The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 62: October 14

Today I went drinking with a former student who asked me, “Are you proud of your hands?”

I thought what a good question this was. As a professor, I am always struggling to ask good questions. How can a question be an invitation, not a test? Questions with answers make people scared. If you’re an up-rounder, 100 percent of possible responses to questions with answers are incorrect. The odds totally favor wrongness. Good questions can initiate a surprising wend toward an answer that is neither right nor wrong, but can be judged as strong or weak or honest or dishonest on the basis of the steps that brought the answerer there. It is a built thing. Sometimes what it builds is bullshit, but the bullshit can be so well-constructed that it has integrity, a pattern integrity. This can be worth admiring.

I admitted I was proud of my hands, though this hasn’t always been the case. I used to hate my hands. Their fingers are short, the nails bitten. When anxious, I unthinkingly chew holes in my hands. Often I do this when I’m teaching or on a stage. I’ve been on a stage and chewed a bloody hole where once there was a cuticle, and have had to scramble to find a piece of paper with which to blot the flow. Occasionally, while teaching or on stage, I’ve had to suck on my finger to keep the blood from going everywhere.

In the past I have suffered hand jealousy. Mine are stubby, with fingernails shaped like sideways rectangles. My left hand is visibly smaller than the right. I have one finger on which I can wear normal-sized rings, because the rest of my fingers I jammed playing basketball. I jammed them shorter and fatter. In the case of some rings, they do not make them big enough for my fingers.

It was fortunate, I guess, that the one normal-sized finger I possess is the finger on which wedding rings are meant to go. When I was first married, I was much more interested in wedding-type wedding rings, and those rings tend to be small, especially if you’re broke, because you have to buy them used, and so they tend to date back to an age when people and fingers were tinier. My first husband and I bought my wedding ring at a pawnshop. People marveled at our brazenness. “Isn’t it bad luck to buy a secondhand wedding ring?” These people assumed the ring had been sold to the pawnshop following a divorce. My first husband preferred to think the woman who’d once owned the ring had died in a sky-diving accident. Years after our divorce, I still own the ring. I keep it in a small box with old business cards and postage stamps of outdated denominations. The box moves around my Maine home, sometimes in this room, sometimes in that. As with many things I don’t keep track of or care much about, I never lose it.