“So?” said Suzy. She brushed her cheek with the end of her ponytail. “Did you get it?”
I glanced around to be sure no one was watching, and lifted my shirt to show her the album.
Suzy laughed. “What! Why did you get that one?” She reached out and took it in her hands, and I felt it peel away from my stomach. Suzy recoiled, nearly dropping the record. “Yuck, Ruth! Why is it all wet?”
I grabbed it back and put it under my sweaty shirt again. David was laughing, and so was Suzy.
“You said to get that one—you showed it to me!” I thought of the red swirl, and her finger following it.
“Not that one—God, Ruth, I hate that band.” She was still laughing, and she kept looking at David, whose laughs were like dumb grunts with big pauses between. “Just keep it for yourself, honestly,” said Suzy. “Thanks, though.” Laughing still.
There I went, moving out of myself, moving way up so that I could look down on my pained expression, my big, ridiculous head hanging so my back hunched. Above me, a lamppost curled over as if mocking me. The lights of the convenience store’s sign were buzzing and the florist was sweeping the walk in front of her shop. It was just the smallest, simplest moment when Suzy turned away from me, pretending she hadn’t seen my face turn pink. David puffed his cigarette and blew a column of smoke at me. It traveled up like a vapor trail and filled my eyes so that tears formed.
“God,” said David to Suzy. “Look at her shoes.”
Suzy laughed again and said, “She has to have them custom-made. Size seventeen! Right, Ruth?” Then she turned to David and put her hand out for his cigarette. “Can I have a drag?”
As she drew in the smoke, David tossed his head back and laughed again. “Look,” he said, pointing at me. “I think she’s crying—shit, is she your boyfriend, or what?”
Right then I understood that there are categories for love, the way there are languages within all language, and currencies of money. How stupid of me not to have known before. I opened my mouth to say something but couldn’t think what it should be, so I closed it again. David laughed harder, with a hissing sound, and though it wasn’t really he who had hurt me, I pictured myself reaching for him, wrapping my fingers around to the back of his skull, and pressing my thumbs on his eyes, pushing into the sockets. Pushing and pushing. Maybe if I pushed hard enough the eyeballs would come out the back and I would have them in my palms, and they would be hard, not like opals but like marbles—nothing precious, parts of a game—and that would prove he wasn’t human. I looked straight at him and sent him this thought: So it is you not me there’s something wrong with. But his eyes were impenetrable, and Suzy was giggling.
I wanted to knock her down, so I turned and started running.
The record was still under my T-shirt, and I wrapped my arms around myself to hide it. My legs and my horrible feet carried the full weight of me along the sidewalk, past all the little people in my world, each with a little life of their own. Cars rolled by on the street, and the boy in the record store’s window looked through me. The sweeping florist lifted her broom out of my way and smiled, and the fleeting kindness stung. I could feel my heart slamming against my chest wall. I ran on, wheezing. My toes pushed at the slits in my shoes and threatened to rip right through. A woman emerged from the bakery holding a birthday cake on one palm, and the man beside her held up his hands to stop me but I blazed by. I wanted to knock them all down, and I could have, just with a swish of my arm.
At the road’s edge I stepped out without looking and slipped back to a day when Elspeth had let go of my hand. Look both ways, she had told me, and urged me forward to cross on my own. The wide world growing wider around me as I stepped carefully across.
How big I’d felt. How free.
Suzy stood in front of Officer McCaul, who’d been walking his beat nearby when the accident happened.
“I don’t know why she started running,” Suzy told him. Her cheeks looked feverish and her eyeballs danced. She twisted her hair around her finger. “I didn’t know she stole the record either. I mean I wasn’t with her. I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“It’s true, she didn’t,” said David. “I was with Suzy the whole time.”
“Doing what?” asked the officer.
David shrugged. “Just talking.”
“And then?”
David shifted from one foot to the other. “We were talking right there, by the bike rack, and then Ruth came out of the record store. Over to us.”
“She showed us the record,” said Suzy, talking fast now. “It was crazy, you were right across the street, and we asked her what on earth she was doing but—”
“Yeah,” said David. “So when she saw you she ran—because of the record, I mean.”
They looked at each other.
The officer, a young man who was new to the force, couldn’t help feeling a puff of pride and imagining himself as he must have appeared in full uniform, striding along at such a pivotal moment. The precise stripe on his pant leg. The shine of his hard, black shoes. He had seen the girl running. They said she was seven feet tall. But before he could even raise his whistle to his mouth—if indeed that was what he was supposed to do—she was lying in the road, a truck was disappearing, and, in all directions, horns were blaring.
The boy who worked in the record store still had his bag of popcorn on the counter, unfinished. He had lost his appetite since the squeal of the truck’s tires had forced him up off his stool, where he’d sat so long that his bum had begun to tingle. From the store window he saw the logging truck swerve, and a cluster of cars responding. But only when he got to the door did he see the body. The record sat propped against a signpost across the street, as if on display. At first he didn’t realize it was a girl, lying there. But then he saw the strange shoes—huge things with heavy brown laces—and he knew who it was, and that she’d been in the shop moments before. Actually, he’d seen her both times. Once with the pretty girl, who was so much smaller, and then a little bit later, alone. He’d seen her put the record up inside her T-shirt, but he didn’t like confrontation and he couldn’t be bothered with petty thieves. Over the summer, he had been teaching himself to play guitar, and he’d had a revelation that music should be free, it should be everywhere, we should all be listening. In fact, at the moment of the accident, he was imagining himself bypassing the university he was headed to that September, and picturing his bookbag as a guitar slung over his shoulder. He would meander south, following the great arrow the geese made in the sky. And then the crash.
Later he heard she was seven feet, two inches, even taller than she looked. It occurred to him that if he had stopped her—if he had accused her of stealing—everything would have been different. That even the most peripheral person has a role to play. But to Officer McCaul he said little, for fear of the trouble he might get into, having assisted a thief. He only said, “Yeah, I think I saw her in the store this morning.” And then, “No, I didn’t realize she’d taken anything.”
The woman who held the cake on her palm was named Martha, and the cake was for her twin boys, who were turning sixteen. Half the cake was chocolate and half white, to suit their different preferences.
After the accident, all of it lay splattered on the ground. No one had bumped Martha—not the giant girl running by, nor Martha’s husband, Bill, who’d held his arms up as she passed. Why he had done that, Martha didn’t know, and it didn’t occur to her to ask him until later, when they were lying in bed, reliving the scene.
“I don’t know,” he said. “She was just going so fast. Did you hear them say she’s something like seven-foot-four? Shocking. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that girl close up before. I guess I was just stunned and I had the feeling something was going to happen. Something bad. You know?”
“I know,” said Martha. She smoothed the ruffles on her nightgown, and once again saw herself drop the cake as the tires squealed. “I’ve always felt that about her, just seeing her a
round town. She has tragedy written all over her, doesn’t she?”
“Mmm,” said Bill. “Some people do.”
“Big, gloomy eyes. It was only a matter of time.”
“Better, maybe, in the end.”
“You mean if—”
“Mmm. Can you imagine a future for someone like her?”
“True enough. If she was a boy, it would be one thing. Big strapping lad. But such a huge girl. A woman.” She grimaced and shook her head.
She kissed her husband’s cheek, then, did up the top button of his pajama shirt even though he didn’t like it that way, and smoothed his chest the way you might smooth a packet you’ve finished wrapping. He switched off the light and they lay in silence for a while. She said in the darkness, “I heard the driver—that man Kowalski—he’s got two little kids.”
The florist had been hoping for a funeral. She sometimes did that, but never admitted it aloud, of course. It was never really an intentional hope, more a spontaneous one that came when there were too many flowers in the fridge and not enough customers. Unless someone died or got married, the flowers would perish. Actually, they would perish regardless, but at least they wouldn’t be wasted, and there would be money in the till. She had never been good at judging how much to buy. She loved all the varieties, and when the truck came around stuffed full with whatever was in season and reeking of nature’s mingled perfumes, she was easily intoxicated, just as she was easily wooed by a man or by second and third helpings at dinnertime. But the business was suffering because of her whims.
As she swept the sidewalk in front of her shop, she was wondering two things simultaneously: how she could use up the old flowers in the fridge, growing transparent and wrinkly as the days wore on, and whether or not she could buy more before they were gone. She felt a sense of relief when she saw that the truck just crossing the bridge was indeed not her deliveryman, but rather Ned Kowalski heading for the pulp and paper mill with a load of wood.
When the giant girl ran by, she happened to look up just in time to catch her eye—a watery, blue, pathetic kind of eye that bulged like a fish’s—and she was so struck by the girl’s obvious distress that she smiled. It was only the smallest of gestures, like a door held open, but she understood the importance of such things. With her broom in her hand she stood watching the girl, lumbering and awkward, and only in that brief instant before the truck hit the girl did she open her mouth to gasp, knowing what she was about to witness. It happened so fast.
Later, she heard the girl was more than seven and a half feet tall, and she thought, I can believe it. I saw her up close.
Ned had the radio blaring as he crossed the river with his heavy load, and he was thinking, What a gorgeous day, and looking forward to dumping his last logs at the mill, and then getting home to his family. He was building a set of stools in the garage, using a rich and grainy oak, and he had only today decided that he would under no circumstances stain them green in deference to his wife, who didn’t know about wood but was a wonderful woman. If it were up to his wife, everything would be green, and green reminded him of bile and his mother’s lumpy pea soup. As he sang along with the radio, he might have been driving ever so slightly too fast, because the music spurred him on and he wanted the day to be done. But he was a good driver; he was never reckless. He was thirty-two and he had never had a ticket. Once he had hit a buck but that had been ages ago. He’d been young, still an inexperienced driver, and it had been pitch black. The animal had stepped into the beam of his headlights, and there’d been no time to change course. In the seconds before the window smashed, he’d seen the bone of its antlers, and the eyes flashing, locking with his. It might have been this old happening drifting back that caused him to veer so swiftly when the girl stepped out in front of him. She must have been eight feet in height, arms and legs flying. The truck jackknifed, shooting across the bridge, smashing through the corroded railings, and landing, nose-down, in the river. Inside, Ned was losing consciousness, with his head crammed against the steering wheel, gushing blood that was quickly diluted. He was spilling blood but filling with water, and he was dreaming of that other accident, when so many people had told him how lucky he’d been to survive.
Chapter 10
Walking home, James went over the last hour with Iris, wincing with shame and wondering whether she understood it was over. He had been this close to telling her about Dieppe, but thanked God that he’d stopped himself just in time, and now he questioned why that would’ve been the ultimate betrayal. What on earth did war stories have to do with cheating on your wife, and why was it that his eyes always found that picture of Iris in uniform whenever he was entangled with her? What drew him to that? Before he left she’d caught him looking at the picture, and had come up behind him and rested her head against his back.
“That was the time of my life,” she said. “Everything after was a disappointment. Until now.”
He looked at her small, bright eyes, her hair pinned back in a style for a much younger woman. People opened themselves up for so much pain and sorrow. They stood right in the line of fire.
If there had been no war, there would be no such “time of my life.” No such picture for reminiscing. But then if there had been no war, he would not have been with Iris, cheating on Elspeth, because he never would have married Elspeth in the first place. War had taken him to England. It had consumed Elspeth’s parents and her brother Stanley and left her there in the shop, waiting for him. He felt a strange twist in his heart. What if Iris was the wife he would have had, had there been no war? And then he realized: If there had been no war, there would be no Ruth. And wasn’t she his greatest gift as well as his greatest contribution?
He reached his house—a bunker with skylights and garden—and rushed toward shelter. As he grasped the door handle, he heard the phone ringing and ringing inside.
It was a perfect day for flying. Clear, for the most part, and blue. But Elspeth was anxious, and irritated by the fact that she had accidentally packed her book of crossword puzzles in with her checked luggage. Which perhaps was just as well, because on the flight over, unable to sleep, unwilling to converse with strangers, she’d worked on almost every puzzle, so that now there were only a handful of blanks here and there that would continue to confound her. Eventually, she’d flip to the back of the book and find the answers and pencil them in with the others, the loss of pride disguised by the sense of accomplishment and the neat letters filling each square. She hated to leave things unfinished.
Her row was called and she stood in the queue, thinking ahead to the delicious feeling of removing her shoes, sinking into her seat. There was a baby in front of her in line, a bright face peering over her mother’s shoulder. Brown eyes wide, gold earrings gleaming in the baby’s earlobes. Babies made Elspeth uncomfortable, but she smiled anyway. The child just stared, and seemed neither happy nor sad about Elspeth’s presence but somehow surprised. What are you doing here? the baby’s eyes asked. What are you? Elspeth looked away, glanced back, looked away.
When the line moved forward and onto the plane, she had the feeling of being pulled by the baby’s gaze, as if an invisible beam linked them. Behind her, a man sighed heavily, his breath ruffling the hair on the back of her head, causing her scalp to prickle. An old fear was entering, blown in by a stranger. Fear of flying, or of falling; she couldn’t quite name the uneasiness.
She had chosen a window seat, not because she wanted to look out, but because she had to, just to make sure nothing happened as the plane soared over land and sea. Rationally, she knew that she’d relinquished all control when she stepped on board, guided by a baby, but some vital part of her was certain of this need for vigilance, this belief that her very eyes on the open air would keep them aloft. Keep all of them aloft, though in essence it was really herself she was concerned about—herself getting home to her family.
Elspeth fastened her seat belt and felt a burst of relief at the satisfying click it made. People were still bo
arding, tucking their things into overhead compartments and squeezing past one another with mumbled apologies, but a quiet came over them when the plane eventually lifted off. Elspeth gripped the armrests. This second time flying felt worse than the first, more reckless. The more times you did something, the more chances there were for things to go wrong. She had a feeling of helplessness, from being up in the sky, at the pilot’s and the atmosphere’s mercy, and also from being so far from home, even as she drew closer. A certainty that something had happened in her absence persisted. Something that would not have happened if she had stayed, and the feeling reminded her of when she was a new mother and would periodically escape, alone, to do groceries or have her teeth cleaned. It was during her return home that she’d become most anxious, convinced that some disaster had occurred while she was away. Yet there they would be, James and Ruth, whole and safe, proving her wrong every time. She knew she had no gift for premonition, and that (in spite of the day of the strawberries) bad things didn’t happen just because she wasn’t there. Bad things could happen anytime—but of course that wasn’t a soothing thought.
Her mind traveled to a lazy summer day from her own childhood, when she was up in her room, looking down at her father working in the garden. Her mother, pregnant with Stanley, was behind her, making her bed, and glanced up in time to see Elspeth’s feet disappearing from the window frame. Soft white curtains against a blue sky. Out she went, twirling. Her father with his spade, the homemade swing, the dirty brick house, and the neighbor’s dog spun around her until her pink dress flew over her head. Then all there was was pink. Pink air on her skin. Pink wind in her ears. Pink light in her eyes. She landed in a swing made of arms, and her father looked down at her with his face drained of color. This must have been the day her fear was born, though she couldn’t remember feeling afraid. Above, her mother leaned out the window with her hands pressed to her mouth, and the clouds moved dizzily past her.
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