The Girl Giant

by Kirsten den Hartog

When he took his hands away, he was small again, standing on the sidewalk to his own home. For a long moment he stared at the house, its white stucco exterior blazing in the sun.

  Chapter 3

  Close an eye and encircle the open one with your thumb and finger, and through that lens you can see the fine details of your kneecap or your hand. See how the skin is woven like fabric, spun from many things? Or hold the lens up and look far, so far off you can see mountains, where a little house is nestled with smoke puffing out of the chimney. You can see great distances through a thumb-and-finger telescope. Try it.

  I had always wanted to tell someone that. Not Elspeth or James, but a child like me. And once I started school that chance would be there. As the day came closer, I thought about how I’d stand in front of the class and tell them what I knew. But then I pictured myself displayed in front of the other students, all of them watching me, and my heart beat so loud that I knew it would drown out my words. I would open my mouth and nothing but the knock-knock sound would come out, and everyone would laugh. Before I even got to school, my ease around other children eroded, the way a bone erodes and can never grow strong again.

  On my first day, I was creeping up on five feet, heads taller than my peers, who stared at me as I made my way down the speckled hall to my classroom, sweaty hand gripping Elspeth’s sleeve. Clip-clop went Elspeth’s shoes, and her dark dress without a speck of lint swished against her nylons, like people whispering. Elspeth was slim and dark-haired with a natural elegance. In Canada, her English accent gave her a level of sophistication that wasn’t earned, for she’d had little education and was far from worldly. But she looked the part. She used a steel-blue pencil to trace the edges of her brown eyes, and dusted the fine bones of her face with bronze powder. I wished that one day I’d be like her. Letting go of her sleeve and entering Room 7 made me feel like a balloon released into the sky, and I kept looking to the window to see if she’d appear there with James behind her. If necessary I could climb through to them and we could all escape together, running from the teacher’s long reach, a hand with claws and grotesque knuckles.

  But no, the teacher was nothing like that. I faced front, and saw her smiling straight at me. Frizzy silver hair like Aunties Gog and Magog. I thought, Maybe I could love it here. The hum of the fluorescent lights, the alphabet traveling around the classroom perimeter. She told us we could do great things with our lives—even the girls—and whether or not it was true, I liked to hear her think up different possibilities of who we could be each time she pointed to the letters: an architect, a botanist, a cartographer, a dancer, an equestrian, a friend, a geologist, a husband, an ice skater, a jockey, a kindergarten teacher, a lumberjack, a musician, a neurosurgeon, an Olympian, a philosopher, a quilt maker, a rodeo rider, a scientist, a taxidermist, an undertaker, a veterinarian, a wife, a xylophonist, a Yeoman of the Guard, a zoologist.

  When at recess a boy put on my coat and ran back and forth with my long sleeves flapping, the teacher sent him to a corner and made him stay there until class resumed. I thought I had an ally then, but once everyone was seated again she made him come to me and apologize.

  “Say sorry to Ruth,” she said as the class looked on.

  I turned away from the boy’s face, from the spots of red on his cheeks and the humiliation in his eyes that branded me as his enemy. As he spoke a mocking “soar-reee,” I looked at my sock bunched down around my ankle, my long foot toe-to-toe with his.

  “It’s okay,” I told him, but really the opposite was true. He, and the others watching, were lost to me for good.

  So why was it that I was happy to be among them? I took their company in whatever form it came, just as a starving person eats whatever she finds. I was put at the back of the class so I wouldn’t obscure the view of the other children, and I found myself grinning at the funny way the teacher’s arm jiggled when she wrote with chalk on the board; at the bee doing a loop-dee-loop outside the window, threatening to fly in. I gripped my pencil, but against my will it snuck up to my face and made a curly mustache on my upper lip. Curls and more curls, the delicious lead-wood smell, and the sharp tip of the pencil tickling my skin. Waiting for the others to turn to me was almost more than I could bear, and my eyes grazed fondly from one child to the next. The funny boy with the ring of dirt around his neck. The cross-eyed girl with braids and corrective glasses. Grace was her name.

  Grace seemed almost like a friend, though we’d never spoken directly. I tried to predict what she might think was funny and curled my top lip up to hold my pencil there. I crossed my eyes for her and plugged my ears with erasers. At recess my heart thumped with the thought of going close to her, but she could see me coming, even when I approached from behind. Maybe her glasses gave her special spin-around vision? It was as though we held an invisible, unbendable pole between us, for whenever I moved close, she moved just that distance away. Little shoulders, little ears, little ski-jump nose. I put my hand out from yards away and pretended to stroke her hair.

  I stood alone in the playground as the swings flew and the monkey bars filled up with children. My hands reached almost to my knees; I was all wrong, out of proportion. I listened to the hiss of the pulp and paper mill across the river, to the whir of the factory where Elspeth had worked. The wind hugged me. It made whispering sounds, circled my feet with a trailing of sand, then spiraled around me, up, up, until I was reeling. If I closed my eyes the children’s voices faded and all I could hear was the whistling of the atmosphere, someone far off calling me. It was a spooky sound, but reassuring too: somewhere, someone knew me and was waiting for me to come.

  At home after school I liked to sit on the floor and draw pictures of me with Elspeth and James in front of our house, and a yellow sun in the right-hand corner with lines I called “the shine” coming out. I drew Grace, too, with her braids and glasses. There were always fingerprints on her lenses, and I wanted to tell her how you could breathe on them and then rub the fog away with something soft and unscratchy.

  “Mum, how do you draw people the way they really look?” I asked Elspeth. “When will I be able to?”

  She answered, “In time, with practice, if you keep at it enough,” but there was a kernel of doubt inside me, and I knew it was there inside her as well. Why could I see just how people looked but not convey it? I felt there must be some clue, some trick—a secret withheld from me—and sometimes I scribbled in hot frustration, ripping through the paper to the floor beneath. I could still kneel easily enough and hunch over my work the way any child would; I had no idea that one day the position would be unthinkable for me. My awkwardness showed more in the way I concentrated, with my tongue stuck out of the left side of my mouth. I held my pencil incorrectly, between my third and fourth fingers. And there were other mistakes, too; the things I hadn’t noticed about myself my giant ears overheard.

  “All these strange little flaws,” said Elspeth. “Where do they come from?”

  “Those things aren’t flaws,” said James. “They’re quirks. Everyone has quirks. You’re pigeon-toed.” This last he spoke with a sneer.

  Elspeth didn’t respond, but thought, Pigeons don’t have toes, not really. In her view, a cluster of flaws had shown up in James, too. His happy-go-lucky simplemindedness. His mouth, which reeked of coffee until a sour smell took over late in the day. She noticed a change in his tone when he spoke of her toes—un-James, she thought, and spiteful. Sign of a widening rift. Elspeth had begun to see cracks in the bedroom walls, and the walls in the kitchen and living room as well. There were places where the plaster bulged, pulling away from the lath. And she heard sounds, late at night but also in the daytime when she was alone in the house. The walls cracked and breathed. Houses could fall apart in moments—the war had taught her that—so it was true that it could happen over time as well, with the people trapped inside. When she put her hand next to the fault lines, the air emerging felt warm and moist, like human breath. All day she listened. She listened after the clothes had
been washed and dried, while she was folding them. She listened after the floor had been polished, while she was observing the gleam. Not admiring her work exactly but registering it as a task completed. She scrubbed the house until her skin stung and her nostrils tingled from the sharp chemical fumes. But she never managed to achieve that same sense of accomplishment she’d had at the hat shop in England, or even at the factory, sewing pocket after pocket for the suits of businessmen. Longing for that monotonous piecework, followed by a more pervasive longing for home, for England, brought her close to crying. She remembered the little church in her neighborhood that had split in two and regretted that she was not going to church often enough. Maybe God was taking revenge. Her whispered prayers were not enough of an allegiance. One day she dug out a plaque of praying hands from among her English mementos. She nailed it to the wall in the hallway. Though the hands gave her some comfort, they frightened me. I sometimes thought of them as I was falling asleep—hands with no body, reaching for me, and me alone in the dark. Elspeth and James, at least, had each other. At the end of each day, after I’d been tucked into my own bed, James pulled Elspeth close, and she welcomed the ritual embrace.

  I love you, he said.

  I love you, too, she said.

  There were nights when the words were like a warning, to remind each of the other’s expectations. And then at times they were spoken with a wistful expression, heads tipped to the side as if exchanging an apology.

  I kept drawing. My pictures took on an ancient Egyptian look, though I knew little of that era; I often drew faces in profile but with the eye staring straight out, and the torso beneath it turned forward. Trees were drawn from the side, but ponds from above, as though I’d flown past, looking down on them. I sat on the floor and drew for hours on end, and when I noticed my tongue sticking out, I pulled it in and made a silent promise to better myself. In pictures I didn’t embellish. I didn’t draw things I’d never seen. I drew Elspeth, James, and myself, and I labeled us Mum, Dad, Me, though there was no mistaking who was whom. The depictions were crude yet honest. The mother had her hair pulled back and if I drew her full face, I placed the number 11 between her eyebrows.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  I reached out and touched the worry lines on her face.

  “That’s your double scar,” I said.

  She smiled, or appeared to. She was twenty-nine years old.

  James wore a happier expression. I drew him in his mail suit and cap, and the big bag strapped over his torso made him shorter on one side than the other, just as it did in real life. His mouth was squeezed into an O, and I pointed to that and said, “He’s whistling,” then attempted to whistle too. My lips puckered in my big face, but no sound came out.

  “No, like this, Ruth,” said Elspeth, and she whistled the tune of the alphabet.

  I tried again.

  “You’re blowing too hard. And puckering. You’re not blowing out candles, Ruth. Watch me.” She gave a long, clear whistle. “See? Let the air out gently, as you need it. Don’t let it fill the space between your lips and your gums.”

  She did everything perfectly, and there was no hope of me being like her. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t make the sound. Elspeth’s frustration increased, and we both felt better when I stopped trying. I began to sing instead, mixing two songs together: ABCDEFG, how I wonder what you are. Until then, Elspeth had never noticed that “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and the alphabet song shared a melody, but it was something I already knew. She watched me print all the letters of the alphabet along the top of my drawing in a crooked line, and she stayed quiet when I told her how the teacher always said we could be anything we wanted to be. “Even the girls,” I added.

  James tried not to concern himself with my future. In the evenings and on weekends, over a span of some years, he taught me about archery, beetle inspection, crazy eights, dominoes, ear wiggling, feather floating, goose chasing, haberdashery, ice fishing, joke telling, kazoo blowing, leapfrog, mimicry, nostril flaring, origami, papiermâché, quick marching, reeling in, shaving, tie tying, ululating, vegetable growing, window washing, x’s and o’s, yodeling, and zeppelins. I was an enthusiastic learner, not always quick, but not slow either. At school, my grades hovered right around average, which was nice, in a way, because average was something unusual for me. But there were things I excelled at, like patterns. Rectangle, square, triangle, square, rectangle. Once you understand them, patterns show themselves everywhere, solid and dependable. When I felt worried or afraid, I looked around for one and never had too long a search. They were on the floor and the ceiling, embedded in the rows of desks, stitched into jumpers and knee socks, locked in the whorls of my fingertips. There were the larger patterns, too, when you saw things from a distance: the person in a house on a street of houses in a town of streets in a province of towns in a country of provinces in a continent of countries, and so on. Everything belonged.

  Elspeth fretted about what went on at school, and felt sure that I got picked on, and James fretted about her fretting and said you could make something come true just by fixating on it enough. There was no proof that I was harassed, he said, and even Elspeth admitted it was just a feeling. She quizzed the teacher about my progress and my interaction with the other students, but the teacher waved her hand and disregarded Elspeth’s concerns. “Children put one another in order,” she said cryptically, without saying which of the children needed sorting. (There was a series of teachers like her, Miss Prue and Miss Gray and Mrs. Ashcroft, each with their own cryptic messages.)

  Sometimes Elspeth wished she could hang with the coats at the back of my classroom, watching, her body falling in folds like the garments. And sometimes, from my place near the coats, I thought I could hear her breathing. How awful it would be if she knew that the things she imagined really happened: erasers twirling toward me and bouncing off my forehead and a bubble of laughter releasing all around me; the big laces of my shoes tied together by the boy who’d flapped my coat sleeves—I’ll remember his name, Ronnie Griffiths, forever. Me rising when the bell rang, stepping forward, and falling to the floor. Monster Girl. Horse Face. Shame burned my eyes and ears. I looked up and saw Grace with her smudged glasses, pink in the face and grinning.

  She can’t help it, I told myself. Everyone is laughing, and she wants to be one of them. I laughed, too, as I pulled myself to standing. It was easier for all of us.

  When I was seven and not yet too big for such an outing, James took me outside town, along a river that branched off ours, where we rented a canoe. It was a beautiful day. Birds soaring. The sky a blue dome patterned with scudding clouds. The quiet landscape carried on around us as though we belonged there. Our little factory town and the pulp and paper mill could be seen in the distance, chugging away.

  James watched my back in the sunlight, my black braid that hung down and my spindly arms that worked the paddle. He liked being able to look at me without my knowing. The sparkling water dripped from my paddle as it moved through the air. James closed his eyes. He heard a rhythm he wasn’t aware of when his eyes were open. He could tell I was happy. Droplets sprinkled our faces as we zigzagged through the water, and when James opened his eyes again he pointed out a great blue heron on the rocky shore. The giant bird turned and nodded, as if to acknowledge us. As James watched my profile grinning at the heron, he was overcome with a burst of optimism that these kinds of moments were sustenance for a child; there was a difference between living and existing. We’ll take a vacation, he decided, recalling his own boyhood trip to the Maritimes, where he’d first seen the underside of a turtle. A wave of nostalgia and an internal slide show of memories: jagged rocks and seagulls, an island with cinnamon roads.

  “Where would you like to go if you could go anywhere?”

  “Um—the beach?” I asked, instead of answering.

  In a flash he was there with thousands of soldiers, and he was pulling himself across the sand, over bodies, moving like a snake, and so
meone else’s blood was running into his eyes—and then he was back with me again, forcing a laugh.

  “It’s not a test, Ruthie, it’s a choice. If you could go anywhere in the world.”

  I let my paddle rest on my lap and thought about my private land with yellow roads. But it had to be a real place, a place I hadn’t been. I pictured the globe in my room. “Egypt,” I said, “for the pyramids.”

  James laughed again. “Pick somewhere a little closer, and I promise you we’ll make it happen!”

  As I spun the globe in my mind, James played out the argument he’d have with Elspeth, and wondered when she had become someone who resisted rather than embraced. There was always a reason not to do something—but at some point she must have been different, because after all she had made it here. She would not want a vacation because there was no money, there was no time, and everywhere we went people would stare. This last reason would go unmentioned but it was the most relevant of the three. They stared at me in the grocery store and in the park and at the beach and on the trams and buses and in elevators and at the doctor’s office and the dentist’s and at the winter fair and in the cinema, and even at church, where we went only two times a year. God should forgive our habitual absence, Elspeth reasoned, for he knew what the rest of the congregation whispered. “That’s the Brennan girl. She’s only seven years old! It isn’t any wonder they haven’t had more children.” As we drove home along the gash of a river, Elspeth would say to James, “You would think that in the House of God—” breaking off because my big ears were listening. As if I couldn’t be hurt by a truth kept silent. I felt Elspeth’s disgust for them. But none of it lessened her fervent, almost desperate belief in God, and none of it inspired me to seek him.

  By the end of our paddle James and I were tired. As he pulled the canoe out of the water, his enthusiasm for our holiday fell away in pieces. He felt scorched by the sunshine and his shoulder hurt from paddling. My new sandals had rubbed my baby toe raw and I was whining.