“I almost died once,” she confessed as we crouched there together. “When I was a baby. I’m allergic to bees, and one stung me.”
I felt my panic close in. Bees were everywhere in summer. They could be anywhere, even indoors. The perpetual ringing in my ears shifted to a low buzz and I glanced around to be sure there were no bees nearby. I locked eyes with her to convey my concern.
“But how do you—how can you keep safe?”
Suzy shrugged and let herself smile a little for my sake. “I don’t want to hole myself up.” She lowered her eyes and added softly, “I’m not afraid of dying.”
But I was terrified to lose her. Why did there have to be bees? I wanted to rip up all the flowers James had planted, the ones that drew the bees. The tallest ones lined the path that led up to my glass doors, a dazzle of hollyhocks and goldenrod. I made Suzy promise never to use that path in daylight again, when the bees were awake and buzzing.
“Yes,” she laughed. “I promise. Now stop, Ruth! Don’t worry about me!”
At night she took the path often, sneaking along it to climb into bed with me. I was ecstatic to have her there, but nervous too—not just to be caught, but to be with her in such a quiet, intimate space. I kept my eyes fixed on the skylight and watched bats flit across the moon.
“Don’t look so frightened!” said Suzy, laughing.
“Ssshhh!”
But she laughed more. I covered her face with my hand in an attempt to silence her, and had a startling, thrilling sensation: I could smother her with my bare hand if I wanted to. I could break her nose and flatten it with nothing more than my palm. I pulled my hand away, shaking.
Mostly, these nights, we lay awake talking. Once, at deep blue midnight, we spotted a falling star through the skylight. I told her that dinosaurs had been wiped out by something that had fallen from the sky, that the whole world had had to start over again several times because of similar catastrophes. And looking up at the single plane that still hung from my ceiling—a Spitfire—I thought to myself that war was like that: one world war and then another. I told Suzy that as a girl I’d pretended to be a sort of dinosaur—a leftover, millions of years old, with a special power for survival. I watched her as I spoke, and liked the way the light and shadow moved over her face, the way she listened, ungiddy, to every word.
And then I went quiet and waited for her to tell me things. Sometimes she offered a rush of trivial observations, such as how Patrick smelled like tomato soup; other times she confessed that she missed her father, who’d been a medical orderly during the war. Her mother said that was just about the worst job a man with a weak stomach could do, and that it had ruined him. Suzy still had his dog tags, and a handsome picture of him in uniform taken before he had been ruined, but he had left the family long ago. Suzy’s mother was beside him in the photo, planting a kiss on his cheek, and I was astounded by how much Suzy looked like the Margaret in the picture, and not the Margaret in real life. That a person could change so much. I thought, But Suzy will never become what her mother is.
“I’m never getting married,” Suzy said, looking sad and serious.
“No,” I promised. “Me neither.”
Suzy smiled then, just a little. “Joke, right? Because who would ask you!”
We laughed together until Suzy fell serious again. She said her father had knocked out her mother’s tooth and her mother could dislodge the fake tooth and send it in and out on the tip of her tongue for a lark. The sight gave Suzy a terrible feeling and made Patrick leave the room.
“I miss my father,” Suzy said, and, after a pause, “but I miss my cat more.” She said the cat was white with two black rings, one around her eye and one around her tail. “Just before we moved, our cat was released into the wilderness with its kittens. The litter always reeked and the food bowl got all moldy, so my mom said she’d had it. She really hates a mess.”
I thought of the garbage and the clothespins, but I also thought, Released into the wilderness sounds nice, almost like a good thing to do.
“I’ve never told anyone about her tooth,” Suzy whispered.
She snuggled into me and I breathed the smell of her hair. I felt in my own body how telling the stories left her dizzy and ungrounded. As she inched home through the flowers and the garbage with her heart rubbed raw, a raccoon looked in on me from the skylight, checking that I was okay, and then it clambered away on its sharp claws.
Though Suzy was sad, my heart was bursting—she was my ally, my only friend, and we would always be together, like Aunties Franny and Bea. In a way I was glad for her unhappiness because it meant she needed me. She had confided in me. No one had ever done that before. I wanted to tell her that I’d never had a friend like her. Only Grace, to whom I had barely spoken. But Grace could not compare. What I’d felt for Grace seemed small and silly now. She was a cross-eyed figment of my imagination. Suzy was bright and alive, something I’d been waiting for since the beginning of time, and also nothing I’d ever expected. She was the collision of those two things.
One night she instructed, “Talk,” and placed her finger on my throat.
I swallowed.
“Say something, Ruth!”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“I can feel your voice buzzing through there when you talk. It’s a funny kind of voice, like it’s coming through a tunnel.” She rested the palm of her hand on my throat. “Ruth, talk!”
“What should I say?”
“Say anything.”
“I like the shape of your head. How round it is at the back, like Nefertiti’s.”
“Ruth, it’s just a head.”
“It’s nice. It’s a nice head,” I told her. And then closer, with my nighttime radio voice, just what I’d been wanting to say: “Everything on you is nice.”
“Yuck, don’t,” she said. “It makes me feel sick when you talk like that.” She lifted her palm from my throat, then pressed on it again.
“Your head’s like a giant peanut,” she said.
She tipped her head back and her mouth opened wide with a burst of laughter, and I said “Ssshhh!” as always.
“I’m sorry,” she said, still laughing. “But it is! Your head is like a peanut!” She could hardly get the words out. “I never noticed before, but it’s all long and kind of dips in and out again, like peanuts in a shell. God, Ruth, you make me laugh so hard I’m crying!”
Whatever made her happy was enough for me. I began to keep a cloth over my mirror, so as not to spoil my exhilaration. When I wasn’t looking at myself, my love for Suzy covered up my self-loathing. By some miracle, it was bigger than me.
And it seemed so long since I’d believed in miracles, but I still remembered the thrill that anything was possible—mushrooms would grow behind my ears if I didn’t wash well enough. If I swallowed my gum, my insides would stick together. The tooth left under my pillow when I was six had been whisked away by a fairy who’d put a shining coin there in its place, something I could spend on anything I liked. Then, one night, I’d woken up and seen James there, with a tooth in one hand and a coin in the other. We looked at each other, saying nothing. His expression had been hard to see in the dark, the response inside of me equally obscured. Was I guilty of something or had I been betrayed? I closed my eyes to let him make the exchange. When he left the room, I heard him whisper with Elspeth in the hallway. The rest of my teeth had fallen out without ceremony. Little by little I realized I had misunderstood many things, but more mysteriously still, the knowing didn’t make me wiser.
With painstaking attention, James refurbished a bicycle to fit me, and just as he’d done when I was little, he ran along beside me with his hand on the seat until he felt sure I was steady enough to ride on my own. Elspeth stood on the porch step, chewing the skin around her fingernails, eyebrows working. I didn’t notice either of them; it was Suzy who kept me upright, cycling forward. And it was Suzy who wound a yellow string around my handlebars for good luck. “So you won’t fall
,” she said. Inside, I promised to keep it there always, and to follow her wherever she wanted to go. As long as she was ahead of me, singing all those songs she knew from the radio, I would follow. What a feeling of freedom it was! And what a sight we were, little Suzy and big me tearing along the horizon, and sometimes her brother Patrick, too, trailing behind us. An afterthought, a shadow.
Outside of town we stopped at a place where the train tracks crossed a narrow river. We dropped our bikes and sat on the rocks beneath the railway bridge with the water moving quickly past. It was white water, and loud, and we had to shout to hear one another. Suzy kept yelling at Patrick to go for a swim but he wouldn’t.
“Okay,” she said. “But if you want to stay with us you have to hang underneath the bridge when the train passes. Until it’s gone right over.”
“But Suzy—” I said. My voice disappeared beneath the roar of the water.
“Okay,” said Patrick. “I’ll do it.”
“You have to climb up now and wait till it comes. Then grab on and hang.”
“Okay.”
“The whole time or you have to go home.”
“I know.”
I watched Patrick step over the rocks in his old sneakers and make his way up under the bridge. He climbed like a monkey and perched himself on a metal rung.
“Suzy, it seems kind of—”
“He doesn’t mind. He likes it.”
We sat watching the water and Suzy smoked one of her mother’s menthol cigarettes. The smoke swirled above us and drifted off, and I looked up to see if Patrick was all right, but he looked just the same as before. Suzy dropped her cigarette in the water and it moved away so fast my eyes couldn’t follow it. Then we heard the train in the distance, barely audible above the rushing water.
“Grab on!” called Suzy.
Patrick reached for a strut and swung himself out just as the train shot overhead. The water was so loud and the train was louder and Patrick was hanging there with his legs dangling. I could see his mouth moving but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. His knees were grass-stained and his T-shirt rose high and showed his skinny middle. I saw his hands gripping the metal, and his body vibrating. I thought I could feel the train’s vibration, too, but it was just me shaking, quivering with fear. The horn blasted, and Suzy whooped with laughter and even Patrick grinned as he made his way back to the rocks. They had done this before, I realized, and my shaking subsided. It was nothing bad if they both understood it. Inviting me along must have been a form of welcome.
When we arrived home that day my parents looked smaller, and the modified house around them seemed all wrong. I could feel how our paths were diverging. Not just mine with theirs, but theirs with each other’s. Increasingly Elspeth and James followed their individual desires rather than those that could be pursued together. James squeezed an array of new hobbies in between his household duties: squash and lawn bowling, beginner’s Spanish, and advanced woodworking, which he could justify because of my constant need for renovated surroundings. He began to notice things he had always taken for granted, such as trees, and to puzzle through what made their roots grow in a different season than their leaves. While he was not a devout man, he thought he glimpsed the mechanics of some master plan that was beyond his knowing. But at Elspeth’s whispered prayers, his eyes rolled.
“Who are you talking to?” he scoffed. “Maybe you should speak up. He’s obviously hard of hearing.”
Every Thursday, just as before, James sat on a bench by the river and ate a pressed ham sandwich. He liked to come to the river to acknowledge a watery day in his past without ever having to say anything about it out loud. As he looked at the ripples of water repeating, he realized that all the days of his future stretched out before him in an expanse of sameness he had neither chosen nor rejected. Thursday, he ate pressed ham. The soft bread turned gummy as he chewed, and stuck to the roof of his mouth. Tomorrow would be Friday and a week would go by and then it would be Thursday again. He looked at the round face of his watch, at the second hand moving through the minute, which moved through the hour, which moved through the day and so on, right back to the beginning. He held his sandwich to take another bite and recalled the time I had bitten into a hot dog and come upon a pig’s eyelid, with the lashes still attached. Being the man of the house, he had examined it closely, and he had never forgotten the way the lashes left an impression in the meat, like a fossil. Now, looking down at his sandwich, he said to himself, “I’m leaving,” and without any action on his part the cycle had been broken. He had always wondered what prompted people to turn their lives upside down, for he was a man who valued constancy, but today he understood that the smallest, least relevant thing could be a provocation. Or perhaps the idea had begun long ago, in his subconscious, rattling and chafing there, waiting to burst through.
While he made the rest of his deliveries, his determination stayed with him. He felt giddy, as though he’d guzzled champagne, and then anxious, as though he’d followed it up with pots of coffee, yet he’d had nothing but one bite of his sandwich by the time his shift was done. Still, today he didn’t hurry home. He returned to his spot by the river and watched the sun traveling in the sky, and marveled at the fact that it was actually he himself who was traveling, though he was sitting still. Then he crossed the bridge and roamed the parts of town that were not on his mail route. How rare it was for him to visit these streets, with their duplexes and brownstones. This was close to home, but he felt he’d entered another world, as in his soldier days when he’d trekked over hill and dale with his equipment strapped on. Before he’d engaged in battle, it had seemed like an opportunity, the trip of a lifetime, yet one that he’d been paid to take.
In an apartment’s windows he saw lights flickering on and then a person illuminated—a little man passing from one room to another. James imagined he himself might live in an apartment like this once his marriage broke up. Once he broke it. Shocking to think. But divorce was spreading, like a sickness or a fashion. It was often written about in the magazines he delivered to people’s homes, which he sometimes scanned on his coffee break. So it was no longer just for celebrities. A thrill crept up his spine, and his stomach burbled, and he stood grinning at the window until the man returned and closed his blind. But James kept smiling.
Before he knew it he had crossed back on the second bridge and arrived in the bustling downtown, where people scurried this way and that. Fat summer raindrops were falling from a single cloud, and when a gust of wind came and the sunshine returned, he stood beaming on the sidewalk. The smell of bread wafted from the bakery. Nearby, the florist’s broom was making a ch-ch sound, and he admired the way the petal-garbage danced like bright confetti as she swept it into a pile. He thought about approaching her and announcing, I’m leaving my wife, just to tell someone, but he flushed, noticing the sway of her flowery dress and the bulge of her calves, and realizing how such a statement could be misconstrued.
Only when he made it to his own street did some form of sadness come over him and hold his feet to the sidewalk. The sensation of hands around his ankles was so real, so like a day he tried to forget, that it seemed they had pushed up out of the earth to grab him. But when he looked down, he saw only his postman shoes, the laces holding fast. He continued toward the house, looking into the living room, where I lay drawing on the floor and Elspeth passed back and forth with the vacuum. He watched me chew the end of my pencil and he knew before she did it that Elspeth would nudge my foot with hers and I would raise my big legs so she could vacuum beneath them. Our actions looked like movements in a dance, the choreography all mapped out and the players stepping through in time with each other. For a moment it moved him.
And then his eye found the steaming bucket and mop at the edge of the carpet, and he knew that when Elspeth was finished vacuuming she would tackle the bare floors. She could never do just one thing in an evening. She even did the tasks she’d asked James to do before he got a chance to start them—or s
he would redo what he had done because it had not been to her standards—and he wondered if there wasn’t some hostility behind that irritating habit, which always made him feel like a disappointing child. He knew that during dinner she would be eating, flexing her troublesome ankles, making the grocery list, finishing a crossword puzzle, and asking about his day without looking up from her paper.
Later James would say to Elspeth, I’m leaving you. Or whatever it was one said. He couldn’t envision what would take place in the wake of that statement—or rather, he could only envision the things that took place every Thursday night. Even with a statement that changed everything, he couldn’t picture anything changing. They would wash up together in the kitchen while listening to the news on the radio, delivered by the same snooty, articulate voice year after year. The heavy stories first, about murder on the large and small scales, and then the lighter ones, about dogs and children. They would comment on things. Then if there was no project under way in his workroom—furniture that needed resizing or a patch for a strained bicycle tire—he would retire to the room he could see now from the street, and as he looked in at the empty chair that had held him for so long in a loose, comfortable embrace, it was as if he were seeing into the near future, when he had gone elsewhere, and he had a great sadness for a day that had not yet come.
That Thursday, we ate in the dining room as usual. My large chair was on the floor, pulled up to the table that sat on a platform of pine boards along with James’s and Elspeth’s chairs. James had sanded and varnished the platform, giving it an oak finish to make the odd structure fit in with the dining room set that had been a wedding gift from his parents. There was always something that needed doing, and most of it was for me.
As James ate dinner kitty-corner to me and across from Elspeth, he examined the cutlery in his hands and asked, “Where did we get these? I mean, who gave them to us?” He ran his fingers along the pieces as though they were precious artifacts dug up from the ruins of an ancient civilization. Objects that might tell him something about the bewildering people who had originally used them.
The Girl Giant Page 7
