Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

* * *

Ten years ago, I spent a week with my father shortly after my mother died. Geraldine and I had just met a few months earlier, and we spoke daily by phone. This was stressful, for it forced me to juggle two conflicting emotions: the elation I felt when I picked up the telephone and heard her voice, and the guilt I felt at not hiding it better. Furthermore, we were firmly in the getting-to-know-each-other stage, yet I never felt truly like myself in my parents’ house, where my past self still lingered oppressively. I worried about this at night as I lay in my old bed, the top half of a bunk bed on which I used to pile everything that was important to me, books mainly, a few photos, and the beginnings of a stamp collection that never got off the ground. I had not mentioned Geraldine to my father, thinking that it hardly seemed an appropriate time to do so, but he was nosy about such things, nosy in a stoic, Minnesotan sort of way, which meant that he would never come right out and ask who called each evening at eight but instead took matters into his own hands. On the fifth night, he retired earlier than usual, and when the phone rang, he picked up his bedroom extension quickly.

“For you,” he announced in a loud, flat voice that carried easily down the hallway, and when I picked up, I could sense him there — hostile but, I could not help thinking, perhaps secretly wanting to understand this thing that made no sense to him, and so, for just an instant, I considered letting him listen.

“Yes?” I said brusquely, greeting Geraldine the way I would a telemarketer.

There was a pause. In a low, confused voice, she asked, “Are you okay?” and I saw at once the folly of thinking that I could inhabit both lives at once.

“Dad, I’ve got it,” I said sternly, and I heard the double click of him hanging up as it traveled across the line and through the house.

* * *

My parents were both pack rats — had become even more so during my mother’s illness — and I felt it my duty, during that visit, to establish some order. The first morning, wishing to take stock of the worst of it, I ventured down into the basement, where I had not been in many years. The carpet was brittle, almost crunchy, under my feet, and when I touched the paneling that ran the length of the hallway, my hand came away chalky with mold. So overwhelmed were my other senses, even taste, that my hearing felt dull by contrast. As the mold spores settled in my lungs, I began to breathe heavily, wheezing as I made my way through the rooms counting sofas (or davenports, as we had always called them). I found five, then opened the door of my father’s library onto a sixth, a slippery horsehair settee that blocked the entrance so that I had to climb over it to get in. The two bottom shelves held books bloated with water. I removed one of them, the illustrated Rip Van Winkle that I had liked as a child, its cover now warped and wavy, the pages stuck permanently together, rendering its contents inaccessible.

From there, I entered the main room, which had once contained the house’s infrastructure: my father’s workshop, the laundry area, a wood-burning stove, and three freezers. Only the freezers still hummed with purpose. Here, another smell hung in the air, vying with the mustiness, a distinctly porkish odor, the source of which it took me several minutes to locate: beside one of the freezers sat a green plastic bushel basket filled with lard, its white, fatty surface embedded with dead insects and dust. Still, compared with everything else, the lard seemed manageable, and I decided to begin with it, to lobby for its disposal that night at dinner, when my father’s mood would surely be elevated by the presence of food.

Dinner, however, got off to a bad start. “Dinner,” I called down the hallway at six thirty. Several minutes passed, and I called again before walking down to my father’s bedroom, where I found him propped up on his bed reading the newspaper.

“Didn’t you hear me calling you for dinner?” I asked.

“I heard,” he said, not looking up. “But in this house, we eat dinner at noon. If you want me to come for supper, you’ll need to say so.”

There was a long, silent standoff between us. “Fine,” I said at last. “Supper is served.” My father got up and followed me down the hallway to the table. He sat down, and I set his plate in front of him. “Shouldn’t we throw out that lard?” I said. “That big tub that’s just sitting there in the basement?”

“Leave it,” he said. “I might make soap.”

“Really? And when, exactly, did you start making soap?”

“I said I might make it, but I can’t if you go around throwing out the lard.”

“Fine,” I said after only the slightest pause. “How about the toasters then?”

On a shelf near his worktable I had found nineteen of them, the two-slicers from early in my parents’ marriage pushed behind the family-size four-slicers, every toaster from my childhood and then some, the potential for sixty-eight simultaneous slices of toast (I had counted) gathered in a state of disrepair.

“What about them?”

“Well,” I said. “They’re toasters. When they break, you throw them out.”

“In my time, we fixed things. We didn’t just toss them on the trash heap.”

“Well, they aren’t fixed. They’re broken, and they’ve been broken for more than thirty years, some of them. Listen,” I said then. “I’ve arranged for a truck to come tomorrow to haul away the sofas— davenports —before they become even more infested with mice than they already are.”

“Mice need a place to live,” he replied fiercely, though I had never known him to be anything less than absolute in his treatment of mice.

“Yes, they do,” I agreed. “And tomorrow they’ll be living at the dump with the davenports.”

“They closed that dump years ago.” He studied his food. “What is this anyway?”

“Fajitas,” I said. “It’s everything that you like — beef, peppers, onions.”

“Everything I like is to have it fried up in a pan with some Crisco and salt. Not this,” he said. We both knew that I had prepared it this way, grilled under the broiler, letting the grease collect in the pan so that it could be discarded, because the doctor had told him that he needed less fat in his diet — less fat, less salt, less food.

“That’s not how I cook,” I said.

“Well, this is not how I eat,” he said, and he picked the plate up and turned it upside down on the table.

* * *

When the two men arrived the next day to haul away the sofas, my father waited until they had carried the fourth one up from the basement and jimmied it around the corner at the top of the stairs before he came out and instructed them to put every single davenport back exactly where they had found it. They did, of course, without even looking my way.

That afternoon as my father napped in front of the television, I went through all three freezers, throwing out anything that looked suspect, peas and string beans and berries that had taken on the desiccated look of long-frozen food. There were rings and rings of potato sausage, which the entire family had always been involved in making but only my parents had liked; my siblings and I could never overcome the memory of making it, the bushel baskets of potatoes that it took us the entire day to peel, the long night of grinding the blackened potatoes together with pork and venison and onions, of stuffing this into pig intestines, and then, at dawn, when we were feeling nauseated from lack of sleep, the stench of leftover meat being fried up for our breakfast.

I filled five garbage bags, which I dragged outside and lifted into the garbage cans lined up behind the house. There were eight of them, eight garbage cans for a man who did not even discard empty pill bottles. Then, because I felt I had earned a break, I walked into town, ducking my head or lifting my hand back at people as they drove by, at these strangers for whom waving was a reflex. My father would have known every one of them, of course, though my father would never have taken a walk along the highway like that because it would have caused people to talk, and more than anything, my father did not want people speculating about his business.