was that a true story?”

“From the class?” I say. “Yes.”

“That's fucked up,” he says. Then he breaks into a grin. “Sorry, I don't know why I'm laughing.”

“Brad,” calls Maya Levine. She's standing a few feet away with Rachel and Josh. “We're going to the shops. Are you coming?”

“Yep.” He looks at me with a straight face, but then he looks over at Yulia and bursts out laughing again. “Sorry,” he manages to say. Then he turns and jogs to catch up with the others.

“What an asshole,” Yulia says. “I wish
his
mother had an abortion.”

I stick my thumb through the hole in my sweater and squint into the afternoon sunlight. “You know what?” I say. “They're right. We do dress like Russians.”

“What?” she says, although I know she heard me.

“And we stink.” I turn to look at her. “It's disgusting. We stink.”

She stands and looks at me for a long moment. Then she takes her drink out of my hand and walks away without a word, leaving me to face it all on my own, and all over again.

I
had never before bumped into a teacher on the weekend. But there he was, sitting at the counter in the window, and I slowed down to take it all in: the face that looked more relaxed than it usually did, the late breakfast in front of him, the hardcover book in his hand with the library tag on its spine. Through the glass I saw him slide something off his fork with his mouth. I felt his eyes land on me the second I took mine off him. I drew in a breath, and went inside.

I took a seat next to the wall and sipped my juice through a straw, flipping through every page of a magazine without taking my eyes off his back. Dressed down for the weekend, he was wearing a pair of faded black jeans and a khaki jacket. His dark hair, usually as carefully arranged as his desk, was ruffled on one side, as though he hadn't even checked it before heading out that morning. When the waitress came to collect his plate, I saw her brush her arm against his as she reached over him. He looked up and smiled and said something before going back to his book.

Under the fluorescent lights in the toilets, I rubbed some gloss onto my lips. I yanked my hair out of its ponytail, ran my fingers through it, and arranged it over my shoulders. It was dirty blond, and dirty. I tied it back up. My jeans were good and new and tight, but the gray hoodie that showed a stripe of stomach kept going from dorky to cute and back again. I narrowed my eyes at my reflection.
Whatever you do,
I told myself,
don't mention tampons
.

“Mr. Ackerman.”

“Sascha, hello.”

“I saw you earlier, when I walked in.”

“Ah, yes.”

“You saw me, too. Why didn't you say hi?”

“I don't know. I suppose I thought you might have better things to do on a Saturday than chat to your boring old science teacher.”

“You're not dorky.” I lap-danced my eyes over his weekend stubble, the gray T-shirt, his right hand, which was tugging at the leather band of his wristwatch. “What are you drinking?”

“It's an affogato.”

“What, like the vegetable?”

“No, it's a coffee drink. Kind of like an ice cream float for grown-ups.”

“I see.” I leaned one hand on my hip and sucked my bottom lip under the top one until it disappeared. Mr. Ackerman looked down to the floor, where one of my sneakers was standing firmly on top of the other. Then he looked around the café, at the other people sitting there, reading newspapers or quietly chatting, and back at me.

“Would you like to try one?”

I perched on the stool next to his and leaned my elbows in front of me. We kept our eyes on the street. It was early afternoon in the middle of autumn, and the sun was bright but stingy with its warmth. A woman walked past pushing an empty pram; she was talking on her mobile phone. Our silence was long and expectant, like the minutes between the snooze button and the return of the alarm.

“So,” I spat out, “sorry about the tampons.”

“Oh, don't worry about that,” he said. “You've done your time.”

Every year since seventh grade, a nurse had come to science class to talk about periods and menstruation. We were never warned beforehand; it was always just sprung on us at the beginning of the lesson. They'd schedule it for first term so the weather was still warm enough for the boys to go play sport with Mr. Ackerman on the oval, while the girls were forced to sit again through the same embarrassing question time; the same video with the same girls wearing 1980s hairstyles and fashion, back when it was really the 1980s and before it was cool again.

This year when the boys returned after the talk, Sam Geary and Sam Stewart had snatched the box of complimentary Tampax off my desk. I was too embarrassed to ask for it back. While Mr. Ackerman was out saying goodbye to the period lady, the boys had unwrapped the tampons, wet them under the tap, and thrown them up at the ceiling, where they'd stuck, the strings hanging down above us for the rest of the lesson like the stalactites we'd learned about the year before.

Later that afternoon, the tampons had dried up and started dropping, one by one, onto the floor and the heads and desks of Mr. Ackerman and his eighth-grade students. I wished I could have seen it. We were halfway through English class, and the boys were excused and the girls told to produce their tampon boxes right there and then. Of course, I was the only one who didn't have mine, so I got sent to Mr. Ackerman's office, where I stood in front of him and told him with a straight face that I had gotten my period that day and had used them all up already.

“All of them?” he'd asked.

“Two at a time,” I'd said.

Unfortunately for me, Miss Nesbit, the swimming teacher, had been keeping track of our cycles so we couldn't use the same excuse every week. When consulted, she had divulged that I wasn't due for another fortnight. I wasn't about to snitch on the Sams, so I'd sat through detention every Thursday afternoon for a month.

When my drink came, I started eating the ice cream out of it with a teaspoon. Mr. Ackerman told me in his classroom voice to stir it in so it would sweeten the coffee. I left it to melt and reached for the sunglasses sitting next to his book and keys.

“Are these yours?” I asked, putting them on. They were too big for me. The arms reached way beyond my ears and I had to press the lenses to my face with my fingers to stop them falling off. The world looked blue from beneath those glasses, like science fiction. “They're so—blingy.”

“I don't know about that.” He smiled for the first time, his face stubbly, and blue now, too. “I've had those since I was at university. They're almost as old as you are.”

I kept them on while I tasted my coffee. It was bitter and strong, and it made me cough so hard my throat stung. I pushed it aside. By the time we stood up to go, the ice cream had floated to the top and was sitting on the surface, solidifying.

Mr. Ackerman was shoving his wallet into his pocket when he came outside to where I waited on the curb. “Well, thanks for the company.”

“Thanks for the coffee.” I took a step closer. He looked away from me, to the traffic in the street. “I didn't expect to see anyone I know hanging out on this side of town.”

He looked down at me with a small smile. “I live on this side of town.”

“Oh, really? With your wife?”

“No, with my parents. I'm just here temporarily. On Charles Street.”

“Is that where you're going now, then? To your mum and dad's?”

“No, actually, I was planning to go over to the National Gallery.”

“I could come,” I said, lowering my voice, my eyes still on his. “I've got nowhere else to be.”

On the tram, I sat down while he went to buy himself a ticket. When he came back, he stood across the aisle from me and tilted his head to look out the opposite window. I looked, too.

“Think it'll rain?” I asked without caring, and he shook his head.

“Nah,” he said.

At a tram shelter outside, a few girls were laughing and backing away from another girl, who was sitting on the bench, pulling off her sweater. She was red-faced and laughing, too.
A bird probably shat on her,
I thought.

“Where are your friends today?” Mr. Ackerman looked over at me.

“Uh, Amy's at drama lessons. Nat's babysitting. Courtney's at home, she's still got glandular.”

“And your family? How come you're out by yourself?”

“My parents are in Portsea. We've got a place down there.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, as though he'd known that already. He had his sunglasses on now, so I couldn't see his eyes. More than half the seats around me were empty but he stood the whole way there, his arm reaching above his head, past the swaying handles, to hold on to the rail.

The security guard and I played the game: He pretended not to be checking me out while I pretended not to notice. My teacher went to the cloakroom, and I stopped at the first picture and checked my reflection in the gold frame. Why, I wondered, couldn't I have just drunk the stupid coffee?

“A monogamist.” Mr. Ackerman had come up behind me.

“Sorry?”

“Chagall. He loved his wife very much.” He leaned in close to the painting. “That's her up there, see? She's flying. And there he is, on the ground below, waiting for her to come down. Hoping to catch her. He put her in all his work.”

He walked on to look at the next one and I watched him go. For a science teacher he seemed to know a lot about art. I, on the other hand, didn't feel like learning schoolish things on the weekend. I dragged myself from painting to painting, ignoring the essay-long inscription next to each one, staring at the colors till they blurred. I made inkblot tests of them all. Instead of a tableful of angels, I saw a close-up of a mouth with teeth falling out. I turned a juggling bird into a woman belly dancing. A bunch of doves in a tree became soggy tampons just hanging there.

But it was true what Mr. Ackerman had said, about the guy's wife. She was all over the place. First she lay draped naked over a tree of roses. Then she was dressed as a bride with a long veil, holding a baby in her arms. And later she wore a housedress, and the two of them floated together above the orange floor of their kitchen.

I finished the room quickly and wandered out to the foyer. That's where Mr. Ackerman found me fifteen minutes later, sitting on a cushioned bench with my legs tucked under me, staring at the floor and pressing the pad of my thumb up onto the roof of my open mouth. He sat down beside me.

“I don't get what he saw in her,” I said. “I mean, she was nothing special, as far as I could see. She had no fashion sense whatsoever and she was probably double his size.”

“Maybe Chagall liked substantially sized women,” Mr. Ackerman said. He laughed when I rolled my eyes at him. “You've had enough, Miss Davies. You want to go home.”

“I want to eat.” I pulled myself to my feet. “I haven't had anything all day.”

He knew a place in Southbank that was nice and quiet, with white tablecloths and waiters in half aprons. He furrowed his brow over his menu like he did in class when someone gave a wrong answer, and he chose my meal for me because I couldn't decide. Then he asked me what had brought me to the “wrong side of town.” So I told him about the formal dress, and the sewing lady at my dad's factory who had put straps on a strapless gown, and how I wished I'd just gone to Chapel Street and bought something off the rack like all the other girls had, because now I didn't even think I should go to the formal because I'd probably be the only one in straps. He was silent through all this, looking around the room at the empty tables, the waiters chatting near the kitchen, then out the window at the river.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“Oh. Nothing. It's just a little strange, I suppose, sitting here.”

“Do you want to go to the food court?”

“No. I just—I haven't eaten out in a restaurant for a long time. But this is nice. This is fine.” He looked at me. “You're hungry.”

“I'm ravished,” I said, and he nodded and smiled down into his bread plate.

Halfway through our risottos, I finally got up the nerve to ask him if he was married. He had been, he told me, for three years, but it was over now and he didn't say why.

For a while after the divorce, he told me, he had stopped reading books. He couldn't sleep properly, either. For the longest time, he said, he would go to see movies, dramatic movies, and keep his eyes closed the whole way through. Just so he could be moved by the music. I asked him why he didn't just stay home and listen to songs in the dark, and he said he liked the ritual of buying the ticket, smiling at the popcorn sellers in their vests, and sitting among the couples and groups of kids who didn't bother turning off their phones before the main feature started. He said he liked the way the score kept up throughout a film, dipping and rising, like someone's chest as they lay sleeping. It was cathartic, he said.