by Lori Ostlund
Aaron nodded, knowing this to be true.
“Do you know, I’ve suffered from constipation since the day I married him.”
He thought about this, remembering how the doctor who talked to him and his mother after his father’s accident had said that his father had not suffered. His aunt had stood then and trudged down the hallway to the bathroom, leaving the door open several inches. While he sat at the table nibbling his English muffin, she labored loudly to expel waste from her body. When she reappeared, her face pale and sweaty, she shook her head, indicating failure, and he felt then, keenly, that his aunt did indeed suffer.
The morning he defeated Satan, Aaron listened to his aunt moving around in the bathroom, before covering his head with his pillow against the sounds he knew she would soon make. After what seemed a very long time, he removed it. Nothing. He rose and remade the bed and walked quickly down the hallway, noticing too late that the bathroom door still stood ajar. “Aaron,” his aunt called from inside. “Are you up?”
“Yes,” he said. “I want to clean.”
“You’re not tired anymore?” she panted.
“I’m not tired.”
“Well, then, I need you to bring me a roll of toilet paper.”
“What?” He was sure he had misheard.
“I didn’t check the roll before I sat down. I need you to bring one, from the closet at the end of the hallway,” she said.
“Do you really need it?” he asked.
“Someone else will need it if I don’t.” She sounded glum, but then her voice lifted, as it did when she was about to pray. “It’s best to be prepared.”
Aaron had never seen anyone sitting on a toilet, but he knew how he felt—awkward and ashamed, his legs dangling helplessly, ankles bound by his trousers. His father had been the opposite. He’d thought nothing of pulling to the side of the road and urinating as cars whizzed by. “Taking a leak,” he called it. His father had also liked to tell bathroom stories, though not all of them took place in the bathroom. His father’s favorite, which he retold at the supper table every few months, involved a man with a name that was not really a name at all, more of an adjective—Stinky something or other. Each fall, Stinky and Aaron’s grandfather, as well as several other men, went on a hunting trip together, and when Aaron’s father turned thirteen, he began accompanying them. These men were willing to rise at four in the morning and sit for hours in the cold inside a blind, which Aaron found a strange name for a place from which one did nothing but watch. They also trekked through the woods, sometimes for twelve hours before giving up and returning to the cabin. The story that his father liked to tell at the supper table was one that had been told in the hunting cabin one night at supper by Harvey, who was the town barber as well as Stinky’s hunting partner, and when his father told the story, he liked to pretend he was Harvey telling it.
“It must have been around seven that we came across this buck,” he always began, his voice slowing and deepening to imitate Harvey’s, taking on a slight lisp, “but to tell the truth, we weren’t really thinking about deer yet. We were just trying to get as much coffee as possible inside ourselves when suddenly the buck’s right there, maybe forty feet off.” His father’s pace quickened. “Well, Stinky throws down his thermos and fires off three shots, and one of them nicks the back leg of the buck. It takes off, limping, and me and Stinky are running after it, when Stinky announces, ‘I’ve gotta shit something terrible.’ We run a few more steps, and he says, ‘I can’t take it,’ and he unzips his suit. I’m a half step behind, and I see his left hand snaking along to the back. We keep running, and before you know it, he pulls his hand out and he’s holding a steaming mound of shit—like a goddamn magician pulling out a live chick. I swear. Didn’t even break stride.”
Here, his father had slipped back into his own voice to explain how Harvey repeated this last line over and over—“Didn’t even break stride”—and how everyone at the table laughed so hard that they actually threw down their forks and stopped eating. What Aaron had always wanted to know—but never asked—was whether Stinky laughed with them.
The only time his mother commented on the story, it was to say, “It’s just not possible,” as if the only thing that troubled her was its feasibility.
“Have you tried, Dolores?” his father asked. His mother looked at her plate and said nothing. “Not a damn shred of humor between the two of you,” his father said then, which was what he always said at the end of his stories.
Unlike his mother, Aaron had never doubted the story’s veracity. He just did not understand why his father found it funny, for no matter how many times his father told it, it was always the same: a man called Stinky chasing a dying deer, wanting that deer so bad that he shit in his own hand to get it. Standing outside the bathroom with a roll of toilet paper, Aaron wondered what his aunt would make of the story, whether she would laugh also or cry in envy. She called to him, and he went in. There she sat with her elbows on her knees, her pink robe tented over her, covering everything but her calves. She looked up at him, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have another person seeing you like that: hunched and vulnerable and straining.
“Thank you,” she said, adding, “You’re a good boy.”
He went into the kitchen and began extracting cleaners from beneath the sink, lining them up on the counter—Pledge, Lysol, Comet. His favorite was the Lysol. He unscrewed the top and breathed in its powerful, antiseptic odor. Soon, the smell would fill the room and then the house. Several years later, as he was cleaning the bathrooms in the café before school one morning, he would breathe in the Lysol’s omnipresent odor and finally understand: his aunt, who had believed God was everywhere, was used to being watched, not just when she was cooking and cleaning and praying, but even when she was on the toilet. And though Aaron did not believe in God, he hoped she had found comfort in having a steady witness to the suffering that would otherwise have been hers to bear alone.
* * *
One morning, Aaron and his aunt drove past the spot where his father had tumbled from the float and died. His aunt said nothing. They were on their way to Target. He had never been to Target. They started in the Men’s Department, where his aunt picked out undershirts for his uncle, then went on to Children’s. “What do you think about this for Mark?” she asked, holding up a blue plaid shirt that looked just like the shirts Mark always wore.
“I think he’ll like it,” Aaron said.
“Do you think so? Boys can be so difficult to buy for.” She said this as though Aaron were not a boy.
She chose shirts for everyone but the Foster. “What about the Foster?” he said. “What color would she like?”
“Don’t call her the Foster. You’ll hurt her feelings. Her name is Alice.”
Alice. It was a nice-enough name. He did not recall hearing anyone in the family use it. “What color should we get for Alice?” he asked.
“We can’t get anything for Alice today,” his aunt explained. “She has a stipend. There’s not enough money left this month.”
Aaron did not know what a stipend was. “Won’t she feel bad?” he asked.
“Well, I suppose she might, but she knows the rules.”
“Oh,” said Aaron. He had not known there were rules.
Nearly twenty years later, as he signed a credit card receipt in a bookstore at the shopping mall in Fargo, the woman behind the counter would look at the name on his card and begin to laugh, pointing at the book that he was purchasing, photographs of nude men. “Now what would your aunt and uncle have to say about your reading material?” she would ask. Only then would he look at the woman, who was pretty in the way of women who work just a bit too hard at it, and realize it was the Foster.
“Oh, my gosh. Foster,” he would say, knowing that was not her name, and she would scowl prettily at him, the sort of woman who could not help flirting with a man, even one buying a book filled with pictures of naked men.
“You still have
n’t figured out that’s not my name, Aaron?”
He would apologize, and she would say, “Alice.” He would ask about his aunt and uncle and cousins, and she would say, “What a family of freaks.”
“Zilpah?” he would ask.
Zilpah was dead, she would tell him matter-of-factly. Right up until the end, her father had refused treatment. She thought there had been a case, something legal, but she didn’t know what had come of it. She would suggest they get a drink and catch up, and when he said he needed to get going, she would call after him poutily, “Enjoy your book.”
“I have a surprise,” his aunt said. “We’re going to buy you school supplies.” She clapped her hands together. “That way, you’ll be ready when you start.”
“I don’t have any money,” Aaron said. He laid his hands on his pockets, recalling the pennies.
“I have money,” his aunt said. “It will be my treat. We’ll hide everything from your uncle.”
“Why will we hide it?” he asked.
“It’ll be fun to hide it. It’ll be our secret.”
They spent forty-five minutes choosing supplies: two fat pencils; a pink eraser; a jar of paste, which his aunt let him smell; and a pair of small, dull scissors. She took down two cardboard boxes with flip lids, one picturing whales and alligators, the other Raggedy Ann and Andy. “Which one do you like?” she asked. “To put everything in.”
He liked Raggedy Ann and Andy, who were smiling and holding hands, but he pointed to the whales and alligators.
“They sure are cute,” his aunt said, gazing at Raggedy Ann and Andy before returning that box to the shelf. She held up the one he had chosen. “It says here these animals are endangered.”
“What does endangered mean?”
“It means there aren’t so many left,” she explained.
“Where did they go?”
“People kill them,” she said, “even though God wants us to protect animals.” She put the box in the cart.
In the car on the way home, he said, “Thank you for my supplies.” They were stopped, waiting for a train to pass. He wondered whether the conductor had noticed them and thought, There sits a boy with his mother.
“It’s my pleasure,” she said. She asked whether he liked trains. When he said no, she began to cry. “You’ll be going home soon.” She rummaged in her purse for a tissue. “Your mother called.”
“She’s not sick anymore?” he asked. “When is she coming?”
“I think she’s coming soon.”
In fact, when they got home, the Oldsmobile was parked at the curb and his mother stood in the yard wearing a fluorescent orange stocking cap with a pompom. It was not cold yet, so the cap puzzled him, especially since his mother did not like bright colors. She raised her hand, not quite waving, and he began to open the car door. “Wait till I stop,” said his aunt. Then, they were stopped, and his aunt said, “I didn’t think it would be so soon,” but he was already out the door and running toward his mother.
“Aaron,” said his mother in a surprised voice, as if she were not expecting to find him there.
“Why are you wearing a hat?” he asked.
She laughed self-consciously. “Oh, I’m just feeling chilly these days. One of the nurses found it in the lost-and-found box and gave it to me.” In a teasing voice, she asked, “Does it look so awful?”
“No,” he said. “It’s nice. I like orange.”
He did not like orange, which his mother knew. He put his arms around her waist, and she squeezed him back, and they stood like that, not speaking. Finally, she bent down and brushed his face with the fat, orange pompom. “How’s that?” she asked.
He made a laughing sound. “It tickles,” he said and broke free.
“Hello, Dolores,” said his aunt.
“Hello, Jean.”
His aunt went into the house and packed a grocery bag with the clothes he had been wearing the day he arrived as well as the hand-me-downs he had been wearing since. On top was the box with his new dress shoes, inside of which she had tucked a small Bible. He wondered whether she’d hidden it because of his mother or because she thought he would enjoy the surprise of finding it. She carried the bag outside, and after his mother set it on the backseat, his aunt said, “Can’t you stay a bit? Irv’ll be home any minute.”
“We really need to get back,” his mother said, speaking as though they’d been home all along and had just stepped out, leaving a pie in the oven.
They got in the car, and as they drove away, Aaron looked back at his aunt, who was staring down at the ground as she waved.
They avoided the parade route. That had not changed. When they were almost home, he said, “I forgot my school supplies,” but his mother said they did not have his supplies yet, and he did not explain, even though it made him sick to think of his aunt unloading the car alone and finding the supplies that were meant to be their secret.
January
7
* * *
His first month in San Francisco, Aaron’s thoughts were consumed by earthquakes. He began to wonder whether his subconscious knew something, even though this kind of thinking—thinking that involved talk of the subconscious—made him uncomfortable. He did not discount intuition or careful observation but found that people too often relied on superstition and wishful thinking, which he grew impatient of being expected to accord the same weight as logic. He spoke aloud of his fear only once, to Taffy, who told him that the school had recently employed a woman from Oklahoma. She had moved home after just one month because she could not stop thinking about earthquakes. Moving back to Albuquerque, moving anywhere, was not an option, so he decided to control his anxiety by not speaking of earthquakes again, a Midwestern approach that he had employed successfully in other situations. It seemed to work in this case also, except on elevators, where his standard fear—that the doors would not open—now wedded itself to a new one. As he stood waiting for the elevator car to tremble and plunge, he began to have what he thought were panic attacks, but these, too, he approached like a Midwesterner, which meant that while everything exploded inside him, from the outside he looked like a man stoically riding the elevator.
He had ridden his first elevator on the Englund family vacation. In a rare gesture of enthusiasm, perhaps even love, his father had parked the Oldsmobile in a loading zone in downtown Minneapolis and pointed to a tall building nearby. Aaron thought that they would look out the car window at the building for a minute or two before driving on, but his father had instructed Aaron and his mother to go inside the building, which he said would surely have an elevator. When they got out of the car, he called after them, “Make it fast. We’re in a loading zone,” as though riding the elevator had been their idea.
Aaron did not know what an elevator even was, but he followed his mother into the building, where they stood in the lobby with a group of men in suits who stared at the two of them, dressed in shorts and grubby T-shirts. Everyone got on together, the other riders rising up around him like corn. When the elevator began to move, he took his mother’s hand and held it tightly while she laughed in a way that suggested she was not entirely at ease either.
On the way down, when they were alone, he asked his mother how the elevator worked. “Cables,” she said. “You know, ropes pulling it up and down.” He imagined people sitting above them, turning these ropes day after day.
“What if the ropes break?” he asked.
His mother showed him the numbers above the door, which flashed as they passed each floor. “Here’s what I want you to do,” she said. “Right after we pass the second floor, I want you to jump in the air as high as you can. That way, if the ropes break, you’ll be in the air when we crash.” He had done it, but that night, as he lay in bed in their motel room, he heard his mother telling his father the story, the two of them laughing. His father said something he did not understand and laughed again, and his mother said, “Jerry, come on. He’s a child. It was sweet.” Lying in bed, Aaron had
felt her betrayal.
Aaron continued to think about earthquakes each time he passed beneath scaffolding or visited a museum or movie theater. Once he sat up from a deep sleep, sure that he had felt something, but everything around him was still. When an earthquake finally occurred, a small one, though he had not known this at the time, he was calm. It lasted six seconds. Automatically, he reached for the shoes he kept tied to his futon frame, in accordance with the earthquake preparation manual he had studied with his students.
“Why we must tie shoes on bed?” asked Cheng, a student from Taiwan, where they were accustomed to earthquakes. “Is for luck?”
“Luck?” Aaron said. He considered this. “No, it’s so you can find your shoes easily, even in the dark. Windows break during earthquakes, so it’s dangerous to walk around barefoot.” He wrote barefoot on the board.
“My friend from motorcycle club said me that the streets can be filling with glass, higher than my head even,” Paolo said.
“Your friend told you,” Aaron corrected him, but he was picturing the futility of shoes when faced with a snowbank of glass.
* * *
Aaron had not yet met the owner of the school, who lived up in Bodega Bay but kept an office on the first floor, walled off by glass and never used so that it resembled a museum diorama. A placard on the door read RICH PULKKA, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. Mr. Pulkka claimed the school as a not-for-profit, a status that annoyed the teachers because they said he made plenty of profit, some of it fraudulently, though nobody dared to report him lest it mean trouble for the students. Aaron did not know exactly what the fraud entailed, but he thought it had to do with the attendance requirements for student visa holders. His roll sheets, for example, contained the names of several students who had not once appeared in class. He marked them absent, but when the sheets were returned to him each Monday morning, the As had been painstakingly turned into Ps, no doubt before the roster was photocopied for the official file.
