The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken

Sweatt. “Caroline’s going to have a baby. She treats it like a drum, but it’s a baby.”
    â€œIt isn’t anything
yet
,” Caroline told me. “I’m barely pregnant.”
    â€œThat’s wonderful,” I said.
    Caroline nodded shyly.
    Mrs. Sweatt drank milk from an enormous glass. At first I wondered whether there was any vodka in it; then I saw that she wasn’t really drinking at all: every now and then she lifted the glass to her face, looked in, and set it back down, the milk level the same.
    After dinner Caroline suggested a break before dessert, and Mrs. Sweatt started to clear the table. She moved very slowly, as if the table were a magnet and all the dishes steel. Several times she lifted a dish a few inches and put it right down.
    â€œDo you need help?” I asked.
    Mrs. Sweatt straightened the tablecloth and said, slowly, “You’re a guest.” Maybe she
was
drunk.
    Caroline took me by the elbow. “Come see the house.”
    So Oscar and Caroline gave me a tour; I looked around greedily. It seemed much the same as it had the last time I’d been there, a motley, homely, dazzling collection of furnishings that seemed tohave only the most tenuous relationship to one another. I imagined taking down books and vases, anything I pleased, even curtains, and inquiring, in a businesslike tone, how long I might keep them. There is nothing I can’t make into a library in my brain, no objects I don’t imagine borrowing or lending out. Not out of generosity—I am a librarian, and protective—but out of a sense of strange careful justice. Part of me believes all material things belong to all people.
    It was a house easily taken over by objects. White thuggy appliances crowded the kitchen; a huge unmade bed took up almost the entire bedroom. The thrown-back messy blankets embarrassed me.
    On the back wall of the shadowy basement, dozens of little pictures hung off a peg board: the ocean, wheat fields, a woman brushing her hair, a horse, and one large canvas that looked abstract but I suspected was merely bad. They were Oscar’s; he was the artist of the seascape in James’s room, of the little flowers on the side of the house. The paintings were damp and blurry and looked ready to overflow their frames, as though they’d been painted through tears.
    â€œWhat medium do you prefer?” I asked.
    â€œAll of ’em. I’m thinking of getting into comic books.” He walked to a table and picked up a piece of paper. It was a cartoon of a bride, with long blond hair, her veil flipped back and streaming behind her like a cape. The bodice of her dress was tight, cut low, and the deep line of her cleavage split in two and broke into curves over each breast. Flames shot out from the bottom of her skirt, a train of flames, and her face was full-lipped and big-eyed and small-nosed and smirking and unmistakably Mrs. Sweatt’s. Mrs. Sweatt a month before, with her old cheekbones and cynicism.
    â€œRocket Bride,” Oscar said. “My newest invention.”
    Rocket Bride, Oscar explained, had been abandoned by her groom at their wedding reception. In her grief she developed the ability to fly and now traveled the world, looking for her husband, but more
importantly
, stressed Oscar, fighting crime and injustice. She subdued criminals with her bouquet. She sometimes workedwith her sidekick, Maid O’ Honor. It was her wedding dress that supplied her superpowers, and she vowed not to take it off until she found her wayward groom.
    â€œDo you pose?” I asked Caroline.
    â€œHe’s never asked me,” she said.
    Oscar laughed. “For a comic book? I work from the imagination only. Not that you wouldn’t make an excellent superhero,” he said to Caroline.
    â€œI haven’t got any superpowers,” she said.
    â€œWhat will she do when she finds him?” I asked.
    â€œFinds who?” asked Oscar.
    I