The Girl Giant

by Kirsten den Hartog

I moved from my bed to James and Elspeth’s, to the couch, napping like a cat and awake in the long hours of the night, just as the balsa tree blooms. In the background, at any time of the day, I might have heard the sewing machine droning, or the snip-snip of scissors as Elspeth with a mouthful of pins added gussets and cuffs and panels to my already patchwork clothing. I knew how the pretty things in her closet disappeared and blended with my clothes to make them longer, bigger, wider, and even when I was very young I was aware of the care she put into altering my clothing. The perfectly finished edges, the secret pockets like gifts with satiny lining. Sometimes a hidden monogram, RFBB, as if any of my clothes could be confused with someone else’s.

  One afternoon, I was listening to her sew when I found a book in my parents’ bedroom. I was lying on their bed and I slipped my hand under the pillow, trying to find a comfortable position. I peeked beneath to see what it was my hand had touched, and saw the grotesque image of an enormous man, and the red words that made up the title The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body. The words formed an arc above the giant, who stooped over a girl riding a wolf. The giant had a mean face, wild hair, and a jutting, scruffy chin. A tooth was missing from his scowl. I slid the book back under the pillow and laid my head upon it, and as I rested, the story moved up through the cloth and feathers, showing me a princess riding a horse through her family’s kingdom. She often went too far, but she always made it home again. Her horse was old and swaybacked, but it was trusty enough. Each time she rode, she ventured farther, until one day she strayed outside the kingdom and happened upon a raven so starved he could not fly.

  “Please help me,” said the raven, “and I’ll return the favor one day.”

  The princess chuckled to herself, thinking the pathetic thing could never be of use to her, but she had a bit of food in her satchel and so threw the raven some crumbs, since it was nothing to her. The raven devoured the food and flew off, and the princess and her horse galloped forward.

  Farther along she came to a brook where a bloated fish thrashed upon a rock. Its eyes implored her.

  “Please help me. I need to get back in the water. I promise one day I’ll return the favor.”

  The young woman smiled to herself again, thinking a fish could never be of much help to a princess. But it looked so pitiful as it choked and sputtered, and it was easy enough to poke it with the toe of her boot and push it back into the water. What was it to her? Nothing! So she did so, and the fish swam away gratefully.

  Farther along she came upon a wolf who lay dying. Its skeleton showed through its hide, and the smell of desperation rose around it.

  “Please help me,” the wolf said to the princess, dragging himself toward her on his belly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, looking down at the wretched animal. “I don’t know how I can help, as I have already given some of my food to a raven and nibbled the rest myself on my long journey. And now I am trying to get home.”

  “Give me your horse to eat,” said the wolf, “and I’ll be strong enough that you can ride on my back.”

  The horse was old and the wolf was so gaunt and desperate that the princess agreed. The wolf devoured the horse in moments, and afterward was so strong that they rode off together in a flurry.

  Just as the sun was setting, the wolf said, “The giant’s house is just around the next bend. He is very cruel as he has no heart in his body.”

  The girl gasped with fear as the house came into view before her. A great shadow fell over her from behind, and, before she knew it, she had been plucked up by the giant’s hand and taken captive.

  The girl lived with the giant through all of the seasons, and would have been bereft were it not for the wolf who came to visit her each morning while the giant slept. One day he brought news that she would be instantly freed if she could find the giant’s heart. So the girl grew wily. Each evening, after the giant returned from working his fields and unchained her, she fed him dinner: rack of lamb, roasted potatoes, and sweet pudding for dessert. He washed it all down with an ocean of wine that made him quiet and calm.

  One night the girl asked the giant, “Where do you keep your heart?” and he laughed at her and said, “Why, of course, in a hole in that oak tree!” He pointed through the window.

  But the next day when she told the wolf and he looked in that spot, it wasn’t there. The same was true each subsequent time the giant told the girl where his heart was: His heart was not in the woodshed or under the porch step, as he had claimed. The wolf would return and look at the girl through the window, past the giant’s sleeping body; he would slowly shake his head. And the girl would sigh. The more they looked for the giant’s heart, the more elusive it became.

  Yet the girl persisted. Then, one evening, after the giant had gobbled down his dinner and swallowed his wine, after the girl asked him, “Where do you keep your heart?” she added, “I’m so fond of you that I can’t bear to think of you without it.” The giant opened his mouth to laugh, as before, but no sound came out. Very solemnly he answered, “In a far-off lake there is an island, in which is a well, in which swims a duck, in which is an egg, in which is my heart.”

  She knew from the look in his eyes that it was true.

  As the giant grumbled and snored through the night, the wolf tore through the countryside. When he reached the lake, he passed the message of the heart to the fish the girl had helped, and the fish swam across to the island, where he passed the message of the heart to the raven the girl had helped, and the raven flew to the edge of the well and called down to the duck, cawing and cawing until the duck fluttered up and off its nest, and there lay the egg, gleaming. The raven retrieved it, and took it to the fish, and the fish took it to the wolf, and the wolf took it to the girl, who kept it in the pocket of her apron all day until the giant came home and unchained her.

  As they were sitting together at dinner, he with his rack of lamb and potatoes and tumbler of soothing wine, she pulled it from her pocket and held it up for him to see. He blinked and opened his mouth to say something, but just then she squeezed the egg in her palm, and the giant himself burst into a thousand pieces.

  Chapter 4

  At the edge of adolescence, I soared past six and a half feet and needed three naps to get through the day. My thirst was unquenchable. I guzzled water whenever no one was looking, because I feared what it meant, and if someone else knew it made the danger more real. What if the food and drink I ingested fed whatever was wrong? I hated my gluttony, and I knew how I looked from the outside, wolfing down my food. The belief that I grew because of my own greed—that it was my fault—became my most painful suspicion.

  From the back I looked like an adult, tall and thin, but face-on my childishness still blazed out. My round eyes held a look of expectation and of not knowing what to expect, and it reminded Elspeth of when I’d been a toddler, eager to explore but ignorant of the risks. How stressful it had been for her to watch my every move. This was like that, too, though I was past full-grown.

  One bright, cloudless day I tripped off the back step and was unable to lift myself to standing. Again and again I pushed my palms into the grass and tried to heave myself upward, but my legs buckled beneath me every time, and my arms were useless. The sound of my voice made me shudder as I called for help, and Elspeth appeared at the back door, looking out at me. For a second she did nothing, and I was afraid I would have to say what I needed.

  Can you help me please?

  Can you get me up?

  But then she moved toward me and put her hands under my armpits. It was so awkward, touching that way, breathing on each other. She was so much smaller. But I struggled up, then eyed the bits of dried grass on my clothes.

  “Thank you,” I said, without looking at her, and I brushed myself off and carried on, away from her. Her eyes went with me. I could sense her watching, feeling sorry for both of us.

  We never spoke of the incident, but it stayed with us. It exacerbated her need to be near me, but on James’s
salary alone our financial situation had become precarious. I had already grown far past the bounds of normal, and there were so many things that needed to be custom-made with my steady growth—not just my clothing, which kept Elspeth up in the wee hours, but my shoes and boots. I slept diagonally, with my legs curled, but I needed a longer mattress, a chair that would hold me, and a table that I could pull up to in order to eat my meals “like an ordinary person,” as Elspeth always said. I hated that phrase. But hated more that I knocked the table with my knees or elbows, spilled drinks, and shattered china. We couldn’t afford for things to be broken.

  Elspeth knew James was right when he said she needed to work.

  “Ruthie already gets to and from school alone with no help from you—that is, when she goes,” he added in a disapproving tone.

  He didn’t realize that in fact she followed me, dashing unseen from tree to tree through our neighborhood, even soaring across the bridge behind me and praying I wouldn’t turn around and see her. Then back behind the trees again as we continued to the west side of town. She noticed the way I walked with my head tilted to the right, and how I would emerge from the back lanes with a tentative manner. Sometimes she could see just the edge of my face, and the way it beamed if another child fell in step beside me, and she would rush along the hedgerow, muttering under her breath, Walk with her, please walk with her. Walk the rest of the way with my girl. Then her obsession would switch from worrying about me being alone to worrying about what the other kids said to me. She strained to listen, as if hearing the words allowed her to manipulate them. When I disappeared through the school doors some of her anxiety went with me, because there was nothing she could do now, it was out of her hands. She stood at the river’s edge with those dark circles under her eyes, looking across to the factory where she had worked, and sensing how it buzzed with energy.

  On the walk home, she promised herself she’d give up the ritual, but before she knew it she was snooping in my room for clues about how I was feeling, what I was thinking, what I might need that she could possibly offer. But the planes and books and dolls and stones and leaves and the endless sketches of herself and James and me—none of it revealed anything. As she left the room, guilt gnawed at her like a little virus blooming, but it didn’t stop her from going back to my room later and looking around more. Picking things up, putting them down. A kind of compulsive devotion. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but it bothered her that she didn’t find it. She’d sit for long spells on the chair in my room with her hands in her lap, and it reminded her of her days at the hat shop window, before James appeared. What if he had never come? Would she still be sitting there?

  It was this image of herself, pathetic and alone, that finally propelled her back to the suit factory after more than a decade away. As though she’d never left, she stitched pockets while the needle whirred up and down before her and a small, hot light illuminated her work. Pocket after pocket after pocket. How many suits had been made on the premises? She had no idea. Thousands, millions. The factory had existed decades before Elspeth’s time, although during the war it had suspended regular operations in order to turn out uniforms for soldiers. Some of the very women she worked with had been at the factory back in those days, and had had husbands overseas. Some of the men had not returned; others, only partly. Had she herself been here instead of in England, she might have stitched the pockets of James’s uniform. So strange to think. Every animate and inanimate thing had converged and come through the tunnel of war at once, and now, on the other side of it, the snarl was still sorting itself out.

  The suits the factory made now were fine ones, better than she and James could afford. She watched her fingers running a piece through and thought of a man’s hand resting inside the quality fabric, coins and keys jingling, a wedding ring strangling a bloated, affluent finger. And then a flash came, of the doctor’s hand waving all worry away. The great bolts of fabric were so tempting. How refreshing it would be to make one whole dress for me out of one kind of fabric rather than tearing and restitching everything I had, or turning her own clothes and James’s into something for me.

  Her work was mundane, but Elspeth enjoyed it for that very reason. There was no doubting what was expected of her, and there was no question that she was competent enough to fulfill those tasks. The workday passed quickly, easily. Every morning she looked forward to the fact that she had somewhere to go, and that it was a place that had nothing to do with her. Or did it? The hardest part of the job was its social aspect, the way the women flocked together at breaks, revealing personal stories. They squeezed each other’s shoulders or stroked a hand with no invitation whatsoever, and they said things like We’re here for you when it was probably not true. It was only one of a million things people said for the sake of saying something. Like, How are you, oh I’m fine, just fine thanks. They brought cream puffs and strudels, sickly sweet food for sickly sweet company.

  “Did you know,” she said to the others one day, in a rare and blurted contribution, “did you know that herringbone is named for the dead fish? The pattern. It’s just like the skeleton after the fish is gone.” Her brother Stanley had loved herring—pickled, smoked, raw. She held the fabric up to show them and then returned to her machine, the cool presence of Stanley at her shoulder and the smell of the fish there too. She closed her eyes to savor the thought of him tipping his head back, dropping the fish into his open mouth.

  The women didn’t know what to make of Elspeth, and she didn’t help them figure it out. They knew she was my mother, and that either Elspeth or James had to be responsible for the fact that I was so overgrown. Why else would they not have had more children, they mused when Elspeth was out of earshot. Perhaps they used birth control. Some said that soon it would be as easy as swallowing a pill, but even now you could use an IUD made of plastic. You just tucked it inside and got on with things as usual. Or maybe they used the old method and just didn’t—you know. Squealing with laughter. Hushing one another.

  Elspeth knew they talked about her, and yet each day at ten o’clock she had tea or coffee with the other women, some of whom had been there since her initial employment before I was born, and a gaggle of new ones who’d started later. At noon there was lunch and more chatter, and at three o’clock, tea and coffee. The women took turns bringing buttery scones and cookies, which at first Elspeth declined. She sat too straight in her chair, enduring the breaks and the chitchat with her jaw clenched, and anxious to get back to her trusty machine, to brown tweed and green gabardine. But after a month or so, she inched her chair closer. The woman who pressed the collars was sobbing. She had a fat, pink face and the frizzy red hair of a clown, and on sight, Elspeth had disliked her. But today the presser sat hunched over, tears dropping onto the carrot cake that stayed untouched in her lap.

  “It’s over,” she said. “It’s completely over. He said he doesn’t love me anymore.” The presser looked up at the others with red eyes and a swollen nose. “So I’m sure he won’t start loving me again. You can’t once you’ve stopped. I mean, can you?”

  There was an awkward silence. Elspeth nibbled her cake as the others fussed over their friend Iris, whose flowery name didn’t suit her. It must be awful, Elspeth thought, to stand over the hot steam all day and have it billowing up at you. That’s why she’s so puffy and red. She tried to imagine James loving another woman, and how the discovery might affect her, but neither thought made her feel anything at all. Even the word divorce, which should have been shocking, didn’t unnerve her when it flitted through her mind. Yet when she let her gaze travel back to Iris, a wave of sorrow came, and something else, something so piercing that she averted her eyes. A sip of tea, a bite of cake. She looked again. Iris’s lashes had darkened and stuck together in little points. Her shoulders heaved and the other women’s hands patted her back. Elspeth wouldn’t like people touching her but Iris didn’t seem to mind.

  After that day, Elspeth began to use the names of the women she
had first thought of as Button, Lapel, or Zipper. Morning, Martha. Sally, this crumble is delicious, the sour berries just make it, don’t they? Edna, how are you doing today? She had to admit (at least to herself) that something had shifted. She had come to appreciate this sense of community, even if she’d let nothing essential of herself slip into the mix. She felt like a person again, a woman among women.

  James noticed the change. He saw how his wife became less heavyhearted when she left him in the morning, resembling the Elspeth of old, who, if you tickled her deep in her right armpit, would explode with laughter, joy infiltrating the features of her face. But she was also a new, more mysterious Elspeth whose existence was separate from his. Watching her go, he found himself recalling how she had come toward him carrying flowers the day they got married, and had danced with her shoes off at the reception. He’d wondered just briefly if she’d married him to escape a life in shambles, because he knew she was too good for him, and he suspected others could see it too. But he had been more in love with her on that day than on any one before, and since then his love had kept growing, sometimes just a little, sometimes in vast amounts. Sometimes it came like a violent blow that knocked the breath from him.

  He recognized his capacity for love in me. Little else of him showed itself in me, except for the black hair and the particular blue of my eyes, and my affinity for drawing. But there was a certain moony quality about me that had to have come from him, and that revealed itself further when a girl moved in next door.

  That very first day she waved at me with a spanned hand and then made her way over. It seemed both momentous and so normal, watching her walk across the grass toward me. She was someone I knew already, or had always known. She wore her hair in sloppy buns on either side of her head, and her skin had a sandy, sun-swept quality, as if she spent all her time outside. She had a little brother who looked so much like Stanley had as a boy that Elspeth, watching us from the window, had to look away: fair hair, and delicate, elfish features, right down to the pointy ears. Elspeth shivered before dismissing him and returning her study to the girl. A small, wiry creature, electric in a dangerous way. Her hands flitted with the energy of insects, and Elspeth saw the spell coming out from her fingertips and wrapping around me like a tangible thing. I stood smiling, delirious, oblivious. My head hung down, and Elspeth imagined me saying, as in days of old, Hello. I’m Roof. What does your name?