The Bigness of the World by Lori Ostlund

Author:Lori Ostlund [Ostlund, Lori]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Anthologies (Multiple Authors), Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction
ISBN: 9780820334097
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

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 regarding a notion whose value she seemed to measure in inverse proportion to the blatant disregard attached to it by

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