Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House - A Romance

They called Mrs. Sweatt simply Missus and treated her like a girl who might be ruining her chance for happiness at every turn. Eat your meatballs, Missus. Aren’t you cutting off your circulation, sitting that way? Missus made the dinner; she embroidered the tablecloth, too; we’re trying to get her to sell her work in town, but she won’t. I felt like they were trying to arrange a marriage between the two of us.

“I hope you’re feeling better,” I told Mrs. Sweatt, wondering what she’d been sick with. Perhaps I’d try to look it up in my book of symptoms: swollen face, lethargy. The only affliction I knew so defined was desperate weeping.

She shrugged. “They tell me I’m supposed to.”

“Missus is getting skinnier,” said Caroline, “while I’m getting fatter .” She thumped her stomach.

“Don’t hit the baby,” said Mrs. Sweatt. “Caroline’s going to have a baby. She treats it like a drum, but it’s a baby.”

“It isn’t anything yet ,” Caroline told me. “I’m barely pregnant.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

Caroline nodded shyly.

Mrs. Sweatt drank milk from an enormous glass. At first I wondered whether there was any vodka in it; then I saw that she wasn’t really drinking at all: every now and then she lifted the glass to her face, looked in, and set it back down, the milk level the same.

After dinner Caroline suggested a break before dessert, and Mrs. Sweatt started to clear the table. She moved very slowly, as if the table were a magnet and all the dishes steel. Several times she lifted a dish a few inches and put it right down.

“Do you need help?” I asked.

Mrs. Sweatt straightened the tablecloth and said, slowly, “You’re a guest.” Maybe she was drunk.

Caroline took me by the elbow. “Come see the house.”

So Oscar and Caroline gave me a tour; I looked around greedily. It seemed much the same as it had the last time I’d been there, a motley, homely, dazzling collection of furnishings that seemed to have only the most tenuous relationship to one another. I imagined taking down books and vases, anything I pleased, even curtains, and inquiring, in a businesslike tone, how long I might keep them. There is nothing I can’t make into a library in my brain, no objects I don’t imagine borrowing or lending out. Not out of generosity — I am a librarian, and protective — but out of a sense of strange careful justice. Part of me believes all material things belong to all people.

It was a house easily taken over by objects. White thuggy appliances crowded the kitchen; a huge unmade bed took up almost the entire bedroom. The thrown-back messy blankets embarrassed me.

On the back wall of the shadowy basement, dozens of little pictures hung off a peg board: the ocean, wheat fields, a woman brushing her hair, a horse, and one large canvas that looked abstract but I suspected was merely bad. They were Oscar’s; he was the artist of the seascape in James’s room, of the little flowers on the side of the house. The paintings were damp and blurry and looked ready to overflow their frames, as though they’d been painted through tears.

“What medium do you prefer?” I asked.

“All of ’em. I’m thinking of getting into comic books.” He walked to a table and picked up a piece of paper. It was a cartoon of a bride, with long blond hair, her veil flipped back and streaming behind her like a cape. The bodice of her dress was tight, cut low, and the deep line of her cleavage split in two and broke into curves over each breast. Flames shot out from the bottom of her skirt, a train of flames, and her face was full-lipped and big-eyed and small-nosed and smirking and unmistakably Mrs. Sweatt’s. Mrs. Sweatt a month before, with her old cheekbones and cynicism.

“Rocket Bride,” Oscar said. “My newest invention.”

Rocket Bride, Oscar explained, had been abandoned by her groom at their wedding reception. In her grief she developed the ability to fly and now traveled the world, looking for her husband, but more importantly , stressed Oscar, fighting crime and injustice. She subdued criminals with her bouquet. She sometimes worked with her sidekick, Maid O’ Honor. It was her wedding dress that supplied her superpowers, and she vowed not to take it off until she found her wayward groom.

“Do you pose?” I asked Caroline.

“He’s never asked me,” she said.

Oscar laughed. “For a comic book? I work from the imagination only. Not that you wouldn’t make an excellent superhero,” he said to Caroline.

“I haven’t got any superpowers,” she said.

“What will she do when she finds him?” I asked.

“Finds who?” asked Oscar.

I took the page from his hand. “Her husband. Will they settle down and live happily ever after?”

“Lord, no.” He looked over my shoulder at Rocket Bride, put a finger on the crown of her head. I saw by the careful signature in the corner that he was the one who’d written my dinner invitation. He stretched his arm around me, set his hand on my shoulder. Then he frowned, and with his other hand carefully whisked away a few pink-and-gray eraser leavings from the edge of Rocket Bride’s veil. “Never. Rocket Bride’s not the forgiving kind. No,” he said. “I think that husband should just pray he never gets found.”

His hand was still on my shoulder.

I am not a person who likes to be touched casually, which means of course that I like it a great deal. Every little touch takes on great meaning — oh, I could catalog them all for you: the bus driver who offered his hand as I stepped down from his bus, his other hand hovering near but not touching the small of my back. My flirtatious college friend who could not keep her hands off of anyone, who flicked one restless finger on the back of my wrist, on my forearm. Handshakes. Because I am short, certain tall people cannot resist palming my head; one college boyfriend stroked my hair so often in the early days of our courtship that, crackling with static, I could have clung to the wall like a child’s balloon.

My list would go on forever, and still it would be shorter than other people’s, because those tentative friendly fingers make me stiffen, and by the time I realize I’ve done it and try to relax, the hands are gone. People get the idea. The better they know me, the less they touch me.

But Oscar did not know me at all. Did not notice the way I quietly jumped as his hand touched my shoulder blade. Did not take his hand away until he was ready to set Rocket Bride down again.

“I have lots of ideas,” he said. “She’s just the first. There’s Fancy Boy, and the Mighty Midget, and, let’s see, Radio Dog—”

Caroline shook her head. “Oscar dreams big.”

“Why not?” said Oscar. “Doesn’t cost anything. Here’s another idea. Record players for cars. I can’t get anybody to invest, but it’s what the American public wants.”

“It is?” I said.

“Well,” said Caroline, “it’s what Oscar wants.”

I said, “But is this a nation of Oscars?”

He got a happy, planning look in his eyes. “A nation of Oscars,” he said, as if he were wondering how to swing it.

“ There’s an idea,” said Caroline.

“A nation of Oscars,” he repeated, smiling fondly.

He would have loved that, I think. Some people like to think they are unique; I saw immediately Oscar did not. What better than walking into a crowd of himself, brillantined, back-slapping men who would congratulate themselves on the good fortune of being who they were. “I commend you on your taste,” Oscar would say to Oscar. “You’re my kind of man.”

When we went back upstairs, Mrs. Sweatt was simultaneously smoking a cigarette and trying to put on a duffel coat. She was apparently unwilling to put down the cigarette and kept switching it from one hand to her mouth to the other hand, trying to avoid the cloth.