Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

Argument A: My brother is henpecked because he eats turkey every day .

In this argument, my father is demonstrating that my brother is henpecked, and so the daily eating of turkey becomes his first (and only) premise, one that he nonetheless shores up amply: “Turkey breasts, burgers, chili, lasagna. Everything’s turkey with her.”

Argument B: Because my brother is henpecked, he eats turkey every day .

Occasionally, one of us (usually me but sometimes my sister) will be foolish enough to suggest that our brother does not eat turkey every single day. My father, in this case, cites as proof the fact that my brother is henpecked, his argument succinct and unshakable: “Of course he does. She doesn’t even let him wipe his own ass.”

II. BROASTED CHICKEN: A STUDY IN SEMANTICS

“The café in Fentonville has two broasted-chicken specials,” my father begins the conversation, not bothering with more standard pleasantries. “Mashed potatoes, a roll with butter, gravy, some kind of vegetable or other.” It is as though he is reading love poetry over the phone, his voice greedy and helpless.

I try to recall what broasted chicken is, how it differs from roasted chicken, what the addition of the b actually means, but the word has been dropped into the conversation with such ease that I know I cannot ask him to explain. “Broasted chicken,” he would reply automatically, the words so familiar to him that they are their own definition. Then, after the slightest pause, he would say it again, “Broasted chicken,” asserting the words in a way that means both “You never visit” and “What kind of world do you live in?” It is true that I visit infrequently, once every three or four years, just as it is true that I live in a world devoid of broasted chicken, which is not to say that there are no broasted chickens in San Francisco. Of course there are. There would have to be.

Sometimes, when I have not called my father in a particularly long time, he will begin the conversation by announcing, “A lot has changed.” Then, he will proceed to fill me in on events that happened years ago as a way of making clear my neglectfulness. “Your sister got married,” he will say, though my sister has been married for seven years and has two boys, odd little fellows who refuse to speak to me on the telephone because they are busy cutting. Each boy has his own cutting box, a cigar box in which he keeps a pair of blunt-ended scissors and his most recent clippings, advertisements for cereal and batteries as well as carefully snipped photos of dead ducks and elk from his father’s hunting magazines. When I ask to speak to them, my sister holds out the receiver, and I hear Trevor, who just turned six, saying, “Tell her to call when we’re not cutting.”

“All they do is cut,” my father complains. My sister has told me that they are afraid of my father, afraid of his largeness, of the way that his feet seem poured into his shoes, the flesh straining against the laces so that they can no longer be tied. They are afraid of the way that he falls asleep talking and then awakens with a start a moment later, screaming, “What?” when they have said nothing, because anger has become his most immediate response.

“I doubt you’d even recognize this place,” my father says at other times, referring to Morton, the town where I grew up, the town where he has always lived, except for a brief period just after high school when the army borrowed him. This was in 1945, at the very end of the war, which was over before he got any farther away than Florida, but something about this experience put him off the world, unnerved him so much that he forgot about college and went immediately back to Morton, picking up where he had left off, helping my grandfather run his hardware store and eventually taking it over himself. He continued to read, preferring characters to actual people, and maintained an extensive library, which he housed in our basement, choosing the only room that was windowless, as though having so many books were something best kept secret. Still, the world outside worked its way in, entering through small fissures in the house’s foundation that grew larger over time, filling our basement with water. Spring was particularly insidious, for as the snow outside slowly melted, the water level rose within, gradually, as though a tap had been turned on somewhere within the bowels of the house, a tap that none of us could locate, left open to a small but unstoppable trickle.

For many years, it was our job — my siblings’ and mine — to mop up the standing water, but as we got older, we procrastinated a bit more each time until finally our parents grew tired of our laziness, tired of their own nagging, and laid down thick carpeting throughout the entire basement, a cheap, urine-colored shag that they said would act as a giant sponge, and in this way, our basement was turned over to the mold. Throughout my childhood, I liked my father’s library better than any other room in the house, liked the moldy smell of books that hung in the air and clung to my clothing. In fact, I considered this the natural odor of books and wondered, each time I checked out a book from the school library, what they had done wrong that caused their books to smell as they did — of paper and ink and the sweatiness of children’s hands.

My father proceeds to give me an oral tour of Morton over the phone, block by block, resident by resident, as though proving my absence to me. “We’ve got Amish now,” he tells me. “Dan Klimek’s got them working out at the cardboard plant he put in just east of town.” But when I ask who Dan Klimek is, my father uses the voice that he would use to explain broasted chicken to me if I were foolish enough to ask. “Dan Klimek. Danny Klimek. Of course you know Danny Klimek,” he says, his voice startled and angry, the syllables like waves beating frantically against the shore. This is a metaphor that would make no sense to my father, for he has lived his life surrounded by lakes and ponds, placid bodies of water whose waves do not beat or pound or crash but rather lap gently at the shore, a steady, soothing sound like that of a cat drinking milk.

* * *

Somehow, almost unintentionally, I became a teacher, a profession of which my father greatly disapproves, considering it a waste of my talents and, on some level, suspect. “Teachers and preachers,” he is fond of saying, “never pay their bills.” For several years I taught high school English, which is how I met Geraldine, but eventually I grew tired of counting my successes in such meager ways, and so I quit and began instead to teach English to adults, to foreigners who need me and thus nod patiently when I require that they answer “How are you?” with “Well,” even though out in the real world people are quick to correct them, explaining, “You need to say good. Well just sounds like you’re kind of depressed.”

I begin class each Monday morning with a vocabulary quiz, testing them on words that we have encountered over the semester and compiled into a list, adding to it daily and occasionally winnowing it down, letting drop those words and expressions that might have meant something to them back home, where they were pilots and geneticists and science teachers, but contribute nothing to their lives here. They are not lazy people, my students, but on Monday mornings, overwhelmed by the week ahead after a weekend spent delivering pizzas and cleaning houses, they become lazy. They become lazy, and in their laziness, they write things like “ Threaten is to make a threat” and “A shoplifter is someone who shoplifts,” knowing, of course, that I will mark their answers wrong, that I will write in the margins next to them: “A word cannot be used to define itself.”