Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

Over the years, my mother was paired with numerous women (as well as one man), all of whom she alienated quickly, unable to sympathize with their constant cravings or the ease with which they capitulated. Furthermore, when they sobbed hysterically during weigh-ins, she dealt with them sternly, even harshly, explaining that they knew the consequences of gorging themselves on potato chips and cookies, which made their responses to the weight gain disingenuous as far as she was concerned. My mother was always very clear in her opinions; she said that in banking one had to be, that she needed to be able to size people up quickly and then carry through on her assessment without hesitation or regret, a policy that she applied at home as well, which meant that if I failed to unload the dishwasher within two hours after it finished running or lied about completing a school assignment, she moved swiftly into punishment mode and became indignant when I feigned surprise. Among the members of Weight Brigade, her approach won her no few enemies. Eventually, she was no longer assigned phone buddies, and by the time she met Ilsa, the other members were refusing even to sit near my mother at meetings, though she claimed to be unbothered by this, citing envy as their sole motivation.

Ilsa was plump when we knew her but had not always been. This we learned from photographs of her holding animals from the pound where she volunteered, a variety of cats and dogs and birds for which she had provided temporary care. She went to Weight Brigade only that one time, the time that she met my mother, and never went back because she said that she could not bear to listen to the vilification of butter and sugar, but Martin and I had seen the lists that our mother kept of her own daily caloric intake, and we suspected that Ilsa had simply been overwhelmed by the math that belonging to Weight Brigade involved, for math was another thing that “absolutely petrified” Ilsa. When my parents asked how much they owed her, she always replied, “I am sure that you must know far better than I, for I have not the remotest idea.” And when Martin or I required help with our math homework, she answered in the high, quivery voice that she used when she sang opera: “Mathematics is an entirely useless subject, and we shall not waste our precious time on it.” Perhaps we appeared skeptical, for she often added, “Really, my dear children, I cannot remember the last time that I used mathematics.”

Ilsa’s fear of math stemmed, I suspect, from the fact that she seemed unable to grasp even the basic tenets upon which math rested. Once, for example, after we had made a pizza together and taken it from the oven, she suggested that we cut it into very small pieces because she was ravenous and that way, she said, there would be more of it to go around.

“More pieces you mean?” we clarified tentatively.

“No, my silly billies. More pizza,” she replied confidently, and though we tried to convince her of the impossibility of such a thing, explaining that the pizza was the size it was, she had laughed in a way that suggested that she was charmed by our ignorance.

Ilsa wore colorful, flowing dresses and large hats that she did not take off, even when she opened the oven door to slide a pizza inside or sat eating refrozen Popsicles with us on the back deck. Her evening hats were more complicated than the daytime hats, involving not just bows but flowers and actual feathers and even, on the hat that Martin and I privately referred to as “Noah’s Ark,” a simple diorama of three-dimensional animals made of pressed felt. Martin and I considered Ilsa’s hats extremely tasteful, a word that we had heard our parents use often enough to have developed a feel for. That is, she did not wear holiday-themed hats decked with Christmas tree balls or blinking Halloween pumpkins, although she did favor pastels on Easter. Still, Ilsa’s hats really seemed appropriate only on the nights that she sang opera, belting out arias while we sat on the sofa and listened. Once, she performed Chinese opera for us, which was like nothing that we had ever heard before and which we both found startling and a little frightening.

Later, when we told our parents that Ilsa had sung Chinese opera for us, our mother looked perplexed and said, “I didn’t know that Ilsa knew Chinese.”

“She doesn’t,” we replied. “She just makes it up.” And then Martin and I proceeded to demonstrate, imitating the sounds that Ilsa had made, high-pitched, nasally sounds that resembled the word sure . Our parents looked troubled by this and said that they did not want us making fun of Chinese opera, which they called an ancient and respected art form.

“But we aren’t making fun of it,” I replied. “We like it.” This was true, but they explained that if we really liked it, we wouldn’t feel compelled to imitate it, which Martin and I later agreed made no sense. We did not say so to my parents, because about some things there was simply no arguing. We knew that they had spoken to Ilsa as well, for she did not sing Chinese opera again, sticking instead with Puccini and Wagner, though she did not know Italian or German either.

My mother, in sartorial contrast to Ilsa, favored tailored trousers, blazers, and crisply ironed shirts, and when my father occasionally teased her about her wardrobe, pointing out that it was possible to look vice presidential without completely hiding her figure, my mother sternly reminded him that the only figures she wanted her clients thinking about were the ones that she calculated for their loans. My mother liked clothes well enough but shopped mainly by catalog in order to save time, which meant that the UPS driver visited our house frequently. His name was Bruce, and Martin and I had always known him as a sullen man who did not respond to questions about his well-being, the weather, or his day, which were the sorts of questions that our parents and the babysitters prior to Ilsa tended to ask. Ilsa, however, was not interested in such things. Rather, she offered him milk on overcast days and pomegranate juice, which my parents stocked for her, on sunny days, and then, as Bruce stood on the front step drinking his milk or pomegranate juice, she asked him whether he had ever stolen a package (no) and whether he had ever opened a package out of curiosity (yes, one time, but the contents had disappointed him greatly).

Martin and I generally stood behind Ilsa during these conversations, peering around her and staring at Bruce, in awe of his transformation into a pleasant human being, but when we heard her soliciting tips on how to pack her hats so that they would not be damaged during shipping, we both stepped forward, alarmed. “Are you moving?” we asked, for we lived in fear of losing Ilsa, believing, I suppose, that we did not really deserve her.

“No, my dears. I’m simply gathering information.” She clasped her hands in front of her as she did when she sang opera, the right one curled down over the left as though her fingers were engaged in a tug-of-war. “It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information,” she declaimed, affecting even more of a British accent than she normally did. “That is our beloved Oscar, of course,” she added, referring to Oscar Wilde, whom she was fond of quoting.

When Bruce left, she first washed his glass and then phoned my mother at work to let her know of the package’s arrival, despite the fact that packages were delivered almost daily. My mother, who was fond of prefacing comments with the words, “I’m a busy woman,” rarely took these calls. Instead, Ilsa left messages with my mother’s secretary, Kenneth Bloomquist, their conversation generally evolving as follows: “Hello, Mr. Bloomquist. This is Ilsa Maria Lumpkin. Would you be so kind as to let Mrs. Koeppe know that the United Parcel Service driver has left a package?” She ended each call with neither a goodbye nor a thank you but with a statement of the time. “It is precisely 4:17 post meridiem,” she would say, for even when it came to time, abbreviations were unacceptable.