Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

Still, she seemed pleased by the soup, and as we ate, tearing off chunks of bread and dipping them into the orange stew, I told her about my day, concluding nervously, “I feel that nothing has gone right here — for us, I mean.”

Georgia chewed and swallowed a shrimp, gulping noisily as it went down. “The Medic broke up with me,” she said.

“Oh,” I replied, my face becoming hot.

“I mean,” she quickly clarified, “she broke up with me because of that line from Eliot.” She lifted her wineglass and bit noisily at the rim, troubled by having made what amounted to a declaration.

“Oh,” I said again, this oh of a much different tenor. We both took a few swallows of wine, hoping to rinse away the carrots that clung to our teeth, though when we kissed, they were still there, small bits of orange that our tongues dislodged.

III. THE VERY FIRST

The first time happened long ago when I was a young girl growing up in that small town in Minnesota with no idea whatsoever that one day I might find myself in love or that the object of my affection might be a woman (moreover, a woman who would someday cheat on me) or that I might find myself a teacher living in such places as Spain and Malaysia, places vastly different from the world that I then knew, but, as it turned out, places where birds would defecate on me nonetheless.

That day, my third-grade class was making its way to the home of Mr. Nyquist, a very old man whose hobby was tumbling agates. Each Halloween, he dropped two or three of them into our bags instead of candy, so we all had examples of his work at home, which meant that as an outing, seeing Mr. Nyquist’s agates held little appeal. He lived only a block and a half from the school, but we were still each assigned a walking buddy, a classmate with whom we were to hold hands and match steps. I was paired with Jaymy Korkowski, a skinny boy with legs far longer than mine. I recall that I expected his hand to be dry and cool in keeping with the thin, chalky look of him but that instead it was wet with perspiration, a fat boy’s hand.

As we passed under an elm tree just half a block from the school, something hit my shoulder with the impact of a lightly packed snowball and, without letting go of Jaymy’s hand, I stopped to inspect it. Each year on Mother’s Day, I was made to present to my paternal grandmother, who did not like me, a box of chocolates from which I always managed to choose the most disgusting one, a chocolate filled with a yellowish, phlegm-like substance that bore an amazing resemblance to the glob that rested atop my shoulder that morning. When Jaymy Korkowski saw it, he dropped my hand, sat down hard on the sidewalk, and began to cry, great, wet, gasping sobs that shook his entire body. Of my thirty-three classmates, he was the one about whom I knew the least, and so I had nothing to draw upon in making sense of his reaction. I leaned down, taking in the full smell of him, which was not unpleasant, the dominant odor that of manure and beneath it, something sweeter, carrots perhaps.

“It’s just bird poop,” I said, though he cried even harder at being provided with this information.

By then, we had fallen well behind the other fifteen pairs, fifteen for there were two students missing that day, both of them farmers’ children, no doubt kept home when it was learned that we would be wasting a precious portion of the day admiring rocks when they could be out in the fields removing them. Mrs. Carlstrom soon noticed our absence and brought the class to a halt. Then, while they waited, watched over by Mrs. Preebe, the portly assistant librarian who had been brought along in anticipation of just such an event, Mrs. Carlstrom marched back to us. By the time she arrived, however, Jaymy Korkowski was on his feet, fully recovered, and so her attention was directed toward my shoulder.

“You’ll live,” she said in the gravelly monotone that she used for explaining division and congratulating us on our birthdays; then, Jaymy Korkowski in tow, she turned and walked back to the others, leaving me behind.

Mrs. Carlstrom was, as I have already noted, nothing like our other teachers, who addressed us in high, cooing voices and seemed perpetually in awe of even our most minor accomplishments. Moreover, they all lived in town and often came into our café with their families, using their regular voices with my parents and slipping into the cooing voices whenever I appeared. I knew what foods they liked and had even seen several of them with ketchup dabbed colorfully on their faces. They were familiar, knowable. Only Mrs. Carlstrom lived elsewhere, eight miles away in Glenville, where my father had grown up and which, on warm Sunday evenings, we visited, driving slowly up and down its streets while he pointed to various houses, explaining who had lived there when he was a boy and who lived there now and how this transition had come about. One evening, he surprised us by looping out of town to show us a run-down trailer park, stopping in front of a lopsided trailer with an overturned wooden crate for steps. Three dogs stood in the dirt yard, eyeing us from behind a chicken wire fence.

“Do you know who lives there?” my father asked of me specifically, and from the backseat I said that I did not.

“That is your teacher’s house,” my father announced.

“Mrs. Carlstrom?” I said skeptically, unable to reconcile her with such a place.

“She’s not much of a teacher,” my father pointed out almost apologetically. “But that’s generally the way it is with smart folks.” As he spoke, he gestured in the general direction of her yard, so I did not know whether he meant that this — the dirt and crate steps and barking dogs — was the way it was with smart people or that she was not much of a teacher because she was smart. Until then, I had not even known that she was smart, though I did know that she was not much of a teacher: if we did not understand some aspect of the lesson, she did not offer examples that might help us better understand what was involved but instead repeated exactly what she had said the first time around, as though there were only one way to convey the information and this was it.

* * *

The elm tree from which the bird took aim at me that morning stood in front of the McHendrys’ house, which I soon found myself inside along with Mrs. Preebe, whom Mrs. Carlstrom had sent back to deal with me while the others forged on with the field trip. We were shown into the bathroom, where Mrs. Preebe scrubbed my shirt while Mrs. McHendry, who possessed the frenetic energy displayed by certain types of very thin people, stood in the doorway regarding us through a haze of cigarette smoke, for these were the days when smokers simply smoked, without rules involved, by which I mean that they did not avoid certain rooms or take into consideration the presence of children.

The McHendrys owned one of two grocery stores in town, the one that we called the Market as opposed to the other, the V Store, as in Variety, which is what they provided — not just food but an assortment of school supplies and clothing as well as an entire section intriguingly entitled Notions. The McHendrys, by contrast, offered a butcher shop, where you could point to a block of pimento loaf, for example, and watch as Mr. McHendry sliced it right there in front of you. He would pinch the first slice between a folded sheet of wax paper and thrust it across the counter for your inspection. “Thinner?” he would ask, in a voice that implied that this was the ideal thickness but that he was giving you the option to ignorantly choose otherwise.

Years later, long after I had left that town, I would learn from my father that on a May day, the first warm day of spring, Mr. McHendry walked out of the Market, leaving behind the few dollars that he had taken in that morning, locked the front door, and took the key next door to the bank, where he handed it over to the bank president, the only person in town who knew exactly how poor business had been for years, and then went home to the house with the elm tree. From this house, according to my father, he did not emerge for nearly a decade. People considered his behavior extreme, some even suggesting that he was not well, and on the other end of the phone line, I could hear the sound of my father tapping his own head, clarifying the nature of this presumed illness. I, however, found his behavior perfectly logical: he had once divided his world between the Market and home, and this was the half left to him. I never wondered why he had given up, for I knew that people did, only why he had chosen that particular day to do so, why, after months of snow and ice, months during which he had gotten out of bed and carried on against the dearth of customers, the encroaching bills, the oppressive proximity of the bank, why he had awakened that morning to the promise of warmth and found it all too much to bear. Only later did I begin to understand the way that a simple gesture of sympathy or solidarity, even, it seemed, one of a meteorological nature, could crumble one’s resolve far more quickly than adversity itself.