The Bigness of the World

by Lori Ostlund

  “We could have stayed home if we had wanted a smorgasbord,” Bernadette had complained bitterly.

  This was true. For nearly fifteen years, the two women have lived in Fergus Falls, a stagnant town along 1-94, nearly an hour from Fargo-Moorhead. When they first moved here, colleagues at the community college where they are both employed had presented this proximity to the interstate as some obvious asset, the value of which remained unquantifiable because nobody required that it be quantified, but they eventually came to understand that the highway’s presence was neutral — it brought nothing in, but neither did it take much out. Beyond the community college, the town is known for its small shopping mall and a park with a large statue of an otter in honor of the fact that Fergus Falls is the county seat for Otter Tail County.

  Only in the last few years have they discovered that another world exists just beyond the Fergus Falls town limits and that, in this world, it is often possible to locate a smorgasbord (or a potluck or a meatball dinner) on a Sunday morning. Such events are generally affiliated with local churches, but the women did not let this bother them. They wore their teaching garb, which blended in well enough with the Sunday-morning attire favored by the locals, particularly as neither woman was prone toward drama or excess, but, still, they attracted attention. Two or three parishioners would approach them during the course of a meal under the pretense of welcoming them, each inevitably inquiring, “So, where are you girls from?” They were always girls in these settings — despite their ages and professions, neither of which they mentioned — because they were two women alone together on a day reserved for family.

  Bernadette was the more talkative at these events, partly because the presence of food made her so, but she was excited also by the sense of adventure that these outings brought to their lives. As long as she could remember, they had awakened each Sunday morning at seven and dressed for the day in their standard casual wear, button shirts with sweatpants, a combination favored by both, for they agreed that a matching sweat suit was monotonous and neither liked T-shirts, Bernadette because they encroached on her neck and Sheila because she believed they made her forearms, which were unusually short, appear even more so. Together, they prepared coffee and a plate of liberally buttered toast, which they consumed over the course of the morning while reading; precisely at noon, they closed their books, opened a can of salmon, and made salmon melts, the last bite of which marked the end of their weekend. There were dishes to be done, of course, but on Sundays they completed this chore without any of their usual bickering, Bernadette accusing Sheila of daydreaming as she washed and Sheila complaining that Bernadette only dried the outsides of things. As they faced the remains of the greasiest meal of the week, they interacted more like colleagues than lovers, observing the other’s work with professional detachment. Then, they retreated to their respective studies and began the business of preparing for the coming week’s classes.

  And so, it was no overstatement to say that the smorgasbords and potlucks had changed everything, turning Sunday from a day of predictable introspection into one of intrigue and hastily graded papers, certainly as far as Bernadette was concerned; Sheila, who had spent every Sunday of her childhood in church, did not share Bernadette’s enthusiasm but enjoyed observing it. She sat beside Bernadette at these outings, quietly troubled by an uneasiness for which she could not fully account, though she understood it to be rooted in distrust, which bothered her, for she did not consider herself an arbitrarily distrustful person. Certainly, she was routinely skeptical in her dealings with students, but that was only because she had witnessed numerous dishonesties over the years; thus, her reasoning went, it would be imprudent as well as professionally remiss to attend to her duties without a measured degree of vigilance. She prided herself, however, on never counting change in stores or asking workmen to put estimates into writing.

  More unsettling for her was the fact that she believed this distrust to be mutual, believed that these strangers whose casseroles and pies she consumed shared her misgivings, though in more generous moments, she understood that it was barely possible to know the workings of one’s own mind, let alone those of a group of strangers, even strangers who, when considered as an abstraction, made up the all-too-familiar backdrop of her Iowan youth. That youth has, by design, become a detached memory — she gave up corn when she was twenty and lost her faith shortly thereafter, and then her parents had died, which made visiting unnecessary. She now thought of her young self as a character whom she had once encountered in a book: she looked back upon her with fondness and a degree of pride, but she felt also that this character, her younger self, had simply ceased to be, had not died but merely ended, the way a book did, with obstacles overcome and lessons learned, the turning of the final page, and then the cover closing.

  Perhaps because of the literary overtones with which she has imbued her small-town upbringing, she is fond of assigning the works of Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson, though her semesterly staple is a short story entitled “The Lottery,” in which a group of villagers gathers together each year to draw lots, with the loser, the one drawing the shortest lot, being stoned to death by the others, for no other reason than to fulfill this particular tradition.

  “What, exactly, does this story imply about traditions?” she would begin the conversation each semester, thinking the answer both obvious yet necessary to the formation of her students’ worldview, but the students, masters at commandeering the question and leading the discussion safely away from the text at hand, would invariably counter with a listing of their favorite traditions, each of which begins the same way: “My family always …” They would discuss their way through the major holidays without her, comparing notes, a friendly rivalry developing between those whose families always opened gifts on Christmas Eve and those who held out for the actual day. She would go home that evening, shattered, and fall into bed at nine o’clock, but she could not help herself — she felt that her students, most of them from the very communities whose potlucks and smorgasbords she partook of each Sunday, needed to be taught the story’s lesson, and so she was willing to ignore the fact that her teaching of it had become its own tradition.

  “They need to learn to examine themselves — their milieu, their beliefs — critically,” she would defend herself to Bernadette. “‘The Lottery’ is a parable, and that’s what they’re used to after all — parables.” This was the way that the two of them spoke with one another, with the fervency of two aging academics perpetually engaged in defending the obsolete theories of their youth. They used grammatically complete sentences, always, and when others inquired how they were, they refused to go along with the current convention of purporting to be good. “I’m well,” they would reply in precise tones to anyone who cared to ask — grocery store cashiers and telemarketers as well as students and colleagues. Sometimes their students giggled at this response, and they suspected that the students, subjected to years of careless language, believed the two of them were the ones guilty of grammatical indiscretion.

  “Of course it sounds funny to them,” Bernadette grumbled. “How are they supposed to know any better when even their other professors claim to be good?” So had begun their brief campaign to correct what they perceived as a grave injustice against the English language.

  “You’re good?” they would query when presented with this response. “Have you been engaged in philanthropic activities?”

  It was not in their natures to press the point further, however, and so they generally stopped there, with this rather bewildering question hanging in the air, making further small talk unlikely. Thus, the campaign had been short-lived, though they continued to be “well” with all who still dared to ask.

  “Even if we are the last two people in the country using well, we shall refuse to cave in. Actions speak louder than words, after all,” Bernadette rallied, though she rarely employed clichés.

  “But well is also a word,” Sheila had reminded her, though sh
e rarely began sentences with coordinate conjunctions.

  “In this instance, however, the speaking of it is an action,” Bernadette had countered, and their fretfulness had been abandoned as they debated whether well, in this particular instance, constituted a word or an action.

  So, of course, they did not blend in at potlucks and smorgasbords, despite their stolid dress, for they carried about them, in gesture and speech, the look of women who confronted daily the signs of steady, incontrovertible decay in the world around them.

  Then, at a potluck last spring, they had been approached by a woman with large bones and an authoritative bearing, the latter established, in part, by the former. Unlike most people who approached them at these events, people who enjoyed their meal first, nestled among family and friends, before turning their prying attention to the two strange women in their midst, the big-boned woman approached them with a full plate, settling between them like a colleague who hoped to complain about a new departmental policy.

  “Hello, ladies,” she announced. She turned her plate carefully clockwise, stopping when the meager helping of three-bean salad sat precisely at twelve o’clock, and then, perhaps feeling that the unusually large mound of scalloped potatoes and ham on her plate required comment, she said, “Clara Johansson makes the best scalloped potatoes,” adding, by way of clarification or maybe enticement, “All cream.”

  “I missed those,” replied Bernadette apologetically, though technically she had avoided them, for she disliked foods that grew underground. “I shall have none of Eliot’s ‘dried tubers,’” she generally declared when potatoes were mentioned, to the bafflement of those around her, and Sheila looked at her, waiting for it, but Bernadette merely turned to the big-boned woman and explained, “There’s so much to choose from at potlucks.”

  “Yes, that’s the truth, isn’t it,” said the woman. Then, after a pause that, in retrospect, they both agreed had been an “artful pause,” she added, “Anyhow, this is the church’s last potluck.”

  “The last potluck! What a shame,” Bernadette had cried out, not at all disingenuously though certainly with greater audible enthusiasm than she normally displayed. “It seems to be a popular event,” she observed in quieter tones.

  “Oh no, it’s not the event we’ll be changing,” said the big-boned woman. “Just the name. From now on, it will be called a pot God’s will. We want to make it clear, especially to some of the younger parishioners, that there is no such thing as luck, not when God is in charge.”

  Because the woman spoke without a trace of irony, Bernadette was nervous to make eye contact, fearful that such intimacy might provoke a response that she had no way of predicting and therefore suppressing; she was not a giggler nor the sort to weep publicly, but she felt that either reaction was possible, and so she smiled cautiously at the woman’s scalloped potatoes instead. Writing well, Bernadette heard herself telling her students monotonously, semester after semester, requires the ability to become your audience — knowing what they know, seeing as they see, feeling what they feel. She looked up at the big-boned woman, who sat regarding the two of them, potatoes growing cold in front of her, and she understood what terrifying and ridiculous advice she had been meting out all these years. She recalled a joke that she had made once as they approached the front doors of one of these churches. “I’m so hungry I could eat the Eucharist,” she had told Sheila, and they had laughed together smugly, glancing around to make sure that nobody stood within earshot. She almost wished that the big-boned woman would stand and publicly denounce them, swinging her big-boned fists like wrecking balls in their direction. How much easier and nobler, she thought, to depart amidst cries of “Heretics!” or calls to be burned at the stake.

  Instead, they left quietly.

  “You knew it was a church,” Sheila pointed out once they were in the car.

  “Yes, but we were just there to eat,” Bernadette answered sorrowfully, and Sheila did not reply, for despite her feelings of unease, she too had believed that they were welcome, at least for the time it took to eat a plate of hot dish and Jell-O.

  “It’s not as though we didn’t pay for what we ate,” Bernadette said a moment later, indignantly this time, but this position was problematic as well, for it made of them contributors, contributors to the promotion of the belief that God oversaw everything, guiding one’s hand through the cookbook of life to stop at just the right hot dish recipe. When Bernadette offered this analogy, it sounded like a thesis straight out of the freshman composition papers that they graded day after day, and so they were able to laugh about it, but there was no ignoring the fact that the conversation with the big-boned woman had changed everything. They thought back over every potluck and meatball dinner and smorgasbord that they had ever attended, and in doing so, they were overcome with self-consciousness, as though it had suddenly occurred to them that they had attended each of these events unclothed, but unclothed the way that one is in a dream, where one is aware of one’s nakedness not as the person sitting there naked but as the viewer of the dream, those two one in the same except for an overwhelming difference — the inability to act, to change one’s nakedness.

  “Which would you rather have if you had to choose — knowledge or the ability to act?” Sheila asked, trying to change the mood in the car to a more philosophical one, but it had not worked, for they understood immediately how futile one was without the other. Then, because the mood in the car still needed changing, they had tried irony next, laughing at the fact that they now understood how Adam and Eve must have felt, naked and suddenly ashamed of it.

  In the midst of this bit of levity, Bernadette had broken in, anguished, asking, “But how can they believe such a thing?” and this question, rhetorical though it was, had demanded a bit of thoughtful silence. They had not really acknowledged it then, but that had been the beginning of things: this sudden feeling that books were no longer enough, that the world was vastly different than they believed it to be, which is why Agadir, with its beer gardens and smorgasbords, had galled them so, for they found that now that they had finally done it, broken away from the lakes and their teaching and the routine of their days, they expected nothing to be familiar and, in fact, took great offense when it was.

  Agadir had been filled with overpriced tourist hotels, its streets lined with tour buses, air conditioned and fumeless, shocks and springs obsessively intact, nothing like the decrepit buses that the women have become used to, buses whose only virtues are cheapness and the ability to teach patience. In fact, because Agadir fell several weeks into their trip, they felt qualified to scoff at these tour buses with their two-people-to-a-seat, keep-the-aisles-clear policies. They have come to enjoy rolling through this landscape with people who are going about their daily business, hauling chickens and goats to market, people who seem thoroughly unmoved by the harsh brownness outside their windows. They are particularly enamored of the fact that the drivers of these buses have assistants — henchmen, they have taken to calling them, part carnival barkers, part airline stewards — whose job it is to hang from the bus calling out destinations, to settle luggage and riders, to pump gas and fetch cigarettes for the driver, and finally, to doze off, crouched in the small stairwell of the bus, during the brief moments when one round of duties is finished and the next, yet to begin.

  They had stopped in Agadir, in fact, only because their guidebook claimed it had an English bookstore, which they never found, and now they are fleeing Agadir as well, its smorgasbords and carefully queued buses. They are going to Tafraoute because they have read in this same guidebook that Tafraoute is a place run by women, the men having gone off to work elsewhere and returning only when they are old enough, or wealthy enough, to retire. The book also had presented it as a place with color, pink granite and flowering almond trees (albeit not at this time of year) and, somewhere outside of town, a series of gigantic rocks painted blue and red and purple by a Belgian who had felt compelled — by the overwhelming brownness they suspect �
�� to alter the desert in some basic but significant way. Their desire to leave Agadir propels them onto the first available bus, which is neither the fastest nor the cheapest, and while there will be ample opportunity during the trip to regret their haste, at first they are simply relieved.

  Somewhere after Tiznit, in the tiny market of a village where they stop to take on passengers, an old man climbs onto the bus before it has fully stopped and makes his way back to them as though he has been awaiting their specific arrival. He looks from Sheila’s face to Bernadette’s, back and forth, confused, as though he expected to recognize them but does not. Then, he raises his fist in the air and lets it spring open, revealing a flimsy watch, which he swings like a pendulum in front of them.

  “Is he trying to hypnotize us?” Sheila asks worriedly, for, in fact, she cannot take her eyes off of the watch.

  “He wants us to buy it,” says Bernadette.

  “How much?” asks the old man suddenly, in English.

  Sheila shakes her head vehemently, but the man continues to dangle the watch with a confidence that they both find alarming.

  “Where are we?” Bernadette asks him in English in order to assess his fluency but also because she would like to know. “What town is this?”

  “How much?” he says again, patiently, and they cannot tell whether his response indicates a lack of English skills or an unwillingness to be distracted from commerce. In the midst of this comes a tapping at their half-open window, which they turn toward and then pull immediately back from, for directly on the other side of the glass, pressed up against it, is a retarded boy of an indeterminate age. He has an abnormally fleshy face that spreads out in strange, fat waves against the glass, and behind his ears are thick, lumpy growths that resemble wads of gum piled on top of each other. When he pulls back from the window, his lips leave behind snail-like tracks on the glass. Their fellow riders, who have been watching their interactions carefully, chuckle at their reaction to the boy while behind him a group of vendors has gathered, no doubt egging him on so that they might enjoy a bit of fun in the midst of the heat and the tedium of selling the same wares day after day.