Mechanics

Mary froze in the front doorway when she saw Jonathan standing beside the sofa wearing a long-sleeved shirt-sleeves for the first time in his life filled with arms. The arms were plastic, as if he’d pulled them off a mannequin. They hung awkwardly at his side, as if he didn’t know what to do with them because he’d never had arms. He walked over and held her. She heard vinyl and metal squeak, and over his shoulder she saw the back of his shirt wrinkle with the mechanisms underneath. She imagined the pulleys under his shirt working his arms tight.

“These are only temporary arms,” he said. “It’s so I can get used to them. I’ll get real ones next year.”

His embrace was like being squeezed by a G.I. Joe, but it felt good. His constricting grip spoke insistently to her back and ribcage. It shouted, Love me. Then, Love me more. She welcomed their painful first words. It had been a hard few months without any arms to speak to her since she’d moved in with him. She pressed her face into his shoulder and cried.

* * *

Mary grew up understanding the language of touch. Her father was born without a face. A muss of wavy red hair covered the top of his head. Below, a blank sheet of skin, dotted with a few freckles and pulled taut over the skull. Others found his appearance disconcerting, proffering sideways glances and raised eyebrows as he walked down the street tapping a cane ahead of him or holding her hand. She found his non-face serene and reassuring. When he spoke to her, it was with his fingers on her chin, his palms brushing her hair. Holding her head with both hands, smoothing the apples of her cheeks with his thumbs meant You make me proud. By squeezing her biceps in his hands and leaning his forehead into hers, he said, I’m sorry your mother left us. He would hug her for minutes, not trying to talk or probe into her eyes, just his arms across her back saying, You are loved. The pads of his fingers dimpled her skin saying, Very much.

The language of touch left little opportunity for lies. She learned to understand it in everyone else, then learned people’s eyes talked for them, too. Words said what people thought. The heaviness in their eyes and in their touch said what they meant, and it was this language, with its own etiquette and grammar, that she learned to trust.

* * *

The day they met, Mary watched Jonathan wander the aisles of the hardware store, a bag looped over his shoulder. He wore shorts and no shirt, his skin shiny and red from the afternoon sun. He was handsome, muscular everywhere except his missing arms. She grew annoyed each time a customer needed to be rung up, distracting her. After several minutes he emerged from the closest aisle and walked toward the register. He shrugged to let his bag drop onto the counter and she pulled out a length of nylon rope and a ceiling hook.

“You’re not going to hang yourself, right?” She joked, but Jonathan didn’t laugh.

“How much?” He reached his toes into the pocket of his cargo shorts and brought out his wallet.

“I can’t let you buy these.” She hid the items under the counter.

“You have to.”

“Not if I don’t want to,” she said. “I don’t want to.”

He stared down at the counter. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.” He smiled. “I want to take you to dinner.”

Mary blushed and coughed into her hand. When she saw he was awaiting an answer, she shook her head and walked into the break room, leaving him at the counter.

That night, she talked to her father about the suicidal man at the hardware store. He sat across from her, leaning forward, his elbow on the kitchen table, his chin in his hand. He wasn’t eating with her. He never did. He breathed and ate through a hole in his throat that other times he kept covered with a thin material. The tube he had to insert in order to eat made breathing difficult, and slurping his soup quickly turned into a spurting, frothy mess, an indignity he preferred to suffer alone. He showed the hole to Mary once when she was young and she ran to her room, crying. Since then, he’d kept most things about himself private, even to her.

“I couldn’t date him,” she told him. “I need someone with arms.” She stared at her face in her bowl of tomato soup. Her eyes looked back, cast in a glassy red, saying I can love. I can.

“I can’t trust words, you know?”  She stared into the washed out plain of her father’s face. “I need arms.”

He reached across the table and patted around until he found her hand. His grip said, I believe in whatever you do.

* * *

The next day, Jonathan pushed open the front door of the hardware store with his shoulder and walked up to her at the front counter.

She said, “I’m not selling it to you.”

He said, “Go to dinner with me.” His voice did something strange-it lay on top of her hands on the counter, wrapped around them.

Looking down, she couldn’t see the words but could feel them there. Words cradled her palms like fingers. She wanted to fill the silence, started moving her lips, searching for the answer to his request.

She told him about her last date, a few weeks before, with Randall. His mother owned the deli across the street and he asked Mary to dinner as he sliced her roast beef. They ate at an Italian restaurant downtown. His eyes were bright blue and aggressive, trying to read past hers and into her brain. He asked her, “What do you think of our potato salad?  I make it myself.” Then he bore down on her with his polygraph eyes until she had to look away, and still she could feel his eyes travel down her dress and fondle her breasts. He said, “You’re real pretty.” As they were leaving, Randall put his arm across her shoulders. His arm said, I own you, the first time she’d been told the truth all night. She hadn’t been back to the deli since. Randall had come into the store in the days after, asking if she wanted to go out again. She busied herself restocking hammers and handsaws, and feigned noises of indecisiveness until he said he had to get back to the deli. After a couple days, he stopped asking.

Jonathan listened. As she spoke, his eyes stayed on hers, and she found herself able to continue talking. She didn’t feel as if he were trying to pry any more words from her beyond what she had to say. She felt comfortable in his gaze, like crawling into her father’s lap as a little girl, telling him everything on her mind. The more comfortable she became in Jonathan’s stare, the more she found herself unable to stop talking. She talked about when she was seven and fell off a neighborhood boy’s skateboard, how she screamed and screamed until her father walked out to her and lifted her off the sidewalk as surely as if he could see her. After she rang up an older man who came in to buy some plumber’s tape and a U-pipe, she told Jonathan about the other normal people she dated, about the boy in high school who said he loved her and, even though his eyes said differently, she let him take her virginity.

At closing time she told him about when her mother left, how, when she was in junior high, her mother came into her bedroom early in the morning, before the sunrise. The streetlights outside lit only her face, floating, crying. Her mother said she couldn’t handle living like this anymore. “I want someone to look at me,” she said, “tell me I’m beautiful, tell me he loves me. I want to feel him kiss me, feel his lips on my lips, feel his lips on my body.” Her words scratched at Mary’s ears. She shirked her mother’s hand on her shoulder, hoped she’d never have to feel her mother’s touch again. Her mother brushed the hair away from Mary’s face, and she could hear the betrayal in the whispering of fingers across her forehead. As she was telling this to Jonathan, she toyed with the keys in her hand and stared down the row of stick-on house numbers. She’d never told anyone about that morning, not even her father. When he woke up to find his wife gone forever, Mary acted surprised along with him. She wasn’t afraid her arms would betray her to her father-she wanted only to share in his grief and forget her own.

“I understand,” Jonathan said.

She smiled.

“You’re the reason I’m not dead right now,” he said.

His voice left his mouth and folded itself over her shoulders, wrapping around her. The words ran across her cheek and cupped her chin, held her face to look straight into his.

“Yes,” she said.

Jonathan looked confused.

“Dinner. Yes.”

* * *

Jonathan became adept at using his new arms. A few weeks after the day he surprised her with that first hug, Mary watched him do the dinner dishes. He cradled the delicate stems of the wine glasses in his pink action-figure hands glistening with soap. The water ran in ribbons down to the open seams of his elbow before pooling into one long bead that dribbled onto the rim of the sink. He ran a towel over the glasses and the dinner plates and the silverware with a magician’s flourish, then dried all the divots and crevices in his arms with astounding accuracy. Earlier that afternoon, his fingers had worked a needle through the fabric of his pants when patching a hole in his jeans. He had the touch of an artisan until the plastic met her skin. After he’d finished the dishes, they sat on the couch watching Tarzan the Ape Man while he ran his hand across her hair. His fingers in her hair were trying to say Even the very thought of you completes me. But the way his manufactured appendages rifled her scalp, it came out as You think you’re completed by me.

* * *

Before he had arms, Jonathan had come home with the groceries to find her pressed into the coat closet, wrapped in scarves and sleeves, warmed by the touch of wool all around her. When she cooked, she cinched the apron so tightly the strings bruised her hips. She knew it hurt him, could tell by the way he asked, “Is everything all right?” and the words brushed the hair from her face.

She tried not to hold his armlessness against him. She loved how his words embraced her, but it was a long way from physical embrace. The first time they had sex, before she moved in, Mary didn’t know how to proceed. The way he removed her clothing, with his teeth and then his toes, was at once arousing and baffling. They began to sweat, and when her arms became tired, she was afraid she would slip sideways without him holding her, but Jonathan never closed his eyes, held fast to hers the entire time. His soft hums and groans slinked across her skin. It was the most intimate she’d ever felt, though she missed having a lover’s fingers exploring her body. In the moments afterward, she felt comforted by his body nested with hers, but she missed the warm touch of an arm resting on her hip.  Her love for him confused her.

* * *

Now that he had them, Jonathan used his arms-with their unrealistic flesh tones and Made-in-Malaysia stamps on the shoulders-in place of the words once used. When she brushed her teeth in the morning, he no longer walked up behind her, rested his chin on her shoulder and wrapped his words around her when he said, You’re more beautiful than the sunrise. This morning he put his fake arms around her waist and they said The sun is beauty. He still hadn’t learned how hard to squeeze to say what he wanted, figuring out where to rub her back in an approximation of The way you look at me makes my heart race. His forearms, palms, biceps, wrists, and fingertips touched her with an accent, loud and fumbling. An acquired language, but still a touch, what she had been craving since their first date.

* * *

A few weeks before, he had yelled at her for the first time. Leaving a restaurant, he held her hand, his grip screaming, Pretty fingers. Come.

She pulled her hand away. “Shut up,” she muttered.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. He reached for her hand again and she pulled away.  “Did I do something?”

“Please don’t touch me right now,” she said. “Your fingers-.” She shook her head.

“Did I do something?” he repeated.

She stared into a shop window.

“You don’t want me to touch you, but you won’t tell me why,” he shouted. The people walking from the parking lot to the door of the restaurant turned to look. His voice gripped her arm and spun her to face him. She hadn’t felt his voice lately.

“I’m sorry,” she said, slipping her hands around his arm and feeling the plastic bicep beneath his coat. “I didn’t mean it.”

He raised his hand and pressed it into her cheek. It yelled, I’m touching you now. She cringed and rested her head on his shoulder as they walked to the car.

* * *

When Tarzan ended, hues of grey dimming to black, they went to bed and made love. He removed her clothes with his hands, pulling them off in a normal way, in everyone else’s way. The conversation his fingers had with her body was tinged with the inaccurate and heavy diction of a foreigner. His hands drew across her thighs and hips, whispering Malaysian love songs in fingertip accents. His “I love you” echoed a bit, slightly hollow. Mary looked at her lover’s closed eyes and couldn’t remember his name.

Later, she watched the stars out the window as the heat from his body warmed her back, his vinyl arm cool against her skin where it draped over her waist. Lying in bed, listening to his breath fall into the rhythm of sleep, she turned and looked at the harness that held his arms to his body. The leather straps were smooth and black and strong, auxiliary to the curves of his muscles. Gently, she rolled him onto his back, pulled on the buckle, and the straps sighed away from his body. She lifted his arms off and away without disturbing him from his sleep.

She carried the arms into the living room and sat on the couch, looking at all the wire and leather and plastic that, over the past several weeks, had conveyed Jonathan’s words in such choppy translation. Arms-plastic, flesh, or otherwise-had little to say when separated from the body. She brushed the vinyl fingertips across her face, but they said nothing. Draped across her shoulders, the arm felt like a smooth garden hose, closing tighter around her neck. She grew angry at the arms for not speaking to her. She thought of her mother, how she ran away because her father didn’t have eyes or lips or words. Would Mary have left Jonathan if he had never gotten these arms? The tops of her ears tingled. Her mother’s voice echoed-I want to feel him kiss me-then her own chimed in-I need him to hold me. The voices rang and rang until they merged into a million clapping hands, fleshy palm against fleshy palm, so loud she ran outside still carrying the arms and screamed into the dark. She crossed the yard to the garage, still naked and glowing in the moonlight, and she fired up the lawnmower. The yell of the engine ripped through the quiet of night. Across the yard, a light turned on in their bedroom and a few seconds later Jonathan ran naked out the back door, too late. Pieces of the plastic arms sprayed across the concrete floor, pink fingertip and elbow and bicep falling with grass clippings and sawdust. The blades gnashed at the arms as they were swallowed under the lawnmower with loud, brittle cracks.

“What are you doing?” he yelled over the noise. “This is what you wanted,” he said.

She said, “I didn’t know, I didn’t know. I don’t want them.” She spoke to the armless shadow cast by the moon across the garage floor. Her hand released the kill switch, letting the lawnmower’s engine choke and sputter and fade into the quiet dark.