by Lori Ostlund
There was something generally deceitful about the letter, which implied that Mrs. Carlstrom had somehow influenced my decision to become a teacher. She had not, nor had she taught me the correct usage of the apostrophe, although she had tried on several occasions, always unsuccessfully. Still, I felt that the letter contained the spirit of what I wanted to say, which was that she had, in some way, marked my childhood, and so I mailed it, addressing it simply, “Mr. Carlstrom, Glenville, MN, USA.” As I walked home from the post office, I stopped to purchase a propane camping stove, and that evening I prepared a soup consisting of what we had on hand: ten shriveled carrots, a few potatoes, and frozen shrimp that turned mealy long before Georgia arrived home.
Still, she seemed pleased by the soup, and as we ate, tearing off chunks of bread and dipping them into the orange stew, I told her about my day, concluding nervously, “I feel that nothing has gone right here — for us, I mean.”
Georgia chewed and swallowed a shrimp, gulping noisily as it went down. “The Medic broke up with me,” she said.
“Oh,” I replied, my face becoming hot.
“I mean,” she quickly clarified, “she broke up with me because of that line from Eliot.” She lifted her wine glass and bit noisily at the rim, troubled by having made what amounted to a declaration.
“Oh,” I said again, this oh of a much different tenor. We both took a few swallows of wine, hoping to rinse away the carrots that clung to our teeth, though when we kissed, they were still there, small bits of orange that our tongues dislodged.
III. THE VERY FIRST
The first time happened long ago when I was a young girl growing up in that small town in Minnesota with no idea whatsoever that one day I might find myself in love or that the object of my affection might be a woman (moreover, a woman who would someday cheat on me) or that I might find myself a teacher living in such places as Spain and Malaysia, places vastly different from the world that I then knew, but, as it turned out, places where birds would defecate on me nonetheless.
That day, my third-grade class was making its way to the home of Mr. Nyquist, a very old man whose hobby was tumbling agates. Each Halloween, he dropped two or three of them into our bags instead of candy, so we all had examples of his work at home, which meant that as an outing, seeing Mr. Nyquist’s agates held little appeal. He lived only a block and a half from the school, but we were still each assigned a walking buddy, a classmate with whom we were to hold hands and match steps. I was paired with Jaymy Korkowski, a skinny boy with legs far longer than mine. I recall that I expected his hand to be dry and cool in keeping with the thin, chalky look of him but that instead it was wet with perspiration, a fat boy’s hand.
As we passed under an elm tree just half a block from the school, something hit my shoulder with the impact of a lightly packed snowball and, without letting go of Jaymy’s hand, I stopped to inspect it. Each year on Mother’s Day, I was made to present to my paternal grandmother, who did not like me, a box of chocolates from which I always managed to choose the most disgusting one, a chocolate filled with a yellowish, phlegm-like substance that bore an amazing resemblance to the glob that rested atop my shoulder that morning. When Jaymy Korkowski saw it, he dropped my hand, sat down hard on the sidewalk, and began to cry, great, wet, gasping sobs that shook his entire body. Of my thirty-three classmates, he was the one about whom I knew the least, and so I had nothing to draw upon in making sense of his reaction. I leaned down, taking in the full smell of him, which was not unpleasant, the dominant odor that of manure and beneath it, something sweeter, carrots perhaps.
“It’s just bird poop,” I said, though he cried even harder at being provided with this information.
By then, we had fallen well behind the other fifteen pairs, fifteen for there were two students missing that day, both of them farmers’ children, no doubt kept home when it was learned that we would be wasting a precious portion of the day admiring rocks when they could be out in the fields removing them. Mrs. Carlstrom soon noticed our absence and brought the class to a halt. Then, while they waited, watched over by Mrs. Preebe, the portly assistant librarian who had been brought along in anticipation of just such an event, Mrs. Carlstrom marched back to us. By the time she arrived, however, Jaymy Korkowski was on his feet, fully recovered, and so her attention was directed toward my shoulder.
“You’ll live,” she said in the gravelly monotone that she used for explaining division and congratulating us on our birthdays; then, Jaymy Korkowski in tow, she turned and walked back to the others, leaving me behind.
Mrs. Carlstrom was, as I have already pointed out, nothing like our other teachers, who addressed us in high, cooing voices and seemed perpetually in awe of even our most minor accomplishments. Moreover, they all lived in town and often came into our café with their families, using their regular voice with my parents and slipping into the cooing voice whenever I appeared. I knew what foods they liked and had even seen several of them with ketchup dabbed colorfully on their faces. They were familiar, knowable. Only Mrs. Carlstrom lived elsewhere, eight miles away in Glenville, where my father had grown up and which, on warm Sunday evenings, we visited, driving slowly up and down its streets while he pointed to various houses, explaining who had lived there when he was a boy and who lived there now and how this transition had come about. One evening, he surprised us by looping out of town to show us a run-down trailer park, stopping in front of a lopsided trailer with an overturned wooden crate for steps. Three dogs stood in the dirt yard, eyeing us from behind a chicken wire fence.
“Do you know who lives there?” my father asked of me specifically, and from the backseat I said that I did not.
“That is your teacher’s house,” my father announced.
“Mrs. Carlstrom?” I said skeptically, unable to reconcile her with such a place.
“She’s not much of a teacher,” my father pointed out almost apologetically. “But that’s generally the way it is with smart folks.” As he spoke, he gestured in the general direction of her yard, so I did not know whether he meant that this — the dirt and crate steps and barking dogs — was the way it was with smart people or that she was not much of a teacher because she was smart. Until then, I had not even known that she was smart, though I did know that she was not much of a teacher: if we did not understand some aspect of the lesson, she did not offer examples that might help us better understand what was involved but instead repeated exactly what she had said the first time around, as though there were only one way to convey the information and this was it.
The elm tree from which the bird took aim at me that morning stood in front of the McHendrys’ house, which I soon found myself inside along with Mrs. Preebe, whom Mrs. Carlstrom had sent back to deal with me while the others forged on with the field trip. We were shown into the bathroom, where Mrs. Preebe scrubbed my shirt while Mrs. McHendry, who possessed the frenetic energy displayed by certain types of very thin people, stood in the doorway regarding us through a haze of cigarette smoke, for these were the days when smokers simply smoked, without rules involved, by which I mean that they did not avoid certain rooms or take into consideration the presence of children.
The McHendrys owned one of two grocery stores in town, the one that we called The Market as opposed to the other, The V Store, as in Variety, which is what they provided — not just food but an assortment of school supplies and clothing as well as an entire section intriguingly entitled Notions. The McHendrys, by contrast, offered a butcher shop, where you could point to a block of pimento loaf, for example, and watch as Mr. McHendry sliced it right there in front of you. He would pinch the first slice between a folded sheet of wax paper and thrust it across the counter for your inspection. “Thinner?” he would ask, in a voice that implied that this was the ideal thickness but that he was giving you the option to ignorantly choose otherwise.
Years later, long after I had left that town, I would learn from my father that on a May day, the first warm day of spring, Mr. McHendr
y walked out of the Market, leaving behind the few dollars that he had taken in that morning, turned the key in the lock and took it next door to the bank, where he handed it over to the bank president, the only person in town who knew exactly how poor business had been for years, and then went home to the house with the elm tree. From this house, according to my father, he did not emerge for nearly a decade. People considered his behavior extreme, some even suggesting that he was not well, and on the other end of the phone line, I could hear the sound of my father tapping his own head, clarifying the nature of this presumed illness. I, however, found his behavior perfectly logical: he had once divided his world between The Market and home, and this was the half left to him. I never wondered why he had given up, for I knew that people did, only why he had chosen that particular day to do so, why, after months of snow and ice, months during which he had gotten out of bed and carried on against the dearth of customers, the encroaching bills, the oppressive proximity of the bank, why he had awakened that morning to the promise of warmth and found it all too much to bear. Only later did I begin to understand the way that a simple gesture of sympathy or solidarity, even, it seemed, one of a meteorological nature, could crumble one’s resolve far more quickly than adversity itself.
On the morning that I was defecated on for the first time in my life, a part of me wanted desperately to believe that Jaymy Korkowski was sobbing on my behalf, that his tears were shed over the small injustice I had suffered, though something, sheer stubbornness perhaps, kept me from doing so. I have since come to understand that this — the need to imagine our pain worthy of another’s anguish, our circumstances capable of invoking sacrifice or even despair in another human being — is a basic human need, one felt even more deeply as we confront our own shortcomings in meeting this need for others.
In the weeks that followed, I committed myself wholeheartedly to learning about Jaymy Korkowski, hoping to make sense of his response, but in the end, I learned only this: that when Jaymy Korkowski was a baby, his father had caught his leg in a bear trap and it had been amputated right above the knee, an interesting but irrelevant bit of trivia, for I was a logical child who knew better than to complete a puzzle out of just two pieces. I have since come to believe that what caused his tears that morning was not something large at all — some deeply ingrained character trait or lasting trauma — but rather a small thing, some soon-forgotten incident that had taken place earlier that morning, coloring his mood for the day: his father had yelled at him, perhaps, for an error made during milking or he had been bullied by the Pipo boys on the school bus. This, after all, is the way our lives unfold.
What this means, of course, is that on a different day, one free of bullies or milking errors, Jaymy Korkowski and I might have joined hands and walked, and as we did, a bird, the same bird if you like, might have defecated on me, but because this was a different morning, Jaymy Korkowski instead might have begun to laugh at my misfortune, to laugh so hard that he wet himself; or, to laugh so hard that I began to cry; or, laughed so hard that I, a shy, tentative, untrusting child, found the sound of it contagious, and we fell together to the curb, shrieking wildly so that Mrs. Carlstrom, who was smart and caustic and a terrible teacher (for some things should not change), called to us to pull ourselves together, to rise and rejoin the group. In this unfolding of events, Jaymy Korkowski and I would go on to become best friends, for what else can two people do who have together laughed at adversity and defied authority? From his mouth would emerge the words that would allow me to understand a boy who cried at the sight of bird shit — though, of course, this boy, the boy offering such revelations, is not, and never can be, the boy who was moved to tears. For, at each turn, the people we hold close elude us, living their other lives, the lives that we can never know.
Idyllic Little Bali
CALVIN GOES FIRST, TELLING THEM ABOUT THE TIME HE was in Florida and decided to attend a Beach Boys concert, not really knowing anything about the Beach Boys except that they played music for basking in the sun to, which, Calvin being from Michigan, might explain why he knew so little about them. He hitched a ride up to Fort Lauderdale, which is where the concert was being held, with a guy in a convertible who dropped him off right at the stadium, and it wasn’t until the band came on stage hours later that he realized the convertible guy, the guy with whom he’d scored the ride, was actually one of the Beach Boys, the drummer, whose name he couldn’t recall.
This is exactly how Calvin tells the story, his clauses like tired acrobats, and though the others at the table have known Calvin only a day, they are disappointed. Joe goes next, then Martin, and after them, Noreen and Sylvie begin a long story about their first date, on which they went to a run-down bar on the west side of Albuquerque, the kind of place, Sylvie explains, where Hispanic butch-femme couples show up in wedding gear on Saturday nights to hold their receptions, the butches playing pool in their tuxedos, the femmes taking over the bathrooms, where, in a never-ending cycle, they fix their makeup and cry with happiness.
“So,” Sylvie says in a voice thick with drama. “There we are on our first date, and Noreen invites this woman Deb to play pool with us.”
Noreen cuts in, explaining that this Deb woman had actually struck up a conversation with her while Sylvie was off in the bathroom. She describes Deb as a massive-thighed Amazon who raised horses and engaged in competitive weight lifting, details that, in her mind, make clear that Deb had posed no threat to their date. She even tells them how Deb, who was wearing shorts, had said, “Go ahead. Feel it,” flexing her very large thigh for Noreen, and how she, Noreen, had of course refused.
“I didn’t even know her,” she reports earnestly. “So why would I feel her thigh?” She actually seems to be soliciting their input, though it is not clear whether she is seeking plausible reasons that she (or anyone in that position) might have opted to feel the thigh or their approval for not having done so.
“It’s irrelevant anyway,” announces Sylvie, but Noreen doesn’t reply because she is thinking about Deb’s thigh, about the way that Deb had first extended her foot delicately, like someone testing the water in a pool, but then had ground her toes hard into the floor, making the leg muscles leap to the surface. There is absolutely nothing sexual about the memory. On the contrary, the thigh had been far too large, too freakish, to find appealing. Noreen had felt the way she did the first time that she saw the penis of an aroused farm animal, fascinated and repulsed, actually unable to look away, but with no sense that what she was seeing had anything to do with her.
“She gave me the creeps. Immediately,” continues Sylvie, by way of letting these relative strangers know that her instincts are keener than Noreen’s. “But Noreen invited her to play pool with us, so what could I say? Then, halfway through the game, this really blond, granola-y type walks in and sits down at the bar. She’s watching us play, so finally I go over and invite her to join the next game, and it turns out that she’s Australian.” She pauses as though she has revealed something significant.
“Olivia Newton-John?” suggests Calvin dryly, and the others laugh because, boring Beach Boys story aside, Calvin is funny.
“What?” says Sylvie nervously, bewildered by the laughter but still joining in, assuming that if others are laughing, then something must be funny. Perhaps because they have spent so much time around strangers on this trip, Noreen has begun to notice just how often Sylvie does this — laughs when she has no idea what is funny, her hand flying up to her mouth to hide the way that confusion tugs it downward.
Noreen suddenly feels tired, tired of the story itself as well as of the way that Sylvie keeps talking over her, keeps saying, “That’s not what happened” when it is, in fact, what happened. Then, there’s the way that Sylvie steered the story right past the particulars of Noreen’s meeting with Deb, had somehow gotten her talking about Deb’s thighs when the meeting was really the important part.
What had happened was that Noreen was sitting at the bar, Sylvie’s st
ool empty beside her, when Deb sat down on it, leaned toward her, and said, “You know why the Jews didn’t leave Germany?” Noreen had been put off at first, thinking that Deb was telling a joke, some one-liner about the Holocaust. After all, it was at this very bar that the DJ had, between songs, once asked, “How many Polacks does it take to rape a lesbian?” and when Noreen complained to the owner, a pudgy man in running shorts, he had said, “What? Are there Polacks here?”
But Deb was not telling a joke. She was relating an anecdote that she had read somewhere, a reply that a Jewish man had given after the war, after he had survived and been asked to explain, in retrospect, why it was that the Jews had not left when they had the chance. “Because we had pianos,” the man had said, at least according to Deb. Deb was slightly tipsy but not at all drunk, and so she did not go on and on about this in an overly sentimental way, which Noreen appreciated, yet it was obvious that the man’s response had meant something to her. Later, Noreen told Sylvie about the exchange and Sylvie had seemed impressed, so how, Noreen wonders, could Sylvie tell the story without beginning there, with the Jews and their pianos?
The others are still laughing at Calvin’s Olivia Newton-John crack, everyone except for Noreen and Martin. They have just added Martin, so there are six of them now, sitting at a table beside a pool in a tiny hotel in Yogyakarta, drinking beer and taking turns describing their oddest brush with fame. When it was his turn, Martin, who grew up in Washington, had shrugged and said, “I don’t know,” and then, as though it were a question: “Ted Bundy used to be my parents’ paperboy?” Martin is forty-five, the oldest of the group, and the others sense that he would not have joined them back home, that he has joined them now precisely because they are not in the United States.