Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

“Why do they need so many rakes?” she asked her mother once, after she had counted and discovered that there were twelve of them. Then, she repeated the question, but this time she said, “Why do they need a dozen rakes?” She was six and had just learned in school that twelve was also called a dozen, and she thought about this often, wondering why there were two words for the number twelve. It seemed unnecessary, unnecessary and odd, for if a number were going to be given two names, the number ten seemed more deserving.

Her mother laughed at her question.

“What’s funny?” Annabel asked.

“Oh, it’s just that you don’t usually use dozen for things like rakes,” her mother said, but when Annabel asked why, her mother replied, “Well, you usually just say a dozen for eggs, or doughnuts, or things like that.” When Annabel later asked her father why you couldn’t say “a dozen rakes,” she expected one of his usual explanations, which were generally long and left nothing out, but instead he replied angrily, “Of course you can. Who told you that? Your mother? Listen to me, Annabel. You can say ‘a dozen rakes’ to me anytime you want. Okay?”

As she and her mother sit in her grandfather’s car on the Saturday after her father’s return from the hospital, her mother says, “Don’t mention your father’s wrists to your grandparents.” She and her mother have not discussed her father’s wrists either, but Annabel does not see any reason to point this out to her mother. “Okay,” she says, though she never mentions anything to her grandparents and her mother knows this.

Her mother looks at her watch and says, “Fifteen minutes. That should do it. Let’s go back in and make your grandparents a little something.”

They always make the same thing, a hot drink mix that her grandparents call Russian tea. The mix consists primarily of Tang, which Annabel dislikes, and cloves. It is her job to carry the china cups filled with the brownish orange liquid out to her grandparents, both of whom bring the hot tea immediately up to their mouths and hold it there, as though the cups were receptacles, or conductors, for their words. It is only then — as they sit with their mouths hidden and their eyes partially concealed by the steam fogging their glasses — that they turn their attention to more interesting topics, namely her father.

“How is he?” one of them generally asks her mother at this point, as though they believe that a pronoun in place of his name will keep Annabel from knowing that it is her father to whom they are referring.

“He’s fine,” her mother always replies sharply, inclining her head toward Annabel, who pretends not to be listening, hoping, futilely, that they might be persuaded to say more. Instead, they all sip their Russian tea and gaze at the photograph of her father that hangs on the wall near the television, a picture in which her father, wearing a green bolo tie, looks cheerful and handsome and not a bit like the twitchy, shirtless man they have come to know.

Today, however, there is no mention of her father, and Annabel wonders whether they have forgotten to ask or whether this omission is something intentional, something that they planned beforehand. She actually hopes that it is the latter because the idea that her father has simply been forgotten, particularly in the midst of such tedium, is too much for her to bear. She turns toward her father’s photograph, but it is gone, which means that the entire time that she and her mother have been sitting here, listening to her grandparents talk about the barber and his mowing, it was already gone — gone, and she had not even noticed.

* * *

Most Saturday nights after Annabel and her mother return from her grandparents’ house, she and her father follow the same routine: her father helps her get ready for bed, and once she is settled beneath her Raggedy Ann quilt, he asks her to describe the visit to his parents. He listens quietly to her report, and when she finishes, he says, “Just remember, Annabel, that these are the people who made your father sleep on the cot.”

“Yes,” she always replies. “I remember.”

“Good girl,” he says as though they are finished with the matter, but then he tells her the story of the cot again anyway, because he likes to remind himself of it, particularly as she is snuggled against him in her very own comfortable bed in her very own room.

“Your grandparents,” he always begins, “had produced seven children by the time I made my appearance. Imagine, Annabel, four boys, three girls, and the two of them living in a tiny, three-bedroom house.” During the introduction, his tone is always noncommittal, as though the story just might unfold in a way that allows for sympathy toward these nine people, his family, crammed together like peas even before his arrival.

“Well,” he continues, “I was put in your grandparents’ room to sleep, in a crib wobbly from overuse.” And there it is, the hardening in his voice at the words wobbly from overuse .

At the age of two, her father had gone from sleeping in this crib to sleeping in the hallway outside his parents’ bedroom, on a cot that was folded up and rolled behind the door of his sisters’ bedroom each morning. The hallway, he told her so that she could picture it because her grandparents had long ago left that house, was like the backbone of a capital E, and the three bedrooms, which jutted out to the left, were its arms.

“It’s not even that I minded the cot,” he always told Annabel at this point, after he had impressed upon her the image of this small boy, him, isolated from every other member of his family. “It was comfortable enough.” No, what he had minded, he said, was the fact that when his parents unfolded the cot and set it up for him each night, they always placed it as far to the right as possible so that it stood just at the edge of the staircase that connected the upstairs sleeping area with the main floor — despite the fact that there was no railing separating the upstairs, and thus him, from the empty space of the stairwell.

Sometimes, he told her, his arm hung down off the cot in his sleep so that his hand brushed his father’s head as his father climbed the stairs for bed. “I would wake to that feeling, the brush of my father’s hair against my fingertips, and for a moment, I had no idea where I was. You see, already I thought of sleep as a period of isolation, and that was so ingrained in me, Annabel, that even half-awake, I found the feel of another person disorienting.” Then, he would reach out to stroke her head or caress her earlobe before he went on.

“It was like sleeping on the edge of a cliff. On any given night, I could have rolled right instead of left, and that would have been it. I would have gone right over the edge.” This is where her father’s story always ended, with the understanding that had he been a different sort of boy — less vigilant, less aware — he would have simply rolled over the edge and been gone.

* * *

This Saturday, when she and her mother return from her grandparents’ house, her father is not there. She and her mother eat dinner together quietly, and when her mother puts her to bed because her father is not there to do it, her mother perches awkwardly on the edge of the bed and says, “I told him to leave, Annabel. It was just getting to be too much. I hope that someday you will understand this, maybe when you’re older.” Her mother goes out of the room quickly, forgetting to leave the hallway light on as her father always does because he understands about the dark.

The next day, Sunday, the telephone rings again and again, and when the answering machine picks up because her mother has told her that she is not to answer it, there is her father, singing a song or telling them about something unimportant — a snapped shoelace, the way his orange juice tasted that morning because he forgot and brushed his teeth before he drank it — as though he is right there in the room with them. By evening, however, he has begun pleading with her mother. “Think about Annabel,” he says. “Have you asked her what she wants?” Before they go to bed, her mother erases the entire tape, and then she unplugs the answering machine.