Life Among Giants Read Online Free PDF

bathrobe faint green. She was smaller and much more delicate than she’d seemed onstage those few times Kate had coughed up tickets, more airy and light and ephemeral than even on the famous album cover. And certainly less beautiful, not particularly beautiful at all. I cowered, all but bowing, soaked in sweat, filthy, embarrassed.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said.
    â€œI’m just mowing,” I said.
    She gave a small but grateful nod.
    â€œI’m Katy’s brother,” I said. “David.”
    â€œI thought it is Lizard, no?”
    â€œ Th at’s what they call me at school.”
    â€œAh,” she said seriously, even somberly. “In Norway, firfisle. ”
    â€œFur-feez-ul,” I repeated, best I could do, as serious as she.
    â€œYou are taller than anyone is saying,” she said, all matter-of-fact, famous Scandinavian lilt. Her gaze lingered briefly on my belly, which in those days was hard as any marble god’s. I was used to comments about my size, used to being stared at, and used to people being a foot and more shorter than I. But even as tiny as she was, at the top of the stairs the dancer towered over me, her greatness like sunshine up there, her sorrow like clouds.
    I said, “I just wanted to help.”
    Apologetically she said, “I can’t pay.”
    â€œIt’s okay,” I said. “Neighbors help neighbors. You know.”
    She seemed to consider that, brightened. “I am wondering if you can help me with one thing more.”
    I tried to take the wide stone steps gracefully, even if three at a time, followed her into the enormous foyer, past the grand stone staircase and through a hidden door, down a hallway into the spacious, restaurant-grade kitchen. We floated right to the stove, where a teapot waited cold.
    She handed me a box of matches, gazed up at me. She said, “I can’t make the fire to light.”
    Th ose startling celadon eyes, always mentioned by the press! (I’d paid attention to every word ever written.) Eyes the color of oxidized copper, or what my mom called sea-foam green, full of light and a penetrating intelligence. Pale, spare eyebrows, open and generous face, her nose tall and thin, cut like glass. Her lips thin, too, and parted in supplication, and I saw as I broke her stare that a front tooth was chipped. She was short, I kept realizing, really quite short. She had breasts under that robe and all the rest of a female body. And she had bad skin, acne-scarred and shining. Which was what I’d tell Mom when I got home. Th e dancer’s unassailable beauty in photographs, her imposing beauty onstage, that towering presence, they were illusory! She was really only a girl, not very much older than Katy and her friends, or me. She smelled of bed sheets more than anything, like someone who’d been ailing, smelled of what must be jasmine—always her scent, according to Kate, who found it nauseating.
    Not I.
    I lit a match, turned the knob, waited. Nothing. “ Th e gas is off,” I said.
    â€œOff?” said the world’s greatest dancer.
    I looked into green light of her eyes a second too long, like rocketing past the earth’s atmosphere and into the realm of stars. Helpfully I said, “You have to have gas to make the burners work. It comes in through a pipe. Did you pay your bill?”
    She studied me, trying to understand. My heart fled to her helplessness. Th e dancer had no equipment for living in this world. When tears came to her eyes, tears came to my own.
    â€œOh, for me,” she said cryptically, and then something urgent in Norwegian, a song of a sentence, a woman troubled about much more than her gas bill. Abruptly she reached up to hug me, or rather, reached up to be hugged the way a child might. I leaned and put my arms about her as best I could, more than surprised, intensely aware of my naked, sweaty, grass-stained chest against her cheek as she pressed