House of Heroes Read online

  “I’ll go make the call for you.”

  “Not with the bow tie and all,” she said. “They’re tanked up. They’ll give you just as much of a hard time.” So neither of us made another call to Mike, and he must have gotten tied up, because he never came.

  I slept on the couch near the stove that night. Before I went to sleep, my thoughts wandered through the reasons I felt Anna had been showing me off at the restaurant. Maybe Anna thought that if the people in the restaurant could see that we had known each other for a long time, it would make her more real to them.

  But did I know her? When I tried to do her in the doorway, it wasn’t her at all. I realized it was only the smallness of the doorway that I had been imitating. I’ve done so many people and animals and household appliances, she should have been an easy subject.

  When the adults weren’t around, my brothers and sisters used to say, “Do Anna! Come on, do Anna!” But walking into a mime is like walking the length of a diving board. On the first bounce you know if you’re going to pull it off. I tried a few times to make the approach with Anna, but couldn’t get her. At the last minute, I would be unsure, and the sense I had of her would swell into something impossible and painful. I couldn’t contain her. I fell asleep with that idea of standing on the edge of the diving board.

  I’ve slept on couches before, in many people’s houses, so when I heard Mike come in, I barely stirred. I heard the talking, and later I heard the bed moving in the other room. It registered that two people were making love. But in the dark there, almost asleep, I wasn’t expecting to hear Anna’s voice. I don’t suppose it was so different from other women’s cries at those times, but it was surely Anna’s voice, and then I was awake and disturbed. For all the pleasure associated with it, there is also a beseeching quality in this sound. It has to do with coming to the edge of loneliness, being helpless in the face of it. There is that moment where you can be everything—or nothing—depending on how the other cares for you.

  Even after they were quiet, I couldn’t go back to sleep. What was it like to sleep with Anna? I should know; I’d spent enough nights in her room. I’d hook my arm over the side of her bed to avoid rolling into the crater her weight made in the mattress. Her bed was really two mattresses, a double bed and a single bed strapped crosswise to the end of it. Puddles would try to sleep between the two of us, but he would be delegated to the bottom of my side of the bed, since there was still a lot of room left there, and even though it was hard to see him in the dark, it seemed that he would be sitting up and watching us, as if he could make sense of our conversations.

  She’d ask me questions, not wanting me to fall asleep. Questions about what I thought of her, and if I thought there was a way she could make friends. Because of her longing, I found the simplest ways to mislead Anna about the world. I painted possibilities for her that I didn’t believe. It was just a matter of people getting to know her I would say—just a matter of time.

  I had stopped sleeping over by my sophomore year. I was involved with my own friends. In Anna’s junior year she maintained that her height was seven feet six inches. But I’m sure she was at least eight. She stopped going to school. My mother would say, “Call your cousin. She’s depressed.” I hated this. Sometimes my aunt would call. “Talk to Anna,” my mother would whisper with her hand cupped over the phone. But I’d shake my head and wave her away.

  Close to that time we were all shocked by a feature story about Anna in the Tribune. My mother saw it first. She pushed the paper in front of me at the breakfast table and stood up abruptly to call my aunt.

  GIANT GIRL RESOLVED TO BECOME MONUMENT AT EL WAS the headline in the local section. My mother was on the phone, “Helen, they say she has been loitering in the El station for weeks. The same stop every day.”

  I stared, bleary-eyed, at a photograph of Anna in the paper. Anna, whom I had never thought of as part of the world, had been photographed at the busiest El stop in Chicago, and this picture was printed in hundreds of thousands of newspapers across the state.

  “Helen!” my mother hissed into the phone. “You knew she wasn’t in school. Didn’t you wonder where she was? They say she stands right where the doors of the train open up. People have to walk around her to get off and on. She won’t answer the guards when they question her.”

  I won’t forget that photograph, Anna’s back to the camera, her head and shoulders standing out of the crowd like a tree in a marsh. The absurdity—what made it a good photograph, and perhaps also a good story—was that not one face or body in the crowd was acknowledging Anna’s enormous presence amidst them. Only the photograph recognized her power—the frozen image of the impression she made in a crowd of bodies, and how the crowd had no choice but to stream around her.

  I still have that photo tucked away in my performance scrapbook. Even when I was sixteen, looking at that picture for the first time, I wanted my cousin to turn and face her photographer. I wanted to see her realize that, at least for that moment, she was being understood.

  The publicity caused the police to be involved, and she ended up in a psychiatric unit. I don’t know if they talked to her about the difficulties of being a giant. I’m sure they talked about “fitting in,” because her behavior turned around. She got a starting position at the post office through Job Corps. While I went to college, Anna started a checking account, got raises and promotions. Eventually she was transferred to Waupaca in a supervisory position. I received a card from her in my dormitory one day. “Puddles died,” she wrote, “and I’m still sad about it. I won’t be getting another until I’m more settled here. This is a very small town. I see the same people over and over again and they see me. I figure eventually they’re going to get used to me….”

  Anna and Mike were up before I was. They were making breakfast sounds, and the smell of coffee eventually drew me out from beneath my covers. The stove had gone too far down. I put my coat on and my wool socks because the cement was cold.

  “Here’s Jane, Mike,” Anna said with great enthusiasm.

  He was perhaps in his mid-forties, stout in his work clothes. His hands were short-fingered and ruddy around his coffee cup. I think he probably thought that he smiled. But it was really just a quick nod.

  “Hello,” he said, clearing his throat.

  My short hair, after it has been slept on, tends to resemble that of a hedgehog’s. I wished I could look less bizarre.

  “Why don’t you stoke that thing, Mike, while I start the eggs,” Anna said.

  The smell of bacon frying and the burning of new wood in the stove began working against the dampness of the cement, making it more like a home.

  After breakfast, Anna showed me some wooden figures Mike had carved. Most of them were of wildlife: a squirrel running over the branch of a tree, a duck in flight. He was very good at conveying the motion in the bodies. Mike stood near the stove with his coffee cup and thumbed through the morning paper while we commented on each figure. But he was paying enough attention to realize we were finished because he pulled out another shoe box. “I’ve started to do some people too,” he said. They were not as true to form, but there was an earnestness in some of his detail—an apron bunched in a woman’s hand, a boy with bulging pockets—that made the figures appealing in their own way.

  The Waupaca Township field is like other small-town athletic fields. It is in a prominent location on the highway into town. The town marker (POPULATION 3,862) is directly across the road. Except for the two cyclone-fence backstops, the two diamonds, two trash barrels, and a pair of six-tier bleachers, the park is grass. Standing in the field, one can see the surrounding businesses: an auto body shop in a large aluminum prefab building; a house with a lot full of school buses; a co-op with two grain elevators like shoulders on either side of it. Nothing was too far away. As people began gathering in the field, I imagined I could almost hear the doors of their houses slamming and cars starting as they left home to come there.

  The sky was a gray ca
nopy, bulging, heavy, and holding water over our heads. The few spectators and the team members stood in hopeful but uncertain postures; it could so surely rain in the next minute. Some of the people dusted the paths between bases with sand to make them less muddy.

  Anna started the women’s softball team three years ago. That was how she made her first friends in town. Mike is on the men’s team. Since they were playing a casual game, the two teams mixed together. Mike and Anna were split up, so one or the other came to stand with me while they waited to bat. Mike brought me a plastic cup filled with beer, which was cold in my already cold hand. Anna was playing first base. She stood with her feet wide apart, calling at plays, yodeling and yelling, having a good time.

  “How’d she ever find a mitt to fit her?” I asked Mike.

  “Had it custom made,” he said.

  I was having trouble thinking of conversation. But there was always the game to watch, and Mike, though taciturn, was comfortable to be with. He had the slightest overbite, giving a touch of vulnerability to an otherwise rough face.

  “She looks absolutely frightening,” I said.

  “Yeah.” Mike laughed for the first time, letting his teeth jut out. “You gotta believe. No batter can run as fast as he might when he’s got Anna waiting for him on first.”

  “You should carve her like that,” I said.

  He looked out at her from underneath the visor of his cap. “No,” he said. I knew he wasn’t finished. He seemed to need to spend a certain amount of time between words. “It would have to be Michelangelo,” he said. “I bought a book of him in Milwaukee. It cost a hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

  He was right. We could see it in the muscles in her legs, as she strained forward waiting for the next play, and in her hands, which were both like a man’s and a woman’s and then like something else. Mike couldn’t carve her into a figure that fit into a shoe box any more than I could make my own hands resemble hers simply by copying the movement of them.

  When I was nine, I used to stand on the sidelines with my friends and watch her play touch football with the older boys. She was fascinating to all of us, and I played the part of her representative. “She’s only ten,” I would say, defying our family taboo about calling attention to her size. “She ate forty-seven pancakes for breakfast last Saturday.” Anna stood for the possibility of myth in our daily lives. And for a while, I earned a certain admiration from the others because I knew her. This was when I first realized that I had a special knack for pointing out certain details in life. But eventually Anna was no longer an amusing wonder. She was as real and floundering in her adolescence as we were. And I suppose, where she was once an ideal, she later became only an exaggeration of what was painful in ourselves.

  A thin man with long sideburns got caught in a pickle between first and second. Anna had the ball and shuffled toward him. He headed back to second. Anna whipped the ball over his head. He spun round and made it back to first before she could touch him or the base.

  “Go, man! Get past that big hog!” A fist came up out of a group of five men standing on the sidelines.

  “Jesus, what’s he doing here?” Mike muttered.

  “What? Who?” I said.

  “The guy in the letter jacket.”

  After some of the men in the group shifted their positions, I could see the man in the letter jacket. Levis, boots, about thirty years old. The men around him were different ages, mostly older. Some wore hunting clothes, a couple wore jeans and flannel shirts like Mike. All of them seemed affected by the diffuse charisma of the younger man. One would chuckle and pass some joke on to another, who would laugh and spit on the ground. But the flow of their interaction seemed to originate always from this young man, who was very handsome. He stood with the tips of his fingers in his jeans’ pockets. He kept his eyes on Anna, and he must have been saying things under his breath, because the others would laugh and look toward her.

  “What does he have to do with her?” I asked.

  “Good question,” Mike said. “He’s a troublemaker. He’s out for her. He was at the Schooner Inn last night. Didn’t she tell you? This has been a problem since she came.”

  “What do you mean out for her?”

  “Out for her. Can’t let her be.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows? Anna’s convinced herself that the guy applied for a job at the post office and didn’t get it or something. That’s not it, though. There’ve been others like him, drawn to her in a hateful way.”

  The game ended in rain, with Anna standing on first base. She stood out there longer than anyone, as if the umpire might change his mind. Her wet clothes were becoming translucent and defining the lines of her body. Her makeup was running. She would be embarrassed, I thought, if she could see how she looked. Mike and I waited for her, getting water in our beer. The man in the letter jacket stood around. The blond hair on his head got dark in the rain. His friends shifted their weight on their feet, blew on their hands. It was getting colder by the minute.

  I took a Saturday afternoon nap in Anna’s room, while she and Mike watched a football game on TV. I think the smell of the cement made me dream about the El station. I was walking along the tracks. Someone had sent me to find Anna. I still hadn’t found her but met the man in the letter jacket everywhere, coming down the stairs, hoisting himself up onto the platform from the tracks. I spent the whole dream trying to get to her before he did.

  Anna woke me hours later. She had a bag of burgers and some milk. “You’ve slept a long time. Fill your stomach now, or you won’t keep up with the drinking tonight.”

  It was dark, and I was groggy and disoriented. “Where’s Mike?”

  “He has a roof in Stevens Point to finish. He’ll meet us later.”

  Anna and I went early to the closing-out party. This way we were able to get a table before the crowds piled in. I thought I had known what to expect: there would be more men than women, many farmers and mill workers. I expected that people would get very drunk, and I’d get a little drunk and watch them. I looked forward to it. I hadn’t expected to get involved.

  Baldy’s and Mary’s was downtown. When we came to the door, Anna stopped for a minute and adjusted herself. She brought out a mirror that looked as tiny as a postage stamp in her hand, checked her lips, her eyes, and the blush on her cheeks. Cars, driving by, made a sticky sound on the wet pavement. A banner cut out of a bed sheet with the word WELCOME hung over the door. The paint was running. Pale red drops of water beaded from the edges and dripped on the sidewalk. When Anna opened the door, there was a vacuum sound like one’s ears being unclogged.

  The bar was dark. We were the first ones there. As we walked, the sound of our heels echoed over the wooden floor. There was one long bar with a mirror behind it. The bartender was bald, as I would have expected. He watched Anna and me as we came in. “Wait, I’ll introduce you,” she said. During her introductions, Baldy looked at me with the studied indifference I’ve seen in many bartenders. But he had small, brown, wary eyes. Mary, a wiry, middle-aged woman, wearing a T-shirt and an apron, pointed her finger like she was shooting us and went on working at a grill behind the bar. I expected this was another friendly sort of bartender’s greeting.

  “Baldy, your bottles are already gone?” Anna said, gesturing toward the empty shelves in front of the mirror.

  He looked up at Anna. “We’d a gone crazy—pouring out individual drinks. We made Wapatui.”

  There were five tables on the floor constructed out of wooden cable spools. Two stacked together made them high enough to put stools around them. In the center of each table was a steel tub. We walked over to one of the tables and looked into the tub.

  “What’s in here?” Anna called back to the bar.

  “Everything,” Baldy answered.

  It was hard to tell what color the punch was. It seemed a sort of amber red. Maraschino cherries and canned pineapple rings floated in it. As we settled onto stools, Anna pulled two plastic cups
from a stack and filled them with a ladle. It tasted sweet and very strong.

  We were joined shortly by three young women, each of them wearing a shoulder bag. They didn’t remove their purses, as if they hadn’t decided they would stay. Anna knew one of them slightly. A young man, whom no one knew, and his girlfriend sat down. The last two stools were taken by an older man and his wife.

  People kept coming through the doors. I realized I’d better pace my drinking. The liquor was much stronger than it tasted. Anna huddled over me, and we were able to talk in the privacy of the noise. We became used to people standing near our table reaching around us to fill their glasses.

  “What do you think?” Anna asked.

  “It’s wild. How come they’re selling out?”

  “Baldy’s had two heart attacks. Mary gave him an ultimatum—no bar, or no wife.”

  Sometimes we were quiet, and I could listen to the snatches of conversation about gardens, or factories, or casseroles. Sometimes there would be hick Wisconsin syntax shouted across the room. “Com’on over—why don’t cha, hey?” and I’d want to nudge Anna to share the distinction between this place and Chicago. But then I remembered that Anna felt no kinship for Chicago. She was less a part of that than I was of this.

  “Do you like Mike?” She was bending close to my ear.

  “Yeah,” I shouted.

  I was telling Anna about the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, because the crowd reminded me of my time there. She began to seem distracted as I was talking. We were facing the bar, and she kept looking in the mirror behind it. I finally looked into the mirror too. It was the man in the letter jacket. He was leaning over his glass on the bar, but he was watching Anna. She had turned away from him and was laughing with the girl next to her—trying to ignore him. His cronies were standing around him on the floor, but he had his back to them. They were all laughing and drinking together. One or another would look over at him, make some mental note, and then look again into his drink.

  Anna seemed resolved to ignore him. She had struck up a conversation with the husband and wife. I stared at him, trying to lock his eyes, the way people will do with cats. But his eyes wouldn’t leave Anna. I looked around the room. Little dramas were developing throughout the crowd that wouldn’t have happened an hour ago. A woman crying in her hand while her boyfriend tried to talk to her. A young man pleading into the pay phone, waiting, nodding his head, opening and closing his fist against the wall. Many people making a point with each other, emphatically pointing their fingers, carefully slurring the words, trying to explain something.