Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House - A Romance

“Can’t I do anything for you?” I asked Caroline.

“Nope.”

Still, I pulled chairs around so she could put her feet up, even filled and delivered pointed paper cups from the dispenser near the bubbler. I took care of her in any little way I could.

Finally one week, she said, “I wish I could return the favor.”

“Okay,” I said. “Next time, you get me a glass of water.”

“No.” She was working on a bright red sweater, which she set on the table. The needles stuck out of it, like Raggedy Ann’s geisha wig. “I mean, invite you over. But Missus — well, she’s not feeling well, and she doesn’t want visitors. When she’s perked up, you’ll have to come back to dinner.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. Had I said something to alienate Mrs. Sweatt at the Stricklands’? Going over everything that I’d said that night occupied me for several hours after work, a jury member reviewing the evidence. Hello? Perfectly blameless. I hope you’re feeling better. Do you need help? Maybe there was something in my delivery that poisoned my intended politeness. Or maybe she objected to something I’d said to someone else, conversation that floated up through the registers from the basement with the heat, my offer of books on cameras to James. I looked in my mirror and said Hello to myself. It took several repetitions for me to decide I was being ridiculous.

Besides, Caroline came and knit, more pregnant every week, and James came to play tricks, tell bad jokes, and do research. That was more than enough consolation.

“Can you imagine,” Astoria said to me, when James came in. “Being that tall.”

“No,” I said.

But I tried. I imagined staring down upon the heads of the world. I imagined never fitting anywhere. I tried to move my body the way James did, one slow piece at a time. But when I thought about these things, when I saw myself as the tallest woman in the world, it felt hollow. So did I. One day after closing I stood on the circulation desk, made myself eight feet tall, taller than James was at the time. A short, ridiculous person on a waist-high desk. The tops of the shelves, I saw, needed dusting.

I could not imagine myself tall, could only imagine being held in the air, suspended at an altitude of seven feet. An uncharted stretch of big body surrounded my usual shape; I tried to feel it. My legs dangled, my fingers curled where my elbows should be. Like one of those maps of lakes, where the deepest part of the water is blue, surrounded by echoes of lighter blue until the cartographer hits land. My body was only the bluest, deepest part of the lake. I could not fill out the rest of the territory.

“Something must have happened,” said Astoria. “To his mother, I mean, when she was pregnant.”

“Astoria,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“Frightened by a giraffe maybe.” She giggled like a bad girl. “Or — frightened by a basketball team.”

“Don’t gossip,” I said to her. “Especially if you’re going to make things up.”

“Peggy, you’re too serious,” she said. “In this life, you have to make things up.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she said. “Because — that’s what life is . Making yourself believe the best things you can.”

“The best things I can believe,” I said, “are the things that happen to be true.”

James took out books on astronomy, ornithology: sciences at once about tininess and height. He approached the desk with books he’d liked and asked for more — he knew it was easier to find more books with a good example in hand.

Then one day, in the first months of 1955—I remember looking over his head at some awful persistent Christmas decoration Astoria had stuck to the ceiling — he came to me without books. His height had become unwieldy; he reached out to touch walls as he walked, sometimes leaving marks way above where the other teenage boys smudged their hands. “I want books about people like me,” he said.

I thought I knew what he was talking about, but I wanted to be cautious. “What exactly about you?” I asked. I made myself think of all the things he could have meant: Boy Scouts, basketball players. Never jump to conclusions when trying to answer a reference question. Interview the patron.

“Tall people,” he said.

“Tall people? Just tall people in general?”

“Very tall people. Like me ,” he said, clearly exasperated with my playing dumb. “What they do.”

“Okay,” I told him. “Try the card catalog. Look in the big books on the table — see those books?” I pointed. “Those are books of subject headings for the card catalog. Look under words that you think describe your topic.” James was used to me doing this: I gave directions but would not pull the books off the shelf for him. My job was to show people — even people I liked — how to use the library, not to use it for them. “Dig around,” I said. “Try height, try stature. Then look in the catalog for books.”

He nodded, leaned on the desk, and pushed off.

An hour later he headed out the door.

“Did you find what you needed?” I asked.

“There isn’t anything,” he said. “There was one book that sort of was about it, but I couldn’t find it on the shelf.”

“There’s something,” I told him. “Come back. We’ll look for it together.”

That night after closing, I hunted around myself. The only thing under stature was a book about growth and nutrition. I tried our two encyclopedias under height and found passing references. Not much.

In truth, my library was a small-town place, and this was a specialized topic. Still, I was certain I could find more. I got that familiar mania — there is information somewhere here, and I can find it, I have to. A good librarian is not so different from a prospector, her whole brain a divining rod. She walks to books and stands and wonders: here? Is the answer here? The same blind faith in finding, even when hopeless. If someone caught me when I was in the throes of tracking something elusive, I would have told them: but it’s out there. I can feel it. God wants me to find it.

That night I wandered the reference department, eyed the bindings of the encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases. James was so big I almost expected to locate him in the gazetteer. I set my hands upon our little card catalog, curled my fingers in the curved handles of the drawers. Then I went to the big volumes of subject headings.

Looking under height and stature turned up nothing; anthropometry was not quite right. Then I realized the word I was looking for: Giant .

Giant described him. Giant , I knew, would lead me to countless things — not just the word, located in indexes and catalogs and encyclopedias, but the idea of Giant, the knowledge that the people that James wanted to read about, people who could be described as like him, were not just tall but giants. I sat in a spindle-backed chair in the reference room, waiting for a minute. Then I checked the volume of the Library of Congress headings. Giants. See also: dwarfs .

We did not have a book, but I found several encyclopedia entries. Nowadays I could just photocopy; but that night I wrote down the page and volume numbers, thinking I could not bear to tell him the word to look under. Most of the very tall people mentioned in the encyclopedia had worked in the circus as professional giants, so I went to our books on the circus.

The photographs showed enormous people. Not just tall, though of course they were that, often with an ordinary person posed beside them. The tall people looked twice as big as the ambassador from the normal-sized, as if they were an entirely different race. The books described weak stomachs and legs and bones. Sometimes what made them tall showed in their faces: each feature looked like something disturbed in an avalanche, separate from the others, in danger of slipping off.