How I Learned to Be Left-Handed

Stan had a fucking big gold Harvard ring. He’d come up to my desk to ask if he had any messages and twirl it around his pinky finger, his index finger and thumb, twirling it round and round while he half-listened about what his clients had asked him to do for the next day’s meeting. He didn’t touch it when he spoke to anyone else. He kept his hands dutifully at his sides while he spoke to Karen in HR, or Bill in accounting. He kept his grip on his coffee cup while junior account managers cornered him in the break room, asking questions that would never matter.

I judged Stan on my first day in the office as a total douche. His father had just retired, a step prompted by the pregnancy of his second wife, and he decided that his final few years should be spent caring for that toddler. Stan had taken over the company. He called himself an ad man. He had watched Mad Men like it was church. His performativity was only overpowered by Sauvage by Dior. I wouldn’t know what the office stench was had he not told me on my first day.

“J’adore Dior,” he whispered in my ear. His hand placed firmly on my lower back.

There weren’t many women in the office. The few that were there were plump and old. They wore clothes their children had given them. They had cards from their children pasted all over their desks. I’m not sure I preferred this to the blank cubicles of the many “Marks” and “Matts” that worked here. The women brought sandwiches for lunch and poured tea from a thermos. They found my salads odd.

“Why would you want to eat like a rabbit?”

Rabbits are quite the slutty animal.

When rabbits go to mate the male chases the female until she stops, she tries to fight him off, and after a substantial amount of fighting the pair jumps in the air to signal that the mating can begin. It’s only after they mate that the doe starts to bleed.

***

Stan and I began relations very quickly after I started. I didn’t know what to call it. Fucking felt too aggressive, seeing as after he would kiss me, and we would share a cigarette before we dressed. Sleeping together would be a fierce mislabeling. He and I had never slept in the same area. Sex, the technical term, still felt too intimate. So began relations.

After the women and young men left the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would go into his office with a stack of checks for him to sign. Though he was always “working late”, he specifically told his wife that he had to work late on these nights. As if she cared. Why would she? Stan is not a cool dude. His wife, whose name I never quite garnered, likely never married him for who he was in the first place. She had her house in the city, and her house in Connecticut, and her house in Palm Springs. What more could a girl need?

Sometimes, I think that we marry the person who bores us most. We’re not traipsing across fields with our betrothed, falling more and more in love every second. To have the energy for love, every day would be simply exhausting. We study abroad in Barcelona like Stan did, we have a torrid love affair with a Spanish woman who ran the bakeshop at the end of the block like Stan did, but we would break it off when we were leaving and propose to our college sweetheart the day after graduation. Like Stan did.

This particular Tuesday Stan was feeling a little friskier than usual. During our staff meeting that morning, he slid his hand up my skirt nearing nearer and nearer to the hot zone while one of the men presented on a project that didn’t matter to anyone at all but gave the man a great deal of pride in completing one single task. I didn’t find the presentation that boring. I had something to focus on.

The old plump women asked me if I wanted to join them at a happy hour. I politely declined, as I always do on these nights. I grabbed the three checks that needed to be signed and went into Stan’s office. He was standing with a drink in his hand looking out at the Midtown Skyline. Before Stan even started he had a small freezer installed below his desk so that he could freeze the balls of ice and keep the whiskey cold. The whole point of the big balls of ice was to pour room temperature whiskey on top of it so that the ice would melt and water down the whiskey so someone other than a reckless psychopath could sip on plain whiskey. His office was always cold.

“Here are the checks.”

He turned around.

“Oh, thanks.”

I pulled a pen from the bun on top of my head, letting my hair fall to my shoulders. Stan gave me a smile. This trick works every time. I learned how to do it in college when I was failing French, and I had to get the French TA to believe that I would sleep with him. I would look at the workbook ardently, take the pen from my hair and bite the tip like I was thinking.

“Comment ca va?

“Ca va. Et toi?”

“Je suis mal.” Then we would laugh and laugh. He gave C for that semester.

***

Stan signed the checks and I poured myself a glass of whiskey, no ice. I sat on the radiator looking out over the skyline. I hated working for an “ad man”, and I hated wearing flats to work every day. Yet, there was something intoxicating about looking over New York City without the sounds of cars or tourists or birds.

I finished my drink and turned around, and Stan was pouring himself another drink.

“Two drinks already? Long day?” I draped my hands over the monstrosity of a desk chair to rub his shoulders.

“Something like that,” he said.

“Well when you start your day off with a presentation like that, the day can only get longer.”

“Yes.” He drank the rest of his second ice-cold drink.

I turned his chair around.

“You were really pulling some moves in that meeting.”

He gave a small smile.

I started to unbutton his jacket, his hands slack at his sides.

“Abby stop.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“No, no. You’re fine. This has been absolutely fine, but it has to stop. I can’t keep fucking my secretary.”

Apparently we were fucking. I stayed silent.

“This has to stop. Tonight. This is the last time. Understand me?”

I nodded my head.

“I’m not, like, going to get rid of you or anything. I mean obviously I can’t fire you, not that I would want to,” he backtracked, “You don’t have to go. Just last time was too close.”

***

The last time was too close, but I thought he was as detached as I was. Last Tuesday we were here post-signing checks, we were on the floor behind his desk. I was looking out at the skyline, and he was looking at his wall of degrees when the door flew open.

“Daddy!”

He shoved me under his desk, buttoned his pants, and stood up at an Olympic pace.

“Oh hi, guys.”

“Daddy, why is your shirt like that?”

He looked down, buttons askew.

“Oh, it was just a new look I was trying. Do you like it?”

“No daddy you look silly!”

He rushed to button it up properly.

“Where’s mommy?”

I let out a breath of relief.

“I’m right here!”

I saw her feet from under the desk.

“Are you almost done here? We wanted to see if you wanted to grab some dinner.”

“Yes, I was just leaving.” Stan grabbed his briefcase next to me, walked with his family out the door.

The light turned off. I was left naked on the ground in the total dark, looking out over the city. I decided to sleep there that night. The cleaning lady thought I was dead when she came in that morning.

***

“Yes, I agree it was too close,” I said.

“I know that things aren’t perfect with my family, but I can’t treat them like that. I can’t imagine what would have happened if they saw you. Their lives would have been over. Not mine, theirs. I’ll fuck myself over before I make their lives any harder.”

His eyes fell.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be sorry. You didn’t do anything.”

I sat on the ground.

“Tonight is it, ok? We can’t do this anymore.”

I nodded my head.

He sat on the ground next to me. He kissed me. We kissed for a long time, way longer than two adults who are just “fucking” should.

Eventually, he flipped me around. He reached forward to grab my hands, and his big fat Harvard pinky ring scratched my forearm. He didn’t even notice. The crimson jewel slicing the fresh skin. As he pushed me back and forth the ring slices more and more, finally drawing blood as he finished.

“That was the last time.”

When I got home I put some hydrogen peroxide on the cut, wrapped a bandage around it and went to sleep.

***

I woke up in the morning feeling awful. My pillow was covered in the mascara I forgot to take off last night. I wondered when I had been crying. I peeled back the covers and found my arm to be stuck to the sheets. There was a thick layer of blood and puss connecting the two. I pulled and pulled but to no avail. I reached in my side table for scissors and cut the bandage off revealing the trench that had become my forearm.

The cut went from wrist to elbow, flayed open. Red as ashing embers. What the fuck.

I texted Stan that I wouldn’t be coming in today because I was sick. He just responded: “I’m sorry.”

Of course he would think this was about him.

I ran to the kitchen and threw more antiseptic on it, and it just poured right off of my arm, hitting the floor with a splash. I wrapped it again and ran out the door to urgent care.

***

The doctor opened the door, eyes on his clipboard.

“Okay, Abby, what seems to be the problem.”

“Um, I think I have a cut that got infected.”

“Well, let’s take a look.”

He undid the bandaging, and without any reaction said: “Well, looks like you’re going to need some stitches.”

“Sure. Okay sounds good.”

When he gave me the shot to numb my arm, I screamed out in pain.

“It’s okay. I know it hurts we just have to be strong okay? It’ll be over in a second.”

Every suture felt like he was peeling back my skin, putting hot bugs on the inside, and they wouldn’t stop moving.

***

My eyes kept rolling back in my head on the train from the pain. I saw people like this on the train all of the time. I figured they were ill, they probably were. Maybe in the same way that I was. I sat in the corner while families looked on, quick glances at whatever was happening. I should have taken a cab.

By the time I got home it was leaking again, but I figured this was how it healed. I took a big sleeping pill, hoping to make the hours until morning pass with blackness.

***

I awoke lying on my stomach. The clock read two am. Fuck. I reached for my phone. I reached again. I looked down. The bandage had stuck to my side. My shirt rose to my chin from hours of restless sleep. The bandage was stuck below my rib cage. I grabbed the scissors, again, and cut off the bandage. The stitches had broken. Strings hanging from the edges of the skin. The cut so deep now I could see the bone.

I ran to the bathroom and turned the light on. The pussed bandage hung from my body. My arm, a salmon steak. I ran the shower white-hot to melt the bandage from my body.

The water felt good on my legs and my back. I dipped my head back, the water pounding on my scalp. I reached my hands up to run them through my hair. The water cracked open the wound even further. Maybe this was helping it, I kept telling myself. Tears were streaming down my face.

When you go to the doctor when you’re little, they ask you with silly faces how bad the pain is. No matter what I would always pick five or under. I didn’t know what six, seven, eight, nine, or ten looked like. I hoped this was a ten, but I knew it was a nine.

I turned around and let the water run over the bandage, hoping it would loosen it enough to get it off. I let the water hit my stomach until it was bright red and numb. I looked down, the bandage had become loose. It slid off of my body taking the better part of my abdomen with it. The water was hitting my ligaments.

Ten. This was ten.

I threw my robe on. White terry cloth quickly soaked with blood. I looked at the clock, seven am. I had been in the shower for hours.

I couldn’t call into work again. Stan would think it was because of him. It wasn’t. I was sick. I had already felt ten, what would eleven or twelve be.

***

My eyes rolled from pain on my commute. Me and my robe jostled from side to side on the downtown two. My naked feet stepped on. I tried to hide the blood, but what was the point. The robe was red. I put my hood up.

The office was bustling when I got there. Everyone smiled at me. Said they missed me yesterday. They loved my dress.

I ran into Stan’s office.

“What did you do to me?” I screamed.

He glared, stood, and closed the door.

“I don’t know what I did to you, Abby. I didn’t do anything. You were ‘sick’ yesterday. You come in here screaming. So, no, I don’t know what I did to you.”

He stood twirling his pinky ring. The red going round and round. He looked me up and down, grabbed his folio, and walked toward the door.

“Look at me!”

He stared at me.

“You look very nice today, Abby.”

I breathed out.

“Are you coming to the meeting?”

I nodded my head.

We walked out of his office. Blood started dripping from the edges of the robe, creating a trail behind us. Drops. The women stepped in it, their kitten heels dotting the carpet with red.

I grabbed my notebook off of my desk. Blood was rushing down my arm. The pages wet. I rolled up the sleeve. My arm was red. The parting of the Red Sea. Waves cascading down.

Enough.

I went to the kitchen and found the cake cutting knife. I knew it wouldn’t be anyone’s birthday for a while, and I would have time to replace it. I sliced my arm off right above the elbow. It came off easily, with little bleeding. I had already lost all of the blood.

“Abby where are you the meeting is starting?” Stan yelled.

I wiped off the counter and threw my arm in the trash.

I took my seat next to Stan.

Delaney Sweet has a MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA from Gustavus Adolphus College. She has been previously published in Prometheus Dreaming. Her apartment is in Manhattan and her home is in Nebraska. You can follow her on Twitter @delaneyasweet and Instagram @delaneyasweet.