The Bigness of the World (24 page)

Marcos is studying when I arrive home, studying with the stereo turned up loud to some awful music of a type that I have never known him to enjoy. He shuts it off immediately, looking concerned to see me home. “Are you ill, Doctor?” he asks.

“Yes,” I reply. “I am unwell, Marcos. Help me into bed.” He does, taking my arm and leading me to our bedroom, where I sit on the edge of my bed while he removes my shoes.

“Marcos,” I say, “when I was a boy and feeling unwell, my mother allowed me to sleep in her bed during the day so that when I went to my own bed at night, it would feel fresh and cool and unfamiliar. May I rest in your bed today, Marcos?”

“That is an excellent idea, Doctor,” he says, and he pulls back the covers of his neatly made bed and helps me in, then perches on the edge. “Is it the headache from last night, Doctor?” he asks with great concern.

“It is everything,” I tell him. “It is everything in the world.” I begin to cry then, cannot stop myself, and Marcos, who will be leaving me soon, takes my hand and holds it, stroking it gently with his thumb. Such torment, but I do not ask him to stop, for this punishment is what I need and what I deserve.

The Children Beneath the Seat

THEY HAD NOT EXPECTED THE DESERT TO BE LIKE
this — just like the stereotypical images of it that they brought to Morocco with them — but, ironically (and disappointingly), it was. There were camels, one of which had chased them up the side of a gorge in a fit of misplaced anger, and the occasional oasis in the midst of kilometer after kilometer of rock and sand and dryness. The only thing that had really shocked them was the unwavering brownness of it all, consuming entire villages so that houses rose like intermittent lumps in a bedspread of brownness. Intellectually, of course, they had expected it, but the intellect cannot always sufficiently inform the senses, which was the reason that they had decided to travel in the first place.
Brownness
has thus become their new word, for there seemed no other way to express it except by giving it the weight, the concreteness, of nounhood — not just brown, but the
state
of being brown. Needless to say, they are from a lush place, Minnesota, a land with so many lakes that it feels compelled to brag about them on its license plates.

They are well into their forties, Bernadette older by thirteen months, but only now have they concluded, grudgingly, that there are things one cannot know except by seeing them. This realization has hit them hard, for they are English professors, both of them, women who have spent their entire lives reading, engaged in the world of heroes and plots, foreshadowing and epiphanies, and, perhaps without even realizing it, they had come to expect that life would follow literary extremes, would be either dazzlingly uplifting or stultifyingly tragic, but that was not the case at all. It did swerve occasionally toward one or the other, of course, but most of the time it occupied a vast middle ground, boring and relentless, a state of affairs that the world of literature had neither taught them to expect nor given them the tools
with which to contend. Trapped within this vast middle ground, they graded papers and paid bills and slept, as did those around them, but it struck them, increasingly, that something was amiss.

It might have helped if they were religious by nature, but they were not, were, in fact, quite the opposite: their disinclination toward religion grew stronger, became more entrenched, as the years passed. Furthermore, in the nearly twenty years that they have been together, they have acquired a tendency to reflect, and thus intensify, certain traits in each other — cynicism and didacticism specifically. Now, under the weight of their combined cynicism, each woman had begun to turn inward, away from the other, until there were times — increasingly more of them — that they crept into bed at night without having exchanged a single word all day. Then, when a simple “Good night” or “Sleep well” would have done much toward slowing this mutual sprint toward the end of their relationship, even then, or perhaps especially then, they could not speak, for the more language was required of them, the less each felt capable of producing it. Instead, they lay side by side, the silence between them like the pounding of waves, which is thought to be conducive to sleep but rarely is.

Thus, there is a subtext to this trip, unacknowledged but with the potential to rise up and overwhelm all others: in short, they hope to subject themselves to something so beyond the scope of what their lives have thus far encompassed that they will find themselves, in the face of it, free of pretense — able to rescue themselves and, in turn, their flagging relationship. The trip will be like an electric jolt to the heart, thinks Bernadette, for as English professors, they are enamored of metaphors and not always able to recognize trite ones, particularly those of their own making.

The desert has been introduced to them largely through the windows of various buses, which they don’t mind, for there is something comforting about being on the move in this country. At the moment, for example, they are headed for Tafraoute, having spent two
sweaty, interminable days in Agadir, the most depressing place they have visited thus far, its beach overflowing with Europeans and beer gardens and restaurants with signs outside all proclaiming, via a diversity of spellings:
SMORGASBORD
.

“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 she 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.