The Giant's House (18 page)

“I'm not much for hats,” I said. “It was a loaner.”

“Oh, don't blame yourself,” said Uncle Fisher. “Never blame yourself. It was the hat's fault entirely. Where are you from?”

“Brewsterville.”

“Pretty,” he said, and I blushed.

“Whose uncle are you?”

“Everybody's. I'm the universal uncle.”

There was something about meeting a man away from my life that made things easier; I could almost flirt. Somehow I felt he could not see my flaws. Nothing mattered. I hoped the hateful couple would see me; I couldn't decide whether I preferred them to think that Uncle Fisher was my husband or my paramour.

“You're just jealous of my hat,” I said. “It's a fine hat.”

“It's a sin against nature.” He hummed something. “You're not married,” he said.

“That obvious?”

“Well, I'm everybody's uncle, and that means I've been to an awful lot of weddings. Single women are easy to spot—they're the ones who are surprised when asked to dance.”

“Are you married?”

“No, no. I believe marriage is a spectator sport. You're a fine dancer, Peggy. Where do you dance in Brewsterville?”

“I don't.”

“Well then, you should come to Wellfleet more often. I'll take you dancing.”

“Where?”

“There's a wedding almost every week. You should come visit me.”

Between James acting impossible, and my not knowing anyone else in the room, and the effortless way he made me dance, I could entertain the idea. The notion that some afternoon I could get in my car and crash a wedding with Uncle Fisher seemed quite possible, as the band swung into another song and he did not even start to surrender me to the chairs that lined the room.

I said, “Sure.”

“You won't,” said Uncle Fisher sadly. “I'd like to believe you'd come, but you won't.”

“I might,” I said. But his doubting it made me certain: I wouldn't. I would step from his arms and forget him.

Which I did, at least sort of. But for weeks after this—longer, really, but with frightening regularity for those first few weeks—I would think of Fisher, with his dark hair and soft body. I could see myself in my car, going to visit him, and wonder, why not just up and go to Wellfleet? Would I know where to find him? Would he be at another wedding, dancing with someone who looked good in a hat? I would calm myself down, I would acknowledge that it couldn't be anything personal—after all, he didn't even know me. He asked me to dance before he'd heard me speak. For instance: he didn't know how I felt about that sullen, bespectacled, irreligious teenager who, as we danced, drank a beer, played with his cane, and longed for the bride.

Later I would think of Uncle Fisher again, a guilty pleasure. He was someone outside of my life who might possibly think of me. A possibility. Some people live in a world of such things. Think of Stella—couldn't she have had anyone she wanted? Don't you think even now, with two grown kids and a husband who drinks too much (and I don't know where Stella is this winter, I only know what I saw that night: Sean drinking and embracing his friends, Stella dancing with everyone, old men, five-year-olds, female cousins), mightn't she think of all the things she could have chosen?

As for myself, I can't, I don't. I am happy with my life, largely
because it
is
my life. How many regrets can I have? I didn't turn much down. Indeed, perhaps on the dance floor I saw the future, knew I'd stay with James forever. Before it was just what I did: I stayed with James; each morning I woke up knowing that it was a day I would devote to him in some small or large way. I was offered so little explicitly in my life, and I accepted nearly every explicit offer. Uncle Fisher was one. A small choice, but a particular one. And I turned him down.

When the second song ended, I sat down on the other side of the room from James and talked to Uncle Fisher.

James approached us. He squinted at Uncle Fisher.

“I want to go home now.”

“In a minute,” I said.

“
Peggy
,” he said. “I don't feel well. I want to leave.”

I stood and shook Uncle Fisher's hand and then gave it a fond pat. “Thank you for the dance. Okay,” I said to James. “Let's go.”

In the parking lot I said, “Did you have a good time?”

He shrugged. “Let's
go
,” he said.

“Why yes Peggy I did. And did you have a good time? Why, yes James, I had a good time too.”

“Oh, is that why you came,” he said. “I thought you were just supposed to drive me. I didn't know you wanted to have a
good time
.”

He looked absolutely disgusted, I couldn't tell over what.

“I didn't know you objected to me having one,” I said. “I thought I was doing you a favor, giving up the better part of one of my days off to drive you to a social event where I wouldn't know anybody. I'm sorry. Perhaps next time I'll wait in the hall, and you can come get me when you're ready to leave.”

I couldn't tell if we were arguing like husband and wife or mother and son; I wanted to rectify that. “I'm happy to drive you anywhere, James. You know that. But I'm not your mother. I'm doing it as a
friend
, and so you better treat me like one.”

We walked to the Nash in silence. Then he said, “I want to drive.” I heard this as,
I want to die
. He rubbed the fender and repeated it.

I answered, not unsympathetically, “You're drunk.”

“No I'm not.”

“You don't know how to drive.”

“You can teach me. I only had one beer. Oh, two, I guess. I mean, you wouldn't even have to teach me, I took driver's ed, the classroom part, so basically I know how. The driver's seat flips down the other side, right? It's perfect.”

I looked at him. I had my hand in my purse, my fingers sliding along the serrated edge of the key.

“I'm insane,” I said.

“No! You're not! I'll be really careful, we won't even go on the highway.”

“Okay. First: which one's the brake and which one's the gas?”

He set his hands in front of him, palms to the ground. He closed his eyes. “Brake.” He depressed his left hand. “Gas. Gearshift.” His right hand closed to a fist, up toward the imaginary steering wheel. “Ignition.” His left hand came up. “Lights. Windshield wipers.” Then he flipped his left hand up, stuck it out, flipped it down. “Right. Left. Stop.”

“You promise to keep your eyes open if I let you drive?”

He opened them, nodded. I flung the keys, and he caught them in a snatch.

“Your reflexes are good. That was the last test. Let's go.”

I folded the driver's seat down. Even he needed a pillow behind him to drive; luckily, so did I, and I tucked it behind him, then got into the backseat so that we were sitting next to each other. I was miles from reaching the radio.

He was a good driver, improbably good for someone who'd never driven, but maybe I was just in a suddenly fine mood. I was surprised by my willingness to let him drive; proud, even. As soon as he got used to the way the car jumped when given too much gas or brake, it didn't jump anymore. I pointed out his tendency to rush traffic lights and stop signs.

“What the heck,” I said. “You might as well drive all the way home.”

“On the highway?” he said.

“It's the middle of the night. There isn't any traffic, and actually it's easier to drive on the highway. There's less to avoid hitting.”

“I'm ready to go to the shoe store,” he said casually. “You can call them.”

“Oh. Good. What changed your mind?”

“It's time,” he said. We finally found Route 6A, and pulled on.

“I want a cigarette,” James announced. He pulled out a crumpled pack from his shirt pocket and looked at me, wanting, I supposed, to gauge my disapproval. I tried not to show any. “Could you get one for me?” he said. “And light it?” So I stuck a cigarette in my mouth, while he unrolled the backseat window by his elbow.

“How often do you smoke?” I asked. He took the cigarette from me, put that hand on the steering wheel, and looked at the watch on his other hand. I'd forgotten what a complicated process juggling the wheel is in the first few days of driving.

“Well,” he said. “Every morning this month.”

“Really.”

He laughed. “It's one
A.M.
July first. I'm only telling the truth. Not that much. Almost never.”

“Me neither,” I said, and I lit a cigarette for myself.

“You, too?”

“Occasionally,” I answered, though it had been since college. I touched my hair, realized Astoria's lurid hat was still in Uncle Fisher's pocket. Somehow I suspected that if I told the story right, she'd understand. And then I rolled down my back window, too, and we smoked our cigarettes and when we were finished we tossed them out, and they flew behind us like Stella's bouquet, except that no plump bridesmaid anchored down by satin shoes and a tulle petticoat caught them. Only the highway, which took care of us in this and other ways on the ride home, our windows still unwound, James still at the wheel.

But before we got to Brewsterville, he said, not looking at me, “Peggy. Have you ever been in love?”

Ah, he was a romantic, like his aunt. I stared out the windshield, wondering what to answer.

“No,” I said finally. “Have you?”

“Hmmm. I don't know. Maybe. Not sure.”

I locked and unlocked the car door. “Who?”

“Who?” he said, and then he must have realized he was stalling. “Who-who. Who indeed.” He sighed. “I think I used to be in love with Stella.”

“Used to be,” I said. “Not anymore?”

“No.”

“What cured you?”

He laughed. “The cure for this terrible ailment was. Well, I don't know what it was. I guess I talked myself out of it. I guess unrequited love is a bed of nails I don't want to spend my life lying on.”

“That bad.”

“No. At first it's the mere feat of it, you know? The fact that you're doing it, the adrenaline gets you through. But after that—”

“After that, you start to feel the nails.”

“Yup.”

“You ever tell her?”

“Fat chance. She has guys telling her they love her all day long. She told me so. Now, if I said I loved her, would she tell me things like that? Anyhow, that's how I feel today.”

Just a crush
, I thought, but I didn't say it. I'd heard enough of the music the teenagers played to know that saying such a thing would turn me into A Hated Grown-up.

“So you never had a boyfriend.” He said this as a statement of fact.

“Yes, I have,” I said. “In my wicked past. A few.” Then I regretted it, because if I'd said no, it would have made our lives more alike. I looked for things that made us seem alike. But I would have been lying; it had been a while, but I'd had boyfriends.

“You had a wicked past?” he said. He smiled, clearly not believing it.

“Semi-wicked,” I said. “Absolutely saintly compared to most.”

“Tell me about it. Did you break his heart, or did he break yours?”

“It isn't interesting.”

“I want to hear about your past,” he said.

“My past,” I told him, “is a series of practical jokes carried out by bored and nasty-minded boys.”

“Oh,” he said. It wasn't the answer he'd wanted.

But for some reason I couldn't help but elaborate. “Every now and then, I get offered a chair, and I think, nope, not going to fall for this again, but of course I do, and when I go to sit down, it's been pulled out from under me.”

“But your heart was never broken,” said James.

“Not my heart,” I said. “I never landed on my heart.”

With the money the shoe store advanced, James commissioned a new pair of pants and a shirt. The Portuguese tailor from the next town came to the cottage to take his measurements.

“Yes,” he said, looking at James. “This is the biggest challenge of my career.” His accent gave the words a jaunty pessimism. But he did good work, though he called several times to make sure that he'd got it right, that the collar would really have to be that expansive, the legs that long. “I saw him but I forget. Remind me again.”

The shoe store people were beside themselves. They took out ads in several local papers, geared toward children and their parents. MEET THE WORLD'S TALLEST BOY, 10 AM–12 PM, HYANNIS SHOES.

I offered to let him drive, but he said he was too distracted. Not distracted enough, however, that he could not criticize with his newfound knowledge of the road. I was a careful driver. Still I could hear him sputter in the back.

We got there at nine, an hour before the store opened, so that James could get settled and get his feet measured for a new pair of shoes; the old ones, he said, were hard to get on in the morning. That was the only way he could tell he'd outgrown them: the difficulty in getting them on first thing, off at night. Sometimes he slept in his shoes, he told me. Between the size of his feet and the distance they were from his arms, it was easier that way.

“Get Oscar to come over,” I said.

“Too much trouble.”

They'd decorated the front of the store with balloons, streamers. A huge shoe took up most of the window display; just like James's, though made years before, so smaller. A middle-aged man in a suit leaned on the short brick wall that held up the shop windows.

“Jim,” he said, standing up, holding out his hand. “Hugh Peters. President of the chain.” True enough, he was wearing beautiful shoes, rich and red as porterhouse steaks. “Glad we finally coaxed you out here.”

“Nice to meet you, sir.”

You could see Hugh Peters trying his best not to notice James's height. He shook his head and laughed. “How tall are you, exactly?”