Innocent
By Sarah Smallwood

I’m sitting on my hands.

This is not due to any sort of mania, nor am I indulging in anything pervy. I do work in a colder-than-average office, but today the temperature is pleasantly above egg-harvesting level, and I would very much like not to be sitting on my hands. I glance at my full cup of coffee, my yogurt, my email cursor blinking in the empty text box. I shift uneasily; it’s just not safe.

I filled my coffee cup as usual this morning, nodding my hellos and generally keeping up the pretense that I enjoy my job. I sat to read morning emails when I noticed an odd smell. I leaned toward my trash bin, thinking a wayward cottage cheese container had been overlooked the previous evening, but it was empty. Upon sniffing my shirt, knees and elbows, I find the smell is coming from the palms of my hands.

It smells like man. Specifically, an old man. Like the bottle of cologne a boy steals from his father without realizing there’s dust on it, because it’s the aftershave Bogey wooed Betty with. This cologne, forty years later, has chemically separated into a woodsy, geriatric stink—and willing to make up for lost time with the zeal of a reanimated mummy.

I shove my hands under my desk, wondering what I could have touched that would make my hands smell this swarthy and ancient. Had I knocked over a bottle of horse sweat while rummaging for hair product? Helped Sean Connery tie his Windsor knot on my way out the door? I swivel my head frantically over my cubicle wall, hoping nobody smells this but me. I often adopt a devil-may-care attitude toward say, flossing, that would change very quickly if it became grounds for social ostracism, but as long as I dance the line between gum health and false teeth, I don’t risk becoming a pariah. If this stink wafts further than my printer, speculation could go anywhere from ‘gold digger’ to ‘grandpa fetishist’ to ‘really clueless lesbian,’ all public personas I have no interest in adopting.

To make matters worse, the smell is starting to exacerbate the headache that I’ve had for the last three days. Spring is not kind to me, and with a three-Motrin breakfast the allergen fury was just starting to ebb. I need to rid myself of stink, or I am in for some champion migraine-barfing. I clench my fists and walk nonchalantly to the bathroom.

Three handwashings later and I still smell of decaying lumberjack. I envision smelling like this forever, unable to use my hands without gloves, claiming psoriasis to hide my embarrassment. A life where I am unable to use touch-screens, scratch cats, or swipe deep gouges of frosting from the can. I would develop hypertension worrying that strangers could smell my secret. I start to sweat.

I briefly wonder, my right eye twitching in pain, if perhaps urine has some sort of fragrance-killing properties. I contemplate jellyfish, sea urchins and, oddly, chemical warfare before I realize that coffee grounds will do the same trick, without violating any health codes or rules of social acceptance. I tear open a sample bag from the Nixon-era cardboard box in the copy room and plunge my hands into it.

I start to think I have won the day when I notice that, among the homey and familiar scent of coffee, the high tang of that Jean Nate to Starbucks’ Chanel: pre-ground office coffee. The choice to use bitter, solo-serving sawdust instead of grade-A beans has left my hands smelling like they’ve recently been on fire.

I dust off the excess grounds and set my hands palms-up on my desk to… air out, I guess. I realize immediately that 1) I look stupid and 2) my hands are chapped from repeated washing—and now that I’ve noticed, there’s no way I cannot put on lotion. I rationalize that my vanilla hand cream will meld perfectly with the coffee, magically erasing all smokiness, and I will smell like mocha.

Post-lotion, I smell like a s’more that has spent its day shooting a particularly sweaty Stetson commercial. I sit on my hands again.

An hour later, I’m setting up a buffet of Thai food for a medical lecture (where there is a vivid color projection what looks, at fist glance, to be enchiladas; since it is unlikely to actually be enchiladas, I avoid a second glance). Due to the haphazard packaging of liquids, my hands quickly become covered in a mixture of coconut milk, hot sauce and beef fat. I head for the bathroom, apologizing to my hands and promising them a nice paraffin treatment which, at this point, would be the restorative equivalent of a pillow mint.

Strangely, the beef fat has dulled the cologne considerably, except for my right palm. How Jack Palance cured his chronic headaches from smelling like this every damn day of his six hundred years, we will never know. I apply more vanilla lotion, as he surely must have done.

The only place I can’t smell myself is on the bus. This is a very relative bliss.

I don’t bother with dinner; I can hardly bring my hand to my mouth without barfing, the idea of doing this repeatedly, involving food, is unthinkable. Rather, I trudge to the kitchen to concoct a hazmat batch of chemicals with various soaps, oils, and cleansers. I soak my hands only a minute at a time for fear of losing fingernails.

My hands now smell like my grandmother’s carpet. A carpet, it must be said, with an impeccable moustache. On the upside, varnish stains on the sink basin have completely dissolved.

Tonight, I tell myself as I cram my be-gloved and peppermint-balmed hands under a body pillow, tonight I couldn’t possibly have flossed.

——

Sarah Smallwood has been published by McSweeney's, loves her dog and will never let you forget that she ran a marathon. She can be reached through her long-documented salute to ennui, The Other Shoe. She lives in Michigan.

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