“If you take my hand, I can show you how to get across,” she said. She wasn’t a pretty girl, so I suspected this was a ploy to put a hand like mine in hers. If she were pretty and if I knew the way, I would have carried her across. That’s the kind of man I am.
I never got across. Not that day or any other, and there were many others. When she wasn’t there offering a hand crusted with work, some other decrepit maid offered one in its place. They could have been sisters or cousins or strangers. I can’t be sure of how many I saw. There must have been many. Or there could have been two: the girl I remember and one other who could not be remembered from one day to the next.
I could never pay such a high cost to get across, arriving in the hand of something so plain, so undeserving. Her grunt of a chin would cast a shadow on me that the people from across would never unsee. First impressions are everything. So each time I visited the recess, I refused her hand or one similar.
If she’d sold me a ticket, I might have taken her hand. I would have made my impressive payment part of my arrival, generously purchasing a worker’s work to further my own. But there was no fare, she sold nothing.
The simplicity of her arrangement was maddening. I asked for a map, but there was none. I asked to follow her across or that she shout directions from behind me, but the way was too dark to see, too loud to hear. I invented all manner of harness and lead to keep my dignity literally out of her hand. But she rejected each one on grounds of being flammable, too heavy to float, too light against the wind, a choking hazard, and tested on animals.
She accused me of complicating things. “Just take my hand,” she said with a coolness that made her thin lips flat. A girl like her cannot dictate things like that. I accused her of running a scam. I named the famous trekkers who now live across and insisted none of those men would have taken her hand. They were men like me. “Maybe not around town, but they took it to get across,” she said.
The last time I visited the recess, I brought with me a pretty girl. Her long legs kept up with me, if her curiosity did not. She had no interest in going across, but this too was to my benefit. “Take her hand, and show her the way across,” I told the girl. “Then, she’ll come back and take me.”
They slipped out of sight and I waited at the recess for three days. The not-pretty girl came back within an hour, but the pretty girl never came back. Women!