Oil and Indifference

I was twenty-three that summer and I had a job inspecting bridges along the coast road, which sounds more interesting than it was. Mostly it meant crawling around under old structures with a flashlight and a clipboard, writing down numbers about corrosion, then driving back to my rented room in town. The company had put me on a six-month contract because one of their regular men broke his hip, and I took it because the year before had been a mess and I wanted something with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The mess had been a co-worker named Jada on a road project up north. We were both adults and both single and it ran for about four months and then she transferred and we said goodbye like civilized people. No hard feelings. But it left me restless in a way I did not enjoy, and I had decided that the summer in this little town on the Amalfi coast would be quiet. Routine. Bridges in the day, dinner at eight, bed by ten.

The town had other ideas, in the form of a night market.

Three evenings a week they strung warm bulbs across the square and put out folding tables, and everybody who had anything to sell came out and sold it. It was mostly tourists buying lemon candy and magnets shaped like lemons and prints of the cliffs with lemons in the foreground. There is a lot of lemon in that part of Italy. I did not need anything from the market, but after my dinner I liked to walk through it, because the light was nice and the alleys around the square funneled the sea breeze through in a way that made even August bearable.

Her stall was on the north side, between a man who sold knives and a woman who sold old postcards. The sign said handmade soaps and oils, hand lettered, and the woman behind it was thirty-one years old and had a way of looking at the crowd like she was grading them. I found out later her name was Caroline Malone and she had come over from Skinner in June to run the stall for her aunt, who had a hip of her own giving her trouble. Caroline had split up with a partner of six years in the spring, mutual and final, and instead of finding a new flat in the same city she had bought a plane ticket. I did not know any of that yet. That first night all I knew was that she sat behind a table of little amber bottles, a person waiting for a bus.

I stopped, because stopping seemed politer than hovering, and I picked up a juggling set she had on the corner of the table. Three cloth balls and a little folded instruction card. I have no idea why a soap stall sold juggling sets. Maybe the aunt threw them in with a wholesale order. I turned the balls over in my hand.

"Those are for people who want to disappoint themselves," she said. She was sorting bottles and did not look up. "Everyone buys them. Nobody learns."

"Maybe I'll learn."

"Nobody learns," she said again, and then she did look up, and I paid for the set, because apparently I would rather prove a stranger wrong than keep six euros.

She wrapped the balls in paper while I counted out coins, and then she said, "Hold out your hand."

That part must be explained properly, because it mattered later. There was a dish on the table with a sample of an oil in it, something with almond and rosemary in the ingredient list, and she said she was supposed to offer a demonstration to anyone who bought anything, it was on the aunt's instruction sheet, and she had been skipping it all week because the tourists wanted to smell candles, not have their hands rubbed. But I had bought a juggling set, which was so stupid that she felt the rule applied.

So I held out my hand and she took it and worked the oil in. Five minutes, maybe less. She knew exactly where the tension lived in a hand, the big pad below the thumb, the ridge along the edge of the palm, and she pressed in slow circles and my whole arm went loose up to the shoulder. The oil smelled like herbs and something faintly sweet underneath. She did not talk while she did it. She just worked, and I stood there in the middle of a night market feeling like I had been taken apart and stacked neatly.

"That's five minutes," she said, and let go of my hand.

I stood there like an idiot for a second. Then I said thanks and bought a bar of soap as well, out of some scrambled feeling of fairness, and left with my juggling balls and my one loose arm.

* * *

Two things happened over the next day. The first was that I tried to learn to juggle, on the empty lot two blocks from the square where a driving school ran evening lessons for adults after the market traffic died down. I had signed up for the lessons weeks earlier, since my Italian license was not going to transfer by itself and the company car was company property. So there I was, between laps of the practice circuit with an instructor who chain-smoked and believed in me less than I believed in me, tossing three cloth balls into the hedge.

The second thing was that I found out what juggling does to your wrists. The instruction card did not mention it. Catching is not the hard part, the hard part is that you do it wrong two hundred times in a row, and your wrists take every one of those two hundred catches as a personal insult. By the second evening I had two bruised, sore wrists and a bruised ego to match, and I was walking back through the square with the balls in my jacket pocket.

She saw me coming. "You tried it."

"I tried it."

"And?"

"I caught the hedge more than I caught the balls."

That almost got a smile out of her. Almost. She was restocking the soaps and I stood at the corner of her table and flexed my right hand, which hurt, and she noticed, because she noticed hands. It was her whole job, noticing hands.

"Come here," she said. "Let me see."

I held out both wrists over the table. She took my right one and turned it gently and pressed along the tendon and I winced and she said, "You're catching with locked wrists. You want to give with the catch, like this," and she demonstrated in the air, soft hands, letting the ball fall into them. "Also you've bruised the flexor side. That needs oil and it needs pressure and it needs a couple of days of not being stupid."

"Is that a medical opinion?"

"That's a stall owner's opinion. Free of charge." She was already getting the little dish out. "Unless you want the proper one, which costs nothing but takes longer, in which case sit down and stop looming over my merchandise."

There was a folding stool behind the table, customers' stool, and I sat on it and put my right hand palm up on the table as I had the first night, except this time my wrist was actually hurt and not just tense. She warmed a drop of the oil between her own palms first, which she had not bothered with before, and then she started at the heel of my hand and worked up over the bruised part with a pressure that was somewhere between relief and punishment. I breathed through the worst of it. It was the kind of hurt that you could feel the end of, hurt that was going somewhere.

"You juggle like you drive," she said. "I watched you out there earlier. Braking at everything."

"You watched me?"

"The lot is two blocks away and the whole market can hear your instructor. He yells like a man whose dinner is burning." Her thumb found a spot low on my palm and I felt it in my elbow. "Also you stall at the turns. Commit."

"It's a three-ton car, not a scarf."

"It's an excuse," she said, and moved on to my forearm, oil and long slow strokes from wrist to elbow, and I stopped having opinions about driving. She worked the meat of the forearm with both hands, one over the other, unhurried, and the crowd went by behind her and nobody bought anything and she did not care. Her hands were stronger than I had expected. I remember thinking that she had done this a few thousand times and that the aunt's stall was lucky to have her and then I stopped thinking in complete sentences for a while.

When she finished she wiped her hands on a cloth and capped the bottle and I got my wallet out.

"No," she said.

"It's an hour of your evening."

"It was twelve minutes and you're bad at arithmetic too." She put the bottle away under the table. "It's slow work. If I charged for it I'd have to hurry, and hurrying ruins it. Come back some other night and we'll do the left one."

I said something agreed to that effect, probably not clever, and picked up my juggling balls.

"And ice them tonight," she said as I walked off. "And stop catching with your wrists, Herman."

I had not told her my name. I found out later she had read it off my lesson receipt, which the driving school had left pinned to the lot gate, because the instructor kept losing them. I decided not to hold it against her. My wrist already felt better and the market ran three nights a week and I had, by conservative count, three weeks of contract left in that town.

The third evening I came back early, before the market really filled, and she was already set up, stacking soap in pyramids like she was building a small city. She pointed at the stool without looking up and I sat down. She took my left wrist this time, no discussion, and got the dish out, and for about fifteen minutes the whole square could have burned down around us and I would not have known.

"You're better," she said, working the tendon. "The catching."

"Two hundred catches, four drops."

"Don't brag."

"Thirty-eight drops."

"That's worse than bragging."

She was thirty-one and had come over from Skinner in June and she talked the way she oiled, long and even, no wasted motion. I was twenty-three and I talked mostly with my shoulders, apparently, because she kept pressing one of them down with her free hand. "Stop doing that," she said. "You carry the whole market up there."

I did carry things up there. I had carried the whole mess with Jada up there for most of a year, four months of a fling on a road project up north that had ended clean enough, no letters, no shouting, just a transfer and a goodbye and then me driving the coast road checking expansion joints for a living and not thinking about it. Except the shoulders thought about it anyway. Her thumbs found the place where the thinking lived and put pressure on it and I made a low noise I will not describe further.

"See," she said. "There it is."

"It's not a house," I said, which was the closest I could get to