The Giant's House

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “Another person could fit, right? In the backseat? A small person?”

  I smiled. “Yes,” I said. “A small person could. Eric?”

  “No. Stella maybe.”

  “Stella would fit,” I said, as if I’d just measured the backseat for Stella’s measurements.

  “So. You wouldn’t mind? Like maybe Sunday, when you weren’t working.”

  “James,” said I, the chaperone, unwitting and unwilling cupid, “of course not.”

  So I did a little research, asked about beaches. I even bought the fixings for a picnic lunch. James himself could not have been as nervous as I was; the whole week felt like one terrible endless day without break, with Sunday, twilight, promised at the end, Stella ascendant.

  Except they took a walk together that Friday, the last Friday of the school year, and Stella told James—who, she said, was her best friend in the world—this: that Sean had proposed, and she had accepted, and that in two months they would move together to Virginia, where Sean would work for his uncle and Stella would, despite everything, finish high school. In Virginia, in some small town, she would be the prettiest housewife in the twelfth grade, and Sean the only husband at the senior prom.

  I was afraid that he’d stop walking, now that Stella was planning for her wedding. But he didn’t; he walked by himself. I got used to seeing him at a distance. No, that wasn’t true—I was used to that already. Was it because of his size that I was so unused to putting myself in the frame? Did I think I wouldn’t fit?

  No. That was how I always saw myself, that is, how I didn’t see myself. I have felt out-of-frame all my life. At best, even as I say this, I am the court painter who, after years of painting the royal family, can no longer resist slipping a bit of herself in the frame. Look, there’s Peggy, her forearm, the toe of her shoe, her frozen unrecognizable face in a swollen mirror on the farthest wall of the room. It doesn’t matter who I am looking at: they are royalty, compared to me.

  James was the only one who ever drew me in at all. In the evenings when we talked, after the teenagers had gone off and there was room, he was the one who made me feel looked at instead of just looking.

  Now James walked alone. James with his cane went down the street, stopped at the end. James inspected the bay from the town pier. James browsed in no stores, endured no conversation, took out not a single book from my library. He returned to the cottage, where the boys were sometimes already waiting outside.

  And three weeks later he came in to see me at work, holding a cream envelope with a card inside. “I’d like to go to Stella’s wedding,” he said. “I asked; you’re invited too, if you’ll drive me.”

  I smiled at the poor bargain of that invitation. But I agreed.

  I had never wanted to be one of those girls in love with boys who would not have me. Unrequited love—plain desperate aboveboard boy-chasing—turned you into a salesperson, and what you were selling was something he didn’t want, couldn’t use, would never miss. Unrequited love was deciding to be useless, and I could never abide uselessness.

  Neither could James. He understood. In such situations, you do one of two things—you either walk away and deny yourself, or you do sneaky things to get what you need. You attend weddings, you go for walks. You say, yes. Yes, you’re my best friend, too.

  Stella Ascendant

  We drove up Route 6A to Wellfleet. Late June light flattens and brightens Cape Cod into a postcard. All reds seem like the same red: the flung-back shutters on the identical cottages that line the road; the lassos of neon that spell Motel; a red-bottomed buoy that has washed up on the beach; a sign that promises lobster with a picture of a lobster. All blues the same, sky, convertibles, James’s eyes. The sand, gold where the wind has combed it; his hair, the same. The seagull in front of a cloud, the cloud, his oxford cloth shirt, all three washed just enough for a hint of gray.

  And me and my big black car and what felt, increasingly, like my big black heart, as unwieldy and peculiar as my car. Maybe as hard, too: that car could have crumpled anything with its unstoppable, undentable bumper. Reserved, Caroline had said, and despite my best intentions, she was right: my torso an unorganized cabinet of secrets I was saving for a later date. They knocked into each other, they bruised and then calloused.

  I’d pictured us driving along, talking, perhaps listening to the radio to music that James dialed up. Which shows you I hadn’t thought it through: in the car I couldn’t see James or his hair and eyes that matched the passing scenery. That they matched is something I know now; I might not have realized it then. He sat in the backseat and had rolled down the back window; every now and then he’d say something I couldn’t hear (my window was rolled down, too), and I’d turn my head and, at the same time, by accident, the wheel; the car would swerve. “LATER!” James would yell as I straightened the car and blushed at the cars that honked at us. We did this three times.

  “I have four left wheels,” I said to James, but he couldn’t hear me.

  We drove up to the church early. It took James a while to disentangle himself from the Nash. It seemed obvious to enter from the front, but how to exit was less clear.

  “Here we are,” I said.

  “Good Luck Cottages,” said James. “We passed those a while back.”

  “I saw them. Run-down places. Probably Luck is the only good thing they can promise.”

  When I’d heard the service would be in a Catholic church, I’d imagined something like Our Lady’s, which was down the street from my girlhood home. I’d snuck inside one afternoon; it was as spindly and impossible and arched as a split pepper. Even though all eyes in the paintings looked away from me—they were trained toward Jesus, or up toward God—I’d felt accused and frightened.

  But St. Catherine’s was plain and white, pretty stained-glass windows set into the doors. Maybe because it was so many people’s summer church the builders thought it proper to dress it like a vacationer: sweet and only informally gaudy. When we went inside, an usher took us to the front pew, the family spot. Stella had thought this out; she knew the front was the only place James would fit. He took the aisle; I sat next to him, and eventually an unspeaking grandmother of some sort took the seat next to me.

  James wore a necktie that Caroline had sewn for him; I recognized the print from one of her fall skirts. I wore a blue dress and a silly hat of feathers balanced on top of my head; Astoria had lent it to me. It was designed to cling to a hairdo without interfering, and so when I’d clipped it onto my uncoifed head that morning, my hair pinned up, more pins in the hat to affix it, the thing looked like a stuffed bird nailed to a tree branch. By now, having been knocked about by the wind through the car window, its grip was loose. I tried to fix it.

  As entertainment, the wedding wasn’t much. The principals kept their backs to us. The priest mumbled and flubbed Stella’s name. I wanted some sort of dramatic ceremony, with wailing or hysterical laughter. James beside me was silent. Then the priest said something, the happy couple kissed, and it was over without bloodshed or tears.

  Despite everything, I never felt jealous at weddings. I longed for love, yes, but I never saw that love was in greater supply at weddings than in butcher shops or department stores. The sight of a couple furtively holding hands beneath a restaurant table was more likely to remind me of the hopelessness of my life than any number of ladies dressed in giant christening gowns reciting words to become joined to a man in a rented suit. I do not like public ceremony, not graduations, not weddings; not pep rallies, nor church. Perhaps I simply do not understand trying to share one emotion (love, relief, faith, pep) with a quantity of strangers.

  The reception was in a restaurant down the street, close enough to walk. Once there, James found a cluster of kids from school, who’d been seated in less prime spots near the back of the church and so were among the first to leave. I recognized Eric from the cottage, but the rest were an assortment of lean boys and sweet girls (girls! I hadn’t imagined that Stella knew, or would acknow
ledge the existence of, any girls) whom I had never met. That Stella had other friends—that she had, in fact, a life outside of the cottage—never occurred to me.

  Food was served in a willy-nilly buffet. I decided I would rather be alone than be one adult among teenagers and said good-bye to James. I took a seat at a table on the other side of the room. There was no seating plan, which meant that Stella was more civilized than I’d thought: seating plans, in my opinion, are a form of social incarceration.

  “What the hell is that?” a woman next to me said as the band set up by the door. She was forty, maybe, a blonde in coral lipstick that looked like a medicine meant to prevent infection. I followed her gaze, sure that it would end at a musician carrying an instrument she could not identify. Instead she was looking at James, returning from the men’s room.

  I started to answer her; her date, a man in thick glasses, did instead: “Jesus Christ. How tall is that?”

  They had been drinking beer in bottles, which amplified their amazement.

  “That’s James Sweatt,” I told them. “He goes to school with Stella.”

  “He’s a freak!” exclaimed the man, as if what I said was impossible, that the sight James presented, his jacket off and his tie loosened, could not possibly know Stella, go to school, walk the floor of the dark wood restaurant in Wellfleet.

  “He’s tall,” I said casually. But the woman shook her head. Well, he shouldn’t be, she seemed to say.

  By then the bandleader had stepped to the microphone to make some announcements, and Sean and Stella, the train of her wedding dress drawn up like a curtain so she could dance, took to the floor for an inane song by, according to the bandleader, “Mr. Irwin, um, Berlin, ladies and gentlemen.” (“A doll I can carry / the girl that I marry will be.…”) The people who sat next to me eventually forgot James, but I didn’t forget them: I wanted to be a movie thug who could pick them up by their shirtfronts and shake them like maracas. Even they would not know whether they were trembling from fear or physics.

  Instead, I drank coffee till I was the one shaking. Stella took the middle of the floor, and the bandleader called for all unmarried women to take the floor around her. I thought I saw James look for me, but his gaze skittered past.

  “You should go up,” said the despicable woman next to me. Did I look so unmarried?

  “No.” I smiled. “My husband wouldn’t like it.”

  The drummer rolled his sticks low, and then hit the cymbal as Stella turned her back and pitched her bouquet into the arms of the plumpest bridesmaid, a dour girl in her peach-colored dress who caught the package with a sigh, as if this were what she was used to all her life, picking up after careless Stella.

  Then the floor in front of the band filled with dancing couples. When I looked across them, James was talking to Eric and a girl even smaller than Eric. James drank a beer, smoked a cigarette. Maybe he was taking up all his mother’s old bad habits. He looked like an adult. Then Eric and his date excused themselves as the band started a new, apparently meaningful song. Stella approached, asked James a question while holding his hand. He shook his head, and she went away. I waited until he finished the cigarette, then went over to him.

  “You going to dance?” I asked.

  “Doubt it. You?”

  “Nobody’s asked me.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I’m more popular than you. Somebody asked me.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  “I can’t dance.”

  “Look at that dance floor,” I said. “Look closely at the men. Most of them can’t dance, but all of them are dancing.”

  He watched them for a while. “Well,” he said. He picked up the beer. I sat down in the chair next to him. “Let me put it this way. I don’t aim to make a spectacle of myself.”

  “You—”

  He laughed. “Peggy, listen, imagine it. Me dancing. You don’t think that would be a spectacle?”

  The song ended, and some couples drifted back to the table. James didn’t make a move to introduce me. In fact, he turned his back toward me and spoke to them in conspiratorial tones. Teenagers.

  A man with a belly and a bow tie approached and asked me to dance. “I’m Uncle Fisher,” he said by way of introduction, which seemed to be enough. He was around forty, with black hair, good-looking enough if you squinted. On the dance floor he asked me whose side I belonged to, and when I said, “Bride’s,” he answered, “Ah. She’s a pip.”

  I smiled. “And what side are you on?”

  “Nobody’s,” he said. “I’m totally impartial.”

  He was a good dancer; I’d forgotten how easy it was to dance with a man who really knew how. Suddenly he said, “Excuse me,” and reached for my hat, which he plucked from my head. The bobby pins clattered to the ground and my hair fell to my shoulders, as if my whole hairdo were a breakaway movie prop designed for this moment. “Much better,” he said. He stuck the hat in his jacket pocket. “Now I can concentrate.”

  “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 t
hink 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.”