Free The Bigness of the World by Lori Ostlund Page A

replied. “Culturally speaking.” Mike nodded deeply as though this were a distinction of relevance in Fargo, North Dakota.
    Later that afternoon, as we sat playing with the boys, my sister turned to Geraldine and said, “I hear you’re Jewish.”
    “News travels fast,” I said.
    “Jewish?” said Mike’s mother, who was also visiting for the day, though in her case, from just sixty miles away, a town called Florence, which is where Mike grew up. Florence, North Dakota, my sister had informed me, was even smaller than Morton, about a third the size, which put the population at around seventy people, two of whom were sitting here in front of me. There was something vaguely impressive about this.
    “You know about the Holocaust?” Mike’s mother said. I could see that Geraldine was bothered by this question, and she remained so even later when I explained to her what I knew to be the truth: it wasn’t that Mike’s mother believed Geraldine might actually be unaware of the Holocaust, but rather that she was establishing her own awareness, broaching the subject the way that we are taught to where I come from—by turning knowledge into a question. Of course, only I could tell that Geraldine was annoyed, and when she answered, her voice was gentle, reassuring. Yes, she told Mike’s mother, she did know about the Holocaust, and Mike’s mother nodded,pressing the back of her fork tines against the crumbs of her rhubarb cake. “It was a terrible thing,” she said.
    The next time Geraldine and I visited my sister and brother-in-law, we flew into Minneapolis and drove west along i-94 to Fargo, stopping in Morton to pick up my father, who alternated between ignoring Geraldine completely and ceremoniously reciting things for us in Swedish—poems and songs and jokes, which he made no attempt to translate though he did chuckle to let us know when something was funny. My father is entirely Swedish, a fact that gives him enormous pleasure. We, his children, are mixed because my mother was half-Norwegian. “The Norwegians have always been arrogant,” my father reminded us frequently when we were young, a comment that he generally made out of the blue. Once, sighing heavily, he had added, “In my day, we buried the Norwegians and Swedes in separate cemeteries.” (“You see,” Geraldine said, laughing, when I related this to her. “There’s no hope for the world. Even the Swedes and Norwegians can’t get along.”)
    He had spoken Swedish as a boy, forgotten it, and then relearned it almost fifty years later from a retired Swedish professor who settled on one of the lakes near Morton and occasionally came into my father’s hardware store to buy things that my father considered “odd,” by which he meant odd for a man to buy—the little skewers that are set into the ends of hot corncobs, Mason jars, plastic sunflowers that spin frantically in the wind. Once, early on, the professor had come in wearing a button that said “N.O.W.,” and my father had asked him, “Now what?” I was in graduate school at the time, living far away in Colorado, and when my father related this story to me, I could tell, even over the phone, that he was disappointed I did not laugh. I wanted to, but I felt that it was dangerous to encourage my father in such ways.
    “It’s a club of some sort,” my father told me. “A club for women.”
    “Anyone can join,” I said. “It’s the National Organization for Women.”
    “Yes,” my father said. “For women.”
    “He’s not married,” he continued a moment later. “Never has been.” I understood my father’s point, the suspicion that surrounded men and women of a certain age who had never married. My father had remained single until forty, and sometimes I thought that he had married my mother simply to escape being the object of gossip and speculation. In fact, I was hard-pressed to discover any other reason, for my parents had been ill suited for each other, a state of