The Bigness of the World

by Lori Ostlund

  “Yes,” said Harold. He almost added that he was a “voracious reader,” but remembering what his father always said, that words were meant to be tools of communication but just as often drove wedges between people, he opted for triteness instead. “I love reading,” he mumbled.

  “Have you read all of these books?” asked Simon with a shrug.

  “Yes. Now, I mainly check them out of the library. The limit is three at a time, but Mr. Tesky lets me take five.” Mr. Tesky was his favorite librarian because, in making recommendations, he never relied on expressions like the other boys or kids your age.

  “Yes,” replied Simon. “That’s because he’s a fag.”

  Harold had no idea what fag meant, but he regretted terribly not using voracious. “Figure it out from context,” his mother always told him after he had bothered her one too many times to explain words. He considered the context and decided that fag had to do with being helpful.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “He is.”

  Simon laughed and threw a pillow at him. “You’re a fag also,” Simon said.

  It turned out that fag meant to work really hard: “TOIL,” said his dictionary. Which made sense, for Mr. Tesky did work very hard. Of course, Harold normally would have noticed that this fag was a verb while Simon had used it as a noun, but Simon’s visit had left him feeling tired and unmoored, and so he overlooked this obvious distinction. He set the dictionary back on the shelf in the spot that it always occupied and surveyed his room, looking for something out of place, something to explain his uneasiness. Finally, he decided to calm himself by slipping into his kimono.

  Harold had purchased the kimono that summer at a yard sale at which his mother had been convinced to stop only because there were books for sale. Overall, his parents did not approve of yard sales, for they felt that there was something unsavory about putting one’s personal belongings outside for strangers to see, and not just to see but to handle and even buy. Harold, however, liked wandering amidst carpets with dark, mysterious stains and mismatched cutlery and stacks of clothing that had presumably once fit the people selling them, people who seemed in no way embarrassed to be associated with these dingy socks and stretched-out waistbands.

  The kimono, by contrast, was the most beautiful piece of clothing he had ever seen, black with a white crane painted across the back, and his mother, who lent him the two dollars to purchase it, told him that it was from Japan and that in Japan everyone wore such things, and though he found this hard to believe, Mr. Tesky later showed him a book from his personal collection with pictures of Japanese people wearing kimonos as they walked in the streets and sat around drinking tea. Harold wore his kimono only at home, but he felt different when he slipped it on, more graceful and at ease, though whether this meant that he felt more himself or less, he could not say.

  He stopped wearing the kimono quite abruptly when he overheard his father referring to it as his “dress,” though there had been issues before that: as he ate, the sleeves dragged across his food and became sullied with red spaghetti sauce and pork chop grease, and as he descended the stairs one night, he tripped on the hem, toppling down the last three steps and wrenching his ankle. For days afterwards, he worried that he had inherited his mother’s clumsiness, though she tended to fall only in public, usually on special occasions. On his first day of school this year, for example, she turned to wave at him and caught her foot where the tile became carpeting. She flew forward, upsetting an easel at which one of his classmates stood painting, and landed face down on the floor, her skirt hiked up along her thigh. Miss Jamison rushed to help, and his classmates gathered around her in awe, shocked and excited to see an adult splayed out on the floor. His mother always attended carefully to his cuts and fevers and upset stomachs, and he knew that he should go to her, but he did not because he could not bear being regarded as the boy whose mother fell. Instead, he stayed at his desk with the top up against the sight of her, arranging his books. When he got home that afternoon, his mother teased him about it so relentlessly that he knew he had hurt her deeply.

  His mother knocked at his door and came in. If she was surprised to see him wearing his kimono again, she did not say so. Instead, she got right to her point, which was that she felt he should invite Simon for a sleepover.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Harold.

  “Why not?” asked his mother, ready, he knew, to tell him yet again that he would have more friends (using “more” as though he actually had some) once he learned not to be so hard on people. “He seemed like an affable fellow.”

  “Yes,” agreed Harold, trying to think of a way to turn his mother against Simon without having to use the word “lustful.” “He is affable, but he’s also a Democrat.”

  His mother sighed loudly and stood up. “I thought you’d had enough of that thing,” she said, meaning his kimono, and she went downstairs to make dinner.

  Harold’s parents were Republicans. For Halloween, they had insisted that he go as the Gallup Poll, a costume requiring two people, one to be Jimmy Carter and the other, Gerald Ford. He wanted to be Carter because he liked the slow, buttery way that Carter spoke, but his parents had forbidden it, instead phoning the parents of a girl in his class whose father was his father’s subordinate at the bank. The girl, whose name was Molly, had been dropped off the afternoon before Halloween, and the two of them sat in his living room, where, with the help of his mother and several newspaper photos, they sketched the two candidates. He was surprised at how well the masks captured the two men — Carter’s sheepish smile and Ford’s large, bland forehead — and after cutting small slits for the eyes and stapling elastic bands to the sides, he and Molly slipped them on and practiced trotting around the living room side by side, pretending to jockey for position and calling out, “We’re the Gallup Poll.”

  Later, after Molly had gone home, his mother told him that he needed to be sure to finish first, and so, as they paraded in front of the judges the next afternoon, he made a halfhearted surge at the very end, nosing ahead of Jimmy Carter. After the prizes had been given, predictably, to a witch, a robot, and a farmer, Mr. Tesky came up to Harold and complimented him on his costume. “Do you follow politics?” Mr. Tesky asked, his Adam’s apple bobbling playfully. As usual, he wore corduroy pants with a belt so long that it actually made another half turn around his body. Harold wondered whether Mr. Tesky had once been fat, a man better suited for this belt, but he did not ask because he knew that it was impolite to ask questions about health. Actually, his parents included money, religion, and politics on this list as well, so Harold did not know how to respond to Mr. Tesky’s question.

  “No,” he said finally. “I’m too young to follow politics.”

  Mr. Tesky laughed and reached out as though to ruffle his hair, then seemed to think better of it and retracted his hand, thrusting it into his back pocket as though putting the gesture literally behind him.

  At dinner, Harold’s father asked nothing about Simon’s visit, which Harold took as an indication that his mother had been sufficiently convinced of Simon’s unsuitability. Instead, the conversation centered on back-to-school night, which they would all three be attending the next evening. Harold did not understand why his parents required him to participate, but the one time that he had protested, explaining that none of his classmates would be going, his father berated him for his apathy. As his parents chewed their roast beef, Harold went through the list of his teachers again, making sure that they understood that Mrs. Olson taught science and Miss Olson, social studies, because his parents tended to mix up the two women, expecting Miss Olson to be young when, in fact, she was just a few years from retirement.

  “You should also meet Mr. Tesky,” he said, and then because it was his habit to utilize new words immediately, he added, “He’s a fag.”

  “Harold,” said his mother in her severe voice. “I don’t want to hear you ever talking that way about people. That’s a terrible accusation.” His father
said nothing.

  Harold did not reply because he had found that when his mother became angry like this, it was best to remain silent and let the moment pass, even when he did not understand what had caused her outburst, for his confusion often provoked her more.

  The next night, as his mother stood in his homeroom talking to a group of other mothers, his father announced, “I think I will have a talk with your Mr. Tesky. Perhaps you can escort me to the library, Harold.”

  Mr. Tesky was on a ladder when they arrived, wearing his belt and a half, the tip of it sticking out at them from behind like a tongue. He did not seem to realize at first that they had come to talk to him, and so while they stood looking up at him, he continued to shelve books, sliding himself nervously along on his rolling ladder. When he finally came down and shook hands with Harold’s father, Harold saw that his collar was twisted inward on one side; it occurred to him that Mr. Tesky’s collars were always askew but that he had never thought to note it until now, now that he was viewing Mr. Tesky through his father’s eyes.

  For nearly ten minutes, the two men discussed Harold and his reading habits, his father comporting himself as though he were gathering information on a new hire at the bank, revealing nothing about himself while asking questions that sought to lay bare gaps in Harold’s knowledge or abilities, weaknesses in his approach to reading. Then, shifting the conversation suddenly away from Harold, his father asked, “Say, what do you make of these speed-reading courses?”

  “Speed-reading?” repeated Mr. Tesky.

  “I’ve been doing some research,” said his father. “Apparently the Carters are big fans and so was Kennedy,” adding with a snort, “For what that’s worth,” as though speed-reading, like opinions on communism or the economy, must be discussed along party lines. “I’m thinking about holding a seminar at the bank, maybe bringing in a specialist.”

  Mr. Tesky sawed his index finger vigorously back and forth beneath his nose.

  “Did you know that the average person reads just two words a second?” his father continued. “But with training, that can be increased to five, even seven. I’ve just been reading about the Wood Method. Ever heard of it? You move your hand across the page as you read, and apparently the motion catches the eye’s attention and stimulates it to work faster.” He opened a book and demonstrated, sweeping his hand across the page as though blessing it or driving out demons.

  Mr. Tesky regarded him the way that Harold’s mother regarded guests who added salt to the food before tasting it. “Mr. Lundstrom,” he began, his neck growing blotchy. “The point of reading is to luxuriate in the words, to appreciate their beauty and nuance, to delve fully into their meaning.”

  “Speed-reading maintains comprehension,” insisted Harold’s father.

  “Understanding has its own rhythm, Mr. Lundstrom,” said Mr. Tesky. “Waving your hand about? Well. That is merely a distraction.”

  Harold had never heard Mr. Tesky speak with such severity, not even when children ignored basic library rules, laughing loudly or moving books around so that others would have trouble finding them. In turn, he had always been impressed with his father’s ability to make conversation with all sorts of people: when the electrician came to update the wiring in their kitchen, his father asked him why electricians made less than plumbers when their work was so much more dangerous, and when the plumber came the next week to unclog the toilet, he told the plumber that he deserved every penny he charged and then some, given what he had to endure. His father deftly calculated people’s interests and needs, drawing them out by soliciting their advice, by making them feel knowledgeable and competent, yet with Mr. Tesky, he had failed. He had asked him about speed-reading but said nothing about the stacks of books that he kept on his nightstand and read faithfully from each night.

  Harold and his father made their way back down the half-lit hallway to his classroom, where his mother was still deep in conversation with the other mothers, standing in a circle near the bulletin board on which Miss Jamison had placed examples of what she considered their best work. In Harold’s case, she had tacked up an uninspired summary of the process of photosynthesis, something he had dashed off one morning before school. Harold knew that people would assume that science was his favorite subject, particularly given the correctness of the writing, but the truth was that he hated science and had written about it correctly only because it would have required more effort to write incorrectly, to misplace commas or choose less exact words.

  His mother, unaware that he and his father had returned, was indeed pointing to his paragraph as she described a boy fascinated by earthquakes, the solar system, and creatures without legs, speaking for several minutes but never mentioning that his fascination was a function not of curiosity but of fear. The other mothers chuckled politely, and then, her voice rising toward closure, his mother announced, “I guess Harold’s just all boy,” invoking his name to refer to a boy who seemed to him as unknowable as God. His mother turned and saw Harold behind her, and her words became a door shutting between them.

  By Minnesota standards, the winter was mild, meaning that the temperature hovered just above zero rather than dipping precipitously below. Still, as they drove home, the road stretched before them treacherously, the icy patches more difficult to detect at night. His mother, who was better on ice, was behind the wheel, Harold beside her because his father had climbed into the back, indicating his wish to be left alone. His mother did not take heed of this, however, instead offering comments about the other mothers that would normally have made his father laugh. Harold wondered whether he would someday grow to care about the sorts of things that his parents did, things like whether a person was missing a button or had applied slightly more mascara to the right eye than the left.

  “Oh,” she blurted out, as though suddenly remembering a missed appointment or forgotten birthday. “The librarian. How was he?”

  “Ichabod Crane,” said his father tiredly. “Skinny. Bookish. Disheveled.”

  Harold’s father did not approve of skinniness in men. He believed that men should be muscular, and though he himself was not, he had established a workout space in a small room at the back of the house, filling it with variously sized barbells and two weight machines and covering the walls with pictures of men flexing their muscles. Harold knew that his father had taped up the pictures to provide inspiration, but the men frightened Harold because they had a hard, geometric quality: they wore v-shaped swimming suits, and their torsos — small waists and broad shoulders — were inverted triangles topped off by square heads. Often, his father came home from work and went directly into this room without even changing out of his suit and tie, and when Harold was sent to call him for dinner, he always paused at the door and then left without knocking because he could hear his father inside, groaning.

  A week later, Harold entered the house to the now familiar sound of his mother speaking to Aunt Elizabeth on the telephone. School had been dismissed an hour early because it was the start of Christmas break, but his mother seemed to have forgotten this, and Harold set about quietly preparing his favorite snack, minute rice with butter. “Before we even met, apparently,” he heard his mother say as he waited for the water to boil, “but do you suppose he thought to tell me about it? I’m just the wife — the blind, convenient, little banker’s wife.”

  She listened a moment, then cut in sharply. “Don’t patronize me, Elizabeth. I know that.” She snorted. “In the closet,” she said derisively. “Where do you even get these terms?” She slammed down the receiver, and as Harold ate his minute rice with butter, he could hear his mother sobbing in her bedroom upstairs.

  When she came down an hour later, she looked surprised to find him sitting at the kitchen table. He had washed his rice bowl and pot and put everything away, and he let her believe that he had just arrived.

  “Should I make you a snack?” she asked.

  “No,” Harold said. “I’m not really hungry.” He waited until she took o
ut the cutting board and began cutting up apples for a crisp. “Remember when you fired Mrs. Norman for putting me in the closet?” he said in what he hoped was a casual voice.

  His mother turned toward him quickly. “That’s not why we fired Mrs. Norman,” she said, and she explained in great detail about the socks. “He’s always been like that. So particular.” She paused. “Harold, your father is leaving. I’ll let him explain it to you.” She turned back around and continued cutting.

  That night, after the three of them had eaten dinner in silence, Harold walked outside with his father, who was carrying two suitcases and a garment bag. His father stowed the luggage in the trunk of his car, and then told Harold that he had something to say.

  “Okay,” said Harold.

  His father cleared his throat several times, sounding like a lawnmower that would not turn over. “According to basic economic theory,” he began, “human beings always work harder to avoid losing what they already have than they do at acquiring more. You see, loss is always more devastating than the potential for gain is motivating. I want you to remember that, Harold.”

  Harold nodded and thrust his hands deep into his pockets, seeking out Mrs. Norman’s toenail, which he flexed between his thumb and index finger.

  “I have a new friend,” his father said, “and I’m moving in with” — he hesitated — “him.”

  “Does that mean that you won’t be checking the windows and doors anymore?” Harold asked. Every night before shutting off the lights, his father walked through the house, staring at each window and each door, checking to make sure that they were properly closed. His mother had always been annoyed by the practice, by the time it took his father to inspect the entire house, but it was something that he had done every night of Harold’s life and so Harold considered it as much a part of bedtime as brushing his teeth and closing his eyes.

  “I guess not,” his father said, sounding disappointed at Harold’s question. He reached out and placed his hand on his car door, and Harold knew what this meant: that his father was ready, even impatient, to leave, that as he stood there explaining himself to Harold, he really wanted to be in his car driving away, away toward his new friend and his new house — while Harold stayed behind in this house, where he would continue to brush his teeth and close his eyes as he always had, except from now on he and his mother would sleep with the windows and doors unchecked all around them. The thought of this filled him with terror, and as he stood there in the driveway watching his father leave, Harold found himself longing for the dark safety of the closet: the familiar smells of wet wool and vacuum cleaner dust; the far-off chatter of Mrs. Norman’s television shows; the line of light marking the bottom of the locked door, a line so thin that it made what lay on the other side seem, after all, like nothing.