Some Things That Happen When You Have the Strength of Ten Men

SOME THINGS THAT HAPPEN WHEN YOU HAVE THE STRENGTH OF TEN MEN

by Mel Nigro

Content warning: Death, sexual harassment, implied sexual abuse, trauma, depression, verbal abuse 

You don't accidentally pull doors off their hinges; you pull them into your face. You break your nose several times before you are old enough to know better. You learn to moderate, to let the strength ebb and flow, so that you don’t hurt yourself, so that you look normal.

No one else knows until you are nine and your sister is seven. You’re out in the woods, trying to cross the creek. If you can get across the creek before noon, Mom won’t know where you are, won’t be able to call you in for chores, won’t be able to smack you both across the knees when you sneak cereal from the pantry. 

Your sister is stepping into the water, but you know that if you bring her back with muddy feet Mom will shake your arm and say, we can’t keep buying shoes. So, you pull her back. You push up your sleeves and squat down next to a fallen log. There it is, the strength, yelling its way down your bones in a tumble of joyful shouts, lifting the log over your head.

Your sister looks up at you with round eyes. Wow, you’re amazing! she says, but as the moment stretches longer and longer and the log is still steady in your hands, she takes a step back and says, please, put it down.

You lay the log from bank to bank. Together, you walk across. Your sister hesitates, but still takes your hand. 

•••

Everyone else learns about the strength after you send the ball flying out of the park during kickball. They watch with open mouths as the ball flies further and further, like a balloon going up into the atmosphere, and someone says great, now what? and they all turn in your direction.

You run home and hide in the closet so that Mom can’t hear you sob, because she never knows what to say or do with a crying child, because she’s just as strong as you but in a different way. She has steel around her heart. She has the kind of strength that comes from standing too tall for too long, so that when the factory closes and Dad loses his job she doesn’t comfort him, just says, you better find another one. When he lashes out, calls her a bitch, a nag, she stands there with iron in her spine and says, this is your problem to solve. You take your sister’s hand and lead her to the basement, so you can watch Spider-Man with the volume turned up loud enough to drown out your mother’s cold, clear responses.

Your sister thinks you are stronger than you are. Just because you do everything first, she thinks that you are strong enough for the both of you. She lets you carry the weight, and you don’t know how to tell her about the strain in your shoulders. The ache at the base of your heart. You don’t know how to set it down gently, and you worry that one day the ache will rise up and shout, enough. 

You want to give your sister this kind of strength. You want her to have the same power pushing her limbs, the same sureness guiding her actions. All you can do is lift logs out of the way and hope she finds the path. When your father leaves, you hold your sister in your too-brawny, too-tawny arms. She relaxes for the first time in a while, like you aren’t dangerous, like you don’t know how to break things in two.

Your uncle visits on your twelfth birthday and comes into your room that night after the cake, just to check on you, he says. He leans in close enough that you can smell the beer on his breath. Your sister is in the top bunk and you can hear her making her breath quieter and something about this scares you so deeply that you push him. Your uncle flies backward and hits his head on the dresser and falls into a coma for six weeks. Your family visits him in the hospital and all you can think is that it’s your fault all your fault you stupid stupid child how could you act like this is not your fault even if he was—even if that was what you thought, how can you— how could you—

When you get home from the hospital, you go out into the woods and heft boulders over your head and throw them down the ridge. Let people think it was a storm, or a bear. You just need to hold the world in your hands and throw it as far as you can.

•••

You have the strength of ten men and sometimes they all shout in one voice, saying, you are too weak, too soft, too scared to use us all. We are each a tiny Atlas, they say, with your burdens on our shoulders, and you hate us. You wish we were gone.

You imagine the ten men stacked inside of you, operating your limbs, layered like a Russian doll. The man who gets his way. The man who is always right. The man who holds still under unbearable weight, and the man who bears all things in silence. The man whose love and desire could swallow an entire country. The man who shouts his name endlessly into the void, until it loses all meaning. The man who cries, the man who never cries, and the man who wants to cry but somehow can’t. And the last man, the man who speaks with your voice and never knows when to stop.

•••

When you reach eighteen, you move into an apartment in the center of town. You get a car and a job loading crates at a warehouse, and you don’t know how to tell your sister that this is not something to admire. My job isn’t impressive, you want to tell her, I barely make enough to buy those fancy greek yogurts we both like. You think that if you were really strong, you’d have moved across the country, to a town where no one would recognize you, where you could be anything or anyone.

You stay because people know you here. They know you’ll help move their cars when they get stuck on the side of the road. They know they can call you to break the handles off doors if the locksmith is still drunk and passed out on his mom’s couch.

Every morning you look at yourself in the mirror and think: there should be bulging muscles. You should have a beard. There should be signs of the shouting man straining in your neck. You start wearing tank tops and tying bandanas around your hair. Let people think you can fix cars and work with your hands. It will throw them off less when you pull out a chair too hard, when your firm handshake leaves aching fingers. They’ll know how to read you. You will make sense. At least, a little bit. You wait, every night, for the moment you can take off your bandana and let the soft wave of your hair tumble down. Curls pressed and flat, compression beginning to unwind.

The best days are when you know what the strength is for. When you lift a car off the sidewalk and its owner says, thanks, man. When you move boxes at the warehouse with inhuman speed, taking ten, fifteen at a time. Oh, and when you dance. When you dance, all ten of the men dance with you, and you shake the foundations of the earth, send shivers down the tectonic plates. You make cracks in the pavement and pull them back together again. You bend and stretch and float. You toss your partner ten feet into the air, and the best part is seeing the trust in her face as she lands, once more, in your arms.

•••

When you move your sister into her first apartment, you think it’s a bad idea, because you want her to get out, go to another city. She is too bright for a place like this, she needs more sky to shine in, but here you are giving her your old couch, carrying it up the stairs. She doesn’t even offer to help. You know that this means she knows you but when she asks you to move the couch an inch to the left, no, two inches to the right, no, back a foot, you drop the couch and start to yell. You lose it. You are a wild and battering storm and you don’t know how to stop and she just stands there in the middle, watching you with eyes as cool as your mother’s. You tell her that she’s trapping herself, staying here, who cares where the goddamned couch sits maybe she should ask her latest asshole boyfriend to move their furniture around, he’s the one who’ll be melding into it over the next few months while she works to support both of them—

She’s crying. She’s crying like metal condensing in the cold, reluctantly, tears beading on her cheeks, and you realize that you’ve done it again, you’ve pushed too hard and broken something. You’re afraid of her silence stretching forever.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you say, and when she takes you into a hug you feel how firm her shoulders are and realize that she has a strength you don’t understand. She has been watching you and your parents shout for years, like a mountain watches the frantic movements of birds. You think: she is the only person I cannot break.

•••

You meet the man who wrecks your sister’s heart and at first it is like looking in a mirror.

Hey, he says, cracking open a coke, flicking the cap into the trash without looking. Nice pecs.

You don’t like him from the beginning, but you try. You don’t like the way he spreads himself everywhere, the way he interrupts you in conversation, the way he hates to lose. He asks to live at her apartment, just until he gets on his feet, and when they break up you know she’ll still be paying his rent. All he wants to do is go biking. He is always fixing a bike or tuning a bike or making a bike out of spare parts. You wonder if the reason you can’t stand him is that you don’t know how to use your strength to mend things, but he does.

When your sister decides to marry him, all of the men raise their clanging chorus of voices like hammers hitting a nail ten different ways and say, absolutely not. You know this kind of man, and you know that she will shrink and dim in his sprawl and noise. You don’t know how to wrangle the ten men’s shouts, how to tell them to shut up, you’re trying to think, because every time you do they shout louder. 

You spend the engagement wrestling each loud sound into the depths of your heart, where they can resound in vibrating, infinite waves. You let the men shout themselves hoarse as your smile cracks at the wedding, as you stand at the reception in the corner by the bar with your fifth whiskey. You’re still wrestling them down when your sister’s new husband comes up, sweaty from drinking and dancing, and slings his arm around your waist. He makes some joke about how he can’t imagine what it would be like to sleep with you, how you must dominate every person you take to bed. He takes a drink. He squeezes your ass.

You break the arm around your waist. Your sister’s husband screams and all the ten men give a glad shout except for one, the always-crying one, who moans so deep and low it vibrates right down to the soles of your feet.

You don’t cry. You watch as the husband is bundled into an ambulance, as the guests console your sister, who screams at you, red-faced, veil crumpled, and gown stained with sweat.

Your mom drives you home. She only breaks the silence to say, why are you always so much trouble.

•••

In the following weeks, your sister stops talking to you, and this is the first weight you cannot lift. You sink further and further under the silence and you’ve still got this useless strength. Get up, the men shout at you, go somewhere, get off your ass, and you shrug them down. At the warehouse, you lift boxes like all the other men with a nothing face. You go home, crack open a Coors Light, and marathon episodes of Fixer Upper. You watch people build and shape their lives into something just a little bit better than what they started with. You watch all that elbow grease going towards something that’ll last for ten, twenty years and think about how quickly you could wreck any of it. How shoddy those two-by-fours are. How fast that new bookshelf would turn to dust in your hands.

You stop using the strength. You let it still and simmer, and you go about your day like anyone else. You practice closing doors gently. You lift boxes with a grunt. You tuck yourself into the corner of the couch, hands between your knees, an apology for every time they were too much.

Maybe one day you’ll go to lift something, to throw something, and the strength will be gone. You’ll be left standing there, this shell, unable to shift or sway or change anything.

•••

It’s been three years since you and your sister last spoke. You have learned not to shout, how to hear all the voices and let them die into the echo of welcome, listening space. You learn how to bench press their fears, their worries, their aggressions. You’ve started building small gifts for your neighbours—coffee tables, nightstands, picture frames—and in return they give you banana bread, tomatoes, dinner once a week. You start weeding your yard and fixing the broken steps. You’ve become your own therapist, your own shoulder to cry on.

You tell each of the ten men to take a seat, except for the crying man. Him, you take in your arms. Him, you hold to your beating heart, you let sob until he is empty, until the rivers and lakes and seas overflow, until it is just the two of you and nine of them, in the silence, in the lapping of the waves. 

At your mother’s funeral, your sister arrives without a husband. She won’t look at you during the service, but she takes your hand when your mother is lowered into the ground.

I fucked up, you say when it is just the two of you and the headstone.

You let silence fall, without stepping to pick it up. There is just you, and her, and the chasm left by your mother, and you know that she sees each man stacked inside you.

When you offer your sister some whiskey from the flask in your jacket, she accepts. I’m sorry, you say, that I pushed so hard. But I’m not sorry I pushed. 

Your sister takes a long breath. I’m glad you did, she says. And I’m sorry, too. 

It is like she has lifted some of the pressure from your shoulders. Like you are sharing a load, together. 

•••

When you get home, you look at yourself, those strong hands, and remember all of the soft things they’ve touched and left whole. You realize that you’ve built walls and broken them down, carried people who were too weak to stand, guided your sister in the woods. You’ve dug gardens, made drinks, read books. You’ve thrown boulders, forded rivers, climbed trees. 

Today, you see that you are not your strength. You are strong. You are ten men. You pull doors off their hinges, you make mountains move with the sound of your voice, you are powerful and loud, and this is okay. You are quiet and still, and this is okay. 

And on this day, in perfect unison, the ten men sing.