The Giant's House (7 page)

Caroline shook her head. “Oscar dreams big.”

“Why not?” said Oscar. “Doesn't cost anything. Here's another idea. Record players for cars. I can't get anybody to invest, but it's what the American public wants.”

“It is?” I said.

“Well,” said Caroline, “it's what Oscar wants.”

I said, “But is this a nation of Oscars?”

He got a happy, planning look in his eyes. “A nation of Oscars,” he said, as if he were wondering how to swing it.

“
There's
an idea,” said Caroline.

“A nation of Oscars,” he repeated, smiling fondly.

He would have loved that, I think. Some people like to think they are unique; I saw immediately Oscar did not. What better than walking into a crowd of himself, brillantined, back-slapping men who would congratulate themselves on the good fortune of being who they were. “I commend you on your taste,” Oscar would say to Oscar. “You're my kind of man.”

When we went back upstairs, Mrs. Sweatt was simultaneously smoking a cigarette and trying to put on a duffel coat. She was apparently unwilling to put down the cigarette and kept switching it from one hand to her mouth to the other hand, trying to avoid the cloth.

“Where you going, Missus?” Caroline asked.

She looked a little panicked, as if she'd been caught doing something she'd been warned against. “Just going for a walk.”

“Missus,” said Oscar. “You think that's a good idea?”

“Around the block,” she said.

“Why don't you have dessert with us,” said Caroline.

“A short walk,” said Mrs. Sweatt. She had the cigarette in her mouth now, buttoning her coat, her eyes shut to avoid the smoke. She slipped the last toggle through the loop by her neck.

“Alice,”
said Caroline. “He said he'd be home by nine.”

The sleeves of Mrs. Sweatt's coat covered her hands; the smoke threatened to cover her face. Her skirt was longer than the coat and bunched up in flowered folds around her calves. She stood still for a minute, considering, then silently went to the table and sat down and ground the cigarette out on the edge of a plate.

“Peggy, come to the kitchen with me,” said Caroline. “Help me cut your beautiful cake.”

Caroline turned on the faucet and washed her hands.

“An after-dinner walk doesn't sound so bad to me,” I said, rubbing my stomach. “Nice to take the air after a meal.”

“Missus doesn't want to walk,” said Caroline. “She wants to spy.”

In the dining room, Mrs. Sweatt sat rigidly on her chair. “It's cold outside.”

Oscar looked through the window at a thermometer attached to the outside sill. “Forty-one. Not too bad. Missus, why don't you take off your coat.”

She undid the toggles slowly, top to bottom, then slipped out of it one arm at a time. It flopped over the back of her chair.

“Here,” said Oscar. “Let me help you.” He stood up and walked behind her.

Mrs. Sweatt took hold of one of the sleeves of the coat as if it were the arm of a favored suitor. “I might go out after.”

“Just stand up a minute.”

She did, and Oscar pulled out the coat and draped it over the back of her chair. “That better?” he asked.

She nodded.

Oscar picked up the plate with the cigarette. “Missus has started smoking again.”

“I picked it up from some friends in the hospital,” she said.

Caroline passed around slices of cake. The white frosting was gritty with sugar.

“Why, it's chocolate,” said Oscar. “Sort of a surprise. Eat your cake, Missus.”

“I don't want to get fat,” she said.

“You!” Caroline leaned back to display her tiny gut. “I myself feel like the
Titanic
.”

“Be careful of icebergs,” said Mrs. Sweatt. “I have it on good authority that it's a terrible thing to sink.”

Then the front door rattled, and James stepped in, his hair blown back by the wind, his cheeks tweaked pink by the cold. Mrs. Sweatt stood up. Her chair fell back in a dead swoon.

“Jim,” she said. She went to him, tugged on the lapels of his coat as if she were getting him ready to go back out again. She was tiny next to him, tiny and voluptuous.

“How are you feeling, Mom?” He set his hand on her head. Well, maybe he had been avoiding her, but the loving concern on his face was so clear it pained me, and then I was disgusted with myself for envying a boy's love for his mother.

“I'm okay,” she said. “Here.” She helped him off with his coat. Her hands went all around him, patting his chest, reaching up to touch his shoulder, his cheek. It was as if she wanted to check whether he'd grown while out of her sight, the way some mothers check for cigarette smoke or whiskey breath—though, of course, she was the one likely to smell of either. “Did you have a good time?” she asked. “Did you get supper?”

“Stuart's dad has a darkroom,” said James.

“I
thought
so,” she said. “You smell like chemicals. Go wash.” But she wouldn't let him go. His glasses had fogged up in the sudden heat of the living room, but he didn't take them off to clear them, just stood still and let his mother straighten his shirt, feel his hands for chill, smooth his cuffs. Finally she took the glasses from his face—he had to bend down to let her reach—and wiped them on the bottom edge of her sweater.

She handed them back. “You go ahead now,” she said as he put them back on. “Wash your hands.”

“First come say hello,” Caroline called to him. She got up to help Mrs. Sweatt's chair to its feet.

“Hello, James,” I said.

“Hello, Miss Cort.”

“You like photography?” I asked, though I knew he did.

“Yes. I need a new camera, though.”

In the living room, Mrs. Sweatt lay back on the sofa. The little bit of her face I could see past the dining room's door frame was dreamy, resolved into its former beautiful shape.

I wanted to offer him something. “We have books on pinhole cameras.” That was just the sort of thing that interested him. “You can make one from a box.”

“From a box?” he asked.

From a box
, I heard Mrs. Sweatt say from the other room, but I could not tell whether she was echoing my statement or her son's question.

That night, when I got outside, when Oscar and Caroline and James had seen me to the door, Oscar touching my shoulder again, Caroline my elbow, James not touching any part of me—I remember all the careless fingers of my life, those that settle and those that don't—when the door was closed behind me and I was alone in the cold, I hugged myself, smiled to myself, whispered assurances in my own ears—those little things you do, alone, when you have just glimpsed part of an agreeable future. No doubts, no apprehension—those are for later, when the future has arrived and you have to deal with the particulars. This moment was the best time. Everything was possible and improbable and meant nothing at all to anyone but me.

I'd read a little about magic; it was something I'd liked as a child, too, not sleight of hand but spectacular escapes. I thought my size would be an advantage. Houdini knew how to dislocate his shoulders, but I was so small I was sure I wouldn't have to do that: my mere tininess would free me.

Now, I wanted to out-Houdini Houdini, but in reverse. I wanted not to escape, but to enter, to insinuate myself into the
smallest places in that house, behind the oil burner, underneath the buffet, inside the oven. I wanted to get myself so caught they'd have to let me stay. Look, they'd say, how did she manage that? That space isn't big enough for anyone. Look at her: she's surely trapped.

Caroline started coming to visit me at work. At first I tried to give her library service. “What kind of books do you like?” I asked, and she smiled and said, “Nothing for me, thank you.” She carried some knitting in a bag and sat at the front table, as though it were somebody's living room; she showed absolutely no interest in the smallest resource of the library, apart from the furniture and the librarian.

She wanted to make conversation. “How's business?” she asked. At first I was terse. (Well, all my life I've been terse, but I mean especially.) In my role as a boss I constantly had to give Astoria meaningful looks when one of her pals lingered too long. It rarely worked; Astoria kept on talking, setting first her elbows, then her upper arms, and finally her impressive bosom upon the counter. Sometimes her voice got too loud; sometimes she whispered in a conspiratorial way. For years I'd tried to keep myself pure in this respect, talking solely about library issues to patrons, even James. That way my meaningful looks could be righteous, if ineffective.

But that was impossible with Caroline, and finally I thought,
Forget it, Peggy
. Astoria would never change. Astoria got to talk. Why not me?

“Can't I do anything for you?” I asked Caroline.

“Nope.”

Still, I pulled chairs around so she could put her feet up, even
filled and delivered pointed paper cups from the dispenser near the bubbler. I took care of her in any little way I could.

Finally one week, she said, “I wish I could return the favor.”

“Okay,” I said. “Next time, you get me a glass of water.”

“No.” She was working on a bright red sweater, which she set on the table. The needles stuck out of it, like Raggedy Ann's geisha wig. “I mean, invite you over. But Missus—well, she's not feeling well, and she doesn't want visitors. When she's perked up, you'll have to come back to dinner.”

I wasn't sure what to say to that. Had I said something to alienate Mrs. Sweatt at the Stricklands'? Going over everything that I'd said that night occupied me for several hours after work, a jury member reviewing the evidence.
Hello?
Perfectly blameless.
I hope you're feeling better. Do you need help?
Maybe there was something in my delivery that poisoned my intended politeness. Or maybe she objected to something I'd said to someone else, conversation that floated up through the registers from the basement with the heat, my offer of books on cameras to James. I looked in my mirror and said Hello to myself. It took several repetitions for me to decide I was being ridiculous.

Besides, Caroline came and knit, more pregnant every week, and James came to play tricks, tell bad jokes, and do research. That was more than enough consolation.

“Can you imagine,” Astoria said to me, when James came in. “Being that tall.”

“No,” I said.

But I tried. I imagined staring down upon the heads of the world. I imagined never fitting anywhere. I tried to move my body the way James did, one slow piece at a time. But when I thought about these things, when I saw myself as the tallest woman in the world, it felt hollow. So did I. One day after closing I stood on the circulation desk, made myself eight feet tall, taller than James was at the time. A short, ridiculous person on a waist-high desk. The tops of the shelves, I saw, needed dusting.

I could not imagine myself tall, could only imagine being held in the air, suspended at an altitude of seven feet. An uncharted
stretch of big body surrounded my usual shape; I tried to feel it. My legs dangled, my fingers curled where my elbows should be. Like one of those maps of lakes, where the deepest part of the water is blue, surrounded by echoes of lighter blue until the cartographer hits land. My body was only the bluest, deepest part of the lake. I could not fill out the rest of the territory.

“Something must have happened,” said Astoria. “To his mother, I mean, when she was pregnant.”

“Astoria,” I said. “I don't think so.”

“Frightened by a giraffe maybe.” She giggled like a bad girl. “Or—frightened by a basketball team.”

“Don't gossip,” I said to her. “Especially if you're going to make things up.”

“Peggy, you're too serious,” she said. “In this life, you have to make things up.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she said. “Because—that's what life
is
. Making yourself believe the best things you can.”

“The best things I can believe,” I said, “are the things that happen to be true.”

James took out books on astronomy, ornithology: sciences at once about tininess and height. He approached the desk with books he'd liked and asked for more—he knew it was easier to find more books with a good example in hand.

Then one day, in the first months of 1955—I remember looking over his head at some awful persistent Christmas decoration Astoria had stuck to the ceiling—he came to me without books. His height had become unwieldy; he reached out to touch walls as he walked, sometimes leaving marks way above where the other teenage boys smudged their hands. “I want books about people like me,” he said.

I thought I knew what he was talking about, but I wanted to be cautious. “What exactly about you?” I asked. I made myself think of all the things he could have meant: Boy Scouts, basketball players.
Never jump to conclusions when trying to answer a reference question. Interview the patron.

“Tall people,” he said.

“Tall people? Just tall people in general?”

“Very tall people. Like
me
,” he said, clearly exasperated with my playing dumb. “What they do.”

“Okay,” I told him. “Try the card catalog. Look in the big books on the table—see those books?” I pointed. “Those are books of subject headings for the card catalog. Look under words that you think describe your topic.” James was used to me doing this: I gave directions but would not pull the books off the shelf for him. My job was to show people—even people I liked—how to use the library, not to use it for them. “Dig around,” I said. “Try height, try stature. Then look in the catalog for books.”

He nodded, leaned on the desk, and pushed off.