Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House - A Romance

In the end, she died as most of us do, absolutely still, earthbound.

Mrs. Sweatt’s body was sent to Iowa, to be buried in her family’s plot. “We’d like to come to the funeral,” Caroline had said when she called to make arrangements, thinking she’d send Oscar out, since she felt too pregnant to travel. But Mrs. Sweatt’s mother said that wouldn’t be necessary. Funerals were not a tradition their family observed.

That upset Caroline; it seemed heathen. But she couldn’t hold a funeral herself, and she couldn’t sway Mrs. Sweatt’s family, and so the body was buried in Davenport, without ceremony.

“Terrible,” said Caroline, and it was terrible. “But at least she’s back in Iowa.” She said this as though Mrs. Sweatt had just gone home to visit friends, stare at her old high school, have a drink in her favorite bad bar. As if being dead were like getting pregnant while unmarried, and Mrs. Sweatt had to disappear until the trauma was over.

“When you think about it,” Caroline said, “Iowa is not such a bad place to be.”

I talked my way back into the house that Saturday, by insisting that the only thing that would make me happy was doing the Stricklands’ housework for them during their difficult time. This was a statement of fact.

Caroline was suddenly hugely pregnant, pink-cheeked and pretty. “Write to James, why dontcha,” she said. “He’ll be there awhile. At least a couple of weeks.”

“I’m planning to go to Boston tomorrow,” I said. “I figured I’d take the bus.”

“Nice of you,” she said. “He could use some company. Oscar will drive you to the bus station.”

“Oh, that’s not—”

“No. He will. Don’t argue. Well, shall we sit?”

“How about laundry?” I said. My unoccupied hands made me nervous, as if I needed to prove that I was here for one purpose: housework. “There must be plenty to do.”

“Most people I would tell no,” she said. “But I know you won’t be happy unless I say yes.”

“That’s right,” I said.

There was plenty of laundry. Oscar’s paint-spattered clothing, some of the cotton men’s shirts Caroline wore instead of maternity smocks. Two shirts and a pair of pants belonging to James, which I set aside for hand washing to save wear since they were so expensive. It was the last of his laundry for a while; now that he was in the hospital, he’d dirty nothing. I didn’t know where Mrs. Sweatt’s clothing had gone.

“Have you been to see James?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I want to, but my doctor says stay put till the baby comes. Which should be at any moment. You don’t know how to deliver a baby, do you?”

“Why? Are you feeling—”

“No. I just thought maybe you might have read a book on it,” she said, as if baby-delivering were a knack, like refinishing furniture, that people picked up for the pleasure of doing. “I feel very pregnant , and I feel like I will be very pregnant forever.” She sighed. “Luckily there’s a cure for it.”

“Has Oscar been to Boston?”

She leaned on the dryer. “Just once. He gets nervous. Thinks I’ll go ahead and have the baby without him. Once the baby comes, everything will be easier.”

“I admire your optimism,” I said.

“I hate suspense,” she said.

A line of socks waited for their matches on the top of the dryer.

“These poor socks have lost their spouses,” said Caroline. She picked one up and talked to it. “Poor widowed sock.”

“It’s true,” I said. “Socks mate for life. Socks and swans.”

“But you can’t just throw them out, can you? I always introduce them to another abandoned sock.” She picked up two lone socks and began to roll them together.

“Still,” I said, “they’re never really happy.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Caroline. She unrolled the socks and held up both to inspect them. “Wash them together enough, and they grow to look like each other. Just like an old married couple.” Then she rolled them back up and threw them in the basket.

“A sock love story,” I said. “I’ve never before thought of the laundry as romantic.”

“Everything’s romantic,” she said. “But I suspect you’re a cynic.”

“No doubt.”

“Peggy,” she said. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No,” I said. I snapped a pair of Oscar’s pants so the wrinkles flew out, then began to fold.

“No possibilities?”

I folded clothing double-time to show that I did not care to talk about it.

“Hmm,” she said. I didn’t know what she was hmming about. “You should try it,” she said.

“I’m afraid I’m not cut out for all that,” I said.

“Well, who cut you out?” she said. “Cut yourself out again.”

“Easy to make it sound so easy,” I said. “But it isn’t.”

“A girl needs a husband, Peggy,” she said.

“Well,” I said. “I’ve always been a terrible failure at being a girl.”

Caroline did not understand me. She was as beautiful as her sister-in-law but never seemed to put much effort into it; every attractive thing about her, from the way her clothes fit to the red lipstick that flattered her skin exactly, seemed like great good luck. She was a dry person, not in an unpleasant way: like a flower that had been pressed in a dictionary for years, lovely and saved but liable to fall to dust. Like a pressed flower, she was messy but steady, captured at some moment for good. Even her clothing was like that, thin pretty cotton that showed the faint tint of her skin beneath it. For all her messiness, her clothes never seemed dirty, as if they came away from meetings with her unimpressed.

Caroline pulled a cobwebbed chair out from a corner and lowered herself into it. “I don’t know,” she said.

“What don’t you know?”

She stretched an arm, thinking. “I wish my family were here. I mean, Mrs. Sweatt is gone, poor Jim’s in Boston. I even miss my brother, and I haven’t missed my brother in years, not since he left Mrs. Sweatt. It’s like I’m about to have even more family”—she put a hand on her stomach—“and all I can think is it isn’t enough, I want more . Don’t you ever get greedy for relatives?”

“You forget,” I told her. “I’m a librarian. All I’m greedy for is peace and quiet.”

Caroline wanted to find me a romance. Perhaps it was the action of a friend who was worried about me, of a soon-to-be mother who suddenly planned to take care of the world. Perhaps without Mrs. Sweatt, she needed a new person to take in hand. Perhaps she wanted to get me out of her hair.

I did think of love sometimes, for months at a time, to the exclusion of everything else. If I had love, I could concentrate on other things. If I had love, then my entire life would open up. Late at night I wouldn’t have to dream of who would love me, and how; nor while shelving books; nor moments when I found myself not paying attention to what people were saying to me. Ordinary people, I thought — loved people — could devote themselves to good works, or other sins, or benign undemanding hobbies.

And then the feeling would pass. I would realize that I hadn’t thought of such things for ages, that such hopeless dreams of romance were like a language I had made up to communicate with a childhood friend and, losing that friend, the verbs and nouns curdled to gobbledygook, evidence of a passion and belief I could not believe I’d ever taken seriously.

I had not had that feeling since I’d met James, and perhaps I was now, for the first time in my life, in love. If that were so, I was wrong: my thoughts were not freer, my life not more efficient. Not even more pleasant — like Caroline, I hated suspense, and suddenly it seemed suspense was the fabric of my life. What will happen next, what will I say next, what will be said to me?