Eric Lindblom and Mary Robertson
Mary Robertson of Greenhaven was hired by Denise Lindblom to microdust the grooves, runners, and lion-head finials of two antique mahogany rocking chairs inherited from her late mother. Denise was so pleased with the work that she asked Mary to come twice a week for a number of cleaning tasks, especially that of dusting the tops of the more than three thousand books that sat in a dozen bookcases throughout the house. Denise Lindblom worked as a reference librarian in our town library. She was married to Mark Lindblom, a high-school English teacher, who was fond of saying that he and his wife lived in a world of books. They had one child, a son named Eric, a high-school sophomore fifteen years old: a shy, lanky, somewhat dreamy young man who had a few friends in the neighborhood and a few at school but who would just as soon sit alone in his room with a book in his lap as go outside and shoot hoops or hang out in town. He sometimes talked to girls but that was all, and he had never gone on a date. He was usually home when Mary Robertson was in the house, kneeling on the tops of books with her mop and dust rags or climbing the shelves of bookcases by means of a rope ladder with hooks on top. He enjoyed watching her work. They exchanged a few words, and he discovered that he could speak easily to her. He admired the perfect cuffs of her rolled-up jeans and the supple movements of her reaching and bending form. He began looking forward to her arrival. She was twenty-one years old, a graduate of Greenhaven College who was working part-time while training to be a research assistant at TomorrowCorp, a new company specializing in the reorganization of existing spaces, in particular the development of aerial bicycle paths. As she spoke in her lively, playful, barely audible voice, Eric felt in his body a vast stillness. One afternoon he saw her resting on a bookshelf. She was leaning back against the spine of a book, swinging her calves slowly back and forth, and the sight of her there on the shelf, with her head tipped back, her brown-black hair falling across one shoulder, and her eyes half closed, filled him with a kind of desperate happiness. He dreamed about her night after night; one night she looked at him sadly, turned into a butterfly, and flew away. He found himself wanting to stroke her hair with the tip of his finger, and the thought of it filled him with a shame so unforgiving that he bit down hard on his fingertip, bringing tears to his eyes. One day, as he adjusted a book for her on a shelf where she was working, something brushed lightly against the side of his hand. He understood that it was her hair, or a piece of her blouse; he felt light-headed and had to brace himself to keep from falling. The daily sight of her anklebones above her white sneakers troubled him as if he had caught glimpses of a forbidden part of her anatomy. In the long days of her absence he fell into states of dullness and apathy so extreme that the act of suicide seemed to him a form of exertion beyond his capacity. These states alternated with sudden eruptions of restlessness that raged in him like attacks of madness. In her presence he felt that he was hovering oppressively close, like a bear bending over a goldfish in a bowl, or remaining at a discourteous distance, huddled in a corner like a homeless man in a bus station, while she, nearly invisible on a distant shelf, seemed no more than an optical disturbance caused by a flicker of light and shade. One day, as she was preparing to leave, he heard something that sounded like “sssooo” in the air of the room. He realized in a rush of panic that he had said aloud the words “I miss you.” She turned to him with a look he could not see clearly and said something that sounded like breath blowing on a candle. On her next visit he stayed in his room, sprawled on his bed reading one page of a book over and over again without knowing whether the dinner conversation at an English country house was witty and cheerful or sinister and tense. He sensed Mary Robertson in his room and felt her climb up the side of his bed by gripping the spread. Once on top of the bed, she began walking forward beside his leg, grasped his shirt next to his belt, and climbed up onto his stomach. There she took several steps forward and sat down facing him, with her legs drawn up under her. She was wearing a white blouse with black buttons and a knee-length pleated skirt. She looked at him kindly. She said that he was a friend, a dear friend, that she loved him as a friend, but only as a friend, and feared that her friendship might have been mistaken for something else. As she spoke, the sound of her voice soothed him, while the actual words she was uttering seemed to contain something dangerous that he would have to return to at a later time and examine with extreme care. He was a lovely boy, she said, who would delight many women, and she would always think of him fondly. But she was a Greenhaven girl, and there could be no crossing over. She hoped she had not encouraged in him a sense that more than friendship was possible. When she was done speaking, she remained sitting with lowered eyes. After a while she stood up, walked forward across his chest, laid the palm of one hand for a moment on his chin, and quickly descended to the bed. She climbed down the side and left the room. She never returned to the house. Mrs. Lindblom complained that the girl had given abrupt notice for so-called “family” reasons and asked her son if he had been aware of anything unusual in her behavior. Eric refused to leave his bed for five days; his mother leaned over him tenderly, feeling his forehead with her palm. He said to himself, over and over again: “I’ll kill myself tonight.” The words helped him get through the next difficult months.
Difficulties
The inhabitants of Greenhaven provoke in us feelings of admiration and envy: we are moved by the perfection of their bodies, the smoothness of their skin, the elegance of their movements. Such feelings often lead to self-loathing, since even the smallest and thinnest of us, in comparison, rise to dizzying heights, move cumbrously, and carry masses of jiggling flesh. Some of us attempt to combat self-loathing by reminding ourselves that the perfection of the Greenhavenites is an inevitable distortion caused by our coarseness of perception, and that among themselves they are surely aware of rough or pimpled skin, hairy nostrils, and unclean teeth. But self-loathing can quickly turn into resentment. What right do these people have to make us dissatisfied with ourselves, in ways for which we are in no way responsible? Wouldn’t we be better off if they simply disappeared? We could squash any one of them with a single blow of the fist. The violence of the thought fills us with anxiety and remorse, and we reproach ourselves for emotions we judge to be savage, vicious, and cruel. These emotions, of course, are precisely what one might expect of enormous creatures who stride violently through the world, crushing insects and blades of grass beneath their feet, slaughtering trees, ripping up the ground, grunting with pleasure. Is it a wonder that we want to be someone else?
The New Shortness
Although many of our teenage boys still long to be tall, a new appreciation of shortness has begun to spread. Shortness, it is felt, is less wasteful of space, more efficient in design. Shortness puts you closer to the earth, where real things happen, while tallness carries you off into the clouds. Above all, shortness decreases your distance from the Little People. Our high school now has a Shortness Club, open to male students five feet two and under. It is considered so great an honor to be a member of the Shortness Club that students are often caught cheating as they stand to be measured; many train themselves to walk and stand upright with deeply bent knees, in order to remain below the dreaded cutoff mark. One troubled boy, a proud member of the club in his freshman year, grew two inches over the summer and was ejected from the club at the beginning of his sophomore year. That afternoon he went home and began cutting off his feet with a hacksaw before his mother found him and called an ambulance. Another boy, confined to a wheelchair, argued that in the name of fairness his height should be measured from a sitting position. Short girls, who are planning to form a club of their own, are treated by taller girls with new respect. New kinds of attractiveness are becoming fashionable: barely developed breasts draw admiring attention; small penises are the envy of locker rooms; little thumbs, small eyes, and narrow shoulders are noted with approval.
Giants
In an effort to experience what they must feel in our presence, we sometimes attempt to imagine smallness. If I am six feet tall, I rise to a height thirty-six times greater than the height of a resident of Greenhaven. A comparable giant, for us, would attain a height of 216 feet. I imagine standing at the foot of such a giant and looking up at a knee that is higher than the crossbars at the top of a telephone pole. My chin reaches partway up the side of a towering shoe. The stench of leather and excrement is so powerful that I can barely breathe. Suddenly the foot rises into the air like a house in a tornado. I want to rush for cover but there is nowhere to go. The foot crashes down like a couch falling from an apartment window. Shudders twist along my legs and up into my chest. From high in the clouds, something massive is coming toward me. Just as it is about to crush me to death, it stops above my head. Long slabs of cracked red meat begin to separate. A row of yellowish white tombstones appears. Between them sit stinking chunks of cheese. The smell of rot and filth thickens the air. Above the teeth I see an ugly wet red quivering mass. A roar fills my ears with pain as a hot wind burns my face. He has said hello. My face is wet with fear.
Deeper Changes
The current fashion for shortness may be a superficial sign, but other shifts suggest more lasting effects. Because of the barely audible voices of the Little People and the virtual silence with which they move about, a new quietness has begun to appear among us. Bursts of loud laughter are frowned upon. Conversations are conducted in low voices. Music no longer blares from open windows. Lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, vacuum cleaners, and snow blowers now come with mufflers. The increased quietness permits us to hear new sounds in our neighborhoods, like the quiver of a grasshopper leg rubbing against a forewing or the sound of a falling maple leaf as it lands on the floor of a porch. More important is the new visual alertness. We pay attention, as never before, to small details of our world, such as the stitches in a window curtain, the shape of a blade of grass, the shadow cast by a hair lying across a cheek. Sometimes we have the sensation that the world has become sharper and more detailed. It’s as if we had been walking in the rain and now the sun has come out. The world bursts out around us. We are born anew. We see.
Thomas Gebhardt and Janet Peterson
At the age of thirty, Thomas Gebhardt began searching for a wife. His life was secure—he had already risen to the position of director of software development at New Directions Software—and he was tired of starting things with woman after woman only to break it off a few months later with the familiar sensation of diminishing excitement. At the advice of a friend and against his own nature, he signed up with Do It or Rue It, a new online dating service known for absolute privacy and a 97 percent rate of success. He was quickly drawn to Janet Peterson, a twenty-eight-year-old website designer with a degree in computer science and a lively online personality. Her one oddity was her refusal to submit a photograph before meeting in person; she would explain when they met. Gebhardt’s instinct warned him to put an end to it now. He was a good-looking man who had always dated good-looking women, and Janet Peterson’s refusal to reveal herself in a photograph was not a promising sign. But he was already so attracted by her words that he decided to cancel an evening with friends in order to risk a single dinner with a woman who might turn out to be missing an eye or an ear. At the restaurant he was conducted to a corner table in an alcove, where he came to an abrupt halt. At one end of the tabletop stood a miniature table and chair, and in the chair sat Janet Peterson. Thomas hesitated. He glanced about, looked at his watch, started to leave, and sat down. As Janet Peterson began to speak, he moved closer and bent toward her. She explained, without apology, that she had arranged her little deception because she wanted a chance to present her case. After the first few emails, she had felt the flow between them. She had dated many men from Greenhaven, always with the result that within two weeks she had lost interest. She was ready for something new. She had read dozens of online profiles before she found his. She felt they had known each other for their entire lives. Yes, of course, there was the question of size, but she preferred to think of it as an accident, whereas the essential things were what mattered. He was welcome to leave now. Thomas, listening carefully, was struck by her intelligence, her animation, her confidence, and her delicate, fierce beauty, which seized him like two hands gripping his arms. He felt an odd desire to lift her in the cup of his hand and cover her with kisses; a sudden sense of his freakishly large mouth filled him with confusion. After this meeting, Thomas and Janet began seeing each other every evening. He was hopelessly in love; life without her was no longer conceivable. She was thoughtful and earnest and tender and funny and strong. She was unafraid of his massiveness and proud of her own size. In her presence he felt something that at first he failed to recognize, until gradually he understood what it must be: joy. He proposed marriage two months after their first dinner. She accepted by climbing onto his shoulder and touching his lip with a hand. They were married by a judge in the town hall, in a quiet ceremony attended by his best friend and her best friend. She moved into his house on a leafy street lined by sycamores and arranged for the transportation of her clothes and possessions from Greenhaven. Thomas immediately set to work clearing out the upstairs guest room and transforming it into a vast workspace for his wife. He hired a skilled carpenter to build into the base of one wall a row of spacious six-inch closets with sliding doors. He hired an electrician to rewire the electrical system for her use. Another carpenter, who for years had produced objects for sale in Greenhaven, was put to work constructing miniature bookshelves, file cabinets, and a computer desk under the supervision of Janet Peterson-Gebhardt. The room was so large that she oversaw the building of a three-sided inner wall with its own ceiling; in the outer space she supervised the construction of a gymnasium and a private bathroom with shower. At night she slept beside him in his bed, on her own small pillow that touched the edge of his. Well before marriage they had discussed frankly the question of sex. At first they had agreed to do without it for the sake of deeper and more important feelings, but they soon found themselves moving from cautious experiment to bold strategy. Thomas would lie naked on his back while Janet crawled among ropy growths to sit at the base of his stiffening penis, which she embraced with her legs and arms. As it hardened and expanded, she would rub her breasts against it and sometimes ascend along its swaying length, in a way that made him erupt in so powerful an orgasm that she would often be flung into the air and land laughing on the bed. This method of lovemaking frequently resulted in her own explosive orgasms. At other times she would climb onto the top curve of his ear and straddle it while sliding back and forth and flinging back her head. Thomas could not bear to fall asleep until his beloved wife was sleeping peacefully beside him. In the morning they shared breakfast—she at her own table and chair on top of the breakfast table, a daily reminder of their first date—and then went to work, he at New Directions Software at one end of town and she in her upstairs workspace. A motorized platform attached to the stairpost and the banister permitted her to travel up and down the staircase with ease. In the evenings they liked to entertain. At first there was some resistance in the neighborhood to the strangeness of the marriage, but Thomas made it very clear that if you did not accept his wife you were not only banished from his list of acquaintances but were likely to face a lawsuit on the grounds of prejudice, harassment, or discrimination. Greenhaven guests were provided with tables and chairs on top of the dining-room table, to which they ascended by means of motorized platforms attached to the table legs. Six months after their marriage, the Gebhardts consulted with doctors from both communities and arrived at the decision to have a child. The research laboratory of Greenhaven Hospital had recently developed a method of drastically reducing the size of sperm donated by our hospital, without any lessening of reproductive power; an early experiment in artificial insemination had proved successful, though the child was stillborn. A year later, Janet gave birth to a healthy son, William. Ten months later, Jane was born. Both children, now six and five, are of Greenhaven size and attend school in Greenhaven, though most of their time is spent in the large house in town. Often we see Thomas lying on his back with outstretched arms in the backyard while Will and Janey, not yet one inch tall, run up and down the length of his body, laughing wildly. Despite some early uncertainty, the neighborhood has come to adore this family, the only one of its kind in our entire town. Whether it is a sign of things to come, no one can say. What we know is that they are happy, happy. At a recent weekend barbecue, after Will and Janey were put to bed, Thomas rose in the summer night, raised his glass, and said that he had been a dead man until he met his wife. At those words Janet leaped onto his belt, nimbly climbed his shirt, and pulled herself onto his shoulder. Standing with her fists on both hips, she looked down at the guests, burst into a smile, flung back her head, and let out a laugh of joy, sheer joy, into the dark-blue glow of the summer night.
Resistance
Although members of both communities support the breaking down of barriers, there are those in both groups who feel that things have already gone too far. It is one thing, they say, to mingle socially and vote together at town meetings; it is quite another to indulge in twisted sexual practices or live together in a mockery of marriage. Discrepancy in size should never lead to unfair treatment, but the discrepancy is real and can only be heightened by attempts to pretend it doesn’t exist. They point out that inhabitants of Greenhaven are always at great risk when entering our homes and yards, with our monstrous children, our cats and dogs the size of buffalos, our sneezes like windstorms, our deadly air-sprays, and our habit of suddenly dropping murderous objects: coins the size of manhole covers, ice cubes like concrete blocks, spilled peanuts the size of baseballs. At the same time, members of our community go about in continual fear of crushing one of them to death with a careless footstep or knocking one of them down with a sudden movement of the arm or hand. Far more hurtful and destructive is the emotional turmoil stirred up in both communities by excessive proximity, since inhabitants small and large become acutely aware of their size and are made to feel awkward, inadequate, and ashamed. People who present such arguments find themselves in the curious position of asserting that attempts to bring the communities closer together do nothing but strengthen their sense of apartness; only strict rules of separation can bring an end to the feeling of separation.
165 Charles Street
A recent development has generated a great deal of discussion in both communities. In a heated bidding war set up by an agent at Franklin Realty, a group of Greenhaven businessmen outbid all rivals for the property at 165 Charles Street, in the heart of one of our most desirable residential neighborhoods. Despite a lawsuit filed against the selling agent by a group of concerned citizens, the sale was perfectly legal. The new owners intend to rent the seven-room neocolonial to an as yet undisclosed number of Greenhaven residents, a plan that may run into obstacles stemming from occupancy regulations. Even if the house is rented or sold to a single Greenhaven family, the neighborhood will be radically affected. Our children and pets will have to be closely supervised, since parents and pet owners are legally responsible for any harm inflicted on Greenhaven citizens. Whether the new residents will work at home or ride their bicycles each day to Greenhaven remains unclear. The deeper reason for purchasing the property also remains unclear. Do the owners wish to be able to extend social invitations to residents of our community, in a way not possible in their little homes behind the wall? Perhaps, as some have speculated, the experiment will fail and the owners will end up living in Greenhaven and renting to us. Even in the event of such an outcome, the symbolic significance of Greenhaven ownership will be impossible to ignore.
Think Big
One troubling response to the increasing presence of the Little People among us is the Think Big movement, started by a bartender who lost his license because of his refusal to serve any person who, in his words, was shorter than a glass of beer. Members of Think Big are known to use disparaging expressions when referring to the inhabitants of Greenhaven: the Itsy-Bits, the Weensies, the Mighty Mites, the Pixels. They are aggressive proponents of big bodies, big houses, big public buildings, and big ideas, all of which, in their view, are threatened by the cult of smallness. One member recently decided to challenge our town’s building code by adding two stories to his Victorian home, located one block from Charles Street; partway through the construction he was ordered to return the house to its original size. In response he hired a contractor to design and build an immense wrap-around porch, which spread over his entire front and side lawns and proudly displayed a row of Corinthian columns two stories high. A group of tall men in their early twenties, wearing Think Big muscle shirts, left a popular bar one night, linked arms, and walked side by side across the entire street and both sidewalks, knocking down anyone who stood in their way. On another night, the police were called to a house in the neighborhood of Thomas and Janet Gebhardt, where a Greenhaven woman was discovered in the rain gutter, crying for help and weeping hysterically. She told the police that a man in a Think Big hoodie had snatched her up as she was taking a stroll just outside of Greenhaven and had driven her to a house where a ladder stood against one wall; after climbing the ladder but before placing her in the gutter, he had held her upside down and looked at her underpants. In an interview with the local paper, the founder of Think Big said that he did not condone such behavior but went on to insist that the movement was a necessary response to attempts to belittle true human beings, who walk with their heads high in the air.
Think Again
In the wake of the Think Big movement, our community has seen the rise of several pro-Greenhaven groups, among them Think Again, whose members challenge every statement of Think Big and retain a team of high-level lawyers to investigate any assertion deemed to be libelous or defamatory. One argument of Think Again is directed against the notion that inhabitants of Greenhaven live in a small world. They point out that the height and proportions of a Greenhaven house bear the same relation to the size of the house dwellers as our houses bear to us. Not only that, but Greenhaven Hospital, though it reaches no higher than our knees, is far larger, in proportion, than our Walter J. Nash Memorial Hospital. It is also true, they argue, that the continual exposure of Greenhavenites to our massive objects and mountainous houses has begun to influence their own architecture, as seen in the recently opened Greenhaven Hilton, which has three more floors than our highest hotel. Another line of argument insists that it is by no means true that our own community values only largeness, as may be seen by our devotion to semiconductors, our interest in genetic engineering, and our dedication to research in fields such as microsurgery, bacteriology, and neuroimaging.
A New World
The signs of unrest are everywhere, but of one thing we can be certain: the Little People are here to stay. Their presence among us seems to grow by the day, though it may simply be that our awareness has become more acute. They do not come to us bearing unfamiliar religions, exotic styles of dress, or unusual forms of behavior; they are like us in every way, except one. It is this difference that creates unease and fascination in equal measure. If, by some miracle of science, they could suddenly grow to our size, we would experience a terrible sense of loss, though exactly what would be lost is difficult to say. Are we drawn to them precisely because they are not us? Sometimes we suspect that they are happier than we are, though this may only be because we cannot always see the expressions on their faces. At other times we fear that our presence fills them with unhappiness. What do we know about them, really? We know only that they are here. In quiet moments—say, when we find ourselves turning over a burger in a backyard barbecue, or standing on a ladder clearing leaves from the rain gutter—a fantasy comes: we are as little as they are. We live with them in their houses, which are spread all over our town. We play baseball in their park. We swim in their pools. We lean back in their lawn chairs in their green backyards. We are happy. The sky is blue. Then a doubt comes over us. What does it mean that we wish to disappear into their world? Does it mean that our own world is no longer enough? Do they have the answer to a question we don’t even know we have? At once we resolve to welcome them even more eagerly into our lives, to greet them with open arms, at the same time reminding ourselves to open our arms very slowly and carefully, for fear of shattering their bones as we knock them across the room with our forearms bigger than porch posts and our knuckles like knee-high boulders.