The Bigness of the World (17 page)

Late one Sunday afternoon, as the three of us sat in the yard in front of Georgia’s apartment, a tiny place above what had once been a carriage house, the talk turned to poetry as it often did when Georgia and I were together. Lisa reached, by reflex, for her medical book and began to read about digestive disorders while Georgia and I attempted to piece together “The Burial of the Dead” from memory. Eventually, she retrieved her
Complete Works of T. S. Eliot
and read the piece aloud.

“Try to guess my favorite line,” I teased in the poem’s afterglow,
sure, in fact, that she could not, for in a poem filled with April’s cruelty and Madame Sosostris, I was drawn to a seemingly innocuous line about sledding. Georgia thought for a moment and then, without consulting the text, recited, “Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went,” speaking quietly, her voice capturing the wistfulness that I too sensed in these lines.

“Yes,” I replied, but only after demonstrating a lengthy interest in the patch of grass directly beneath my crossed legs. “Yes, that’s it.”

The confidence with which she had recited these lines quickly gave way to nervousness, the sort that hangs in the air like a scent, and the Medic, looking up from her digestive disorders, sniffed delicately like a cat, then closed her book with a loud clap. “Well, should we start cooking?” she asked, for the three of us had planned to make dinner together. I knew, however, that I could not enter Georgia’s narrow attic apartment and stand cooking with them in its tiny kitchen, the ceiling slanting crazily down around us, and so I made an awkward excuse and left, but as I let myself out at the gate, I felt inexplicably giddy, as though exiting a lecture that had presented a familiar topic in an entirely new, and unexpected, light.

“Don’t leave Eliot outside,” I called happily back to them, gesturing at the book, which lay side by side with the Medic’s textbook, indistinguishable from afar, unlikely twins keeping company in the grass.

Just weeks earlier, I had finished my Master’s degree in literature and taken to walking for much of the day, a purposeless endeavor that provided something I had missed during my years of poring over literary theory — a straightforward sense of progress. Georgia, who was on sabbatical from teaching high school, often joined me for the morning stint before heading off to her bartending job at the American Legion. Most mornings, she greeted me in her pajamas, apologizing profusely as she tamped down her curls and dressed,
but the morning after our Eliot exchange, she was waiting fully dressed and exploded out the door, frantic, like a dog that has not been exercised in days. We were both fast walkers but particularly so that morning, our conversation, by contrast, stalling frequently, for many of our usual topics seemed suddenly unworthy of words. As we waited for the green light at the corner of Mountain and Twelfth Street, our attention safely fixed on a woman pushing a stroller across the intersection toward us, I blurted out my intention to go abroad, an intention that was being formed even as I opened my mouth to describe it. The stroller, choosing this moment to collapse, doubled in on the sleeping baby, who awoke and made his displeasure known, and we rushed out to carry the stroller to safety, the mother trotting behind us with the shrieking infant.

“Where will you go?” Georgia asked quietly as we worked at resurrecting the contraption.

“Hungary,” I replied, an answer reflecting less a personal interest than a need to seem in possession of a considered response.

“I’ll go with you,” Georgia said, her voice rising uncertainly. “If you want.” She added, “It could be fun,” and then, finally, “We broke up last night.”

Three weeks later, we were in Spain, Hungary having proven an unexpectedly complicated destination. However, once we were there, alone in a cheaply furnished apartment with too many bedrooms and massive furniture that shed its veneer in large strips, which we dutifully glued back in place, we did not know what to do next, for we simply did not know how to take the final steps toward each other. Thus, we found ourselves easily frustrated by nearly everything: the country, the language, but, most of all, each other.

Spain exhausted us: people stayed up all night drinking and smoking, and then, judging from the evidence in the streets, vomiting and shedding shoes as they made their ways home, all of this performed
loudly, of course, for Spaniards seemed inordinately loud, a state of affairs that we both found unnerving, perhaps because we held something so fragile between us. There were other things that we disliked. Vegetables were always overcooked in restaurants. Also, when we shook our rugs from our balcony, Juan Carlos, who lived below us, came up and scolded us, and when we pointed out that the old ladies all shook their rugs from their balconies, he told us that
we
, and not the old ladies, lived above
him
, and so we were forced to lug our rugs down three flights to the street, where, as we stood shaking them, the old ladies came by and ridiculed us to boot.

I did not like the old ladies in Spain, who laughed openly at my pronunciation and thought nothing of pushing me aside in the market and calling out “I am” when the butcher asked who was next or of screaming out the names of the fruits and vegetables I was trying to procure quietly by pointing. Furthermore, they insisted on going out for bread in their robes each morning and then gathering at the corner beneath our apartment to chat, calling to one another so loudly that I thought, the first time, that someone was being attacked until I stepped out onto the balcony and saw only them beneath me, clutching
pistolas
of warm bread to their breasts, their overweight lapdogs guarding their ankles.

One morning, I carried our dirty rugs down to the street, where four men in blue jumpsuits stood on the sidewalk around a large hole that had been dug to expose our building’s gas line, staring into it as they sipped cognac that had been delivered from the bar on the corner. It was 10:30 in the morning, a suitable hour for a drink apparently, for I had been watching this same cycle of events for nearly two weeks, two weeks, I should add, during which we had no gas for cooking or hot showers. The mailman arrived then also and was invited to join them, which he did, eagerly claiming a cognac and edging up to the hole.

It disappointed me to see him so easily distracted from the rigor
of his day, for one of the things I most liked about Spain was that mail was delivered not once, but twice, daily. Just the evening before, I had come home to find proof of this second round of deliveries, a letter from my father consisting of one sentence written on the back of a used café receipt. “Thought you’d be interested,” it said, a reference to the attached clipping from the
Alexandria Tribune
describing the details of Mrs. Carlstrom’s recent death.

It was in a similar fashion, two years earlier, that I had learned of the massive stroke that left her paralyzed and unable to speak, though there was speculation that her condition had worsened during the forty hours she lay on her kitchen floor, waiting for her husband, a truck driver, to return home and find her. “He’s parked her in Crestview,” my father wrote at the end of that epistle, referring to the nursing home in Glenville, a place I knew well, for when I was ten, I made monthly visits there to a man whom the Girl Scouts had chosen to be my foster grandfather, though he was only thirty-two, younger even than my parents, and lived there because he was mentally retarded and had nowhere else to go. I brought him cookies, usually cinnamon logs. These, he ate in a single sitting, always offering me one, which I refused because the smell of the place — urine and ointment and what I assumed to be aging flesh — made me gag. In fact, sitting perched on a chair beside him, I felt like an older sister charged with watching him eat, which he did loudly and messily. Though I did not do so, I had an overwhelming desire to scold him, to point to the wet crumbs scattered across his face and shirt, knowing that he would make an effort at reform, for, even though I was a child (or perhaps
because
I was a child), I could see that docility was expected from the residents, which is why I could not imagine Mrs. Carlstrom there — until it occurred to me that the stroke had imposed a docility all its own.

Thus, two years had passed, during which time I thought of her infrequently if at all. According to the article, she had been visited
daily by her husband, whom the staff described as “a quiet, overly devoted man.” Indeed, he had given up trucking in order to sit beside her in silence, she unable to speak and he, presumably, not wont to, a routine that had continued day after day until he arrived one afternoon for his daily visit, placed a pistol directly above her left ear, and shot her as she sat propped up in her bed. The staff had gathered in the hallway, too afraid to enter the room where Mr. Carlstrom sat holding his wife’s hand, the pistol resting atop the mound of her stomach. When the sheriff, a man with whom Mr. Carlstrom sometimes hunted, arrived, Mr. Carlstrom let go of her hand so that he could be handcuffed.

“I did it because I loved her,” he was quoted as saying, a statement about which much had been made, by the community and, therefore, by the press, who devoted the remainder of the article to comments reflecting what was termed “community grief”: “He’s nothing but a cold-blooded murderer,” Alice, 38, of Glenville, had said while a local pastor warned, “To say that this was done out of love is blasphemy.” I showed the article to Georgia, my voice tight as I read aloud these statements from people who had been his neighbors and friends, people whom I knew I might recognize by sight or surname.

“They’re in shock,” she offered.

“You don’t know that,” I replied angrily. “You’re from New York. You don’t know the first thing about these people.” Which implied that I did. We went off to our separate rooms, and in the morning when I awoke, Georgia had already gone out.

I knew that some sort of gesture was needed, an action that would be viewed as conciliatory, and so I decided to clean the apartment, which is how I came to be standing on the sidewalk with the rugs, watching the men in blue jumpsuits drink cognac and nod at the gas line. Determined that their idleness not dictate my own, I dumped my bundle of rugs to the ground, chose one, and began shaking it mightily so that it snapped like a sail in the wind and filled the air with dust.

“¡Olé!” cried out one of the men while the others laughed and cheered me on.

“Don’t you have work?” I asked in awkward Spanish, glaring at the hole.

“Ah,” said the mailman. “You must be the American.” He set down his cognac, dipped into his mailbag, and produced two letters, which I stepped toward him to receive. As I did so, however, extending my hand eagerly, I felt something hit my wrist, a warm, gentle splat, and I held it up for inspection. There it was, no bigger than a squirt of toothpaste, a small white glob drizzled with specks of black, so stunningly simple in appearance that it struck me as something that might be presented, atop an oversized dinner plate and with much fanfare, at a restaurant featuring haute cuisine.

“Asshole birds,” said the mailman shaking his head sadly, and the others joined in, loudly and creatively cursing the birds perched on the balcony above us.

I, though, was in no mood for sympathy, certainly not that tendered by a group of men who had been mocking me moments earlier and who, moreover, were the reason I had not enjoyed a hot shower in weeks. My anger, of course, was much broader, including in its scope any number of things: the fact that across the ocean, in the place where I had grown up, an old man sat in jail awaiting trial for what I deemed the ultimate act of love (because, at that age and fresh from years spent in the study of literature, I believed that sacrifice always implied love); that for this act he had already been judged harshly by those around him; and that I myself, despite my years of bookish devotion to such matters, had absolutely no idea how to engage in the pursuit of love.

“
Chica
,” said one of the men, awkwardly (and loudly). “Don’t cry.” And I realized only then that I was.

He bent down and picked up a cognac, which he handed to me. “To the asshole birds that shit on us,” he said cheerfully, waving his glass in the air as the others joined in. I clinked my glass against
theirs and we drank, drank with the relish that comes from toasting adversity.

Dear Mr. Carlstrom [I wrote later that morning],

Twenty years ago, your wife was my teacher. From her, I learned, among other things, the correct use of the apostrophe. I am currently living in Spain, a country technically without apostrophes, though this does not prevent people from using them everywhere. Yesterday, for example, I saw a sign that read “Billiard’s” and another offering “English language book’s.” I could not help but think of Mrs. Carlstrom, who would have inquired indignantly, “Of what, may I ask, are these billiards and books in possession?” I am teaching English to businessmen here, and though I am not suited for this particular audience, I believe that I may be suited for the profession itself.

There was something generally deceitful about the letter, which implied that Mrs. Carlstrom had somehow influenced my decision to become a teacher. She had not, nor had she taught me the correct usage of the apostrophe, although she had tried on several occasions, always unsuccessfully. Still, I felt that the letter contained the spirit of what I wanted to say, which was that she had, in some way,
marked
my childhood, and so I mailed it, addressing it simply, “Mr. Carlstrom, Glenville,
MN, USA
.” As I walked home from the post office, I stopped to purchase a propane camping stove, and that evening I prepared a soup consisting of what we had on hand: ten shriveled carrots, a few potatoes, and frozen shrimp that turned mealy long before Georgia arrived home.

Still, she seemed pleased by the soup, and as we ate, tearing off chunks of bread and dipping them into the orange stew, I told her about my day, concluding nervously, “I feel that nothing has gone right here — for us, I mean.”