“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 She had already withdrawn from typing class; she no longer went to gym.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.
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 smash 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?”