Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

“There’s no island,” I said suddenly. Our parents’ kitchen had not one island but two, which Ilsa had given names. The one nearest the stove she called Jamaica and the other, Haiti, and when we helped her cook, she would hand us things, saying, “Ferry this cutting board over to Haiti,” and “Tomatoes at the south end of Jamaica, please.” Once, during a period when she had been enamored of religious dietary restrictions, she announced, “Dairy on Jamaica, my young sous chefs. Meat on Haiti,” and we had cooked the entire meal according to her notions of kosher, though when it came time to eat, she had forgotten about the rules, stacking cheese and bacon on our hamburgers and pouring us each a large glass of milk.

From the other room, we heard a sound like maracas being rattled, which made me think of our birthdays because our parents always took us to Mexican Village, where a mariachi band came to our table and sang “Happy Birthday” in Spanish. We heard water running and then the parrot screaming obscenities again as Ilsa passed through the living room and back into the kitchen. She had put on a hat, one that we had not seen before, white with a bit of peacock feather glued to one side.

“This has been an absolutely splendid visit, but I must be getting the two of you home,” she said. “Gather your things, my goslings.” But we had come with nothing save the spices, which now sat in a pool of brown liquid, and so we had no things to gather.

* * *

When we arrived home that afternoon, our father was already there, waiting for us at the dining room table, where he sat with the tips of his hands pressed together forming a peak. He did not ask where we had been but instead told us to sit down because he needed to explain something to us, something about our mother, who would not be coming home that day. “You know that your mother works for your grandfather?” he began, and we nodded and waited. “Well, your grandfather has done something wrong. He’s taken money from the bank.”

“But it’s his bank,” I replied.

“Yes,” said my father. “But the money is not his. It belongs to the people who use the bank, who put their money there so that it will be safe.”

Again, we nodded, for we understood this about banks. In fact, we both had our own accounts at the bank, where we kept the money that we received for our birthdays. “He stole money?” I asked, for that was how it sounded, and I wanted to be sure.

“Well,” said my father, “it’s called embezzling.” But when I looked up embezzling that evening, I discovered that our grandfather had indeed stolen money.

“And what about our mother?” Martin asked.

“It’s complicated,” said our father, “but they’ve arrested her also.”

“Arrested?” I said, for there had been no talk of arresting before this.

“Yes,” said my father, and then he began to cry.

We had never seen our father cry. He was, I learned that day, a silent crier. He laid his head on the table, his arms forming a nest around it, and we knew that he was crying only because his shoulders heaved up and down. I sat very still, not looking at him because I did not know how to think of him as anything but my father, instead focusing on the overhead light, waiting for it to click, which it generally did every thirty seconds or so. The sound was actually somewhere between a click and a scratch, easy to hear but apparently difficult to fix, for numerous electricians had been called in to do so and had failed. I had always complained mightily about the clicking, which prevented me from concentrating on my homework, but that day as I sat at the table with my weeping father and Martin, the light was silent, unexpectedly and overwhelmingly silent.

Then, without first consulting me with his eyes, our custom in matters relating to our parents, Martin slipped from his chair and stood next to my father, and, after a moment, placed a hand on my father’s shoulder. In those days, Martin’s hands were unusually plump, at odds with the rest of his body, and from where I sat, directly across from my father, Martin’s hand looked like a fat, white bullfrog perched on my father’s shoulder. My father’s sobbing turned audible, a high-pitched whimper like a dog makes when left alone in a car, and then quickly flattened out and stopped.

“It will be okay,” Martin said, rubbing my father’s shoulder with his fat, white hand, and my father sat up and nodded several times in rapid succession, gulping as though he had been underwater.

But it would not be okay. After a very long trial, my mother went to jail, eight years with the possibility of parole after six. My grandfather was put on trial as well, but he died of a heart attack on the second day, leaving my mother to face the jury and crowded courtroom alone. Her lawyers wanted to blame everything on him, arguing that he was dead and thus unable to deny the charges or be punished, advice that my mother resisted until it became clear that she might be facing an even longer sentence. Martin and I learned all of this from the newspaper, which we were not supposed to read but did, and from the taunts hurled at us by children who used to be our friends but were no longer allowed to play with us because many of their parents had money in my grandfather’s bank and even those who didn’t felt that my mother had betrayed the entire community.

We missed her terribly in the beginning, my father most of all, though I believe that he grieved not at being separated from her but because the person she was, or that he had thought she was, no longer existed, which meant that he grieved almost as though she were dead. There was some speculation in the newspaper about my father, about what was referred to as his “possible complicity,” but I remain convinced to this day that my father knew nothing about what had been going on at the bank, though whether it was true that it was all my grandfather’s doing, that my mother had been nothing more than a loyal daughter as her lawyers claimed — this I will never know. Martin was of the opinion that it shouldn’t matter, not to us, but I felt otherwise, particularly when he came home from school with scratches and bruises and black eyes that I knew were given to him because of her, though he always shrugged his shoulders when my father asked what had happened to him and, with a small smile, gave the same reply: “Such is the life of a fairy.” My father did not know how to respond to words like sissy and fairy, nor to the matter-of-fact manner in which Martin uttered them, and so he said nothing, rubbing his ear vigorously for a moment and then turning away, as was his habit when presented with something that he would rather not hear.

* * *

Of course, as Ilsa walked us home from her cottage that day, we had no inkling of what lay ahead, no way of knowing that the familiar terrain of our childhoods would soon become a vast, unmarked landscape in which we would be left to wander, motherless and, it seemed to us at times, fatherless as well. Rather, as we walked along holding hands with Ilsa, our concerns were immediate. I fretted aloud that our parents would be angry, but Ilsa assured me that they were more likely to be worried, and though I did not like the idea of worrying them, it seemed far preferable to their anger. There was also the matter of Ilsa herself, Ilsa, who, even with her hat on, seemed unfamiliar, and so Martin and I worked desperately to interest her in the things that we saw around us, things that would have normally moved her to tears but which she now seemed hardly to notice. Across our path was a snail that had presumably been wooed out onto the sidewalk during the previous day’s rain and crushed to bits by passersby. I stopped and pointed to it, waiting for her to cry out, “Death, be not proud!” and then to squeeze her eyes shut while allowing us to lead her safely past it, but she glanced at the crushed bits with no more interest than she would have shown a discarded candy wrapper.