Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

This last one was the “Don’t cry” that came from Georgia’s mouth the morning that I was defecated upon for the third time in my life. By the time that Gerard Tung appeared with his key and his attitude, I was sitting on the step outside his textile store, crying and swiping at the eggy mess on my skirt.

“Where is your friend today?” he asked, making no mention of my state.

“My friend?” I replied, though it was none of his business. “My friend is gone.”

II. THE PENULTIMATE

The second time occurred when I was twenty-nine, in Madrid, where the woman who was to become my lover (yes, Georgia) had not yet become my lover, despite the fact that we had moved to Spain in order to bring such a thing to fruition, a motivation that neither of us had acknowledged, not even to ourselves. We had met some months earlier in Albuquerque, but our courtship had seemed impossible there, for neither of us could bear the thought of others watching it unfold, offering comments that would make us more self-conscious, particularly given our mutual tendency toward shyness, mine of the Midwestern sort, a reticence that was like a dog holding fast to a bone, Georgia’s an easily misread shyness that manifested itself in a steady stream of words.

When we met, Georgia was dating Lisa, a perfectly nice woman who took her lesbianism seriously, despite having not informed her parents of its existence. This she blamed on the fact that she was Korean. “When I visit my parents, I am still expected to greet my father at the door when he returns from work each night,” she told us one evening over beers, by way of explaining just how difficult it would be to tell them.

“But you don’t even speak Korean,” Georgia observed, for the sake of understanding as well as arguing, which were two equally compelling tendencies in her personality, though I knew that her point lay in the latter camp.

“Exactly,” replied Lisa. “So how could I tell them?”

Lisa was in medical school, and though I liked her and enjoyed our weekly tennis matches, cordial yet competitive affairs, I referred to her, disparagingly, as the Medic because I could not get over the fact that she did not like poetry and thought nothing of blurting out, “I don’t get poetry at all,” by which she meant that she not only didn’t understand it but even questioned its value.

Late one Sunday afternoon, as the three of us sat in the yard in front of Georgia’s apartment, a tiny place above what had once been a carriage house, the talk turned to poetry, as it often did when Georgia and I were together. Lisa reached, by reflex, for her medical book and began to read about digestive disorders while Georgia and I attempted to piece together “The Burial of the Dead” from memory. Eventually, she retrieved her Complete Works of T. S. Eliot and read the piece aloud.

“Try to guess my favorite line,” I teased in the poem’s afterglow, sure, in fact, that she could not, for in a poem filled with April’s cruelty and Madame Sosostris, I was drawn to a seemingly innocuous line about sledding. Georgia thought for a moment and then, without consulting the text, recited, “ ‘Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went,’ ” speaking quietly, her voice capturing the wistfulness that I too sensed in these lines.

“Yes,” I replied, but only after demonstrating a lengthy interest in the patch of grass directly beneath my crossed legs. “Yes, that’s it.”

The confidence with which she had recited these lines quickly gave way to nervousness, the sort that hangs in the air like a scent, and the Medic, looking up from her digestive disorders, sniffed delicately like a cat, then closed her book with a loud clap. “Well, should we start cooking?” she asked, for the three of us had planned to make dinner together. I knew, however, that I could not enter Georgia’s narrow attic apartment and stand cooking with them in its tiny kitchen, the ceiling slanting crazily down around us, and so I made an awkward excuse and left, but as I let myself out at the gate, I felt inexplicably giddy, as though exiting a lecture that had presented a familiar topic in an entirely new, and unexpected, light.

“Don’t leave Eliot outside,” I called happily back to them, gesturing at the book, which lay side by side with the Medic’s textbook, indistinguishable from afar, unlikely twins keeping company in the grass.

* * *

Just weeks earlier, I had finished my master’s degree in literature and taken to walking for much of the day, a purposeless endeavor that provided something I had missed during my years of poring over literary theory — a straightforward sense of progress. Georgia, who was on sabbatical from teaching high school, often joined me for the morning stint before heading off to her bartending job at the American Legion. Most mornings, she greeted me in her pajamas, apologizing profusely as she tamped down her curls and dressed, but the morning after our Eliot exchange, she was waiting fully dressed and exploded out the door, frantic, like a dog that has not been exercised in days. We were both fast walkers but particularly so that morning, our conversation, by contrast, stalling frequently, for many of our usual topics seemed suddenly unworthy of words. As we waited for the green light at the corner of Mountain and Twelfth Street, our attention safely fixed on a woman pushing a stroller across the intersection toward us, I blurted out my intention to go abroad, an intention that was being formed even as I opened my mouth to describe it. The stroller, choosing this moment to collapse, doubled in on the sleeping baby, who awoke and made his displeasure known, and we rushed out to carry the stroller to safety, the mother trotting behind us with the shrieking infant.

“Where will you go?” Georgia asked quietly as we worked at resurrecting the contraption.

“Hungary,” I replied, an answer reflecting less a personal interest than a need to seem in possession of a considered response.

“I’ll go with you,” Georgia said, her voice rising uncertainly. “If you want.” She added, “It could be fun,” and then, finally, “We broke up last night.”

* * *

Three weeks later, we were in Spain, Hungary having proven an unexpectedly complicated destination. However, once we were there, alone in a cheaply furnished apartment with too many bedrooms and massive furniture that shed its veneer in large strips, which we dutifully glued back in place, we did not know what to do next, for we simply did not know how to take the final steps toward each other. Thus, we found ourselves easily frustrated by nearly everything: the country, the language, but, most of all, each other.

Spain exhausted us: people stayed up all night drinking and smoking, and then, judging from the evidence in the streets, vomiting and shedding shoes as they made their ways home, all of this performed loudly, of course, for Spaniards seemed inordinately loud, a state of affairs that we both found unnerving, perhaps because we held something so fragile between us. There were other things that we disliked. Vegetables were always overcooked in restaurants. Also, when we shook our rugs from our balcony, Juan Carlos, who lived below us, came up and scolded us, and when we pointed out that the old ladies all shook their rugs from their balconies, he told us that we, and not the old ladies, lived above him, and so we were forced to lug our rugs down three flights to the street, where, as we stood shaking them, the old ladies came by and ridiculed us to boot.

I did not like the old ladies in Spain, who laughed openly at my pronunciation and thought nothing of pushing me aside in the market and calling out “I am” when the butcher asked who was next or of screaming out the names of the fruits and vegetables I was trying to procure quietly by pointing. Furthermore, they insisted on going out for bread in their robes each morning and then gathering at the corner beneath our apartment to chat, speaking to one another so loudly that I thought, the first time, that someone was being attacked, until I stepped out onto the balcony and saw only them beneath me, clutching pistolas of warm bread to their breasts, their overweight lapdogs guarding their ankles.