The Girl Giant

by Kirsten den Hartog

  “Dad,” I said. “There’s a blister!”

  Every word that came out of my mouth was a high-pitched whinge. Walking back to the car, James held hands with me, though I was barely a head shorter than him now. As he drove us home he had to suppress the fear that had lately come whenever we got in the car, that if one day it would be too small for me, what then, what on earth then? Was such a thing really possible? He pushed the foreboding back down, reminding himself of what the doctor always said: Nothing seems to be wrong.

  We moved through the landscape of leafy trees, on toward the town with its smokestacks and traffic lights. We rumbled across the bridge, and with every bump little whimpers worked their way out of me. In the driveway James switched off the engine and just as he turned to me a whine came again.

  Flushing red, he leaned into me and hollered, “BE QUIET!”

  How a face can change in a moment.

  Once inside the house, he released me to Elspeth. He loved me, but it was always good giving me over. He flopped onto their bed and slept through supper until evening, and I knew, though it had never been mentioned, that the possibility of our holiday had evaporated. When he woke he found he had drooled on the pillow, or maybe he’d cried. He thought of the afternoon, the canoe’s slender bow splitting the water. The sound of the paddle and the creaking boat played in his head like music, like a melancholy song lodged there, and that bothered him more than his shoulder or his sunburned skin, for surely it had been among the happiest of days.

  James and Elspeth’s bedroom was rose-petal pink, a radiant shade. It seemed, stepping in, that not just the walls had been painted, but somehow the air was pink too. There was something calming about this room, where the curtains were always closed and the light from the bedside lamp was golden. The lamp sat on a doily made by my grandmother, a little scrap of cloth saved from a vanished life. For me she existed only in photographs. She was closed up in an album with my grandfather and Elspeth, who, amazingly, had once been a child. But not like me. Never like me. I loved to pore over pictures of Elspeth as the little girl Elsie, so pretty in her loose cotton dresses. The boy beside her in the photos is Stanley, her fair-haired little brother, who had a passion for cavies. I could see the cages stacked up behind him in the photo, stretches of wire framed with wood. One of the little animals sits on his shoulder, nuzzled into the crook of his neck, and I decided, looking at Stanley, that he must have been just like Dickon from The Secret Garden, who befriended wild creatures and knew how to make himself look like grass and trees and bushes. I tried to picture myself in the Secret Garden with Dickon, surrounded by roses, but it was an inconceivable scene; I knew I didn’t belong there.

  Elspeth’s bedside table held nothing but the doily and the lamp. A single dust mote sat on the dark, polished wood, like a star resting on tiny, pointed feet. On James’s side, there was also a table and lamp. The clock was there, too, and had to be wound regularly so he would wake up in time for work. He was a sound sleeper, and the room, so dark, so quiet other than the tick-tock, would hold on to him every morning if he let it. Often he wanted to. It was peaceful there upon the feather pillows.

  There were no pictures on the walls, no knickknacks on the dresser, which stood tall and plain against the wall, facing the bed. The first three drawers were for her and the bottom three for him. In with his socks and underwear was a velvet box that held an army ID tag and also a pair of cuff links, never worn in my lifetime, but in their wedding portrait one winks out of his suit sleeve, against his crisp, white shirt.

  The wedding picture, the room’s only adornment, sat on the dresser and shows James in uniform, his arm wrapped around his bride’s waist, where the taffeta is drawn tight and spills to the floor. At Elspeth’s neck a glass pendant hangs from a fine chain. Her diamond earrings were given to her by James the night before this day: Corporal James Brennan, who found his bride in a hat shop while looking for a gift for his mother.

  Looking at the portrait took me through to an earlier time when James and Elspeth were not my parents. The couple in the picture were like characters from a made-up tale; I could shape them and reshape them. They could be whoever I wanted them to be—the tiny dolls from my dollhouse or larger-than-life people like Anna Swan and Martin Bates, a giantess and a giant who fell in love and traveled together through Europe, befriending kings and queens. When they married, Anna’s bridal gown and her towering hairstyle were festooned with orange blossoms. Martin wore a military uniform with fringed, shimmering epaulets. But in my version, James’s head pokes up out of Martin’s stiff collar and Elspeth’s rises from the ruffles of Anna’s gown.

  Elspeth is stepping down the church aisle toward James in huge, dainty shoes. There are bits of rubble in her way and she must step carefully to avoid them. Her little father is beside her, wearing his cardigan with its pockets full of rocks. He has a terrible, shell-shocked expression as he grips his daughter’s arm. I am here, too, an anachronism as well as an anomaly among the million tiny people filling the pews and stretching down the street in an endless line. Sunshine spills through the cracked church steeple; there are pigeons peering down from the fault line. Beyond them, a warplane crosses the strip of blue sky, its engine loud, then muted. Elspeth’s old, rangy aunties look up, shielding their eyes as the plane passes, both giving the pilot two thumbs up. Elspeth’s mother is here, too, in the front row with Elspeth’s brother Stanley and a row of heads from the hat shop. A guinea pig sits in Stanley’s lap.

  The day has been billed as the union of the Tallest Couple in the World, a sort of fairy-tale wedding that will lead to a marriage bigger and better than an ordinary one, but the bride’s veil is crooked and her shoes pinch, and the war still rages outside. It touches all of us, no matter how big we are, no matter how strong. From a distance the bride sees a gold button fall from her groom’s giant uniform, spinning to the floor. She stoops to retrieve it, though the real Elspeth would never stoop with all those people watching—not for James or for anyone. It is too much to ask.

  Looking on, I feel frustrated knowing what I know, but unable to change things. If only she understood the importance of such a gesture—placing the button in his hand and squeezing her own closed over it.

  Alone in my room on the day of the canoe trip, I poked at my watery blister. I didn’t yet know of Robert Wadlow, the young man who could touch the tops of traffic lights. In the year of his death, just as the war was beginning, he was twenty-two years old, stood eight feet, eleven inches tall, and weighed 491 pounds. And yet he had a wispy, fragile quality: a lanky body, spindly limbs, the hairless face of a boy. His feet were so far from his brain that he could barely sense them. His joints had warped under his own weight, and the leg brace he wore to help him walk chafed away at a blister on his ankle until the raw spot was infected. And he walked on, not knowing that the infection was moving through him. When the doctors tried to save him, it was too late.

  My own blister would not kill me, and was less painful than James’s harsh words. In the oasis of my yellow room, I crept back from the sting. From the ceiling hung fourteen model airplanes that twirled when I entered, and seemed to be greeting me, beckoning me.

  Already I had to duck when I walked beneath them. I was getting large enough to wear Elspeth’s clothes and shoes, and I would try them on, rushing so that I wouldn’t be caught, seeing in the mirror how wrong I looked, how unlike her. But soon I was nine and, to my great relief, had outgrown anything worn by Elspeth. In the privacy of my room there was only me in the mirror to compare myself with. I would come home from school, walk down the hallway past the praying hands and the dressmaker’s dummy, grasp the glass knob and turn: open, enter, close. Release of a long-held breath. I’d lie on my bed with my shoes on and look at the planes, listen to the balsa wood wings tap-tap against one another until they settled and were once again still. Balsa trees grow quickly, sprouting waxy flowers that open at night. The trees are short-lived, though. They grow in a hurry because they have onl
y so much time.

  But I look back with tunnel vision; I forget all of the normal days, in which Elspeth, James, and I sat together listening to the radio or playing cards, comfortable in our family routine. In the spring we planted flowers, and on summer evenings we sometimes set up the croquet hoops in our backyard. Mallets knocking against the painted wooden balls. In the fall we raked the leaves of our maple tree into a mountain, as any family would. At Thanksgiving and Easter and Christmas, the aunties Franny and Bea sent packages from England, full of sweets and fancy teaspoons and Marks & Spencer nightgowns. We dined with my grandparents on James’s side, and Uncle Norm and Aunt Tess. It was always my job to set the table, and then afterward to clear it, to wipe away the crumbs from the tablecloth with a little tool Elspeth had, a brush that lifted the crumbs and rolled them into a box that was also its handle. Uncle Norm, who had been a foot soldier like James, said that if it wasn’t for the war, we wouldn’t have such nifty modern conveniences, and though I didn’t quite know what he meant, from then on I always thought of the war when I brushed the table clean.

  The mundaneness of everyday life must have taken up most of our time, but in my memory it occupies the smallest sliver. So I say with honesty that this version of my life is just that: a version. It has been said that my condition may affect the memory, and anyway, it’s not for me to decide the absolute truth of things, or why the truth might not be my truth. Even from my great distance, I am just too close to say.

  The doctor measured my head and looked in my mouth, ears, eyes. He tapped my knees and my back and took my pulse and my blood pressure. His hairy fingers pressed on my stomach and my neck, and I could feel my heart racing with the chance that he would find whatever he was looking for—something wrong with me—but, as with every year, my body held on to its secret, and he pronounced me “healthy as a horse” and released me. I thought of the taunts, Horse Face and Monster Girl. I said nothing about my headaches or the shooting pains in my shins. The sense of my muscles stretching inside me, the tendons pulled thin. When he asked me, “How do you feel?” I said, “Fine. Thank you.” Just the way I had been taught. He put a note in the file for Ruth Brennan: age ten, six-foot-two.

  In the car on the way home, I felt the tension drinking up the air. James was clenching his teeth, and I could see the little muscle working in his jaw even as I tried to focus on the pattern of the streetlamps standing at attention by the side of the road. Finally he said to Elspeth, “I’d like to think he’s right. But we should get another opinion.”

  Before he could finish she was already hissing, “Ssshhh,” and jerking her head back to me.

  Like her I didn’t want to discuss it, or even to hear it discussed. Nothing was wrong with me. Yet I stayed home from school as often as I could, professing bellyaches or sore throats—less worrisome than my real symptoms, one of which was loneliness. But then I would imagine myself growing bigger and bigger, confined in my little bedroom. The Cornish giant, Antony Payne, stayed so long in his room that when he died, his corpse would not fit through the door and could not go down the stairwell. To get him out, they had to lower the floor to ground level. But who were they? Who sawed through the joists and the floorboards? At least if a soul dies with a body, then in death there can be no indignity. But in life there is plenty. In time I would find out everything I could about Antony Payne and so many others—like Anna Swan, the one who’d married Martin Bates. Before she met Martin she’d followed the path of other misfits and ended up at Phineas T. Barnum’s American Museum, where curiosities showed themselves to the curious, the pity going both ways.

  One muggy July day, a fire broke out at the museum, and Anna found herself trapped on the third floor, with the sound of screaming animals ringing in her ears. Bears, lions, kangaroos perished, though the human curiosities were quickly saved. But the giant girl couldn’t fit through the burning doorways, and even if she could have, the weakened stairs might have snapped under her weight. Anna’s best friend, the Living Skeleton, stood by her as long as he dared, but as the heat increased he could feel himself melting. And he was such a delicate creature already, needing to keep a nourishing flask of sweet milk on a chain around his neck. He lifted it toward his friend now, but Anna shook her head no. The perspiration rolled from her face as she watched the Living Skeleton leave her. Isaac was his name—important to remember that he had one. He had been a cobbler in another life, she recalled, as she listened to his shoes cross the floor. The flames popped and hissed. They poked through the floorboards and raced up the corners of the room. Then a window crashed, and Anna thought at first it was because of the intense heat, but faces appeared, and a derrick, and then the walls on either side of the window were bashed away too. Anna gathered her skirts and ran to the open space, crunching over the glass. She climbed out onto the derrick and they tied her to it, and when she looked below she saw that a crowd had formed, applauding her escape. Among the ordinary people were the Living Skeleton, the Fat Lady, and the Littlest Man. How small they looked as she hovered above them! Eighteen men held the line as they lowered her to the ground, and she could feel her face burning from the heat and from the humiliation of needing such special treatment. She couldn’t lift her eyes to meet the gaze of the onlookers, and she was thankful that a carriage was waiting for her. She squeezed herself into it and heard the crowd mutter as one, amazed that a little princess coach could contain such a great lady. The carriage whisked her away from the burning building, and she sat hunched inside, holding her big knees, head pressed to the ceiling, skirt ballooning around her.

  It certainly was something to feel my body elongating, opening out like the largest telescope that ever was. I kept outgrowing my surroundings—not just my shoes and underwear, but my chair and bed, the bathtub. All the places meant to hold me comfortably so that I could just let go and be myself. My toothbrush lost in the palm of my hand and fluttering against my teeth like eyelashes. The very walls of my home shrinking. In some ways it seemed that the external things were getting smaller while I was staying the same. The idea of my room contracting with me inside it gave me the feeling of suffocating, and when I thought about that for long enough I’d find renewed enthusiasm for the outside world, whatever its complications. When I did go to school, I rushed as quickly as possible across the bridge, and took back alleys the rest of the way, staying out of sight as long as I could. The sparrows chirped and chattered in the trees as I approached, but stopped whenever I walked by, and stayed silent until I’d passed. Then they’d start up again, just as if they were talking about me. The mourning doves were kinder. They stayed at the edges of the alleys, their muted grays and browns lost among the leaves and wild grasses. I was like that great blue heron James and I had seen; I didn’t belong among them. Yet I kept my class picture in my bedside drawer and studied it daily, naming each child and memorizing all the things I knew about them, drawing their likenesses with great care on foolscap paper and then labeling each sketch, only to tuck it away beneath the photo. The boy with the ring of dirt around his neck had been with me since kindergarten, as had Grace—her eyes were still crossed, doubled in size through her thick lenses, and I loved her more than the others though in all our years together we had hardly spoken. Ronnie Griffiths, sleeve flapper, shoelace tier, was long gone, but there was no end of replacements for his kind. Boys who stuck out a foot in the hall, sending me flying; girls rippling with laughter as they slipped their tiny feet into my shoes.

  In the front row of school pictures, the most delicate girls sat with their hands folded and their ankles crossed, the way Elspeth did. Little ladies in picture-day dresses. Grace was right in the center of them, and I was two rows behind, in the middle at the back. Tip of a triangle, or more like a solitary mountain. But look at my smile! If only I could drink something, eat something to alter my height, like Alice in Wonderland, then there would be nothing to set me apart. But as it was I inched up, faster and faster. Curioser and curiouser.

  Could they see
me growing? Could they hear the ringing in my ears? And was the ringing the reason that I didn’t know the answers to the questions the teacher asked? What does a miller do? My panic rising. Make hats? Saw wood? Gather wind? Or was it just that I was so afraid I couldn’t concentrate? I no longer trusted the answers that came to me when I sat in class, and I kept quiet, hoping that no questions would be asked of me. Could I do this my whole life? Could I sneak through?

  For days I stayed home, avoiding delivery of my oral book report, but the assignment waited for me, and in a daze I found myself there in front of the class, wearing my lucky dress with seven pockets, reeking of shame. Sweat formed under my hair and trickled down my forehead. It slid down to my eyebrows and then dropped from that great height to the linoleum like a stream of shining pearls. I could hear muttering and giggling. The teacher hissing, Sssshhhh, making everything worse. Each pocket of my dress had something inside meant to bring me luck—a strand of blue yarn, a penny, a pink barrette that Grace had dropped and I had been too shy to return, an old fair ticket, a button, a paper clip, a bead—but one by one, I could feel each of them failing. Me losing my will to be upright, eyes closing, knees buckling, falling to the floor in a dead faint. When I came to, I kept my eyes shut as everyone whispered around me. Stroke of brilliance for a stupid girl. Now I would be allowed to go home.

  As in my infancy, Elspeth pampered me. She brought me hot chocolate and cold apples cut into wedges. I loved her for not talking about what happened at school, but I very nearly asked her, time after time, Will it always be this way? Will they always hate me? Taking myself ahead to the moment where she didn’t know what to say stopped me. After all, it was good to be home.