The Bigness of the World

by Lori Ostlund

  “Well,” says Bernadette, “I guess this is it.”

  “Yes,” Sheila agrees, “I guess it is.”

  “Ladies,” the hotelier sings out when they appear in the foyer with their backpacks. His eye is in full color now, but he makes no attempt to hide it as he had done the night before. “Please, let us have some tea together.” He gestures toward his quarters, and because they are leaving, they feel that they cannot say no. They find his low table set with three teacups as well as a loaf of bread, jam, and a small plate of olives, the three cushions arranged neatly around it, and he allows them to survey it for a moment before urging them, with a graceful sweep of his arm, in the direction of it all.

  “I am sorry, ladies, about the difficulties,” he tells them once they are seated, his voice strangely animated. “My nephew, you see. He came for a visit.” He turns his attention to pouring the tea, and the women look around the room one last time, trying not to fidget though they are anxious to leave, to make a first step toward departure, even one that will mean sitting in the market for another two hours awaiting the arrival of the bus. Nearby, so close, in fact, that they wonder how they could not have noticed them immediately are the Richard Chamberlain photographs, in shreds, laid out on the open prayer rug. Somebody, presumably the hotelier, has attempted to mend them, but with limited success, the resulting composites bringing together features of the actor from conflicting decades, drastically differing hairstyles and clothing, a facial topography of wrinkles that appear and disappear and then appear again.

  The hotelier acknowledges the damage with a shrug. “My nephew,” he says sadly but then, perhaps because they both look guiltily away from the photographs, he adds almost cheerfully, “There is nothing that can be done, but he will bring me others. Better ones. He is sorry for what he has done.” Giving a small, authoritative clap of his hands first in Bernadette’s direction and then in Sheila’s, he orders them, “Eat, please,” and they both take up their bread, on which he has spread jam, and begin the process of chewing and swallowing.

  Nothing more is said as they finish eating, drink one cup of tea, and accept, though do not drink, a second, but when they stretch their legs in anticipation of leaving, the hotelier rises first and prepares to speak. He stands before them for perhaps forty seconds, clearing his throat repeatedly until both women fear that he might have a piece of bread lodged in it, but at last he stops, gasps once, and his hands, twin birds that generally flutter about excitedly when he speaks, dart inside the sleeves of his djellaba and are still.

  “You see, I love him, and that must be considered,” he announces, ceremoniously and with great finality, and only now do the women understand how much they have come to rely on his hands, their fluttering, distracting lightness. He smiles at them both then, sweetly, and in the awkward silence that ensues, the women begin to move away from one another, distractedly, their buttocks rotating on the scratchy woolen cushions until they are sitting with their backs nearly touching, faces cast in opposite directions, as though they can no longer bear the thought of their eyes resting on the same things. To a third party, not the hotelier but a casual observer, one able to take in, from a measured remove, both women at once, they might resemble a pair of matching bookends that have drawn more closely together in order to accommodate the steadily depleting collection of books that they once held between them.

  All Boy

  LATER, WHEN HAROLD FINALLY LEARNED THAT HIS PARENTS had not fired Mrs. Norman, the babysitter, for locking him in the closet while she watched her favorite television shows, he could not imagine why he had ever attributed her firing to this in the first place, especially since his parents had not seemed particularly upset by the news of his confinement. His father had said something vague about it building character and teaching inner resources, and his mother, in an attempt to be more specific, said that it could not hurt to learn how the sightless got by. Nor had Harold minded being in the closet, where he kept a survival kit inspired by the one that his parents, indeed all Minnesotans, stored in their cars in winter, though his contained only a small flashlight, several books, water, and a roll of Life Savers, chosen because he liked the surprise — there in the dark — of not knowing which flavor was next.

  Furthermore, he understood Mrs. Norman’s motivations, which had to do with the fact that if he were allowed to watch television with her, he would inevitably ask questions, which she would feel obligated to answer, thus diminishing her concentration and so her pleasure. Her concerns seemed to him reasonable: he had a tendency to ask questions, for he was a curious child (though awkwardly so), a characteristic that his teachers cited as proof in making comments both positive and negative.

  Mrs. Norman, it turned out, had been fired because she sometimes wore his father’s socks while she watched television, slipping them on over her own bare feet. It was the bare part that completely unhinged his father, who did not like to drink from other people’s glasses or sit in the dentist’s chair while the dentist stood close to him smelling of metal. One night, Mrs. Norman left a pair of his father’s socks on the sofa instead of putting them back in his father’s drawer, and when his father asked her about it, she said, “Oh my, I took them off when my toes got toasty and forgot all about them,” apologizing as though the issue were the forgetting and not the wearing. This had further angered Harold’s father, who considered the sharing of socks — his naked feet where hers had been — an intimacy beyond what he could bear, and after he talked about it “morning, noon, and night for two days,” as Harold’s mother later put it, they fired Mrs. Norman.

  Harold was quite familiar with Mrs. Norman’s feet. They were what old people’s feet should look like, he thought, with nails so yellow and thick that she could not cut them by herself, not even with his assistance. Instead, her daughter, who occasionally stopped by on one of the two nights each week that Mrs. Norman stayed with Harold, cut them using a tool with long handles and an end that looked like the beak of a parrot.

  “May I watch?” Harold asked because he was the sort of child who differentiated between may and can and found that adults often responded favorably to this, granting him privileges that they might not otherwise have offered. He did not feel that he was being dishonest because he cared deeply about grammar and would have gone on using may even without such incentives.

  “You may,” replied Mrs. Norman, inclining her head toward him as though she were a visiting dignitary granting him an audience, and Harold sat down next to her. Her daughter, a powerful-looking woman in her thirties, stood over them with the device, holding it in a way that suggested that she enjoyed tools and was looking forward to using it. Harold did not like tools, which he thought of as destructive, even though his father told him that he needed to learn to view the bigger picture: it was true that tools were used to cut and bore and pound, but these small acts of destruction generally resulted in a much bigger act of creation. “Like our house,” his father said, as though their house were an obvious example of the way that creation came out of destruction.

  Mrs. Norman’s daughter was what his parents called “jolly.” There were other words that they used, words that he did not yet know despite his extensive vocabulary, but he knew “jolly” and felt that she was. She drove a very old motorcycle, which she had to roll to start, and once when his father, who knew nothing about motorcycles, made polite conversation, asking, “Is it a Harley?” she replied, “More like a Hardly,” and then she thumped his father on the shoulder and laughed. His father had also laughed, surprising Harold because being touched by people he didn’t really know was another thing his father considered too intimate.

  Mrs. Norman’s daughter grasped her mother’s foot and positioned it on her thigh, but this gave her no room to wield the device properly, so she helped her mother onto the floor, where Mrs. Norman sat with her back braced against the sofa while her daughter squeezed the ends of the cutting device together and the tips of the nails broke free with a loud snap and fl
ew into the air like Tiddlywinks.

  “Can you please pick those up, Harold?” said Mrs. Norman. “They’re sharp, and I don’t want anyone stepping on them.”

  Harold crouched on the floor around Mrs. Norman’s newly trimmed feet and began to collect the nails, gathering them in his cupped left hand. He studied one of them, flexing it between his fingers, surprised at its sturdiness. “May I keep it?” he asked, thinking that it would make a welcome addition to the contents of his pocket, which already included a small snail shell, an empty bullet casing, a strip of birch tree parchment, and several dried lima beans, items chosen because they offered a certain tactile reassurance.

  “Ish, no,” said Mrs. Norman. “I want you to throw them away this minute and then scrub your hands. You too,” she admonished her daughter, who was using the hem of her shirt to brush away the chalky residue that clung to the tool’s beak.

  Harold went into the kitchen and emptied Mrs. Norman’s toenail clippings into the milk carton filled with compost — all except the large one, which he slipped into his pocket. As he scrubbed his hands at the sink, Mrs. Norman’s daughter came and stood beside him, so close that he could smell her, an oily smell that he suspected came from the Hardly. Harold did not like to be this close to people, close enough to smell them, though his mother said that this was simply his father rubbing off on him and that he needed to focus on the positive aspects of smell, the way that it enhanced hunger and rounded out memory. Harold tried to embrace his mother’s perspective, but he could not get over the way that odor disregarded boundaries, wrapping him, for example, in the earthy, almost tuberish smell that hung in the air after Mrs. Norman had spent time in the bathroom.

  “How old are you these days?” asked Mrs. Norman’s daughter as she scrubbed vigorously at her hands.

  “Ten,” he said. “Well, eleven.”

  “Which is it?” asked Mrs. Norman’s daughter, still scrubbing. “Ten or eleven? Age is a very clear-cut thing, you know. When you become eleven, you lose all rights to ten.” She said this in a serious tone, looking him in the eye rather than down at her soapy hands, but then she laughed the way she had when she said “more like a Hardly” to his father, and Harold instinctively stepped away from her.

  “Eleven.” This was true. He had turned eleven just two weeks earlier.

  “And what sorts of things do eleven-year-old boys like to do these days?”

  “I’m not sure.” He knew what he liked to do. Besides reading, which was his primary interest and one that he would not belittle by calling a hobby, he liked very specific things: he enjoyed making pancakes but not waffles; he took pleasure in helping his mother dust but could not be convinced to vacuum; he kept lists of words that he particularly liked or disliked the sound of. At the moment, he thought that vaccination and expectorate were beautiful but could not bear the word dwindle.

  He did not, however, know what boys his age liked to do, for he had no friends. At school, he interacted only with adults, who, he had learned, were subject to many of the same foibles he witnessed in his classmates, especially Miss Jamison, his homeroom teacher, who cared deeply about having the approval of her students and found ways to ridicule Harold in front of them, not overtly as his classmates did but making clear her intention nonetheless.

  For example, after he had been home with a cold for two days, she asked, “Harry, how are you feeling?” She was the only teacher who called him Harry, though all of his classmates did, and he hated it, convinced that they were really saying “hairy,” but when he complained to his mother, she told him to explain that he “did not care for the diminutive,” and so he did not mention the problem to her again.

  “I’m better,” he said.

  “Better?” Miss Jamison repeated loudly. “So you’re feeling better?” She said this with a smirk, exaggerating better as though it were wrong in some fundamental and obvious way, and his classmates all laughed knowingly. He spent the rest of the morning thinking about it: hadn’t she been asking him to compare how he felt today with how he felt yesterday? Ultimately, he decided that there was nothing wrong with saying better, but that night at dinner when his father asked how he was feeling, he said, “Well,” just to be safe.

  Shortly after Mrs. Norman’s firing, it seemed that Harold might acquire a friend, a boy named Simon, who transferred into his class just after Thanksgiving. When Simon came over to his house to play, however, he announced to Harold that his mother had a lustful look.

  “I don’t know what that means,” Harold replied grudgingly, for he was used to being the one who knew words that his classmates did not.

  “You know. Like she wants sex,” Simon said matter-of-factly, as though this were a perfectly normal observation to make about a potential friend’s mother. Harold did not reply, and the two boys sat on the floor in his room chewing summer sausage sandwiches made for them by his mother, who had chatted away with Simon as she cut and buttered the bread, trying, Harold knew, to be overly gay as a way of making up for his inability to say and do the sorts of things that would make Simon want to visit again. This is what her hard work had earned her, Harold thought sadly, the indignity of being described as lustful by an eleven-year-old boy who then gobbled up the sandwiches that she had so lustfully prepared.

  Simon’s comment struck him as particularly unfair because he knew that his parents did not have sex. He had heard his mother telling Aunt Elizabeth as much on the telephone. His aunt lived in Milwaukee, and because it was a long-distance call, she and his mother talked just once a month, generally when his father was at work, though lately they had begun to talk more often, and his father had started to complain about the higher bills. “Why doesn’t she ever call you?” asked his father, adding, “Goddamn hippies.”

  Harold did not know what hippies were, not exactly, but his aunt had spent two days with them in August, and so he had his theories. Prior to this visit, he had not seen his aunt since he was six because she and his father did not get along, and throughout the visit, he felt his father’s unspoken expectation of loyalty, but he could not help himself: he had liked his aunt, who wore fringe and waited until both of his parents were out of the room to say, “Harold, I’m deeply sorry about your name. I should have tried to stop them.”

  Harold didn’t know how to respond, for he thought of his name as who he was, a feature that could not be changed without altering everything else. Still, he liked the earnest, conspiratorial way in which his aunt addressed him.

  “What do your friends call you?” she asked. “Harry?”

  He did not tell her that he had no friends. “No, I don’t really care for diminutives,” he said instead.

  She laughed. “Well. Now I can certainly see why they chose Harold.”

  He smiled shyly then and offered to make her iced tea.

  “Groovy,” she said. “I like a man who can cook,” and when he explained that iced tea did not actually involve cooking, she laughed her throaty, pleasant laugh yet again.

  Eventually, Harold understood that his mother called his aunt more frequently because she and his father argued more frequently, their arguments sometimes taking root right in front of him but over things so small that he did not understand how they had been able to make arguments out of them. Thanksgiving was a perfect example. As the turkey cooked, his parents sat together in the kitchen drinking wine and chatting, their faces growing flushed from the heat and the alcohol, and when everything was ready, his father seated his mother and then placed the turkey in front of her with a flourish.

  “Le turkey, Madame,” he declared, pronouncing turkey as though it were French.

  His mother giggled and picked up the carving knife. “Harold, what part would you like?” she asked.

  “White meat, please.”

  “I’ll give you breast meat,” his mother said, adding with a small chuckle, “God knows your father has no interest in breast.”

  For the rest of the meal, Harold’s father spoke only to Harold, asking
him for the gravy when it actually sat in front of his mother. His mother was also silent, and when the meal was nearly over, she dumped the last of the cranberries onto Harold’s plate even though all three of them knew that cranberries were his father’s favorite part of Thanksgiving. Later, as Harold sat reading in his room, he heard his parents yelling, and he crept down the hallway and perched at the top of the stairs, letting their voices funnel up to him.

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about,” his father shouted.

  “Come on, Charles. Lighten up.” Harold heard a small catch in his mother’s voice, which meant she wanted to laugh. “He thought I was talking about the turkey breast.” She paused. “Which, of course, I was.”

  There were five words that were forbidden in their household, words that, according to his father, were not only profane but aesthetically unappealing. Harold heard his father say one of these words to his mother, his voice becoming low and precise as it did when he was very angry. His mother did not reply, and a moment later, Harold heard his father open the front door and leave.

  When his mother came to tuck him in, her eyes red from crying, he asked where his father had gone. “To the pool hall,” she said, which made her start crying again because this was an old joke between them. When his father occasionally disappeared after dinner, slipping out unannounced, Harold’s mother always said, “I guess he’s gone to the pool hall.” She had explained to Harold what a pool hall was, and they both laughed at the notion of his neat, serious father in such a place, there among men who smoked cigars and sweated and made bets with their hard-earned money.

  “You have a lot of books,” Simon said after he had proclaimed Harold’s mother lustful and they had finished their sandwiches, and there seemed nothing left to do.