The Girl Giant

by Kirsten den Hartog

  They were just like the clouds now surrounding the plane: gentle and puffy. Picture-book clouds that put her at ease. Somewhere below her was Cornwall, land of so many of the legendary giants and giant-killers she had read about on her hunt for stories with a happy ending. The Cornish giant Bolster could stand with each foot on hills six miles apart, and he stretched twelve miles into the sky. Looking down into the valley, he mooned over the pious and beautiful Agnes, a girl of normal size who had a lovely voice and would sing in the fields as she went about her chores. Bolster’s lovesick moans and sighs could be heard over all of Cornwall, like a chorus to her song. Finally, the giant mustered his courage and approached her, stooping way, way down to proclaim his love.

  “Will you marry me?” he asked.

  Agnes studied the vast head, the great gapped teeth, and the eyes that were so far apart they looked in two directions. She had heard the giant ate girls like her, and here he was proposing marriage! But Agnes was a quick thinker.

  “I will,” she said, masking her revulsion. “Yes, I will, provided you prove your love by performing the following tasks.”

  She rhymed off races and duels and oodles of challenges, all of which Bolster completed with ease.

  “Now?” he asked, wayward eyes blinking. “Now will you marry me?”

  But Agnes insisted on one more task. She led him to the cliffs at the seaside and showed him a hole in the rock.

  “If you fill this with your blood,” she said, “I’ll be yours forever.”

  From on high, Bolster peered down. His vision was not the best, but it appeared a narrow enough hole. It would be nothing for him. Right then and there he took a knife from his pocket, sliced open his arm, and let the blood spill. It poured out of him, but the hole didn’t fill. Only in his last moment of life, when he had become so weak, so pale, and had crashed down with his face near the hole, did he hear the rush of water below, and see his blood draining into the sea.

  The red stain still showed on the cliff there, but Elspeth couldn’t see it from where she was. She flew up and over, and the stewardess handed out LifeSavers, the peppermint kind that James liked best. She fingered the package but didn’t open it. She remembered that there was more to the Bolster story, as there was more to every story, depending on the angle of your approach: Bolster wooed Agnes, but was married to a giantess he had tired of. A great whale of a girl. For years he had ordered her to haul rocks from one place to another, and she had grown stooped and surly, as any woman would. Elspeth touched the wrinkles between her eyebrows, and folded her hands in her lap, where the LifeSavers rested, pure white rings. So who was the evil one? Agnes, who had been pious but unkind? Or Bolster, who had adored Agnes but mistreated his wife? And if you couldn’t know who was bad and who was good, what was the point of the story?

  She thought of a conversation she’d had with James about evil, back in the very early days when they’d talked about everything, at least a little bit, and how his take on the goodness of all people had made her less inclined to tell him more of what she knew—to spare him. Because it was somewhat charming, in those days, that he didn’t believe in evil after all he must have seen and done. She didn’t try to convince him of what she knew to be true: that evil was everywhere, that it spread like mold if you didn’t viciously attack it, and that it was your moral obligation to do so. Or you would pay the price for having done nothing.

  The day her parents had died, she’d sat in the sun among the strawberries, and a cloud had passed over—or something that caused a shadow. That was the moment she should have stood and run, the moment she knew what was coming. The hum came, too, and then the sirens. But she sat still. Everything that followed hinged on those seconds of indecision. Later she hung on to the notion that everything happened for a reason. God’s ways were mysterious, but not without purpose. What a crutch that had been so often through her life. Nothing had to be explained.

  The plane shuddered and bumped, as though traveling over gravel, and an announcement was made about turbulence. The baby with the earrings was crying two rows ahead, and Elspeth gripped the armrests again. If the plane hurtled into the ocean right now, and everyone plunged to their deaths, she would still cling to the idea of God’s will as she descended. This is happening because God wills it. Or even, This is my final payment. But was that right or wrong?

  The thought was as vast as the sky around her. A wave of nausea as the plane dipped and rocked. The plane shuddered again and a vision of the doctor came to mind. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong. Why had she always resisted a second opinion? Because it would be awkward to make demands? Or because of what might be found out? The doctor knows, she had said to James. Doctors do. Do you have some fancy degree you haven’t told me about? Why do you think you know more than he does? She cringed, remembering. What he should have said was, Because I know my daughter, that’s why. That’s what Elspeth would have said if the tables had been turned, because Elspeth was smarter than James—and infinitely more foolish. He was far too good for her, and he didn’t even know it.

  How did anyone know anything?

  And what could be more obvious than the fact that something was definitely wrong with their child?

  She blinked and looked out the window so the person beside her wouldn’t see she was crying. The clouds were like the mist at Niagara Falls, where James had taken her when she’d first come to Canada. The mist had been cold and relentless, but James had leaned into it and taken it like a gift while she had shriveled beside him, shoulders hunched, eyebrows furrowed. The picture in her mind formed a portrait of their marriage, and she felt sorry.

  Elspeth returned home smaller with a fine streak of white in her hair. The LifeSavers waited in her purse. As she walked toward Arrivals she worried that if she relaxed her muscles, her bones would shatter, and she would collapse and be unable to give James the LifeSavers. And what she needed to do most was give him something, and she knew he needed to receive.

  He was waiting when she got there. She watched him through the glass doors and noticed how little he looked in his regular clothes, out of uniform, and how his longer hair, which she normally buzzed for him, stood straight up, as if saying hello to her. He looked sad and frightened, rumpled all over, and a thought flashed—Something has happened to Ruth—but was gone again. She put her hand to the glass and pushed, though his eyes had not yet found her.

  Chapter 11

  No one spoke. A mechanical hiss and beep formed into a song with the ringing in my ears. I couldn’t open my eyes, and yet I could see quite clearly. The smothering painted ceiling had no skylight, and I missed the glass roof of my room. How could I see the ceiling with my eyes sealed shut? I remembered wanting to press my great thumbs into the eye sockets of the boy David—how satisfying that would be—but perhaps it was my own eyes I’d pushed. Were they somewhere inside me? How can I see with no eyes? And then a transcendent feeling: I can see without eyes. The ceiling split open and curled out to what looked like a black sky full of stars. I was traveling slowly toward them, and they were glowing brighter and brighter. But I was disoriented in such infinite space. I couldn’t really be sure whether I was looking up or looking down. As I came closer, I saw. The stars were really only people, billions of sparks of light covering the earth. And there I was, falling toward them.

  But then, giants were always falling. The great Finnish giant, Väinö Myllyrine, fell down his front steps one autumn, and found he could no longer walk. Over eight feet tall, nearly four hundred pounds, he was fifty-four years old at the time of his accident, and his joints were worn and fragile, like old, dry rubber bands.

  As a young man, strangely handsome, he’d traveled through Europe, showing himself in suit, coat, and top hat. He almost made it to America, but his tour was canceled because of the onset of the Second World War. War has a way of changing things. After it was over, he moved in with his mother. Their small house was surrounded by a dense hedge of fir trees that discouraged the curious
, and behind it Väinö raised chickens, and tended apple trees, and sang in the sauna with his brother.

  After his fall, his giant hip was nailed together again, but it never really healed. Väinö was transported from one hospital to another, but his condition deteriorated, and within months he died.

  And don’t forget the Texas giant, Jack Earle, whose father took him to Los Angeles when he was just thirteen, and paraded around town with him so he could get used to the fact people would stare at him. “Wherever you go,” his father warned him, “people will always stare.” The boy was already more than seven feet tall, and soon he was scooped up by the silent film industry, and found himself roaring without sound through Jack and the Beanstalk. One movie after another for years. But then one day he lost his footing on some scaffolding and hurtled to the ground during the making of a comedy that went on without him. The set shook when he landed, and a beam of wood crashed down on top of him.

  The giant survived, and the miracle was twofold, because after that he stopped growing.

  From the airport, James raced south across the border to a New York hospital.

  “Why didn’t they take her to the hospital at home?” Elspeth asked. Her voice vibrated strangely.

  “No,” James answered. “Too serious. She needs—” He hesitated. “—special care.” How could he explain that it wasn’t because of the accident? He kept thinking of the word macramé, but that wasn’t right, that wasn’t it. Something adenoma. Since the moment of their reunion, he’d spoken in point form. The little words that connected things had floated away and he couldn’t find them when he needed them, so he just pushed forward whatever would come and hoped that she’d be able to string the ideas together without too much distress.

  “Where were you when it happened?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t know if it was an accusation, and he didn’t want to lie. But it wasn’t the time for truth either.

  “James, where were you, were you with her?”

  With who?

  He gripped the steering wheel hard but his palms were slick with sweat.

  “Shopping,” he said. “I was shopping.” And he envisioned himself in the grocery store with a cart full of things that would get them through, keep them safe. Reconnaissance missions, those were called.

  The guilt streamed from his eyes and made it hard to see, but he kept on driving, he kept on moving toward me with her at his side. They leaned forward, both of them, to get to me faster. All of the millions of obstacles disappeared as they raced along. And now there they were standing over me, one on each side, looking down. He was thinking, What if I really had been shopping, and I had seen her run by? I might have stopped her, and she was thinking, I never should have left to take care of people who’d already died, when the living needed me.

  Even in my altered state I was the only one who understood the futility of constantly rearranging what was to what might have been. If this, if that, if not, what if, if only.

  An X-ray showed a benign tumor—a macroadenoma—at the base of my brain, behind my eyes. The accident had lodged the tumor against the optic nerve, causing blindness. But long before that happened, the tumor’s constant pressure on the pituitary gland caused the secretion of excess growth hormone, which for years made me grow rapidly taller. Finally an answer, but it only brought more questions. The plan was to shrink the tumor through doses of radiation, and thereby restore my sight and slow my growth. Ideally, they would remove the tumor altogether; a minuscule sharp instrument would travel up my nostrils and into my skull, where the gland hung from the brain like fruit from a tree.

  “But in your daughter’s case it’s just too risky now,” the doctor told them.

  A kind of whirring pause, like air leaving the room through a secret passageway.

  “You should have come to us much sooner. Even with treatment she’ll continue to grow for a number of years.”

  “And without?”

  The doctor lifted his eyebrows. “Without? Well, there’s no question.” He shrugged. “She’ll grow until her body can’t sustain her anymore.”

  Elspeth and James waited, but the doctor cleared his throat and said nothing more. Hair curled from his ears and nostrils. He folded his fingers together and cracked his knuckles. Elspeth wore an azure suit with gold buttons, and kept her purse on her lap. James reached for her hand. Both James and Elspeth found some small comfort in the familiar face of the other. Together they turned back to the doctor and asked what more they should know.

  “Her organs have been adversely affected,” he said. “She grows, they grow.” He held his hands up as though cupping a swollen heart. “She may well already be—let’s say dim-witted. But that’s a minor matter. Lots of ‘normal’ people are,” he said, wiggling his fingers to convey quotation marks. He smiled, and then put on his grave expression again. “In any case, I must prepare you: Even with the tumor removed, your daughter will not likely live a long life.”

  The doctor unfolded his fingers and stretched one empty hand across the desk toward Elspeth and James as though offering something, but there was only an abundance of hair, and a ring too small for his finger. He pressed his palms together, like the praying hands mounted on wood on the wall at home. “This kind of thing is no one’s fault,” he said. “Nature errs now and again.” Elspeth blinked and looked at the floor. An error, she thought. Somehow the news was not surprising, but rather a confirmation, or an explanation long sought.

  Remembering this moment, I can feel the apprehension in her belly, her heart inside my own, thumping with fear, and James’s longing to trust the man with eyes like holes in his face, doors you might enter if you were brave or foolish enough.

  Much of that time in the hospital was like a dream. The night before my sight returned, I was sure that Suzy came to see me. She looked just like Grace when I pictured her, but I could feel Suzy’s presence in the room, and smell a smell like apples and old cigarette smoke. I stayed as still as I could and waited for her to say something to me. And I was sure she sat down beside the bed and rested her head on my arm, and that it seemed like an apology. Her hair felt soft, and her breath on my skin was moist. I’m sorry, too, I said. I said it quietly, just loud enough for her to hear, because what if you loved someone and then found out they didn’t exist? Whose fault was it when the love could not possibly be returned?

  In the morning she was gone, and when I opened my eyes, I squinted at the white walls the way you squint at snow on a bright day. I saw my foot protruding from the sheet, bare and pink. I wiggled my toe to be sure it was mine, though it could never be mistaken. At first the days and nights rolled together, but eventually I could tell them apart. The pattern gave me something to depend on.

  Once I woke in the middle of the night to find Elspeth sobbing over me, and leaning to kiss my forehead. Her tears dropped on my eye, on the bridge of my nose. My face was wet with them. She grabbed my shoulders and pressed her face into my hair, crying, and everything turned the wrong way around, as with Suzy the night of Margaret’s fall; Elspeth was a child waking from a nightmare, and looking to me for comfort, but I couldn’t give what she asked of me, I didn’t know what to do. I lay still and waited for her to go away again. In the morning, when she returned with James and sat by my bed, nothing was mentioned, and I noticed the shoes I had cut were gone and a new, larger pair sat in their place. And I felt thankful.

  I understood there was a tumor, but my condition was otherwise nameless and mysterious to me. No one had labeled it, or explained in plain language what the implications were, or how such a thing could happen in real life, outside of storybooks. What did it mean for my future? The question was so terrifying that my mind kept traveling backward instead, finding a story I’d heard in kindergarten, about a “Giant S” from the Land of Oz. It had taken me so many listenings to hear the word as it really was: giantess. And Mrs. Yoop of Yoop Valley had been icy and cruel. When the Tin Woodman and his friends discovered her in her windowless cas
tle of purple stone, she barely turned in her chair, where she sat eating buttered biscuits. The walls of her dining room were lined with plates of pure gold, and her immense body was covered in silver robes with floral designs. “Why don’t you come in and allow the door to shut?” she asked them. “You’re causing a draft, and I shall catch cold and sneeze. When I sneeze, I get cross, and when I get cross I’m liable to do something wicked.” She was among the cleverest magic-workers in the world, and could transform anyone into anything. The very biscuits she ate had been mice just moments before, when a hankering struck her. She laughed when she told them that, and the expulsion caused such a breeze that the wobbly Scarecrow was almost blown off his feet and had to grab his tin friend to steady himself.

  Was that what I was? A giantess? I couldn’t bring myself to ask. But then on a bright afternoon as the leaves turned through the hospital windows, I was wheeled to a dark room, where a film reel clicked and popped, and a fairy-tale monster appeared on a screen—hunched back, protruding brow, prominent jaw, fleshy ears and lips. The film was about a woman who was twenty years older than me, and had what I had.

  “It isn’t as bad as you think,” said the woman on screen.

  She had a spitty way of talking, and shiny, oily skin. Her thick tongue impeded her speech, and her voice was muffled, deep as a man’s. She rested her head in her huge hand, and I saw her sausagey fingers, so revolting that I lost track of her words. I could see that she was kind, but that only made things more awful. I couldn’t accept her existence as evidence that I would be all right because I saw, beyond everything else, the loneliness that ached all through her. It showed in her eyes, in the stiff way she held herself, in the beam of light that projected her onto the screen. The brightness that shone back at me felt as though it was pouring into me, and if I sat too long in front of it I would become just like her. But then she said, “It isn’t your fault. It isn’t anything you did that made you this way.” She leaned forward and smiled, showing teeth with wide gaps. “You’ve got to use what’s been given to you. That’s the part you can control. That’s the part that’s up to you.”