Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

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On the morning that I was defecated on for the first time in my life, a part of me wanted desperately to believe that Jaymy Korkowski was sobbing on my behalf, that his tears were shed over the small injustice I had suffered, though something, sheer stubbornness perhaps, kept me from doing so. I have since come to understand that this — the need to imagine our pain worthy of another’s anguish, our circumstances capable of invoking sacrifice or even despair in another human being — is a basic human need, one felt even more deeply as we confront our own shortcomings in meeting this need for others.

In the weeks that followed, I committed myself wholeheartedly to learning about Jaymy Korkowski, hoping to make sense of his response, but in the end, I learned only this: that when Jaymy Korkowski was a baby, his father had caught his leg in a bear trap and it had been amputated right above the knee, an interesting but irrelevant bit of trivia, for I was a logical child who knew better than to complete a puzzle out of just two pieces. I have since come to believe that what caused his tears that morning was not something large at all — some deeply ingrained character trait or lasting trauma — but rather a small thing, some soon-forgotten incident that had taken place earlier that morning, coloring his mood for the day: his father had yelled at him, perhaps, for an error made during milking or he had been bullied by the Pipo boys on the school bus. This, after all, is the way our lives unfold.

What this means, of course, is that on a different day, one free of bullies or milking errors, Jaymy Korkowski and I might have joined hands and walked, and as we did, a bird, the same bird if you like, might have defecated on me, but because this was a different morning, Jaymy Korkowski instead might have begun to laugh at my misfortune, to laugh so hard that he wet himself; or, to laugh so hard that I began to cry; or, laughed so hard that I, a shy, tentative, untrusting child, found the sound of it contagious, and we fell together to the curb, shrieking wildly so that Mrs. Carlstrom, who was smart and caustic and a terrible teacher (for some things should not change), called to us to pull ourselves together, to rise and rejoin the group. In this unfolding of events, Jaymy Korkowski and I would go on to become best friends, for what else can two people do who have together laughed at adversity and defied authority? From his mouth would emerge the words that would allow me to understand a boy who cried at the sight of bird shit — though, of course, this boy, the boy offering such revelations, is not, and never can be, the boy who was moved to tears. For, at each turn, the people we hold close elude us, living their other lives, the lives that we can never know.

Calvin goes first, telling them about the time he was in Florida and decided to attend a Beach Boys concert, not really knowing anything about the Beach Boys except that they played music for basking in the sun to, which, Calvin being from Michigan, might explain why he knew so little about them. He hitched a ride up to Fort Lauderdale, which is where the concert was being held, with a guy in a convertible who dropped him off right at the stadium, and it wasn’t until the band came on stage hours later that he realized the convertible guy, the guy with whom he’d scored the ride, was actually one of the Beach Boys, the drummer, whose name he couldn’t recall.

This is exactly how Calvin tells the story, his clauses like tired acrobats, and though the others at the table have known Calvin only a day, they are disappointed. Joe goes next, then Martin, and after them, Noreen and Sylvie begin a long story about their first date, on which they went to a run-down bar on the west side of Albuquerque, the kind of place, Sylvie explains, where Hispanic butch-femme couples show up in wedding gear on Saturday nights to hold their receptions, the butches playing pool in their tuxedos, the femmes taking over the bathrooms, where, in a never-ending cycle, they fix their makeup and cry with happiness.

“So,” Sylvie says in a voice thick with drama. “There we are on our first date, and Noreen invites this woman, Deb, to play pool with us.”

Noreen cuts in, explaining that this Deb woman had actually struck up a conversation with her while Sylvie was off in the bathroom. She describes Deb as a massive-thighed Amazon who raised horses and engaged in competitive weight lifting, details that, in her mind, make clear that Deb had posed no threat to their date. She even tells them how Deb, who was wearing shorts, had said, “Go ahead. Feel it,” flexing her very large thigh for Noreen, and how she, Noreen, had of course refused.

“I didn’t even know her,” she reports earnestly. “So why would I feel her thigh?” She actually seems to be soliciting their input, though it is not clear whether she is seeking plausible reasons that she (or anyone in that position) might have opted to feel the thigh or their approval for not having done so.

“It’s irrelevant anyway,” announces Sylvie, but Noreen doesn’t reply because she is thinking about Deb’s thigh, about the way that Deb had first extended her foot delicately, like someone testing the water in a pool, but then had ground her toes hard into the floor, making the leg muscles leap to the surface. There is absolutely nothing sexual about the memory. On the contrary, the thigh had been far too large, too freakish, for her to find it appealing. Noreen had felt the way she did the first time that she saw the penis of an aroused farm animal, fascinated and repulsed, actually unable to look away, but with no sense that what she was seeing had anything to do with her.

“She gave me the creeps. Immediately,” continues Sylvie, by way of letting these relative strangers know that her instincts are keener than Noreen’s. “But Noreen invited her to play pool with us, so what could I say? Then, halfway through the game, this really blond, granola-y type walks in and sits down at the bar. She’s watching us play, so finally I go over and invite her to join the next game, and it turns out that she’s Australian.” She pauses as though she has revealed something significant.

“Olivia Newton-John?” suggests Calvin dryly, and the others laugh because, boring Beach Boys story aside, Calvin is funny.

“What?” says Sylvie nervously, bewildered by the laughter but still joining in, assuming that if others are laughing, then something must be funny. Perhaps because they have spent so much time around strangers on this trip, Noreen has begun to notice just how often Sylvie does this — laughs when she has no idea what is funny, her hand flying up to her mouth to hide the way that confusion tugs it downward.

Noreen suddenly feels tired, tired of the story itself as well as of the way that Sylvie keeps talking over her, keeps saying, “That’s not what happened” when it is, in fact, what happened. Then, there’s the way that Sylvie steered the story right past the particulars of Noreen’s meeting with Deb, had somehow gotten her talking about Deb’s thighs when the meeting was really the important part.

What had happened was that Noreen was sitting at the bar, Sylvie’s stool empty beside her, when Deb sat down on it, leaned toward her, and said, “You know why the Jews didn’t leave Germany?” Noreen had been put off at first, thinking that Deb was telling a joke, some one-liner about the Holocaust. After all, it was at this very bar that the DJ had, between songs, once asked, “How many Polacks does it take to rape a lesbian?” and when Noreen complained to the owner, a pudgy man in running shorts, he had said, “What? Are there Polacks here?”

But Deb was not telling a joke. She was relating an anecdote that she had read somewhere, a reply that a Jewish man had given after the war, after he had survived and been asked to explain, in retrospect, why it was that the Jews had not left when they had the chance. “Because we had pianos,” the man had said, at least according to Deb. Deb was slightly tipsy but not at all drunk, and so she did not go on and on about this in an overly sentimental way, which Noreen appreciated, yet it was obvious that the man’s response had meant something to her. Later, Noreen told Sylvie about the exchange and Sylvie had seemed impressed, so how, Noreen wonders, could Sylvie tell the story without beginning there, with the Jews and their pianos?