"A Stranger's Hips, A Stranger's Hands" by Alyssa Northrop
This is a selection from our Fall/Winter 2020 issue, featuring prose, poetry, and art from over 20 contributors.
The bar was somewhere across the canal, on a street I didn’t recognize or wasn’t capable of recognizing at that moment. The area, as we descended, was filled with a terrible odor, human waste and garbage and something else, some chemical that seemed to underlie everything, everywhere, now. But the white gravel courtyard and high-ceilinged space was swarming with a certain kind of beautiful person, young enough to be unlined and unbowed, but old enough to have made some of their own money, and to have the appearance of confidence that that money entailed.
I was with a variety of my boyfriend’s friends, a magazine writer and another magazine writer and a visual artist and someone who was studying material culture. I liked them, at least in theory. They were both interesting and projected that they were interesting in the way they dressed, and the way they talked about the Internet, as if they could have become influencers but had decided against it. I wanted to be interested, but sometimes in situations like this with my boyfriend I felt that I was losing myself to the role I played, the role of his girlfriend, and so I often became quiet, unable to parse whether my reactions were my own or the reactions I believed a girlfriend should have. I was also a little bit high and this made my thoughts tangle and move in syrupy motions so that translating anything in my head into speech felt effortful and confusing.
One of the magazine writers turned to me now, maybe noticing that I was quiet. He was wearing a jean jacket and jeans and round transition lens. He’d told me earlier that he’d run twenty-two miles that day. I had formed an impression of him the first time I met him as someone who was large and confident and easy to be with but now he seemed shrunken. I knew he had broken up with a long-term girlfriend recently and it was strange to see his fragility written so boldly in his body language. He was telling me now about a girl he had met recently. He said that after he asked her out she had informed him that she was underaged. I laughed automatically and asked what he’d done when she said that and he said he was asking me what I thought he should do. He wanted to know if he shouldn’t go out with her.
How old are you? I asked.
He told me he was twenty-nine.
I thought of my students, some of whom were just eighteen and already engaged, their rings heavy on their girlish hands, how often I had wondered about the families they came from, the religions that required long skirts and head coverings, the ease with which their parents covered them up and then gave them away. I remembered then the way my own father had insisted I not wear shorts to high school, even on days when it was unbearably hot, how I had fought and screamed and then marched back upstairs defeated to change, feeling martyred and misunderstood.
When I didn’t reply, the magazine writer told me another story about the night he met her, the clothes she was wearing (he worked for a fashion magazine), the dog shelter she told him she volunteered at, and as he spoke, I couldn't stop staring at his teeth, at the pattern of grayish discoloration, like evidence of a leak behind a painted wall.
At that time, my lease was up and my boyfriend and I were in the midst of deciding whether we would live together. That night we had just had another inconclusive and ambivalent conversation. At first I had been the one pushing to move in; now he had taken that role. It was as if we were taking sides for the sake of argument, rather than revealing how we truly felt. When I looked at him now, I had developed a kind of layered vision — like those children’s books that show the layers of a city as you turn the pages, Manhattan moving from forest to town to city in the blink of an eye — as if I could see all the possible routes we might go down. I looked at his face—he was taller than me with dark hair and crooked front teeth—and I could see him as someone I had loved and left, someone I would remember as part of a time characterized by what I thought of as dream anxiety: people I knew were either doubling down on their dreams, resolving to live pennilessly and morally, or they were pushing their dreams aside as cobwebs in a dusty attic, judgmental of those whose vision remained clouded by childish notions. I was the former, teaching at an underfunded, crumbling public school in the dull belly of Brooklyn, and my boyfriend was the latter, working in investment banking at the shiny tip of Manhattan, and I wondered sometimes if this contrast obscured who we really were.
Other times, though, it was as if I could look at him and see him at all the stages of his life at once. In those moments I could see that he contained everything and I felt tenderness and admiration for who he was and who he would be. I could imagine our lives twisting together and revealing themselves in front of us in long fits and starts, the way waves come in long, rolling sets. I felt an immense sense of belonging.
Our table was a plush white booth inside a room with a huge skylight, lit from the back by an electric light, giving the impression of daytime. We had had beers and frozen margaritas, we had covered a variety of salacious topics, and now the other two women with us, the artist and material culture expert, had returned from taking a tequila shot, making noises about dancing. We made our way into the back where a tunnel opened up into a larger room. The music was the consistent beat of disco with what sounded like spirituals overlaid and repeated endlessly at the crest of each beat. Each song seamlessly faded into the next and we all swayed with varying degrees of rhythm. The material culture expert had told me earlier that disco was meant to mirror the female sexual experience, an experience that did not end in one climax but could be made up of a series of orgasms, each rolling into the next. I had not experienced this exact phenomenon. Usually, I told her, I orgasm once and that’s it. I had always felt lucky that I was capable of that, I said, because I knew women who couldn’t come during sex at all. She had not replied, maybe, I thought now, so as not to make me feel like a prude. And as I watched her and her friend dance, each movement a new and improved iteration of the one before, it occurred to me that the women I knew might be somehow un-liberated in comparison, as if in our bourgeois striving to match our partner’s orgasm we had not let ourselves achieve what these two beautiful dancing women could achieve, one long rolling experience of pleasure.
My boyfriend was dancing near me, but I was so entranced by the dancing women, by the implications of the disco music and our discussion of orgasms, that suddenly I couldn’t stand to look at him. I found his movements overly thoughtful, devoid of the unconscious grace that the women possessed. I felt a kind of disgust welling up in me and, along with it, a sense of intense despair. Maybe what I wanted was neither option. I did not want to live with him and I did not want to live without him. I did not want to go through the days I had been going through, the hope of morning followed by the slog of the afternoon, the unending cycle of graded papers, the years that had started to slip, one into the next, and overlap. I wanted some third and unfathomable option. I wanted to be old already. I wanted to read by a window in some forested place, my boyfriend there but in the other room, just out of sight.
Back outside I watched as the magazine writers smoked. I had started buying lottery tickets recently, because I wanted to take things less seriously, to be reminded of the role of chance and also because I felt desperate for a stroke of luck to befall me, for good news to fall out of the air and into my open hand. I found one in my pocket now and rubbed it between my fingers. Eventually they offered me a drag and I dropped the lottery ticket back into my pocket and took the cigarette, though I could feel the weight of my boyfriend noticing. He didn’t like cigarettes. The last time I had smoked was on a trip out west, the year before. I remembered that trip lovingly: the mountains and the wide-open plains, the feeling like you could stop anywhere and build a house, create a life for yourself out of the vast empty spaces. We spent all our time outdoors there—it was the end of April, and I had forgotten what being outside felt like, had forgotten the feeling of the sun, and I felt like someone who had been woken suddenly from a long and fitful sleep. The only thing I disliked was the people behind the counter at the dispensary. I was resentful because I knew they could tell I didn’t understand the difference between all the carefully named and packaged strains of weed. Though they did not betray it outwardly, I could tell they saw me as inexperienced. I retaliated in my head by deciding their taxonomy was a silly, capitalist enterprise, and by getting so high that night I convinced myself my boyfriend was going to hurt me if we went to sleep together. I insisted on staying up to smoke cigarettes alone outside, hoping that if I came back to myself, the fear would release its grip.
Now my boyfriend turned away from me and toward the visual artist. I had had jealous boyfriends—it seemed now they had all been possessive, though the reality was that one had been more jealous than the others, more controlling and manipulative, damagingly so—and I thought it was important not to subject a partner to what I had been subjected to: the distrust, the anger and consequences. Because of this, I often insisted that I found jealousy to be a ridiculous, time-wasting endeavor. Still, though moments before, dancing, I had found my boyfriend hard to be around, I was now seized by resentment of this woman and her hold over him. She was tall and sexy with curly bangs and bags under her eyes that made her seem troubled. They spoke about my boyfriend’s plans to garden the next day and I heard him say she should come by, that he’d love her help gardening.
Before she could respond, I interrupted and said, Your garden is a mess.
It is, he said. That’s why I need help.
I can help, I said.
Great, he said without really turning toward me. That would be great.
They are the same height, I thought, looking between them as they stood there, looking into each other’s eyes as they listened to each other. There was such a real expression of concern and mutual respect on their faces as they discussed the timing of and tools necessary to gardening that it seemed to me as if they were discussing the needs and proclivities of a child they’d had together and dearly loved.
I made myself turn away toward the magazine writers again, hoping to be included in their conversation. They were discussing the waste treatment plant across the street. Bored, I looked down at the white pebbles on the ground. I wondered where they had come from and by what process they had been cut into those jagged little squares.
One of the magazine writers leaned over then and asked the visual artist about her motorcycle license, her plans to get a motorcycle. She said that before she bought one, she wanted to figure out where she would store it for the winter. She said she’d rather get a bicycle first and that her co-worker had offered her one without wheels. I looked up and said old bicycles could be a money suck, the bike shops charged you an arm and a leg for a simple tune up, and that it would be better to get a new one.
I have friends who can fix bikes, she said. I probably wouldn’t take it to a shop.
That’s lucky, I said.
She looked at me and didn’t say anything and I suddenly felt weak and silly without possession of a motorcycle license or bike-friendly friends. I had seen my relationship as a means to freedom, as a way to unlock the cold doors of loneliness, to live more securely and therefore more freely, but having a boyfriend at all now seemed like a conspiracy to keep me from getting a motorcycle license, from the casual dangers and freedoms of adventure.
She turned back to the magazine writer then and now that she was no longer looking at me I took the opportunity to study her more openly. She was not beautiful, I decided, but this didn’t matter. I imagined she had been raised by people who encouraged her to cultivate her tastes without inhibition, to strike out in search of the things that pleased her rather than wait to be told what she should like. My own parents had both been raised by people who had come to this country from somewhere else and so were bent on the task of fitting in, invested in the creation of a life that looked like the lives around them. They had encouraged us, whether consciously or not, to take our cues from others, to read the room and act accordingly. Because of this, I had always believed there was something I was missing, something that I would figure out only by looking closely at the people around me. I sought answers, while at the same time wishing I didn’t need them.
The visual artist must have sensed my stare because she turned and frowned at me and I looked quickly away, embarrassed to have been caught, afraid also that she was somehow clairvoyant and had read my mind.
I told my boyfriend I wanted to leave and we said goodbye and left the bar, wandered home among the squat brick buildings, carcasses of industry transformed into ice cream shops and bowling alleys, playgrounds for people who had no time to play, across the canal and along residential townhouse-lined streets that stretched all the way to the river. At his place we undressed and he pulled me onto the bed. I fell on top of him and put my arms out over his arms, trying to pin him down.
Do you want this? he asked, easily freeing his arms and putting a hand down between my legs. I nodded and he flipped me over so that he was kneeling over me. His gestures were familiar, but he was moving with more purpose than usual, and it occurred to me that he might be imagining that it was the visual artist here below him. We kept our fantasies private, in bed and really elsewhere, and I knew if I asked him, I would run up against some kind of pact he had made with himself. I knew he had certain rules he forced himself to abide by and I also knew that admitting to these rules would be scary to him. He was afraid of what he wanted and, maybe more than that, afraid of what I might want. I didn’t like the way this tendency kept us both in the dark from one another, but at this moment, I didn’t care.
He put a hand to my throat, gently at first, and then held my throat harder. I closed my eyes and stretched my neck so it sank back over the pillow. In my mind I played the image of him and the visual artist, their long limbs entangled, his hand on her throat, his eyes on her contorted face, his other hand kneading her heavy breasts. I sank into my vision until I almost stopped noticing what was happening in real life. I watched her body that was also my body pinned to the bed by my boyfriend’s hips, by his hands, that were also a stranger’s hips, a stranger’s hands, and when I came I stopped seeing, but I kept contracting, over and over, I came, lit up with inner momentum that was like a wave, I mean, it was like riding a wave from another world, where I knew what I wanted, where I knew how to be myself.
Alyssa Northrop's short fiction has appeared in literary journals such as the Colorado Review, the South Carolina Review, and now Epiphany. She is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program where she was the recipient of a Truman Capote Fellowship, a Lainoff Fellowship and the Himan Brown Award.
