Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

Simon’s comment struck him as particularly unfair because he knew that his parents did not have sex. He had heard his mother telling Aunt Elizabeth as much on the telephone. His aunt lived in Milwaukee, and because it was a long-distance call, she and his mother talked just once a month, generally when his father was at work, though lately they had begun to talk more often, and his father had started to complain about the higher bills. “Why doesn’t she ever call you?” asked his father, adding, “Goddamn hippies.”

Harold did not know what hippies were, not exactly, but his aunt had spent two days with them in August, and so he had his theories. Prior to this visit, he had not seen his aunt since he was six because she and his father did not get along, and throughout the visit, he felt his father’s unspoken expectation of loyalty, but he could not help himself: he had liked his aunt, who wore fringe and waited until both of his parents were out of the room to say, “Harold, I’m deeply sorry about your name. I should have tried to stop them.”

Harold didn’t know how to respond, for he thought of his name as who he was, a feature that could not be changed without altering everything else. Still, he liked the earnest, conspiratorial way in which his aunt addressed him.

“What do your friends call you?” she asked. “Harry?”

He did not tell her that he had no friends. “No, I don’t really care for diminutives,” he said instead.

She laughed. “Well. Now I can certainly see why they chose Harold.”

He smiled shyly then and offered to make her iced tea.

“Groovy,” she said. “I like a man who can cook,” and when he explained that iced tea did not actually involve cooking, she laughed her throaty, pleasant laugh yet again.

Eventually, Harold understood that his mother called his aunt more frequently because she and his father argued more frequently, their arguments sometimes taking root right in front of him but over things so small that he did not understand how they had been able to make arguments out of them. Thanksgiving was a perfect example. As the turkey cooked, his parents sat together in the kitchen drinking wine and chatting, their faces growing flushed from the heat and the alcohol, and when everything was ready, his father seated his mother and then placed the turkey in front of her with a flourish.

“Le turkey, Madame,” he declared, pronouncing turkey as though it were French.

His mother giggled and picked up the carving knife. “Harold, what part would you like?” she asked.

“White meat, please.”

“I’ll give you breast meat,” his mother said, adding with a small chuckle, “God knows your father has no interest in breast.”

For the rest of the meal, Harold’s father spoke only to Harold, asking him for the gravy when it actually sat in front of his mother. His mother was also silent, and when the meal was nearly over, she dumped the last of the cranberries onto Harold’s plate even though all three of them knew that cranberries were his father’s favorite part of Thanksgiving. Later, as Harold sat reading in his room, he heard his parents yelling, and he crept down the hallway and perched at the top of the stairs, letting their voices funnel up to him.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” his father shouted.

“Come on, Charles. Lighten up.” Harold heard a small catch in his mother’s voice, which meant she wanted to laugh. “He thought I was talking about the turkey breast.” She paused. “Which, of course, I was.”

There were five words that were forbidden in their household, words that, according to his father, were not only profane but aesthetically unappealing. Harold heard his father say one of these words to his mother, his voice becoming low and precise as it did when he was very angry. His mother did not reply, and a moment later, Harold heard his father open the front door and leave.

When his mother came to tuck him in, her eyes red from crying, he asked where his father had gone. “To the pool hall,” she said, which made her start crying again because this was an old joke between them. When his father occasionally disappeared after dinner, slipping out unannounced, Harold’s mother always said, “I guess he’s gone to the pool hall.” She had explained to Harold what a pool hall was, and they both laughed at the notion of his neat, serious father in such a place, there among men who smoked cigars and sweated and made bets with their hard-earned money.

* * *

“You have a lot of books,” Simon said after he had proclaimed Harold’s mother lustful and they had finished their sandwiches and there seemed nothing left to do.

“Yes,” said Harold. He almost added that he was a “voracious reader,” but remembering what his father always said, that words were meant to be tools of communication but just as often drove wedges between people, he opted for triteness instead. “I love reading,” he mumbled.

“Have you read all of these books?” asked Simon with a shrug.

“Yes. Now, I mainly check them out of the library. The limit is three at a time, but Mr. Tesky lets me take five.” Mr. Tesky was his favorite librarian because, in making recommendations, he never relied on expressions like the other boys and kids your age .

“Yes,” replied Simon. “That’s because he’s a fag.”

Harold had no idea what fag meant, but he regretted terribly not using voracious . “Figure it out from context,” his mother always told him after he had bothered her one too many times to explain words. He considered the context and decided that fag had to do with being helpful.

“Yes,” he agreed. “He is.”

Simon laughed and threw a pillow at him. “You’re a fag also,” Simon said.

It turned out that fag meant to work really hard: “toil,” said his dictionary. Which made sense, for Mr. Tesky did work very hard. Of course, Harold normally would have noticed that this fag was a verb while Simon had used it as a noun, but Simon’s visit had left him feeling tired and unmoored, and so he overlooked this obvious distinction. He set the dictionary back on the shelf in the spot that it always occupied and surveyed his room, looking for something out of place, something to explain his uneasiness. Finally, he decided to calm himself by slipping into his kimono.

Harold had purchased the kimono that summer at a yard sale at which his mother had been convinced to stop only because there were books for sale. Overall, his parents did not approve of yard sales, for they felt that there was something unsavory about putting one’s personal belongings outside for strangers to see, and not just to see but to handle and even buy. Harold, however, liked wandering amid carpets with dark, mysterious stains and mismatched cutlery and stacks of clothing that had presumably once fit the people selling them, people who seemed in no way embarrassed to be associated with these dingy socks and stretched-out waistbands.

The kimono, by contrast, was the most beautiful piece of clothing he had ever seen, black with a white crane painted across the back, and his mother, who lent him the two dollars to purchase it, told him that it was from Japan and that in Japan everyone wore such things, and though he found this hard to believe, Mr. Tesky later showed him a book from his personal collection with pictures of Japanese people wearing kimonos as they walked in the streets and sat around drinking tea. Harold wore his kimono only at home, but he felt different when he slipped it on, more graceful and at ease, though whether this meant that he felt more himself or less, he could not say.

He stopped wearing the kimono quite abruptly when he overheard his father referring to it as his “dress,” though there had been issues before that: as he ate, the sleeves dragged across his food and became sullied with red spaghetti sauce and pork chop grease, and as he descended the stairs one night, he tripped on the hem, toppling down the last three steps and wrenching his ankle. For days afterward, he worried that he had inherited his mother’s clumsiness, though she tended to fall only in public, usually on special occasions. On his first day of school this year, for example, she turned to wave at him and caught her foot where the tile became carpeting. She flew forward, upsetting an easel at which one of his classmates stood painting, and landed facedown on the floor, her skirt hiked up along her thigh. Miss Jamison rushed to help, and his classmates gathered around her in awe, shocked and excited to see an adult splayed out on the floor. His mother always attended carefully to his cuts and fevers and upset stomachs, and he knew that he should go to her, but he did not because he could not bear being regarded as the boy whose mother fell. Instead, he stayed at his desk with the top up against the sight of her, arranging his books. When he got home that afternoon, his mother teased him about it so relentlessly that he knew he had hurt her deeply.