“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 were 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.”