Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House - A Romance

“Let me look,” he said.

The paper towels fell to messy pieces as I swabbed at James’s foot. “That’s better,” I said, because it was, anything was better. “What you chiefly need is a pedicure. In the meantime, maybe we should go home.”

“No,” he said. “I told them I’d be here.”

I thought, But I bet they don’t want you here now. Of course they didn’t, and that made me want to stay. I wanted to fix the whole thing, but the whole thing was so bad. How could this have happened? We kept him fed, got him books, we sent him on a walk with a pretty girl, we worried and we fussed and we never thought about his feet. Never occurred to us that someone who could not feel his feet would have problems with them: weren’t all foot problems pain?

“Let’s give it a chance,” he said. “They advertised and everything. They’ve already paid me some, and they’re going to pay more.”

“Here you go,” said the salesman. He handed me a grimy towel and a roasting pan. “Borrowed them from the restaurant next door.”

I said to James, “Let’s get you clean.” I filled the pan and lifted it, wobbling, to the floor. “Pick up your foot and set it here.” I rolled up his pant leg so that it wouldn’t slop in the water. It was a man’s calf now, thin but with hair scattered over the skin.

“I have to do this,” he said. “I can’t have come all this way just to leave.”

“Oh, honey,” I said. I put my hand in the water. I laced my fingers between his toes, those sticky toes, sharp with their uncut nails. “I don’t even know if I can get your shoe back on.”

“Give it a chance, huh? We won’t get my feet measured, but I can still meet the kids.”

We kept still a minute, me holding on to his foot, him wedged back on that toilet, one arm draped over the sink. Shouldn’t he get to a doctor, get those feet checked out? The water in the roasting pan was getting cold. I wanted to dry his foot, but the restaurant towel was filthy.

Well, we’d have to improvise something. We were used to it. Ordinary-sized people, they don’t know: their lives have been rehearsed and rehearsed by every single person who ever lived before them, inventions and improvements and unimportant notions each generation, each year. In 600 B.C. somebody did something that makes your life easier today; in 1217, 1892. Somebody like James had to ad-lib any little thing: how to sit, how to travel.

I looked at him. “How long?”

“Half an hour,” he said. “Hour tops. And in the future,” he said, “we’ll know.”

“Know what?”

“Know to be careful,” he said, but all I could think of was all the other things that could go wrong.

So I cleaned the other foot, which was bad, but not quite as. Blotted them dry with paper towels, chased down drops of moisture between his toes, in the cracks of neglected skin at his heels. The shoe store carried foot powder, and they donated a can to the cause. I got the shoes back on, without the socks, and told him to sit on the desk and stay put — avoid walking at all costs.

And in fact we stayed two hours. We agreed with the shoe salesman that there was no point in measuring him for shoes—“His feet are all swollen out of size right now anyhow,” he said, “you can just measure them for me when you get home”—so James sat on the desktop and waited for the customers. Children ran in, their mothers following with the rolled-up newspaper page: Meet the world’s tallest boy!

“I figured he must be,” said Hugh Peters. “Now I think he must be the tallest man, too.”

The children were amazed by him. “You must be very old,” one said. James handed out presents from the wicker basket. He talked to mothers. One was holding a fat baby. “Ninety-ninth percentile for height and weight,” she said, joggling him. You could tell it was something she usually said with pride, but this time her voice was tinged with apprehension.

Hugh Peters tapped me on the shoulder. “Cup of coffee?” he asked. I shook my head. “Come back and talk to me a second, anyhow.”

He took me to the storeroom and sat down on a wobbly salesman’s chair. “Nice kid,” he said. “Here, let me write you the check for the rest of his fee.”

“Got a lot of customers,” I said.

“Yeah. Advertising pays off.”

“Sorry it took so long to lure him out here. Now that he sees it’s easy — he’s having a great time with those kids — next time won’t be so hard.”

Hugh Peters nodded seriously.

“And I was wondering,” I said, and why was I so bold? Two pleasant hours in a shoe store, and I was ready to ask for, I was ready to demand the moon. “What about the exposition in New York?”

“Oh,” said Hugh Peters. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“He seems pretty fragile, don’t you think?”

“Not as fragile as he looks.”

“I just don’t want him to overextend himself.”

“I appreciate your concern—”

“Miss Cort,” said Peters. Now he looked me in the eye; I hadn’t realized he’d been avoiding that. “We’re a shoe company. He doesn’t walk well. He has foot problems.”

“Foot problems one day,” I said.

“It isn’t good advertising. We can work something out, certainly, with making his shoes and whatnot, we’d still like to use his name. But the exposition, no, I think we’ll have to turn that possibility down.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m a businessman,” he said, then he sighed. It wasn’t a businesslike sigh. “He’s a nice man, nice boy, but what can I do? He’s got those braces. I didn’t know about the braces. If he falls, where does that leave us? You understand?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“You’ll tell him? Because it’ll be better out of your mouth. Tell him what you like, what you think will make it okay. Make me a villain, if that’s easier. I am sorry.”

Out in the shop James had his foot under the fluoroscope. Through the shoe leather and skin, you could see the jumbled-up bones, gray and aquatic-looking. He wiggled his ghostly toes for the children.

Hugh Peters left me to drive home James, who’d thought the day was a success. I’d insisted that we stop by his doctor’s on the way home, and was already filled with shame that I hadn’t insisted on medical attention right away. “That wasn’t so bad,” said James, and for him that was a statement of starry-eyed optimism. “I’m thinking, Peggy, maybe I’ll go into sales.”

“I thought you wanted to be a lawyer.”

“Law school takes forever. Next time I come out, I figure I’ll prepare more.”

“Well,” I said. “That might be a while.”

He didn’t hear me. He was remembering the ring of the cash register as the mothers bought their children shoes, a sound that James could think he caused. He did cause it, I’m quite sure. The salesman would hand the customer the change, and the customer turned to James and thanked him , not the salesman, not the president of the company.

The doctor scrubbed his feet down and prescribed a salve. A mild infection, not too bad. But the doctor was angry.

“Who’s in charge of these things?”

“Me,” James said quietly. “I just didn’t feel it.”

“Well then, you need help,” said the doctor. “If you can’t tell when something’s gone this wrong, enlist somebody who can. No reason for this sort of thing to happen.”

He clipped James’s toenails, too. “Come here,” he told me. “Watch. Somebody else should know how to do this.”

Of course I should have told James straight off about what Hugh Peters had said. James’s life was constantly forged for him: your mother is alive, you’ll be employed forever, you will never die, you should look forward to everything.