After the Parade

by Lori Ostlund

  Finally, on a sweltering day in May, Aaron approached Roberta Klimek on the playground, where she stood by the monkey bars, alone like him. “Excuse me,” he said, the first words he had ever spoken to this girl whose fists he knew intimately, wanting to establish himself as a polite boy, a boy who said “excuse me” even to his tormentors, but as Roberta Klimek leaped on him and began to pound him with her fists, he knew that this trait was what flamed her hatred.

  His mother was summoned to a meeting attended by the principal, Mrs. Lindskoog, the school nurse, Aaron, Roberta Klimek, and her father, who sat beside his daughter with similarly clenched fists and explained that she was in training. She planned to become a boxer, and he supported her dream. That was the word he used—dream—and Aaron would always remember how everyone looked down at the floor at the very sound of it.

  “What can I do?” Aaron asked Clarence as he finished telling the story.

  “I’ve never had much success thwarting bullies,” Clarence told him, “though if it’s any consolation, bullies, in my experience, eventually tire of you and move on.”

  “It’s time to go,” said Aaron’s mother from the doorway of the sunroom. “I don’t like driving on gravel roads after dark.” It was not yet noon, so her comment made no sense, but Aaron did not say so. “Five minutes,” she said and left.

  “Please, Clarence,” he said. “Tell me about Olga’s tale of woe before we go.”

  “Impossible,” said Clarence. “Stories should never be told quickly. One must always leave time for creative embellishment and digression, or what are we left with?” He looked at Aaron, who shrugged. “The dreary facts. That’s what,” said Clarence. “And I can assure you that Olga deserves much more than the dreary facts.”

  Though Aaron would not grasp until he was much older that Clarence had been in love with Olga, he could see that Clarence would not be convinced to tell the story. Already his mother was yelling, “Right now, Aaron” from the other room, and so he took the handles of Clarence’s wheelchair one last time and pushed him down the hallway and onto the porch, where the four of them regarded one another awkwardly, as people often do when it is time to say good-bye.

  “Well,” said his mother as they pulled out of the driveway, one of Gloria’s doilies on the seat between them. “That’s finally over.”

  * * *

  He had always liked sleeping in cars, waking up in a different place. It was the closest he came to understanding the passage of time. He shut his eyes, listening to the pleasant sound of gravel rattling beneath the car. “What would you think if we moved?” his mother said.

  Aaron opened his eyes.

  “We already moved,” he said.

  “I mean into town. I’m thinking about buying the Trout Café. I’ve already talked to Frank, and he’s interested. We would live there.”

  Aaron tried to imagine it: he and his mother stretching out in the booths to sleep each night, awakening in them each morning, his mother going into the bathroom marked Ladies while he used the one for Men. “Do people live in cafés?” he asked.

  “We’ll live over it,” his mother said. “You’ll help me in the kitchen, washing dishes and chopping things. It’ll be a lot of work, you know, so I’ll need you.” It was only then that he understood what his mother meant. They were going to run the café the way that Frank did, frying hamburgers for people and bringing them ketchup and pie.

  “We don’t know how to live in a café,” he said.

  “We’ll learn,” his mother said. “Sometimes you’re such a scaredy cat.” She laughed, but he heard his father’s voice saying “chickenshit.” “I can cook,” she said. “Remember what I told you yesterday, about when I worked for the Goulds.”

  Only later, years later, did he understand that she had needed him to say the things she did not yet believe: that she could run a café and cook for people and be happy.

  “What will Frank do?” he asked instead.

  “Frank will retire. He’ll go fishing whenever he wants and sit in his garden. Maybe he’ll drop by for a cup of coffee sometimes. First, though, he’ll teach us everything we need to know.”

  “Like about the cash register?” Aaron asked.

  “Well, yes, the cash register, for one thing. And we’ll need to learn how to manage in such a large kitchen. I’ve got some ideas of my own also.”

  She sounded happy when she said this, happy to have her own ideas.

  “What kind of ideas?” he asked.

  “Oh, just some ideas about how to fix things. Frank’s getting old, and when people get old, they shouldn’t have to think about those things anymore. But we’re not old, are we?” she asked brightly. “For starters, I’d like to change the menu a little.”

  “Won’t Frank feel bad if we change the menu?”

  “Why would he feel bad, silly?” she said. “It will be our café. Besides, people expect change. They look forward to it.”

  He thought about Frank sitting at home in his garden, wondering what had been wrong with his menu. He tried to feel excited because his mother was, but he could not. He did not believe that people looked forward to change.

  February

  12

  * * *

  February started warm (unseasonably so said his colleagues), but over the course of a weekend, the temperature dropped thirty degrees. Aaron woke up late that Monday. There was not enough time to walk to school, and anyway, it depressed him to imagine the bison in Golden Gate Park huddled together on such a bleak day. He added a second sweater under his corduroy jacket and walked down to wait for the bus, which arrived late and fuller than usual, everyone on it subdued, the way people get when the weather has tricked them.

  His classroom was like stepping into a freezer vault. When Chisato arrived just after him, he greeted her, and his breath hung like smoke between them. “Excuse me,” he said because he was on his way downstairs to inquire about the lack of heat, but she blushed as if he were asking her to ignore some bodily indiscretion.

  Chisato had begun arriving earlier each day so that now she was often there when he came in, sitting in the half darkness of the room, her feet swinging above the floor. She was short, well under five feet, and coy about her age, though Marla had let slip that she was in her mid-forties. She often dressed like a teenager, a chaste teenager, in plaid skirts with fringe and knee-high boots, her hair held back by matching barrettes. That morning, she had on thin white gloves of the sort librarians wear for handling rare documents. Chisato did not interact with the other students, though they were friendly toward her. The Brazilian boys flirted, but Aaron knew that the flirting meant nothing. That was just the way the boys communicated, standing close and touching, laughing easily with their mouths wide open so that you could see their teeth. They all had beautiful teeth, white and not overly corrected the way American teeth were.

  At first, he had imagined that Chisato must be terribly homesick, here without family or friends, but as he got to know her, he decided that she was probably lonely in Japan also, that Chisato would be lonely wherever she went. When she started coming in early, he feared that she was developing a crush but soon realized that she viewed this time before class as an opportunity for individual instruction. He appreciated her studiousness yet had begun to feel oppressed by it and by the way she planned out precisely what she would say to him, obviously with the aid of a dictionary and a grammar book, so that even when she described simple things—her landlord’s dog or the bar where she played darts—she sounded like a child reciting a poem that she did not fully understand, her sentences technically correct but without the rhythm and inflection that imparted meaning.

  “I was quite moved,” she had told him recently, describing her first bowl of miso soup since leaving Japan, her delivery so lacking in spontaneity or proper inflection that he had understood neither the words nor the emotion they were meant to convey. At his urging, she repeated the story—three times, each telling exactly the same, right down to the i
ntonation of “I was quite moved”—and then, also at his suggestion, she had written those final words out on the board, along the bottom so that he had to crouch to read them.

  “Ah,” he said, finally understanding what she had been trying to tell him, though by then the words had meant nothing.

  Several of the teachers were already in Marla’s office, where she was explaining that Mr. Pulkka had come in during the night and placed a padlock on the small storage room that housed the heater controls. At the end of her explanation, she looked at her watch and announced enthusiastically, “It’s time for class,” not giving them the opportunity to complain. The teachers turned and went back to their freezing rooms. As Aaron climbed the stairs to the third floor, he thought about how Walter would have stayed right there in Marla’s office until heat had been restored because that was how Walter was. He argued and complained and made demands—to hotel clerks and customer service reps, managers and stewardesses—while Aaron stood by, looking apologetic and embarrassed but still, as Walter had always reminded him, ultimately benefiting from the results that Walter achieved.

  Aaron had never learned to be comfortable with anger—because of his father, he supposed—though Walter’s anger was nothing like his father’s. Walter did not get angry often, but when he did, he did not hide it from the world. On the contrary, anger was Walter’s way of getting everyone else to see what was right. It was a public event. Aaron understood all of this. He did. But understanding it did not change the way he felt, and the way he felt was sick inside every time he witnessed anger—not just Walter’s—or felt it rising in himself. He preferred to think of himself as someone who did not get angry, except that he did, his anger seeping out in small bursts of sarcasm or heightened politeness.

  Aaron found his students huddled at their desks, bundled up in coats and scarves so that he could not make out who was who at first. They peered at him, sure that he had rectified the problem because they believed he would not let them freeze. “It’s time to start class,” he said, echoing Marla without realizing it, and his students opened their notebooks and prepared to learn. Soon, Bart, a work-study student from Ukraine, appeared with a space heater in each hand. He plugged in the heaters, ceremoniously, one on each side of the room, and then loitered for a moment, like a luggage porter expecting a tip. The heaters’ singular effect was to remind the students that they were paying tuition to freeze. And they were freezing. Each time they answered a question, their words crystallized in the air, shocking the Brazilians and Thais in particular. After an hour of this, Aaron tossed his chalk on the desk and went back downstairs.

  “Come in,” Marla called when he knocked at her office door. As he opened it, a wave of heat rolled out.

  “I’m glad at least one of those space heaters works,” he said.

  In response, she flapped her arms, a gesture he interpreted as “shut the door and stop letting out the heat.” She had not yet taken down the Christmas lights above her desk, and they blinked off and on, making the sweat on her brow and nose glisten. He shut the door but remained standing, despite her suggestion that he sit, while he described the impossibility of teaching under such conditions. “They’re trying to take notes with mittens on,” he said. “It’s like watching some silly party game.”

  “Do something that doesn’t require writing,” Marla said. She sounded tired. “It’s supposed to warm up again by Wednesday.”

  “What are you saying? That Mr. Pulkka won’t turn the heat back on?”

  He knew that she had not asked. Taffy had told him that when Pulkka and Marla looked over the books together, Pulkka questioned each expense and hinted that he could always find a new director, someone less blind to waste. Their work relationship was complicated by the fact that they had dated briefly, years earlier. “She dropped him,” Taffy said, “so he enjoys making her feel insecure about her job, especially now that she’s divorced with two kids to support.” It shocked Aaron that Marla had confided in her employees about such things.

  “It’s more than just the wasted time,” he declared. He was still wearing both sweaters and the corduroy jacket and could feel the sweat pooling under his arms.

  Marla looked up, responding to his tone, but he did not know how to explain to her that it made him feel foolish, like a failure really, to stand there before his freezing students blowing warmth into his cupped hands as he scribbled sentences on the board, aware that they were all watching him, watching him accept these conditions. He looked at Marla, her desk piled high with papers, photos of her children on the walls, a sprig of mistletoe—he noticed it only then—hanging over her head.

  “Never mind,” he said. “The students are waiting.”

  * * *

  Lila was leading the class in calisthenics. She had become interested in what she called “American-style fitness” during the year she worked at Disney World. He waited for the class to complete a round of jumping jacks before announcing, “The heater is very broken. It cannot be fixed today.” He wanted to tell them the truth—that the owner had locked up the controls—but he maintained an old-fashioned belief in basic workplace loyalty, even when it seemed so obviously misplaced.

  They spent the rest of the morning playing the Culture Game, which he had invented when he was teaching at the community college in Albuquerque. The game, which required them to discuss questions that focused on small cultural differences between their countries and the United States, had started as a way to fill leftover minutes at the end of class, but his students had begged to play it at other times because they knew firsthand that the small differences were what bred confusion and distrust. Over the years he had created a lengthy list of questions, which he added to constantly:

  What should you do if you see an old man kicking a dog?

  When someone on the street asks for directions, should you make up directions if you are not sure how to get there, just to be polite?

  If you are invited to a friend’s house for dinner, should you help with the dishes?

  The rules were simple: he read a question aloud, blew his whistle, and the students rushed to discuss it with someone who was not from their country. Four minutes later, he blew the whistle again and the class reported their responses. Of course, they liked this part of the exercise, enjoyed explaining how things worked in their countries, but soon enough someone always asked, “What is the correct answer here in America, Aaron?” They liked to believe there was a correct answer.

  The cold had made the students listless, so Aaron began with this question: Is it okay to ask someone how much money he pays for rent? He had found that money questions had an energizing effect. Their answers were nuanced, most of them having to do with the motivation behind the asking. “Is not okay if you are just being nosy,” said Pilar, though she pronounced it “noisy.”

  When it was Aaron’s turn, he told them that once when he hosted a class party in Albuquerque, a Vietnamese student had inquired how much his house cost.

  “Were you embarrassed by this question?” Katya asked.

  He admitted that he had been.

  “This I do not understand,” said Katya. “Americans are thinking all the time about money but always they are saying it is bad manners to talk about money. Maybe if they are talking about money more, they will not be thinking all the time about it.”

  The others nodded.

  “Maybe,” Aaron said. He knew they were expecting a better answer than this, but he put the whistle to his mouth and blew. “Next question: Is it okay to drop in on a friend uninvited?” They had just learned the phrasal verb to drop in on, and he noted their excitement at encountering it.

  Ji-hun, one of the Korean students, began the group discussion by acknowledging that it was best to call ahead, his reasoning practical: one should not waste time driving to visit a friend who was not home. Beyond that, everyone agreed that it was okay—not just okay but a happy surprise. They seemed perplexed that it was even a question.

  Finally, Die
go asked, “And for Americans?”

  “It depends on the person,” Aaron said, an answer that always displeased them. They wanted a set of rules that they could draw upon without having to consider individual desires or preferences.

  “Is like this in London,” said Neto, one of the Brazilians. He had studied there for two years and claimed to miss it, but now he told them a story about an elderly couple who had lived in the apartment above his and invited him for dinner once a week and on holidays. “They were my family there,” Neto said. “But one day I received good news at school, and when I arrived at my apartment that night I went up to tell them. It was ten o’clock, and they were wearing their robes and watching television, which I knew because I can hear the television from my ceiling. I only go because I know they are awake and because I am very exciting, but they told me it was too late, that I should not come to their door like this, unannounced.”

  The others listened, but Aaron could tell from the way they shook their heads that this made no sense to them.

  “The next day,” Neto continued, “I told my news, and they made a special dinner. I did not tell them, never, that I felt so sad when they scolded me.”

  The class was quiet. Finally Paolo asked, “What is your idea about drop-in, Aaron?”

  He considered blowing his whistle or correcting one of their grammar errors, but he looked at his students there before him, coats zipped, hoods up, all of them shivering yet focused, wanting to know what he thought.

  “I do not like when people drop in,” he said.

  They shifted in their seats and waited for him to explain, but he could not tell them about the hostility he felt each time his doorbell rang unexpectedly, how he pressed himself against the wall out of sight or tiptoed into the bathroom and turned on the shower, hoping that the unwanted visitor would hear it and leave. Once he had even crouched under his desk until he was sure the person had gone.