Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House - A Romance

He walked over. She barely came up to his knee. I could see where her girdle ended: her stomach rose up over it like a sequined bolster. The circus paired them so they’d exaggerate each other’s size, but they in fact looked right together, the way opposites often do, sequin and poplin, frivolous and studious. Leila looked like some fizzy obsolete green drink from a nineteenth-century novel, one that puts you to sleep and gives you dreams that explain your life; James, like the country doctor who’d visit you the next day to break the news that you might never recover. Leila the energetic drug, James the antidote, distilled from the same plant but with different inclinations.

Leila did not even bother to attempt to look him in the eye when they were standing. “Good way to break my neck. So, Jimmy, where do you buy your clothing? Same place I do, I bet. Help me on this truck, okay?” He offered his hand; she looked at it and laughed.

“Too big!” she said. “We are a pair . Afterward, we will go dancing.” She put her hand out to the truck driver instead. James got in next to her, his cane across his lap.

“You wanna go to your seat?” the manager asked me.

I didn’t, but I went anyhow. Tomorrow I’d wait backstage, but for opening night they’d saved me a seat in the front row, just to the right of the center ring. I left Leila and James on their truck, ready far in advance for the starting parade.

The parade was only a minute; James didn’t even get off the truck. He and Leila waved as they toured the arena, but they waved the same way the bouncing girls on top of elephants did, and the clowns, and the acrobats in their lamé suits.

Then the circus started. Sitting that close dizzied me. As a child, I sat up high in the back of Boston Garden, where I could keep my eyes on all three rings at once; down here my attention was scrambled by the poodles with their fur shaved in ruffs and the ponies in feathered crowns. Really, I was just biding my time till James came back for his featured performance. I wondered what the audience would think of him. And then I wondered whether everyone in the circus had someone like me in the stands — not in New York, necessarily, but down the road, a mother in a hometown, a pretty girl met on the street in Miami, a barely known cousin in Des Moines: one particular person looking with particular interest. I wondered how Mrs. Sweatt, in this audience, would look at James. Some pride perhaps, a lot of worries. Mostly, I imagined her sitting still, saying, my son, my son, my son .

And then I tried to view everyone with this individual interest. The showgirl with the red hair and blond eyebrows. The lantern-jawed clown dressed like a schoolmarm. The red-faced roustabout whirling the elephants’ steel pedestals through the cutaway into the center ring. It got oppressive, as if by paying this attention I created the need in them. Not a profound need: the showgirl was not offering me her soul, just her legs in thick not-quite-skin-colored stockings, her spangled doublet, her face smiling up at the audience in general. But surely she needed to be looked at; why else would she have joined up?

Finally it was time for James and Leila. The ringmaster announced them from the center, and the truck was revealed in a splash of lights. Leila stepped out first, almost bouncing, waving. Then James. I waited for the gasp, but there was none. The light glinted off his glasses, though he barely moved. Maybe he was sniffing for the first rich hints of a fire from a dropped cigarette. First I looked across the arena to the people on the far side: the few faces I could divine seemed, well, unimpressed. The people on either side of me watched James with no wonder at all; the kids squirmed in laps, stood on thighs to face their parents. They’d seen women swinging from their long hair, men pedaling bicycles across wires, tigers complaining like retirees as they lay down, rolled over, sat up. The cheapest seats were so far away that nothing looked big to them, not even James. Just a man, just an ordinary man, leaning on a cane as tall as the ringmaster. They’d have preferred the cowboy outfit, a mile-long leotard.

Leila climbed up to a high platform that put her at James’s eye level, and this the crowd liked — funnier to have the height difference beneath her. The lights bubbled off her sequins, green, intoxicating.

“You were terrific,” I told James after the show. I’d gone backstage as soon as possible.

“Not much to do. But I was nervous.”

“You seemed like an old pro.” I reached up to smooth the lapel of his jacket. He’d been sweating, from nerves or exertion I didn’t know, and the fabric had darkened in spots. “Maybe we’ll get this cleaned tomorrow.”

Leila came up to us, riding on the back of the truck. “My chauffeur brings me everywhere.” She punched the arm of the man behind the wheel, who didn’t even smile. “Where you staying, Jimmy?”

“At the Astor.”

“A snob!” she said happily. She stood up on the back of the truck. “Me, I stay with everybody else. So. We’ll have lunch. Me and you.” It wasn’t a question.

“Sure!” James said. “Great. Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow, yes. Where do you eat? Your favorite place.”

“Anywhere. Where do you eat?”

Leila shrugged. “When I get hungry, I stop and eat. Wherever I am. Not so fancy as you, so you choose.”

“The Automat,” said James.

Leila laughed. “Not fancy, but good. You will reach the top drawers and I the bottoms. Good.”

“What time?” I asked.

“Ah,” said Leila. Then she turned to James. “She wants to be invited. She’s afraid I will do something to her boy.”

“No—” I started.

“She thinks I will kidnap you to the circus forever. She thinks I will make you elope.” She looked at me again. “I will not. But maybe—” She sat down, not next to the driver but on the platform behind him, her legs dangling off the edge. “Maybe the boy wants to elope himself. So! To make you feel better, have dessert with us. For lunch I get him for my own, then you come. If we elope, we do this with your blessing. Right, Jimmy?”

“Yes,” said James. “Of course.”

“Twelve o’clock the Automat,” said Leila. “One-thirty for dessert.” Then she slapped the driver on the back as if he were a horse who’d fallen asleep, and the truck went lurching off.

Before I went to meet them at the Automat, I looked through my suitcase for something to wear. How had I managed to assemble such a dowdy brown wardrobe? I put on one outfit, then tried a belt to dress it up and show off my hips, then decided that my hips were no prize and shouldn’t be highlighted. Leila would know what to wear, I thought. Then I was appalled with myself: now I was jealous of a midget with an accent. Which gave me something else to be appalled about, characterizing her in such a way. I finally put on the dress I’d worn the day before and went out to hail a taxi.

The Automat was crowded with a combination of tourists — after life in Brewsterville, I could identify any sort — and regulars. The visitors peered through every single food window; the New Yorkers had the locations of their favorites memorized. I’d pictured Leila in a child’s red vinyl booster seat, but instead she perched on top of a stack of metal chairs. She was in the middle of some story that made her spread her arms like a fisherman describing a lost catch.

The lunch china was still there, thick and yellowed and edged in gray marcelled waves. One solitary, ludicrous iced sweet roll sat on a saucer almost exactly the same size.

“Welcome,” she said. “We have saved this bun for you to eat.”

“No thank you,” I said. “I see you haven’t eloped.”