THE BLACK HAND GIRL

a short story.....

The Black Hand Girl

After my first year at Duke University, I went to Harvard Summer School. My mother didn’t want me to go because of the Boston Strangler. “I just hate to think of you like that, with your face all purple and your tongue hanging out. Why can’t you be a normal girl and spend the summer getting a tan?”

The dean at Duke probably wouldn’t have wanted me to go to Harvard either, because at Duke I was viewed as a troublemaker, mostly because of hypnosis.

In high school I had learned how to hypnotize people by accident. “Look deep into my eyes,” I said to my sister Marie one night, when we were watching an evil hypnotist in a B movie on television. I said this with great conviction and Marie looked at me as if I were joking. Then something peculiar happened: she seemed to drift toward my eyes. “I’m going to count to five,” I whispered, “and when I get to five you’ll be in a deep trance.” I whispered because I was afraid. There was a current between us as certain as the electricity in a doorbell I’d once touched.

Marie’s eyelids fluttered. As I counted to five, her eyes closed. “Can you bark?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Will you do it?”

“Yes.”

“Be a dog, then. Bark.”

Her eyes remained closed, but Marie’s lips pulled back from her teeth, and she began to make little yipping noises. I recognized our neighbor’s chihuahua.

I counted backwards from five and Marie woke up. “I don’t think we ought to tell Momma or Aunt Doodles about this,” I said.

During my senior year in high school I developed a different technique, no longer hypnotizing through eye contact, which scared me too much, but with a lighted cigarette in a semi-dark room. Making people bark remained my favorite trick. Sometimes I told them what kind of dog to be, and other times I allowed them to choose.  I knew I shouldn’t be doing hypnosis, especially at parties, but at Duke it made me popular and feared.

College caused me authority problems right from the beginning. There were rules against women wearing pants to classes or the dining room, and a rule against wearing curlers in your hair in public. There was even a ‘suggestion’ that women shouldn’t smoke cigarettes standing up. Soon there was a new regulation concerning hypnosis.

The Dean’s summons came right after second semester began. For my audience I wore a madras wraparound skirt, a Gant button-down shirt, and a cardigan with leather patches on the elbows. I even wore a panty girdle and hose. She would see that I was a normal, healthy young woman, not a troublemaker.

Dean Pottle looked at least forty years old.  Her hair was brown and she was wearing a brown tailored suit. Her skin revealed that she had once had a mild case of acne. She was smoking a cigarette and seemed quite friendly as she invited me to sit down across from her.

“Ellen,” she said comfortingly, “we’ve had a report that you went to Dr. Hillyer’s class in the medical school wearing nothing but a bathing suit and carrying a bottle of champagne on a silver tray.”

I tried to think of how best to reply. “I’m not in the medical school, Dean Pottle, so I didn’t think the regular rules would apply. Anyway, it was Dr. Hillyer’s birthday, and some of his students asked me to deliver the champagne. It seemed harmless enough. I would never have agreed to do it if I’d known the class was at eight-thirty in the morning, I can assure you of that.”

When she said nothing, I elaborated. “I wore my trenchcoat over my bathing suit until I got to the door of the classroom, and I put it right back on as soon as I gave him the champagne.”

Her eyes seemed less affable. “The same trenchcoat you’ve been wearing to your regular classes?”

I nodded.

“Is it true you’ve been wearing your trenchcoat to classes with nothing under it?”

“It certainly is not true, Dean Pottle. I wear a slip and a bra. I even wear hose.”

“Ellen, you do know about the dress code, don’t you?”

“I’m within the dress code, Dean Pottle. It just says you can’t wear pants, it doesn’t say you have to wear a skirt. Also, a slip is a kind of skirt, isn’t it?

The Dean was trying to look stern, but I began to suspect she might like me. “Do you think of yourself as an unusual girl, Ellen?”

I nodded miserably. “Listen, Dean Pottle, would you mind if I smoked too? I’m pretty nervous.”

“Go ahead. But you do have a tendency to bend the rules, don’t you think?”

I lit a Winston. “I don’t know.”

“Let’s start with the hypnosis.”

“There was no rule against hypnosis.”

The Dean took a final meditative drag on her own cigarette and crushed it out in a brown glass ashtray.

“Anyway, there’s not much to it,” I said. “To hypnosis. I saw it on tv one night. I say corny stuff like ‘Look only at the tip of my cigarette, your eyelids are getting heavy.’ It turns out that most people are just dying to go into a trance.”

The Dean was staring at the smoke curling slowly from my cigarette.

“Hello?” I said.

With effort she looked up at me. When she didn’t speak, I continued, “I tell them, look at the glowing ember of the cigarette. Let your mind relax.”

The Dean looked right back at my cigarette. She seemed like a nice enough person. She probably thought the rules were dumb too.

“Your eyelids will close by themselves.”

Her eyelids lowered gently, like dancers bowing.

Slowly I counted to ten.  “That’s good. You’re feeling very good. Just rest now.”

A manila folder with my name on it was lying on her desk. Carefully I picked it up. In it were my college application, my board scores, and a handwritten report on the hypnosis incidents. The conclusion said I had difficulty accepting discipline and was on academic probation for poor grades.

I replaced the fold gently and said, in my most soothing voice, “When you wake up you’ll feel great. You won’t have any memory of this trance. No memory of it at all. You’ll think Ellen Burns is a nice, interesting girl with no problems. Nod your head if you understand me.”

The Dean nodded, eyes still closed.

I wanted to know what kind of dog she might be, but someone could walk in, and I wanted to put this unexpected opportunity to good use. Several of my friends were going to Harvard for the summer.

“When you wake up, I’m going to ask you about recommending me for summer school, and you’re going to think that Harvard’s a wonderful idea, despite my academic record. You’ll say Harvard is bound to help me with my authority problems. Do you understand?”

She nodded again.

I counted slowly backward from ten to one, then said, “Wake up now.”

The Dean’s eyes opened. “I feel great. You’re a wonderful girl, Ellen, with no serious problems.”

I put out my cigarette in her brown glass ashtray.  “Dean Pottle, I wanted to ask you about going to Harvard this summer.”

I had made several unsuccessful attempts to lose my virginity at Duke, and Harvard had begun to seem like a possible solution.

My roommate at Duke was named Darlene. Darlene was an angular, good-looking girl with sharp cheekbones and black hair cut in a smooth pageboy that swayed when she moved.  She had been coaching me on the loss of my virginity.

In high school I had read an article that said sperm could swim right through your underpants, so whenever I got close to intercourse with a boy, I imagined microscopic tadpoles swimming desperately through cotton fibers the size of the columns at Stonehenge. And I was distracted by other thoughts: germs swim back and forth between mouths; the tongue is a muscle and disappears down the back of the throat, so what is it attached to?

“I want to be normal,” I kept saying to Darlene. “I want to lose my normal virginity. Normally.”

“I’ll fix you up with Don. He doesn’t have any experience either. You can learn together.”

“Darlene, how can that be a good idea?”

“Trust me, it’s a good idea.”

So Darlene arranged for this boy named Don to take me to dinner at a restaurant called Chicken in the Rough. The restaurant’s logo was a long-legged chicken in a tam-o’-shanter swinging a golf club. Sitting in one of the dark red booths, I felt as if I were in a dentist’s waiting room.

Don was melancholy, with dark, dramatic looks; his thick, black eyebrows moved when he chewed. When he bit into a chicken leg, I pointed at the tiny string of meat hanging from the bone. “That’s a ligament, Don. In the fourth grade they told us that you could see what ligaments were when you ate dark meat fried chicken.”

He looked uncertain.

“That’s why I only eat white meat,” I said.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Once the top of my mouth started getting loose. I could move the skin with my tongue. So I went to the dentist and said, ‘The roof of my mouth is rotting off. I have some terrible disease.’ He looked in my mouth and said, ‘Do you eat soup?’ So I said of course I eat soup.  ‘Do you drink coffee?’ Of course I drink coffee. ‘Well, you’re drinking it too hot.’ I was kind of disappointed, you know? I thought I had some rare disease.”

Don put down his chicken leg. “I don’t know what Darlene said to you, but we don’t have to do anything. We really don’t.”

“Could we drink some beer?”

So, while the chicken and fried potatoes congealed in their grease and the salad wilted in its pool of dressing, Don and I drank a pitcher of beer, and I began to relax. Don was a good enough looking boy, although he lacked the wildness I found compelling in Darlene’s boyfriend, who had taken the mike away from the singer of a black blues band at a fraternity party and sun an original version of “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” called “Put Your Legs Round My Shoulders.”

Don had been raised by his grandmother in Greensboro, North Carolina. When he graduated, he wanted to be a newspaper reporter in a small Southern town. He said his grandmother’s lifelong wish was to meet Lawrence Welk. Someday Don hoped to arrange that for her.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.

In the bathroom, I confronted the most serious obstacle to the loss of my virginity. Under my skirt I was wearing a panty girdle. I hadn’t really meant to wear the girdle, but when I was dressing I kept hearing my mother’s voice saying, Any woman looks better in a girdle, so I’d put it on experimentally, and it felt so secure, so bracing, that I’d left it on. Now I didn’t know what to do about it. I considered taking it off, but it was too bulky for the pocket of my trenchcoat.

What I did have in my pocket was a Norform vaginal suppository that Darlene had given me to insert “Just before intercourse.” It was supposed to lubricate me, a word that made me feel like a car. But when was “just before intercourse”? After I peed, I inserted the suppository and pulled the girdle back into place, feeling deeply relieved. The girdle meant I couldn’t make love, but the suppository meant I sincerely wanted to.

On the way out of Chicken in the Rough I stopped at the bar in the front room and downed a double shot of bourbon, neat. “I never met anybody like you,” Don said.

“I’m absolutely normal,” I said, feeling a rush of love for the shot glass. “I’m normal for me. Really.”

The November night was inky blue, the air clean and brisk. Don put his arm around me as we walked. The bourbon warmed my blood and the melting Norform made me feel odd.  I stopped Don on the street and kissed him the way I thought someone in a movie might kiss.

Soon we were in the dormitory parking lot, leaning against a stranger’s empty car, still kissing cinematically. Then we were in the back seat of the same car, half lying down. Just when the kissing was getting boring, Don put his hand up my skirt. I had never had anyone’s hand up my skirt before.

His fingers moved tentatively up my legs. “My god, what’s this?” he said, encountering the girdle.

I wanted to explain, but I was too dizzy.

His hand wandered around the flesh of my thigh, then moved upward and inward. The dissolved Norform was all over the crotch of the girdle. “My god, you’re wet,” he said.

I tried to hold still.

“Okay,” he mumbled, sliding two fingers awkwardly up the leg of the panty girdle.  When he touched me something flashed in my head, and my hips pushed hard against his hand.

“Oh my god, oh my god,” he said, pulling his hand free.

“I’ll take it off,” I said. “No problem. Here. I can take it off.”

Don was still crouched over his hand. His fingers glistened in the darkness. A lump appeared behind his knuckle and swelled while I watched.

“It’s…..it’s growing,” I said.

“It’s sprained,” he said.

I became famous almost overnight.

Don told no one about the girdle, but he did admit to Darlene’s boyfriend that his injury was “sort of sexual.”

“Sort of sexual,” Darlene’s boyfriend said, “what is sort of sexual?”

Don’s hand was not sprained. He had broken a blood vessel behind his knuckle. Overnight the blood spread under his skin, turning it puffy and greenish. By the end of the week, his hand had turned black, with a dark red palm.

Boys I’d never heard of called me at the dorm, and Don followed me to several classes. “We’ll try it again. We’ve got to try it again.” He looked vulnerable, stunned by love, extending his black hand.

I never wanted to see Don again in my whole life, so I felt almost relieved when my mother telephoned and said, “Why don’t you fly home this weekend and get measured for your hand-sewn human-hair wig?”

She met me at the airport in Charleston, just before midnight on a Friday. She was wearing purple toreador pants, a gold lame shirt, gold slippers, a stroller-length mink coat, and large dark glasses.

I don’t want anyone to recognize me,” she whispered, looking uneasily around the deserted airport. “That’s why I have on these glasses.”

For a year now my mother had been addicted to diet pills. Am-bars,” she would say in a singsongy voice. “I was a different person before I found Am-bars. The am stands for amphetamine and the bar stands for barbiturate! The amphetamine speeds you up, and the barbiturate slows you down. You don’t have any appetite, but you’re not nervous!”

Before my mother found diet pills, she did not speak in italics and exclamations, and she was not wiry and loud. Before she found diet pills, she was heavy and depressed. Now she liked to scrub the tiles in the bathroom with a toothbrush, and she had fired the maid because she said it felt so good to push the vacuum cleaner around and polish the silverware herself. She liked to get down between the tines of the forks. “It takes patience! I have lots of patience!”

Her arms vibrated as she embraced me. “Doesn’t it look real?” she whispered. “Isn’t it astounding?” She patted her hair, which was set in a French twist.

Her hair was so smoothly arranged that no false scalp showed, but the elegant twist did look odd. My mother’s real hair is naturally curly.

The next day I was staring at myself in the beautician’s mirror. “Thank you, Momma.”  Like Momma’s wig, Aunt Doodles’ wig, and my sister Marie’s wig, mine was set in a French twist.

The four of us were standing around the beauty parlor. We had the monolithic look of a gang. “The French Twist Gang,” Marie said quietly, meeting my eyes in the mirror. Marie had grown tall and fragile, a natural blond with a sweet smile and a placid manner. She was three years younger than me.

Aunt Doodles was married to my mother’s brother Royce. “We all look alike in these wigs,” Doodles said, “but I’m the inflated version.” Doodles didn’t care for the diet pills because, she said, they made her heart hurt.

Doodles was built square, “like a refrigerator,” she would announce cheerfully. She wheezed loudly almost all of the time. “There’s just not much room for air in there,” Marie had once remarked.

After my wig fitting, we went shopping, and I bought a garter belt. “I’m not wearing girdles anymore, Momma. Don’t ask. I’m just not, no matter what.”

The wig not only changed how I looked, it changed how I felt about myself. When I got back to school, boys stopped pursuing me. Perhaps they no longer recognized the black hand girl. I abandoned not only hypnosis but parties, and my study habits improved. By the time I got to Harvard, I had been taken off academic probation. Dean Pottle later claimed that her confidence in me had “turned me around.”

I met Nicky Sommers on a sticky Saturday night in a drugstore in Harvard Square, where I was buying a new copy of Peyton Place because the pages of my copy were falling out.  He was buying a book called Thinking about the Unthinkable, which I assumed was pornographic but turned out to be about nuclear war.

My copy of Peyton Place was worn out because, in the long afternoons in my apartment in Back Bay, while my roommate, Dottie Plant, was out waitressing, I had discovered masturbation.

When I was wearing the wig I dressed like a Duke sorority girl and studied calmly, but when I was not wearing the wig a certain wildness seemed to overtake me. “Anything goes,” I sang one night and danced around the apartment as if I were in a musical comedy. So I tried to wear my French twist wig almost every day, and I was making good grades. Dean Pottle was going to be proud.

My wig got gummy with dirt, and I had to give it up for six days to have it professionally cleaned. Without the wig I began to wear white lipstick. I combed my hair out straight and drank Scotch on the rocks while I studied. Sometimes I dressed in a black jersey and tight black jeans and imagined I was a beatnik like the ones I’d seen in Time magazine. I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I reasoned, and no one in North or South Carolina need ever know I was behaving this way.

Sexually, I began to experiment. I read the sex scenes in Peyton Place and drifted into them like hypnosis, my old teddy bear clutched tight between my legs. I felt bad about my teddy bear, who was not holding up well under this assault, but as long as I didn’t touch myself, I was sure I couldn’t be doing anything wrong. Then one afternoon when it was too hot in the apartment to wear a lot of clothes, my wildness overcame my scruples. I touched my genitals and bled. The word masturbation finally occurred to me. I realized I had deflowered myself.

My wig would be available again on Monday. On Saturday night, since I was ruined anyway, I went to a drugstore in Harvard Square in my white lipstick, black jersey, and tight black jeans, to buy a new copy of Peyton Place. I was standing furtively behind the paperback rack when this boy wearing jeans that looked as if they hadn’t been washed in a month said, “Are you from down home?” He had an unmistakable Southern drawl.

I didn’t answer, of course, or even look up. My mother’s warnings about the Boston Strangler had made a vivid impression on me, so vivid, in fact, that when I tried to swear off Peyton Place, long fantasies about the Boston Strangler had drifted in to replace it.

“Southerners look different,” he continued. “We walk different, or something.”

That the Boston Strangler was a Southerner seemed unlikely, so I looked him full in the face. “Where are you from?”

“Texas.” He had a nice smile and crooked teeth. His hair was stringy, and he wore glasses.

“Texas isn’t the South,” I said. “Texas is the West.”

If I hadn’t agreed to go drink beer with Nicky Sommers, I wouldn’t have told him funny stories about my family, and if he hadn’t laughed so much at these stories, I wouldn’t have drunk so much. If I hadn’t drunk so much, I wouldn’t have ended up back at my apartment with him, and if Dottie Plant had been home I wouldn’t have ended up on the sofa with him. If he hadn’t been lying with his skinny hip jammed against my tight black jeans, I wouldn’t have drifted into Peyton Place.

Your nipples are as hard as diamonds, the irresistible man whispered, and Do it to me, the woman whispered back.

Nicky unbuttoned my shirt and cupped his hand over my breast.

“Diamonds!” I shouted, and we both began to shudder. I tried to stop making sounds and kept my eyes shut tight.

“Hey,” he kept saying. “Hey,” but not as if he expected any response.

I was breathing as if I’d been running.

“Wow,” Nicky whispered, “you had an orgasm.”

“I did not,” I said, trying not to cry.

“Wow, I never gave a girl an orgasm. Hey. Wow.”

When Nicky arrived at my apartment for our first real date on Monday night, he had cut his hair and shaved so close his jaw looked raw and scraped. We were going to a French restaurant, where, he promised, the menu would really be written in French.

Nicky was wearing a suit and tie, and on his feet were grown-up, lace-up men’s shoes. In his hand was a bouquet of daisies.

I had picked up my wig from the cleaners. I was wearing a blue sheath dress, my garter belt, hose, and high heels.

“Your hair looks great that way,” Nicky said.

We stared dumbly at each other, like people who have fallen in love.