The Girl Giant

by Kirsten den Hartog

  “I don’t like that girl,” she said to James. “She looks like trouble.”

  James laughed. “What does trouble look like? I thought it would be bigger, somehow, or hairy.”

  He held her arm and led her back to the sofa, where a steaming cup of tea awaited her. He always made her tea on weekend afternoons, just at the time she desired it, but the offering was spoiled by the fact that he never steeped the tea long enough, and the bubbles that formed on top reminded her of spent dishwater.

  Outside, I dangled over the new girl, grinning a foolish grin. My face was bony now; the skin stretched over it gave me a deathly appearance, but I nearly forgot about myself when I looked at her. She had hair like honey and big green eyes.

  The family’s belongings were unloaded from a pickup truck by men with tattoos. Chairs drifted by in the background; a floor lamp sauntered past; from a cardboard box came the mewling of kittens. I stood with my hands thrust into the pockets of my homemade pants, and had a feeling of floating. My upper back bulged. My heart hummed. One shoulder stooped toward the girl as I willed myself smaller.

  I was six-foot-eleven the day I met Suzy Malone, bursting through my most rapid growth period and all the physical changes that went with it. Sometimes I grew an inch in a single week, and I had trouble adjusting to the constant changes in my size. My arm span was greater than my height, and the way I stood, slouching, made my arms dangle longer still. I had long ago outgrown ordinary doorways, and had to duck to enter the rooms of our house. To climb up stairs I turned sideways, because my feet were too big for the steps. My voice was getting deeper, and sounding farther away, as if I were disappearing inside myself. I had tunnel vision, but an eye for detail. In fact, I suppose this has always been true of me: I can hardly pull my eyes from the infinitesimal details to take in the broader picture, so vast and vague that I don’t know what to make of it.

  The day I met Suzy I had a bruise on my forehead from bumping into a doorway, and she had a faint birthmark on her left cheek, like a berry stain. My eyes kept traveling to it, then over to her ear where an earring glittered, up to the top of her head, and down, finally, to her eyes, green with flecks of amber. Over, up, down, over, up, down. My heart was clunking, and the pulp and paper mill was stinking in the distance, and I was praying that she knew it wasn’t me giving off that smell, but there was no way to be sure. She was chattering about her bicycle, and did I know the best trails, and what was the fastest route to the beach, and did I have a bicycle, and why on earth not, and how anyone could be without a bicycle she didn’t know because riding was just the best thing, believe her, she had done it for ages. She had never had training wheels or a tricycle, ask her brother—she’d just always had a perfect sense of balance, watch, and she lifted her foot behind her and lowered her upper body until she’d made herself into a T. There was a pause as she posed there, suspended on one leg. The only sound was me breathing and shuffling a little beside her. And then she began to fall and reached for my hand, gripping my fingers and laughing, and after she’d steadied herself and stood up again and taken her hand from mine there remained a tingling where she’d touched me.

  “You have to get a bike,” she said.

  I just laughed awkwardly, trying to think of something to say, nothing coming—but I was already promising in my mind to do so, both to keep up with her and to avoid letting her down. I had already decided that from this day forward those were the most important things.

  That night in front of my mirror I replayed our conversation, watching my face move in reaction to her words, seeing what she saw, and wondering if it was not so bad, especially from this angle or that one. I pulled my curls straight and held on to them, and I looked smaller already. If I could only figure out how to keep my hair that way. If I could freeze myself, just like that, and still manage to be with her.

  In their pink room, Elspeth said to James, “We have to do something about that girl.”

  “What girl?” he asked. He sat on the edge of the bed with his back to her and removed his slippers.

  Elspeth rolled her eyes. She gave his back a light, quick smack. “Pay attention!”

  He laughed. “Oh, that girl. Why?”

  “It’s not funny. She’ll get her heart broken, you know.”

  He chuckled again. “Why on earth would you think that? A friend is just what she needs right now. Really, it’s about time.” James slid under the sheets and began to wriggle toward Elspeth, and he was about to say, snickering, Don’t you think it’s also about time for—but her face close-up was red with rage, and there were tears starting.

  “Oh boy,” he said. “Here we go.”

  “How can you! Ruth is not just any girl!” Elspeth shouted, but the shout, of course, was a whisper, lest it drift out of the room and down the hall, toward the yellow room. “For heaven’s sake, James, do you think you could muster some concern for your own daughter?”

  James glared at her. Very slowly, he said, “Don’t ever accuse me of not caring. Ruth is any girl. She has a heart. She has a life to live.”

  He threw off the covers and sat up, stepping back into his slippers. He pulled on his robe and left the room and did not return until morning, and in all their years, through all their quarrels, this was the first such separation.

  But as he lay in the hammock under the stars, he felt proud of himself. He remembered a quiet night during the war when he had slept outside and felt aware, just briefly, of his place in the universe. He’d lain on his back and tears of contentment had dripped into his ears. He’d heard them pooling. And he had realized that an invisible string connected each star to a person, and that therefore he had nothing to fear. No one did. That night he felt a similar contentment. He believed his words to Elspeth had for once come out succinctly, just the way he had intended, and with a certain poignancy too. He hadn’t anticipated that. He’d often stopped himself from responding to Elspeth’s remarks because he couldn’t find the right thing to say, and because life itself seemed a muddle, a riddle, which he could not lay bare. But outside, the sky above James was clear, and he was small but specific beneath a full moon. The hammock held him like a great, cupped hand.

  Alone in the bed, Elspeth, too, could see the moon. It was either almost full or it had been full yesterday, she didn’t know which. She felt glad to have the bed to herself, and moved to the middle and spread her limbs. It occurred to her that it would make things better if she went to James and asked him to come back, that she wouldn’t even need to apologize and he would come. It occurred to her that her ultimate goal should be to make things better, and that not moving from the bed meant she didn’t want to. But why should she always be the one doing everything?

  At work, some of the women insisted that husbands and children smothered the very person who kept them all going; the mother, they said, was the nervous system of the family. The redhead Iris said that women had finally had enough and were fighting back. Though actually, Elspeth thought at the time, it was Iris’s husband who’d had enough and left her. Still, Elspeth felt smug and unappreciated all at once, and though she knew she would never do so, she saw herself relating the exchange she’d had with James, telling the other women how he’d thought he could fix it all with a bit of snuggling. The women would know what she meant by that, and they would scoff and tut-tut as they slurped their tea. She felt vindicated just imagining the scene. She stretched her limbs wider yet, reveling in her loneliness, at least for one night.

  Suzy Malone was fourteen, a little older than me, and worlds wiser. After she arrived, the roof of our house came off, the sky beyond was revealed, and the home was revealed to the sky. Birds flew over and looked down inside the house and saw for the first time that it was much tinier than it appeared to be from the outside. They saw the thinness of the walls dividing the rooms from one another, and they could see inside the walls as well, the wires and the insulation, and they wondered at the complexity of the house’s structure; was it for protection, like the
uniform and cap James wore when he strode purposefully outside, or the big shoes that covered my aching feet?

  Elspeth never said so, but the house with no roof reminded her that a ceiling could collapse and land on the floor—she had seen it happen—and so the open space was oppression for her, just as for me it was freedom. I moved trancelike through the house as the walls and doorways were enlarged to accommodate me. All the renovations were for my sake, though it was never mentioned. A layer of plaster dust covered everything, and I, too, grew dusty. The white powder clung to my black hair. It collected in the folds of my clothes, in my shoes, in the contours of my face, making me ghostlike, but I had never been more alive.

  At the house next door, raccoons knocked over the garbage bins. Late at night, I could hear them calling and crying to one another that good things had been found. They made a home in the chimney, and their silhouettes scrabbled across the roof, the mother with six little ones behind. Beneath them, the human family carried on. The curtains in the living room window were attached with clothespins visible from the outside, and stayed closed all day, as if someone inside was sleeping and mustn’t be woken at any cost. Elspeth disapproved of the clothespins, the garbage, and of course the raccoons, while James suggested that the Malones just needed time to settle in.

  “Give the woman a chance,” he said. “She’s on her own, poor thing. Maybe I should offer—”

  “Don’t,” said Elspeth. “You’ve got plenty to do right here.”

  And so he didn’t.

  Weeks passed and nothing changed. If the Malones’ garbage got put out, it usually happened on the wrong day, and had to be brought back in again, which sometimes took the better part of the week, meaning it would not be put out by the next collection day either. The bins were stuffed so full the lids wouldn’t stay on, and the garbage gave off a stench more fetid than the pulp and paper smell, like something live rotting. The marigolds that had been planted that spring by the previous tenants died from neglect and yet still managed to look like stiff soldiers guarding the perimeter. The lawn turned pale as straw, except for the rounded border that got watered by our own spinning sprinkler.

  I couldn’t see into Suzy’s house, and wouldn’t have had the nerve to look had I been able to, but she spied on me with abandon. She looked into the living room when she walked by on the street in her dirty sandals, and she looked into the kitchen from along the back lane. One day she caught my eye, waved, and motioned for me to come outside. No one had ever been so familiar, so casual with me, and I rushed to put my shoes on and get out to her before she changed her mind and wandered away.

  I took big steps toward her on the grass and then stood there, wondering what I should say.

  “Hi,” I said. A weird sort of laugh slipped out of me.

  She could feel my jellyfish eyes caressing the top of her head and she peered up at me, smirking.

  “What does the top of my head look like from up there?”

  “Oh,” I said. I looked at the part in her hair, dotted with blackfly bites; her hair itself had strands that were blond, red, and golden. “It’s nice.” I wanted to say, Everything on you is nice, but just thinking it made the blood rush to my ears.

  We were midway between our two houses, and Suzy said, “Come and sit in the sun with me. You’re really pasty. You’d look good with a tan.”

  I followed her across the grass, thinking that maybe I would look good, that there were all sorts of things that I could do that I’d never even thought of doing before. Suzy pulled out two lawn chairs for us and plunked herself into one of them, and ever so carefully I lowered myself and wedged my bottom into a chair. I tried not to put my full weight into the seat of it, so it was difficult sitting there with her, our faces raised to the sun and my muscles straining, but every moment felt worth it until the stitches in the chair began to give way. I could feel them popping and heard the fabric snapping beneath me.

  “I have to get going,” I said, and tried to pull myself up out of the chair, but I was stuck, looking like an absolute fool in front of someone perfect.

  But Suzy just grinned. “Let me help you,” she said, and she eased the chair’s arms that dug into my sides away from my body, and put the chair back on the ground. We were closer than ever, then. She was right beside me, holding my wrist, and she looked up and said, “Wow—you really are tall. No matter how much I see you I just can’t get over it. You seem bigger each time.”

  “Yeah,” I said, shrugging. “I know it’s strange.”

  I turned to go, but Suzy called to me, “Strange, yeah. But pretty amazing too. See you tomorrow?”

  Yes.

  Chapter 5

  Suzy’s mother, Margaret, had taken a job at the suit factory, but Elspeth doubted she’d keep it long. She had a cigarette burning beside her at all times, and more than once she scorched the fabric she was working on. She didn’t take part in the discussions during breaks, but sometimes released a phlegmy laugh at things the women said, things that were stupid to her for reasons she didn’t care to share. She always arrived late in the mornings, and as she passed Elspeth’s machine a bad smell floated behind her. Each time, Elspeth paused and watched Margaret’s thick back, flashing dagger eyes at the stout, tough-looking woman who’d brought Suzy into the world.

  It was with Margaret’s arrival that pieces of fabric found their way into Elspeth’s bag every few days at the factory. Bits of lining or piping, or sometimes large cuts of flawed but quality fabric that would have been discarded. The first time she saw the material in her bag, Elspeth looked around for a clue as to who had put it there. But the other women were all busy with their work; they paid no attention to her. Should she take it? Was it stealing? What if she got caught? Just this once, she decided. But days later there was more, and she took it again and again.

  Through the long summer, while our mothers worked at the factory, Suzy and I lay in the meadow behind the houses, face-to-face. Suzy’s feet, filthy from her lack of socks and shoes, came just to my knees. I was so enamored with her that she even succeeded in having me take off my shoes, and I had not done that in public, away from the safety of home, since I was a young girl and less aware of my differences. She undid the long laces and pulled from the heel until one foot and then the other was released.

  “Are these homemade shoes?” she asked, turning them over in her hands and inspecting them.

  “Sort of,” I said. “Store-made, but especially for me.”

  She pulled my socks off and my face went hot. One of my toenails was twisted and ingrown—a curled, gray nail instead of a smooth, pink one—but my feet were otherwise like regular feet, if large and red and throbbing. I wanted to know if she thought that my feet looked more normal with or without my shoes on, but out of politeness I couldn’t ask. What if she said with? That I should always keep them covered? I didn’t want to know. Anyway, it was better to look away from my feet and focus on hers, dirty but pretty, with high ballerina arches. She was going to be a dancer someday, she said, or a singer.

  We walked in the grass together and left our shoes behind, which for Suzy was no big thing but for me was a liberation. I looked down at her, with the buttercups all around, and memorized the image so I could draw it later, and keep it. I tried to watch her from the corner of my eye so she wouldn’t see me staring, but she was in constant motion and I couldn’t keep track of her. She could easily disappear from my field of vision, and then I’d almost gasp out loud, fearing I’d lost her. So I gave up pretending not to notice her. The feeling whirring inside me was familiar, like hunger—a thing that couldn’t be denied—so even when she laughed at me, I didn’t really mind. I knew I looked ridiculous, that she could see me from a long way off, the blue sky beyond my black hair, a cloud forming a hat on my head.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She chewed her cheeks but laughed harder.

  I dipped down, and my face loomed before her.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “I don’t kno
w,” she said. “I just feel funny. Like I’m walking with an ape or an alien. Or an elephant who can talk.”

  For a moment my head pounded and my vision blurred. But then I grinned at her and made an animal sound.

  Whatever it took, I would keep her.

  James and a few hired hands renovated our house that summer. When the roof was laid back on, it was glass in places, and let in the light that the stippled ceiling had always kept out. James grew blisters on his hands and dark circles formed under his eyes, to match Elspeth’s. But he whistled, too—he was happy taking care of me. He put glass doors on my room, which opened out to the backyard. For days after, a cardinal came and knocked on my new doors with her beak. She was a soft red, washed with gray, but her face had a frightening intensity. She knocked as though trying to tell me something, and once, she followed me from room to room, appearing at each window with the same rat-a-tat-tat. Pretty as she was, she scared me. Eventually, she flew straight for me with the glass between us, and fell dead to the ground without me ever hearing what she wanted to say. At the time it was something of a relief, because I didn’t want a message that would change the way things were, and messages always do. If you open yourself to receive one and then don’t act on it, the message stays inside you. No one ever rushes to tell you that all is okay, they rush to tell you how it should be, or to warn you of what’s to come. And I was happy; I didn’t want to be warned. I buried the bird in the garden, right outside the doors to my room, and Suzy herself helped me push the earth over its body.