by Lori Ostlund
“Why are you calling?” Walter asked. He was not going to make it easy, and why should he? He’d made things easy all those years, and look where that had gotten him.
Aaron did not answer right away. He wanted Walter to know that he appreciated everything he had ever done for him, but all the ways that he thought about conveying his gratitude sounded like clichés. He could not imagine anyone being convinced by clichés, though he knew people were. People listened to pop music, didn’t they? They wept at musicals and exchanged Hallmark cards. But not Walter.
“I’m calling to say that you saved my life,” Aaron said. “And to say thank you.”
Gloria was right—people did what they wanted to do. Walter had wanted to help him because helping him had also helped Walter. That morning, Aaron had opened an unpacked box and found his journal of grievances inside. He had thrown it away because that was what he wanted to do, because forgiving Walter was forgiving himself. He stood up and looked out the window of his new studio. He thought about Walter on the other end of the line, looking at the familiar walls of their house with no idea that Aaron was looking at the ocean. Even when they were together, he saw now, they had always been looking at different things.
“Call you next week?” Aaron said, and Walter said, “I’ll be here.”
* * *
Maybe George had stopped going to the café after Aaron stood him up, or maybe he had not been a regular there to begin with. Maybe his presence that day had been a fluke. After two weeks of eating pie and waiting for George to reappear, Aaron got on Muni one afternoon, thinking he would ride the N all the way to the ocean and walk home from there. He got on, and there was George, wearing his Muni uniform and asking to see his ticket. Aaron showed him his ticket and said, “I’m sorry. I got scared. What time do you get off? Do you want to take a walk?”
And George said, “At six. And yes.”
When six came, Aaron was waiting. George came up close to him as if he were going to hug him, but he did not. After Aaron had recovered from his fear that George might hug him, he realized that he was disappointed George had not, so he reached out and hugged George. George hugged him back, and Aaron blurted out, “I’m not really much of a hugger” because they were two strangers after all, which meant that everything they did would lay the groundwork for how each came to understand the other. He did not want George to think he went around hugging people, that he crossed over into intimacy with such ease. Except now George would think he was so attracted to him that he could not help himself, that he had felt compelled to hug him.
But George just smiled and said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself,” and Aaron smiled back and said, “I am large. I contain multitudes.”
“Actually, I’m not much of a Whitman fan,” said George.
“Me neither,” said Aaron. Even agreeing made him feel shy. “Anyway,” he said, “while I was waiting for you, it occurred to me that you’ve been on your feet all day, so it’s okay if you’re not up for a walk.”
“Are you standing me up again?” said George.
Aaron looked down. “It was the poem,” he said at last. “The Richard Hugo poem. It reminded me of someone, a man I met years ago, when I was just a boy. He introduced me to that poem, to poetry, to so many things.” How strange it felt to be discussing his life in such general terms, to be referring to Walter as “someone.” He took a breath. “I loved him very much.”
“Okay,” George said. “Good. It’s important to have been in love.”
If he and George began walking now, where would it end? Would a day come when they would say, “Do you realize how many miles we’ve walked together?” They would try to calculate it. At least ten thousand they would decide. By then, they would know everything about the other. He would know that George always needed to be on his right when they walked because as a boy he had gone to the post office each day with his father, who could not hear from his left ear, so George had always walked on his right. Now George could not walk any other way. They would have had lots of sex. They would have talked and read poetry because poetry was not only who he was with Walter, it was who he was.
Or maybe none of that would happen. Maybe years from now, while eating a piece of pie, he would think to himself, What was the name of that man I met over pie? He worked for Muni, I recall. We took a walk together once.
He did not know what would happen because that was the way life worked. You went to a parade, and your father fell from a float and died. You got into bed, thinking about the map of Canada, and woke up the next day to find your mother gone. You went out fishing one night, and met the man who would change your life. You fell asleep at the wheel of the U-Haul in which you were leaving the man you’d met fishing, checked into a seedy motel, and saved a life.
“So, should we walk?” said George.
“Yes,” said Aaron, and they started walking.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following:
The organizations and individuals who offered crucial support in the early stages of this book, especially Nancy Zafris, who got my publishing ball rolling and has continued to offer friendship and guidance; The Rona Jaffe Foundation, which provided me with the financial means to reduce my teaching load in 2009–10; the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I was the Kenan Visiting Writer from 2010 to 2012 and was fortunate to have wonderful students and colleagues; Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference; and all the hardworking editors at various literary journals who have supported my work, especially New England Review, as well as those who published early parts of this novel: The Iowa Review, Bluestem, Beloit Fiction Journal, Nashville Review, and the Northwest Review.
My agent, Terra Chalberg, who is pragmatic and supportive and knows when to set deadlines;
Liese Mayer, my editor, who has been an enthusiastic friend to this book, saving me from myself countless times with her thoughtful, gentle, and judicious edits; as well as Nan Graham, Kate Lloyd, Alexsis Johnson, Rita Madrigal, Mia Crowley-Hald, and the rest of the team at Scribner, all of whom have made me feel continuously grateful to have found a home for my book with them.
My students, who make me feel both useful and hopeful. I’m not sure how much I would write if I didn’t feel both of these at least some of the time;
My dear friends, who understand that when I complete a day of writing, I rarely want to talk about it, and who have shown their support in countless ways;
Anne Raeff, my first reader, with whom I have spent nearly two-and-a-half decades of my life.
Turn the page for an excerpt from “All Boy” from Lori Ostlund’s debut story collection,
The Bigness of the World
All Boy
Later, when Harold finally learned that his parents had not fired Mrs. Norman, the babysitter, for locking him in the closet while she watched her favorite television shows, he could not imagine why he had ever attributed her firing to this in the first place, especially since his parents had not seemed particularly upset by the news of his confinement. His father had said something vague about it building character and teaching inner resources, and his mother, in an attempt to be more specific, said that it could not hurt to learn how the sightless got by. Nor had Harold minded being in the closet, where he kept a survival kit inspired by the one that his parents, indeed all Minnesotans, stored in their cars in winter, though his contained only a small flashlight, several books, water, and a roll of Life Savers, chosen because he liked the surprise—there in the dark—of not knowing which flavor was next.
Furthermore, he understood Mrs. Norman’s motivations, which had to do with the fact that if he were allowed to watch television with her, he would inevitably ask questions, which she would feel obligated to answer, thus diminishing her concentration and so her pleasure. Her concerns seemed to him reasonable: he had a tendency to ask questions, for he was a curious child (though awkwardly so), a characteristic that
his teachers cited as proof in making comments both positive and negative.
Mrs. Norman, it turned out, had been fired because she sometimes wore his father’s socks while she watched television, slipping them on over her own bare feet. It was the bare part that completely unhinged his father, who did not like to drink from other people’s glasses or sit in the dentist’s chair while the dentist stood close to him smelling of metal. One night, Mrs. Norman left a pair of his father’s socks on the sofa instead of putting them back in his father’s drawer, and when his father asked her about it, she said, “Oh my, I took them off when my toes got toasty and forgot all about them,” apologizing as though the issue were the forgetting and not the wearing. This had further angered Harold’s father, who considered the sharing of socks—his naked feet where hers had been—an intimacy beyond what he could bear, and after he talked about it “morning, noon, and night for two days,” as Harold’s mother later put it, they fired Mrs. Norman.
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.
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.
