The Girl Giant

by Kirsten den Hartog

  Elspeth answered, but he didn’t hear her. He was looking at her bare earlobe, and noticing the absence of a diamond there caused him to drift into a vignette of their wedding day, the day after he had given her a pair of earrings, winking up from a blue velvet box. For the ceremony, she had appeared at the chapel door, and he, heart ballooning, had watched her approach on the arm of no one, small and pristine. Such a contrast with later, when she’d wept in their room and looked at him with a desperate face and said (only this once) that nearly everyone she had ever loved she had also lost, and that was why she was terrified, she would always be terrified, she was sorry.

  “Shhh,” he had said. “You won’t lose me. I can promise you that.”

  He had taken her shoes off, and rubbed her pinched, bony feet, and she had fallen asleep in her wedding dress and diamonds with crescents of black mascara under her eyes.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked him now, voice spiced with animosity.

  He checked himself and glanced at me, but I shrugged. I was inhaling my potatoes, thinking ahead to a second helping before the first one was done.

  “Like what?” he said.

  She made a mopey, puppy-love face, and his nostalgia withered.

  Because I’m leaving you, he thought with a thrill.

  And that night as she slept beside him, he looked at her eyes moving under her eyelids. He remembered thinking about her eyes before they were married, about how they were rich as topaz, and working up the nerve to deliver that little piece of poetry that now made him wince for his former self. The man who would say such a thing seemed like a different man, and the woman who’d heard it someone other than Elspeth. (Elsie, they had called her. Why hadn’t he?) As though he were watching a corny movie, he saw himself and Elspeth standing in the hat shop with their fingers entwined. He was saying the words rich as topaz, and she was lifting her face to his, flashing her two jewels at him and locking him in place, and yet seeming also demure and refined. He smiled. He thought of waking her up and telling her what he’d been thinking about, because it suddenly seemed more funny than awful, the silly intricacies of courting and the bloated language of romance. But to do so would also be to say, I’ve been lying awake thinking about us. Thinking way back to the beginning. And she would know. She would have to know.

  You are the love of my life, he said without speaking, and her sleeping face softened as he thought the words.

  No. Of course he could never leave her.

  On a hot morning in August, the phone rang just before breakfast. Elspeth was buttering toast and James was setting the table, so it was me who answered and heard the prim English accent on the other end of the line.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello. Mrs. Elspeth Brennan, please.”

  I watched Elspeth’s hand rise and cover her crumpling face as she learned that the aunties had died—both Franny and Bea, together. They were out for a country drive, but something went wrong. A passerby noticed skid marks on the pavement leading to a trail of broken shrubs. He pulled over, got out of his car, and followed the path to a lake where the aunts’ car had bubbled under. They were found inside, Franny in the driver’s seat as usual, and Bea, having climbed across from the passenger’s side, with her arms around her sister. No one knew what made the car leave the road, but Bea’s window was open. If she’d wanted to escape, she could have.

  Elspeth sank to the floor and cried with the phone buzzing in her hand, and James hurried toward her, crouching down beside her and smoothing her hair. I had never seen her sit on the floor before. The toast and tea grew cold in honor of Franny and Bea, of Gog and Magog. The real ones were just ordinary old ladies; the legendary versions descended from a Roman emperor. He had thirty-three daughters, every one of them wicked and wild, and he married them off to thirty-three men with the hope of taming them, but the daughters would not be subdued. One night, they slit their sleeping husbands’ throats, a crazed act, or one of solidarity. As punishment, the daughters were banished from the kingdom and set adrift in a boat with their hair tangling in the sea breeze, waves churning beneath them. They came to an island inhabited with demons, and they mated with them, producing a race of giants. Gog and Magog were two of these, and grew to be the guardians of the city of London, chained to the palace gates.

  I loved the aunties from afar, since their great stature put my own in context. And yet before Elspeth left for England, she showed me a photograph of herself as a girl about my age, standing between two women of regular size.

  “That’s Bea,” she said, pointing, “and this one’s Franny.”

  She seemed to have forgotten her lie that the aunts had stretched to six-foot-four, at least, and that, no, sorry, there were no photographs. Baffled to the point of speechlessness, I stared at the two women. Bea had a kind face and curly hair; Franny was slimmer and squinted into the camera as though she were trying to see me. Between them, Elsie had been caught with her eyes shut. But she grinned, so this was before the war, when the scope of the coming tragedy was unimaginable. In the photo, with its rippled white edges and varying shades of gray, she wouldn’t look at me, so it was hard to tell whether or not to feel deceived.

  Chapter 6

  I curled myself into the car and sat with my chin on my knees as we drove Elspeth to the airport. She could take the train, she said, but James insisted on seeing her off, which meant a long drive to the city and a kink in my neck that would last for days.

  James carried Elspeth’s suitcase as we walked through the airport. Heads turned to see the mother, the father, the gigantic child. I had never been in an airport before, and found myself itching to travel, as in my childhood when James would ask me to spin the globe in my bedroom and then tell me a story about the place where my finger had landed. It was because of this game that I had quickly learned the names of countries, and where they sat in relation to one another. I knew where he had been as a young soldier, but not what had happened to him in those places. And I knew where she had been when he’d found her, in a town in England, to which she was now returning. Three weeks she would stay, maybe four. My buttons would pop. My sleeves would creep short in her absence. I had never been separated from her before, but I kept my nervousness as secret as my excitement.

  We said good-bye to Elspeth as if she were going downtown for groceries, and no one acknowledged that this was anything more than that, except we stayed and watched the plane lift off, and I looked through my trusty thumb-and-finger telescope until I could see Elspeth in one of the little windows. The plane carried her up and away, which was an amazing thing to watch from either vantage point. I could see myself get smaller in her eyes.

  This was the first time Elspeth had ever flown. During takeoff, she felt a tremendous relief and a new, unnamable burden. She would be “home” in a matter of hours, though it had taken days to come to Canada by ship, and she and the other passengers—brides all—had endured seasickness and winds strong enough to blow a body overboard. Maybe someone had been blown overboard, she couldn’t quite remember whether that had happened on her own ship or another. And now here she was, roaring through the sky at a phenomenal speed, but sitting with her hands in her lap, gazing out the window. She passed over the mouths of rivers, over the foothills, and the heartlands. She saw from above the lakes that were formed when a giant’s footprints filled with rain, the mountain ranges that are great bodies sleeping. As she crossed the belly of the ocean she counted the years since she’d been back: thirteen.

  It was difficult to imagine herself as a young bride looking for her husband on the blank horizon. She remembered the clothes she’d worn that day—a pleated skirt and blouse she’d made herself—and she could see them now as if they were on her body, but she couldn’t see herself, at least not the parts that counted, the face and the eyes. What had she been thinking then? Why had she agreed to come? When she thought back to the women on the ship—a thousand brides—they seemed just like the women of the factory, a gro
up to which she didn’t really belong. Why was that, when they had so much in common? They had all married Canadian soldiers. They had sat in bomb shelters with gas masks over their mouths. They had picked through rubble for lost things. Probably they had each lost someone, somewhere, over six years of war. They had watched the war dramatized on movie screens even while it continued around them, and they had noticed that the uniforms fit perfectly on actors but rarely so on real people. Maybe it was even true that every one of them felt as separate from the group as Elspeth did—perhaps they had that in common too. But the link was meaningless if no one spoke it into existence. The Aquitania that had brought her to Canada was a luxury ship with grand, decorous rooms, a favorite of celebrities in the 1920s but pressed into service as a troop carrier during the war, and the war had beaten it down. The Aquitania still had her wartime colors in 1946, the year Elspeth crossed—drab gray, the color of rubble. To Elspeth, everything was gray then, and for a time after, and if it wasn’t, it seemed garish or disrespectful. Or blatantly, selfishly naive. So she crossed under a gray sky, on top of gray water, toward a gray horizon. And didn’t it just say everything when James was there waiting for her in the crowd with a bright bouquet of flowers, a red rose in his lapel, a green tie, and a purple band around his hat?

  But wait—there is so much to say before that.

  In the summer of 1944 I share a bird’s-eye view with rockets and warplanes as smoke from bombs disperses the puffy clouds that would otherwise linger in the sky over England. Elsie is twenty-one years old and lives with her parents near London. She makes hats, but no one is buying them now, and the little hat shop that has been in the family for generations has instead become a gathering place where local women knit socks for soldiers. The heads that model the hats are bare skulls, lined up on the shelves at the back of the store; the hats are packed away in cedar boxes to be preserved for happier days. It is a time of waiting, of not knowing how long the waiting will take, or what it will bring when it’s over.

  It is also strawberry season, first the plain white flowers and then the fruit. The berries push out from the circles of leaves without any awareness of the state of the world. They expect it to be warm and sunny, and it is. Elsie fills pails with strawberries. The fruit reminds her of when she and her brother Stanley were little, and they would eat as their mother picked under the hot sun. Stanley is a soldier now. Just nineteen, he’s been to all sorts of places he would never have otherwise visited. When at last he came home on leave, there was something sophisticated about him, something alien. He joked but she could smell his fear. Or was it hers? The freckles on his nose had disappeared, as if they were spots that could be brushed off at will, and at first she couldn’t figure out what was different about him, what was wrong.

  The last time she saw him was February. He had cut himself shaving and the nick glistened as he leaned in to kiss her good-bye. Their mother cried and blew her nose in her hankie, a loud, honking blow that made Elsie and Stanley exchange a familiar, stifled laugh. Their father, having stumbled through the Great War, saluted, and with his cardigan hanging down around him he seemed tiny and old. Inside his tattered slippers were feet that had once turned red and blue from trench foot, and had remained, years later, susceptible to the cold. He wiggled his toes as he hugged his boy, and reminded him to change his socks often.

  And then Stanley was gone, by truck, by train, by ship, writing mystifying letters home that were fewer and farther between, harder and harder to decode—if in fact they needed decoding. Was he trying to tell her something, or was he just writing about his days?

  Dearest Elsie,

  Can you believe two among us have been stung by what is called a “man of war,” of all things? It’s a kind of jellyfish with a long, dangerous stinger. The boys are paralyzed, moaning in the infirmary, but I am fine except for a fantastic sunburn, blisters and all. No more swimming for me. The men of war are as plentiful as U-boats in these parts, and a fearsome enemy. I want to go swimming, but don’t worry, I won’t. Please don’t tell Mother about the jellies. I know how she worries.

  Yours,

  Stan

  February, and now June. She picks only the ripest berries, the ones that drop into your palm as soon as you touch them. She picks two, eats one, picks two, eats one. The sun makes a blanket on her back, on her hair, so it’s as if she’s under the covers, like the cat, Louie, who sleeps purring at her feet. Louie is Stanley’s cat, and he never liked her until Stanley was no longer around. The cavies, too, are kinder now that she is the one to feed them. But it’s him they love, as all animals do. Once when he was a boy he came home from school trailing three dogs who wanted to be with him.

  A bee buzzes, and then another. She hears her mother’s voice from long ago, Stay perfectly still and they won’t bother you. But the noise builds to a fevered hum. The seconds pass so slowly, giving her every opportunity. There is the sound of sirens, the cue to run, but Elsie sits still. A shadow passes, turns her legs gray as they stretch before her. Somewhere nearby, the bombs scream down, the ground shudders. Elsie sits in the meadow with her eyes closed, the pail of berries on her lap. These latest bombs are actually rockets with no pilot to sacrifice—doodlebugs, they call them, a name so ridiculous she can’t bring herself to say it. The bees hover over the strawberries, and she can feel the whir of their wings against her fingers. She waits. When everything is quiet she opens her eyes.

  Something has happened, she knows that, but a dead calm protects her as she walks home along a street cluttered with bricks. The church has cracked open. Houses have tumbled in on themselves and spilled out over the pavement so that everyone’s personal things are on view. An invasion. There are chairs and pots, books and clothing, a piano, and a teacup sitting unbroken in its saucer. Other things have exploded beyond recognition. Somewhere under it all is her father in his cardigan, her mother. But the hat shop with the house above it is still standing. Not even the glass has cracked, and the heads lined up at the back of the store stare out.

  For Elsie, this is the only slowed-down day in all of the war—longer even than that Blitz night in May, years ago now, when London flamed and she watched it burning from a distance, sitting high in a tree with Stanley. This day goes on and on, into the night, lit by balls of blue and orange blazing and turning in the sky like planets rushing too close. At the end of the road, the aunties appear, Franny and Bea, with their sturdy shoes and their handbags, the kind that hold everything, despite being compact with tidy snap closures. Into the handbags go Louie the cat, his food bowls, Elsie’s toothbrush and nightgown, a bundle of Stanley’s queer letters, and a book of photographs that can’t replace the lasting image: Elsie’s parents under the bricks. She opens the doors to the cavies’ cages and releases them, and before any of it has begun to seem real, she is on board a train, with the aunts at her side like crutches, and they are off to somewhere safer.

  The aunts have procured a farm in the country until the city is livable again. Elsie doesn’t ask for details, and is thankful to be in an anonymous space, where it’s easy to slip into another existence. The aunties function as man and wife, meaning the unspoken things are the greatest barrier between them. They bicker the way married couples do, and one evening over throat-burning whiskey Franny suggests that the world needs war; that men do. They need the release that comes from fighting, defending, maiming, saving, killing one another. The chance to be heroic. “Then we should get rid of men,” says Bea, and they cackle and pour more whiskey. Bea does the cooking and cleaning, and Franny trims the hedges and puts out the garbage and sets the mousetraps that are of dire necessity in such a drafty, old house. Mice move so quickly, so silently, they make you wonder if you are seeing things. They can disappear into holes no bigger than a coin, so they come in and out as they please, skittish with fear, but persistent. Bent on surviving. Elsie dreams of them scampering over her in the night, wakes to the trap snapping. She thinks of the cavies and wonders how they will manage on their own,
what Stanley will say when he returns and finds out she set them free, which may be the same as killing them. Her mother and father are in heaven, she reminds herself. They have gone to a better place, and she will one day join them there and apologize in person—not for the cavies but for ignoring the sirens. She digs into those words for comfort: a better place. But comes up empty, clenching her teeth. And when she prays she can’t help but feel she is whispering to herself, which lends her prayers a level of desperation, or lunacy. If the soul carries on in heaven, why do these deaths feel so final, deep in her core, where her own soul apparently resides?

  Because there is nothing after, she thinks, there is only now. But she never says this out loud.

  When the end of the war comes, people laugh and sing, but there is no transition and Elsie is unprepared for the shift. All the foolish songs are meant to show a bravado she doesn’t feel; their buoyancy is sickening. The words and the music insist on jubilance while the evidence of disaster sprawls around them. How do we clean it all up? Where do we begin?

  “I think you need to stay with us,” an auntie says—it doesn’t matter which, because they come as a pair, like salt and pepper. Being with them only underscores her solitude. She is now a drifting fragment that needs to connect or risks endless loss in the atmosphere. And what of Stanley? Somehow she knows already, but returns home and waits.

  Elsie sits in the window of the hat shop and looks out, marveling at how things go back to normal, at how some things stayed normal all through the war. People get up in the morning and go whistling down the street, like characters in a movie. Weddings happen, there is even confetti. Babies are born and, around the corner, a frail old man falls down the stairs and suffers not even a bruise. Someone swears about burnt toast. Men and women come home after a harrowing time away, and many of them look the same as they did before, if you believe what their faces tell you. Richard Wilson is back, handsome as ever. More handsome, maybe, with broader shoulders and a confident gait. So not everyone has been altogether broken. On the streets of the partly obliterated neighborhood, girls bump into him and say, Oops, excuse me, and he tips his hat and smiles with one side of his lovely mouth as he looks down at them. This is what they mean by those three simple words, Life goes on. You go with it or it goes on without you.