13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [28]
Louise has yearned keenly for the fulfillment of motherhood. She has been trying so hard. As of the day where our story hovers (Tuesday, November 6, 1928), she has not succeeded in this strenuous endeavor, though Lord knows she has been the most efficient puller of husbandly seed she has been allowed to be.
The gloves are mesh so that they can be comfortably worn on a warm day. Also, the hands can be seen through them. Though this effect might look sensual, this is not the true meaning of this tight netting. The idea is to let a little bit of the moist skin of the wearer’s fingers through the gloves so that she can gain purchase on the pages of her prayer book as she flips them during mass.
Fingers truly gloved would slide, would force the wearer to struggle noisily with her text during holy offices, and this cannot be. What if the wearer of such gloves got frustrated with her unwieldy and tenuous grasp on her blessed book? What if she were to sigh and grumble aloud in church? This cannot be—oh—she might even forget herself and take the Lord’s name in vain!
The stone church is God’s house, and must be treated as such. The mesh gloves are the most appropriate, though some of the more sin-minded men in the congregation might be inclined to leer at the sheathed hands of women clasping the Book and think of what it might be like to have the mesh graze their skin, with the heat of the woman’s hand still palpable through it. How wrong they are to think of taking the woman’s hand in their own, pushing the lace-bordered elastic back from the wrist and kissing its underside, just at the juncture with the palm, such a sensitive and ticklish place.
Women titter when they are kissed there. They blush and look away, shivery with goose bumps.
The men are wrong to think this—in church no less.
And Louise, that corrupted woman, is even more lewd than any of these men to think of them doing such things to her in church, yes, in church.
It is not her fault: she finds the gloves irritating. It is still a bit of a trick to flip the pages with them, especially noiselessly the way she’s supposed to. Bare hands would be much easier, but she cannot break with tradition. She wears the required dainty hat too, of course: a black one, since her favorite (the violet one) is too brightly colored for a place where Latin is spoken.
She finds the gloves irritating, so she sits there as this dead foreign tongue that is supposed to transport her closer to God slides past her ear, and she pictures possible contexts in which the gloves might be pleasing to her.
(Or pleasing to him—whoever the man is. To be taken in the confessional booth: her whole body quakes in heated desire at the idea. Let God strike her dead! No, let God enter her and do what He will with her: let Him inflict His just punishment! She can use a little discipline; such a wayward child she is. Oh, to be taken in the confessional booth, but by whom? The priest? Oh no, not the priest. He wouldn’t know what to do with her. Any good-looking man will do, any man who knows how to properly wield the marvel that God has given him, as long as this man has a beautiful mouth for her to kiss.)
These days, she does not go to church often because she gets bored so easily by the interminable chanting—all the standing and the sitting and the kneeling—the kneeling especially makes dirty things spring to her mind—this naughtiness always happens to her. She can’t help it.
STILL, THE BLACK GLOVES may be church gloves, but she has also worn them to funerals. She’s had the gloves for many years: they are expensive and beautifully made, meant to last as long as a woman’s hands will fit into them, if birthing her children does not make her too fat. (The funerals: first Camille, then her brother. At Camille’s funeral, she wept and wept in her father’s arms; at her brother’s, her heart was too exploded for her to even make a sound. If her father had tried to touch her to comfort her, she would have violently