The Bigness of the World

by Lori Ostlund

  One of my suitcases was gone, but I forgave her this, for I had taken her suitcase with me to Scottsdale, the suitcase that we always fought over because it was light and maneuverable and orange—easy to spot on the luggage carousel. I fetched it from where I had parked it just inside the door and, not one to let sorrow sideline the moment’s practical requirements, began to unpack—placing clothes in the hamper, hanging my toothbrush in its usual slot, though both were now available, and transferring the set of essays that I had graded on the plane into my briefcase.

  Inside the suitcase’s small, inner compartment, which overzealousness required that I check even though I had not used the compartment, I discovered a piece of paper folded carelessly in half. It bore a pinhole near the top, and several Chinese characters marched down one side, so I knew immediately that it had been left behind after Felicity’s less-methodical style of unpacking, carried out exactly one week earlier upon her return from Hong Kong. The rest of the text, which was in English, read thusly:

  NOTICE

  Kindly to all hotel guests.

  A Hong Kong film company has need of the following:

  1. Several women (Caucasian) to serve as extras. Roles require British Victorian maidens, but as there is no speaking requirement, Americans and Australians are acceptable. Costumes provided. No stipend, but scene involves eating. Real food provided.

  2. Caucasian woman, any age, for horror film. No speaking, but must be willing to shave head on camera. Upon completion of baldness, a fee of $2500 (U.S.) will be paid in cash.

  Interested parties should please inquire from Mr. Simon Woo, front desk, for contact particulars. Thank you.

  I read the notice twice, the English teacher in me making mental corrections, before tucking it away inside my desk, in the notebook containing this account, and though I tried to sleep then, I could not. Finally, I rose, retrieved this notebook, and proceeded to read back over my text thus far, but gone were my student days when everything seemed clearer in the middle of the night. I did realize, in looking back over what I had written, that I had said nothing of Felicity’s hair, beyond noting its absence. For the record, it was blond, though not purely so, but I dislike expressions such as dirty blond and dishwater blond. Perhaps what I most admired about her hair, purely from an aesthetic point of view, were the two patches of white hair that grew in little tufts on either side of her head, directly at her temples. A beautician told her once that these white patches were caused by the use of forceps during childbirth, which I liked to think was the case, suggesting as it did that her stubbornness-bordering-on-truculence had been there all along, making its debut in her unwillingness to cooperate with her own birth, and while the beautician had seemed confident of her theory, she had also maintained with equal assurance that she herself had been born with the ability to understand both German and Chinese, so you can understand my reluctance to put full faith in her explanation.

  When I parked in the school lot the next morning, I looked around at the other cars, wondering which was the used car that Felicity had purchased with her own funds, the source of which I had identified but did not wish to dwell upon. She and I did not cross paths that morning, which was not surprising, for, as I have already indicated, math and English occupied different sides of the school. I made it through my first class and chose to spend my free period in my classroom rather than in the teachers’ lounge, so I was there, sitting at my desk, when my tenth graders arrived, Salingers in hand. It was impossible, of course, that they knew anything of our breakup, but I could not shake the feeling that they sensed something, for they struck me as oddly muted that morning, restrained, like caricatures of what they believed perfect students to be.

  I handed back their essays, the ones that I had graded on the airplane in a state of oblivion as my bald girlfriend was transporting her few possessions, via her new used car, to her studio downtown, but when I turned toward the blackboard to copy out the five worst sentences, something struck me, perhaps the memory of the last sentence that we had revised, pushing and prodding it into some sort of straightforward, grammatically sound ideal: Ms. Lundstrom and Ms. Shapiro are lovers. In any case, as I stood there at the board, chalk in hand, set to record their most recent transgressions, I began to sob. I did so quietly, of course, but eventually they understood that something was amiss, and I felt them become perfectly still behind me. For several minutes, I stared at a particular spot on the blackboard, at what appeared to be the remains of a letter b, composing myself, and then I turned to face my tenth graders, wholly unprepared for the looks of sheer terror and helplessness that sat upon their faces. We stayed as we were, facing one another, I in front of the blackboard and they, sitting erectly in their seats, eyes focused uniformly downward, with the exception of Tina, my timid, plaid-wearing redundancy expert, who sat in the back row regarding me closely and nodding.

  “Class,” I said at last, “please forgive me. I am not in the habit of indulging in such outbursts.” At hearing me sound reasonably like myself, they tilted their faces upward again, relief settling collectively upon them; I recalled, in that instant, the vulnerability of youth. I would like to say that this put me fully in charge of my emotions and that the remainder of the class passed without incident, but that was not the case. Rather, as the tears began to flow once more down my face, I blurted out—in an attempt to explain myself and perhaps offer reassurance—these words: “Ms. Shapiro is bald.”

  And Down We Went

  I. THE LAST TIME

  I have been defecated on three times in my life, literally crapped on that is, for I am not the sort to go around characterizing any victimization I might feel in such vulgar metaphorical terms. In each case, the offending party was a bird, the incidents occurring on three different continents over the course of thirty-five years, the third and most recent incident occurring on a quiet street in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, as Georgia and I stood beneath the eaves of an antique textile shop waiting for it to open. We had first visited the shop two days earlier and were not particularly looking forward to seeing the owner again, for, like a certain type of gay man everywhere, even Malaysia it turned out, he could not take lesbians seriously and responded to our questions regarding songket and ikat with a barely concealed smirk. At one point, he wrapped a shawl around my shoulders and stepped back, declaring, “Ideal for the streets of Manhattan,” though I was not from New York and had said nothing to suggest otherwise. “And more reasonably priced than other pieces in the collection,” he added, tucking his hands behind his back as if to suggest that he were at my service.

  The shop was late in opening that morning, though lateness was something we had come to expect in the year that we had been teaching in Malaysia. There was even an expression that Malaysians used — rubber time — to sum up their general feelings about time, which they saw as something that could be stretched and pulled, even snapped, as the occasion required. I was familiar with lateness from my years in New Mexico, but I could not adjust to the rubber analogy, perhaps because I had been living so long in the desert, a place where rubber turned quickly brittle, bags of unused rubber bands crumbling in my desk drawer. Thus, when my Malaysian students, tethered to their invisible rubber bands of time, arrived late for class day after day, my patience grew brittle. “Tardiness sends a nonverbal message,” I reasoned with them, employing the language of Business Communications, which is what I had been hired to teach them after all, but they stared back at me with looks that implied that Business Communications was a subject best left to theory.

  Eventually, I began locking them out, but they simply gathered in the hallway, waiting patiently for me to relent. I always did, for I knew that they were sorry, not sorry that they had been late but sorry that their lateness upset me, which were two different things. But as I unlocked the door one morning, prepared to listen to the usual excuses about the rain and late buses and uncooperative scooters, I saw myself as they must: a middle-aged woman who lectured them day after day regar
ding a notion whose value she seemed to measure in inverse proportion to the blatant disregard attached to it by others, who pounded the doorjamb, her neck growing blotchy, as they looked on quietly, their shuffling feet the only suggestion of protest. When, I wondered, had this woman begun to view tardiness as a symbol of moral decay, a personal attack being perpetrated against her daily? And when had I become her?

  I spent the first eighteen years of my life in rural Minnesota, attending school with farm children who often arrived late for some reason or other — because milking had taken longer than usual or a calf had become sick. There were times, too, at the beginning and end of the year, when they missed entire days, a state of affairs toward which most teachers in our school were tolerant. The exception was third grade: that year, as the farm children slouched in exhausted and disoriented, excuse notes in hand, Mrs. Carlstrom, our teacher, stopped whatever we were doing to assess each note, and then, picking up her chalk once again, addressed the recently arrived child, saying, “Mr. Otto, how nice that you could fit us into your busy schedule,” after which she chuckled dryly. We were afraid of Mrs. Carlstrom for a variety of reasons: because she talked like this, using our surnames and speaking as though we were adults who made our own decisions about time and attendance and our educations in general and because, unlike our other teachers, she did not alter her tone or diction level when she addressed us, not even her notion of humor, which was tied closely to the first two and which none of us understood.

  My parents owned the only eating establishment in town, The Trout Café, and were thus acquainted with Mrs. Carlstrom, who occasionally came in after school and drank several cups of coffee while grading our homework, a process that often involved little more than drawing an angry red line diagonally across a page, which meant that the work was, as she put it, unacceptable. My father told me once that she had a “caustic wit,” which, he said, was something that most people did not appreciate. I did not know this word caustic and, until I bothered to look it up, mistakenly assumed it had something to do with cause, though what I thought it caused, I cannot say — shame and uneasiness, I suppose, judging from my classmates’ reactions. When I finally did check its meaning, I found that caustic wit had actually to do with bitterness and that bitterness (this also from the dictionary, for I was too young to have learned these things in any other way) had much to do with disappointment.

  During that year in Malaysia, I realized that I had had enough of teaching, which I had been doing for fifteen years with a fair amount of success and, it must be said, an increasing sense of bitterness. We both felt this way, I think, Georgia to the lesser degree and I to the much greater, though we spoke of it only in small, petty complaints. The day that my classroom epiphany occurred was my forty-fourth birthday, no milestone event but significant nonetheless, for that was Mrs. Carlstrom’s age when I was her pupil. We had been in Malaysia for six months by then, but I had told no one at the college that it was my birthday, certainly not my students, who would have stared at me awkwardly, wondering what they were to do with the information. However, when we awoke that morning, Georgia made no mention of it either, though we had celebrated the occasion together fourteen times. Throughout the day, when we met in the hallway at school or sat together in the cramped teachers’ room, I looked for signs that she was pretending, perhaps to heighten the pleasure of a planned surprise, but as the day wore on, surpriseless, I knew that she truly had forgotten, and I consoled myself by blaming the tropics, which did not provide the usual seasonal markers, turning leaves and shortening days, that keep us attuned to weeks and months and the passing of time.

  Late that afternoon, as we sat together grading papers at our only table, Georgia threw down her pen with a startled look and blurted out, “Happy Birthday.”

  “Thank you,” I answered cordially.

  She looked around wildly for a moment, as though she had misplaced something of importance. “I thought that we might go out for noodles,” she said at last, and though this was something we did at least twice a week, I replied, “That sounds nice.”

  That night after we had eaten our noodles and raised our Tiger beers in a toast, after we were back home and in bed, lying far apart in the darkness (presumably because of the heat) and speaking of trivial matters, I found myself overcome with desire, a yearning so strong that it was like a presence there in the bed between us, something separate from me, outside my control. In the early days of our relationship, we had often lain awake all night, not making love but talking, as though only by forfeiting sleep could we tell each other all of the things we wanted to say. Of course, we had sex also, but sex was secondary, an act that we engaged in at dawn, when the sky began to lighten, making us too shy for words. In fact, sex for us then was like the cigarette that other people smoke after sex, a way to separate into two discrete beings. I do not recall now when our days started to fill with events deemed unworthy of discussion, but they did, and as silence or, even worse, inconsequential chatter followed us to bed, sex took on a cathartic role, becoming a constant toward which we could turn to find any number of things — pleasure, comfort, and even reconciliation.

  The desire I felt that night was not sexual however — that is, I knew that the simple act of sex would do nothing to alleviate it. Rather, what I felt was nothing less than a desperate need to pass the long hours of the night telling Georgia about my day: how, as I unlocked the classroom door that morning and faced my tardy students, I had watched myself as though watching a stranger, noting the way that the students regarded me, with a mixture of pity and awe and resentment, and how all of this had left me feeling deeply disoriented and alone. I saw then that my desire was not a presence between us but a void, a deep pit that we both turned instinctively away from, rolling toward our opposite sides of the bed, Georgia snorting as she often did just before falling into a quiet, motionless sleep.

  In Malaysia at that time, the midnineties, everyone was engaged in the making of money, and though Georgia and I had never fared well at this, largely through lack of trying, we allowed ourselves to be wooed by the ease with which students and colleagues alike engaged in various sorts of entrepreneurial maneuvering, doing so without any of the soul-searching or shame that often accompanied such things back home. We lived in Malacca, an old port city known for its antique shops, which we took to perusing on the weekends. It was there that we met Jackson, a portly Chinese man several years our junior who owned a shop specializing in sea salvage, pottery mainly, scavenged from sunken trading ships along the coast. Jackson was an expert in any number of things, and as we spent more and more time in his shop, he became like a mentor to us, teaching us practical skills such as how to determine what tools had been used in a chest’s construction and whether a textile had been stitched by hand; most important, Jackson treated our newfound interest in business as something normal, even desirable.

  One Saturday, as we drank tea in the back of Jackson’s shop, a partially enclosed courtyard overgrown with lush tropical plants, a man came back to where we sat and opened a suitcase on the table in front of us. Inside, beneath a stack of sweaters and trousers, unlikely tropical wear, lay twelve lumpy socks, which he picked up by the toes one at a time, letting the contents of each spill into his hand. “Fossilized red coral,” Jackson explained as we held the carvings, which were smooth and surprisingly cool. “From Tibet.”

  Then, lulled not just by the tactile sensation but also by the soothing staccato of Chinese as Jackson and the man bargained, disagreeing and then — their tones unchanged — agreeing, I felt, for the first time in weeks, fully relaxed. And though this was indeed pleasant, the significance of that afternoon lay in what happened next. After the man departed, we admired Jackson’s purchases while he proudly recounted the details of his bargaining, in doing so referring repeatedly to this man with whom we had just been sitting as the smuggler. He did so casually, as though smugglers were a daily part of life, not just his own but ours as well. How to explain the overw
helming gratitude I felt at that moment, the sheer giddiness at being treated like somebody accustomed to the company of smugglers?

  And so, shortly thereafter, during a two-week visit to Java, Georgia and I decided to become proprietresses, traders in Asian furniture and antiques, announcing our decision via a letter that we sent to family and friends back home and receiving, in return, letters of surprise and, in the case of Georgia’s grandmother, disapproval at what she disdainfully termed our “foray into commerce.” I soon began waking up most nights in a panic, unable to imagine the shift from a professional life that revolved around instructing others in the rules of grammar, interactions I regarded as pure, to one in which conversations about furniture would dominate — conversations, moreover, that would be aimed at nudging my audience toward the purchase of a piece of said furniture: a teak daybed, a dowry chest or, my favorite, a dingklik.

  A dingklik is a primitive bench, innocuous in and of itself, though the word, which was like two dueling interjections — Ding! Klik! — delighted me with its exotic dissonance. Later, I fretted that it was my pleasure in speaking the word that had led us to purchase seven of them, along with fifty-three other pieces of furniture, during our visit to Java, for the trip, our first period of sustained relaxation in several years, had done what such things often do: it had acted as a referendum on our lives, allowing us the opportunity to assess our situation, to find it lacking, and, through the purchase of a container of furniture that represented our combined life savings, to, in effect, vote for change.