Self

The scar is slick and smooth, a half-inch long plateau of white flesh on the back of my hand. It doesn’t tan, and it never flushes when the rest of my body gets hot.

The day my hand was wounded, I was a 7-year-old child in the Midwest. I was growing into a tangle of long limbs that defied the proportion of the rest of my squatty body, a clumsy girl with few friends. It was winter, and I was cold.

My father and I were in a station wagon, the kind with wood panels on the side and an 8-track player and everything. We were running errands, and our last stop was my dad’s office on a military base to pick up some paperwork. We eased into the parking lot of my dad’s building. Gray sooted snow framed the asphalt. Our car slid on a patch of black ice, and my dad let out a low whistle when we skidded to a stop.

“That was close,” he said. He laughed, and the air from his lungs puffed out in little clouds.

After we parked in front of his building, we both climbed out of the car. I struggled to even do this. My coat was too big for me, since my mom insisted on buying one size up. My feet slipped on the ice and my mittens fumbled with the car door, which was slick with melting snow. I pushed the door and — POW.

I inhaled sharply, without intention. I was stuck there, my hand caught in the door, pierced by a jagged sliver of car. My insides went metallic and cold, but my right hand felt suddenly bright and alive.

I spoke just three words out loud: “Dad. Daddy. Help.” I was calm enough to remember that in military families only fathers were allowed to yell.

“Come on, Margaret. Enough messing around.”

“Daddy,” I said. “My hand is in the door.”

The bulldog skin of his face sagged as he frowned. He stomped over to my side of the car and assessed the situation. Sure enough, my hand was shut inside the door. And the door was locked.

“Oh my God,” my father said. His expression softened.

He fumbled for his car keys with shaking hands, then dropped them. As he pawed for the keys on the ground, I grew impatient and used my free hand to tug at the impaled one.

The metal sliced through my veins as easy as a steak knife on soft butter. Blood squirted, leaving red blossoms on my light grey mitten, my coat, and the snow.

When my dad finally opened the door, I scrambled inside the car and pressed a wad of tissues against my hand.

“Don’t make a mess,” my father warned.

It didn’t take us long to get to the hospital, where doctors passed me around in a complicated emergency room do-si-do until I finally landed in front of a nurse. She prepared the needle and thread for my stitches, and she said it was weird to see a kid who didn’t cry. Then she sank into a metal chair opposite mine.

Cleaning the wound, she suddenly exclaimed, “Oh no!” She looked from my hand to my face, then back to my hand again.

“What?”

“Well, you know what they say about princesses, right?”

No. I had no idea. My princess knowledge was limited to a couple of Disney books and coverage of Princess Diana on “Good Morning America.”

“The thing is, when a prince marries a princess, he kisses her right hand,” the nurse said. Then she motioned to my right hand. In the pointed light of the sterile room, the wound looked especially mangled, like steak tartare.

“But now you can’t marry a prince, because you’ll always have a scar there,” she said. “You’ll never be a princess.”

There are very specific things that destroy young hearts: A helium balloon floating off into the sky. A sandcastle stolen by crashing waves. And a fucked-up nurse who tells a little girl that she’ll never be a princess.

I didn’t even know becoming a princess was an option, but I wanted it back as soon as it was gone.

My nurse tucked her head down and began the delicate work of sewing me together. Every stitch pulled the skin taut over my hand, reinforcing her words. You are not magnificent. You are not special. You will never have white horses and bouncy hair and a prince willing to slay your dragons. No matter who you become, no matter how you heal, you will always be scarred.

I cried then. It wasn’t so much about the pain, which I could bear. It was learning the very grown-up lesson that some things never disappear, they only fade.

Almost twenty years later … 

I fell for a man who swept me away in a bright and shiny luxury car. He drove me to other cities and took me to dinner at restaurants with linen napkins. He sent me love letters thick and fragrant with words that had never been given to me before. He held my hand, and his touch ignited my skin.

He was older, and his body had a hardness that was different from the boys I dated before him. He ate right, ordered his food steamed and without sauces, and he didn’t drink or smoke until I talked him into it. I made him do bad things. That’s what he told me.

I laughed at the idea that I was corrupting him, when he was clearly the one who wielded all the strength in our relationship. He was the one who could easily overpower me, could almost shatter me with the force of his weight against my hips, could dissolve me by going a week without a phone call.

This man and I clung to each other in parking lots, hotel rooms just off the highway, and abandoned buildings. He had a key to an old post office, and we often slept together on a sleeping bag underneath the “out-of-town” slot. Sometimes people still dropped letters in there, letters that weren’t going anywhere at all.

I never wore a watch, because time wasn’t something within my control. He was always late. His wife was always waiting. I always wanted more. Together we were greedy, stupid and gluttonous, like people who devour a cheesecake in just one sitting, then lean back and wonder, “What’ve I done?”

He often left before me, and I lingered to clean up our mess — to roll and stash the sleeping bag and make sure the lock on the post office door clicked behind me, to be certain we didn’t leave a trace. It never felt scandalous until that moment, jogging two blocks to the alley where I parked my car. Alone.

Sometimes, when the days stretched long in between our visits, I walked around the block where he lived. If I looked through the trees just right, I caught glimpses of him in the backyard, running and playing games with his young child. In the winter it was easier, no leaves on the trees to block my view of him and his daughter, bright neon blossoms against a backdrop of white snow.

One night I told him I had second thoughts. There was no fantasy left at that point, no illusions of happily ever after. I wasn’t looking for Prince Charming. I simply wanted a relationship between two individuals who could walk down the street together. No more wine-sticky kisses in a lightless post office.

“Shhh,” he said, stroking my hand. The skin of his thumb caught ever-so-slightly on the pucker of my scar. “Don’t be that way.”

Then he told me that I was magnificent. That I was special. And he held my hand until it disappeared into his.

“You’re my princess,” he said.

But I knew the truth.