“Shoot,” he said, one distracted finger probing a sore patch in his mouth.
“I wonder if Brenda could keep an eye on Truly for me. Just during the week. I wouldn’t ask, but things aren’t working out too well with Amanda Pickerton.”
Gus extracted his finger and examined something yellowish on the end of it. “What about Serena Jane? You want us to take her, too?”
My father shifted. “She’s not the problem.”
Gus’s gaze drifted over to me, curled up now with the flea-bitten dog, and took in my attire for the first time. “Why’s she dressed like that?” he asked.
My father sighed. “She won’t fit into anything I’ve got for her, and she won’t wear Amanda’s girl’s clothes.”
At that, Gus chuckled and hocked a wad of phlegm into the muck beside him. “A real live wire, eh?” He grinned, and my father finally relaxed, seeing that maybe this was a good place for me after all. I couldn’t possibly make more of a mess than already existed, for one thing, and even if I spent my days naked as the Lord God made me, no one would care. August walked over to me and smiled down like a shabby but benevolent god. “You’ll be all right, little one,” he said, and I stared right back at him, stupefied by the erroneous prediction.
When my father returned that evening, he found that Brenda’s solution to my clothing dilemma had been to dress me in boys’ clothes. Where they came from, my father had no idea, but there were so many odd pieces and bits around the place—the rusted bugle abandoned under the kitchen table, the frying pan lurking on the porch steps, stacks of newspapers and racing reports spread over a chair—that he didn’t bother to ask. All he knew was that when he walked into Brenda’s kitchen, I was alive, well, and buckled into a pair of black-and-white denim overalls like a train engineer, the sorrowful dog curled loyally by my side in a corner, Amelia crouched next to me, watching with savage interest as I wielded a pink plastic doll leg. My father glanced around, but there was no evidence of the rest of the figure. Side by side on the floor, Amelia and I seemed to be not so much companions as individual islands—Amelia silent and half-feral, me spilling over my edges. Amelia made a lunge for the doll leg, but I wasn’t ready to give it over to her yet. She stuffed her mouth full with her fingers and waited, making odd, off-key noises, halfway between grunting and music. I looked up at my father and held out my arms, babbling a string of nonsense. Amelia quickly reached out and snatched the doll leg for herself with a snarl before retreating under the table.
“What’s the matter with that one?” my father asked, jutting his chin toward Amelia. “Doesn’t she talk right?”
Brenda shrugged over the biscuits she was mixing. “She will when she’s up and ready.”
My father bent down and hoisted me onto his hip. “Has she been good?”
Brenda sighed. “Good enough.” She whacked her wooden spoon on the side of the bowl, then passed it to Amelia, who abandoned the doll’s appendage and began licking the buttermilk batter in long, enthusiastic slurps.
My father sidled to the door. The heat from the oven was making him sweat. “Well, okay, then. Thanks for everything. Especially the clothes.”
Brenda didn’t miss a beat in the punishment of her dough. “You’ll have to buy her more,” she said from behind a piece of fallen hair.
My father paused. “More clothes for a girl, or more clothes for a boy?”
Brenda stopped kneading for a moment, and it was long enough for my father to remember that she used to be pretty. “What do you want her to be?”
My father considered. “Well, she is a girl.”
“So?”
My father thought back to those perfectly round and expectant days just before my mother gave birth, a memory that shimmered for him now, frail as a soap bubble. He remembered the football he’d brought home and tossed gently to my mother, the new pigskin slapping in her hands as if it belonged in them. He remembered my mother finishing matching blue booties and cap, holding up the cobwebbed yarn for inspection on a knitting needle. My parents had liked names that began with the letter C. Caleb. Christopher. Clive. It must have seemed impossible to my father that there had once existed a period in his life so ripe with optimism and hope. But why shouldn’t I be what suited me best? If he sped, my father bet, he could get to Hinkleman’s department store before it closed. He reached for the screen door and saw that it was torn in several places.
“Thank you,” he said again, but Brenda just shrugged and turned back to her baking, scooping round moons out of the dough with the rim of a glass and the heel of her hand, then pushing the leftover pieces back together. If there was one thing Brenda Dyerson was good at, she knew, it was cooking up the scraps destiny had laid out on its plate for her.
“Bring her back tomorrow if you want,” she spat, sliding the tray of biscuits in the oven. “Amelia likes the company, and I ain’t got nothing but time on my hands, anyway.”
My father put a hand to his temple, tipping an imaginary hat. Time, he figured, was better than nothing. We would take it.
Chapter Four
If the purpose of education is to reshape the self, carving and digging like a whittler’s blade, then my education surely began on a glimmering autumn morning in 1958 when I heard myself called “giant” for the first time.
As a special treat, Serena Jane woke me up early that morning and fixed me a proper breakfast—cereal, toast, and a glass of milk. “Be glad Dad remembered groceries,” she said, sliding the food across the table to me. “Half the time I go to school with a rumbling belly, but I’ve learned to live with it.”
I nodded and tried to chew my food slowly. I knew what she was talking about. The more I grew, the hungrier I got, and we never had much food in the house. The Dyersons didn’t, either. They ate straight out of the ground from their wilted garden and off food vouchers the rest of the time.
Serena Jane brushed toast crumbs from her lips and stood up, holding out her hand. She was being so nice to me this morning, it was almost as if she were a different girl. “Come on, I’ll brush your hair before we go, but we have to hurry.” When it came to the issue of being on time, Serena Jane was as tightly wound as the steel hand of a stopwatch. She rushed me everywhere we went, but I tried not to mind. It was just her way of saying she was the boss of us in life.
She whipped a comb through my hair, rubbed my shoes with some spit and a tissue, and then I let her propel me out the front door, waiting while she dutifully turned the key and locked it. We trundled down the sidewalk past Sal Dunfry’s house and then past the Pickertons’, but when we passed the cemetery, I dug in my heels and stopped cold, as immovable as a mule.
I almost never came by my mother’s grave, but now, in the early morning’s golden sunlight, I could see the white square of her headstone winking at me, and before Serena Jane could say boo, I’d torn my hand from hers and dashed through the iron gates. “Truly, wait!” Serena Jane called, her voice a hollow reed in the distance, but I kept going to the corner plot where our mother was buried. I couldn’t say why I needed to kneel on the grass, brushing my hands along the tops of weeds, but the action calmed me. If I closed my eyes, it was almost as though my mother were alive, stroking my hands and telling me things would be fine, that I would love school.
I felt a sharp yank on the back of my collar, and then Serena Jane was leaning over me like an impatient crow, asking me what on earth I thought I was doing. “You do realize that there’s a whole living world waiting on us, don’t you, Truly? I swear, sometimes I think that head of yours is really a pumpkin or something.” Sadly, I patted the grass one last time, then got up and followed her.
Eventually, we arrived at the one-room schoolhouse, and Serena Jane ushered me up the steps by the hand but dropped my wrist as soon as we were inside. Even though my sister was two years older than me, I was taller. Over the past year, I had shot up so fast, I was two inches bigger and pounds heavier. It seemed that the nearer I came to Serena Jane in size, the more distant and
unlike me she grew. She hung her sweater on one of the coat pegs and smoothed her collar, her eyes scanning the yard through the open door for the friends I’d heard about but whom she never brought home. “Stay here,” she said, turning her back. “I’ll come back and tell you what to do soon.”
“But I want to come with you.” I wanted to follow my sister but knew I would be banished. I felt tears fill my eyes.
Serena Jane pursed her lips, considering. More than anything, I knew, she hated it when I cried, not because she felt pity, but because she hated the sensation of guilt. It was the one weapon I had over her, but I used it only in times of duress. Serena Jane sighed and held out her hand again. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, all right, if you’re going to be like that about it. Just don’t say anything, and you have to do exactly what I tell you.”
Just then, however, a bell rang, sending the raspy scent of chalk dust, glue, and freshly sharpened pencils deep into my cortex. A hawk-eyed woman in a sweater set marched to the front of the room. Serena Jane guided me to a row of desks. “Sit here,” she whispered, and pointed to the desk next to her. It was nicked and so old that it still had an inkwell. I squeezed my thighs into the seat as best I could and folded my hands up like a tent. I looked over to my sister, but she was staring straight ahead, her ankles crossed, her fingers all lined up evenly, the model student.
All that morning, I learned how much I didn’t know. The alphabet for starters—a string of crazy angles and curves with a lilting, singsong tune. How to write my name. The numbers from ten to twenty. How many sides a pentagon had. My head swelled with facts like a gutter after a rainstorm. The bell clanged again, and the children started filing outside for morning recess. Once again, I followed my sister. Through the open door I could spy the generous leaves of the chestnut tree fluttering, and I yearned to go and stand under it, listening to its chatter. Serena Jane and I were almost through the door when the teacher’s voice snapped through the air like a crocodile tail sweeping for prey.
“Girls. A moment, if you please.”
Serena Jane sighed and watched the other girls huddle into groups. She took me by the wrist again and returned to the front of the classroom. When my sister and I stood side by side like that, her chin was level with my shoulder. “Yes, ma’am,” we said.
The teacher sniffed. Her lips bunched themselves up like bees. “Which one of you is Truly?”
Serena Jane pointed at me. “She is.”
“And how old are you, child?”
I half raised my hand. The teacher flicked her eyes down to the roster in her hand, then back to me again. I held my palm up higher, all five of my fingers extended, eager as soldiers before a battle. The teacher squeezed her eyes open and shut. “But this can’t be right. You’re a little giant!”
I blushed. It was a word I’d heard before in Brenda Dyerson’s fairy stories, wherein magic stalks grew out of regular dried beans, ordinary geese laid jewel-encrusted eggs, and enchanted harps sung of their own accord. To me, it was a word that swirled with extraordinary promises of castle spires and treasure chests. That’s not how the teacher said it, though. She spat the word through the front of her teeth, as if she were expelling used toothpaste. “Huge!” she elaborated. “Surely it’s not normal.”
Serena Jane and I blinked at her. It wasn’t normal not to have a mother, either, or to have a father who drank beer at breakfast, but we did, and we put up with those things, just as we put up with hand-me-down clothes, and no birthday parties, and Christmas without a tree. The bell rang again, and the teacher put the roster back down on her desk. “Recess is over,” she said, as if she were flicking a fly off her shoulder. “But this discussion is not. Please come and see me when the school day is over.”
My sister and I shuffled back to our desks in the center of the room. Maybe Serena Jane managed to learn something that afternoon, but I didn’t. My mind was stuck on a single phrase, like a shoe in gum, and I knew that no matter how hard I tried, I’d never be able to pull it loose. Little giant. The words rolled around and around in my empty head, my education stalled before it got started.
The teacher was named Miss Sparrow. Fresh-faced out of a ladies’ seminary, she was new in town and thus unfamiliar with the peculiarities lurking among some of Aberdeen’s children. Which was unfortunate because she was exposed to them all at once. Aberdeen’s population was so small that its children were educated together in one classroom, with the older pupils helping the younger ones. Miss Sparrow, who hailed from the comparative metropolis of Albany, found the entire concept charming when Dick Crane, Aberdeen’s youthful mayor, described it to her in a job interview in the seminary’s chintz tearoom.
“How adorable!” she’d exclaimed, inhaling her Darjeeling and fluttering her long eyelashes at a man she guessed was at least eight years younger. “How very basic!” And Dick Crane, charmed himself by the length of Miss Sparrow’s delicate legs (whose allure belied her thirty-five years), sipped his tea and neglected to correct her vision of a rural Arcadia.
In 1958, Aberdeen was stuck somewhere between a village and a town. Its sidewalks had weedy cracks that gaped bigger every winter. The bells at the firehouse sometimes locked when the weather was damp, and the newspaper had quit printing its Saturday edition. There was still a recreational softball team, a ladies’ gardening committee, and a brick library, but the team never won, the collective age of the gardening committee was four hundred and seven, and the print in half the books in the library was so faded and smeared, it was no longer legible.
Even the town trees were looking a little stunted. Starting in early autumn, their leaves merely mottled and dropped instead of igniting into the traditional yellows and reds. On the first day of school, the steps leading into the school hall were already so slimy with desiccated foliage that Miss Sparrow had to stop and scrape the smooth bottoms of her spectator pumps back and forth across the door lintel. When she looked up, she discovered Marcus Thompson, the smartest and smallest boy in school, skulking behind the globe on her desk.
“Oh—but—my goodness,” she gasped, for Marcus had the general appearance of a garden gnome.
“Hello,” he spat through a gap in his buckteeth. “I came to clap erasers.”
Miss Sparrow smoothed a manicured hand over her abdomen and sucked herself a little taller. “Of course.” She smiled, her Satin Primrose lips blooming into a harsh curve like a sickle. “How sweet. I’m Miss Sparrow, the new teacher.” She stepped behind the desk to escape Marcus, but he was not to be thwarted. He enthusiastically began to bang the felt erasers, releasing a maelstrom of chalk and dust.
“It’s like intergalactic dust,” he crowed, screwing up his face to watch the white particles fly. “Maybe this is what Laika saw out the window of her capsule.”
Miss Sparrow put a fist to her mouth and coughed. “Who?”
Marcus increased his pounding. “Laika. You know. The Russian space dog. I read all about her in the paper.”
Miss Sparrow put down her fist. “You can read?”
“Oh sure! Laika was on Sputnik Two, which orbited the earth two thousand five hundred and seventy times.” His brow furrowed, and he momentarily halted the erasers. “All the scientists are always talking about sending a man into space, but I think Laika is the real hero. She died, though, you know.”
Miss Sparrow frowned and brushed dust from her hair and camel skirt. “The Russians are not our friends, young man.”
Marcus considered this. “Does that mean we should be glad when their space dogs die?”
Miss Sparrow did not get a chance to answer, for the rest of the children tumbled into the schoolroom in a noisy knot. Marcus’s dust set off a towheaded boy’s asthma. Immediately he began gasping and wheezing, his poor lungs squeezing themselves like faulty bellows, his aspirin-colored face blooming into a dusky pink.
“Marcus Thompson!” Vi Vickers scolded, holding the gasping child by the elbow. “Stop it! You know you’re supposed to do that outside!”
When Marcus’s genie cloud of dust settled, Miss Sparrow got a good look at the rest of her class and was relieved to see that several of the girls were even very pretty. She noted with pleasure which of them had on smocked dresses for the first day of school and which of them had new ribbons braided into their hair, which of the boys’ cowlicks had been pasted down with Brylcreem so their heads shone like angels. All in all, she surmised to herself, running her red-tipped fingers down the tiny shell buttons of her cardigan, they were workable. Hope began beating again in the birdcage of her breast. Then the door flew open, and the prettiest child Miss Sparrow had ever seen descended upon her, holding the hand of the ugliest.
But surely your family must have seen a doctor,” Miss Sparrow said to my sister as we continued our conversation after school, giving my bulk the same critical eye the judges used on the heifers at a county fair. I shifted, adding to Miss Sparrow’s bovine assessment of me.
It didn’t help that, for once, I was dressed as a girl. In a fit of compassion, Mrs. Pickerton had sewn me a school wardrobe of dull brown pinafores, army green skirts with suspenders, and tan blouses. As attire went, it was a prison sentence—a solitary confinement of the soul. On me, the pleated skirt and Peter Pan collar looked cartoonish, almost freakish, the product of a sewing pattern gone terribly wrong. In fact, Mrs. Pickerton had had to increase the measurements by four, resulting in circuslike proportions that did nothing to hide my lumps and bumps. I hung my head and let my sister do all the talking.
The Little Giant of Aberdeen County Page 5
