The Bigness of the World

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 was 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 others, who pounded the doorjamb, her neck growing blotchy, as they looked on quietly, their shuffling feet the only suggestion of protest. When, I wondered, had this woman begun to view tardiness as a symbol of moral decay, a personal attack being perpetrated against her daily? And when had I become her?

I spent the first eighteen years of my life in rural Minnesota, attending school with farm children who often arrived late for some reason or other — because milking had taken longer than usual or a calf had become sick. There were times, too, at the beginning and end of the year, when they missed entire days, a state of affairs toward which most teachers in our school were tolerant. The exception was third grade: that year, as the farm children slouched in exhausted and disoriented, excuse notes in hand, Mrs. Carlstrom, our teacher, stopped whatever we were doing to assess each note, and then, picking up her chalk once again, addressed the recently arrived child, saying, “Mr. Otto, how nice that you could fit us into your busy schedule,” after which she chuckled dryly. We were afraid of Mrs. Carlstrom for a variety of reasons: because she talked like this, using our surnames and speaking as though we were adults who made our own decisions about time and attendance and our educations in general, and because, unlike our other teachers, she did not alter her tone or diction level when she addressed us, not even her notion of humor, which was tied closely to the first two and which none of us understood.

My parents owned the only eating establishment in town, the Trout Café, and were thus acquainted with Mrs. Carlstrom, who occasionally came in after school and drank several cups of coffee while grading our homework, a process that often involved little more than drawing an angry red line diagonally across a page, which meant that the work was, as she put it, unacceptable. My father told me once that she had a “caustic wit,” which, he said, was something that most people did not appreciate. I did not know this word, caustic, and, until I bothered to look it up, mistakenly assumed it had something to do with cause, though what I thought it caused, I cannot say — shame and uneasiness, I suppose, judging from my classmates’ reactions. When I finally did check its meaning, I found that caustic wit had actually to do with bitterness and that bitterness (this also from the dictionary, for I was too young to have learned these things in any other way) had much to do with disappointment.

* * *

During that year in Malaysia, I realized that I had had enough of teaching, which I had been doing for fifteen years with a fair amount of success and, it must be said, an increasing sense of bitterness. We both felt this way, I think, Georgia to the lesser degree and I to the much greater, though we spoke of it only in small, petty complaints. The day that my classroom epiphany occurred was my forty-fourth birthday, no milestone event but significant nonetheless, for that was Mrs. Carlstrom’s age when I was her pupil. We had been in Malaysia for six months by then, but I had told no one at the college that it was my birthday, certainly not my students, who would have stared at me awkwardly, wondering what they were to do with the information. However, when we awoke that morning, Georgia made no mention of it either, though we had celebrated the occasion together fourteen times. Throughout the day, when we met in the hallway at school or sat together in the cramped teachers’ room, I looked for signs that she was pretending, perhaps to heighten the pleasure of a planned surprise, but as the day wore on, surpriseless, I knew that she truly had forgotten, and I consoled myself by blaming the tropics, which did not provide the usual seasonal markers — turning leaves and shortening days — that keep us attuned to weeks and months and the passing of time.

Late that afternoon, as we sat together grading papers at our only table, Georgia threw down her pen with a startled look and blurted out, “Happy birthday.”

“Thank you,” I answered cordially.

She looked around wildly for a moment, as though she had misplaced something of importance. “I thought that we might go out for noodles,” she said at last, and though this was something we did at least twice a week, I replied, “That sounds nice.”

That night, after we had eaten our noodles and raised our Tiger beers in a toast, after we were back home and in bed, lying far apart in the darkness (presumably because of the heat) and speaking of trivial matters, I found myself overcome with desire, a yearning so strong that it was like a presence there in the bed between us, something separate from me, outside my control. In the early days of our relationship, we had often lain awake all night, not making love but talking, as though only by forfeiting sleep could we tell each other all of the things we wanted to say. Of course, we had sex also, but sex was secondary, an act that we engaged in at dawn, when the sky began to lighten, making us too shy for words. In fact, sex for us then was like the cigarette that other people smoke after sex, a way to separate into two discrete beings. I do not recall now when our days started to fill with events deemed unworthy of discussion, but they did, and as silence or, even worse, inconsequential chatter followed us to bed, sex took on a cathartic role, becoming a constant toward which we could turn to find any number of things — pleasure, comfort, and even reconciliation.

The desire I felt that night was not sexual, however — that is, I knew that the simple act of sex would do nothing to alleviate it. Rather, what I felt was nothing less than a desperate need to pass the long hours of the night telling Georgia about my day: how, as I unlocked the classroom door that morning and faced my tardy students, I had watched myself as though watching a stranger, noting the way that the students regarded me, with a mixture of pity and awe and resentment, and how all of this had left me feeling deeply disoriented and alone. I saw then that my desire was not a presence between us but a void, a deep pit that we both turned instinctively away from, rolling toward our opposite sides of the bed, Georgia snorting as she often did just before falling into a quiet, motionless sleep.

* * *

In Malaysia at that time, the mid-nineties, everyone was engaged in the making of money, and though Georgia and I had never fared well at this, largely due to lack of trying, we allowed ourselves to be wooed by the ease with which students and colleagues alike engaged in various sorts of entrepreneurial maneuvering, doing so without any of the soul-searching or shame that often accompanied such things back home. We lived in Malacca, an old port city known for its antique shops, which we took to perusing on the weekends. It was there that we met Jackson, a portly Chinese man several years our junior who owned a shop specializing in sea salvage, pottery mainly, scavenged from sunken trading ships along the coast. Jackson was an expert in any number of things, and as we spent more and more time in his shop, he became like a mentor to us, teaching us practical skills, such as how to determine what tools had been used in a chest’s construction and whether a textile had been stitched by hand; most important, Jackson treated our newfound interest in business as something normal, even desirable.

One Saturday, as we drank tea in the back of Jackson’s shop, a partially enclosed courtyard overgrown with lush tropical plants, a man came back to where we sat and opened a suitcase on the table in front of us. Inside, beneath a stack of sweaters and trousers, unlikely tropical wear, lay twelve lumpy socks, which he picked up by the toes one at a time, letting the contents of each spill into his hand. “Fossilized red coral,” Jackson explained as we held the carvings, which were smooth and surprisingly cool. “From Tibet.”

Then, lulled not just by the tactile sensation but also by the soothing staccato of Chinese as Jackson and the man bargained, disagreeing and then — their tones unchanged — agreeing, I felt, for the first time in weeks, fully relaxed. And though this was indeed pleasant, the significance of that afternoon lay in what happened next. After the man departed, we admired Jackson’s purchases while he proudly recounted the details of his bargaining, in doing so referring repeatedly to this man with whom we had just been sitting as the smuggler. He did so casually, as though smugglers were a daily part of life, not just his own but ours as well. How to explain the overwhelming gratitude I felt at that moment, the sheer giddiness at being treated like somebody accustomed to the company of smugglers?

* * *

And so, shortly thereafter, during a two-week visit to Java, Georgia and I decided to become proprietresses, traders in Asian furniture and antiques, announcing our decision via a letter that we sent to family and friends back home and receiving, in return, letters of surprise and, in the case of Georgia’s grandmother, disapproval at what she disdainfully termed our “foray into commerce.” I soon began waking up most nights in a panic, unable to imagine the shift from a professional life that revolved around instructing others in the rules of grammar, interactions I regarded as pure, to one in which conversations about furniture would dominate — conversations, moreover, that would be aimed at nudging my audience toward the purchase of a piece of said furniture: a teak daybed, a dowry chest, or, my favorite, a dingklik.

A dingklik is a primitive bench, innocuous in and of itself, though the word, which was like two dueling interjections—Ding! Klik! — delighted me with its exotic dissonance. Later, I fretted that it was my pleasure in speaking the word that had led us to purchase seven of them, along with fifty-three other pieces of furniture, during our visit to Java, for the trip, our first period of sustained relaxation in several years, had done what such things often do: it had acted as a referendum on our lives, allowing us the opportunity to assess our situation, to find it lacking, and, through the purchase of a container of furniture that represented our combined life savings, to, in effect, vote for change.

Georgia had cheated on me. The high school in Albuquerque where she taught had arranged an overnight camping retreat in an attempt to get the faculty to bond, a goal that they had apparently achieved, for when she returned the next day, Georgia immediately confessed that she had been placed with a much younger colleague in what she referred to ridiculously as a “tent-cabin” and that, during the night, they had spoken openly and intimately about many things. “Something happened,” she whispered, and then she began to sob.

“She’s twenty-six,” I said. “You were twenty when she was born. You could be friends with her mother.” I did not say that she could be her mother because I found such a statement too dramatic. Nor do I know why I chose to make the discussion about age, as though it were the woman’s age that I objected to, as though I would have been perfectly happy had Georgia cheated on me in a “tent-cabin” with a woman in her forties. Beyond this, we had decided not to discuss the details, or, in fairness, I should say that I had decided this for us, and in order to make my wishes perfectly clear, I ended what was to be our only discussion of the topic with the most flippant comment that I could muster on such short notice. “A younger woman,” I said. “Since when did we begin engaging in heterosexual clichés?”

After several weeks of moping around the house, Georgia suggested that we needed “a challenge” and broached the idea of going overseas. I understood that she was making a gesture, and so we went, abandoning established lives involving jobs and friends and a house, choosing Malaysia for no other reason than that it seemed an ignored country, the one that tourists leapt over as they passed from Thailand to Indonesia. The move, however, had solved nothing, and so we had taken this more dramatic step, binding ourselves to each other by using every cent we had to buy dingkliks and palungans and gereboks, to buy a whole new vocabulary in order to avoid the ordinary words that one uses to discuss such an ordinary event as cheating.

* * *

This was how we came to be standing on the steps of Gerard Tung’s antique textile shop that morning, waiting for it to open. As we waited, a bird in the eaves above us, knowing nothing of the events that had brought us there, defecated down the front of my blouse and, for good measure, onto my skirt. The bird’s waste hit with the force of a water balloon, giving the impression of an intentional blow rather than what it was, a by-product of nature that I had unwittingly placed myself in the path of. In fact, I believe that it was this — the randomness coupled with the utter absence of malice — that triggered my highly uncharacteristic response: under the strain of attempting to suppress my tears, my chin began to quiver, dimpling like a golf ball.

Georgia fumbled around in her backpack. “Don’t cry,” she said.

There are, I have learned, numerous ways to make this statement. There is the Don’t cry that is issued as a demonstration of solidarity and sympathy and that is succeeded, most often, by the words or you’ll get me started. There is the more detached and perhaps reflective Don’t cry, one suggesting that the situation, and often life in general, does not merit tears, a tone that I generally find both reassuring and persuasive. Then there is the Don’t cry that is pure threat, that warns, Do not start because I am not in a position to think about you or your needs, and if you do start, you will see this and most surely be disappointed.

This last one was the “Don’t cry” that came from Georgia’s mouth the morning that I was defecated upon for the third time in my life. By the time that Gerard Tung appeared with his key and his attitude, I was sitting on the step outside his textile store, crying and swiping at the eggy mess on my skirt.

“Where is your friend today?” he asked, making no mention of my state.

“My friend?” I replied, though it was none of his business. “My friend is gone.”

II. THE PENULTIMATE

The second time occurred when I was twenty-nine, in Madrid, where the woman who was to become my lover (yes, Georgia) had not yet become my lover, despite the fact that we had moved to Spain in order to bring such a thing to fruition, a motivation that neither of us had acknowledged, not even to ourselves. We had met some months earlier in Albuquerque, but our courtship had seemed impossible there, for neither of us could bear the thought of others watching it unfold, offering comments that would make us more self-conscious, particularly given our mutual tendency toward shyness, mine of the Midwestern sort, a reticence that was like a dog holding fast to a bone, Georgia’s an easily misread shyness that manifested itself in a steady stream of words.

When we met, Georgia was dating Lisa, a perfectly nice woman who took her lesbianism seriously, despite having not informed her parents of its existence. This she blamed on the fact that she was Korean. “When I visit my parents, I am still expected to greet my father at the door when he returns from work each night,” she told us one evening over beers, by way of explaining just how difficult it would be to tell them.

“But you don’t even speak Korean,” Georgia observed, for the sake of understanding as well as arguing, which were two equally compelling tendencies in her personality, though I knew that her point lay in the latter camp.

“Exactly,” replied Lisa. “So how could I tell them?”

Lisa was in medical school, and though I liked her and enjoyed our weekly tennis matches, cordial yet competitive affairs, I referred to her, disparagingly, as the Medic because I could not get over the fact that she did not like poetry and thought nothing of blurting out, “I don’t get poetry at all,” by which she meant that she not only didn’t understand it but even questioned its value.

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, speaking 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 ten thirty 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 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 local paper 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 Lakeview,” 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, thirty-eight, 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 had 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.”

Georgia chewed and swallowed a shrimp, gulping noisily as it went down. “The Medic broke up with me,” she said.

“Oh,” I replied, my face becoming hot.

“I mean,” she quickly clarified, “she broke up with me because of that line from Eliot.” She lifted her wineglass and bit noisily at the rim, troubled by having made what amounted to a declaration.

“Oh,” I said again, this oh of a much different tenor. We both took a few swallows of wine, hoping to rinse away the carrots that clung to our teeth, though when we kissed, they were still there, small bits of orange that our tongues dislodged.

III. THE VERY FIRST

The first time happened long ago when I was a young girl growing up in that small town in Minnesota with no idea whatsoever that one day I might find myself in love or that the object of my affection might be a woman (moreover, a woman who would someday cheat on me) or that I might find myself a teacher living in such places as Spain and Malaysia, places vastly different from the world that I then knew, but, as it turned out, places where birds would defecate on me nonetheless.

That day, my third-grade class was making its way to the home of Mr. Nyquist, a very old man whose hobby was tumbling agates. Each Halloween, he dropped two or three of them into our bags instead of candy, so we all had examples of his work at home, which meant that as an outing, seeing Mr. Nyquist’s agates held little appeal. He lived only a block and a half from the school, but we were still each assigned a walking buddy, a classmate with whom we were to hold hands and match steps. I was paired with Jaymy Korkowski, a skinny boy with legs far longer than mine. I recall that I expected his hand to be dry and cool in keeping with the thin, chalky look of him but that instead it was wet with perspiration, a fat boy’s hand.

As we passed under an elm tree just half a block from the school, something hit my shoulder with the impact of a lightly packed snowball and, without letting go of Jaymy’s hand, I stopped to inspect it. Each year on Mother’s Day, I was made to present to my paternal grandmother, who did not like me, a box of chocolates from which I always managed to choose the most disgusting one, a chocolate filled with a yellowish, phlegm-like substance that bore an amazing resemblance to the glob that rested atop my shoulder that morning. When Jaymy Korkowski saw it, he dropped my hand, sat down hard on the sidewalk, and began to cry, great, wet, gasping sobs that shook his entire body. Of my thirty-three classmates, he was the one about whom I knew the least, and so I had nothing to draw upon in making sense of his reaction. I leaned down, taking in the full smell of him, which was not unpleasant, the dominant odor that of manure and beneath it, something sweeter, carrots perhaps.

“It’s just bird poop,” I said, though he cried even harder at being provided with this information.

By then, we had fallen well behind the other fifteen pairs, fifteen for there were two students missing that day, both of them farmers’ children, no doubt kept home when it was learned that we would be wasting a precious portion of the day admiring rocks when they could be out in the fields removing them. Mrs. Carlstrom soon noticed our absence and brought the class to a halt. Then, while they waited, watched over by Mrs. Preebe, the portly assistant librarian who had been brought along in anticipation of just such an event, Mrs. Carlstrom marched back to us. By the time she arrived, however, Jaymy Korkowski was on his feet, fully recovered, and so her attention was directed toward my shoulder.

“You’ll live,” she said in the gravelly monotone that she used for explaining division and congratulating us on our birthdays; then, Jaymy Korkowski in tow, she turned and walked back to the others, leaving me behind.

Mrs. Carlstrom was, as I have already noted, nothing like our other teachers, who addressed us in high, cooing voices and seemed perpetually in awe of even our most minor accomplishments. Moreover, they all lived in town and often came into our café with their families, using their regular voices with my parents and slipping into the cooing voices whenever I appeared. I knew what foods they liked and had even seen several of them with ketchup dabbed colorfully on their faces. They were familiar, knowable. Only Mrs. Carlstrom lived elsewhere, eight miles away in Glenville, where my father had grown up and which, on warm Sunday evenings, we visited, driving slowly up and down its streets while he pointed to various houses, explaining who had lived there when he was a boy and who lived there now and how this transition had come about. One evening, he surprised us by looping out of town to show us a run-down trailer park, stopping in front of a lopsided trailer with an overturned wooden crate for steps. Three dogs stood in the dirt yard, eyeing us from behind a chicken wire fence.

“Do you know who lives there?” my father asked of me specifically, and from the backseat I said that I did not.

“That is your teacher’s house,” my father announced.

“Mrs. Carlstrom?” I said skeptically, unable to reconcile her with such a place.

“She’s not much of a teacher,” my father pointed out almost apologetically. “But that’s generally the way it is with smart folks.” As he spoke, he gestured in the general direction of her yard, so I did not know whether he meant that this — the dirt and crate steps and barking dogs — was the way it was with smart people or that she was not much of a teacher because she was smart. Until then, I had not even known that she was smart, though I did know that she was not much of a teacher: if we did not understand some aspect of the lesson, she did not offer examples that might help us better understand what was involved but instead repeated exactly what she had said the first time around, as though there were only one way to convey the information and this was it.

* * *

The elm tree from which the bird took aim at me that morning stood in front of the McHendrys’ house, which I soon found myself inside along with Mrs. Preebe, whom Mrs. Carlstrom had sent back to deal with me while the others forged on with the field trip. We were shown into the bathroom, where Mrs. Preebe scrubbed my shirt while Mrs. McHendry, who possessed the frenetic energy displayed by certain types of very thin people, stood in the doorway regarding us through a haze of cigarette smoke, for these were the days when smokers simply smoked, without rules involved, by which I mean that they did not avoid certain rooms or take into consideration the presence of children.

The McHendrys owned one of two grocery stores in town, the one that we called the Market as opposed to the other, the V Store, as in Variety, which is what they provided — not just food but an assortment of school supplies and clothing as well as an entire section intriguingly entitled Notions. The McHendrys, by contrast, offered a butcher shop, where you could point to a block of pimento loaf, for example, and watch as Mr. McHendry sliced it right there in front of you. He would pinch the first slice between a folded sheet of wax paper and thrust it across the counter for your inspection. “Thinner?” he would ask, in a voice that implied that this was the ideal thickness but that he was giving you the option to ignorantly choose otherwise.

Years later, long after I had left that town, I would learn from my father that on a May day, the first warm day of spring, Mr. McHendry walked out of the Market, leaving behind the few dollars that he had taken in that morning, locked the front door, and took the key next door to the bank, where he handed it over to the bank president, the only person in town who knew exactly how poor business had been for years, and then went home to the house with the elm tree. From this house, according to my father, he did not emerge for nearly a decade. People considered his behavior extreme, some even suggesting that he was not well, and on the other end of the phone line, I could hear the sound of my father tapping his own head, clarifying the nature of this presumed illness. I, however, found his behavior perfectly logical: he had once divided his world between the Market and home, and this was the half left to him. I never wondered why he had given up, for I knew that people did, only why he had chosen that particular day to do so, why, after months of snow and ice, months during which he had gotten out of bed and carried on against the dearth of customers, the encroaching bills, the oppressive proximity of the bank, why he had awakened that morning to the promise of warmth and found it all too much to bear. Only later did I begin to understand the way that a simple gesture of sympathy or solidarity, even, it seemed, one of a meteorological nature, could crumble one’s resolve far more quickly than adversity itself.

* * *

On the morning that I was defecated on for the first time in my life, a part of me wanted desperately to believe that Jaymy Korkowski was sobbing on my behalf, that his tears were shed over the small injustice I had suffered, though something, sheer stubbornness perhaps, kept me from doing so. I have since come to understand that this — the need to imagine our pain worthy of another’s anguish, our circumstances capable of invoking sacrifice or even despair in another human being — is a basic human need, one felt even more deeply as we confront our own shortcomings in meeting this need for others.

In the weeks that followed, I committed myself wholeheartedly to learning about Jaymy Korkowski, hoping to make sense of his response, but in the end, I learned only this: that when Jaymy Korkowski was a baby, his father had caught his leg in a bear trap and it had been amputated right above the knee, an interesting but irrelevant bit of trivia, for I was a logical child who knew better than to complete a puzzle out of just two pieces. I have since come to believe that what caused his tears that morning was not something large at all — some deeply ingrained character trait or lasting trauma — but rather a small thing, some soon-forgotten incident that had taken place earlier that morning, coloring his mood for the day: his father had yelled at him, perhaps, for an error made during milking or he had been bullied by the Pipo boys on the school bus. This, after all, is the way our lives unfold.

What this means, of course, is that on a different day, one free of bullies or milking errors, Jaymy Korkowski and I might have joined hands and walked, and as we did, a bird, the same bird if you like, might have defecated on me, but because this was a different morning, Jaymy Korkowski instead might have begun to laugh at my misfortune, to laugh so hard that he wet himself; or, to laugh so hard that I began to cry; or, laughed so hard that I, a shy, tentative, untrusting child, found the sound of it contagious, and we fell together to the curb, shrieking wildly so that Mrs. Carlstrom, who was smart and caustic and a terrible teacher (for some things should not change), called to us to pull ourselves together, to rise and rejoin the group. In this unfolding of events, Jaymy Korkowski and I would go on to become best friends, for what else can two people do who have together laughed at adversity and defied authority? From his mouth would emerge the words that would allow me to understand a boy who cried at the sight of bird shit — though, of course, this boy, the boy offering such revelations, is not, and never can be, the boy who was moved to tears. For, at each turn, the people we hold close elude us, living their other lives, the lives that we can never know.