The Giant's House

by Elizabeth McCracken

  In fact I was crying for myself. I was an idiot, and while that wasn’t the worst thing—most people are idiots—for some reason I was an idiot who would be lonely the rest of her life. An idiot who had believed, briefly, foolishly, based on nothing, that this might not be so.

  Through my tears and the shower I heard my front door open and close; I was listening for it. I waited ten minutes—not crying now, just listening to make sure he was gone—then put on my robe and went into my living room.

  I’d expected my apartment to be wrecked. By what I’m not sure, by whatever had happened last night, by Cal this morning. I’d half hoped he’d turn out to be a common thief, a man who’d take advantage of a hysterical but private woman by silently removing her valuables. But my apartment was as orderly as ever, and the only thing Calvin Sweatt had helped himself to was tomato juice; the glass, still glazed red, was upside down in the sink. I imagined he’d probably dribbled some down his shirt.

  There was a note on the kitchen table.

  PEGGY I hope you are ok I thought I should go I didnt take any pictures you could send me ones you wanted to me Caroline has my adress in NYC thanks I like the one in the bathroom mirrer And maybe a picture of you too if theres any thanks I’m sorry you feel this way Cal

  Residence

  You can’t hide a fire behind paper. This sounds like something a mother would say, some piece of wisdom, although I don’t know that it is. Before James died, if someone had said that to me, I would have said, Yes you can, if you work hard enough. If you lay a book down on a fire, wait until the flame has almost bit its way through the top cover, then quick throw down another one, maybe you can hide it. It might take diligence, but I was always a diligent woman.

  For years I tried to hide a fire with books, endless books. I think I was born with a little grief in me, a sadness, not unlike Mrs. Sweatt’s. I tried my best to hide it. All I did was succeed in making the fire hungrier to finally burst out big. I can’t say that I think it did the books too much good either.

  Peggy, you might say to me, didn’t you think the fire would burst around, creep up the binding? All those words just wicks? Fire is a speed-reader, which is why the ignorant burn books: fire races through pages, takes care of all the knowledge, and never bores you with a summary.

  I would have said: maybe your fire. But I know my life, and it is a small, hesitant thing. I thought then that the smallest thing in the world would put out the flame, and I had one of the biggest. And then suddenly, he was gone, and I had nothing left to throw down.

  That Saturday afternoon, the one after Cal Sweatt drank his tomato juice and moved on, I wept, wretched. I sat in all the chairs in my apartment, stopped weeping long enough to stand up, walk to a new chair, and sit. Then I started crying again. Sometimes I quit just long enough to laugh at myself, the mess I was.

  Around four o’clock I got up, took a shower, got dressed in my old gummy clothes. I washed the upturned glass that Mr. Sweatt had left in my sink and filled it with cold milk, then took it back to the table. What I really wanted was whiskey. I don’t think I’d had one since Mrs. Sweatt and I, seven years before, had ducked into that Provincetown bar. Sitting in my kitchen, I imagined the way whiskey would ease down my throat, the immediate warmth that followed it, first head, then body, slow enough that by the end of the drink I wouldn’t remember the start of it, wouldn’t even feel grateful. I’d just be warm and happy and unbelieving I’d ever been anything else.

  That was what real love must be like, I thought. Most people get it, most people are used to it. Me, here I was, hung over with something that hadn’t even been love. Probably I should swear it off, like an alcoholic. I should just vow never to try it again in my life. I didn’t see it ever being offered, anyhow.

  I felt left. I felt abandoned. And until that moment in my kitchen, looking at my spinster’s glass of milk, I honestly believed that it was James’s father who had left me, that it was a man who couldn’t bring himself to use a comma saying, I have to go to Albany, that did this to me. I was amazed the way a child is amazed to discover, holding his thumb to his eye, that he can blot out a mountain.

  I thought work would take my mind off its awful machinations, all the things I should have done that would have prevented everything: James’s death, Mr. Sweatt’s return, all that followed. That was what I called it, to myself, all that followed.

  But the library made me sick. Every day was a little worse, until a month later I could hardly stand it.

  It was a Friday, and April, and the building seemed toxic: the brown dust the books gave off, the tropical dampness of the ladies’ room, the cracked glass panes in the floors in the stacks that, at the merest suggestion of a footfall, might drop their burden—a patron, me—down to the basement. The patrons sickened me, too. More books! They dropped off their books and demanded more, they spied a best seller and wanted it then, never mind the waiting list. Even the books disgusted me that day. Their jackets were plastic-wrapped, to keep clean, and that struck me as sleazy, that they were doing things they needed to be protected from. Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others. Now my books seemed so filthy, physically filthy, that I didn’t want to touch them; usually, when a book seemed unclean, I washed the covers with a soft waterless soap made for the purpose. Now I picked them up gingerly, threw them on the distribution shelves for Darla.

  I forgave no fines that day. I searched for no titles for the curious. When one woman came back for a book she’d returned half an hour before, thinking she’d left a letter between the pages, I thought about telling her she’d just have to wait until the book had been reshelved, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to look for it. But I hadn’t turned that wicked yet. It was a philosophy book, which meant that I’d tossed it up on the highest of the shelves behind the desk. I got a footstool and stepped up, and it was then, reaching, a foot off the ground, that I did a little arithmetic.

  I grabbed the book, found the letter, and brought it to the woman. She thanked me, sounding a little afraid.

  I went to the doctor for a long lunch hour to set facts straight. The fact was this: I was pregnant.

  Maybe I wanted to be; maybe in the back of my mind I’d planned it, thought this was one thing Calvin Sweatt could give me: those genes. A baby with those remarkable genes. Not as a replacement for James, but a reminder. My life was over and I wanted a new one. No better way, as I thought about it.

  I felt my body suddenly. Was that so bad? I’d been absent, for years it seems. I’d set up residence in James’s body, and there was room there for me. He didn’t use all of it. Plenty of space. And when I went to kiss him that night—James, I mean, not his father—when I leaned forward, punched my arm into the pillow, I still wasn’t in my body, I was trying to pay back rent, I was begging not to be evicted, I was knocking on a door I knew was about to be locked, saying, Just another minute, wait, I’ve packed, I know, put off the demolition, I just want one more look around. And he let me, and then he died.

  I walked back to the library, to the staff room. I sat down. I didn’t have to wait for the test results: I knew. Astoria followed me. Normally we weren’t ever in that room together; when one of us was on the desk, the other was off. I was sitting on the awful sofa we’d inherited when the town manager’s office had been redecorated. I must have looked like I’d been hit by a truck and thrown onto that sofa, my legs off in different directions, my head flopping back.

  “I think you should consider taking some time off,” Astoria said.

  I didn’t speak; like an accident victim, I concentrated on not moving anything.

  “You’ve been through all of this,” she said, sitting down next to me, “and you haven’t taken any off. You’re exhausted. Get away. We’ll figure it out here. I know you don’t think so, but we can keep this place running without you awhile—and that’s
not an insult, it’s a compliment. You’ve got this library running so tightly it can go by itself.”

  My eyes started to tear, because she was lying. I was doing a terrible job, and had been. “It’s okay,” I said. I sat up. “I’ll be taking time off soon enough.”

  “You will?” she said.

  “I will. I’m pregnant.”

  I can’t say that her mouth fell open, but her entire face rearranged itself. Then she bit her lip.

  “Wonderful?” she asked.

  I nodded. I think I even blushed.

  “Good,” she said. “But, Peggy—”

  “James,” I said. “It’s James’s baby.”

  I knew, by telling her, that it would get around town. One of the reasons Astoria liked working at the library was to receive and relay gossip. She would tell everybody—strangers, and the regular patrons, and Oscar and Caroline—and she would tell each in a hushed voice, as if they were the only ones she was taking into her confidence.

  That night Caroline called me at home.

  “Peggy,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  She waited for me to say something, but I didn’t.

  “Is it true?” she began. I heard Alice nattering on in the background. “Is it true you’re expecting—”

  “—yes—”

  “James’s baby?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But that’s impossible, isn’t it?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s more than possible. It’s true.”

  “But that doctor. The one who wrote the article. He said James couldn’t …” She let her voice trail off, and I felt sorry for her. She was not good at this sort of thing.

  “Did that doctor get anything else right?” I asked.

  “No,” she said emphatically. “That’s what I told Oscar.” Suddenly her voice flooded with something, and it took me a second to realize it was her usual warmth, which she’d been holding back. “You should come home,” she said. “You could live in the cottage. We’ll close it down as a museum and set you up. You should live with us, Peggy. Look! I’m pregnant, too—”

  “Caroline—”

  “We’ll have children together,” she said, like a lovestruck man proposing marriage.

  “Oh, Caroline,” I said. “Yes. Okay. Yes.”

  And that night I packed a few things and put them in the car and drove back to Winthrop Street.

  Oscar and Caroline and Alice greeted me, Oscar so full of attention and caution that I thought, if he wasn’t already married, he would have offered to make an honest woman of me. They carried my things back to the cottage.

  “We’ll pick up your furniture tomorrow,” Caroline said. “You can’t climb up into this bed—”

  “I’ve climbed into it before,” I said, not thinking how that sounded.

  “Well, yes,” said Caroline. “I just meant—later, it will get harder. Believe me—after a while that bed will look like Mount Kilimanjaro. We’ll spruce up the place—”

  “No,” I said. “Leave it. Leave everything.”

  The town manager called me later that week, to tell me I’d been fired; not bad enough that the library (so he’d heard) was falling to pieces, but surely I understood the moral problem here. A public librarian, after all …

  Fine, I told him, fine, and I said good-bye to my library. Oh, I was a scandal. A grown woman, they said, well into her thirties and him barely out of his teens. Not to mention everything else. Maybe they did mention it, some of them, but that talk didn’t make it back to me. Some of the more sympathetic and liberal people in town—those who considered themselves artistic—thought I was a romantic figure. Caroline told me a few people even claimed that James and I had gotten married secretly in New York. She’d done nothing to discourage that rumor.

  I had a new job, anyhow, in charge of the James Carlson Sweatt Home. Still a librarian—always a librarian—I organized his letters, to and from, I wrote a guide to the newspaper clippings.

  You would have thought that first week would have been the worst, but it wasn’t. I ate cookies from the bakery, canned soup heated up on the hot plate. I listened to the radio and read the last library books I’d brought to James, which since his death had sat on the night table, collecting fines; I’d known they were there, of course, just never could bear to pick them up. City of God, From Here to Eternity, Thurber Carnival. I’d felt like returning them meant I was closing out his account.

  Finally one morning Caroline came to the cottage and said, “You can’t go on like this.”

  I looked around the room. I thought she was kicking me out.

  “There’s someone else you have to think about, Peggy,” she said, and she touched my stomach to remind me. “Come to the front house.”

  “I like it here,” I told her.

  “For meals. That’s all. For meals and a little company. I’m home all day, too; I could use the conversation myself.”

  So I did that. I took my dinner and breakfast there, chatted with them. I wanted to stay at the cottage mornings and afternoons, waiting for visitors; I wanted to be always ready and present. That is, I wanted them to know that I lived there.

  But evenings, I sat on the sofa with Caroline, whose stomach was just beginning to push at her own clothes; soon she’d move on to wearing Oscar’s pants, kept up with a knotted scarf. And though I’d thought during the week I’d spent alone in the cottage that it was the way I wanted it—me, the radio, the silly cat leaping from surface to surface—I discovered that it was simply because I could not have imagined the pleasant life in the front house. Oscar offering me something, sweet potatoes or gravy, a homey rich dish, his hands on one side of a warm platter or bowl and mine on the other; Caroline back and forth from the kitchen, her hair tied back; Alice, a good eater always, picking one thing off the plate and sticking it in her mouth till the plate came clean. Caroline cooked and I washed, each according to her abilities.

  I’d always thought of happiness as some dramatic talent, or unreal luck; I’d never imagined it could come in this workaday variety. This was something James had done, too, after all: he sat in this dining room, ate Caroline’s careful soft food. She was frightened of people choking, and if anyone so much as coughed at her table, she looked alarmed; if it went on, she stood up asking, Are you okay, do you need some water? The cougher, red-faced and damp-eyed, had to smile and nod, and Caroline took her place again. Such sweet strange concern was everywhere in that house. It was not my life—I knew that—but it was the life of people I felt comfortable with, and that was enough. When dinner was over, I went back to the cottage and turned on the radio and knit. Caroline had taught me.

  After a while I just stayed at the front house till it was time to go to sleep. Caroline and I got bigger and bigger. She was a little disappointed with me—she wanted someone to discuss stretch marks with, to compare swollen feet, and I demurred. But I learned from her, sometimes too literally, as if she were a girl I admired one class ahead. I did everything she did, two months behind: a crying jag at the end of the third month; a passion for salt in the fourth; a two-day superstitious prohibition on mentioning the baby at all in the fifth. When Caroline gave birth to another daughter, they named her Margaret Ann, after me and then Oscar’s mother. They didn’t realize that Peggy is my given name. Now they call her Ann, because I do.

  That gave me two months to meet a baby before being introduced to my own, which seemed like good planning. I was strangely patient. The townspeople were the ones who waited nervously, who called each other up to say, Has it happened yet? Will it be another one, do you think?

  Dorothy was born two months to the day after Ann, perfectly healthy, fat, but nothing else. I decided not to name her after anybody.

  And so I had James back. I don’t mean Dotty, who grew up so much her own person, I sometimes thought she wasn’t related to anyone—plump and impetuous, a dear, longed-for foundling. Our girls played together in the yard between our houses. They knew they were someho
w related. Cousin Dotty, Alice called, and sometimes, mistakenly, Cousin Ann, as if all babies born that one year were her cousins.

  I told Dotty about her father. I told her about James, because he is her father, in every way. For instance: it is a scientific fact that she shares his genes. We live in his house, among his possessions. And in every way, he is the one who brought her to me, which is one of the reasons I love her—though much to my misanthropic amazement, not the only reason. He was my one, true husband and love, and he would have loved her best, like he loved Alice, only better, because Dotty is his and has his name. And everybody else told Dotty about James; everybody else told her stories about that wonderful man, her father.

  The girls are gone now. The Strickland girls went to college in Boston and stayed there. I see them when they come for visits. Alice looks like photographs of the old Alice; it’s only when she speaks that Mrs. Sweatt disappears. She is certain of herself, and it gives her a weird beauty. Ann is tall enough that we once worried, though the doctors told us not to; she stopped growing in eighth grade when she was five foot nine, as if it were a childhood hobby.

  And Dotty is in Chicago, twenty-five years old, older than James lived to be. Still plump, still looking like no one I’ve ever known. She comes to visit me every summer for a month; in between I rarely hear from her. My address book is crowded with her different houses. I don’t think I have the most recent. Sometimes my letters bounce back to me; other times she writes, thanking me for my news. She sends postcards, no place for a return address, saying I’m fine, I’m okay, more later. She always signs, love. She had parents who were in love with each other, and that is a blow no child can recover from. Everyone I ever knew has turned into a stack of papers.

  I have James back because I live in his house. I show the tourists around. Every day I talk about him and sleep in his big bed, dream of him. That mattress is a mess. I can’t bear to replace it. It feels warm, as if he’s just gotten up, the whole bed warm wherever my skin touches it. Even in the summer, not enough people come. I wait. I read.