Free The Bigness of the World by Lori Ostlund Page B

affairs foreshadowed on their first date, when my father lent my mother a book to read so that they would have something to discuss on their second. My mother had returned the book to him unread, claiming that she could tell from the cover, which was blue, that the book was not going to be about anything.
    My father had shown me the book once, a heavy tome called Gus the Great . He had read it and The Great Gatsby one after the other and, for this reason (and perhaps because both titles included Great ), always thought of them together, though he had much preferred the former. When I asked him what Gus the Great was about, he said that it had to do with the circus. “The circus?” I replied. I had never known my father to have any interest in the circus. “Yes, but that’s not what it’s about,” he said. “Not really. Anyway, it’s much funnier than that Gatsby book.” Later, when I finally read Gatsby , I was puzzled by this comment, for there was no way to think that Fitzgerald had been attempting humor, but I eventually realized that my father was simply saying something about himself, about what he had needed in his life at that time.
    Ten years ago, I spent a week with my father shortly after my mother died. Geraldine and I had just met a few months earlier, and we spoke daily by phone. This was stressful, for it forced me to juggletwo conflicting emotions: the elation I felt when I picked up the telephone and heard her voice, and the guilt I felt at not hiding it better. Furthermore, we were firmly in the getting-to-know-each-other stage, yet I never felt truly like myself in my parents’ house, where my past self still lingered oppressively. I worried about this at night as I lay in my old bed, the top half of a bunk bed on which I used to pile everything that was important to me, books mainly, a few photos, and the beginnings of a stamp collection that never got off the ground. I had not mentioned Geraldine to my father, thinking that it hardly seemed an appropriate time to do so, but he was nosy about such things, nosy in a stoic, Minnesotan sort of way, which meant that he would never come right out and ask who called each evening at eight but instead took matters into his own hands. On the fifth night, he retired earlier than usual and, when the phone rang, he picked up his bedroom extension quickly.
    “For you,” he announced in a loud, flat voice that carried easily down the hallway, and when I picked up, I could sense him there—hostile but, I could not help but think, perhaps secretly wanting to understand this thing that made no sense to him, and so, for just an instant, I considered letting him listen.
    “Yes?” I said brusquely, greeting Geraldine the way I would a telemarketer.
    There was a pause. In a low, confused voice, she asked, “Are you okay?” and I saw at once the folly of thinking that I could inhabit both lives at once.
    “Dad, I’ve got it,” I said sternly, and I heard the double click of him hanging up as it traveled across the line and through the house.
    My parents were both pack rats, had become even more so during my mother’s illness, and I felt it my duty, during that visit, to establish some order. The first morning, wishing to take stock of the worst of it, I ventured down into the basement, where I had not been in manyyears. The carpet was brittle, almost crunchy, under my feet, and when I touched the paneling that ran the length of the hallway, my hand came away chalky with mold. So overwhelmed were my other senses, even taste, that my hearing felt dull by contrast. As the mold spores settled in my lungs, I began to breathe heavily, wheezing as I made my way through the rooms counting sofas (or davenports as we had always called them). I found five, then opened the door of my father’s library onto a sixth, a slippery horsehair settee that blocked the entrance so that I had to climb over it to get in. The two bottom shelves held books bloated with water. I