twenty-four
omething strange about her hands, Harry thought. A quick-swirl breeze passed through the patio
where they were sitting, and Ruth laughed and grabbed her napkin with long- nailed fingers before it
blew into her steamed clams. "Let's go eat some clams," she had said, when he pulled her away
from the convention, "they're nice and quiet."
She saw the direction of his gaze, smiled, and put her hands down flat on the table. Her fingernails were painted cerulean blue and numbered on each hand with red like blood from one to six.
"Ruth, you", he began, with an electric-edged shock, but she interrupted.
"Have six fingers on each hand."
He stared, thinking that if she were to lace fingers with him, he would be fully engulfed by her, thumb on one side of his palm and little finger on the other. Guilty, he looked up at her face, but saw only humor in the sharp corners of her mouth. Her face is so neat, he thought, no blemishes or undue angles, just little and heartshaped and smooth.
"Buying gloves is impossible, typing's easy, playing the piano's hard, yes, I also have twelve toes, no, it didn't screw up the decimal system, and yes, I can move them all."
He sat back, and tried not to look at her hands.
"Why is playing the piano hard?"
"Because the scale is arranged for ten-fingered people. Typing's okay because there are two extra keys in the middle, G & H."
"Ever consider having the extra ones removed?"
"Which are the extra ones?"
He reached out and touched her left hand. She allowed him to pick it up and turn it over, and he felt at once repelled and attracted, by her warmth and the strangeness of her tapering fingers. She wore no rings, only the nail enamel, and it somehow didn't seem that her hands could be real. They were perfect in their sixness, and as he looked he felt that he had never really seen hands before, that here was the exception that proved the rule.
"Are you done?" Ruth asked, neutral.
"Oh, sorry, yes, you must really hate that."
Harry dropped her hand and fumbled for his own napkin.
"No, I meant your meal. We could leave, you know."
He put some money under his water glass so it wouldn't blow away, estimating that he had overtipped by about ten dollars. He didn't care. He had hardly noticed the clams, too engrossed by this impromptu date.
Earlier that day, Harry had met Ruth at a laminator's convention in a room full of salesmen with bellies overhanging their belts like over-risen bread, talking in hearty voices about pouches and hot presses.
Harry wandered the reception with a warm orange juice in hand, greeting his father's friends and telling them that, indeed, he was stepping into the old man's shoes. His father's worsening health made it impossible for him to attend this gathering, even though it was the high point of the industry's year. Harry found it hard to share his enthusiasm. Looking around, he estimated that he had another ten minutes of sanity in this room, where the air was stale with the delegates' nervous sweating and the plates of drying tuna sandwiches on the buffet.
Time to go find some real food, he thought, and then he saw her. One of the balding Lotharios, a man Harry's father described as "flash", was chatting to a tiny dark-haired woman in a short blue sleeveless dress. Her coolness was exotic, like a margarita full of crushed ice, with the acrid bite of tequila hiding under the sugary surface. The salesman had her backed into a corner, and despite her smile, Harry thought there was something of desperation in her large eyes. She leaned away from the dacron bulkhead, he was telling her an off-color joke, Harry thought, if the rising bravado in his voice was anything to go by.
Harry came up behind Flash and interrupted the joke.
"Oh, there you are, aren't we going for lunch?"
"We most certainly are," she replied, in an even, low voice, "Excuse me, it was nice talking to you."
"I'm Harry," he told her, when they emerged into hard sunlight and the smell of hotdogs charring on the vendor's carts by the waterfront, "and I really would like to take you for lunch. Unless you especially like old tuna-fish sandwiches."
When they left the restaurant, there was no talk of returning to the convention. "Let's go for a walk", she said, so they headed for the seawall. Women in wash pants and tube tops were walking dogs and pushing strollers, and teenagers roller-bladed past them, walkmans thumping.
They walked for a while without talking. Harry inhaled the yeasty smell of the docks and watched an assorted group children playing on the sand, burying each other and chasing seagulls with war-whoops. The bird-chasers held bright beach-towels clasped at their necks, like capes, and their voices floated up to him, thinned by the wind. "I'm Aquaman!" "I'm Wonderwoman!" "Those birds are endangering the future of the planet!"
"Did you ever want to be a superhero?" he asked Ruth, hoping to make amends for having given in to his curiosity about her hands.
"I liked the X-men, when I was a teenager, they were all mutants."
"Any of them have extra," he started, then thought better of it.
"No, but Anne Boleyn had six fingers, did you know that? I've even heard she had three breasts, but I don't know that from right or wrong. But in those days it was a witch sign, extra digits, and that's how Henry the Eighth had her beheaded, he just accused her of heresy. Nowadays most parents have a baby's extra fingers removed just after birth, and the child has a scar but no real memory of being any different. Surgical amputation is recommended in cases of polydactyly, they say in the textbooks, but they never say why."
Harry made a sympathetic sound, but Ruth went on.
"My parents rejected all the doctors' suggestions, they figured if it was meant to be then why mess with it, they said they couldn't bear the thought of chopping off a tiny baby's perfect finger just so I could fit in. Do you know that if the extra finger doesn't have a bone in it, they just wrap a suture around it and wait until it falls off?"
"That must hurt."
Harry thought of his baby cousin, who had cried all night when their families went camping, because she had a string from her sleeper wrapped around one of her tiny toes. When his aunt figured this out, while changing the baby's clothes in a last attempt to make her comfortable, she sat with the quiet child in her lap and cried herself.
"Well, yes, I'd say it'd hurt like hell. My kind of polydactyly, where the fingers are all in proportion, and there are bones and articulated joints, is rare, and I sometimes used to go to the medical school and let the students look at my hands."
She laughed, a rueful sound, and Harry took one of her hands again and held it.
"I used to think, when I was about ten, that I would try to become a witch when I grew up. My parents always told me I was special, and I think it went to my head for a while."
"Not any more."
"They called me spider-fingers at school, try to get me to chase them so they could run away screaming. Don't let Ruth touch you, you'll turn into a black widow."
"I'm not worried," he told her, and she laughed again.
"A black widower, you'd be."
Before he could reply, Ruth stopped in front of a stall selling gaudy silver jewelry. She picked up a ring from a tray. The headscarfed woman minding the stall watched her closely as she tried on the ring, but didn't seem to notice anything unusual.
The ring was a common design, two flattened, clasped hands, cheap-looking and not very shiny. The stall-woman remarked, "Got too many fingers."
"What?" Harry was startled by this display of bad manners from a stranger, but the woman laconically pointed to the ring.
Sure enough, on Ruth's many-fingered hand the ring looked appropriate. It had a small tube of extra silver on one side, like a finger, where the craftsman had apparently neglected to close the mould all the way.
"How much?"
"Aw, five dollars. That's what I paid for it, and nobody wants it, may as well break even."
Harry put a five dollar bill into her greenish hand, and pulled Ruth away. She was still mesmerized by the ring. It wasn't until he sat her down on a nearby bench that she came round, and looked up at him with muzzy eyes.
"It's hot," she said, in a voice that sounded far away, as if on a bad telephone connection, "We could use some rain."
"We certainly could."
A misty cloud on the horizon grew larger as they watched, gathering vapor like a fast- motion movie, until it covered the sky and shadows crept up the beach. When the rain came, it was stinging cold, almost hail. Harry tried to hold his jacket over their heads, but the rain defeated him.
"Oh, enough, enough," whispered Ruth, her hair clotted to her head, and the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
They stared at each other. The cloud dispersed with the same unnatural speed, and the children, who had run for shelter under the pier, came out to retrieve their buckets and shovels.
Ruth found her voice. "That was interesting. What else should we try?"
Harry couldn't believe that the storm had even happened, it had been so intense and fast, but his clothes were soaked and rivulets were still trickling down his neck.
"Maybe it's only weather?"
"Let's find out." Ruth sounded like a child, and her eyes were glittering. "I'd like ice cream, how about you?"
"Umm, sure."
A Mohawked teenage boy on rollerblades skated by too fast, dropping a scoop of bile- green ice-cream into Ruth's lap. She laughed, and the tremor in her voice matched the quaking of Harry's limbs.
"I guess," he managed, "you don't get a choice of flavors. But it could be coincidence, couldn't it?"
"One more try, then we'll know. You don't get three coincidences in a row. That would just be too much of a coincidence."
We'll know what? he thought, trying to catch his tumbled thoughts.
"So, what do you want?"
"I would like," she said, "for my hands not to be abnormal."
Bells tolled, with the cathedral tone of ebbing consciousness. Angelic voices murmured discordant words that Harry couldn't quite hear. The beach went translucent for a moment, then wavered slightly and disappeared.
Harry sipped his warm orange juice and listened with half his attention while one of his father's friends talked to a small dark-haired woman wearing a blue maternity dress.
"Are you hoping for a boy or a girl, Ruth?"
She smiled, and caught Harry's eye. He felt a moment of abiding sadness, welling up from a place he couldn't quite remember.
"It doesn't matter really," she replied, a bit absently, "as long as it has twelve fingers and twelve toes like everyone else."
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