Upon My Sword | Liz Pertzoff
My hands are an enlarged version of a lady’s hands that in Victorian literature might have been described as “long-fingered if nicely formed.” When I was younger I’d expected my fingers to become replicas of my mother’s when she was the age I am now–arthritic knuckles the size of small walnuts and nails professionally manicured like wizened apple dolls with bright red lips.
But this didn’t happen. My fingers are straight and strong, except for my index fingers which lean slightly and I believe affectionately into their adjoining fuck-you neighbors.
For nearly twenty years I wore bandaids on my fingers. I lost the tip of my left pointer when I was carving a turkey. My mother had been visiting. This must have been the sixth or seventh night. She only lived three hundred miles away but she visited infrequently and her sojourns were Chekhovian in duration and style. I was carving the turkey and she was still yakking—the woman never shut up. I took a swig of single malt and in a heroic sacrifice to save my mother’s life, I deflected the knife which was heading toward her heart onto my own finger.
I needed the ER. My car was manual which she couldn’t drive, so I sat behind the wheel with a towel around my hand, motor running, headlights aimed toward the hospital, waiting for my mother. She emerged at the front door to ask if she could wear my mink because it wouldn’t show blood if any sprayed onto the passenger side of the car. She’d arrived in something white, no doubt endangered. “Wear the mink.”
My hands are richly scarred—two brown spots from the morning I hurried bacon for my father-in-law’s breakfast. An inch-long silvery rope on the palm of my right hand from falling off my bike, my big sister’s hand-me-down Western Flyer with balloon tires which had perpetual slow leaks making the bike dangerous to maneuver.
There is a thin scar on the side of my right pointer. I’d been quarreling with my husband while fixing dinner, standing at the kitchen door halving an avocado while he lounged on the sofa. My voice was getting shrill because I was working myself up into a homicidal lather. Suddenly Mr. Wonderful stopped his side of the noise and said, “Look at what you’re doing. Aren’t you right-handed?” I stopped short, too. Blood was dripping into the avocado I held in my right hand, halved with a knife I held in my left hand.
That marked the end of the bandaid years, the end of my “murder turned inward” self-mutilating psychiatric disturbance, the end to ER visits and stitches.
What these large straight-fingered and finely-formed hands can do besides mayhem is make things. They can throw pots on a wheel, knit Aran sweaters, notate canons, stitch Ukrainian tapestry, rescue weak gravies, invisibly mend, plait blonde hair, copy any color in paint, and compose a pretty thank you note. They’ve more than redeemed themselves. They are by no means terminally lethal.