Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

“She was telling me what she had for lunch,” I replied. “A bologna sandwich. I can elaborate if you like, but please consider my feelings, being asked to reflect upon the inadequacies of her lunch. Quite honestly, I do not wish to know the details of my colleagues’ lives nor to share with them the details of mine. I do not wish to hug my colleagues or reveal to them my favorite song. Certainly, I do not want them feeding me Jell-O from a spoon gripped between their teeth.” These were all references to activities introduced by the Critical Friends, who emphasized closeness and frankness and transparency but who, in fact, operated like a secret society, sweeping in and out of classrooms, sequestering themselves with individual teachers, and introducing a whole new vocabulary, which I privately referred to as the Orwellian Code. Under their tutelage (and here I return to my point, having digressed), we are no longer to speak of our concerns or dislikes, freighted as these words are with negativity; we are instead, the Friends explained, to wonder about such things, or, reverting to the noun form, to share a wonder .

“But that has just the opposite effect,” I had shouted, half-rising from my seat. “If one of my esteemed colleagues were to wonder at my idea, I would understand immediately that my idea was so poor, so ill-conceived, so beyond the pale, that he felt compelled to resort to euphemism in order to conceal his horror.” Several of my colleagues chuckled, but their amusement did not keep them from complying, and eventually I was the only one left still speaking of weaknesses and concerns.

Thus, when I take umbrage at Thorqvist’s use of wonder, he squeezes his eyes shut but quickly reopens them and says, “Fine, allow me to rephrase,” and I know then that the matter before us is serious. He clears his throat and begins again. “Dr. Daneau, I am… concerned by reports from parents that you are making the boys hold hands with one another.” He coughs excessively before asking, “Is this true?”

“Why, yes,” I say. I do not know what I had been expecting, but it was not this. “I have been employing this punishment for some years, quite effectively I might add. When two boys insist on pummeling each other, punching and roughhousing and such as young boys are wont to do, I have found that nothing works better than to make them sit side by side for the rest of the period holding hands. If they can’t keep their hands off each other, I advise them, then they shall spend the period with their hands directly engaged with each other. I, of course, impose this punishment judiciously.”

Thorqvist stares at me, a look that I cannot fully decipher. “Parents have complained,” he says at last.

“Parents complain about everything these days, except for the most troubling fact of all — that their children are lazy and spoiled and entirely ill-equipped to face the world.”

“Dr. Daneau, I must say that I am surprised, surprised that you, of all people, have chosen to use such a method.”

“I am afraid that I do not follow you.”

He fidgets with his pen, somersaulting it from nib to end several times. “Well, Dr. Daneau, I prefer to address this delicately, so you will forgive me for being roundabout — it is simply that, given your personal situation as it were, I am surprised that you would consider such a thing… well, appropriate.”

“Dr. Thorqvist,” I say sharply, “I do not see your point. However, I do ask that you think carefully before pulling your support for discipline.”

“I am afraid that you misunderstand the severity of this matter, Dr. Daneau, so let me be very clear: there will be an investigation. Furthermore, I must inform you that you have been officially placed on leave. A substitute has been called. You are to leave the building immediately without having any contact with the students. Do you understand what I am telling you?” I gather my energy to stage an angry rebuttal, but his soliloquy does not end there. “Please make this easy on both of us, Michael,” he continues instead, quietly, using my given name for the very first time in our long acquaintance.

It has been years since anyone has called me Michael in this way, intimately, urgently. The last person to do so was he, the night that we walked together after the Mahler, a performance that left me in a precarious state. The baritone was a moody, Heathcliffian presence on the stage, and the words, sung in German so that I received them secondhand from a translation printed in the program, affected me profoundly. I began to shake and then, as the baritone repeated the final, haunting word, Ewig, to sob. In the half-lit hall, I reached out and gripped his arm, but it was as though my touch burned, so quickly did he pull away.

We left the concert hall and walked aimlessly, not speaking, not even exchanging small politenesses about the cellist who dropped her bow midmovement, until we reached the corner, that corner, where an elderly woman approached us carrying a metal lunchbox. It was clear from her eyes and the thickness of her lipstick that she was mad, and when she spoke, she held the lunchbox to her mouth as though it were a channel for her words.

“Please be so kind as to tell me where to go,” she said.

I might have ignored her, but he was not like that. “Ma’am,” he began, but she interrupted him, crying out, “I cannot hear you. You must speak into the box. Please,” and she held the box to her ear, waiting. He, of course, leaned forward, doing as she asked. “Ma’am,” he said, “you must take this money and find a place, a safe place, where you can eat and pass the night.” He held out a five-dollar bill, which she regarded cautiously, as though trying to determine whether it was money or a snake. Finally, with a grunt, she seized it and gestured for him to listen.

“Only we can know,” she whispered into the box, into his ear, and though there were numerous ways to interpret her words, which were nothing more than the words of a crazy woman after all, I could not help but hear them as a request, a request that I be excluded. She walked away, box in one hand, money in the other, and, as though heeding her directive, he turned to me immediately and said, “We must not mingle with each other, Michael.”

He was Iranian, but his English was very good. Still, there was no way for me to know what he meant by this, to know why he had used mingle, which was something that people, strangers, did at cocktail parties. Of course, he might have been thinking of the word in a purely physical sense, for he was a scientist, my former chemistry professor in fact, and in this capacity, I had heard him use the word often to speak of the way that liquids came together, mingling in the beaker. He moved close to me one last time, shook my hand formally, and uttered the very same words that, twenty years later, my principal would use in asking me to leave the building: “Please make this easy on both of us, Michael.”

Thorqvist concludes our meeting with one of his usual malapropisms, urging me to “keep my lip up.” It is this, and only this, that keeps me from becoming emotionally indiscreet, that allows me the fortitude to walk out of his office and across the parking lot to my car. It is October, a likable month I have always thought. The air is chilly and crisp, and as I drive, I study the sky, imagining young Thomas Jefferson’s family also gazing up at this moment, gazing at this very same sky and thinking, “That is where he died.” It seems to me unjust, supremely and sublimely unjust, to have as a reminder such a vast, inescapable expanse.

Marcos is studying when I arrive home, studying with the stereo turned up loud to some awful music of a type that I have never known him to enjoy. He shuts it off immediately, looking concerned to see me home. “Are you ill, Doctor?” he asks.