The Bigness of the World (25 page)

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.

“I love you!” the boy calls out to them in a deep, unformed voice, and they do not realize at first that he is speaking English. “I love you!” He begins to dance then, frantically, while the men behind him cheer and clap their hands in some vague semblance of rhythm. Even as the bus pulls out of the market, the boy is still dancing; he
pulls off his shirt, either in response to the heat or the coaxing of the men, and dances, and their last glimpse of him is of a large white mound twisting and writhing, the final, energetic gasps of a fish set down in the desert.

They do not speak until the bus is well outside of town, allowing the dexterity of the henchman, who hangs from the bus with one hand, to command their attention. “I was just so … so … taken back,” Sheila says at last, weakly, testing this position aloud, sensing that their claim to indignation on the retarded boy’s behalf is compromised by the fact that everyone had witnessed their repulsion.

“An odd place,” Bernadette agrees, feeling safest with small, inconsequential commentary, and then they are quiet again, aware of the continuing stares of their fellow passengers and the increasingly tortuous nature of the road.

Perhaps an hour later, although they are seemingly in the middle of nowhere, the bus stops, and a family climbs on board, the parents, plodding and silent, accompanied by three children of varying heights but with a uniformly androgynous appearance — dull, sunken eyes and shaven heads covered with scabs and even a number of open sores to which red slashes of Mercurochrome have been applied, giving them the appearance of strange, colorful warriors from some remote tribe that is not in the habit of taking the bus. The parents settle heavily into the seat in front of the women, the only empty seat, while the children pause mutely in the aisle until the father makes a gesture, a downward slice with his hand, and the children drop obediently to their knees and crawl beneath the seats, the two youngest curling together under the parents’ seat like twins waiting side by side to be born, while the other, the tallest of the three, huddles beneath the women’s seat.

Before the family’s arrival, the women were quite aware of being the oddest thing that the other riders had expected to encounter on
this trip, but now they are fairly sure that they have acquired competition, a fact that relieves them greatly, for it is a tiring thing already, this trip through winding mountain roads in 115-degree heat with the smell of diesel fuel and vomit everywhere. An occasional, vomit-ripe plastic bag rolls past their feet on inclines, like a water balloon in search of a target, but most of the other riders have given up on bags and are simply emptying their stomachs directly onto the floor. At several particularly curvy points, Sheila thinks that she might be forced to join them, but she concentrates on restraint, mindful of the attention that her particular nausea is sure to attract. Each time the bus begins a steep climb, Sheila and Bernadette pull their feet up quickly, holding them off the floor while vomit flows beneath them like an incoming tide, and then again on the downward grade as the tide goes out. They have only daypacks with them, which they early on had removed from the space beneath their seats, cradling them in their laps instead. It is this vacated space which the boy occupies, for, though still unsure of his gender, that is how they have decided to think of him — as a boy, or more specifically, and purely for ease of reference, as a pronoun:
he
.

“What do you think he’s doing down there?” Sheila asks.

“Nothing, I imagine. He’s probably just staring at our ankles.” For some reason, this thought — of the small, strange boy fixated for hours on their ankles — unsettles both of them, and they begin to fidget, keeping their legs in restless motion.

“What if he bites us?” asks Sheila, who has unusually fleshy calves.

“Why would he bite us?” Bernadette responds, but sharply, in a way that suggests that she too has entertained such thoughts.

“It must be so hot down there,” Sheila says eventually. “And they’ll be covered with vomit.”

“Well,” says Bernadette, whose practical nature often gets misread as apathetic. “What can we do really?” She looks out the window,
finding the barrenness consoling. Many of the other passengers are still watching them, some turned fully around in their seats, apparently unconcerned about the havoc that this may wreak on their already compromised stomachs. It is too soon to tell whether their interest has shifted to this strange family, three-fifths of which has taken up quarters under the seats, or whether people simply wish to see how the two women will respond to them.