To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

gestures made throughout the day might click into place for me, and all that exile, all that alienation and scorn, simply vanish? But I couldn’t do it. I despised the wet sensation that refused to subside even after all the lotion had been rubbed in and could be rubbed in no farther. I hit that terminal point and wanted nothing more to do with something either salutary or vain but never pleasant. I thought it was heinous. That little hardened dollop of lotion right at the lip of the squirter, that was really so heinous. But it was part of the point, the whole point. Why was I always on the outside looking in, always alien to the in? As I say, Connie was not alone. In medical offices, law firms, and advertising agencies, inindustrial parks, shipping facilities, and state capitols, in ranger stations and even in military barracks, people were moisturizing. They were in possession of the secret, I was sure of it. They slept soundly. They played softball. They took walks, sharing with one another in the soft fall of night the events of the day while the dog trotted alongside them. It was terrifying. Their leisure was a terror to me. So at ease it was, so natural. And yet you had to wonder: whence this mania, this scampering frenzy to lotion yourself throughout the workday? Connie’s hands were dancing and copulating, working the wet lotion down to an evenly distributed film across the surface of her hands. It was really almost a kind of grotesquerie that should have been done only in private. And unnecessary. Connie had good hands. Old-people hands are the only hands that seem to the naked eye in urgent need of a new coat of moisturizer. They are liver spotted, bony, thin skinned, tendony, and dying. I will be sitting across the patient from Abby, who is just waiting to pass off an instrument, and I will point at the patient’s hands, the hands of an old person distracted by trying to keep her mouth open under the light, and I will say, pointing at the old poxed and spotted hands, “Is that what Connie is trying to forestall?” Abby being Abby, she’d have no opinion on the matter. Oh, she had plenty of opinions, I’m sure, but none she cared to express through her pink paper mask. Though I think she would have happily expressed them had I not been present. At some point every day, I’m sure that Abby wanted me to be the victim of a disabling stroke. Then she would be free to unleash at last. My rolling eye, my sunken cheek, my mouth unable to call back spit, would only encourage her, and from the floor I would hear for the first time every last unedited truth. Still tending to the woman in the chair, I asked her, “Do you moisturize, Abby?” She looked at me like,
Do I moisturize?
“It’s very important to lubricate yourhands, apparently,” I said. “And other parts, too.” And other parts, too! My mouth was constantly pouring out the stupidest shit! The stupidest, always-innocent, all-too-easily-misinterpreted shit! She would never say it, but of course that’s what she was thinking, what the two of us were thinking, probably also what the old broad in the chair was thinking.
    At some point in Connie’s moisturizing, her hands downshifted. All that manic whipping around turned into something gentler, more deliberate. She had reached that point when the lotion, absorbed into the skin, ceased being a sloppy slick and now retarded as much as lubricated motion. She was no longer just applying the lotion. She was working it in with more attentive strokes, concentrating on one finger at a time and on the little blond webbing between fingers. She conjoined her hands as if in sensuous prayer and then unconjoined them to make a pass across the spur of a thumb, all of this as patiently as a player working oil into a new ball glove. She concluded (her attention half turned now to something new) with a series of ritualized, perfectly silent hand embraces, one hand clasping the other, the other hand clasping the first, the