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.”
Meet the Tallest Boy in the World
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.
I offered to let him drive, but he said he was too distracted. Not distracted enough, however, that he could not criticize with his newfound knowledge of the road. I was a careful driver. Still I could hear him sputter in the back.
We got there at nine, an hour before the store opened, so that James could get settled and get his feet measured for a new pair of shoes; the old ones, he said, were hard to get on in the morning. That was the only way he could tell he’d outgrown them: the difficulty in getting them on first thing, off at night. Sometimes he slept in his shoes, he told me. Between the size of his feet and the distance they we
re from his arms, it was easier that way.
“Get Oscar to come over,” I said.
“Too much trouble.”
They’d decorated the front of the store with balloons, streamers. A huge shoe took up most of the window display; just like James’s, though made years before, so smaller. A middle-aged man in a suit leaned on the short brick wall that held up the shop windows.
“Jim,” he said, standing up, holding out his hand. “Hugh Peters. President of the chain.” True enough, he was wearing beautiful shoes, rich and red as porterhouse steaks. “Glad we finally coaxed you out here.”
“Nice to meet you, sir.”
You could see Hugh Peters trying his best not to notice James’s height. He shook his head and laughed. “How tall are you, exactly?”
“It’s been a while since I’ve checked,” said James. He smoothed his new shirt.
“About?”
“Eight feet two, last time I was measured.”
“But still growing?”
“So far,” said James.
“So you must be the tallest in the world by now. I mean, nobody’s eight feet tall. Am I right? Basketball players aren’t eight feet tall.”
“I don’t know,” said James. “I don’t follow basketball.”
“Well, come on in,” said Hugh Peters.
The shoe store had two doors: regular-sized and child-sized, right next to each other. “Play your cards right,” Hugh Peters said, “and we’ll put in another one for you.”
It looked just like the shoe stores of my youth: boxes stacked along the walls like a puzzle whose point was to extract what you wanted without disturbing the whole pile; slanted stools; gray metal slide measures. Up front there were chrome chairs with shiny red vinyl seats; halfway back, in the children’s section, were identical chairs half the size. From the front the chairs looked like some botched trick of perspective. A wicker basket in the back held prizes for children who’d been good, and probably for those who hadn’t. No customers yet.
“What’s that?” James asked, pointing at a piece of machinery in the back.
“Fluoroscope,” said Hugh Peters. “Like an X ray. Helps us look at the bones of growing feet, figure out what’ll fit ’em best.”
We stood there. James looked around for a wall to lean on or a chair without arms. But the walls were jumbled up with their boxes, and we were standing by the banks of extra-small chairs.
“Would you like to sit down?” I asked him, loud enough for Hugh Peters to overhear.
“Oh,” Peters said. “Well. Didn’t think of that. Those chairs—” He pointed at the adult chairs near the front. “No good?”
James shook his head. “The arms will get in the way.”
“Let me look out back.”
He called over a salesman, and together they went to the storeroom. The salesman came back wheeling an oak desk chair, took a look at James, then wheeled it back.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea,” James said to me.
“They’ll find something.”
Then Hugh Peters and the salesman came out carrying a desk that matched the chair. Peters had taken off his suit jacket, had flipped his red necktie over one shoulder. The blotter slipped off the top and hit the floor.
“I hope, that this, is fine.” They set the desk down. Peters adjusted his tie, then wiped his shining forehead. “Should be tall enough, right?”
James sat on the edge. “Fine.”
“Well, let’s see. I think we’ll get a pretty big crowd. We’ve done radio, we’ve done the papers. Town’s talking about it. Kids mostly, and parents. So all we need you to do is sit and chat. Mention what you like about the shoes. How they treating you, our shoes?”
“They’re good,” said James.
“They don’t pinch, right? Give you good support?”
“Very good support.”
“Okay, mention that.”
“I will.” James nodded.
“Good support for growing feet—and who’d know better than you, right?”
“Let’s take a gander at your dogs, Jim.” The salesman knelt down. “Let’s see,” he said, looking at the brace that buckled beneath the sole of the shoe, “how does this work?” Then he figured it out, undid it. The brace swung back with a creak. He unlaced James’s high stiff shoe and slipped it off.
Even I could smell it: terrible, acrid. James’s sock was soaked through at the toe. The salesman made a face.
“Wow,” he said. He held on to James’s heel a moment, at a dry spot. Then he said, “Maybe you want to wash your feet, Jim. There’s a sink out back, in the men’s room.”
James looked down at his foot. “Okay. Put the shoe back on?” The man did. “Tie it, too, will you?” The man clearly wanted to get away from that foot as quickly as he could, but he obeyed.
James stood; the unfastened brace clattered against itself. I followed him to the men’s room, which would have been cramped for a regular-sized person.
“Do you want some help?”
“Be quicker that way.” He wedged himself in and sat on the closed lid of the toilet, leaned against the wall.
I knelt down; I had to open the door to give the back half of me room. “Hand ’er over,” I said, and he scooted the foot in my direction. I unlaced the shoe—the salesman had fixed a knot instead of a bow—and slipped it off.
I’d been mad at the salesman at first for what seemed like rudeness, but this close I understood that it must have taken all he had to be that polite. It was what you might expect something dead to smell like, complicated and searing. I tried not to cough.
Then I slipped off his sock and saw that what I had thought was just sweat, just the usual bad manners of boyhood biology, was blood and fluid. His foot was meaty, rubbed wrong by the shoe and by itself. Some places the skin was white, other places pink. Up by his heel his skin was so dry it looked like it would flake off at a touch. The whole thing was cold. His toes were worst: the nails curled around their own toes, or knifed their neighbors, tore them up.
“Jesus Christ,” I heard somebody say. It was the salesman, looking over my shoulder. “Doesn’t that hurt?”
“We’ll be with you in a minute,” I said. “We’re taking care of it.” I got up and turned on the sink, soaked some paper towels through. I pumped some soap from the dispenser into my palm and then let the water flow over it into the sink.
I said, “Are your feet always like this?”
“Sometimes,” said James. His voice was low, and when I looked up he was close to tears. “I can’t feel them,” he said. “How can I know if I don’t feel them?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll clean them up.” I picked up the wad of paper towels and knelt again.
“I can’t help it. I can’t help it if I don’t know.”
“James,” I said. I held on to his foot. “Just calm down and everything will be fine.” I doubted this. The foot looked infected, and suddenly I realized there was a good chance the other would be just as bad, if not worse. I stuck my head out of the bathroom. “Hey,” I said to the salesman, who was talking to Hugh Peters. “Do you have a bowl, and perhaps a towel, a cloth one?”
“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.