Excerpts From A LITTLE BOOK OF HANDS, Millie Tullis

Excerpts From A LITTLE BOOK OF HANDS
By Millie Tullis

I would like the line up the hands of all the women I have ever known.
I hate looking at my own hands. I love my mother’s.

My mother says when she gives blood, the nurses sometimes turn giddy.
Jackpot!
She means that she is easy to get blood from.
Her veins are large and visible.

My mother’s hands are freckled, her veins a soft purple.
My mother’s hands are olive.
She calls her skin green.
As in, My skin is green.
I can’t wear that color.

I am pink-tinted.
Red in sunlight.
White in winter.
I can’t wear my mother’s earth tones.

When I was a child I took a quiz in a magazine.
I wanted to be winter but at the end of the quiz, I was informed I was spring.
The magazine told me to wear pastels.
The colors of my Easter dresses.
I wanted deep colors.
Jewel-tones.
Green, blue, red.
I wanted drama.
Really, jewels can carry many tones.
Or many tones wear jewels.

In high school
I gave my blood away.
It was almost free.
I traded my blood in for peanut-butter wafer cookies, juice, and skipping class.

Now I leave the room when my father describes the ski injuries he witnesses each weekend.
Last week my father said a man hit a branch skiing downhill too fast and it shredded his ear.
Almost clean off.
Almost torn from his head.

When did I shift?
Away from blood.
From horror films and injuries. Now
I dread a quick shot in the arm.
I can’t make it relax.
I can’t make it relax although I know it will feel worse
because I can’t.

I no longer bleed monthly.
I’m glad. I would be happy to never menstruate again.
Once, when I was fourteen, I bled for over a month.
Low iron, my mother wondered.
The family doctor gave me ibuprofen.
He told me to wait
until it stopped.

Women get work done on the backs of their hands to make them look younger.
They put in fillers. Doctors re-plump and replenish the natural volume to the back of hands
to provide a more supple and youthful appearance.
This is called Hand Rejuvenation.
Sunspots and scars can be lasered away.

I grew up in Utah.
A plastic surgery haven.
Salt Lake City, the core of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,
has the second highest rate of plastic surgeons per capita.
Just under Miami.
Above L.A.

I hate my hands because they are scarred, dry red and achy.
Mostly it’s the scars.
Layered scars from scabs I fixated and fixated and fixated on.

All of my life?
All of my life.

My fingers are short.
When I sleep they are curled into fists.
Held to my chest.

I don’t love my hands, but I would never hand them over.
I can’t imagine letting anyone go under my hands
with a needle. With their plumping volumes.

I need my hands with me.
I sleep with them curled up beneath my neck.
This is bad. I know it. They wake up numb and aching.

Monks mapped out time on their hands— you could track when Easter would come each year by counting joints and nails.

Hands were mnemonic devices. They held
what we most wanted to remember.

The hand became an instrument of mental, not just menial, labor.

My grandmother typed my grandfather’s dissertation. She fixed the spelling and grammar, translated his handwritten drafts into paragraphs— into clean language, into white paper and black ink.

What did her fingers look like then?

I can see her hands now— pale as his are freckled from sun.

But in pictures from her past she is tan, deep olive, dark haired.

Always thin.

In his book on the history of sincerity in American religion and secularism, Charles McCrary
asks, What does it mean to ‘hold’ a belief?

And where
in the body

do we imagine belief to be held?

When I no longer believed, did my body change?

It did and I changed it.

Leaving the Mormon Church at 18 but still living in Utah meant piercing my ears.
My friends pierced them in our dark and cheap basement apartment.
We used apples and needles and rubbing alcohol.
Leaving was a rushed tattoo on the inside of my arm that peeled off in looping black script as it healed.
Leaving meant tank tops.
I never wore them as a child.
Unless I was swimming. By water
the freckles on the tops of my shoulders popped in the sun.
Burning into permanent sunspots.
Here is where my skin looks the most like my mothers.

The thing I miss about attending church is the singing.
No, not the singing. But
the singing with others. I miss
the feeling of singing in a room
where everyone held in the room
is singing.

I liked to be the one to hold the hymn book.
I held it in my childhands.
I knew when to turn the page.

Millie Tullis (she/her) is a writer, teacher, folklorist, and researcher. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and an MA in American Studies & Folklore from Utah State University. Her work has been published in Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Millie is the Editor-in-Chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal. Raised in northern Utah, she lives in upstate South Carolina.

Sources

Language placed in italics does not come from me. Other than the italics that appear in personal and family sections, quotes’ sources can be found here.

Cooperrider, Kensy. “Handy Mnemonics: The Five-Fingered Memory Machine.” The Public Domain Review. https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/handy-mnemonics.

“Cosmetic Surgery and Body Image Among Utah Women.” Utah Women and Leadership Project (Utah State University). https://www.usu.edu/uwlp/blog/2017/cosmetic-surgery-and-body-image-among-utah-women.

“Hand Rejuvenation.” Brigham and Women’s Hospital. https://www.brighamandwomens.org/surgery/plastic-surgery/procedures/hand-rejuvenation#:~:text=Today%2C%20there%20are%20options%20to,fat%20transfer%20to%20your%20hands.

McCrary, Charles. Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers. Chicago: 2022.

Images

Sir Peter Lely. “Study of the Forearms and Hands of a Woman.” 1665. In the public Domain. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/459387.

An 1815 guide by H. Somerhausen for remembering significant epochs from Dutch history. https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb11291278.

Excerpts From A LITTLE BOOK OF HANDS, Millie Tullis

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