Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

We turned our attention to word choice then, with Clara S., as she always signed her name, suggesting that lezzie seemed “informal — or something.”

“Hmm,” I replied. “Yes, I suppose that a case could be made for informal. Does anyone else have any thoughts on the word lezzie ?”

“It’s spelled wrong?” suggested Beth, an exceedingly poor speller who walked with a strange, gliding motion, as though she were skiing.

“I know,” cried Manuel, who was the sort to answer only those questions that the other students had already, and unsuccessfully, attempted. “It’s prejudicial.” He sat back with his long arms crossed triumphantly, a gesture that did nothing to endear him to the other students.

“What would you suggest?” I asked.

“Lesbian?” Manuel replied after a careful pause, having the good grace to uncross his arms as he spoke. Still, the other students became quiet, unsure perhaps where lesbian stood on the “prejudicial” scale, but I was saved the need to make a reassuring response by Tina, a shy girl, partial to plaid, who asked, “Isn’t that redundant? I mean, you know they’re lesbians because they’re both women and they’re lovers.” Had I been in a different frame of mind, I might have turned the discussion to her seemingly unconscious reference to me and Felicity in the third person, though hadn’t I been urging the students all year to please, oh please, just distance themselves a bit from the text?

“Nice work, Tina,” I said, and she blushed deeply, in keeping with the type of personality that is attentive to redundancy.

The critique session took nearly half an hour, at the end of which the students slumped in their seats, looking dazed and exhausted. On the board was our final revision: Ms. Lundstrom and Ms. Shapiro are lovers. Of course, we had changed “Miss” to “Ms.” in both cases, for, as I pointed out to them, Ms. Shapiro and I were not schoolgirls, nor was this the 1950s.

* * *

Felicity and I were introduced six years ago by a mutual friend whom I shall call Sally. Sally and I had, once upon a time, been English majors together, but she had gone on to accept a position, temporary she assured me at the time, with a company that replaced windshield glass. The company, however, was not accustomed to having employees who could put an estimate into proper letter format or utilize the semicolon, and soon she had been promoted to regional manager. There was a long period after college during which Sally and I were not in contact, but when I moved to the Twin Cities, I called her and we met for lunch. She looked nearly the same, although puffier and with a penchant for purple, and when she asked what I had been doing for the last fifteen years, I blurted out this parallel list of accomplishments: I had earned a master’s degree, done some teaching, and established that I was a lesbian.

Sally was new to the idea of knowing lesbians and admitted to being somewhat nervous, though she seemed unable to articulate the source of her nervousness. I have found that, when presented with this revelation, many people take a careful step back, keeping their mouths shut for fear of saying something wrong, but I have always found myself more charmed by those of Sally’s nature, those who barrel right in, unaware that a list of right-and-wrong-things-to-say even exists. Thus, while Sally confessed to a certain nervousness, it was certainly, and refreshingly I might add, nothing that compelled her to err on the side of caution. She telephoned not long after our lunch meeting to announce that she had just met another lesbian, suggesting, with much enthusiasm, that I might wish to meet her new acquaintance, a customer named Felicity whose windshield had been shot out by a neighbor who resented people parking on the street in front of his house.

“And why might I want to meet somebody with such a ridiculous name?” I asked.

Sally paused, for I don’t think that it had occurred to her that her suggestion might be met with anything but equal, possibly greater, zeal. “You’re of the same ilk,” she said at last.

Assuming that by ilk she meant a shared orientation, I replied that her “lowest common denominator” approach to matchmaking was a bit insulting.

“But you’re both lesbians,” she insisted indignantly.

“That,” I explained, trying to be gentler, “is the ‘lowest common denominator’ to which I refer. It is a necessary factor, true, but it hardly qualifies as, well, ilkiness.” In her defense, she did not know the special attachment I had to the word ilk .

Sally, however, was of a persistent nature, and so, several weeks later, when she and I again met for lunch, Felicity was there as well, though I learned afterward that she had been no more apprised of this meeting than I. At the time, I was putting the finishing touches on my dissertation, which dealt with the practicalities of teaching grammar and writing to older-than-average students. I had discovered, for example, that in a class made up largely of women in their fifties, coordinate and subordinate clauses made sudden sense for them when likened to marriages, the former a marriage in which the two parties were equals, the latter a marriage in which one party was dependent on the other for meaning. In my dissertation, I had neglected to mention, as a corollary to this discovery, that many of the women steadfastly purged their writing of all subordinate clauses following this lesson, suddenly seeing something shameful in each if and because .

I arrived for lunch that day bearing a list of problematic sentences from my dissertation, hoping to review them with Sally in order to ensure that my meaning, as I intended it, was patently clear, even to the less engaged reader. I saw no reason to alter my plans simply because Felicity was present. In turn, she felt that it was perfectly acceptable to interrupt me and my troubling sentences almost immediately with the following observation: “You have no control over what the reader thinks; you do realize that, I would hope. It doesn’t matter what you intended.”

I’d had my fill of critical theory by that time, so I certainly did not need to be eating lunch with some amateur reader-response critic, but when I suggested, coyly, that perhaps she had been reading too much Stanley Fish, she stared back at me blankly. “I don’t believe that I am familiar with Mr. Fish’s work,” she replied, overly politely I felt. “I’m simply making a point about the way that people communicate. This conversation is a perfect example,” she added, pointing her fork at me severely and, I might add, not unbecomingly. “I’m saying one thing, but you think I’m talking about something else entirely, about some Fish fellow, whom I’ve never even heard of.”

I will admit that her use of whom left me undone, even with that preposition dangling unattractively at the end, but then I’m afraid that I’ve always been attracted to such things, the ability to differentiate between subject and object forms, a refusal to use if when the situation requires whether .

“This,” she was saying, “is what makes mathematics so appealing. The number one is simply that — one. Everyone who sees it thinks the same thing.” She looked smugly at me across the table.

“Yes,” I replied. “But numbers are just as much symbols as words are.” I had nowhere to go from there, but I babbled on. “This,” I said, pounding the table, “is a table, the actual, tangible thing, not to be confused with the word. The same can be said for your number one, I am afraid.” I sketched out the number in the air between us.

Of course I was ashamed of myself, using basic Plato to impress this woman, though, to her credit, she did not look impressed. There was a moment of stiff silence, which compelled me to continue. “To quote one of my students, ‘Why is a sheep a sheep and not a rock?’ ” I said lamely, a bit of irrelevant nonsense to end the discussion, but to my great pleasure, she laughed. Sally, in case you were wondering, was still present, sitting there eating her Cobb salad and, I was to find out later, listening to us argue and regretting the fact that she had ever thought us ilkstresses (my word, of course, not the windshield-fixing Sally’s).