The Girl Giant

by Kirsten den Hartog

  And as I sat staring, the light from the screen warmed me like sunshine. I believed I could feel the tumor inside me, a hot white stone trapped in one of the least accessible parts of the body. This was the thing that held the secret of my vast size, and now that it was known to me I felt a bewildering need to protect it, even as they shrank it away, as though it were me, myself, hiding there, and not the seed of all my problems. At the same time I loathed myself more than ever, and all that was wrong with me. The two things were inseparable: me and my condition. We were one and the same. I questioned every twitch and pain—the ringing in my ears that had for so long kept me awake late into the night, wondering what would become of me. I had a feeling of falling slowly, of never landing, my stomach collapsing as I spun through the air. Where once I had put one foot in front of the other and taken myself from place to place, now I had lost all control of my future.

  When the film ended, I grew cold. I could not erase the image of the woman looking at me, talking to me, and the tick-tick-tick sound of the reel spinning and spinning, like a bomb, like a life running out. I wished I could move things back to the day of the accident, and never find out what was wrong with me, but then I pictured myself walking to school again, doing everything I had once done, and the sadness, the sameness, weighed on me. There I would be with the others and the little teachers, with my knees crammed beneath my already oversized desk. A gush of relief when I was allowed to stay home. A wish to say thank you, but an awareness that those words might give me away. So silence, always silence. Elspeth pulling my covers up under my chin, kissing my forehead. Closing me into a room that couldn’t contain me, and waiting, just waiting, for another day that offered less than the one still passing.

  Every day of my recovery, the Statue of Liberty stood guard, with her green copper skin and bones of iron. She could see into my window, and during the long nights when the hospital turned dark and quiet, she would sometimes dip down and whisper to me about all of her adventures. She had arisen in Paris, surrounded by scaffolding and getting taller and taller so that eventually she towered over rooftops and monuments and the tallest trees. She grew tall enough to learn a massive, wonderful secret: that there was no one in the firmament. It was only a vast, empty space that looked down on this one, seething and soaring with life. A space to contemplate what you should have done when you were there, waiting to get to heaven.

  Her construction was so costly that once in a while a piece of her was packed up and shipped off for viewing. Her hand gripping its torch traveled without her all the way to Philadelphia to take part in the Centennial Exhibition. You could pay fifty cents to climb out to the lacy torch balcony. With the fair over, the lady’s hand moved on to Madison Square, where it stood for years, like an old ruin that had lost its context. Eventually it crossed the ocean again, to join the rest. There, the lady’s graceful head and shoulders were shown in a palace garden at the Paris World’s Fair, and people lined up by the hundreds to go inside. Other parts of her appeared throughout the Champ de Mars park, but she was not truly spectacular until she was whole. She stood 111 feet tall, from her heel to the top of her head. Her eyes were each two feet wide, her stern mouth was three.

  But before long she was dismantled into hundreds of pieces, and sent in crates across the ocean. The warship that carried her rocked through a black storm. Her giant toes and fingers, her eyes peering through a slat, the salt water stinging. Upon arrival she was put together, and became something larger than life, a figure worth revering, though she wasn’t human at all.

  James and Elspeth came upon her as they walked the streets of New York City, looking dazed and foreign, dwarfed by their surroundings. He kept his hands in his pockets, and she linked her arm through his, which was the way they had walked when they were courting. How many moments are just echoes of earlier moments?

  They boarded a train that plowed through the underground and surfaced now and again in the bright daylight. People scurried on and off, and rats dozed in the sewers. No one but Lady Liberty stared at James and Elspeth, because without me, there was nothing unusual about them.

  Elspeth, having just come from London, noticed the busyness less, but to James it seemed there was not a spot on the pavement that stayed unoccupied for more than a second or two. People swarmed the streets and left layers of invisible tracks. They passed in cars and on foot, by bicycle. They stood on street corners, wolfing down hot food from paper napkins. They teemed from buildings that stood stories high, and you would think that in such a crowd, with so many sites to wander to, two people could lose themselves easily, but the lady always found them. From her little island, she beckoned them forward, and finally they squeezed onto the ferry and rode toward her. She really was colossal. She really did make your jaw drop when you stood at her base, looking up. James thought but did not right away say that her crown’s windows reminded him of military pillboxes—places to shoot from. The clamor of war was in his ears again, just for a moment.

  They climbed the spiral staircase to the crown, and when they looked out, they saw more people milling below. Separately, they were reminded of their honeymoon at Niagara Falls, and how being a tourist at such renowned destinations makes you feel small and pointless, but also part of something, and so less fearful of your insignificance. It doesn’t matter, James thought, almost smiling, nearly lighthearted. Nothing is the end of the world.

  It was up there, in the crown, that James pulled his hand from his pocket and squeezed Elspeth’s fingers. He brought them to his mouth and kissed them—a rare, intimate gesture—and she looked at him as if he were crazy.

  He turned and gazed through the pillbox window.

  “I have something to tell you,” he said.

  It is August 1942. The day before the ships pull out, James sits with two friends—Charlie and Gord—enjoying tea and scones. Tea tastes better in England, scalding and pure. He doesn’t know why, but it does. Afterward he’ll think of this day often, the hot tea and his companions, especially Gord who says that when he gets home he wants to skinny-dip with a girl named Joan. “In Tea Lake,” he says, stirring his tea. She offered once—it was actually her idea!—and he turned her down. The lost moment is all he can think about this far from home, in a country swimming in tea.

  James groans in commiseration. But at the time, to James, there is nothing special about the afternoon. It isn’t until nighttime that they are told they’ll be going on a maneuver, and the next day the trucks line up and man after man gets loaded in. They ride to the shipyards with the tarps tied down over top of them, and on board the troop carrier they are given their instructions and their ammunition, including two grenades. One by one they go out on deck to prime their grenades, because accidents happen—they happened on board other ships, when the men went out in groups, and one person’s mistake means everyone around him goes down.

  As the ship pulls away, James looks back on England getting smaller, and has a weird feeling of losing something, though England is not and never has been his home.

  It doesn’t take long to cross the Channel. It’s dark as they approach France, the wee hours of the morning; this is meant to be a surprise attack. He can hear the water sloshing, and thinks it looks like thick, black oil. A vast sea of oil. They climb into the landing craft in silence and begin to rock forward over the waves, but suddenly flares of light rip the sky and illuminate everything. He sees more ships, more landing craft stuffed full with soldiers. He sees Gord’s face, turning back to look at him. White like a moon. Another blaze of light and a ship in the distance is on fire. Still they move toward shore. The water explodes around them, great fountains shooting high, and as he leaves the boat, someone behind him—he can’t see who—gets hit and plunges into the water. James feels hands grip his ankles and he begins to sink, but then the grip loosens and lets him go. Not a stranger but some man he knows, dying, just as James floats to the surface. All through the water there are bodies, already. On the beach there are soldiers in pieces.
He’s there with his rifle and his two grenades, his clothing drenched, and the enemy everywhere above and around them as the sun rises, but they’re too far away to hit. He can hear and see the sniper fire coming in an endless stream, but he can’t find a single man to shoot at. Only his fellow soldiers like a net around him. Everywhere they run, they trip over one another.

  And the sound is deafening—the gunfire, the planes overhead, exploding and falling, the men screaming, the bombs whistling down. The tanks slip on the stony beach, undone by pebbles. Rocks spray up and fly like bullets. They ricochet off his helmet and graze his shoulder and he thinks for a moment he’s been shot. He runs for cover behind a stalled tank and looks for someone he knows, someone who will tell him what to do now that nothing is going as planned, because he’s useless without orders; he’s been trained to follow orders. On the ship over, under the dark sky, Gord said this was just what would happen: that every battle passes in confusion, beginning with a plan that gets blown apart in the first few seconds of fighting. Where is Gord now, and Charlie? He can’t think for the noise. There are people ablaze, trapped in curls of wire. A man catches his eye and mouths, Shoot me. He’s bleeding from the neck. He won’t live long. He’s suffering. But James can’t bring himself to do it. He looks away. He stays facing the other direction, but the man’s gaze pierces his scalp. He can smell blood and shit and smoke and the salt of the ocean. A leg in a boot lies beside him. The beach is littered with bodies, with rifles belonging to the dead and wounded.

  It seems like an eternity spent darting out, shooting at anything, finding cover again behind the sacred tank. He pulls the pins from his grenades and throws them, but he has no idea where they land. Smoke rises in columns of pink and orange, toxic black. He thinks he sees Gord running past with no helmet, and he calls to him, but his voice is lost.

  Still, the idea of Gord makes him venture out again, though he can’t find him. He trips over stones and guns and fellow soldiers, and falls to the ground as something whizzes past his ear. And then he’s too far from the tank to risk going back. He lies there in his wet clothes, among the dead. There’s a face right beside him, eyes open. The cuts on the cheek might be from a normal day. He hears another bullet enter the clothes and body of the young man, and sees the body rise and fall with impact, but there is no change on his face, which holds the look of shock, of terror. If this was the last thing you saw in life. James closes his eyes against the face. He grips the rocks and squeezes his fingers around them, and finds that he has lost his ability to stand. Get up, he tells himself. But he can’t make himself go, he won’t follow his own orders. He opens his eyes again and looks at the face, and then he reaches forward and shuts the eyes that accuse him. He grabs the man’s arm and pulls—pulls and pulls until he’s under the body. It might not protect him, but it might.

  How much time passes then? He can’t say. Six times he sees the same man going by, carrying wounded soldiers toward the water. He cradles them in his arms the way a mother holds a baby. When James dares to lift his head and look farther he sees something white flying—a shirt or a hankie, it doesn’t matter that it isn’t a flag. Someone calls, “Every man for himself,” and he pushes the dead man off and makes for the water, red now, in the daylight.

  The redness returned her to the strawberries. She told him the story of that day. By now they were sitting on a bench near the statue, looking out at the water.

  “I’ll never forgive myself,” she said, but wondered for the first time if she could, or might, now that there were new things to feel guilty about. “You were right,” she said. “About the second opinion.”

  He looked at his feet beside hers, unsure how to answer. “Not right enough,” he said finally. “I didn’t push. But it won’t help us to dwell on that now.”

  “No. But it needs to be said.”

  As they watched the ferry approaching he smiled at her and said, “Let’s go see our girl.”

  They boarded with their arms linked, and their two stories together were like strands made into a knot; you cross them, you tuck one under the other, and cinch them closed.

  So simple, and yet it took me forever to learn to tie laces. I thought I would never know, and then one day it came to me. I thought, That’s all? Because it had looked so complicated for so long.

  There is an uncanny resemblance between real giants and giants in fairy tales. The Cyclopes giants of Greek mythology have one eye in the middle of their foreheads, and lousy vision, and in real life a tumor may well press on the optic nerve, skewing peripheral vision, or even causing blindness, as with me and Jack Earle.

  A child giant shoots straight up, more or less proportionately, but if he manages to go through puberty—or if his tumor forms in adulthood—his height growth stops, and a new, more insidious growth begins. His skin turns thick and oily, and the bones of his hands and feet expand. His big lips and jutting chin, his swollen nose and ears—all of these changes happen because his soft tissues, like his organs, can’t stop growing. The bony overgrowth in his face and nasal passages gives him earth-quaking snores and a deep, hoarse voice that scares children. His foul mood and his bouts of rage may be brought on by his frequent headaches, the pain in his joints, and the overall discomfort of a condition he cannot control.

  He’s nothing to fear, despite his immense size and his hunched back. An excess of salt makes his muscles swell with water, so he’s huge, but he’s actually weak. His big bones press on his nerves and make his arms and legs tingle. His bloated heart can’t pump enough blood to serve him, and he tires easily, through no fault of his own. Often he carries a club—a tree ripped from the ground—because his knees and ankles can’t take the weight of him, and his feet have been squashed flat. The club is his cane—without it he cannot walk.

  Only in fairy tales is he almost always a man. If he survives to the end of the story, he might be spotted disappearing over a mountain and down into a cave, in the wildest, least inhabited region. All too often that’s where he goes to escape the civilized world, because if he lived within it, what would we make of him? And how would he see us, in turn?

  My treatments were finished for a time, but I appeared the same on the outside. I returned home, and found a fat, hard-covered sketchbook waiting for me on my bed, with a set of pencils that came in a red tin container. I opened the book and smoothed the blank pages, but I couldn’t think what to draw, and I was distracted by the world outside pressing in. The news about me—the giantess—had followed me home, so reporters popped up on the doorstep, wanting a look at me, and the telephone sent out shrill cries like a peacock screaming. The sound came at night, too, as the three of us sat together in the living room playing Parcheesi. The dark spaces on the board were “safe spaces,” but the house was a safe space, too, we all felt it. It smelled of us; everything in it was familiar and held the prints of our fingers. Elspeth made popcorn and James scooped it up in handfuls as we ignored the telephone together, crunching away and chasing each other around the board and deciding, in unison but without words, that the questions on the other end of the line were no one’s business but our own.

  How old is she?

  How tall is she?

  How much does she eat?

  How much does she weigh?

  What size are her shoes?

  I learned there was such a thing as the Tallest Living Woman in the World, but whoever she was would die, and someone else would be tallest until another soared past, crippled by weak bones and bloated organs, but phenomenal just the same. Even if her greatest goal was to grow vegetables. To this day I wonder, what if there was a title for most average? Or kindest? Kindest Living Woman in the World.

  The house next door sat in quiet darkness, and the more I ignored it, the more it grew in the periphery, with the moon hanging above, and the dark windows, and the sense of emptiness all around. I knew it meant Suzy had gone. When I finally inched my way next door I brought my sketchbook with me. I had barely cracked open the book, only eno
ugh to smell the pages. I knew it held so much more promise than the notepads and loose sheets I had used forever, and I didn’t want to spoil that by drawing the wrong thing, or by drawing something wrong. But now I knew what had to come first.

  I looked through the windows of Suzy’s house. The curtains on their clothespins had been left behind, but there was enough of a crack to show what remained inside—a stained mattress with the stuffing spilling out, and just beyond it, a doll’s head, parted from the body. Nearby was a heap of everything: an old soup tin, toy trucks and cars, pantyhose, cereal boxes, a tube of toothpaste, and half of a game board. I had the sense that I had seen it all before. I sat on the grass and sketched the exterior with my big, clumsy hand shading everything gray, not a Suzy color at all. Later I kept examining the drawing, and studying the real house, too, expecting Suzy to part the curtains and look out at me in a burst of color.

  And then one day the color appeared in a bouquet of flowers on the step. My first thought was that Suzy had died, and I ran out to our yard, looking for Elspeth, crying out to her, “What happened to Suzy?” and thinking, Was it my fault? But the flowers weren’t for Suzy.

  “They must be for Patrick,” she said. “I don’t know why they bothered,” she added with a roll of her eyes. “Those people won’t be back here again.”

  But people always came back, in one form or another. Elspeth knew and I knew, too, though neither of us said it. I remembered how Suzy had once boasted that they’d moved thirteen times, and felt a glimmer of happiness that perhaps she hadn’t lied about everything—perhaps there were other things that had been true.