The Bigness of the World

by Lori Ostlund

  “You let me do all the talking,” said Julia several minutes later as we sat outside a café, waiting for our orange juice to arrive. We had become a bit obsessed with orange juice, for no matter how carefully we stressed that we did not want sugar, we had yet to receive juice that met this simple specification. “You made me seem like the unreasonable one.”

  I knew that Julia hated to appear unreasonable, and so I considered apologizing. “Care to bet on the sugar?” I said instead, hoping to redirect her ire, to remind her that I was an ally, at least when it came to sugar.

  The waitress, a young Malay woman with a prominent black tooth, appeared balancing two very full glasses of orange juice on a tray. As she drew near, she seemed to lose speed, as though she sensed the depth of our thirst and was overwhelmed by the power she held to alleviate it, finally stopping altogether, resting the tray on the back of a nearby chair. As we watched, she picked up one of the glasses and took a sip before placing it back on the tray and continuing toward us. Smiling, she set the sipped-from glass in front of me, the untouched one in front of Julia.

  “Excuse me,” I said politely. “I believe you drank from my glass.”

  She smiled at me. “Is fine,” she replied and departed gracefully.

  “What did she mean by that?” I asked Julia. “Did she mean, ‘Yes, I did drink from your glass and the fact that I did so is fine,’ or did she simply mean that the juice is fine? As in, ‘I took a sip of your juice just to make sure, and it’s fine.’”

  We studied the juices for a moment. I knew that Julia wanted to drink hers, and why shouldn’t she? Nobody had sipped from her glass.

  “Well,” I said peevishly. “Go ahead.”

  “Maybe she was just smelling it,” she suggested once she had taken two very long drinks.

  “Smelling it?” I said.

  “Yes, you know. Just sniffing it.”

  “You saw her drink from it.”

  “Yes, she definitely drank from it,” she agreed, changing tack. “Though I don’t see what the big deal is.”

  I considered the implications of this last statement, considered it, that is, within the context of our relationship. Julia and I had been together for two years, not a lifetime, granted, but it was, I believed, a length of time. She knew things about me: that I could not tolerate the smell of fish in the morning; that I felt suffocated at being told the details of other people’s bodily functions; that I abhorred public nose picking, both the studied sort in which some of my students engaged, and the fast poking at which I always seemed to catch people on buses or in line. Then, too, there was the matter of what she jokingly referred to as “the zones,” which, simply put, are the areas of the body that I do not care to have touched nor to see touched on others nor, quite frankly, to even hear discussed. During my last checkup just before we left for Malaysia, my doctor nonchalantly pressed her hands to my abdomen, coming far too close to my navel, which, along with my neck, is a primary zone.

  “Could you please not brush against my navel?” I had said, perhaps a bit sharply.

  “Your navel?” she replied, pulling back as though I had accused her of biting.

  “Yes,” I said. “It unsettles me.” I felt that unsettles was a perfectly appropriate word for the situation, precise enough in connotation to convey my displeasure, but cryptic enough to save me from feeling foolish, assuming that she had the good manners not to press the issue, which she did not.

  “How strange,” she replied, pausing to regard me. Then, her hands drawn to her own navel, she began to massage it. “The navel, you know, is the final remaining symbol of our connection to our mothers, a reminder of our past dependence.” Her rubbing intensified, and I suspected that she might be newly pregnant.

  “Please,” I said stiffly. “I would prefer that you not touch your navel in my presence. In fact, I would prefer that we not even discuss navels.”

  When I arrived home that afternoon, I told Julia about the encounter, huffily, in a way that suggested that the doctor had been intentionally trying to goad me. She had been sympathetic, but that night at dinner, she had tentatively broached the subject again, her tone suggesting that she found my reaction perplexing, even perturbing, and though I concealed my dismay, I could not help but recall the early days of our relationship, when she had stroked my brow encouragingly as I related the story of the wood tick that had worked its way deep into my navel when I was eight.

  “The big deal,” I replied, speaking loudly, which Julia hates. “The big deal is that this is my juice.” That night, as I lay in bed, Julia asleep next to me, it occurred to me that I did not even know whether the juice had come with sugar or without.

  The following Saturday, Julia and I encountered Shah on the footbridge. I was surprised to see him there though not surprised at what his presence meant. He was wearing a pair of large white pants that flapped like sails in the evening breeze and, as usual, a purple shirt. As we passed him, he looked away, thus acknowledging my presence, and I, in deference to his wishes as well as bridge etiquette, said nothing.

  “Poor fellow,” Julia remarked as we descended the steps at the other end.

  “It does not justify his behavior,” I said vehemently, for I sensed something in her tone, particularly in her use of the word fellow, which made Shah seem hapless, free of guile.

  The next morning, Sunday, we were awakened early by the sounds of screaming, and when we dressed quickly and stepped out of our apartment, we found our neighbors gathered on the walkway outside, pressed against the railing that curved around the courtyard like theater patrons looking down from their box seats. As we wiggled our way in next to them, we saw that all around Nine-Story Building, the tenants stood in similar rows, everyone peering downward, at where a body lay in the courtyard below, face down, arms out, like a doll flung aside by a bored child.

  “But this is becoming too much,” complained our neighbor Prahkash. “Why must they always come here to do themselves in? I pay the rent, not they. We should begin charging admission.” He spit over the rail, and I watched the drop fall and disappear.

  The next day, we read in the newspaper that the victim was a Chinese man in his late forties who had just returned from a gambling trip to Australia, where he had lost the equivalent of fifty thousand U.S. dollars, a sum of money that it had taken his family five years to save. They were preparing to start a business, a karaoke restaurant, and the man, impatient to begin, had flown to Sydney, lost everything at the blackjack tables, and returned to Malaysia broke, taking a taxi from the airport in Kuala Lumpur back to Malacca. He was dropped at the night market, where he drank a cup of coffee at one of the stalls, leaving the suitcase behind when he departed. After seeing the man’s picture in the paper the next day, the stall owner had announced that he had the man’s suitcase, the suitcase that had, presumably, been used to tote the fifty thousand dollars on its one-way journey. The story of the abandoned suitcase had appeared as a separate article, next to a picture of the stall owner holding it aloft.

  “Did you see the suitcase in the newspaper?” a neighbor inquired several days later as Julia and I passed her in the hall.

  “Yes. The poor man,” I replied sourly. “Misplaced his suitcase as well.”

  She paused and then, not unkindly, said, “Ours is the only building tall enough. It can’t be helped, you see.” She was trying to prepare me, letting me know that this was not an anomaly, but perhaps I looked puzzled or in need of further convincing, for she said it again, with the same air of resignation that tenants used to discuss the smell of urine in the elevator: ours was the only building tall enough—she paused—tall enough to ensure success. That was the word she used—success—from which I understood that somebody who jumped and lived would also have to suffer the humiliation of failure.

  Julia said nothing during this exchange, but after we closed our door, she turned to me angrily and said, “Why do you have to act that way?”

  “What way?” I asked, feigning inn
ocence.

  “Like you’re the only one who cares what happened to that man. Like she’s a jerk for even talking about him.”

  “She was not talking about him,” I replied. “She was talking about his suitcase.”

  “People are never just talking about a suitcase,” Julia said quietly.

  That night, she did not come into our bedroom to sleep, which was fine with me as I found sleeping alone preferable in the tropical heat, though I had not mentioned this to Julia because it seemed imprudent to discuss anything related to our bed at that particular moment. There is a term that lesbians use—bed death —to describe what had already begun happening long before Julia took the bigger step of physically removing herself from our bed. In fact, at the risk of sounding confessional, a tendency that I despise, I’ll admit that we had not actually touched in any meaningful way since the afternoon that we bathed together at the seedy hotel. That this kind of thing occurred with enough frequency among lesbians to have acquired its own terminology in no way made me feel better. If anything, it made me feel worse, for I dislike contributing in any way to the affirmation of stereotypes.

  Then, on the second Friday after she stopped sleeping in our bed, an arrangement that had continued without discussion, I was returning from Mahkota Parade with groceries when I ran into three students. “We saw Miss Julia at the bus station,” announced Paul, an amiable boy with a slightly misshapen head. This happened often, people reporting to us on the other’s activities, even on our own, as though we might have forgotten that we had eaten barbecued eel at a stall near the water the night before.

  “Oh?” I replied, striving for a nonchalant oh rather than one that indicated surprise or begged for elaboration.

  “Is she going back?” Paul asked, by which he meant leaving.

  “Yes,” I said without hesitation, knowing it to be true, for, as Paul spoke, I had the sense that I was simply being reminded of something that had already happened.

  Her clothing and computer were gone, but so too were the smaller, everyday pieces of her life: the earplugs she kept beneath her pillow, the biography of Indira Gandhi that she was halfway through, the photo of her great-grandmother Ragnilde with her long hair puddled on the floor. In fact, their absence hurt more, for it suggested a plan, a methodical progression toward that moment when she boarded the bus with her carefully packed bags, leaving nothing behind —not even, it turned out, a note, which meant that she had left without any sort of goodbye, that she had considered the silence that reigned between us those last few weeks a sufficient coda. I sat on the bed and tried to determine the exact moment her decision had been made, when she had thought to herself, “Enough,” but I could not, for it seemed to me a bit like trying to pinpoint the exact sip with which one had become drunk.

  Eventually —hours later I suppose, for it had grown dark outside —I realized that I was hungry and, with no desire to cook the food that I had purchased for the two of us that afternoon, decided to visit our favorite stall, where we had often whiled away the cool evenings eating noodles and potato leaves and, occasionally, a few orders of dim sum. I knew, also, that the owner would ask about Julia’s absence and that this would afford me the opportunity to begin adjusting to the question and perfecting a response.

  I locked our apartment door, but as I turned toward the stairwell out of habit, I felt a heaviness in my legs and considered taking the elevator. If Julia had been there, she would have said, “We are not taking the elevator,” and I would have felt obligated to make a small stand in favor of it, but Julia was not there, which meant that the decision was mine: if I took the stairs, it would be as though Julia still held sway, but if I took the elevator, it would seem too deliberate, a reaction against her, particularly as I hated the elevator as much as she. As I stood debating in the poorly lit doorway of the stairwell, there came from farther up the stairs a heavy thudding sound. I imagined some large, hungry beast making its way down the steps toward me, for boundaries between inside and out did not always exist in Malaysia, and I shrank back, prepared to flee.

  A moment later, Shah appeared, lumbering onto the landing where I stood. My first, naive reaction was to wonder whom he had been visiting there in Nine-Story Building, and my next, to marvel that he, whose body literally reeked of lethargy, had chosen the stairs. He paused on the landing, catching his breath in wet, heaving gasps, and then turned, looking back over his shoulder like a hunted creature. His face was streaked with tears and snot and displayed neither the coyness nor the mocking obsequiousness that I had come to expect; even his jowls, those quivering, disdainful jowls, sagged more than usual. In that instant, of course, I understood what had brought Shah to Nine-Story Building, the realization crashing down on me with all the weight of Shah himself. From my hiding place, I looked on as he removed a large, dirty handkerchief from his pocket and cleaned his face. Then, keeping a distance between us, I followed him down the four flights of stairs and out onto the busy night street. Julia would have insisted on something more, but Julia was no longer there, and so I watched Shah shuffle off down the sidewalk before I turned in the opposite direction, joining the flow of people exhausted from being out in the world all day who were finally heading home to their beds.

  Talking Fowl with My Father

  I. TURKEY: A CIRCULAR ARGUMENT

  My father wants to know what I had for lunch today. I haven’t called in months, but this is what interests him.

  “I had a turkey sandwich,” I say.

  “Turkey,” he says with clear disgust. Last year, my father’s doctor gave him a list of safe foods, foods recommended for someone in my father’s condition. Turkey was high on the list. My father has never liked turkey, except at Thanksgiving and only then because it comes with all sorts of things that he does like—fatty skin swaddled in strips of bacon, mashed potatoes, gravy, rolls and butter, ham (yes, ham). My father has always managed to treat turkey as the annoying but harmless relative who shows up once a year on the holiday, but now, now turkey has become my father’s enemy.

  Of course, he has numerous reasons for not liking turkey, first among them being that he likes beef. And while this might not seem like a reason, it is what my father tells me whenever I ask him why he doesn’t like turkey.

  “Because I like beef,” he says.

  “It’s not an either/or question,” I say. “It’s like salt and pepper. You can like both of them. Now, if turkey and beef are sitting in a room alone and someone says that you can pick only one thing from the room, okay. Then, it’s true—you can have turkey or you can have beef. But this isn’t like that.” Geraldine and I just spent our tenth anniversary in Greece, two blissful weeks walking where Plato and Socrates once walked, both of us nearly in tears at the thought of it, and here I am, one month later, having this conversation.

  Reason number two: because it is on his list.

  Reason number three: because my baby brother, whom he considers henpecked, eats turkey in some guise or other for dinner every night, or so my father claims. The one time that Geraldine and I visited my brother and his wife at their overly childproofed house in a suburb of the Twin Cities, the four of us and their five children ate lunch together (turkey sloppy joes, for the record) while discussing the pros and cons of my brother’s retirement plan. As he spoke, he stared at Geraldine as though he couldn’t quite figure out who she was or how she had come to be sitting at his wood veneer table. His wife, whom I was meeting for the first and what would turn out to be the only time, said very little during the meal, but when I reached for the water pitcher, she noticed my raggedy fingernails and broke her silence to announce bitterly that my brother chewed not just his fingernails but his toenails as well, addressing her complaint specifically to me, as though this were some sort of Lindquist family conspiracy for which I was equally answerable.

  Geraldine and I flew back to San Francisco that evening, and when I called my father several weeks later to tell him that we had made it home safely, the first thing
he wanted to know was what my sister-in-law had served for lunch. “Sloppy joes,” I told him, and there was a short pause of disappointment before my father, who has never cooked anything in his life, replied triumphantly, “I’ll bet they were turkey. You know, all she gives him is turkey.”

  It is worth noting that the two parts of my father’s argument regarding the state of my brother’s diet and marriage are interchangeable, that both can (and do) function as Conclusion or Premise, depending on what we are arguing about—whether my father is trying to convince me that my brother does eat turkey every day or that he is, indeed, henpecked.

  Argument A. My brother is henpecked because he eats turkey every day.

  In this argument, my father is demonstrating that my brother is henpecked, and so the daily eating of turkey becomes his first (and only) premise, one that he nonetheless shores up amply: “Turkey breasts, burgers, chili, lasagna. Everything’s turkey with her.”

  Argument B. Because my brother is henpecked, he eats turkey every day.

  Occasionally, one of us (usually me but sometimes my sister) will be foolish enough to suggest that our brother does not eat turkey every single day. My father, in this case, cites as proof the fact that my brother is henpecked, his argument succinct and unshakable: “Of course he does. She doesn’t even let him wipe his own ass.”

  II. BROASTED CHICKEN: A STUDY IN SEMANTICS

  “The café in Fentonville has two broasted-chicken specials,” my father begins the conversation, not bothering with more standard pleasantries. “Mashed potatoes, a roll with butter, gravy, some kind of vegetable or other.” It is as though he is reading love poetry over the phone, his voice greedy and helpless.

  I try to recall what broasted chicken is, how it differs from roasted chicken, what the addition of the b actually means, but the word has been dropped into the conversation with such ease that I know I cannot ask him to explain. “Broasted chicken,” he would reply automatically, the words so familiar to him that they are their own definition. Then, after the slightest pause, he would say it again, “Broasted chicken,” asserting the words in a way that means both “You never visit” and “What kind of world do you live in?” It is true that I visit infrequently, once every three or four years, just as it is true that I live in a world devoid of broasted chicken, which is not to say that there are no broasted chickens in San Francisco. Of course there are. There would have to be.