The Giant's House (6 page)

“I think so,” I said. “A famous lawyer, maybe.”

She looked at me as if I were the stupidest person in the world. “Oh, I'm not talking about what he'll
do
. I'm talking about him. He'll be the tallest man ever, that's why he'll be famous.”

“He's young,” I said. “He won't grow forever.”

“You'll see,” she said. “Drink.”

I didn't want to. I investigated my glass, trying to seem thoughtful. “But your husband,” I said. “He wasn't from Iowa.”

She wrinkled her nose, then scratched it. Mrs. Sweatt was always itchy when questioned. “No. He was a Cape Cod boy. Cape Cod.” She sighed. “Ruined me.”

“The Cape or the boy?”

“Oh, I guess I can't pin it on the Cape,” she said. “Drink your whiskey.”

“Okay.” I lifted the glass, paused, poured it in my mouth, and swallowed. I concentrated on whacking the empty glass on the bar, so I wouldn't shudder.

Mrs. Sweatt smiled completely for the first time in my presence; I saw that one of her lower teeth was entirely silver. “Wow,” she said. She'd forgotten that in whiskey, as in many things, it's the amateurs who have to be showy.

It wasn't as cool as I'd expected outside; it had been the wind off the ocean that chilled us, and now we were a block inland. Mrs. Sweatt was back to her usual silence. I still could taste the whiskey on the edges of my tongue. I felt a trifle unbuckled.

From behind us, a voice said, with a conspicuous lack of French accent, “It's les girls!”

I turned. Oscar, of course.

“Les Brewsterville girls! Where you been, girls?”

Mrs. Sweatt wore a distracted, wistful look on her face, like the girl singer of a big band during a tragic ballad's instrumental solo.

“Walking,” I told Oscar. “Only walking.”

Even now, I remember Mrs. Sweatt as the embodiment of every sad love song ever written; she believed every musical statement of what love did to you when it went wrong, how it was like a poison without an antidote, how you'd never breathe right again. Most people feel that way only when the music plays; all her days, Mrs. Sweatt's heart was tuned to some radio frequency crammed with tragedy. Even that night in Provincetown (sitting on the sea wall, walking to the bar, drinking whiskey) she sounded like she was singing her own sad, particular lyrics:
Can't blame it on Cape Cod, guess I'll blame it on the boy
.

To others, perhaps, Mrs. Sweatt and I seemed similar: two youngish single women in a town of married couples. People in town probably pitied our singularity. We were old to be unmarried, and odd, surely matchless. But here's the difference: she was ruined by love—that's how she put it—while I was ruined by the lack of it. And the fact is when you're flooded with something, you're more likely to rot away, to disappear entirely, than if you dry up slowly. Ask the Egyptians, ask anyone.

A month after that night in Provincetown, James brought me a folded piece of ruled paper.

“It's from my aunt,” he said.

The handwriting said
Peggy Cort
on the outside of the fold. It was improbably fancy handwriting for the unfancy paper—brown ink and the practiced thick-then-thin cursive of someone who'd been brought up to write thank-you notes promptly.

Inside were the words
dinner, friday, six pm, dessert if you're willing
.

All my life, dinner invitations moved me peculiarly. Dinner parties, like romance, always seemed to happen to someone else. I was a librarian approaching thirty, and people perhaps thought I was allergic.

I kept the catalog cards of withdrawn books for scrap at the desk. I picked one up to respond and glanced at the back.
A home cyclopedia, encompassing health, nutrition, and child raising
. That didn't seem right. I sorted through the pile, hoping ridiculously I'd find one of the cards for that ruined copy of
Tom Sawyer
James had kept, but of course I'd pulled them years before. Some long-gone patron had already taken them, jotted down something less important on the back of the title card, the author card, the shelf list. I settled for
A History of Rhode Island
.

Dear Mrs. Strickland: Yes please
, I wrote.
And yes to dessert as
well. P. Cort
. I folded it in half. The printing on the front of the card left no room for me to write her name as she'd written mine, so I slipped my note in a library envelope.

Mrs. Sweatt met me at the door. Instead of saying hello, she plucked the bakery box from my hands by the length of string that held it shut, then turned from me, as if she were a servant taught not to interact with the guests. I hadn't seen her at the library in the past few weeks, I realized, and in that short time she'd changed. Her face puffed out, as if she'd gained ten pounds only in her head; the rest of her looked bird-skinny.

“Hello,” I said. I tried to make it sound meaningful.

She sighed, and lifted that newly heavy head, and looked at me, and said, “I've been sick.”

Oscar Strickland was just behind Mrs. Sweatt; he shook my hand. “Hello, Miss Cort.” He, too, seemed strangely shy; I'd remembered him as a jocular man, even loud.

“Please call me Peggy,” I said.

Caroline came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on the back pockets of her jeans. “Why Peggy Cort,” she said. “How nice.”

“There's cake,” said Mrs. Sweatt. She'd set the empty box on the table by the door and now peered into the little white cake that balanced on her upturned palms.

James did not have dinner with us; he was working on some homework at a friend's. I wondered whether he spent a lot of time avoiding the grown-ups—I wanted to pin his absence on something other than my presence, since I'd secretly hoped that the invitation was his doing. Well, I thought: James's house. I wanted to look at every object and invest it with him, to pick up a bottle off the plate rail that ran the edge of the dining room, unfold the quilt hanging off the back of a chair, saying,
James?
as if James were a relative so long missing I believed he'd somehow become the bottle, the quilt. But that was impossible. The knickknacks had clearly belonged to some significant but long-dead old lady; the furniture was mismatched and gummy with years of hasty polishings.
Nothing reminded me of him. I sat at the dinner table in what I assumed was his chair.

They called Mrs. Sweatt simply Missus and treated her like a girl who might be ruining her chance for happiness at every turn. Eat your meatballs, Missus. Aren't you cutting off your circulation, sitting that way? Missus made the dinner; she embroidered the tablecloth, too; we're trying to get her to sell her work in town, but she won't. I felt like they were trying to arrange a marriage between the two of us.

“I hope you're feeling better,” I told Mrs. Sweatt, wondering what she'd been sick with. Perhaps I'd try to look it up in my book of symptoms: swollen face, lethargy. The only affliction I knew so defined was desperate weeping.

She shrugged. “They tell me I'm supposed to.”

“Missus is getting skinnier,” said Caroline, “while I'm getting
fatter
.” She thumped her stomach.

“Don't hit the baby,” said Mrs. Sweatt. “Caroline's going to have a baby. She treats it like a drum, but it's a baby.”

“It isn't anything
yet
,” Caroline told me. “I'm barely pregnant.”

“That's wonderful,” I said.

Caroline nodded shyly.

Mrs. Sweatt drank milk from an enormous glass. At first I wondered whether there was any vodka in it; then I saw that she wasn't really drinking at all: every now and then she lifted the glass to her face, looked in, and set it back down, the milk level the same.

After dinner Caroline suggested a break before dessert, and Mrs. Sweatt started to clear the table. She moved very slowly, as if the table were a magnet and all the dishes steel. Several times she lifted a dish a few inches and put it right down.

“Do you need help?” I asked.

Mrs. Sweatt straightened the tablecloth and said, slowly, “You're a guest.” Maybe she
was
drunk.

Caroline took me by the elbow. “Come see the house.”

So Oscar and Caroline gave me a tour; I looked around greedily. It seemed much the same as it had the last time I'd been there, a motley, homely, dazzling collection of furnishings that seemed to
have only the most tenuous relationship to one another. I imagined taking down books and vases, anything I pleased, even curtains, and inquiring, in a businesslike tone, how long I might keep them. There is nothing I can't make into a library in my brain, no objects I don't imagine borrowing or lending out. Not out of generosity—I am a librarian, and protective—but out of a sense of strange careful justice. Part of me believes all material things belong to all people.

It was a house easily taken over by objects. White thuggy appliances crowded the kitchen; a huge unmade bed took up almost the entire bedroom. The thrown-back messy blankets embarrassed me.

On the back wall of the shadowy basement, dozens of little pictures hung off a peg board: the ocean, wheat fields, a woman brushing her hair, a horse, and one large canvas that looked abstract but I suspected was merely bad. They were Oscar's; he was the artist of the seascape in James's room, of the little flowers on the side of the house. The paintings were damp and blurry and looked ready to overflow their frames, as though they'd been painted through tears.

“What medium do you prefer?” I asked.

“All of 'em. I'm thinking of getting into comic books.” He walked to a table and picked up a piece of paper. It was a cartoon of a bride, with long blond hair, her veil flipped back and streaming behind her like a cape. The bodice of her dress was tight, cut low, and the deep line of her cleavage split in two and broke into curves over each breast. Flames shot out from the bottom of her skirt, a train of flames, and her face was full-lipped and big-eyed and small-nosed and smirking and unmistakably Mrs. Sweatt's. Mrs. Sweatt a month before, with her old cheekbones and cynicism.

“Rocket Bride,” Oscar said. “My newest invention.”

Rocket Bride, Oscar explained, had been abandoned by her groom at their wedding reception. In her grief she developed the ability to fly and now traveled the world, looking for her husband, but more
importantly
, stressed Oscar, fighting crime and injustice. She subdued criminals with her bouquet. She sometimes worked
with her sidekick, Maid O' Honor. It was her wedding dress that supplied her superpowers, and she vowed not to take it off until she found her wayward groom.

“Do you pose?” I asked Caroline.

“He's never asked me,” she said.

Oscar laughed. “For a comic book? I work from the imagination only. Not that you wouldn't make an excellent superhero,” he said to Caroline.

“I haven't got any superpowers,” she said.

“What will she do when she finds him?” I asked.

“Finds who?” asked Oscar.

I took the page from his hand. “Her husband. Will they settle down and live happily ever after?”

“Lord, no.” He looked over my shoulder at Rocket Bride, put a finger on the crown of her head. I saw by the careful signature in the corner that he was the one who'd written my dinner invitation. He stretched his arm around me, set his hand on my shoulder. Then he frowned, and with his other hand carefully whisked away a few pink-and-gray eraser leavings from the edge of Rocket Bride's veil. “Never. Rocket Bride's not the forgiving kind. No,” he said. “I think that husband should just pray he never gets found.”

His hand was still on my shoulder.

I am not a person who likes to be touched casually, which means of course that I like it a great deal. Every little touch takes on great meaning—oh, I could catalog them all for you: the bus driver who offered his hand as I stepped down from his bus, his other hand hovering near but not touching the small of my back. My flirtatious college friend who could not keep her hands off of anyone, who flicked one restless finger on the back of my wrist, on my forearm. Handshakes. Because I am short, certain tall people cannot resist palming my head; one college boyfriend stroked my hair so often in the early days of our courtship that, crackling with static, I could have clung to the wall like a child's balloon.

My list would go on forever, and still it would be shorter than other people's, because those tentative friendly fingers make me
stiffen, and by the time I realize I've done it and try to relax, the hands are gone. People get the idea. The better they know me, the less they touch me.

But Oscar did not know me at all. Did not notice the way I quietly jumped as his hand touched my shoulder blade. Did not take his hand away until he was ready to set Rocket Bride down again.

“I have lots of ideas,” he said. “She's just the first. There's Fancy Boy, and the Mighty Midget, and, let's see, Radio Dog—”