Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

Years before, when his doctor had first begun to mention diet and exercise, before my father decided to stand firm against anything that might benefit his health, he went through a brief period of highly anomalous behavior — namely, following his doctor’s advice. For almost two months, he and my mother drove back into town each night after dark and locked themselves inside their store, where, for forty-five minutes, they walked. They went up and down the same aisles where they spent their days, past gopher traps and sprinklers and all kinds of joinery, my father in the lead, my mother several steps behind. After my mother accidentally let this secret slip and I asked why, why, when they could be out looking at lakes and trees and fields of corn, they preferred to walk indoors, she said, “You know your father doesn’t want people knowing his business.”

I walked for five hours that day, walked until I no longer felt mold each time I breathed in, and when I returned, my father said, “What did you do? Walk all over the county?” He was still in front of the television, and he spoke in a cranky way that implied that he had spent the entire afternoon sitting right there, waiting for me to return, but the next morning when I got up early to cart the garbage cans down to the road for pickup, they were all empty. While I had been out walking around letting people know my business, my father had undone all of my work, returning everything to the freezers. That was day three. We spent the last four days of my stay in idle silence.

* * *

Ten years have passed since that visit, but it’s right there between us — the unspoken betrayal — when I ask my father how long ago he shot the pheasant that he now wants to FedEx me. Finally, I say what I mean—“That pheasant must be at least five years old”—and he hangs up on me; I, ever my father’s daughter, wait until the next evening to call back, and when I do, though I let the phone ring thirty, and then forty, times, there is no answer.

This, I suppose, is the moment when other children pause to consider broken hips, burst hearts, a sudden, irrevocable loosening of the mind. “He’s in the bathroom,” calls Geraldine from the study, her voice overly reassuring, for she too knows his pattern: startled by the first ring, setting aside his book on the second, picking up, always, on the third, answering, “Yut,” as though the ringing were a question. “Dad?” I always reply, this, too, a question, and then, before we begin talking, he tells me which phone he is on, kitchen or bedroom, because he wants me to be able to picture him — where he is sitting, what he is seeing — as our voices float back and forth across the distance.

Tonight, the rings adding up in my ear, I imagine him, broom in hand, descending those sixteen treacherous steps, both feet resting briefly on each one until he stands surrounded by a lifetime’s worth of broken toasters and davenports, a roomful of books nearby, their words trapped between waterlogged pages. The freezers are open, all three of them, lids tilted up like coffin covers, and he pauses in their white glow, trying to take it all in: this wealth before him, this carpet dissolving beneath his feet.

When Annabel comes home from school on Tuesday, her father is back, standing at the corner of Indian School and University, across the street from where the bus drops her and the other children from her apartment complex. When the light finally changes, the two of them cross hurriedly toward each other, and so their reunion takes place in the middle of the street, her father twirling her around several times and then releasing her abruptly in order to present his middle finger to an old woman in a Volvo station wagon who has beeped tentatively to let them know that the light has gone red.

“So, are you surprised?” her father asks as they pass through the front doors of the complex, and because his tone is light and he is holding her hand and yanking her arm about in a happy, frenetic way that does not match their steps, she responds honestly, “Yes,” without pausing to think through the possible implications of his question or her answer.

“Why are you surprised?” he asks, stopping suddenly and squeezing her hand hard to underscore the question. “Did you think I wasn’t coming back?” The pressure on her hand increases. “Did your mother say something?” She looks down then.

“Look at me, Annabel,” he says, and she does.

“She said you were in the hospital and the doctors didn’t know when you would come home,” she tells him, which is more or less the truth, the less part of it being that her mother actually told her, just two days earlier in fact, that the doctors were not sure that he would ever be able to come home. “I’m so happy you’re home,” she adds, because she is and because she does not want to talk to him about her mother.

They stand outside their apartment door for several minutes as her father searches through his pockets for his key until Annabel suggests that they use her key, which she takes from around her neck and hands to him. His hand trembles slightly as he fumbles to insert it in the lock, and Annabel looks away, breathes in deeply, and concentrates on thinking absolutely nothing. This works, for when she turns back, her father has the door open and is gesturing, with a gentleman’s low bow and flourish, for her to enter.

“So, are you ready for a snack?” he asks, his tone light again, and when she nods, he says, “What are you in the mood for?”

“Anything,” she tells him, and she goes into her room to change, knowing that when she comes out, her father will have made something awful, something like sardines and melted marshmallows on saltine crackers.

“How much do you love your dad?” he’ll ask, motioning with his head for her to be seated, and though she always tries to think of new ways to answer this question, she never comes up with anything but the same old responses— a whole lot, very much, tons .

“Enough to eat sardines with marshmallows?” he’ll say, setting the plate in front of her. And she does— does love him that much, does eat it, polishes off the entire plate, in fact, of whatever he puts before her while he sits watching her chew and swallow and demonstrate her love in a way that she does not know how to do with words.

“That’s my girl,” he’ll say when she’s finished, words that prove to her that it was worth everything — the awful taste and the feel of the food sitting in her stomach like a stone or tumbling about like clothes in a washer. Sometimes, the nausea overwhelms her and she excuses herself, slips into the bathroom, where she leans way down into the toilet bowl, her face nearly touching the water, and vomits as quietly as possible.

Today, when she comes out in her after-school clothes and they go through the usual routine, what her father sets before her is a plate of celery sticks, three of them, arranged like canoes, overflowing with mayonnaise and topped generously with chocolate sprinkles. Her father, of course, knows that she hates mayonnaise more than anything, that she finds even the smell of it unbearable. It occurs to her then that her father is still angry, and so she eats with extra diligence, her father watching as usual, and when she is finished, she looks up at him hopefully. “That’s a girl,” he says, but Annabel understands that there is a difference, a very big one, between “a girl” and “my girl.”

“Did your mother tell you about these?” he asks matter-of-factly, pulling back the cuffs of his shirt and laying his thin, white arms out on the table between them, elbows turned down, wrists facing up. Her mother had not told her, of course, had said only that her father was tired and needed a rest, and Annabel sits looking at his wrists, feeling the mayonnaise inside of her like something living, something that wants out, but she will not allow it, not today.