Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

We had spoken just once while she was away, the day after she arrived in Hong Kong, a brief conversation that seems, in retrospect, to have focused solely on our neighbors, the retired wrestling coach and his wife, who had not yet removed their Christmas lights although it was past Saint Patrick’s Day and moving swiftly toward Easter. “Shall I speak to them about it?” I had asked, but she sounded distracted, which at the time I attributed to jet lag. Could it be, I now wondered, that she was already bald, even then? That as I was speaking to her about such trivial matters as Christmas lights, she was pressing the telephone to her bald head fifteen hours ahead of me in Hong Kong? Thus, the first discernible emotion related to her baldness: anger. Or perhaps annoyance. Yes, simple annoyance, for it would not do to overstate the matter.

I lay there listening to her sinuses rattle for a good hour before I got out of bed and, in an attempt to understand the situation — her motivations, my reticence — began to write this all down, to record the details as they occurred to me and then to study what I had written, to analyze it in much the same way that I would a text, the analyzing of texts being both my forte and my livelihood. I suspect that most people would be happier if they could manage their relationships in this way, applying their professional training toward making sense of their personal lives as well, though I am obviously in a better position to do so than, say, a plumber or somebody who handles money for a living.

I must confess that, in recording these simple facts, I immediately encountered a snag: in the first sentence, I wrote “my girlfriend,” but only after elaborate hesitation, realizing that I had no fixed designation for her other than her name, which is Felicity, an overtly, almost aggressively, symbolic name that I have nevertheless learned to use without smirking. I briefly considered lover, but felt that the term put a disproportionate emphasis, inaccurately I might add, on one particular aspect of our relationship. As for partner and significant other, nothing need be said. Thus it was that I chose the unequivocally precise (albeit bland) designation girlfriend, though not without experiencing the aforementioned hesitation, for simply put, girlfriend sounds juvenile and might mislead one about our ages, which I will now describe as fortyish.

As I wrote, I could not help but dwell, with some frustration, on certain matters that I had hoped to discuss with Felicity before we returned to school the next day, but she had chosen to arrive home bald instead, preempting discussion. There was the ongoing situation with Mr. Matthers, who, like us, was in his first year of employment at the school, a private high school, technically without a religious bent, though there are shades of such everywhere these days. Felicity had laughed when I told her, early on, that it would behoove us (yes, I used behoove ) to pay attention to the stir that he was already causing; the three of us were hired together, I pointed out sternly, and thus were associated with one another in the minds of our colleagues, but she said that it behooved us (mocking me, no doubt) to pay attention to ourselves.

At that point, there had been only the vague reports that Mr. Matthers was teaching with both hands held in the air, not fully extended like in a holdup, but partially, with his hands sprouting out just above his shoulders. I began to hear more specifically about this strange behavior from my students, many of whom were in his science classes. One day, while my tenth graders worked at their desks diagramming sentences, which, for the record, I still consider a worthy endeavor, I crept down the hall and around the corner to Mr. Matthers’s room. He was wearing a tan lab coat with Let’s Bake Bread stenciled across the front, standing before the class with his heels together and his toes pointed out at a ninety-degree angle, in what we were taught was the appropriate stance for reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or acknowledging “The Star-Spangled Banner” when I was young. And yes, his hands were aloft, not gesturing or even keeping rhythm with what he was saying but simply floating, perfectly still, as though he had thrown them up in a moment of surprise and forgotten them there.

However, that night at dinner, when I informed Felicity that I had gone down to Mr. Matthers’s classroom and witnessed his strange behavior firsthand, she remained dismissive. “Maybe it’s part of a science experiment,” she suggested, chewing as she spoke.

“A science experiment,” I replied incredulously, though I paused to swallow first. “The students say that he teaches the entire class like that. How could it possibly be part of a science experiment?”

“Well, perhaps Mr. Matthers is experiencing problems with his circulation. Perhaps he is simply following the advice of a doctor,” she had suggested next.

“Perhaps,” I replied. “But wouldn’t he explain this to the students if that were the case?”

“Perhaps Mr. Matthers is of the opinion that his duty to the students is to explain science,” she replied, getting in the final “perhaps,” though I knew that she did not care for Mr. Matthers either.

That had been our last discussion of the matter, but during her week away, a second problem had arisen with Mr. Matthers, one that I wanted to apprise her of before she returned to school. I couldn’t very well rouse her from a deep, jet-lagged sleep to do so, but the next morning, once we were in the car, I turned to her and said, “Mr. Matthers has been up to his old tricks.” She was still bald, of course — not that you would imagine otherwise.

Our commute took approximately twenty-five minutes, enough time to have discussed both Mr. Matthers and the other situation had Felicity been amenable to a discussion, which she was not on that particular morning. There were signs. Some mornings, she turned toward the window and rested her forehead against the glass, “appreciating its coolness,” she said. Other days, she hummed, a habit she’d had as long as I’d known her. In both cases, I knew not to make any conversational overtures. I do consider it worth mentioning that she did not hum when she was alone, at least not to my knowledge. Rather, the humming was a purely public gesture, a means by which she kept others at a distance. I had pointed this out to her — the impoliteness of it — because that is the sort of thing that one wants to know, but she just laughed.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Humming is a joyful sound, an expression of tranquillity and ease.” What does one say to that?

Ten minutes into our commute, she had still offered none of the positive indicators that meant she welcomed conversation. She had not turned toward me with her left arm flung up along my seat back, fingertips extended invitingly. Nor had she called me DriverDriver, which was her nickname for me, borrowed from our friend Sandy, an accounts analyst who was often perplexed by the workings of the human mind. Aware of her shortcoming, Sandy administered personality assessment tests to all of her employees and then interacted with each according to the guidelines prescribed for his or her personality type. When she asked Felicity and me to take one of these tests as well, to help her be a “better friend” as she put it, we of course obliged. I tested into the driver camp for both primary and secondary traits, thus the nickname.

Drivers are the control freaks, the ones who cannot let anything slide, though the nickname was meant as a joke, of course, a play on the fact that I literally never let anyone else drive. I’ve tried, but I get panicky the minute anyone else is behind the wheel. It’s the speed, I suspect, for I feel the same way when a plane surges forward on takeoff, moving faster and faster down the runway with no possibility of turning back: my heart rate accelerates, and I am struck by an overwhelming desire to scream, “Stop the plane!” I can imagine few things more mortifying, and the fear of embarrassing myself in this way somehow only exacerbates my panic. Still, I have found that I can calm myself in the middle of these attacks by focusing on something small and unchanging, a meaningless line of text from the airline catalog or the knuckles of my hands.