Taller Tales

This isn't about me; it's about the marks that have been left on me. Or because of me, because the thin little lines are not visible on my skin. They never were. 

That doesn't mean I'm not still wearing them today. However, the wall or rather the door frame that fits in the wall, does have stripes that are visible to the eye. Stripes that are also mine because when they were made I was made to stand very straight and tall (ironic word) and very close to the vertical surface that was behind me. 

I don't know who was straighter in that ramshackle old house - me or the wall. It was very old - two centuries old - and I was very young when it all started - maybe two years. We were, as I've just said, very close. Were and are.

The closeness and the growth of the marks left on both wood ands me all started in the kitchen, the back wall with the ragged screen door out to the porch. To the right of the door, on the frame, to be precise. The kitchen wasn’t repainted for nearly fifty years, so the marks were never in danger. Some in pencil, a few in ballpoint pen, they went up on the wood, never concerned that they could someday disappear. You keep growing, they said. We’re right here with you. 

Nobody would ever have contemplated removing them after they'd outgrown their usefulness, in part because there was no such thing as outgrowing the role they'd be born into. They had been put there to measure me.

Onward and upward, I am thinking now.

At some point they - the grownups, my parents, not the marks - commandeered an additional door frame for measuring me. Maybe carrying out the ritual twice was to make sure things were done with precision. Or perhaps they had so much fun drawing the horizontal lines in the kitchen that they wanted to do it twice. The event might very well have had some suspense or guesses being made: 

How much taller? A quarter of an inch, I'd say. No, I bet it's more, like half an inch. How long has it been since the last time we measured? Look at the date beside the line; it should be written there.

I can still hear the exchanges, real or just imagined.  I loved being the star attraction, although it wasn't hard to occupy that status because I was the only child my parents had. But can you blame me? If you don't have any siblings, you usually get extra love from Mom and Dad. They make up for not having any other children in the house to play with.

Apparently getting taller was a great accomplishment. Maybe not every child was able to do that. Or maybe not every child's parents were willing to write on walls or doors to record the height increases of a child. Maybe the pen and pencil lines didn't matter in such a run-down house; nothing was ruined by them.

The slippery door frame paint of the second set of marks made it hard to be accurate, but anyway. This second door was the one between the dining room and the side room off the bathroom. A word about the significance of this location:

The little room was maybe eith or nine feet square, but it had a single-paned window with wavy glass and two doors. It also had a tiny closet that might have been triangular, like in the real old days, two centuries ago. I only opened that odd closet twice, for reasons unknown, and had found it impenetrable. Probably even my grandmother didn't know what was in it.

The little room, despite its size, was the one that almost everybody had slept in, whether they were residents of the house or not. It only had space enough for a narrow single bed and small dresser, but for reasons unexplained everybody had slept in it. It is also my recollection that some died or came close to dying in it. Its window, thin glass and all, never let in any sunlight. A plant could never have grown there. Yet even as it was nobody's room, it was everybody's. It looked the nicest when it was nobody's and the neatly made bed served to toss a coat or sit to remove boots. It was a useful room when not used for sleeping.

However, as a dark room, with no privacy, too much stuff crammed into it, and a window that faced away from the sun but with no lamp to correct its dimness, it needed cheering up. It couldn't be just ‘the room off the bathroom’ and little more. Yet when I think about it, the room used to be bigger, have more space. If I recall correctly, for a while it was my playroom and held my play stove, my huge metal dollhouse, my cardboard store with fake boxes of food. I had a play iron, too. My own house within a house. Surely it didn't really shrink as I got older?

Oh, and I think my crib was kept in it so the grown-ups could keep an eye on me at night while they were at the dining room table eating, doing jigsaw puzzles, playing hearts or pinochle. Safe, within sight and hearing range. Nobody had any of that baby technology back then. You kept your babies close and monitored them yourself, without machines.

Measure me here, I thought. I must have. I might have been a baby, but I noticed a lot of things.

I didn’t consciously know about those things while I was being measured, every so often, but at least twice a year. Or randomly. (My family was not the organized type, for reasons I won't go into.) Not that I grew very fast or tall, but at least I grew. The marks - the vertical slashes inscribed on not one but two door frames, just to underline the importance of my parents' double effort - were proof of it. They were my proof of ownership. My height belonged to the house and the house was mine. I lived in it, was happy, and grew. Straight, even today, if not tall.

Now the house no longer belongs to me, although it should. It doesn’t matter, because I have all I need out of it, except... Except the two vertical boards of the door frames, where my growth was charted because someone - my mother as well as my father - felt it was important. So important that it was done twice for good measure. (That last word constitutes a pun, but I’m talking seriously, about something important. Hence the need to repeat myself. I want people to understand what I'm going through.)

The point is I need those boards, and you might think there's a simple explanation: they have a lot of sentimental value for me. While that is absolutely true, there is another, more compelling reason. This is a situation which I am currently facing, and I'm certain the wriitings on the wall can help me resolve. From all I've told you, it should be obvious that they anchor me, give me a place in the world. It's a vertical place, true, but it's mine.

Now that place is being questioned and is making me have severe doubts as to my perception of reality. I mean, I always knew exactly how tall I was and could point to the proof on the walls. The proof was never questioned, but now I am worried. Because it seems as the years have passed, I have slowly begun to diminish. Not my brain, which I hope continues to be as high-functioning as always, but my height. This frightens me, because I have read about the Benjamin Button in F. Scott Fitzgerald's story and am afraid I too might be going back in time. Well, not quite like Button, who aged backward while going forward in time.  

So it turns out I'm shrinking, although not becoming younger. Only my vertical characteristics are coming into question. I can't imagine being shorter. As short as when I was a baby. As short as when I was born (before my marks could be drawn on walls) and measured nineteen and a half inches. As short as when I wasn’t, yet. Maybe not all that different than Benjamin Button after all.

Still I'm sure I didn't imagine I was growing, although I finished, stopped getting taller, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I think. It wasn’t my imagination that I reached the grand height of five feet and X inches. It isn’t my imagination that I now measure five feet and X minus two inches. It isn’t, because they did my height and weight at my last annual doctor’s visit and told me when they did it, along with my weight. 

I said: 

What?! 

And began to worry. I really don't want to disappear. That would drive me crazy.

Besides, I am owed those boards, the ones that must have been spared by any repainting done by the new owners. They are all I have, the only proof that I was a normal, much-loved child who grew - not a lot, but enough. I didn’t shrink from time to time, which would have been extremely odd. I simply grew in an upward direction. But without my door boards, I can’t prove it. I can't provide any evidence to refute my having lost (apparently) two inches in recent years. They are my only hope.

[Editor's Note: There is a gap here, during which a great deal of observation and planning took place. This has involved several trips of several hundred miles each way to observe the house and its occupants, if there are any. The surveillance has been completed, so that the story can continue.]

I have finally been able to determine that the house is empty. The new owners seem to be very disloyal people, and are selling it only eighteen years after purchasing it from me. Inconceivable. How could they only live there for eighteen years? Or maybe they didn't lower themselves to live there, just rented it out. It hurts to think that might have been the case. Had I known, I never would have sold the old place.

Now, however, they’re going to sell my measurement marks on the door frames and that’s like a knife in my ribs. That feeling has given me the idea that will fix everything. I have brought a strong cutting tool, kind of like a miniature saw, that will slice through the slender board around the door, allowing me to remove just the portion with the marks and dates. (I do hope the dates haven't been smudged too much by careless hands or coats rubbing on them.)

This might seem dangerous, but I'll work quickly and not saw or cut away any more than I need. I'm also taking two lengths of wood to leave in the house so the new occupants don't have to pay for replacing the missing portion. Anybody with basic carpentry skills can probably fit in the boards I'm going to leave. They'll also want to paint them to match the rest of the frame, but I can't recall what color or type of paint we had used. That was decades ago, so it's not my fault if I've forgotten. There's probably some leftover paint in the house, in the basement. We didn't throw anything away and you never know when extra paint will be needed to touch up a spot.

I'm trembling and have goosebumps on my arms as I stand at the front door. My front door. I can't believe I'm going to open it and walk in, just as I did all those years from the time I was one until I had to sell it after my parents were gone. People might wonder how I can just walk in, but it's kind of still my right and I know I don't need a key. I know that because the house is old and because there never was a key to any of the three doors on the first floor nor to the door leading out of the basement. I have three choices to enter, but the front door seems the most appropriate.

Here I am, standing at the second door frame used for measuring, looking into the dark little room-belonging-to-nobody. Suddenly there's a flash, like from a camera, and I see me on the shoulders of Daddy, he is ducking down to pass through the door, both of us laughing. To the right are my marks.

But no. They are gone. Somebody has painted over them with a garish white - horrid color - and they are gone. Yet invisible as they are, those marks remain on me like tattoos I've never gotten.

Oh no, what if the same thing has happened to the measurements in the kitchen? Maybe the kitchen table has concealed them and nobody has painted the kitchen in the eighteen years since I was last in it. I'm afraid to look, afraid to find that we - the marks and I - are missing from that place too.

They're still here!! A bit smudged, as feared, but legible and living proof of my maximum height as five feet X inches, not five feet X minus two inches. I must work fast.

Epilogue:

She worked fast and remembered to leave the replacement wood propped next to the door. She'd even left a polite note saying Sorry about the paint. Then there was the sound of the front door opening, the door made of veiny metal, painted the ugliest, warmest brown in the world, it's bottom edge never fitting properly with the flooring so there was forever a miserable draft in the hall.

After the outside door came the inside door, at the other end of the hallway. That one was wooden, but it didn't fit the floor well enough either since the place was so old. There was less of a draft, though. The inside door often stuck when it was humid, but it always opened with a shuffle and a whoosh, and sometimes a bang if it rebounded against the wall inside.

Both doors opened and shut and someone had entered the living room. If that person had looked straight ahead, it might have been possible to spot the person removing part of the door frame - just a small part - in the kitchen, which was at the back of the house. That did not happen for some reason, and so the person in the kitchen and the piece of wood with its marks sought the only exit: the cellar.

She was only two strides away, flipped the ancient iron latch with its curved thumb rest, and flew down the rickety stairs. (Well, maybe they weren't all that rickety, because they hadn't changed much in two centuries.) The cellar door was off to the left and its only latch was a wooden wedge you turned from the inside, so getting out was that simple. 

She spun the latch, tightly clutching the slender piece of wooden with its splinters, and took a moment to decide where she would head to get away. These people wouldn't recognize her, but she didn't want them to see her coming out of the house. Once she managed to move away from it, she could calmly walk to her car, which was parked right out front.

Once she had the marks in her possessions, she gave a sigh of relief and started the last trip back to her current residence. She had what she needed.

Until the next time she went for her annual medical examination and was told how tall she was.

It was also suggested that, given her age, she might think twice before making any long trips by herself. It could be risky.