Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House - A Romance

“I didn’t know you objected to me having one,” I said. “I thought I was doing you a favor, giving up the better part of one of my days off to drive you to a social event where I wouldn’t know anybody. I’m sorry. Perhaps next time I’ll wait in the hall, and you can come get me when you’re ready to leave.”

I couldn’t tell if we were arguing like husband and wife or mother and son; I wanted to rectify that. “I’m happy to drive you anywhere, James. You know that. But I’m not your mother. I’m doing it as a friend , and so you better treat me like one.”

We walked to the Nash in silence. Then he said, “I want to drive.” I heard this as, I want to die . He rubbed the fender and repeated it.

I answered, not unsympathetically, “You’re drunk.”

“No I’m not.”

“You don’t know how to drive.”

“You can teach me. I only had one beer. Oh, two, I guess. I mean, you wouldn’t even have to teach me, I took driver’s ed, the classroom part, so basically I know how. The driver’s seat flips down the other side, right? It’s perfect.”

I looked at him. I had my hand in my purse, my fingers sliding along the serrated edge of the key.

“I’m insane,” I said.

“No! You’re not! I’ll be really careful, we won’t even go on the highway.”

“Okay. First: which one’s the brake and which one’s the gas?”

He set his hands in front of him, palms to the ground. He closed his eyes. “Brake.” He depressed his left hand. “Gas. Gearshift.” His right hand closed to a fist, up toward the imaginary steering wheel. “Ignition.” His left hand came up. “Lights. Windshield wipers.” Then he flipped his left hand up, stuck it out, flipped it down. “Right. Left. Stop.”

“You promise to keep your eyes open if I let you drive?”

He opened them, nodded. I flung the keys, and he caught them in a snatch.

“Your reflexes are good. That was the last test. Let’s go.”

I folded the driver’s seat down. Even he needed a pillow behind him to drive; luckily, so did I, and I tucked it behind him, then got into the backseat so that we were sitting next to each other. I was miles from reaching the radio.

He was a good driver, improbably good for someone who’d never driven, but maybe I was just in a suddenly fine mood. I was surprised by my willingness to let him drive; proud, even. As soon as he got used to the way the car jumped when given too much gas or brake, it didn’t jump anymore. I pointed out his tendency to rush traffic lights and stop signs.

“What the heck,” I said. “You might as well drive all the way home.”

“On the highway?” he said.

“It’s the middle of the night. There isn’t any traffic, and actually it’s easier to drive on the highway. There’s less to avoid hitting.”

“I’m ready to go to the shoe store,” he said casually. “You can call them.”

“Oh. Good. What changed your mind?”

“It’s time,” he said. We finally found Route 6A, and pulled on.

“I want a cigarette,” James announced. He pulled out a crumpled pack from his shirt pocket and looked at me, wanting, I supposed, to gauge my disapproval. I tried not to show any. “Could you get one for me?” he said. “And light it?” So I stuck a cigarette in my mouth, while he unrolled the backseat window by his elbow.

“How often do you smoke?” I asked. He took the cigarette from me, put that hand on the steering wheel, and looked at the watch on his other hand. I’d forgotten what a complicated process juggling the wheel is in the first few days of driving.

“Well,” he said. “Every morning this month.”

“Really.”

He laughed. “It’s one A.M. July first. I’m only telling the truth. Not that much. Almost never.”

“Me neither,” I said, and I lit a cigarette for myself.

“You, too?”

“Occasionally,” I answered, though it had been since college. I touched my hair, realized Astoria’s lurid hat was still in Uncle Fisher’s pocket. Somehow I suspected that if I told the story right, she’d understand. And then I rolled down my back window, too, and we smoked our cigarettes and when we were finished we tossed them out, and they flew behind us like Stella’s bouquet, except that no plump bridesmaid anchored down by satin shoes and a tulle petticoat caught them. Only the highway, which took care of us in this and other ways on the ride home, our windows still unwound, James still at the wheel.

But before we got to Brewsterville, he said, not looking at me, “Peggy. Have you ever been in love?”

Ah, he was a romantic, like his aunt. I stared out the windshield, wondering what to answer.

“No,” I said finally. “Have you?”

“Hmmm. I don’t know. Maybe. Not sure.”

I locked and unlocked the car door. “Who?”

“Who?” he said, and then he must have realized he was stalling. “Who-who. Who indeed.” He sighed. “I think I used to be in love with Stella.”

“Used to be,” I said. “Not anymore?”

“No.”

“What cured you?”

He laughed. “The cure for this terrible ailment was. Well, I don’t know what it was. I guess I talked myself out of it. I guess unrequited love is a bed of nails I don’t want to spend my life lying on.”

“That bad.”

“No. At first it’s the mere feat of it, you know? The fact that you’re doing it, the adrenaline gets you through. But after that—”

“After that, you start to feel the nails.”

“Yup.”

“You ever tell her?”

“Fat chance. She has guys telling her they love her all day long. She told me so. Now, if I said I loved her, would she tell me things like that? Anyhow, that’s how I feel today.”

Just a crush , I thought, but I didn’t say it. I’d heard enough of the music the teenagers played to know that saying such a thing would turn me into A Hated Grown-up.

“So you never had a boyfriend.” He said this as a statement of fact.

“Yes, I have,” I said. “In my wicked past. A few.” Then I regretted it, because if I’d said no, it would have made our lives more alike. I looked for things that made us seem alike. But I would have been lying; it had been a while, but I’d had boyfriends.

“You had a wicked past?” he said. He smiled, clearly not believing it.

“Semi-wicked,” I said. “Absolutely saintly compared to most.”

“Tell me about it. Did you break his heart, or did he break yours?”

“It isn’t interesting.”

“I want to hear about your past,” he said.

“My past,” I told him, “is a series of practical jokes carried out by bored and nasty-minded boys.”

“Oh,” he said. It wasn’t the answer he’d wanted.

But for some reason I couldn’t help but elaborate. “Every now and then, I get offered a chair, and I think, nope, not going to fall for this again, but of course I do, and when I go to sit down, it’s been pulled out from under me.”

“But your heart was never broken,” said James.

“Not my heart,” I said. “I never landed on my heart.”

With the money the shoe store advanced, James commissioned a new pair of pants and a shirt. The Portuguese tailor from the next town came to the cottage to take his measurements.

“Yes,” he said, looking at James. “This is the biggest challenge of my career.” His accent gave the words a jaunty pessimism. But he did good work, though he called several times to make sure that he’d got it right, that the collar would really have to be that expansive, the legs that long. “I saw him but I forget. Remind me again.”

The shoe store people were beside themselves. They took out ads in several local papers, geared toward children and their parents. MEET THE WORLD’S TALLEST BOY, 10 AM–12 PM, HYANNIS SHOES.