Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

Harold was quite familiar with Mrs. Norman’s feet. They were what old people’s feet should look like, he thought, with nails so yellow and thick that she could not cut them by herself, not even with his assistance. Instead, her daughter, who occasionally stopped by on one of the two nights each week that Mrs. Norman stayed with Harold, cut them using a tool with long handles and an end that looked like the beak of a parrot.

“May I watch?” Harold asked because he was the sort of child who differentiated between may and can and found that adults often responded favorably to this, granting him privileges that they might not otherwise have offered. He did not feel that he was being dishonest because he cared deeply about grammar and would have gone on using may even without such incentives.

“You may,” replied Mrs. Norman, inclining her head toward him as though she were a visiting dignitary granting him an audience, and Harold sat down next to her. Her daughter, a powerful-looking woman in her thirties, stood over them with the device, holding it in a way that suggested that she enjoyed tools and was looking forward to using it. Harold did not like tools, which he thought of as destructive, even though his father told him that he needed to learn to view the bigger picture: it was true that tools were used to cut and bore and pound, but these small acts of destruction generally resulted in a much bigger act of creation. “Like our house,” his father said, as though their house were an obvious example of the way that creation came out of destruction.

Mrs. Norman’s daughter was what his parents called jolly. There were other words that they used, words that he did not yet know despite his extensive vocabulary, but he knew jolly and felt that she was. She drove a very old motorcycle, which she had to roll to start, and once when his father, who knew nothing about motorcycles, made polite conversation, asking, “Is it a Harley?” she replied, “More like a Hardly,” and then she thumped his father on the shoulder and laughed. His father had also laughed, surprising Harold because being touched by people he didn’t really know was another thing his father considered too intimate.

Mrs. Norman’s daughter grasped her mother’s foot and positioned it on her thigh, but this gave her no room to wield the device properly, so she helped her mother onto the floor, where Mrs. Norman sat with her back braced against the sofa while her daughter squeezed the ends of the cutting device together and the tips of the nails broke free with a loud snap and flew into the air like tiddledywinks.

“Can you please pick those up, Harold?” said Mrs. Norman. “They’re sharp, and I don’t want anyone stepping on them.”

Harold crouched on the floor around Mrs. Norman’s newly trimmed feet and began to collect the nail clippings, gathering them in his cupped left hand. He studied one of them, flexing it between his fingers, surprised at its sturdiness. “May I keep it?” he asked, thinking that it would make a welcome addition to the contents of his pocket, which already included a small snail shell, an empty bullet casing, a strip of birch tree parchment, and several dried lima beans, items chosen because they offered a certain tactile reassurance.

“Ish, no,” said Mrs. Norman. “I want you to throw them away this minute and then scrub your hands. You too,” she admonished her daughter, who was using the hem of her shirt to brush away the chalky residue that clung to the tool’s beak.

Harold went into the kitchen and emptied Mrs. Norman’s toenail clippings into the milk carton filled with compost — all except the large one, which he slipped into his pocket. As he scrubbed his hands at the sink, Mrs. Norman’s daughter came and stood beside him, so close that he could smell her, an oily smell that he suspected came from the Hardly. Harold did not like to be this close to people, close enough to smell them, though his mother said that this was simply his father rubbing off on him and that he needed to focus on the positive aspects of smell, the way that it enhanced hunger and rounded out memory. Harold tried to embrace his mother’s perspective, but he could not get over the way that odor disregarded boundaries, wrapping him, for example, in the earthy, almost tuberish smell that hung in the air after Mrs. Norman had spent time in the bathroom.

“How old are you these days?” asked Mrs. Norman’s daughter as she scrubbed vigorously at her hands.

“Ten,” he said. “Well, eleven.”

“Which is it?” asked Mrs. Norman’s daughter, still scrubbing. “Ten or eleven? Age is a very clear-cut thing, you know. When you become eleven, you lose all rights to ten.” She said this in a serious tone, looking him in the eye rather than down at her soapy hands, but then she laughed the way she had when she said “more like a Hardly” to his father, and Harold instinctively stepped away from her.

“Eleven.” This was true. He had turned eleven just two weeks earlier.

“And what sorts of things do eleven-year-old boys like to do these days?”

“I’m not sure.” He knew what he liked to do. Besides reading, which was his primary interest and one that he would not belittle by calling a hobby, he liked very specific things: he enjoyed making pancakes but not waffles; he took pleasure in helping his mother dust but could not be convinced to vacuum; he kept lists of words that he particularly liked or disliked the sound of. At the moment, he thought that vaccination and expectorate were beautiful but could not bear the word dwindle .

He did not, however, know what boys his age liked to do, for he had no friends. At school, he interacted only with adults, who, he had learned, were subject to many of the same foibles he witnessed in his classmates, especially Miss Jamison, his homeroom teacher, who cared deeply about having the approval of her students and found ways to ridicule Harold in front of them, not overtly as his classmates did but making clear her intention nonetheless.

For example, after he had been home with a cold for two days, she asked, “Harry, how are you feeling?” She was the only teacher who called him Harry, though all of his classmates did, and he hated it, convinced that they were really saying “hairy,” but when he complained to his mother, she told him to explain that he “did not care for the diminutive,” and so he did not mention the problem to her again.

“I’m better,” he said.

“Better?” Miss Jamison repeated loudly. “So you’re feeling better ?” She said this with a smirk, exaggerating better as though it were wrong in some fundamental and obvious way, and his classmates all laughed knowingly. He spent the rest of the morning thinking about it: hadn’t she been asking him to compare how he felt today with how he felt yesterday? Ultimately, he decided that there was nothing wrong with saying better, but that night at dinner when his father asked how he was feeling, he said, “Well,” just to be safe.

* * *

Shortly after Mrs. Norman’s firing, it seemed that Harold might acquire a friend, a boy named Simon, who transferred into his class just after Thanksgiving. When Simon came over to his house to play, however, he announced to Harold that his mother had a lustful look.

“I don’t know what that means,” Harold replied grudgingly, for he was used to being the one who knew words that his classmates did not.

“You know. Like she wants sex,” Simon said matter-of-factly, as though this were a perfectly normal observation to make about a potential friend’s mother. Harold did not reply, and the two boys sat on the floor in his room chewing summer sausage sandwiches made for them by his mother, who had chatted away with Simon as she cut and buttered the bread, trying, Harold knew, to be overly gay as a way of making up for his inability to say and do the sorts of things that would make Simon want to visit again. This was what her hard work had earned her, Harold thought sadly, the indignity of being described as lustful by an eleven-year-old boy who then gobbled up the sandwiches that she had so lustfully prepared.