The Bigness of the World

by Lori Ostlund

  Drivers are the control freaks, the ones who cannot let anything slide, though the nickname was meant as a joke, of course, a play on the fact that I literally never let anyone else drive. I’ve tried, but I get panicky the minute anyone else is behind the wheel. It’s the speed, I suspect, for I feel the same way when the plane surges forward on takeoff, moving faster and faster down the runway with no possibility of turning back: my heart accelerates, and I am struck by an overwhelming desire to scream out, “Stop the plane!” I can imagine few things more mortifying, and the fear of embarrassing myself in this way somehow only exacerbates my panic. Still, I have found that I can calm myself in the middle of these attacks by focusing on something small and unchanging, a meaningless line of text from the airline catalog or the knuckles of my hands.

  “Mr. Matthers is up to his old tricks,” I repeated, for though Felicity had not extended any of her conversation invitations, neither was she humming or resting her forehead against the window.

  “What has he done now? Taken to overseeing the labs with his legs bowed?” she replied, in a voice suggesting that she really did not care to know. Still, she had asked, and that was enough of an opening, particularly if I ignored the latter half of her question.

  “Well,” I said, perhaps too eagerly. “Remember how you commented just last week that Mrs. Chavez is really starting to show?” Mrs. Chavez, who, like Felicity, is a math teacher, announced just after the Christmas holiday that she was pregnant.

  “I do.”

  “Well, Mr. Matthers has taken to asking her, every time he sees her in fact, whether she has ever experienced a miscarriage. On Thursday, four or five of us were in the lounge, and we all heard him. We knew about it already, of course, because Mrs. Chavez had mentioned it to several of us.” This made it sound as though I was one of the people that Mrs. Chavez confided in, though that was not the case. “Then, Ms. Gutierrez scolded him right there in front of everyone. She told him that it wasn’t proper to ask any woman, but especially a pregnant one, whether she’d ever had a miscarriage.”

  “And has he stopped?” Felicity asked, showing more interest than I expected.

  “Well, I haven’t heard of anything else, but I left right at the bell on Friday. I had the show, you know.”

  The show, because I realize that I haven’t explained about the shows yet, was a cat show in Los Angeles, for which I left immediately after school on Friday, returning Sunday afternoon in time to grade a set of mediocre essays before picking Felicity up from the airport. Felicity and I are both highly skilled cat judges and, as such, find our services requested at cat shows all over the world. When we were hired at the school, the principal, who was a cat lover as well (though of the mixed-breed, pound-affiliated variety), was quite accommodating about our obligations. In turn, as a gesture of goodwill, we put forth that, except in cases of emergency, we would not accept judging duties that resulted in our being absent from work at the same time. Thus, Felicity agreed to do the Hong Kong show while I stayed behind, holding up our end of the bargain, teaching while she was off, as it turned out, having her head shaved.

  By this time, we were pulling into the school parking lot, so Felicity was preoccupied, taking it all in after a week away, her head pivoting in tight, frenetic movements, like a sparrow’s, which might have been the way she always moved her head, though, in the past, her hair was there to soften things. We got out of the car, walked across the parking lot and through the front doors, our paths diverging immediately—mathematics left, English right.

  And so, I did not tell her about the other incident, the one that had nothing to do with Mr. Matthers at all. It happened on Friday, third period, with the tenth graders, of whom I am rather fond. I had started them on Salinger, despite the fact that another English teacher, whose name I shall not disclose, had suggested that Salinger, with all his “New Yorkiness,” had little to “say” to a group of students who had grown up here in New Mexico.

  “I believe that Salinger has something to say to all tenth graders,” I had replied, perhaps overearnestly. “I myself was once a tenth grader growing up in Minnesota, and I found that he had plenty to say.” I do not buy into this idea that one learns more from literature that is familiar; in fact, it seems only logical that one would learn most from subject matter that one has not already mastered through the daily grind of one’s existence, which is what I shall tell her the next time she bothers me about Salinger.

  I arrived in the classroom just as the bell was ringing, for I had paused briefly outside Mr. Matthers’s room on my way back from the teachers’ lounge, which is where I generally spend second period, my free hour. When I entered the classroom, the students were unusually still, already in their seats and seemingly engrossed in their Salingers. I felt a momentary thrill at being proven correct, but I had not turned to my right as I entered, so I did not yet know what was there, written in large letters on the blackboard.

  “Good morning, class,” said I, then waited while they responded in kind, for one of the things that we had been working on was the forgotten art of basic, cross-generational politeness. They always had plenty to say to one another, but on the first day of class, they had stared blankly at me when I greeted them, and so I had related the story of my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Kjelmer, who required us to line up at the end of each day and pass by her on our way out of the room, pausing to shake her hand and thank her for some specific contribution that she had made to our educations that day. I am fairly sure that we did not find this odd or extreme, but my students had stared at me in horror as I recounted the tale, a few of them even gasping, as though each day had ended with the beheading of a student rather than this basic gesture of appreciation.

  Having acknowledged their return greeting with an inclination of my head, I turned around toward the board, and there, in an awkward teenage scrawl, was their summary of my relationship with Felicity:

  MISS LUNDSTROM & MISS SHAPIRO ARE LEZZIE LOVERS!!

  My immediate reaction, as you might expect, was akin to my feelings upon takeoff—that is, I felt remarkably close to crying out, “Stop the plane!” Instead, I did what a speech teacher long ago had advised, which was always to act in opposition to what one’s nerves dictated. Thus, instead of mumbling and stammering my way through a demand to know whose work this was on the board, I turned back toward the class and asked, in a very precise, audible tone, whether anyone could recall my position on the ampersand.

  There they sat with their mouths drifting open like a choir fading out after a sustained high note, and so I took several steps backward toward the board and pointed, with a surprisingly steady finger, at the offending ampersand. “This symbol, as you may recall, is called the ampersand. Like all symbols used to replace perfectly good words, it is, in my opinion, a symbol primarily of laziness and should be tolerated only on signs or in computer programming.” With the side of my hand, I deftly swiped at the ampersand, then picked up a piece of chalk, and neatly wrote the word and in its place.

  “Well,” I said, turning again to the class. “Who would like to go next?”

  They were familiar with this exercise, of course, for each time I handed back a set of essays, I selected five particularly poor sentences from among them, which I copied onto the blackboard. Then we worked our way through them, one at a time, making corrections and revisions. Nonetheless, I was surprised when Keith, a short boy with a purple smattering of acne, raised his hand.

  “Keith,” I said.

  “The exclamation points?” he asked.

  “What about them?” I prodded.

  “Do you really need two of them?” The students understood how I felt about the exclamation point, the impact of which I illustrated early on by passing around a print of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

  “Good,” I said. “Though I think that begs the question, ‘Do we really need even one?’” I held the chalk out and Keith came dutifully to the front of the room, erased the exclamation marks, and inserted a s
imple period in their place.

  “Well, I suppose that naturally brings us to the excessiveness of all-uppercase lettering, does it not?” I said, the students nodding as I rewrote the statement in lowercase, retaining the essential capital letters, of course.

  We turned our attention to word choice then, with Clara S., as she always signed her name, suggesting that lezzie seemed “informal—or something.”

  “Hmm,” I replied. “Yes, I suppose that a case could be made for informal. Does anyone else have any thoughts on the word lezzie?”

  “It’s spelled wrong?” suggested Beth, an exceedingly poor speller who walked with a strange, gliding motion, as though she were skiing.

  “I know,” cried Manuel, who was the sort to answer only those questions that the other students had already, and unsuccessfully, attempted. “It’s prejudicial.” He sat back with his long arms crossed triumphantly, a gesture that did nothing to endear him to the other students.

  “What would you suggest?” I asked.

  “Lesbian?” Manuel replied after a careful pause, having the good grace to uncross his arms as he spoke. Still, the other students became quiet, unsure perhaps where lesbian stood on the “prejudicial” scale, but I was saved the need to make a reassuring response by Tina, a shy girl, partial to plaid, who asked, “Isn’t that redundant? I mean, you know they’re lesbians because they’re both women and they’re lovers.” Had I been in a different frame of mind, I might have turned the discussion to her seemingly unconscious reference to me and Felicity in the third person, though hadn’t I been urging the students all year to please, oh please, just distance themselves a bit from the text?

  “Nice work, Tina,” I said, and she blushed deeply, in keeping with the type of personality that is attentive to redundancy.

  The critique session took nearly half an hour, at the end of which the students slumped in their seats, looking dazed and exhausted. On the board was our final revision: Ms. Lundstrom and Ms. Shapiro are lovers. Of course, we had changed “Miss” to “Ms.” in both cases, for, as I pointed out to them, Ms. Shapiro and I were not schoolgirls, nor was this the 1950s.

  Felicity and I were introduced six years ago by a mutual friend whom I shall call Sally. Sally and I had, once upon a time, been English majors together, but she had gone on to accept a position, temporary she assured me at the time, with a company that replaced windshield glass. The company, however, was not accustomed to having employees who could put an estimate into proper letter format or utilize the semicolon, and soon she had been promoted to regional manager. There was a long period after college during which Sally and I were not in contact, but when I moved to the Twin Cities, I called her and we met for lunch. She looked nearly the same, although puffier and with a penchant for purple, and when she asked what I had been doing for the last fifteen years, I blurted out this parallel list of accomplishments: I had earned a Master’s degree, done some teaching, and established that I was a lesbian.

  Sally was new to the idea of knowing lesbians and admitted to being somewhat nervous, though she seemed unable to articulate the source of her nervousness. I have found that, when presented with this revelation, many people take a careful step back, keeping their mouths shut for fear of saying something wrong, but I have always found myself more charmed by those of Sally’s nature, those who barrel right in, unaware that a list of right-and-wrong-things-to-say even exists. Thus, while Sally confessed to a certain nervousness, it was certainly, and refreshingly I might add, nothing that compelled her to err on the side of caution. She telephoned not long after our lunch meeting to announce that she had just met another lesbian, suggesting, with much enthusiasm, that I might wish to meet this new acquaintance, a woman named Felicity whose windshield had been shot out by a neighbor who resented people parking on the street in front of his house.

  “And why might I want to meet somebody with such a ridiculous name?” I asked.

  Sally paused, for I don’t think that it had occurred to her that her suggestion might be met with anything but equal, possibly greater, zeal. “You’re of the same ilk,” she said at last.

  Assuming that by “ilk” she meant a shared orientation, I replied that her “lowest common denominator” approach to matchmaking was a bit insulting.

  “But you’re both lesbians,” she insisted indignantly.

  “That,” I explained, trying to be gentler, “is the ‘lowest common denominator’ to which I refer. It is a necessary factor, true, but it hardly qualifies as, well, ilkiness.” In her defense, she did not know the special attachment I had to the word ilk.

  Sally, however, was of a persistent nature, and so, several weeks later, when she and I again met for lunch, Felicity was there as well, though I learned afterwards that she had been no more apprised of this meeting than I. At the time, I was putting the finishing touches on my dissertation, which dealt with the practicalities of teaching grammar and writing to older-than-average students. I had discovered, for example, that in a class made up largely of women in their fifties, coordinate and subordinate clauses made sudden sense for them when likened to marriages, the former a marriage in which the two parties were equals, the latter a marriage in which one party was dependent on the other for meaning. In my dissertation, I had neglected to mention, as a corollary to this discovery, that many of the women steadfastly purged their writing of all subordinate clauses following this lesson, suddenly seeing something shameful in each if and because.

  I arrived for lunch that day bearing a list of problematic sentences from my dissertation, hoping to review them with Sally in order to ensure that my meaning, as I intended it, was patently clear, even to the less engaged reader. I saw no reason to alter my plans simply because Felicity was present. In turn, she felt that it was perfectly acceptable to interrupt me and my troubling sentences almost immediately with the following observation: “You have no control over what the reader thinks; you do realize that I would hope. It doesn’t matter what you intended.”

  I’d had my fill of critical theory by that time, so I certainly did not need to be eating lunch with some amateur reader-response critic, but when I suggested, coyly, that perhaps she had been reading too much Stanley Fish, she stared back at me blankly. “I don’t believe that I am familiar with Mr. Fish’s work,” she replied, overly politely I felt. “I’m simply making a point about the way that people communicate. This conversation is a perfect example,” she added, pointing her fork at me severely and, I might add, not unbecomingly. “I’m saying one thing, but you think I’m talking about something else entirely, about some Fish fellow, whom I’ve never even heard of.”

  I will admit that her use of “whom” left me undone, even with that preposition dangling unattractively at the end, but then I’m afraid that I’ve always been attracted to such things, the ability to differentiate between subject and object forms, a refusal to use if when the situation requires whether.

  “This,” she was saying, “is what makes mathematics so appealing. The number one is simply that—one. Everyone who sees it thinks the same thing.” She looked smugly at me across the table.

  “Yes,” I replied. “But numbers are just as much symbols as words are.” I had nowhere to go from there, but I insisted on babbling on. “This,” I said, pounding the table, “is a table, the actual, tangible thing, not to be confused with the word. The same can be said for your number one, I am afraid.” I sketched out the number in the air between us.

  Of course I was ashamed of myself, using basic Plato to impress this woman, though, to her credit, she did not look impressed. There was a moment of stiff silence, which compelled me to continue. “To quote one of my students, ‘Why is a sheep a sheep and not a rock,’” I said lamely, a bit of irrelevant nonsense to end the discussion, but to my great pleasure, she laughed. Sally, in case you were wondering, was still present, sitting there eating her Cobb salad and, I was to find out later, listening to us argue and regretting the fact that she had ever thought us ilkstresses (m
y word, of course, not the windshield-fixing Sally’s).

  Over the next few days, Felicity and I did not discuss her baldness or the incident with the chalkboard or even the ongoing escapades of Mr. Matthers, who had gone on to post several signs in the teachers’ lounge announcing that he was interested in acquiring used Tupperware, the word used underlined thrice. She made a point of emphasizing her busyness and her jetlag, and before we knew it, it was Friday and I was off again, this time to a cat show in Scottsdale, and when I returned on Sunday evening, via a taxi as we had planned, Felicity was gone. I’m sure that to the average, discerning reader, this comes as no surprise, and so I am embarrassed to admit that I never saw it coming.

  She left a short letter, of course, in which she explained that she had moved into a studio apartment downtown and purchased a used car, drawing entirely on her “own funds,” she was careful to note. The car, she wrote, had belonged to one of the teachers at the school, but she did not refer to this teacher by name, an omission that struck me as a total denial of the degree to which our lives were intertwined. She acknowledged this interconnectedness only at the very end when she wrote that it was her desire that we not “advertise” the change in our relationship at work, that she did realize there would be speculation and gossip, particularly after she filed her new address with the school secretary, but that she hoped we could “absent ourselves from such conversations and treat one another with the politeness and friendly rivalry accorded colleagues.”

  I was most bothered by the reference to her “own funds,” for I was not aware of any funds other than the meager sum of money that resided in our joint checking account, though the mystery of these funds resolved itself soon enough. I made a quick sweep of the house, noting that she had taken all of her books, an easily accomplished task for we had never merged our collections, but left those that we had acquired together. Appliances and kitchen items also remained, though when I counted the cutlery and dinnerware, both of which we had purchased in sets of twelve, I found that each set now consisted of eleven pieces, a consolation, for had there been two of each missing, it would have suggested a situation that I lacked the emotional wherewithal to face.