Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House - A Romance

But he returned the next Friday, with a different question. I still remember: he wanted to know what an anti-Pope was.

Maybe it was forgiveness, and maybe it was just teenage obliviousness, but the sight of James that afternoon seemed miraculous. You came back , I said to him as I sent him to the card catalog (“Look under Catholic Church — history”) and he said, Sure, Peggy, where else would I go?

I watched him read that afternoon. He sat at the table in the front room — his favored spot, ever since his first visit. Looking over his shoulders, I could see his book through the edge of his glasses. The words slid in curves as he moved his head.

I wanted to stand there forever, see what he saw. Not possible, of course. He’d stand up and take those glasses with him. I could only see through them now, me standing and him sitting, hunched significantly over, because he needed a stronger prescription. His eyes were growing at a different rate from the rest of him and would not stay in focus.

Caroline had an easy pregnancy. I’d expected that she would. It was as if the new stomach that swelled in front of her were something she’d expected all her life, an addition that she’d been meaning for years to install. Some women move into their bellies when they’re pregnant; it’s everything they think of, it’s what they move first and most carefully. Not Caroline. She lived in her whole easy body, barely changed her flat-footed gait.

I myself hardly noticed my physical self, which I considered a not-too-useful appendage. Only my feet demanded my attention. When I wore a bad pair of shoes on a busy day, my feet swelled, complained. I was forced to think of them, to picture getting home and slipping off my shoes, the way a starving man will torture and comfort himself with fantasies of food. Nothing to do — I could not pad around the library stocking-footed. My mouth answered questions, but I was stuck in my throbbing feet.

My feet were wide, wide, wide, and flat-footed, which was mostly a blessing — no arches to ache or fall. Nevertheless, by the time I was in my mid-twenties, they were an old person’s feet, bunioned and calloused and noisome and shapeless and yellowed. Blue veins ran the length; my toes, forced into tiny places for years, huddled together for comfort. I didn’t mind so much: it was as if I knew what I would look like as a senior citizen, from the ground up.

James caught me late one Friday at the library, a week after his return. (Though he hadn’t actually been gone, I always thought of it that way, his return .) I’d taken off a shoe and put it on the counter, searching for the boulder I felt sure was somewhere around the toe. Probably it was just a piece of sand. This close to the ocean, you always have sand in your shoes, embedded in your carpet, even if you never go to the beach.

“Your shoes bother you?” he asked.

“Oh,” I said. I shook out the shoe, dropped it to the floor, and stepped into it. I walked around to the front of the desk, trying to get the shoe jammed on; on top of everything, it was a little too small. “Always, I’m afraid. Usually. That’s what happens when you’re on your feet all day.”

“What size do you wear?” he asked.

“Five and a half,” I said, automatically shaving a full size off. “Women’s. Different from men’s.”

“I know. I wear a man’s thirty,” he said. Then he saw the surprise on my face and laughed. “Five times bigger. More than five times.” He stood beside me and steadied himself with his hand on my head. I didn’t take it personally — he often steadied himself with the closest person; it was usually the handiest thing. Then he took his hand away.

“Look,” he said. He’d lined up his foot with mine. They didn’t even look like the same part of the body, his high black shoe next to my white pump.

“Your feet are wide,” he said.

“Yes.”

“So you wear a five and a half wide?”

“Five and a half, six wide.”

“Which one?”

“Okay,” I said. “You caught me in a vain lie. Six wide. Honest.”

“Vanity is saying you wear smaller shoes than you really do?”

“Well,” I said. I blushed. “For some of us, it is. Women, I mean.”

Two weeks later he brought me a small cardboard box.

“I got these for you,” he said.

Inside were a pair of sensible oxblood lace-ups. Old-lady shoes. The good tangy smell of leather floated up.

“James,” I said. “You bought me shoes.” I could not remember the last time someone had given me a gift, other than the occasional Christmas box of chocolates from a patron.

“Well, I got them,” he said. “These are good for your feet. I just started working for a shoe store. They make all my shoes.”

I tried to picture James sitting on a shoe saleman’s slanty stool. He would not fit.

“You’re selling shoes?” I asked.

“Sort of.” He lifted one of the shoes out of the box and held it in his hand. “I’m going to do personal appearances. You know, show up. Look tall. And they’ll make my shoes for free.”

“No pay?”

“Shoes are expensive,” he said. “My shoes are, anyhow.” He looked back down at his feet. “Maybe I’ll go to New York.”

“This shoe store is in New York?”

He shook his head. “Hyannis. But there’s an expo in New York in the spring.” He pointed with the shoe in his hand at the shoes on my feet, navy blue snub-nosed pumps. “You shouldn’t wear those,” he said. “They’re bad for your feet. These”—he handed me the shoe—“they have ankle support and arch support and everything. I talked to the shoe guy. I was just going to get you black, and he wanted to talk me into pink. I knew you wouldn’t wear pink shoes.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said. “That’s true.”

“So we compromised on red. Reddish brown, anyhow.”

“They’re wonderful,” I said.

“Try them on. Might be a little stiff at first, but they’ll wear in. The shoe guys break mine in for me with a machine, but they know exactly how my toes go. They’ve got a cast of my foot. A couple of casts. They’ve got one they’re going to put in the window, and a shoe in my size that they’re going to bronze and hang outside. I have to sit down now,” he told me. “Try them on.”

He went to one of the library’s older chairs — the nineteenth-century furniture fit him best; the newer stuff was blocky and ungenerous — and dragged it close so he could watch me.

I knew, looking at the shoes, that they would be murder. True, they had ankle support. And arch support, but for someone as flat-footed as I was — and getting more flat-footed every year — that would hurt, not help. Most important was the missing half-size I had shaved off, out of vanity’s sake. Now what difference would a half-size smaller foot have made to a sixteen-year-old boy, especially one who wore size thirty shoes?

They’d put a little broguing around the toes of the shoes — to make them feminine, no doubt. They reminded me of the sort of boots sullen young girls of the gay nineties wore. I picked one up.

Luckily, I could get my foot in. I was glad James had made me confess to the additional half-size. I bent down to lace it up, disappearing behind the circulation desk. The shoe had a bracing, athletic feel.

“Try them both,” he said, straining to see me over the desk. “I can take them back for adjustments. Get them to stretch out parts.”

I’d deliberately chosen the left shoe, since my left foot was slightly smaller than my right. But I put the other on, laced it up.

“Walk in them,” James said. “Make sure they fit.” He sounded like my mother, school-clothes shopping.