I have a theory that we each have a vague kinship with an exotic animal. Perhaps you have an inexplicable affinity for leopard print. Or your shower curtain is covered in butterflies, similar to the one tattooed on your ankle. Or you were a Rubenesque, somersaulting toddler and your family nicknamed you Panda.
For me it is the giraffe. My career as a long-necked mammal began at a supermarket checkout circa 1987, when a woman actually said it: “Aw. You look just like a little giraffe!”
I looked up to my mother for help, but her face was hidden behind a tabloid announcing Princess Diana’s marital woes. I was left to fend for myself.
I must have looked stricken, because the woman said: “Don’t worry honey, it’s a compliment.” (“Don’t worry” is code for “You should really worry a lot about this.”)
She was a puffin of a woman, smiling warmly down at me. Stick drawings were an accurate representation of my body that year, so I’m sure that my limbs shooting out of a jumper below a mop of brown hair did indeed resemble a baby giraffe.
Up to that point, I was aware of height only insofar as I bruised my knees on my best friend Jeni’s bike handlebars, and that I shopped in the juniors section. I wasn’t concerned until adults started regularly shrieking, “My, look how tall you are!” Rather than looking at my never-ending fingers and saying, “Oh, a piano player,” they opted for a comparison with an African safari creature.
The woman was still looking at me expectantly. I grabbed my mother’s thigh, looked down and quietly said: “Thanks.”
Puffin woman would prove to be firmly in line with the rest of society. In my elementary school zoo play, I was the giraffe. In sixth grade, when my science class voted on who would do reports on which animals, I got the giraffe.
A decade later, as a 188cm first-year undergraduate at Harvard, the annual water polo team initiation ritual took place at a jungle-themed party. While the other girls wore little black dresses (the panther), faux snakeskin trousers (the python) or tight red sweaters over green minis (the parrot), I wore tapioca yellow Capri pants, ears and chocolate body paint spots.
Tall folk are incapable of talking about their height without discussing their family. Height is a trait that comes with a long shadow. There’s always a history. It’s an inheritance.
Mine begins in 1952, when my grandmother bought a baby book in which to note the developments of my mother’s childhood and began plotting my mother’s height on the growth chart provided. The result is comical: My mother’s height stubbornly refuses to stay within half a page of the chart’s clearly defined “average zone.” By age four, my grandmother’s ballpoint indentations have turned into a panic. The page is filled with erased pencil dots attempting to plot the future. The future said 188cm.
In 1962, my grandmother read in a newspaper about a new estrogen treatment that brought on early puberty, closing the growth plates around the age of 11, thereby skipping the furious years of growth at 12 and 13. Up to that point, my mother’s tall childhood had been textbook: “Amazon Arline!” she was called. “Daddy Long Legs.” Ten thousand queries of “How’s the weather up there?”
One of her legs was already permanently shorter than the other from her hip-drop stance, where she spread her legs into an upside-down V and shifted one hip downward so the socket dropped, shaving off around 10cm. With slouching, she could reduce herself by nearly 17cm.
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