Patricia Feeney
The First Time
Early in our marriage, my husband and I lay spooned on the couch watching Hill Street Blues. During a scene between Dennis Franz and Daniel Travanti, my husband slid his hand over my waist and laced his fingers through mine, gently, deftly, as if he’d done it forever, as if we’d lived in utero, as close as twins.
Years later, our eighteen-year-old daughter spoke to me about sex, quizzing me on my history, unwittingly hinting at her experience. I didn’t ask her, “Have you had sex?” but “Have you ever held hands with someone?” Her face reddened as if I’d probed a personal, unspeakable detail. “Holding hands can be more intimate than sex,” I said.
“You’re right,” she answered. She didn’t tell me if she had.
My daughter’s thirty-one now, well past questions about sex. But she recently asked when I first held hands with her dad. I told her I wasn’t certain. I shared my memory of holding hands while we watched Hill Street Blues.
“But before that? You don’t remember?”
I flipped back the early pages of my mental journal, now mere whispers of thundercracks from our past. “I imagine it was on our third date. We sat in Dad’s Thunderbird and kissed for the first time. Knowing Dad—the romantic he is—he would have held my hand when he walked me to the door that night.”
My daughter’s in love with a new man. She speaks openly of him, no longer issuing warnings to stay out of her business. She’s introduced him to us, something she’s never done with previous men. She has a track-record of two-week relationships with men who have no access to their feelings. The new man has clocked ten months. She’s met his family. His friends. And he’s met hers. She said they talk. The new man listens.
“I can tell him anything,” she said. “I trust him.”
She now understands the intimate touch of entwined hands. Maybe the first time is etched in her memory. Maybe someday she’ll look back on the feeling of his hand in hers. She doesn’t know it won’t matter if she remembers the first time.
When I hold my husband’s hand today, I feel the connection of decades of marriage. His hands are rough from physical work, heavy from the weight of caring for his mother, his children, our pets, and me. But beneath the sinews and gnarls of age, beneath the hardened skin, I feel my husband’s tenderness, softer, more resilient, as deep as the undercurrents of a roiling river, more intimate than any touch of our past.
Patricia Feeney lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband and three family pets. She is a founding member of The Crooked Tree Writers, a St. Louis-based critique group, and is a member of the St. Louis Writers Guild and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Her work has appeared in The Lindenwood Review, Bayou Magazine (Pushcart nominee), Windmill Journal of Literature and Art, Inscape, Adelaide Literary Journal, biostories, Grub Street Literary Magazine, and elsewhere.
Years later, our eighteen-year-old daughter spoke to me about sex, quizzing me on my history, unwittingly hinting at her experience. I didn’t ask her, “Have you had sex?” but “Have you ever held hands with someone?” Her face reddened as if I’d probed a personal, unspeakable detail. “Holding hands can be more intimate than sex,” I said.
“You’re right,” she answered. She didn’t tell me if she had.
My daughter’s thirty-one now, well past questions about sex. But she recently asked when I first held hands with her dad. I told her I wasn’t certain. I shared my memory of holding hands while we watched Hill Street Blues.
“But before that? You don’t remember?”
I flipped back the early pages of my mental journal, now mere whispers of thundercracks from our past. “I imagine it was on our third date. We sat in Dad’s Thunderbird and kissed for the first time. Knowing Dad—the romantic he is—he would have held my hand when he walked me to the door that night.”
My daughter’s in love with a new man. She speaks openly of him, no longer issuing warnings to stay out of her business. She’s introduced him to us, something she’s never done with previous men. She has a track-record of two-week relationships with men who have no access to their feelings. The new man has clocked ten months. She’s met his family. His friends. And he’s met hers. She said they talk. The new man listens.
“I can tell him anything,” she said. “I trust him.”
She now understands the intimate touch of entwined hands. Maybe the first time is etched in her memory. Maybe someday she’ll look back on the feeling of his hand in hers. She doesn’t know it won’t matter if she remembers the first time.
When I hold my husband’s hand today, I feel the connection of decades of marriage. His hands are rough from physical work, heavy from the weight of caring for his mother, his children, our pets, and me. But beneath the sinews and gnarls of age, beneath the hardened skin, I feel my husband’s tenderness, softer, more resilient, as deep as the undercurrents of a roiling river, more intimate than any touch of our past.
Patricia Feeney lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband and three family pets. She is a founding member of The Crooked Tree Writers, a St. Louis-based critique group, and is a member of the St. Louis Writers Guild and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Her work has appeared in The Lindenwood Review, Bayou Magazine (Pushcart nominee), Windmill Journal of Literature and Art, Inscape, Adelaide Literary Journal, biostories, Grub Street Literary Magazine, and elsewhere.