After the Parade

by Lori Ostlund

  “Remember, children,” Miss Meeks said, “in my class there are no show-offs.”

  His mother was waiting for him after school. On the way home, she walked far ahead of him, only turning once to ask how his day had gone.

  “Okay,” he said, and she said, “Just okay?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “What did you do?”

  “I answered questions,” he said.

  “Questions about what?” He could tell that she was interested.

  “Moorhead,” he said. “Paul Bunyan.” He did not say his dead father.

  * * *

  Aaron did not know where his mother went after she left him at school each morning, but she was always back at noon, waiting for him on foot as the other children boarded the bus and rode home. This routine—walking, school, walking—became the order of their days, one he grew to appreciate because his mother seemed happiest as they walked. Their afternoons also followed a new pattern. When they arrived back at the house, his mother went into her bedroom and closed the door, and he waited—at the kitchen table or in his bedroom—while she rested. She never offered to make lunch first, but he did not mind because he knew that she was tired. Besides, he liked to prepare his own lunch. He always made the same thing, saltine crackers dipped in ketchup.

  “I’ll have a dozen today,” he would say, out loud, to himself. Dozen was the word for twelve. He would count out twelve crackers, which he lined up around the rim of the plate like fallen dominoes. In the middle, he squirted the ketchup. After he finished eating, he drank a glass of water, gulping loudly, a sound that had always angered his father.

  “How am I supposed to eat with you making that goddamn noise?” his father used to yell. “It’s like listening to a clogged drain.” One time, his father had jumped up from the supper table and retrieved a red plastic bottle from under the sink. Gripping Aaron’s head in the crook of his elbow, he tried to force Aaron’s mouth open as he held the red bottle above it. What had frightened Aaron most was the way his father trembled.

  “Jerry, stop,” his mother had said, her voice low and scared. His father had stopped. Years later, when Aaron asked his mother about that night, she explained that it was Drano his father had threatened to pour down his throat. “He never would have done it,” she assured him. “He was just like that, always trying to scare people into changing.”

  Mr. Rehnquist was part of their new routine also. On the first day of each month, he came by after supper to pick up the rent check. During these visits, he seemed awkward, not jolly and at ease as he had been the day they met him. Aaron’s mother said that it probably made him shy to be a guest in the house that he’d lived in as a boy. “Why?” Aaron had asked, and his mother said, “Well, there are things that happen in a house, things you don’t always like to think about. Maybe Mr. Rehnquist remembers those things when he comes here.”

  Mr. Rehnquist’s visits always ended at the kitchen table with the adults drinking coffee while Mr. Rehnquist quizzed Aaron about school, about what he was learning and how he was getting on with Miss Meeks, the latter a question to which Aaron gave brief replies because he did not want Mr. Rehnquist to think less of him for failing to win over his teacher.

  “How’s crazy Betty behaving?” Mr. Rehnquist asked one night in the silence after they’d finished discussing school.

  “You’ll have to ask Aaron,” his mother said. “They’re good friends, you know.”

  Aaron realized only then that Mr. Rehnquist was referring to Betty Otto, who lived in the house behind them, but he did not understand why his mother would say they were friends. It was true they sometimes chatted, but he did not think that chatting constituted a friendship, though he did not really understand what friendship involved. His mother said it was natural to want the company of others, sounding almost suspicious of those who did not, despite her own friendlessness.

  “She still busy with that garden?” Mr. Rehnquist asked him.

  “Yes,” Aaron said.

  “She’s also busy shooting off her gun,” his mother said.

  “She shoots squirrels because they ruin her garden,” Aaron said.

  This garden lay on the other side of a row of tall pine trees that served as a boundary marker. When they first moved in, Aaron had often knelt on the bed in his new room, staring out the window at the garden and the house beyond. He soon discovered that a woman lived there, thin with milky skin and curly hair as red as a clown’s. She had a dog that she usually kept tied to a pole beside the doghouse, which sat in front of the real house like its shadow. Aaron always noted the dog’s location because he was afraid of dogs. Those first several weeks, he had spied on the house as he waited for his mother to finish resting, until one afternoon he knew that he could not stay inside even one second longer. He rose and went out into the front yard, where he paced with frantic anticipation. When nothing happened, he walked around to the backyard and stood in the knee-high grass beside the pine trees.

  “What are you looking at, little boy?” called a voice. He moved closer and saw the woman, stretched out on her side in the garden. She was wearing a large straw hat.

  “My name is Aaron,” he said, then added, “Nothing.”

  The woman sat up and removed the hat in order to scratch vigorously at her scalp. “My name is Betty Otto,” she said. “You may call me Miss Otto, as I am an unmarried woman, or you may call me by my full name, but you may not call me by my Christian name alone because I do not abide such familiarity from children.” She waved him closer. “I don’t recognize you. You must not be one of those awful Packer boys.”

  “No,” Aaron said. “The Packers moved away.”

  “Good riddance,” she said. “They were unusually mean children.” He could tell that she considered all children inherently mean.

  “What did they do that was mean?” he asked.

  “Well,” she said, struggling to her knees and then her feet. “First, they were cruel to Princess.” She pointed at the dog, which sat, untied, at the edge of the garden. “She is pure German shepherd, which you will realize if you know anything about dogs. I’ve had her since she was a pup, and in that time I’ve spoken to her only in German. It is her mother tongue and the only language she responds to.”

  The dog lifted its head. “Princess,” Betty Otto called. “Heil!” The dog stood and trotted along the perimeter of the garden to its mistress. When it barked at Aaron, Betty Otto said “Heil!” again, and the dog fell back on its haunches, whimpering.

  “You see?” Betty Otto said. “But those Packer boys insisted on screaming at her in English, which confused her, so she bit one of them. Right here.” She tapped her own cheekbone. “Just missed the eye.” She sounded pleased. “The parents tried to pretend it was my fault, but I wasn’t having any of that.”

  “Maybe the Packers didn’t know German,” Aaron said.

  “Nonsense. Did you ever meet the Packers?” Aaron shook his head. “Well then. After Princess bit the boy, I told them to stay on their side of the trees, but do you know what those horrid boys did?”

  “No,” said Aaron.

  Betty Otto bent and scratched the dog’s ears. “Those hoodlums came out in the middle of the night and moved the trees, a good foot and a half, I’d say. Just look how close they are to my garden now.” She pointed to the garden, as though this were proof. “They didn’t think I’d see them,” she continued, “but I was expecting them. I waited right over there.” She pointed at a shed. “I fired off a few shots, just to scare them. You should have seen them run.” She gave a pleased chuckle, which Princess echoed with a growl.

  “Is that why they moved?” Aaron asked.

  “They moved so that Mr. Rehnquist’s son could move in,” said Betty Otto.

  “But we moved in,” said Aaron.

  “Mr. Rehnquist’s just teaching his son a lesson. You’ll be gone soon enough.” She regarded him slyly. “You know, your mother spends a lot of time outside at night.”

&
nbsp; He did not know this. “Would you shoot at her?” he asked.

  “She just looks at the sky. Would you shoot someone for looking at the sky?”

  * * *

  Miss Meeks never warmed to Aaron. Everything about him seemed to displease her: his politeness and earnestness and timidity, his overwhelming need to learn. She did not hide her feelings, and this set a tone, the model for acceptable behavior toward Aaron Englund, the new boy, which his classmates emulated. All of it, Aaron concealed from his mother. The next year, he and the other students moved across the hallway to Mrs. Lindskoog’s room. He still saw Miss Meeks and greeted her courteously each morning. She sniffed in return, crossed her arms, and nodded, but when the children who had been her pets appeared, she hugged them and said how much she missed them. These same children stood around on the playground laughing about the thick veins that covered Mrs. Lindskoog’s calves and about the way they could hear her urinating inside the tiny bathroom attached to their classroom, everyone falling silent when she went in.

  “Aaron lacks enthusiasm,” Mrs. Lindskoog wrote on his first report card.

  “Lacks enthusiasm?” his mother muttered scornfully, pointing at the string of Excellents and Very Goods that Mrs. Lindskoog had also given him, but Aaron knew that Mrs. Lindskoog had offered this criticism to help him, just as she hoped to improve his printing by gripping his hand tightly in hers and forcing it down on the page.

  Upon entering first grade, he grew quickly enamored of phonics, which taught him that words were not just bunches of letters clumped together arbitrarily. Of course, there were exceptions, groupings that didn’t add up in a logical way, but he came to accept, almost relish, these minor glitches in an otherwise perfect system. It was why the word itself—phonics, with that odd ph—seemed so appropriate. As they walked home each day, his mother usually inquired what he had done in school, to which he replied, “We did phonics.” Sometimes, he followed this with a question related to what he had learned, a question such as “Do you prefer hard g or soft g?”

  “Soft,” his mother had immediately answered, for she had no preference and knew that thinking about it would not reveal one.

  “Really?” he said, disappointed. “I prefer hard.”

  “They’re both fine sounds,” she said. “You wouldn’t have giraffes without soft.”

  It had not occurred to him that things could not—even did not—exist without names. “What would happen to them?” he asked finally.

  “Who?” said his mother. She was often distracted.

  “The giraffes,” he said. “What would happen to them?”

  “Nothing would happen to them. They just wouldn’t be giraffes.”

  “What would they be?”

  “Well, of course they would be giraffes. They just wouldn’t be called giraffes.”

  A farmer drove by, lifting his index finger at them, which was how people waved in Mortonville. Aaron waved back.

  His mother had told him once that his grandmother, the pack rat, had phoned the hospital right after he was born to suggest a name for him. Lars. Sometimes he tried to think of himself as a boy who came when his mother called “Lars!,” who printed Lars at the top of each page of homework and was intimate with a capital L. No, he had concluded, Lars would be a different boy and there would be no Aaron.

  Another time he asked his mother, “Do you know about sometimes y?” But that time she was tired from doing nothing all day.

  “Why what?” she said.

  “The letter y,” he said, about to explain, but she turned to him and snapped, “No nonsense today, Aaron.” After a few more steps, she said, “I’m not myself. I have a headache,” so they walked the rest of the way in silence.

  The headaches were why his mother rested so much. He had seen her lying in bed pushing her palms against the sides of her head in an attempt to make the pounding stop. He had never had a headache, not that he could remember, but he knew that she was in pain. He was good at imagining what others were feeling. It came naturally to him, this desire to be inside someone else’s head, to escape his own.

  One afternoon he tiptoed down the hallway to his mother’s room, carrying a cold washcloth. He’d wrung it out carefully: if he twisted too much, it would be tepid before he reached her, but neither did he want water running down her face and onto the pillow. In the last year, he’d become an expert at fashioning the perfect washcloth. His mother was lying with her eyes closed in the king-size bed that had belonged to the Packer boys’ parents. When he laid the washcloth on her eyes, she said, “Did I ever tell you about my name?” Her lips moved, but with her eyes covered the words did not seem to belong to her.

  He lay down beside her and stared at the ceiling. “No, you didn’t tell me,” he said.

  “Do you know what missionaries are?” she asked. He did know. His aunt had corresponded with missionaries. She had shown him the envelopes bearing stamps that were colorful and strange. “Well,” she said, “when I was just a bit older than you, maybe eight or nine, a missionary came to our town to raise money for her mission work.”

  “To Park Rapids?” he asked. Until recently, he had thought the town was called Park Rabbits, which he imagined as a grassy place full of benches and trees, people sharing picnics, and, of course, rabbits.

  “Yes, of course to Park Rapids,” his mother said impatiently. “Our teacher, Mrs. Olsen, invited the missionary to talk to us about the country where she’d lived for years. Guatemala, it was called. All of my classmates laughed when she said it. I didn’t laugh, but that didn’t really matter because the others did.”

  “Why did they laugh?”

  “Because of the way she said it. Gua-teh-mal-ah,” his mother intoned, imitating the missionary. “But they were really laughing because they were scared.”

  “Why were they scared?”

  “Because people feel scared sometimes when they have to think about the world.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess because there’s a lot to think about,” his mother said.

  “Does it scare you to think about the world?” he asked.

  Instead of answering, his mother said, “She was an unusual woman. Do you know what she was wearing? Denim jeans. It was maybe 1950, and the female teachers and students all had to wear dresses. That’s just now changing—do the girls in your class still wear dresses?”

  “Some of them wear scooter skirts.”

  “What in the world is a scooter skirt?”

  Aaron paused, feeling his face become hot. “It’s a special skirt so the boys can’t see the girls’ underwear. It has shorts underneath.”

  “Do the boys try to see the girls’ underwear?”

  “Some of them do. At recess usually, but also when they’re getting on the bus.”

  “Aaron, have you ever tried to look at a girl’s underwear?” his mother asked.

  “No,” he said, which was the truth. Sometimes he sat on his bed and studied his underwear, which was white and had a discreet opening for his penis, but he could find nothing interesting about it. If he ever became friends with any of the boys, he thought he would ask why they did it, spent so much time and risked getting in trouble as well for a glimpse of something that surely was as ordinary as their own.

  “You know how disappointed I’d be if I heard you were involved with anything like that,” his mother said. She pressed on the washcloth with her fingers.

  “Should I fix it?” he asked.

  “Please,” she whispered. He lifted the cloth gently and went down the hallway to the kitchen sink, where he thought the water ran cooler.

  “You were telling me about the missionary,” he said when he returned, “and about your name.” He settled the washcloth back across his mother’s eyes, and she whimpered.

  “Well, we came in from recess, and there she was at the front of the room. We all got quiet right away. Even Mrs. Olsen seemed a little scared of her.”

  “Because she was wearing jeans?”

/>   “I guess the jeans were part of it. We just knew she was different somehow, and then after everyone stopped laughing about Gua-teh-mal-ah, she pointed at the map and said, ‘Well, children, a nickel to the student who can actually point out Guatemala.’ We all just sat there, and she looked at us, one by one, challenging us to look away. I couldn’t help it—I looked down before she even got to me.

  “Finally, when she’d out-stared us all, she shouted, ‘Ha!’ and slapped her thigh. We all jumped. We weren’t used to adults acting that way. She said, ‘I see that your uniformly maintained ignorance does not amuse you nearly as much as the names of countries about which you know nothing, not even where they are located in this great world of ours.’ Then she turned to Mrs. Olsen and said, ‘I am wasting my time here.’ ”

  “What did Mrs. Olsen say?”

  “Nothing. That was the worst part. She just bowed her head. I couldn’t bear it because I knew where Guatemala was. In the evenings after I finished my schoolwork, I was allowed to spend ten minutes studying my father’s atlas. Mrs. Olsen knew this. She often sat with me at lunch, quizzing me on geography, but I was so shy in those days, and she didn’t want to put me on the spot.”

  “Did you go up and show her?” He wanted the story to end well, wanted his mother to rise as the hero and Mrs. Olsen to be redeemed.

  “I didn’t even raise my hand. I just ran up and pointed to Guatemala. You should have seen me. I was shaking so hard that my finger pattered against the map, but when the missionary reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a nickel, I took it. Then, as I turned to go back to my seat, she said, ‘What might your name be?’ I told her, and she said, ‘Ah, Dough-lor-ace,’ so grandly I didn’t even recognize my own name. Dough-lor-ace.” His mother laughed softly. “Aaron, do you know what my name means in Spanish?”

  “No,” he said. It shocked him to think of people saying his mother’s name but meaning something else altogether.

  “Pains. Dolores means pains. Isn’t that amazing? That people in other countries, countries like this Guatemala, are walking around saying my name when they stub their toes, or cut themselves, or visit the doctor. I think about that every day, Aaron—how lucky I was to have that missionary visit our class.”