by Karen Foxlee
“Maybe you should take some time off from school,” suggested Mother.
“But then I wouldn’t see Teddy or Warren or Fletcher.”
A man came from the Guinness Book of World Records and knocked on our door. It’s the kind of thing that happens when your brother grows too big. He walked right up the steps into our apartment building and Mother was so angry that someone had let him in. She said it was an inside job. She blamed Mr. Petersburg straight off. Not only was he writing letters to federal and state penitentiaries, he was writing them to the Guinness Book of World Records.
But it could have been anyone. Anyone at all. It could have been Mr. King. Or it could have been a teacher. It could have been Mr. Bartholomew for all we knew.
“Who is it?” said Mother, that afternoon at the door.
It was the man from the Guinness Book of World Records. He said so. He stated his business. He had heard possibly the biggest kid in America lived right here. He wanted to talk about getting a measurement. Gaining an entry. Maybe Davey was even bigger than Robert Wadlow at that age. He really wanted to know. Fame awaited. He said it all. His sales pitch went on for a minute. All through the closed door. When he finished there was silence and he waited. Mother stood very still on our side. It seemed like an eternity she stood there, and I don’t know what she was thinking. Then she unlocked the door and flung it open.
“You get out of here this instant!” she screamed.
Not just yelled.
She screamed. She had a damp tea towel in her hand from when she’d been drying the dishes. She smacked the man over the head with it. You could tell he wasn’t expecting it. He didn’t even have time to put up his hands. Thwack, down it came again and he was running backwards, away.
Thwack, she was out into the hall chasing him.
Thwack, she was chasing him down the stairs.
He never came back. I’ve since looked at the entries on the tallest people in the world and there were many. I stared into their eyes in the grainy black-and-white pictures. There was Ella Ewing, towering in the big tent, and Édouard Beaupré, lifting a horse as high as his shoulders. Sideshow giants Jack Earle and Al Tomaini. There were figures and graphs. Pictures of pants and custom-built chairs. But nothing of dreams. Nothing of love. Nothing of goodbyes.
Davey grew. I walked with him to school and his back ached. “Don’t lean all over me,” I said.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t breathe your horse breath all over me,” I added.
“That’s a pretty mean thing to say,” he said.
There was a sign for the school dance in the auditorium.
“Don’t think you’re going to that,” I said.
Davey got new pants made for the school dance. “Special pants for a mighty special boy,” was what Miss Finny said. I didn’t want Mother to go back to Miss Finny, not after she reported me to the police. I said as much and Mother stared at me for a good minute, shaking her head.
“Sometimes you really make me wonder, Lenore Spink,” she said.
I didn’t make eye contact with Miss Finny for the whole visit. It was my mission and I succeeded. Once, she said, “And how’s young Miss Lenny?” and I pretended I didn’t hear her.
“She’s okay,” said Davey for me.
Miss Finny smiled and got to solving her favourite problem, Davey.
She had some old fabric that she was going to add to the bottom of his pants. It was a different colour but she said it would create an optical illusion to make him look shorter. Mother was impressed. Miss Finny factored in his left leg being longer than his right.
“Don’t need no fancy tailor,” she muttered to herself as she worked. “You just need Miss Finny, don’t you, Davey boy?”
Davey smiled down at her.
He put on his two-toned pants and he oiled down his hair for the dance. He was excited. Davey liked to dance. That was the worst part. Davey loved to dance but he danced badly and I knew people would stare at him. They wouldn’t stare at him because he was extra-large because they were mostly all used to that, but they’d stare because they’d never seen him dance before and they didn’t know what they were in for. I wore my mint green seersucker dress. I let down my thin brown hair. I covered over my freckles with my mother’s powder puff. But my hairy werewolf pelt of shame was out. I was filled with Davey-dancing dread.
“I don’t think I’ll go.”
“You have to go and look after Davey,” said Mother.
I said, “I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“You know I don’t like dances,” I said.
“Don’t like dances?” said Mother, like it was the most stupid thing she’d ever heard. “You’re going. Your brother wants to go, so you’re going.”
Davey couldn’t stop smiling as we walked down Second Street.
I said, “Stop smiling.”
He tried but his smile kept breaking through. His huge face cracked open and out it came.
“Stop it,” I shouted at him. He closed up his great grin and looked forlorn.
“Honest to God,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
But at the school he looked at all the paper lanterns and the coloured lights strung up around the gymnasium and out beamed his smile again. He looked at all the girls and boys, a big shifting wash of pastel dresses and bell-bottoms and he leaned even more to one side with excitement, his let-down two-toned pants strained across his hips.
CJ wore denim hand-me-downs. She had on the largest belt buckle I’d ever seen and her sisters had done her hair in hot rollers.
“Wow,” I said.
“I know,” she replied.
Her hair seemed bigger than her.
“Hello, Davey,” said CJ. “Nice pants.”
“Hey,” said Davey, but he wasn’t really paying attention. His right leg had started jiggling to “Dancing Machine.” That song banged inside my brain. I was wishing he would stop it. I was so wishing he would stop it. I was wishing it with all my heart. I hissed, “Davey,” under my breath but his leg wouldn’t stop. It jiggled and twisted and he smiled and then his arm joined in, just one.
“Hey, Davey’s dancing,” said Chad Longora who was in Davey’s class and was of normal height, but oversized personality. He started dancing in front of Davey and Davey danced right back at him and I tried to work out if Chad was making fun of Davey or not and I decided on not, but then I couldn’t be sure because more children were joining in and I lost Chad’s face in the big skin-coloured wash of smiling faces.
Even more kids joined in, Fletcher and Warren and Teddy, and they were leading the giant boy out into the centre of the dance floor and then “The Loco-Motion” started playing and it was my worst nightmare. And there was just about every kid in the entire school dancing around Davey and then forming a train, sometimes with Davey at the lead and sometimes with him in the middle. Davey danced like he was made out of metal. Davey danced like the Tin Man. Davey jerked. He jerked and smiled. It made everyone else smile.
“That’s the best thing I’ve seen since sliced bread,” said CJ, breaking off the tail of the train and coming to stand near me. Her big hairsprayed hair looked even bigger, she couldn’t stop smiling either. I hated him. I loved him.
Matthew Milford came and asked me to dance. It took him forever. I was going to just say it for him but I didn’t. I made him suffer and then I suffered while he suffered. My quills came out. He could sense them without me saying a thing but he didn’t back away. When he was finished asking I just stared at him.
“Come on,” he said, and he was for an instant completely stutter free. We danced. It was super-serious, like a trap door would open if we made a wrong move, but when it was done and the song was over, he smiled his New York smile at me.
I went back and sat in my dark corner when it was finished like a hermit crab going back into its shell. I watched over Davey. He danced with the boys from his class in a big circle. He dan
ced with the girls from his class. He danced with Mr. Marcus. He danced with Miss Schweitzer. He danced with Principal Dalrymple. He danced with CJ and once even with Tara Albright. He never danced alone. Not once. My shame broke up right there, crack, into a thousand tiny pieces and it drifted away like storm clouds out to sea. Without my werewolf pelt, I felt fresh and clean. I smiled at Matthew Milford and we danced again.
I saw Great-Aunt Em on the day Davey had his first seizure. It was from a distance but I knew it was her. You couldn’t mistake Great-Aunt Em, after all, although the world made her look tinier and more stooped, and the yellow scarf tied around her head was bright as a daffodil.
I stood statue-still watching her.
It was on the street behind the school and she was being helped into a car outside a bingo hall. The person helping her was a woman in a uniform and she was fussing over Great-Aunt Em. She was fussing over her in a good way, and although I was too far to hear I could almost imagine what she was saying. Come along now, Mrs Spink. Did you enjoy that? I think you look so much better for getting out in the fresh air. And I saw Great-Aunt Em look up at the woman, smile, and start to speak. She was probably going to tell a story. A story about horses or dusty towns.
I suddenly wanted to run toward her. To race up and to bang on that car window before she left. To say something. To say, I wish you’d really been my great-aunt. I wish it was real. I swear I wouldn’t have shouted or sounded angry. To say, I wish you’d known my father. To say, I’m glad you are outside. I hope this lady listens to your stories. To say, No hard feelings.
But I didn’t. I stayed glued to that spot, watching and then the car was gone.
On the day that Davey had his first seizure, he said I was spotty and orange. I said, “Pardon?”
He said, “Seriously.”
I said, “Mother, Davey is saying I’m orange.”
He said, “I’m not saying it in a mean way.”
It was a disaster. I mean, what if that was the real reason Matthew Milford had danced with me? What if he felt sorry for me because I was orange?
“Don’t say she’s orange,” said Mother. “Really, Davey. What would make you say that?”
“And spotty,” said Davey cheerfully. He looked back at the TV.
“Everyone is orange,” he said, and he chuckled. “And spotty. Even the television is spotty.”
“That’s it, you’re not going to school today, something’s not right,” said Mother. “Have you got a headache?”
“A little one,” he said.
“You’ll stay home with Mrs. Gaspar.”
Davey was devastated.
I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. At my hair, which I tried to do attractively, tied in a ponytail to one side. At the freckles on my nose, which I had tried to cover with my mother’s powder puff. I couldn’t see orange. There was no orange. “Why is he saying we’re orange?” I said to Mother in the kitchen. She was looking out the window, stopped quite still, at the pigeons flying and the sunlight.
“Hush now,” she said, and she had her hand over her heart.
I went without him and he stayed with Mrs. Gaspar. Matthew Milford smiled at me near my locker. He just happened to be there getting books out. He was taking a long time. I was taking a long time too. “H-h-h-hey,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said. I wondered if I was orange. He was kind of looking at my face as though he was searching for something. Then he looked away. Then he looked at my books. “Are you d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-oing your …” he asked.
“I’m doing my assignment on the Founding Fathers,” I said. It was the truth.
“M-m-m-m-m-e too,” he said. “D-d-d-d-do you w-w-w-w-want to wr-wr-wr-wr-wr—”
“Write it together?” I asked. “Yes.”
I thought my yes was too forceful. I tried another one. I toned it down. “Yes,” I said. I shrugged my shoulders at the end like I didn’t care. I could feel my feet lifting off the ground.
He smiled.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he said in a robot voice. No stutter.
He did some robot arms.
“Okay,” I laughed.
Afterwards CJ said, “You look different.”
“Man, why does everyone keep saying that,” I said.
All the way home I didn’t expect anything bad. I had seen Great-Aunt Em, and Matthew Milford had asked me to write an essay with him, and badness was the furthest thing from my mind that white sunshiny day. Then I saw Mrs. Gaspar standing at the front door of our apartment building, looking down the street, and when she saw me, her hands went up to her face and then into the air and she started running toward me, and it was a terrible thing to see. She was like a little skittle, lurching side to side, her beehive waving madly. You see, you see, you see, you see, I didn’t see it coming, not at all.
She was rushing toward me and crying out my name and my mother’s name and Davey’s name until she had her arms around me.
Mother said when he woke up his face was so serene. She saw in his face a man. She glimpsed him suddenly, tall and handsome, the sort of man who finished up his work and drove his truck home and opened his front door and picked up his children and kissed his wife. A little glimpse of another future.
And when he came home to us, when he walked in through the door and lurched himself onto the sofa, smiling, I noticed his calmness.
Davey didn’t need so much care at first. It was his eyesight mainly, but of his increasing blindness he did not complain. He didn’t say I was orange anymore. He said, “You’re glowing.”
“All of me?” I asked.
“Just your face. Like you are a jack-o’-lantern, only not orange. A body with a lantern for a head.”
“Stop it,” I whispered.
“I’m just telling the truth,” he said.
“Can you see my face?”
“Not really, it’s just a white shape glowing. I like it. Are you smiling?” he said.
“No, I’m crying,” I said.
“You are not,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“You only cry when things are really bad, Lenny.”
He bumped into walls. I had to guide him by the hand. His hand was large and coarse, the skin thickened and dry, layer after layer, until it was hard as stone. “Forward, forward, stop. Turn to your left,” I said, but he forgot left from right.
“Left?” he’d ask, confused.
“Left,” I’d say, “like turn left, left hand.”
“Oh,” he’d say.
“The toilet is right in front of you,” I’d say.
“Thank you,” he’d say.
He was polite like that.
I’d hear his pee hitting the floor.
“Sorry,” he’d say.
Sometimes I’d say, “Don’t worry about it.” Other times nothing because I’d be angry at having to clean up pee. You don’t become someone perfect just because your brother is dying. You stay the person you are and all your good and bad bits are magnified.
I read to him.
I read to him from the encyclopedia, his favourite parts. Sometimes what we thought were favourite parts weren’t favourites anymore. Frogs, for instance, didn’t excite us any longer. I read instead to him about the Great Plains where once more than 30 million bison roamed.
“That’s a lot of bison,” he said with his eyes closed.
“They were nearly hunted to extinction,” I said.
“That’s a lot of hunting,” he said.
“There’s a picture,” I said. “It’s all these bison skulls piled up in a mountain.”
He didn’t open his eyes. “That’s terrible,” he said.
“I wonder if he’ll come back,” he said, so quiet I could barely hear him. Like he was thinking a thought out loud.
“Who?” I whispered, but I knew.
“It was wrong to just go and never say goodbye,” he said, louder no
w. He’d never once said that in all his life.
“Maybe he’ll come back,” I said, but Davey shook his head.
“I wish I was a pioneer,” he said after a while.
It made me think about our running-away plans. They seemed such a long time ago. Just like Peter Lenard Spink seemed so distant. I had a pain in my throat, all my tears stuck there in a hard lump.
“Ouch,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I started to cry. He lay on the sofa with his eyes closed and I cried beside him. I did it quietly so he wouldn’t know.
“How’s that brother of yours doing?” asked Nanny Flora.
“Not so good,” I said.
“Yes, your mother wrote me,” said Nanny Flora. “I hear his eyesight is not so good and he had a seizure.”
“He had three,” I said. “But he’s home now again. He’s been to the hospital twice. They put him on pills that make him so sleepy.”
“Well,” she said.
It was an unusual well for her. I thought I heard a little chink in her clean armour.
I didn’t help her out, I didn’t say a thing. I wasn’t scared of her anymore. I’d had a totally imaginary terrifying great-aunt. Nothing could scare me anymore.
“Well, I think it’s about time I came out, don’t you think, Lenore?” she said.
“Huh?” I said.
“Don’t say huh,” said Mother, from the sofa.
“I mean, I think I ought to catch a bus up, don’t you? Stay for a while.”
I was so stunned I couldn’t speak. I imagined her arriving. I imagined as best I could with her voice and her photo that sat on the top of the china cabinet. She was tiny and wiry and stick-brittle. She’d smell like dishwashing liquid and Ajax.
“You there, honey?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Don’t tell your mother now,” she said. “It’s our secret, Lenore.”
“Okay,” I said. And I put the phone down and tried to look completely normal.
“What in blazes are you looking like that for?” asked Mother.
