Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

“Oh no, it’s not the event we’ll be changing,” said the big-boned woman. “Just the name. From now on, it will be called a pot God’s will . We want to make it clear, especially to some of the younger parishioners, that there is no such thing as luck, not when God is in charge.”

Because the woman spoke without a trace of irony, Bernadette was nervous to make eye contact, fearful that such intimacy might provoke a response that she had no way of predicting and therefore suppressing; she was not a giggler nor the sort to weep publicly, but she felt that either reaction was possible, and so she smiled cautiously at the woman’s scalloped potatoes instead. Writing well, Bernadette heard herself telling her students monotonously, semester after semester, requires the ability to become your audience — knowing what they know, seeing as they see, feeling what they feel. She looked up at the big-boned woman, who sat regarding the two of them, potatoes growing cold in front of her, and she understood what terrifying and ridiculous advice she had been meting out all these years. She recalled a joke that she had made once as they approached the front doors of one of these churches. “I’m so hungry I could eat the Eucharist,” she had told Sheila, and they had laughed together smugly, glancing around to make sure that nobody stood within earshot. She almost wished that the big-boned woman would stand and publicly denounce them, swinging her big-boned fists like wrecking balls in their direction. How much easier and nobler, she thought, to depart amid cries of “Heretics!” or calls to be burned at the stake.

Instead, they left quietly.

“You knew it was a church,” Sheila pointed out once they were in the car.

“Yes, but we were just there to eat,” Bernadette answered sorrowfully, and Sheila did not reply, for despite her feelings of unease, she too had believed that they were welcome, at least for the time it took to eat a plate of hotdish and Jell-O.

“It’s not as though we didn’t pay for what we ate,” Bernadette said a moment later, indignantly this time, but this position was problematic as well, for it made of them contributors, contributors to the promotion of the belief that God oversaw everything, guiding one’s hand through the cookbook of life to stop at just the right hotdish recipe. When Bernadette offered this analogy, it sounded like a thesis straight out of the freshman composition papers that they graded day after day, and so they were able to laugh about it, but there was no ignoring the fact that the conversation with the big-boned woman had changed everything. They thought back over every potluck and meatball dinner and smorgasbord that they had ever attended, and in doing so, they were overcome with self-consciousness, as though it had suddenly occurred to them that they had attended each of these events unclothed, but unclothed the way that one is in a dream, where one is aware of one’s nakedness not as the person sitting there naked but as the viewer of the dream, those two one in the same except for an overwhelming difference — the inability to act, to change one’s nakedness.

“Which would you rather have if you had to choose — knowledge or the ability to act?” Sheila asked, trying to change the mood in the car to a more philosophical one, but it had not worked, for they understood immediately how futile one was without the other. Then, because the mood in the car still needed changing, they had tried irony next, laughing at the fact that they now understood how Adam and Eve must have felt, naked and suddenly ashamed of it.

In the midst of this bit of levity, Bernadette had broken in, anguished, asking, “But how can they believe such a thing?” and this question, rhetorical though it was, had demanded a bit of thoughtful silence. They had not really acknowledged it then, but that had been the beginning of things: this sudden feeling that books were no longer enough, that the world was vastly different than they believed it to be, which is why Agadir, with its beer gardens and smorgasbords, had galled them so, for they found that now that they had finally done it, broken away from the lakes and their teaching and the routine of their days, they expected nothing to be familiar and, in fact, took great offense when it was.

* * *

Agadir had been filled with overpriced tourist hotels, its streets lined with tour buses, air-conditioned and fumeless, shocks and springs obsessively intact, nothing like the decrepit buses that the women have become used to, buses whose only virtues are cheapness and the ability to teach patience. In fact, because Agadir fell several weeks into their trip, they felt qualified to scoff at these tour buses with their two-people-to-a-seat, keep-the-aisles-clear policies. They have come to enjoy rolling through this landscape with people who are going about their daily business, hauling chickens and goats to market, people who seem thoroughly unmoved by the harsh brownness outside their windows. They are particularly enamored of the fact that the drivers of these buses have assistants— henchmen, they have taken to calling them, part carnival barkers, part airline stewards — whose job it is to hang from the bus calling out destinations, to settle luggage and riders, to pump gas and fetch cigarettes for the driver, and, finally, to doze off, crouched in the small stairwell of the bus, during the brief moments when one round of duties is finished and the next, yet to begin.

They had stopped in Agadir, in fact, only because their guidebook claimed it had an English bookstore, which they never found, and now they are fleeing Agadir as well, its smorgasbords and carefully queued buses. They are going to Tafraoute because they have read in this same guidebook that Tafraoute is a place run by women, the men having gone off to work elsewhere and returning only when they are old enough, or wealthy enough, to retire. The book also had presented it as a place with color, pink granite and flowering almond trees (albeit not at this time of year) and, somewhere outside of town, a series of gigantic rocks painted blue and red and purple by a Belgian who had felt compelled — by the overwhelming brownness they suspect — to alter the desert in some basic but significant way. Their desire to leave Agadir propels them onto the first available bus, which is neither the fastest nor the cheapest, and while there will be ample opportunity during the trip to regret their haste, at first they are simply relieved.

Somewhere after Tiznit, in the tiny market of a village where they stop to take on passengers, an old man climbs onto the bus before it has fully stopped and makes his way back to them as though he has been awaiting their specific arrival. He looks from Sheila’s face to Bernadette’s, back and forth, confused, as though he expected to recognize them but does not. Then, he raises his fist in the air and lets it spring open, revealing a flimsy watch, which he swings like a pendulum in front of them.

“Is he trying to hypnotize us?” Sheila asks worriedly, for, in fact, she cannot take her eyes off the watch.

“He wants us to buy it,” says Bernadette.

“How much?” asks the old man suddenly, in English.

Sheila shakes her head vehemently, but the man continues to dangle the watch with a confidence that they both find alarming.

“Where are we?” Bernadette asks him in English in order to assess his fluency but also because she would like to know. “What town is this?”

“How much?” he says again, patiently, and they cannot tell whether his response indicates a lack of English skills or an unwillingness to be distracted from commerce. In the midst of this comes a tapping at their half-open window, which they turn toward and then pull immediately back from, for directly on the other side of the glass, pressed up against it, is a retarded boy of an indeterminate age. He has an abnormally fleshy face that spreads out in strange, fat waves against the glass, and behind his ears are thick, lumpy growths that resemble wads of gum piled on top of one another. When he pulls back from the window, his lips leave behind snail-like tracks on the glass. Their fellow riders, who have been watching their interactions carefully, chuckle at their reaction to the boy while behind him a group of vendors has gathered, no doubt egging him on so that they might enjoy a bit of fun in the midst of the heat and the tedium of selling the same wares day after day.