We Others

by Steven Millhauser

  “Worse!” I whispered. “How could I—”

  “By thinking about it,” she scarcely said. I could feel her looking at me, as if she were touching my face.

  “I never think about it,” I said, turning suddenly, but Emily was leaning back with half-closed eyes.

  That night, as I sat at my desk, it struck me that her words, which had barely crept out of silence, might have had another meaning. I had thought she meant that I was making it worse by drawing attention to something she wanted to forget. But now I wondered whether she’d meant that I was literally making it worse—harming her hand by my thoughts, which she could feel pushing painfully against it, like sticks.

  A few days later, Emily and I were walking home under the maples. I was talking and gesturing with my right hand, which suddenly struck Emily’s left elbow. “Sorry!” I almost shouted.

  Emily smiled at me. “You didn’t exactly kill me, you know,” she said, with a little laugh.

  I gave a little laugh of my own. “So tell me,” I said. “What does the doctor say?”

  Emily stiffened. In the silence I could hear her wide leather belt creaking as she walked.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Nothing? The guy just stands there, like an idiot?”

  “Nothing good. Nothing that helps. They don’t know anything. Anything anything anything.”

  “All right,” I said. “All right.”

  One night I dreamed that Emily held out her gloved hand to me. “I can’t get it off,” she said. I fumbled with the buttons, which wouldn’t come undone, and as I unrolled the glove clumsily, for it clung tightly to her skin, I uncovered a smooth, pink, perfectly formed foot.

  I could sense a change. In class she would lower her hand hesitantly to the desk, as if the slightest touch were more than she could bear. When she walked in the corridors, she cradled her books clumsily with her right arm, so that they were crushed up against her. Sometimes a book would slide slowly from the pile and fall to the floor with a sharp noise, like a shot. Then, before I could get to her, she would crouch down quickly, sitting awkwardly on her upraised heels, with one knee higher than the other, and balance her books in her lap while she reached for the fallen book with her right hand.

  That was what I saw; but there must have been many things I didn’t see, small embarrassments and humiliations. She had already withdrawn from typing class; she no longer went to gym. When I passed her in the halls, she was always walking alone. People gave her a little distance. No one wanted to brush against the white glove. It was easier to pretend she wasn’t there.

  I watched her—watched that glove. It clung to her hand like a growth on her skin. Emily was right: I could feel my thoughts scratching at the whiteness, like fingernails. Sometimes, glancing over, I would see a white wound, a bright gash in her flesh—and I would reproach myself, for after all, it was only a glove.

  One rainy Saturday night I was sitting on the couch beside Emily in her dark living room, watching a black-and-white movie. A man in a rumpled suit and a dripping hat was walking along a deserted road at three in the morning, in a splattering downpour that seemed to be part of the rain outside. I had driven over after dinner in my father’s Dodge; Mr. and Mrs. Hohn had retired upstairs after the ten o’clock news. When her parents left, Emily had turned off the lamp on the table between the couch and the armchair, for her father always liked to have a light on when he watched television. The room wasn’t entirely dark; television light flickered on the mahogany lamp table, and light from a streetlamp entered beneath two slightly raised shades and lay in dim stripes along one wall. Emily sat on my left, with her cordovan loafers off and her legs tucked under. Her knees were toward me; the white glove lay stretched along her thigh. The whiteness grew brighter and dimmer as the movie changed.

  I could hear the rain falling on the porch roof and dripping along the side windows, and I could hear the movie rain beating against the deserted road. Now and then there was a crack of thunder, which might have come from either place. It was the sort of night I liked best—the sound of movie rain, the different sound of real rain, the dark room touched by streetlight, Emily sitting quietly beside me with her legs tucked under, the peaceful house. But the glove lay there, invading the night, disrupting the dark with its irritating whiteness. I wished that she’d covered it with a blanket, or held it farther away. It was so close that I could have reached over and unbuttoned it without shifting more than a shoulder.

  The movie ended. The last scene showed a close-up of the man, who was sitting at a bar with rain dripping from his hat. Emily rose, walked over to the television, and turned it off. She came back to the couch and sat down, stretching her legs out on the coffee table. Her ankles lay next to a little porcelain man playing an accordion. In the dark living room I could hear the rain, which was coming down quite hard, and it occurred to me that the exaggerated sound of the movie rain had actually been the sound of the real rain striking Emily’s porch roof and dashing itself against the bushes by the windows. We sat in the dark, as we often did, and Emily said, “It’s nice, sitting in the dark.” “Yes,” I said, “it’s nice.” The gloved hand lay in her lap. It rested on its side, the palm facing me; a dim streak of light touched her bare forearm and the wrist of the glove. I could see the two buttons very clearly.

  “Look at that,” I said, and lightly touched her forearm where the dim light lay across it. She looked down at her arm, where my two fingers rested. I moved my fingers slowly down her forearm until the side of a finger touched the edge of the glove. Slowly I lifted one finger and stroked the white cloth. It was softer than I had imagined. “What are you doing,” Emily whispered. “Nothing,” I said. I began stroking the part of the glove that lay over her wrist. Emily’s right hand descended onto my fingers. She lifted my hand and placed it on her collarbone. With the fingers of her right hand she unbuttoned the top button of her shirt. Then she undid the button below. I felt the sudden edge of her white bra and the skin below her collarbone; my thumb touched the small connecting strap that joined the parts of the bra. I understood, with absolute clarity, that she was offering me her breasts in place of her hand. An immense pity came over me, for Emily Hohn, for the two of us sitting there like sad children, for the dark room and the spring rain, before anger seized me. She was hiding something from me—trying to put me off the scent. I reached down and began to unbutton the glove. Emily cried out—a single high sharp note, like the wail of an animal—then knocked my hand away and swung out of the couch. In the dark her hair looked wild, and for a moment, as she loomed over me, I had the sense that she was standing in the rain, glaring down at me, her hair dripping, her face shining, as I lay in a puddle at the side of the road with the rain beating against my face.

  8

  She was absent the next day. At home I dialed her number and hung up after the first ring. I was angry at myself in every way, but it was more complicated than that—I felt I’d been driven to the edge of what I could bear by the oppressive white glove. In all this, Emily wasn’t innocent—she knew something and refused to speak. Exactly what I’d hoped to accomplish by removing the glove was no longer clear to me. But the glove had disturbed the harmony between us, had introduced a note of uncertainty, of opacity. If I longed to see what lay underneath, it wasn’t simply in order to gratify a by now ferocious curiosity, but to release Emily and me from the spell of secrecy, to return us to peacefulness—for there was no peace between us anymore, only the mocking white glove. I hated that glove, hated the way it sat there without doing anything. I wanted to tear it off and set it on fire. Better yet, I would bury it in my backyard. Then a tree would grow, and every spring, when the maples put out their yellow-green and dark red flowers, the buds of my tree would open into white gloves.

  When she appeared at school the following day, she rigorously avoided my gaze. She looked tired and drawn; her anger, if it was that, seemed a kind of sadness. I stayed out of her way. It was all fine with me—fine to smas
h things up, fine to be done with it all. High school would end, I would drag my way through the stupefying summer, then off to college and a new life, hey ho. It was all fine: dead and fine. She was already a memory—the girl with the white glove.

  A week passed, the weather grew warmer. On the way home from school I heard the sound of hedge clippers and electric edgers. Someone was tarring a driveway. The smell of fresh tar mingled with bursts of cut grass. In school the windows were wide open and I could hear the dark cry of a mourning dove and the leathery smack of a baseball against a glove. One afternoon at my locker I heard a voice say, “Are you angry at me?” and I felt as if a hammer had struck the side of my head.

  “Angry! No, why would I, not really, I thought you—”

  “So would you like to”—she shrugged—“I don’t know, come over?”

  Then I was walking home with her, through flickers of light and shade. On the front porch we sat on the glider. Mrs. Hohn brought out a plate of sugar cookies, each with a dab of jelly in the center, and glasses of iced tea. It was as if nothing had happened—had anything happened?—but I felt something unspoken in the air, like a heaviness. I glanced at Emily. She was staring straight ahead and holding a cookie in her hand, stroking it with her thumb. Sugary granules fell in her lap. I stared out past a square porch post, one side in sun and one in shade. Shadows of maple leaves moved on the sunny part. Emily said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”

  “Thinking?”

  “About—you know.” She shrugged her right shoulder—a quick impatient little shrug, which made the right side of her collar lift and fall. “I’m ready now.”

  “Ready! I don’t know what you—”

  She looked at me. “To—you know—show you.”

  Her eyes burned at me—I had to look away.

  “Only if you—” was all I could say.

  It was to take place Saturday night. Her parents were going out and they wouldn’t be back before midnight. She’d been thinking about it, ever since that night, and she now saw that it was the right thing to do. She had feared I would never visit her again, once I knew. She’d been afraid, she’d been ashamed, but she was no longer that way. Her mother wanted it kept a secret. Her mother would kill her. But Emily trusted me. It was meant to be.

  “There’s just one thing,” she said.

  “Which is?”

  “Whether you’re really sure.”

  “You mean whether I’m sure you—”

  “I mean sure you really want to.”

  “What makes you think—”

  “It’s just that it’s not—it isn’t what you think.”

  “I don’t think anything.”

  She threw me a look. “I mean it might really bother you. I mean more than you think.”

  “But you—you’re the one—”

  “It’s you—it’s you—you don’t like it when things—you know, when things—”

  “When things—”

  “When things aren’t—when they’re not—not the way you—”

  And an irritation came over me, for it was as if I were the one being tested.

  “Oh, don’t worry about me. But are you sure you—”

  “Oh yes—yes—I mean if you’re sure you—”

  This was on a Tuesday. During the rest of the week we fell into our old habits with a kind of gratitude. It was early June; under the maple leaves Emily walked through trembling spots of sun with a light jacket tied around her waist. From the porch I watched the girls across the street jumping rope. Overhead a squirrel scampered across a telephone wire and leaped onto a branch. In the warm summery air I could hear the smack of the rope, the soft clatter of a basketball against a backboard, the slam of a wooden screen door. Beside me, on the glider, Emily sat with her legs tucked under. Her black flats rested on the floor of the porch and her gloved hand lay in her lap. She was wearing a rose-colored shirt with the sleeves rolled neatly above her elbows and a tartan-plaid skirt held in place at the side by a gigantic safety pin the size of a pocket comb. On the green wicker table, a black tin tray painted with pink flowers held a pitcher of pale yellow lemonade in which dark yellow slices of lemon floated. We talked about a paper for English, and her friend Debby’s troubles at home, and the summer. She wished she could go on a family trip the way she used to in her childhood—she missed that camp in New Hampshire—while I argued that summer was a perfect time for doing absolutely nothing. “What do you mean by ‘nothing’?” Emily asked. The rope slip-slapped. In the gleaming windshield of a parked DeSoto, I could see a perfect reflection of green leaves, brown branches, and blue sky. “Nothing,” I said, “is the least amount of effort over the greatest amount of time.” “That,” said Emily, “is so—” and burst out laughing. The glider creaked. The sun shone down.

  9

  On Friday night I played Scrabble with the Hohns on the dining room table, under the little brass chandelier with six bulbs shaped like flames. Beside the table stood a wheeled cart on which lay a plate of homemade peanut butter cookies and four glasses of limeade, each at a different level. “Don’t,” Mrs. Hohn said, glancing at Emily. I stared at my tiles, which were not promising. Later, when it was time for me to go, all three of them stood in the little front hall. The wooden door was open, and through the screen door I could see dark leaves shining green beside a streetlight, and a pale band of sky over the black rooftops. “Night, Will,” Mr. Hohn said. “Drive safe, now.” “Good night, Will,” Mrs. Hohn said, raising her hand shoulder-high and bending her fingers twice. “And thank you for keeping Em company tomorrow night. Not that she isn’t perfectly capable of taking care of herself, Lord knows. My big girl.” She placed an arm around Emily’s shoulders and looked at me fondly. “You’re all so grown up now! I can hardly believe it.”

  When I drove over to the Hohns’ on Saturday evening, Emily opened the door. Her parents had already left. For a while we sat on the faded pink cushions of the glider, in the warm dusk. It was the time of day when leaves are dark and the sky is watery pale. The world seems unable to make up its mind, as if at any second it might become deep night or a new day. Suddenly the streetlights came on. “I’ve never seen that before!” Emily cried. I said, “I can’t really remember whether I have or not. It’s strange. Wouldn’t I remember something like that?” “When I was little,” Emily said, “I once saw it raining on one side of the street—right over there—and not on this side. It was magical. I ran over to touch the rain and then I ran back into the sun. And then, a few years later, maybe seventh grade, when I remembered it, I couldn’t be sure it had really happened. I couldn’t feel the memory, you know what I mean? And I still can’t be sure, even though”—she waved her hand rapidly in front of her eyes—“oh, let’s go inside, I hate these idiotic bugs.”

  I followed her into the living room and sat down next to her on the dark blue couch beside Mr. Hohn’s armchair, with its slightly sagging cushion and its yellow hexagonal pencil lying on one arm. On the coffee table stood the little accordion player. His head was tilted to one side and he was looking at me with a mad grin. I leaned back, but Emily stood up and said, “Let’s go upstairs!” I followed her up the carpeted stairs, sliding my hand along the dark banister. At the landing I glanced at the painting, but it was hidden behind the glare of its glass. For some reason I thought: Now I will never know. In Emily’s room I pulled out the wooden desk-chair and sat with my arms crossed on the back. Emily sat on the side of the bed. Her feet hung just above the floor. The gloved hand lay in her lap.

  She patted the bed beside her and said, “Sit over here.” Carefully I made my way to the bed and sat down. “There’s no use waiting,” she said. Her voice sounded excited and weary at the same time.

  She lifted the gloved hand slowly from her lap, as if it weighed a lot, and turned her forearm so that the two white buttons were exposed.

  “All I ask,” she said, “is that you promise me one thing.”

  I though
t about it. “All right, I promise.” I looked at her. “So what do I have to—”

  “That you won’t hate me.”

  “Hate you!” It struck me that I shouldn’t be having this conversation, that things were taking a wrong turn. “Why would I—”

  “Because it’s bad. It’s not what you think. It’s—wrong.”

  “Wrong? That’s a strange thing to—”

  “I didn’t want you to know. But you want to. You want to.”

  “But not if—”

  “You’re always thinking about it. Judging me. Holding it against me.”

  “That’s not—I’m not holding—”

  “Always looking. Making it worse.”

  “But that’s—”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise—I promise—but listen—Emily—” I stood up and began pacing up and down in front of her, like a man in a hotel room in a movie. “You don’t—not if you—I mean, I don’t have to—”

  “But you do. You do. You have to. I know you. That’s—who you are. You have to. Everything was so fine, and now—”

  “It’s still fine. And you’re bound to get better, I’m sure the doctor—”

  “It’s not like that—you don’t know. You want everything to be a certain way. But it isn’t. It isn’t. Look. Look. I’ll show you.”

  Swiftly, angrily, she undid one white button. The glove seemed to expand slightly, as if it had been closed very tight. She began fumbling with the second button, the one closer to her hand. “Don’t just stand there,” she said fiercely. “Help me.” I sat down next to her and began working the button through the hole, which was stretched to a thin line. The glove was bound so tight that it must have chafed her wrist, which looked a bit red, unless it was my tugging and pulling that was bringing the blood to the surface.

  “I think I’ve got it—wait—Emily—just a—there!” The glove was now open at the wrist, though I could see nothing of the hand itself. “That must be a relief. Do you want me to—”