The Bigness of the World

by Lori Ostlund

  “The shortest,” they answered in unison. “We’re walking,” Sarah explained.

  “Walking!” the beekeeper exclaimed in horror. “Nobody walks to the Mennonites. And the Mennonites, for their part, do not walk to us.”

  “Well, we’re walking,” said Sarah again, “so if you would be kind enough to point us in the right direction, we would be grateful.”

  “Come,” said the beekeeper, struggling to his feet. They stood also and waited as he placed his Panama hat precisely atop his head, and then they followed him from the restaurant.

  “Do you see this road?” the beekeeper asked, but the sun was strong already, and they both had trouble adapting after the darkness of the restaurant. Finally, when Sarah’s eyes had adjusted sufficiently, she found that he was pointing straight down at the very road that they were standing on, which was also the road that led to their bungalow.

  “Yes,” she told him.“I do see this road.”

  “Very well.” He went on to explain that they should follow this road out of town. “You will pass some bungalows,” he said, and they nodded. “You must continue past the bungalows for approximately one more kilometer. On your right, you will see a river. Leave the road and walk down to the edge of the river. Stand by the edge in full view of the other side, and soon somebody from the other side will come for you in a boat and ferry you across. You should give him fifty cents apiece. When you reach the other side, you will see another road, and you should continue along that road. There will be people to guide you.” They thanked him and started on their way, though they were skeptical about the river crossing. In fact, everything unfolded as the beekeeper predicted, and when they each handed the boatman fifty cents, he tipped his straw hat at them and extended his oar for them to hold onto as they stepped from the boat onto a cluster of damp rocks and from there to the shore.

  They walked all morning, but the longer they walked toward the Mennonites, the farther away from the Mennonites they were, or at least that was how it seemed, for as they stopped at the various houses and huts along the road to inquire about the distance, the numbers tossed out grew steadily larger. At one hut, the woman opened her refrigerator and took out two sodas, which she offered to them. They drank them, but when they prepared to leave, she told them that they owed her two dollars for “the refreshments.” They gave her the money and didn’t mind really because they had been thirsty and they knew that she needed to make a living. Then, after they had paid her, as they were waving goodbye, she said, quite matter-of-factly, “You will never reach the Mennonites,” and for some reason, this, they minded.

  Several times during the day, they sat down near the side of the road, generally under a tree, to drink from their water bottles, and each time, a passing vehicle stopped and the driver offered them a ride. Finally, they were afraid even to pause because they found it difficult to reject the offers again and again. At one point, several schoolchildren approached them, giggling, and asked for water, so they gave the children a bottle that was half-full and told them to keep it, though they both knew that they were acting less out of generosity than a shared fear of germs. Finally, after they had been walking for over six hours, they decided that they had no choice—they would accept the next ride, which turned out to come from a very large blond man in overalls accompanied by two equally blond, similarly dressed teenage boys all crammed together in the cab of an old pickup truck. The man in overalls nodded toward the back, and they climbed in and squatted as though preparing to urinate.

  “Mennonites!” Sarah mouthed excitedly.

  “Yes, but now what do we do? We can’t very well tell them that we’re on our way to see them.”

  The Mennonites did not ask where they were going, however. Instead, the large, blond man drove and the two teenagers rocked gently in the seat next to him. They had driven several miles when, coming over a hill, the women found the landscape startlingly different. Scattered at intervals were farm houses, large and white and sturdy, with barns off to the side and a silo, sometimes even two, attached to the barns. And everywhere they looked there was corn, rows and rows of it. Best of all, the smell of worked soil hung thickly in the air.

  “It just feels so weird,” said Sara after they had both studied the scenery for a moment. “It’s just like Minnesota. It even smells like Minnesota.”

  “Or Iowa,” said Sarah without a hint of annoyance. Rather, she sounded relieved, and Sara, hearing this in her voice, looked over at her quickly. They smiled, and Sara began to sing then, giddily, a song rushing to her from her childhood: “Ho, ho, ho. Happy are we. Anderson and Henderson and Lundstrom and me.”

  The truck turned in to a driveway and continued for several yards toward the house before the driver pressed gently on the brakes, put the truck in reverse, and backed toward the road, stopping at the point where the driveway and the road met. Still, nobody in the cab spoke to them or even turned around to acknowledge them, and the women stood up uncertainly, clutching the sides of the truck lest it begin to move again. When they had dropped to the ground, they waved thank you, and the truck crept forward again toward the house.

  Now that they were at the Mennonites, they did not know what to do. The day was warm, and the swaying of the truck had left them both drowsy, their legs rubbery. They stood for a time in the road, taking in the corn, and then they turned and began to walk back in the direction from which they had just come. They had not gone far when they heard behind them the whir of bicycles approaching, and so they moved to the side of the road, out of the way. The first bicycle passed quickly, astride it a boy of perhaps twelve pedaling furiously, one leg of his overalls bunched up around his white thigh to keep it from being sucked into the bicycle chain. As he went by, he turned and smiled at them, but it was not a friendly smile; in fact, it was decidedly unfriendly, as though the boy knew why they had come, and they felt ashamed of themselves then for thinking of the Mennonites as a destination.

  As Sara looked down, the second bicycle slowly passed on her right, and she felt a hand on her breast, squeezing hard. It took her a second to understand what had happened, as though she were translating from a language that she had just begun to make sense of. Sarah, who was a half step behind her, saw the boy’s hand come out and knew instinctively what he was about to do, and she kicked at him, too late. Next, she screamed at the boy, at both boys, who stood on the pedals of their bicycles, heads turned back toward the women to witness their response. Finally, she picked up rocks and began hurling them at the boys, but they were too far away for the rocks to do anything but provoke laughter. The boys pedaled furiously up a hill, and when they crested it, they stopped briefly to wave at the women, and then they were gone.

  “Bastards,” Sarah screamed, and then, because there was nothing more that she could do, she turned back toward Sara, who was hiccuping sobs, and they stood awkwardly together by the side of the road, all around them the dark earth that had made them think of home. Sarah studied the handprint, thinking how young the boy had looked to have such large hands and how dark, like the soil, the mark was, emblazoned across the white of the shirt. The hand was directly over Sara’s breast, appeared to be cupping it in fact, rising and falling with it as she breathed.

  Upon Completion of Baldness

  MY GIRLFRIEND RETURNED FROM HONG KONG BALD, thoroughly bald, the bumps and veins of her skull rising up in relief, as neat and stark as the stitching on a baseball. When we embraced, I noted that her scalp had a sickly yellowish cast to it, the influence of the airport’s fluorescent lights apparently, for once we were home, the yellowness had vanished, leaving nothing but white. It may surprise you to know that I did not address her baldness immediately, right there in the airport, but I did not. Rather, we stepped free of our embrace and then rode the escalator down a level to retrieve her suitcase, though I will admit to standing a step above her as we descended in order to survey the very top of her head, the crown, which appeared freer of veins than the rest of her head and brought t
o mind a bird’s belly.

  “How was Hong Kong?” I asked as we waited for the conveyor belt to start up and produce her suitcase.

  “Tiring,” she said with a small, exhausted smile meant to confirm her reply.

  Then, we stood in silence for several minutes, waiting for her bag to appear, which it did, bright orange and easy to spot. The closest I come to experiencing a sense of wonder in regard to the world and its workings is at the moment that I catch sight of a familiar piece of luggage, last seen thousands of miles away, chugging up the conveyor belt from the bowels of the airport. I simply do not expect it. Perhaps this seems overly pessimistic, for something must be done with those scores of bags so carefully collected and tagged on the other end. They cannot all simply disappear into nothingness. True. However, I fully expect the other travelers’ bags to arrive; it is only the appearance of my own that provokes awe. Furthermore, for the sake of full disclosure, I will reveal that only once has my luggage actually gone astray, and not during one of the more complicated international flights but after the shortest hop imaginable—fifty minutes, Denver to Albuquerque, Albuquerque being home.

  When we walked from the car to the house, the chilly desert air seemed to startle her as though, in that moment, she realized that there was a price to be paid for having no hair, and while I still said nothing, I was happy to see her suffer just a bit. She unpacked immediately, unusual for her, while I sat on the bed and watched, focusing on her hands, which dipped in and out of the suitcase, bearing all of the familiar clothing with which she had departed just a week ago, several pairs of black dress pants and lots of orange—blouses, sweaters, a scarf. Somehow, she can combine black and orange and not come off looking as though she’s dressed for Halloween, but with her nude head bobbing atop her shoulders like a pumpkin, it occurred to me that things might be different now. And still I said nothing, for I hadn’t decided yet what it was that I felt—anger, sorrow, embarrassment, perhaps all three.

  “Here,” she said, handing me a plastic bag containing what appeared to be individually wrapped squares of candy, but when I unwrapped a cube and set it on my tongue, it was definitely not candy. I sucked on it a moment and then bit down.

  “Bouillon?” I inquired politely. She laughed, and it sounded the same, rich and frothy, but when I glanced up, her head was bald, and she stopped.

  “Dried tuna with wasabi,” she said, and we fell silent.

  We brushed our teeth together, both of us vying for the sink, a common occurrence, but when the mint of the toothpaste mixed with the residual taste of dried tuna and wasabi, I nudged her quickly out of the way and leaned over the bowl, gagging. When I glanced up in the mirror, she was there behind me, perhaps looking concerned, though I cannot be sure of that. I do know that with the toothbrush protruding from her mouth, her baldness seemed almost mechanical, as though her head were nothing more than a giant socket, a home for various parts. Later, when we were in bed, I opened my eyes, expecting to see her head illuminated, a full moon rising over her pillow, but there was nothing, only the faint throttle of her breathing.

  We had spoken only once while she was away, the day after she arrived in Hong Kong, a brief conversation that seems, in retrospect, to have focused solely on our neighbors, the retired wrestling coach and his wife, who had not yet removed their Christmas lights although it was past Saint Patrick’s Day and moving swiftly toward Easter. “Shall I speak to them about it?” I had asked, but she sounded distracted, which at the time I attributed to jet lag. Could it be, I now wondered, that she was already bald, even then? That as I was speaking to her about such trivial matters as Christmas lights, she was pressing the telephone to her bald head fifteen hours ahead of me in Hong Kong? Thus, the first discernible emotion related to her baldness: anger. Or perhaps annoyance. Yes, simple annoyance, for it would not do to overstate the matter.

  I lay there listening to her sinuses rattle for a good hour before I got out of bed and in an attempt to understand the situation—her motivations, my reticence—began to write this all down, to record the details as they occurred to me and then to study what I had written, to analyze it in much the same way that I would a text, the analyzing of texts being both my forte and my livelihood. I suspect that most people would be happier if they could manage their relationships in this way, applying their professional training toward making sense of their personal lives as well, though I am obviously in a better position to do so than, say, a plumber or somebody who handles money for a living.

  I must confess that, in recording these simple facts, I immediately encountered a snag: in the first sentence, I wrote “my girlfriend,” but only after elaborate hesitation, realizing that I had no fixed designation for her other than her name, which is Felicity, an overtly, almost aggressively, symbolic name that I have nevertheless learned to use without smirking. I briefly considered lover, but felt that the term put a disproportionate emphasis, inaccurately I might add, on one particular aspect of our relationship. As for partner and significant other, nothing need be said. Thus it was that I chose the unequivocally precise (albeit bland) designation girlfriend, though not without experiencing the aforementioned hesitation, for simply put, girlfriend sounds juvenile and might mislead one about our ages, which I will now describe as fortyish.

  As I wrote, I could not help but dwell, with some frustration, on certain matters that I had hoped to discuss with Felicity before we returned to school the next day, but she had chosen to arrive home bald instead, preempting discussion. There was the ongoing situation with Mr. Matthers, who, like us, was in his first year of employment at the school, a private high school, technically without a religious bent, though there are shades of such everywhere these days. Felicity had laughed when I told her that it would behoove us (yes, I used behoove) to pay attention to the stir that he was causing; the three of us were hired together, I pointed out sternly, and thus were associated with one another in the minds of our colleagues, but she said that it behooved us (mocking me, no doubt) to pay attention to ourselves.

  At this point, there had been only the vague reports that Mr. Matthers was teaching with both hands held in the air, not fully extended like in a hold up, but partially, with his hands sprouting out just above his shoulders. I began to hear more specifically about this strange behavior from my students, many of whom were in his science classes. One day, while my tenth graders worked at their desks diagramming sentences, which, for the record, I still consider a worthy endeavor, I crept down the hall and around the corner to Mr. Matthers’s room. He was wearing a tan lab coat with Let’s Bake Bread stenciled across the front, standing before the class with his heels together and his toes pointed out at a ninety-degree angle, in what we were taught was the appropriate stance for reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or acknowledging “The Star-Spangled Banner” when I was young. And yes, his hands were aloft, not gesturing or even keeping rhythm with what he was saying but simply floating, perfectly still, as though he had thrown them up in a moment of surprise and forgotten them there.

  However, that night at dinner, when I informed Felicity that I had gone down to Mr. Matthers’s classroom and witnessed his strange behavior firsthand, she remained dismissive. “Maybe it’s part of a science experiment,” she suggested, chewing as she spoke.

  “A science experiment,” I replied incredulously, though I paused to swallow first. “The students say that he teaches the entire class like that. How could it possibly be part of a science experiment?”

  “Well, perhaps Mr. Matthers is experiencing problems with his circulation. Perhaps he is simply following the advice of a doctor,” she had suggested next.

  “Perhaps,” I replied. “But wouldn’t he explain this to the students if that were the case?”

  “Perhaps Mr. Matthers is of the opinion that his duty to the students is to explain science,” she replied, getting in the final “perhaps,” though I knew that she did not care for Mr. Matthers either.

  That had been our last discussi
on of the matter, but during her week away, a second problem had arisen with Mr. Matthers, one that I wanted to apprise her of before she returned to school. I couldn’t very well rouse her from a deep, jetlagged sleep to do so, but the next morning, once we were in the car, I turned to her and said, “Mr. Matthers has been up to his old tricks.” She was still bald, of course, not that you would imagine otherwise.

  Our commute took approximately twenty-five minutes, enough time to have discussed both Mr. Matthers and the other situation had Felicity been amenable to a discussion, which she was not on that particular morning. There were signs. Some mornings, she turned toward the window and rested her forehead against the glass, “appreciating its coolness,” she said. Other days, she hummed, a habit she’d had as long as I’d known her. In both cases, I knew not to make any conversational overtures. I do consider it worth mentioning that she did not hum when she was alone, at least not to my knowledge. Rather, the humming was a purely public gesture, a means by which she kept others at a distance. I had pointed this out to her—the impoliteness of it—because that is the sort of thing that one wants to know, but she just laughed.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Humming is a joyful sound, an expression of tranquility and ease.” What does one say to that?

  Ten minutes into our commute, she had still offered none of the positive indicators, the signs that she welcomed conversation. She had not turned toward me with her left arm flung up along my seat back, fingertips extended invitingly. Nor had she called me DriverDriver, which was her nickname for me, borrowed from our friend Sandy, an accounts analyst who was often perplexed by the workings of the human mind. Aware of her shortcoming, Sandy administered personality assessment tests to all of her employees and then interacted with each according to the guidelines prescribed for his or her personality type. When she asked Felicity and me to take one of these tests as well, to help her be a “better friend” as she put it, we of course obliged. I tested into the driver camp for both primary and secondary traits, thus the nickname.