The Bigness of the World

by Lori Ostlund

  “Dinner?” I say, struggling to my feet.

  “Telephone,” he replies.

  “I did not hear it ring.”

  “Your principal,” he mouths, his expression serious, for my principal never phones me at home.

  I go into my study to take the call. “Good evening, Thorqvist,” I say.

  “Deneau. Sorry to trouble you at home. The, ah, your …” he says, struggling for words to describe Marcos, who undoubtedly introduced himself as my houseboy.

  “My houseboy?” I say, attempting matter-of-factness.

  “Yes,” he says, clearing his throat directly into the phone. “He assured me that I was not calling you away from the table.”

  “Not at all,” I say.

  “Excellent. I, listen, we must speak tomorrow. First thing.”

  “Very well. I shall stop by your office. Seven thirty shall we say?”

  “Fine.” He sounds distracted, and in the background, I hear a woman, his wife no doubt, asking querulously, “Well, what does he say for himself?”

  “Good evening then, Thorqvist,” I say and hang up.

  As usual, the chicken is dry, but I spend an inordinate amount of time praising it, sidestepping Marcos’s questions regarding Thorqvist’s call. After dinner, I beg off of our nightly study session. “Headache,” I explain, touching my temples, and though it is only eight o’clock, I go off to bed.

  In fact, my head is throbbing. I realize this only when the room is dark and I am lying very still, listening to the familiar sounds of Marcos’s cleaning. When I interviewed Marcos three years ago, we walked through the house as I described his duties room by room, ending up here, in the bedroom, where two full-sized beds sat side by side. “Yours would be the right one, though if you prefer the left, that would be fine,” I explained nervously. This was the moment when interviews crashed to a halt, when the houseboy-to-be exploded angrily out the door or made some awkward excuse and left. With those few, like Jung, who stayed, a round of negotiations ensued during which the salary crept upward while I assured them repeatedly that nothing more was required than their nightly presence in the other bed. This was true, though I did not mention that without it, I could not sleep. Only Marcos knows this, Marcos, who took in the two beds and my nervous fumbling and said, “Doctor, when I was a boy, we were very poor. My brothers and I slept in one room. I miss that very much.” He smiled, and I clasped my hands together and smiled back.

  Finally, I doze off, awakening when Marcos slips into his bed. Moments later, the room fills with the uncomplicated and reassuring sound of his snoring.

  “Ah, Deneau,” Thorqvist greets me heartily the next morning.

  “Dr. Thorqvist,” I reply, waiting for an invitation to be seated, but he is busy rummaging through papers, no doubt seeking out the newest bit of damning evidence. “Coffee?” he asks at last, looking up. I nod, and he rises and leaves quickly, almost, I think, gratefully. Out of habit, I glance at the row of his wife’s samplers, noting that an eighth one has appeared. Its focus is also the ant, though this one offers an Iranian perspective on those troublesome creatures. In faulty English, it reads: “For an ant to have wings would be his undoing.”

  “Sit. Sit,” says Thorqvist, bustling back in with two coffees.

  “Thank you,” I say, accepting one of them, and then, “Your wife seems quite enamored of the ant.”

  “Yes.” He settles himself back behind his desk. “She finds them industrious and underappreciated and —” He waves his hand about to indicate that there is a third adjective he cannot recall.

  “Iranian, this one,” I say. “Have I told you my favorite Iranian proverb, Dr. Thorqvist?”

  He stirs his coffee.

  “He’d hang if it were free,” I say.

  “Who?” he asks, looking up quickly.

  “No,” I say. “That’s the proverb. Well, it’s not exactly a proverb. It’s what one says of a cheapskate. He’d hang if it were free.” I laugh suggestively, and he spits out a halfhearted chuckle that turns into a thundering bout of throat clearing, at the end of which we both fall silent.

  “Dr. Deneau,” he begins tentatively. “I wonder —” He falters when I hold up my hand warningly, for he knows how I feel about the word wonder, not the word itself but the usage that has been imposed on us by the Critical Friends, a nervous, giddy group of experts brought in by the school to help improve classroom performance. The Critical Friends is their actual name, a name far better than any I could devise by way of satire, and they employed it without a trace of irony when they introduced themselves at the first meeting of the school year. “We are here to help,” they continued earnestly, the frequency with which they made this assertion calling it into question, just as the fact that they referred to themselves as friends when they were so obviously not underscored that discrepancy.

  They would be coming into our classrooms to observe us, they explained, after which they would discuss with us what they had observed. This process, the process of discussing their observations with us, was referred to as reflecting, a word once used to define the capabilities of mirrors and perfectly still bodies of water. No more. Now, we cannot act, speak, or read without being obligated to reflect, publicly and aloud. Reflections have become the bookends to our days, the benedictions to our meetings.

  At a meeting last month, for example, we were placed in pairs and told to reflect upon our days; after several minutes of this, we were instructed to reflect upon our partner’s reflection, at which point I lost all patience and cried out, “Sir, we are fiddling as Rome burns. I have students who cannot say how many inches are in a foot, who do not understand that 4 times 5 begets the same answer as 5 times 4.” This outburst, as it was termed, merited a visit to Thorqvist’s office, where he explained that the exercise had been intended to promote faculty camaraderie. How, he asked me, did I suppose Miss Thoreson felt about my outburst?

  “She was telling me what she had for lunch,” I replied. “A bologna sandwich. I can elaborate if you like, but please consider my feelings, being asked to reflect upon the inadequacies of her lunch. Quite honestly, I do not wish to know the details of my colleagues’ lives nor to share with them the details of mine. I do not wish to hug my colleagues or reveal to them my favorite song. Certainly, I do not want them feeding me Jell-O from a spoon gripped between their teeth.” These were all references to activities introduced by the Critical Friends, who emphasized closeness and frankness and transparency but who, in fact, operated like a secret society, sweeping in and out of classrooms, sequestering themselves with individual teachers, and introducing a whole new vocabulary, which I privately referred to as the Orwellian Code. Under their tutelage (and here I return to my point, having digressed), we are no longer to speak of our concerns or dislikes, freighted as these words are with negativity; we are instead, the Friends explained, to wonder about such things, or, reverting to the noun form, to share a wonder.

  “But that has just the opposite effect,” I had shouted, half-rising from my seat. “If one of my esteemed colleagues were to wonder at my idea, I would understand immediately that my idea was so poor, so ill-conceived, so beyond the pale, that he felt compelled to resort to euphemism in order to conceal his horror.” Several of my colleagues chuckled, but their amusement did not keep them from complying, and eventually I was the only one left still speaking of weaknesses and concerns.

  Thus, when I take umbrage at Thorqvist’s use of wonder, he squeezes his eyes shut but quickly reopens them and says, “Fine, allow me to rephrase,” and I know then that the matter before us is serious. He clears his throat and begins again. “Dr. Deneau, I am … concerned by reports from parents that you are making the boys hold hands with one another.” He coughs excessively before asking, “Is this true?”

  “Why, yes,” I say. I do not know what I had been expecting, but it was not this. “I have been employing this punishment for some years, quite effectively I might add. When two boys insist on pummeling one anothe
r, punching and roughhousing and such as young boys are wont to do, I have found that nothing works better than to make them sit side by side for the rest of the period holding hands. If they can’t keep their hands off of one another, I advise them, then they shall spend the period with their hands directly engaged with one another. I, of course, impose this punishment judiciously.”

  Thorqvist stares at me, a look that I cannot fully decipher. “Parents have complained,” he says at last.

  “Parents complain about everything these days, except for the most troubling fact of all — that their children are lazy and spoiled and entirely ill-equipped to face the world.”

  “Dr. Deneau, I must say that I am surprised, surprised that you, of all people, have chosen to use such a method.”

  “I am afraid that I do not follow you.”

  He fidgets with his pen, somersaulting it from nib to end several times. “Well, Dr. Deneau, I prefer to address this delicately, so you will forgive me for being roundabout — it is simply that, given your personal situation as it were, I am surprised that you would consider such a thing … well, appropriate.”

  “Dr. Thorqvist,” I say sharply. “I do not see your point. However, I do ask that you think carefully before pulling your support for discipline.”

  “I am afraid that you misunderstand the severity of this matter, Dr. Deneau, so let me be very clear: there will be an investigation. Furthermore, I must inform you that you have been officially placed on leave. A substitute has been called. You are to leave the building immediately without having any contact with the students. Do you understand what I am telling you?” I gather my energy to stage an angry rebuttal, but his soliloquy does not end there. “Please make this easy on both of us, Michael,” he continues instead, quietly, using my given name for the very first time in our long acquaintance.

  It has been years since anyone has called me Michael in this way, intimately, urgently. The last person to do so was he, the night that we walked together after the Mahler, a performance that left me in a precarious state. The baritone was a moody, Heathcliffian presence on the stage, and the words, sung in German so that I received them secondhand from a translation printed in the program, affected me profoundly. I began to shake and then, as the baritone repeated the final, haunting word, Ewig, to sob. In the half-lit hall, I reached out and gripped his arm, but it was as though my touch burned, so quickly did he pull away.

  We left the concert hall and walked aimlessly, not speaking, not even exchanging small politenesses about the cellist who dropped her bow midmovement, until we reached the corner, that corner, where an elderly woman approached us carrying a metal lunchbox. It was clear from her eyes and the thickness of her lipstick that she was mad, and when she spoke, she held the lunchbox to her mouth as though it were a channel for her words.

  “Please be so kind as to tell me where to go,” she said.

  I might have ignored her, but he was not like that. “Ma’am,” he began, but she interrupted him, crying out, “I cannot hear you. You must speak into the box. Please,” and she held the box to her ear, waiting. He, of course, leaned forward, doing as she asked. “Ma’am,” he said, “you must take this money and find a place, a safe place, where you can eat and pass the night.” He held out a five-dollar bill, which she regarded cautiously, as though trying to determine whether it was money or a snake. Finally, with a grunt, she seized it and gestured for him to listen.

  “Only we can know,” she whispered into the box, into his ear, and though there were numerous ways to interpret her words, which were nothing more than the words of a crazy woman after all, I could not help but hear them as a request, a request that I be excluded. She walked away, box in one hand, money in the other, and as though heeding her directive, he turned to me immediately and said, “We must not mingle with each other, Michael.”

  He was Iranian, but his English was very good. Still, there was no way for me to know what he meant by this, to know why he had used mingle, which was something that people, strangers, did at cocktail parties. Of course, he might have been thinking of the word in a purely physical sense, for he was a scientist, my former chemistry professor in fact, and in this capacity, I had heard him use the word often to speak of the way that liquids came together, mingling in the beaker. He moved close to me one last time, shook my hand formally, and uttered the very same words that, twenty years later, my principal would use in asking me to leave the building: “Please make this easy on both of us, Michael.”

  Thorqvist concludes our meeting with one of his usual malapropisms, urging me to “keep my lip up.” It is this, and only this, that keeps me from becoming emotionally indiscreet, that allows me the fortitude to walk out of his office and across the parking lot to my car. It is October, a likeable month I have always thought. The air is chilly and crisp, and as I drive, I study the sky, imagining young Thomas Jefferson’s family also gazing up at this moment, gazing at this very same sky and thinking, “That is where he died.” It seems to me unjust, supremely and sublimely unjust, to have as a reminder such a vast, inescapable expanse.

  Marcos is studying when I arrive home, studying with the stereo turned up loud to some awful music of a type that I have never known him to enjoy. He shuts it off immediately, looking concerned to see me home. “Are you ill, Doctor?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I reply. “I am unwell, Marcos. Help me into bed.” He does, taking my arm and leading me to our bedroom, where I sit on the edge of my bed while he removes my shoes.

  “Marcos,” I say, “when I was a boy and feeling unwell, my mother allowed me to sleep in her bed during the day so that when I went to my own bed at night, it would feel fresh and cool and unfamiliar. May I rest in your bed today, Marcos?”

  “That is an excellent idea, Doctor,” he says, and he pulls back the covers of his neatly made bed and helps me in, then perches on the edge. “Is it the headache from last night, Doctor?” he asks with great concern.

  “It is everything,” I tell him. “It is everything in the world.” I begin to cry then, cannot stop myself, and Marcos, who will be leaving me soon, takes my hand and holds it, stroking it gently with his thumb. Such torment, but I do not ask him to stop, for this punishment is what I need and what I deserve.

  The Children Beneath the Seat

  THEY HAD NOT EXPECTED THE DESERT TO BE LIKE this — just like the stereotypical images of it that they brought to Morocco with them — but, ironically (and disappointingly), it was. There were camels, one of which had chased them up the side of a gorge in a fit of misplaced anger, and the occasional oasis in the midst of kilometer after kilometer of rock and sand and dryness. The only thing that had really shocked them was the unwavering brownness of it all, consuming entire villages so that houses rose like intermittent lumps in a bedspread of brownness. Intellectually, of course, they had expected it, but the intellect cannot always sufficiently inform the senses, which was the reason that they had decided to travel in the first place. Brownness has thus become their new word, for there seemed no other way to express it except by giving it the weight, the concreteness, of nounhood — not just brown, but the state of being brown. Needless to say, they are from a lush place, Minnesota, a land with so many lakes that it feels compelled to brag about them on its license plates.

  They are well into their forties, Bernadette older by thirteen months, but only now have they concluded, grudgingly, that there are things one cannot know except by seeing them. This realization has hit them hard, for they are English professors, both of them, women who have spent their entire lives reading, engaged in the world of heroes and plots, foreshadowing and epiphanies, and, perhaps without even realizing it, they had come to expect that life would follow literary extremes, would be either dazzlingly uplifting or stultifyingly tragic, but that was not the case at all. It did swerve occasionally toward one or the other, of course, but most of the time it occupied a vast middle ground, boring and relentless, a state of affairs that the world of literature had neither
taught them to expect nor given them the tools with which to contend. Trapped within this vast middle ground, they graded papers and paid bills and slept, as did those around them, but it struck them, increasingly, that something was amiss.

  It might have helped if they were religious by nature, but they were not, were, in fact, quite the opposite: their disinclination toward religion grew stronger, became more entrenched, as the years passed. Furthermore, in the nearly twenty years that they have been together, they have acquired a tendency to reflect, and thus intensify, certain traits in each other — cynicism and didacticism specifically. Now, under the weight of their combined cynicism, each woman had begun to turn inward, away from the other, until there were times — increasingly more of them — that they crept into bed at night without having exchanged a single word all day. Then, when a simple “Good night” or “Sleep well” would have done much toward slowing this mutual sprint toward the end of their relationship, even then, or perhaps especially then, they could not speak, for the more language was required of them, the less each felt capable of producing it. Instead, they lay side by side, the silence between them like the pounding of waves, which is thought to be conducive to sleep but rarely is.

  Thus, there is a subtext to this trip, unacknowledged but with the potential to rise up and overwhelm all others: in short, they hope to subject themselves to something so beyond the scope of what their lives have thus far encompassed that they will find themselves, in the face of it, free of pretense — able to rescue themselves and, in turn, their flagging relationship. The trip will be like an electric jolt to the heart, thinks Bernadette, for as English professors, they are enamored of metaphors and not always able to recognize trite ones, particularly those of their own making.

  The desert has been introduced to them largely through the windows of various buses, which they don’t mind, for there is something comforting about being on the move in this country. At the moment, for example, they are headed for Tafraoute, having spent two sweaty, interminable days in Agadir, the most depressing place they have visited thus far, its beach overflowing with Europeans and beer gardens and restaurants with signs outside all proclaiming, via a diversity of spellings: SMORGASBORD.