Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

When Annabel opens the door to the apartment on Monday, letting herself in with the key that she carries around her neck, the telephone is ringing, and she cannot help but feel for a moment that the apartment does not belong to her because the ringing was there before her. She knows that she should not answer it because her mother has instructed her not to, but after several rings, she picks it up, justifying this course of action by telling herself that it could be her mother calling to make sure that she has arrived home safely. However, once she has already committed herself by lifting the receiver, she realizes that if it is her mother calling, she is only doing so to test Annabel.

“How’s my girl?” says her father, whispering as he used to when she was young and having bad dreams in the middle of the night.

“Hi,” she says in response, surveying the apartment nervously because she cannot fully shake the feeling that her mother is there somewhere, sitting off to the side, listening.

“Did you get my messages yesterday?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“I miss you.”

“I miss you,” she answers, whispering now also.

“Listen,” he says then. “I need your help. I need you to write down some things. You know, things that your mother says about me, things that we could use if we had to.” She doesn’t answer, and then he says, “Annabel, she doesn’t want me to see you or even talk to you. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not as though this is the first time. She acts like this is the first time, but it’s not, so why now, Annabel? Do you understand? Because I don’t. I surely don’t.” There is a very long silence.

“The day you were born,” he declares suddenly, no longer whispering. “That was the first time. I bet you didn’t know that, did you? It was the day you were born. Your mother made me promise that I would never tell you that, but what’s the purpose of these secrets? I mean really, Annabel, what is the purpose?” He is speaking slowly now, forming these last four words with great care.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“It was because I loved you so much, even before you were born, and I could feel how much you loved me. That’s why I did it. Do you know that, Annabel?” He pauses, as though waiting for her to reply. “At night, when your mother was asleep with you between us, I would put my hand on her stomach, on you, and I could feel you telling me that, Annabel. I could feel you saying that you loved me. That already you loved me more than anyone had ever loved me or ever would.”

She thinks that her father might be crying, but she isn’t sure, and for a while neither of them says anything. “So you see,” he says finally, his words tapering off as though he is falling asleep. “It doesn’t make sense.” Annabel waits, but her father doesn’t speak again, and after several minutes, she hangs the telephone up, gently, not wanting to wake him.

When her mother gets home, she seems distracted, but she goes through the usual set of questions: Did you have a snack? Did you do your homework? What sounds good for dinner? Annabel answers these No, Sort of, and I don’t know, and when her mother adds a new one, “Did your father call?” Annabel pauses for just a moment, and then, very calmly, says, “No.” Her mother looks so relieved that Annabel understands, with sudden clarity, that lying is not always a bad thing, not when it so obviously means that she can help them both; later, she even hears her mother humming as she makes fried ham, which is Annabel’s favorite.

The next day when Annabel arrives home from school, the phone is ringing again, but she knows what she needs to do, and she sits on the sofa listening to it, her hands tucked beneath her thighs. Eventually, she gets up and sets the table, two places instead of three, so that everything will seem right when her mother gets home. When the ringing finally stops nearly two hours later, she feels its absence like a sharp, sudden pain, but she understands now how it is: that this pain, this pain is how much she loves him.

The two American women read in their guidebook that there were Mennonites not far from town, so on the second morning they set out to find them. The women were staying perhaps a quarter of a mile outside of town in a bungalow, a round structure with cinder block walls, one of several grouped together along a footpath behind the main office. At some point, perhaps when bungalows were in greater demand, a flimsy wall had been erected down the middle of each, slicing it into two separate, though by no means soundproof, units. Now, however, the entire place stood empty, the grass along the footpath left uncut so that mosquitoes swarmed above it, attacking the women’s bare legs as they walked to and from their bungalow.

When they first entered the office from the road and inquired whether there were vacancies, the man behind the counter nodded his head, looking almost ashamed, and said, “Sure, we got rooms. Just go ahead and take your pick.” He was an older man, quite black with grizzled hair, and he wore only a pair of shorts and a necklace from which hung some sort of animal’s tooth. Because they did not want him to feel more defeated than he already seemed, they did not comment on the lack of other guests, though they were, in fact, elated.

The guidebook had warned that the town itself could get noisy at night — too many bars — and since neither of them had much tolerance for unabashed revelry, the sort that people tend to engage in while vacationing in someone else’s country, they had heeded the book’s suggestion to stay just outside the limits of the town proper. They had to walk into town to eat, of course, but it was nice, if not a bit disorienting, coming home in the dark like that. They simply followed the lane that led out of town, sliding their feet along the gravel rather than lifting them up and taking actual steps, which would have required far more trust than the two women felt able to invest at that point, either in this country or in themselves. Still, they liked the walk, particularly the final stretch with the field on the left that contained a dozen cows whose silent, sturdy presence comforted them.

In all regards, the women (Sarah and Sara, who, because they were both visual people, did not think of themselves as having the same name) found this town vastly superior to Belize City, from which they had just escaped, after spending only one night there in a hotel above a bar where their room had throbbed with a steady bass throughout most of the night. In the room next to them was a very young Japanese couple who had spent the last three years trying to see the world, “the whole world,” the young man had informed them, so that they could return to Japan and begin working and not feel as though they had missed something. They had gone through Asia first, and then into Africa and Europe, and now they were working their way up from South America. But Belize City, they told the two American women in careful English, was the very worst place they had ever been, “so dirty and”—this after pausing to weigh all of the English words at their disposal—“evil,” and Sara and Sarah, who had just spent the last four hours walking around Belize City, agreed, though they kept their opinion to themselves, as was their tendency when talking to fellow tourists.

Their plan had been to take a taxi from the Belize City airport to a pleasant bed-and-breakfast that their guidebook highly recommended (it was run by an American), but instead the taxi driver had taken them straight into the dirty, crowded heart of the city and dumped them in front of the hotel. “Cheap,” he told them. “Cheap and very near.” He did not say very near what, but it appeared to be very near every trash heap and vice the city had to offer. Still, they were tired of sitting, so they got out of the taxi, paid the driver, and checked into the hotel, where there was not actually a room ready for them. Instead, they had nervously entrusted their suitcases to the proprietor, who assured them that he would move the bags himself into the first available room.