Harriet had hung up on me. I knew I wouldn’t hear from her again. My heart sat, a tight tiny rock in my chest. Instead of helping, I had made things harder for her. Looking back, I might have hung up on me too.
I had met Harriet ten years earlier when my friend Jay suggested I meet her. “She reads palms”. He told me bouncing his mischievous eyebrows up and down. ‘But her business card says she’s a “hand analyst”’.
Jay and I were in Winnipeg working together through a sub-zero prairie winter, at The Manitoba Theatre Centre. We were in a play called “Talking Dirty”, a zany Canadian comedy about mixed-up relationship shenanigans among the academic set in the 1980s. It had its moment in the sun on the regional theater circuit, before the century and social tides turned and the #MeToo movement finally dragged disbelieving predators blinking into the light. My character Jackie, an unaware Kitsilano Hippie Bimbo, wouldn’t play today. Now, she would courageously out the professors’ dodgy moral decisions, pen a bestseller, and launch her own IPO featuring a unique line of women’s wellness products. But it was the 1980s and I made my living playing several bimbos that decade and didn’t give it a second thought. I was just grateful they paid the rent.
Harriet had traveled into town especially to see “Talking Dirty” and meet the cast. We were asked by Jay, as a favour, to stay after the show to meet Harriet and hear about her research project. She hoped we would volunteer to help with her groundbreaking science-based project AND discover fascinating information about ourselves in the bargain. Harriet was looking for “creatives” like us - artists and actors. Even better, she said, would be signing up a “homosexual or a criminal”. She paused here for a moment in case any homosexuals or criminals in our cast wanted to raise their hands. Jay, our (sadly for Harriet) straight, I’ll-try-anything-once star had already been her first volunteer, and he told us, “It was a blast.”
Harriet described how she “cast” the prints, the extensive analysis she did on them, and the research she had been amassing over the years, with the ultimate goal of offering her work to major universities. When we participated, she would meet with us to make our prints and then share a written report with us on what our hands revealed. During her talk, she raised her own hand skyward every so often, wiggling her fingers vigorously. “I do this” she explained, “to wake them up.” I found out years later she suffered from a degenerative neurological condition with a name I can’t remember, that caused her to lose all feeling in her left hand. It was probably also the reason her tongue darted in and out as she focussed her attention, like a chameleon checking for nearby insects.
As Harriet really got going, these twitches stopped. Words tumbled out of her like a waterfall. She seemed to be racing to get everything said before the tics caught up with her again. She finished with a crescendo: “Hand Analysis is the key to everything!”. She exhaled, waiting for volunteers. Harriet was just too interesting for me NOT to offer her my palms.
We met at her hotel room the following day at one p.m. She got right to work, applying black sticky ink to my hands with a doll-sized paint roller, something that Barbie might use to repaint the Dream House. She squinted under her lopsided glasses. Her mouth moved constantly, tongue popping in and out with concentration. I took a moment to glance around her hotel room. Several books were splayed open on her bed, a wooly sweater draped over the stiff leather armchair, and a half-finished bowl of what could have been chocolate ice cream teetered precariously on the bedside table. I fought the urge to rescue it.
Satisfied that she had completely covered the palm of my hand in the uncomfortable sticky blackness, Harriet surgically extracted four pieces of onionskin from a nearby jumble and laid them out on the glass tabletop. One at a time she positioned each of my palms, ink side down, over the top and pressed it firmly down on the snow-white page. “Don’t move a whisker” She whispered. I didn’t.
When she was done, I washed my hands in the hotel bathroom. This left a nasty-looking black ring in the sink. Harriet examined the still-wet prints on the glass table. There it was in black and white: the map of me, my habits, my past, future, peculiarities, personality, my passions. At least, that’s what I assumed Harriet saw. I saw nothing more than a handful of meaningless lines. Some intersecting, a couple of large furrows snaking confidently across the expanse of my palm. There were a few tiny tributaries that began and ended nowhere. That project I didn’t finish in High school? The gay boyfriend who ghosted me?
“What does it mean?” I asked. “Too early to tell”. She said. She had to study them, spend time with them, consult some research material. Before I knew it, we’d said goodbye, and the heavy hotel door had clicked shut. Its mean little spy eye stared at me unblinking, revealing nothing. I hovered, dazed, in my untethered body and, after a few seconds, padded down the hermetic, hushed hallway to the elevator.
Later that night the audience roared at our onstage shenanigans. As I held for a laugh, I spotted a shiny black dab of ink in the crevice by my left thumb. For a flash, Harriet joined me on stage. “I’ll be in touch soon”, she had told me.
It was two years before I steered a rented Honda Civic, crinkled map on my lap, along the flat prairie Highway toward Harriet’s little house in Selkirk Manitoba. It was time to find out about the mysteries hidden in my hands.
I love this story - so well-conveyed.