The Bigness of the World

by Lori Ostlund

  “Leave it,” he said. “I might make soap.”

  “Really? And when, exactly, did you start making soap?”

  “I said I might make it, but I can’t if you go around throwing out the lard.”

  “Fine,” I said after only the slightest pause. “How about the toasters then?”

  On a shelf near his worktable I had found nineteen of them, the two-slicers from early in their marriage pushed behind the family-size four-slicers, every toaster from my childhood and then some, the potential for sixty-eight simultaneous slices of toast (I had counted) gathered in a state of disrepair.

  “What about them?”

  “Well,” I said. “They’re toasters. When they break, you throw them out.”

  “In my time, we fixed things. We didn’t just toss them on the trash heap.”

  “Well, they aren’t fixed. They’re broken, and they’ve been broken for over thirty years, some of them. Listen,” I said then. “I’ve arranged for a truck to come tomorrow to haul away the sofas … davenports before they become even more infested with mice than they already are.”

  “Mice need a place to live,” he replied fiercely, though I had never known him to be anything less than absolute in his treatment of mice.

  “Yes, they do,” I agreed. “And tomorrow they’ll be living at the dump with the davenports.”

  “They closed that dump years ago.” He studied his food. “What is this anyway?”

  “Fajitas,” I said. “It’s everything that you like—beef, peppers, onions.”

  “Everything I like is to have it fried up in a pan with some Crisco and salt. Not this,” he said. We both knew that I had prepared it this way, grilled under the broiler, letting the grease collect in the pan so that it could be discarded, because the doctor had told him that he needed less fat in his diet—less fat, less salt, less food.

  “That’s not how I cook,” I said.

  “Well, this is not how I eat,” he said, and he picked the plate up and turned it upside down on the table.

  When the two men arrived the next day to haul away the sofas, my father waited until they had carried the fourth one up from the basement and jimmied it around the corner at the top of the stairs before he came out and instructed them to put every single davenport back exactly where they had found it. They did, of course, without even looking my way.

  That afternoon as my father napped in front of the television, I went through all three freezers, throwing out anything that looked suspect, peas and string beans and berries that had taken on the desiccated look of long-frozen food. There were rings and rings of potato sausage, which the entire family had always been involved in making but only my parents had liked; my siblings and I could never overcome the memory of making it, the bushel baskets of potatoes that it took us the entire day to peel, the long night of grinding the blackened potatoes together with pork and venison and onions, of stuffing this into pig intestines, and then, at dawn, when we were feeling nauseated from lack of sleep, the stench of leftover meat being fried up for our breakfast.

  I filled five garbage bags, which I dragged outside and lifted into the garbage cans lined up behind the house. There were eight of them, eight garbage cans for a man who did not even discard empty pill bottles. Then, because I felt I had earned a break, I walked into town, ducking my head or lifting my hand back at people as they drove by, at these strangers for whom waving was a reflex. My father would have known every one of them, of course, though my father would never have taken a walk along the highway like that because it would have caused people to talk, and more than anything, my father did not want people speculating about his business.

  Years before, when his doctor had first begun to mention diet and exercise, before my father decided to stand firm against anything that might benefit his health, he went through a brief period of highly anomalous behavior—namely, following his doctor’s advice. For almost two months, he and my mother drove back into town each night after dark and locked themselves inside their store, where, for forty-five minutes, they walked. They went up and down the same aisles where they spent their days, past gopher traps and sprinklers and all kinds of joinery, my father in the lead, my mother several steps behind. When my mother accidentally let this secret slip and I asked why, why, when they could be out looking at lakes and trees and fields of corn, they preferred to walk indoors, she said, “You know your father doesn’t want people knowing his business.”

  I walked for five hours that day, walked until I no longer felt mold each time I breathed in, and when I returned, my father said, “What did you do? Walk all over the county?” He was still in front of the television, and he spoke in a cranky way that implied that he had spent the entire afternoon sitting right there, waiting for me to return, but the next morning when I got up early to cart the garbage cans down to the road for pickup, they were all empty. While I had been out walking around letting people know my business, my father had undone all of my work, returning everything to the freezers. That was day three. We spent the last four days of my stay in idle silence.

  Ten years have passed since that visit, but it’s right there between us—the unspoken betrayal—when I ask my father how long ago he shot the pheasant that he now wants to FedEx me. Finally, I say what I mean—“That pheasant must be at least five years old”—and he hangs up on me; I, ever my father’s daughter, wait until the next evening to call back, and when I do, though I let the phone ring thirty, and then forty, times, there is no answer.

  This, I suppose, is the moment when other children pause to consider broken hips, burst hearts, a sudden, irrevocable loosening of the mind. “He’s in the bathroom,” calls Geraldine from the study, her voice overly reassuring, for she too knows his pattern: startled by the first ring, setting aside his book on the second, picking up, always, on the third, answering, “Yut,” as though the ringing were a question. “Dad?” I always reply, this, too, a question, and then, before we begin talking, he tells me which phone he is on, kitchen or bedroom, because he wants me to be able to picture him—where he is sitting, what he is seeing—as our voices float back and forth across the distance.

  Tonight, the rings adding up in my ear, I imagine him, broom in hand, descending those sixteen treacherous steps, both feet resting briefly on each one until he stands surrounded by a lifetime’s worth of broken toasters and davenports, a roomful of books nearby, their words trapped between waterlogged pages. The freezers are open, all three of them, lids tilted up like coffin covers, and he pauses in their white glow, trying to take it all in: this wealth before him, this carpet dissolving beneath his feet.

  The Day You Were Born

  WHEN ANNABEL COMES HOME FROM SCHOOL ON TUESDAY, her father is back, standing at the corner of Indian School and University, across the street from where the bus drops her and the other children from her apartment complex. When the light finally changes, the two of them cross hurriedly toward each other, and so their reunion takes place in the middle of the street, her father twirling her around several times and then releasing her abruptly in order to present his middle finger to an old woman in a Volvo station wagon who has beeped tentatively to let them know that the light has gone red.

  “So, are you surprised?” her father asks as they pass through the front doors of the complex, and because his tone is light and he is holding her hand and yanking her arm about in a happy, frenetic way that does not match their steps, she responds honestly, “Yes,” without pausing to think through the possible implications of his question or her answer.

  “Why are you surprised?” he asks, stopping suddenly and squeezing her hand hard to underscore the question. “Did you think I wasn’t coming back?” The pressure on her hand increases. “Did your mother say something?” She looks down then.

  “Look at me, Annabel,” he says, and she does.

  “She said you were in the hospital and the doctors didn’t know when you would come home,” she tells him, which is more or less the truth, the less
part of it being that her mother actually told her, just two days earlier in fact, that the doctors were not sure that he would ever be able to come home. “I’m so happy you’re home,” she adds because she is and because she does not want to talk to him about her mother.

  They stand outside their apartment door for several minutes as her father searches through his pockets for his key until Annabel suggests that they use her key, which she takes from around her neck and hands to him. His hand trembles slightly as he fumbles to insert it in the lock, and Annabel looks away, breathes in deeply, and concentrates on thinking absolutely nothing. This works, for when she turns back, her father has the door open and is gesturing, with a gentleman’s low bow and flourish, for her to enter.

  “So, are you ready for a snack?” he asks, his tone light again, and when she nods, he says, “What are you in the mood for?”

  “Anything,” she tells him, and she goes into her room to change, knowing that when she comes out, her father will have made something awful, something like sardines and melted marshmallows on saltine crackers.

  “How much do you love your dad?” he’ll ask, motioning with his head for her to be seated, and though she always tries to think of new ways to answer this question, she never comes up with anything but the same old responses—a whole lot, very much, tons.

  “Enough to eat sardines with marshmallows?” he’ll say, setting the plate in front of her. And she does—does love him that much, does eat it, polishes off the entire plate, in fact, of whatever he puts before her while he sits watching her chew and swallow and demonstrate her love in a way that she does not know how to do with words.

  “That’s my girl,” he’ll say when she’s finished, words that prove to her that it was worth everything—the awful taste and the feel of the food sitting in her stomach like a stone or tumbling about like clothes in a washer. Sometimes, the nausea overwhelms her and she excuses herself, slips into the bathroom, where she leans way down into the toilet bowl, her face nearly touching the water, and vomits as quietly as possible.

  Today, when she comes out in her after-school clothes and they go through the usual routine, what her father sets before her is a plate of celery sticks, three of them, arranged like canoes, overflowing with mayonnaise and topped generously with chocolate sprinkles. Her father, of course, knows that she hates mayonnaise more than anything, that she finds even the smell of it unbearable. It occurs to her then that her father is still angry, and so she eats with extra diligence, her father watching as usual, and when she is finished, she looks up at him hopefully. “That’s a girl,” he says, but Annabel understands that there is a difference, a very big one, between “a girl” and “my girl.”

  “Did your mother tell you about these?” he asks matter-of-factly, pulling back the cuffs of his shirt and laying his thin, white arms out on the table between them, elbows turned down, wrists facing up. Her mother had not told her, of course, had said only that her father was tired and needed a rest, and Annabel sits looking at them, feeling the mayonnaise inside of her like something living, something that wants out, but she will not allow it, not today.

  “Touch them,” her father says, his voice gentle but urgent. “It’s okay. I want you to. You won’t hurt me.”

  Already the cuts have risen up in angry welts around the stitches, which she studies carefully, thinking about the fact that they were put there by someone she does not even know, a stranger who held her father’s wrists and created these precise, black marks. There are nine of them, she notes, four on the right wrist, five on the left, and as she places a small finger against each of them, one by one, she closes her eyes and tries to imagine that they are something else, the stitching on a baseball, for example. She loves baseball, not the sport in its entirety but playing catch, which she and her father do together regularly in the park, where her father throws the ball so hard that her hand stings each time she catches it, which she usually does. Sometimes her palm aches for days afterwards, though she would never tell her father this. Still, even with her eyes closed, she cannot really pretend that she is touching a baseball because her father’s skin is warm and soft and she can feel his pulse, a slight, rhythmic quivering that means that he is still hers.

  Later, when her mother comes home, Annabel hears the two of them arguing, her mother saying, “What is wrong with you? She’s a child, Max. A child.” Annabel is only nine, but she already understands about her mother, knows, for example, that her mother would be angry to learn that Annabel and her father spent the afternoon inspecting his wrists, and so Annabel would never think to tell her this. She cannot help but wonder how it is that her father, who is an adult after all, does not understand such things.

  The next day when she arrives home from school, her father is sitting barebacked on the sofa. She knows what this means, of course, that the maggots have returned and are writhing just beneath his skin, making him twitchy and unable to sit still, just as she knows that even the merest brush of cloth against his skin riles the maggots even more. He has explained all of this to her many times, but she cannot actually imagine how such a thing feels, though she knows that it must be awful. His neck is bothered most by the maggots, and when he is forced to put on a shirt—in order to greet her mother or go outdoors—he shrugs his shoulders repeatedly and tugs incessantly at the neckline until it dips, like a very relaxed cowl, to his belly button.

  “The maggots?” she asks quietly, standing next to the sofa with her book bag still strapped to her back.

  “Yes,” he answers wearily.

  “Are they bad?”

  “It’s all I can think about,” he tells her. “Your mother doesn’t understand, of course. Do you know what she tells me? She tells me to just not think about it.” He laughs when he says this, in a way that invites her to join in, to find humor in her mother’s insensitivity. He has told her this before, many times, explaining that it is because her mother grew up in Minnesota, where they prize something called stoicism.

  “What is stoicism?” she had asked him once.

  “Well,” he had said, thinking for a moment. “It’s like this. Let’s say that your mother and I are out taking a walk and I get a pebble in my shoe. What would I do?”

  “Take it out,” she had suggested, her voice rising faintly at the end so that her words occupied the space between statement and question, but her father had ignored her uncertainty.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Of course. I would take it out. Any normal person would. Now, what would your mother do?”

  To be honest, she did not know what her mother would do, but she felt that it would disappoint her father were she to admit this, and so, because she understood the direction in which he was nudging her, she said, after an awkward pause, “Leave it.”

  “Right again. Because your mother likes to suffer, Annabel. She likes to feel that pebble in her shoe. And then, at the end of the walk, do you know what your mother would do?” He had become more excited, warming to his explanation, not really expecting her to answer. “She would tell me about the pebble. She would say, ‘Max, I’ve had this pebble in my shoe the whole time we’ve been walking, and it’s really starting to hurt.’” When he said this, his voice changed, becoming higher like her mother’s voice and drawing out the o’s as he did when he teased her mother about being from Minnesota. “She would expect me to feel sorry for her, but I wouldn’t, of course. I’d tell her, ‘Well, sit down and take the damn thing out.’ And you know what she’d say then? She’d say, ‘Oh, never mind, Max. It’s okay. We’re almost home anyway.’”

  He had paused then, his eyes closed, hands clasped in front of him as her grandparents did when they prayed before eating, but Annabel knew that her father was not praying. He did not believe in it. After a moment, his breathing slowed, and he opened his eyes and said, “You see, Annabel, your mother needs that pebble. She wouldn’t know what to do without it. You can see that, can’t you, Annabel?” His tone was fierce, beseeching her, his face glowing
red, the way it used to when he came in from gardening, back when they had a garden, back when they had a house.

  She had nodded, though she had never seen pebbles in her mother’s shoes, had not even heard her mother mention pebbles. “You need to be on your guard, honey. Okay?” he said. “Because if your mother has her way, you’ll be walking around with a pebble in your shoe, too.” He breathed in deeply through his nostrils, as though the air were very fresh and only now could he enjoy it.

  On Saturdays, Annabel and her mother visit her grandparents. Her father does not go along, even though they are his parents, because he says that they stare at him. During these visits, her grandfather and grandmother both sit in their recliners, which have been placed up on cinder blocks so that when they stand, they do not have to hoist themselves upward in a way that would strain their hips. She and her mother sit on a floral sofa across from them, and Annabel feels self-conscious because there is a picture of Jesus hanging right above her, which means that when her grandparents look at her, they are seeing Jesus as well. They generally talk about uninteresting topics such as what songs were performed on Lawrence Welk during the week’s reruns and how many times they saw the retired barber who lives across the street mowing his lawn. Once, he mowed his lawn three times during a single week, and they reported this to Annabel and her mother with a great deal of indignation.

  “Doesn’t the man have anything better to do with his time?” her grandfather had asked again and again, shaking his head.

  “Maybe he misses cutting,” her mother said, which was a joke, but Annabel’s grandparents do not acknowledge jokes.

  Her grandparents are very pale because they do not go outside and have not for many years. In their garage sits her grandfather’s car, which has not been driven in six years. Every other week, she and her mother go out and start the car to keep the battery in good condition, just in case. A couple of times, she and her mother went to the gas station and filled a large red can with gasoline, which they poured into her grandfather’s car.