The Bigness of the World

by Lori Ostlund

  “Why don’t we just take the car to the gas station?” she asked her mother. “Wouldn’t it be easier?”

  “Your grandfather does not want the car moved,” her mother explained.

  “Why?”

  “Because something might happen to it. We might get into an accident, and then he wouldn’t have the car if he needed it.”

  First, her mother rolls open the garage door, though Annabel knows that they will not be going anywhere. They climb in, and her mother pulls the seat forward so that she can reach the pedals. She is always careful to push it back again when they are finished, in deference to Annabel’s grandfather, who is very tall. Then, the two of them sit in the idling vehicle, staring straight ahead at the rakes that hang from the walls of the garage in neat, orderly rows.

  “Why do they need so many rakes?” she asked her mother once, after she had counted and discovered that there were twelve of them. Then, she repeated the question, but this time she said, “Why do they need a dozen rakes?” She was six and had just learned in school that twelve was also called a dozen, and she thought about this often, wondering why there were two words for the number twelve. It seemed unnecessary, unnecessary and odd, for if a number were going to be given two names, the number ten seemed more deserving.

  Her mother laughed at her question.

  “What’s funny?” Annabel asked.

  “Oh, it’s just that you don’t usually use dozen for things like rakes,” her mother said, but when she asked why, her mother replied, “Well, you usually just say a dozen for things like eggs, or donuts, or things like that.” When Annabel later asked her father why you couldn’t say a dozen rakes, she expected one of his usual explanations, which were generally long and left nothing out, but instead he replied angrily, “Of course you can. Who told you that? Your mother? Listen to me, Annabel. You can say a dozen rakes to me anytime you want. Okay?”

  As she and her mother sit in her grandfather’s car on the Saturday after her father’s return from the hospital, her mother says, “Don’t mention your father’s wrists to your grandparents.” She and her mother have not discussed her father’s wrists either, but Annabel does not see any reason to point this out to her mother. “Okay,” she says, though she never mentions anything to her grandparents and her mother knows this.

  Her mother looks at her watch and says, “Fifteen minutes. That should do it. Let’s go back in and make your grandparents a little something.”

  They always make the same thing, a hot drink mix that her grandparents call Russian tea. The mix consists primarily of Tang, which Annabel dislikes, and cloves. It is her job to carry the china cups filled with the brownish orange liquid out to her grandparents, both of whom bring the hot tea immediately up to their mouths and hold it there, as though the cups were receptacles, or conductors, for their words. It is only then—as they sit with their mouths hidden and their eyes partially concealed by the steam fogging their glasses—that they turn their attention to more interesting topics, namely her father.

  “How is he?” one of them generally asks her mother at this point, as though they believe that a pronoun in place of his name will keep Annabel from knowing that it is her father to whom they are referring.

  “He’s fine,” her mother always replies sharply, inclining her head toward Annabel, who pretends not to be listening, hoping, futilely, that they might be persuaded to say more. Instead, they all sip their Russian tea and gaze at the photograph of her father that hangs on the wall near the television, a picture in which her father, wearing a green bolo tie, looks cheerful and handsome and not a bit like the twitchy, shirtless man they have come to know.

  Today, however, there is no mention of her father, and Annabel wonders whether they have forgotten to ask or whether this omission is something intentional, something that they planned beforehand. She actually hopes that it is the latter because the idea that her father has simply been forgotten, particularly in the midst of such tedium, is too much for her to bear. She turns toward her father’s photograph, but it is gone, which means that the entire time that she and her mother have been sitting here, listening to her grandparents talk about the barber and his mowing, it was already gone—gone, and she had not even noticed.

  Most Saturday nights after Annabel and her mother return from her grandparents’ house, she and her father follow the same routine: her father helps her get ready for bed, and once she is settled beneath her Raggedy Ann quilt, he asks her to describe the visit to his parents. He listens quietly to her report, and when she finishes, he says, “Just remember, Annabel, that these are the people who made your father sleep on the cot.”

  “Yes,” she always replies. “I remember.”

  “Good girl,” he says as though they are finished with the matter, but then he tells her the story of the cot again anyway because he likes to remind himself of it, particularly as she is snuggled against him in her very own comfortable bed in her very own room.

  “Your grandparents,” he always begins, “had produced seven children by the time I made my appearance. Imagine, Annabel, four boys, three girls, and the two of them living in a tiny, three-bedroom house.” During the introduction, his tone is always noncommittal, as though the story might just unfold in a way that allows for sympathy toward these nine people, his family, crammed together like peas even before his arrival.

  “Well,” he continues, “I was put in your grandparents’ room to sleep, in a crib wobbly from overuse.” And there it is, the hardening in his voice at the words “wobbly from overuse.”

  At the age of two, her father had gone from sleeping in this crib to sleeping in the hallway outside his parents’ bedroom, on a cot that was folded up and rolled behind the door of his sisters’ bedroom each morning. The hallway, he told her so that she could picture it because her grandparents had long ago left that house, was like the backbone of a capital E, and the three bedrooms, which jutted out to the left, were its arms.

  “It’s not even that I minded the cot,” he always told Annabel at this point, after he had impressed upon her the image of this small boy, him, isolated from every other member of his family. “It was comfortable enough.” No, what he had minded, he said, was the fact that when his parents unfolded the cot and set it up for him each night, they always placed it as far to the right as possible so that it stood just at the edge of the staircase that connected the upstairs sleeping area with the main floor—despite the fact that there was no railing separating the upstairs, and thus him, from the empty space of the stairwell.

  Sometimes, he told her, his arm hung down off the cot in his sleep so that his hand brushed his father’s head as his father climbed the stairs for bed. “I would wake to that feeling, the brush of my father’s hair against my fingertips, and for a moment, I had no idea where I was. You see, already I thought of sleep as a period of isolation, and that was so ingrained in me, Annabel, that even half-awake, I found the feel of another person disorienting.” Then, he would reach out to stroke her head or caress her earlobe before he went on.

  “It was like sleeping on the edge of a cliff. On any given night, I could have rolled right instead of left, and that would have been it. I would have gone right over the edge.” This is where her father’s story always ended, with the understanding that had he been a different sort of boy—less vigilant, less aware—he would have simply rolled over the edge and been gone.

  This Saturday, when she and her mother return from her grandparents’ house, her father is not there. She and her mother eat dinner together quietly, and when her mother puts her to bed because her father is not there to do it, her mother perches awkwardly on the edge of the bed and says, “I told him to leave, Annabel. It was just getting to be too much. I hope that someday you will understand this, maybe when you’re older.” Her mother goes out of the room quickly, forgetting to leave the hallway light on as her father always does because he understands about the dark.

  The next day, Sunday, the telephone rings again an
d again, and when the answering machine picks up because her mother has told her that she is not to answer it, there is her father, singing a song or telling them about something unimportant—a snapped shoelace, the way his orange juice tasted that morning because he forgot and brushed his teeth before he drank it—as though he is right there in the room with them. By evening, however, he has begun pleading with her mother. “Think about Annabel,” he says. “Have you asked her what she wants?” Before they go to bed, her mother erases the entire tape, and then she unplugs the answering machine.

  When Annabel opens the door to the apartment on Monday, letting herself in with the key that she carries around her neck, the telephone is ringing, and she cannot help but feel for a moment that the apartment does not belong to her because the ringing was there before her. She knows that she should not answer it because her mother has instructed her not to, but after several rings, she picks it up, justifying this course of action by telling herself that it could be her mother calling to make sure that she has arrived home safely. However, once she has already committed herself by lifting the receiver, she realizes that if it is her mother calling, she is only doing so to test Annabel.

  “How’s my girl?” says her father, whispering as he used to do when she was young and having bad dreams in the middle of the night.

  “Hi,” she says in response, surveying the apartment nervously because she cannot fully shake the feeling that her mother is there somewhere, sitting off to the side, listening.

  “Did you get my messages yesterday?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “I miss you.”

  “I miss you,” she answers, whispering now also.

  “Listen,” he says then. “I need your help. I need you to write down some things. You know, things that your mother says about me, things that we could use if we had to.” She doesn’t answer, and then he says, “Annabel, she doesn’t want me to see you or even talk to you. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not as though this is the first time. She acts like this is the first time, but it’s not, so why now, Annabel? Do you understand? Because I don’t. I surely don’t.” There is a very long silence.

  “The day you were born,” he declares suddenly, no longer whispering. “That was the first time. I bet you didn’t know that, did you? It was the day you were born. Your mother made me promise that I would never tell you that, but what’s the purpose of these secrets? I mean really, Annabel, what is the purpose?” He is speaking slowly now, forming these last four words with great care.

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “It was because I loved you so much, even before you were born, and I could feel how much you loved me. That’s why I did it. Do you know that, Annabel?” He pauses, as though waiting for her to reply. “At night, when your mother was asleep with you between us, I would put my hand on her stomach, on you, and I could feel you telling me that, Annabel. I could feel you saying that you loved me. That already you loved me more than anyone had ever loved me or ever would.”

  She thinks that her father might be crying, but she isn’t sure, and for a while, neither of them says anything. “So you see,” he says finally, his words tapering off as though he is falling asleep. “It doesn’t make sense.” Annabel waits, but her father doesn’t speak again, and after several minutes, she hangs the telephone up, gently, not wanting to wake him.

  When her mother gets home, she seems distracted, but she goes through the usual set of questions: Did you have a snack? Did you do your homework? What sounds good for dinner? Annabel answers these no, sort of, and I don’t know, and when her mother adds a new one, “Did your father call?” Annabel pauses for just a moment, and then, very calmly, says, “No.” Her mother looks so relieved that Annabel understands, with sudden clarity, that lying is not always a bad thing, not when it so obviously means that she can help them both; later, she even hears her mother humming as she makes fried ham, which is Annabel’s favorite.

  The next day when Annabel arrives home from school, the phone is ringing again, but she knows what she needs to do, and she sits on the sofa listening to it, her hands tucked beneath her thighs. Eventually, she gets up and sets the table, two places instead of three, so that everything will seem right when her mother gets home. When the ringing finally stops nearly two hours later, she feels its absence like a sharp, sudden pain, but she understands now how it is: that this pain, this pain is how much she loves him.

  Nobody Walks to the Mennonites

  THE TWO AMERICAN WOMEN READ IN THEIR GUIDEBOOK that there were Mennonites not far from town, so on the second morning they set out to find them. The women were staying perhaps a quarter of a mile outside of town in a bungalow, a round structure with cinder block walls, one of several grouped together along a footpath behind the main office. At some point, perhaps when bungalows were in greater demand, a flimsy wall had been erected down the middle of each, slicing it into two separate, though by no means soundproof, units. Now, however, the entire place stood empty, the grass along the footpath left uncut so that mosquitoes swarmed above it, attacking the women’s bare legs as they walked to and from their bungalow.

  When they first entered the office from the road and inquired whether there were vacancies, the man behind the counter nodded his head, looking almost ashamed, and said, “Sure, we got rooms. Just go ahead and take your pick.” He was an older man, quite black with grizzled hair, and he wore only a pair of shorts and a necklace from which hung some sort of animal’s tooth. Because they did not want him to feel more defeated than he already seemed, they did not comment on the lack of other guests, though they were, in fact, elated.

  The guidebook had warned that the town itself could get noisy at night—too many bars—and since neither of them had much tolerance for unabashed revelry, the sort that people tend to engage in while vacationing in someone else’s country, they had heeded the book’s suggestion to stay just outside the limits of the town proper. They had to walk into town to eat, of course, but it was nice, if not a bit disorienting, coming home in the dark like that. They simply followed the lane that led out of town, sliding their feet along the gravel rather than lifting them up and taking actual steps, which would have required far more trust than the two women felt able to invest at that point, either in this country or in themselves. Still, they liked the walk, particularly the final stretch with the field on the left that contained a dozen cows whose silent, sturdy presence comforted them.

  In all regards, the women (Sarah and Sara, who, because they were both visual people, did not think of themselves as having the same name) found this town vastly superior to Belize City, from which they had just escaped, but only after spending one night there in a hotel above a bar where their room had throbbed with a steady bass throughout most of the night. In the room next to them was a very young Japanese couple who had spent the last three years trying to see the world, “the whole world,” the young man had informed them, so that they could return to Japan and begin working and not feel as though they had missed something. They had gone through Asia first, and then into Africa and Europe, and now they were working their way up from South America. But Belize City, they told the two American women in careful English, was the very worst place they had ever been, “so dirty and” (this after pausing to weigh all of the English words at their disposal) “evil,” and Sara and Sarah, who had just spent the last four hours walking around Belize City, agreed though they kept their opinion to themselves, as was their tendency when talking to fellow tourists.

  Their plan had been to take a taxi from the Belize City airport to a pleasant bed-and-breakfast that their guidebook highly recommended (it was run by an American), but instead the taxi driver had taken them straight into the dirty, crowded heart of the city and dumped them in front of the hotel. “Cheap,” he told them. “Cheap and very near.” He did not say very near what, but it appeared to be very near every trash heap and vice the city had to offer. Still, they were tired of sitting, so they got out of the taxi, p
aid the driver, and checked into the hotel, where there was not actually a room ready for them. Instead, they had nervously entrusted their suitcases to the proprietor, who assured them that he would move the bags himself into the first available room.

  Then, though the guidebook had recommended not doing so, they walked down along the empty pier, stopping eventually for drinks at a small café attached to the side of a house. The sign out front claimed that the café was open, but when they followed the arrow around the house to the side door marked “Café,” they found themselves in an empty, poorly lit room with several tables and a dartboard. They sat down anyway because neither woman was ready to face the street again, where they felt conspicuous and vulnerable to all of the dangers that the guidebook had warned of: drive-by shootings, gangs, drugs, purse snatchers, con artists, and ass grabbers, though they were not sure whether the book had actually mentioned the last of these or whether they were simply allowing their imaginations to get the better of them. The room was cloyingly hot and musty, and at one point Sara, who had grown up in Minnesota and was fond of explaining to people that the state actually contained almost one hundred thousand bodies of water, commented that the room reminded her of a lake cabin.

  “It’s the smell,” Sarah replied, “the smell and the paneling.”

  “No,” Sara said firmly. “That’s not it. There’s just something about it, something I can’t quite put my finger on, but it’s not that obvious.”

  “That’s exactly what it is,” Sarah told her. “You just think that because I’m from Iowa, I don’t know anything about lake cabins.” She spoke almost sneeringly, and Sara looked startled, for the two of them rarely argued. They were quiet then, and after several more minutes, a door near the back of the room creaked open, and they sensed that they were being watched.