by Lori Ostlund
Of course, he knew what perspicacious meant, but he did not know how to convey this to her or whether she would make too much of his doing so. “I know what perspicacious means,” he blurted out finally.
She chuckled. “Good,” she said. “Because I want to show you something.”
They stood, and she unlocked and opened the door. The television in the living room was still loud, but she held a finger to her lips as they tiptoed down the hallway to the next door. She opened it, and he felt her hand on his arm, pushing him inside, into the darkness. The door shut. He heard it locking, her hand fluttering against the wall until she found the light switch.
They were in the bathroom, and he could not look at Mrs. Bergstrom, not with the toilet right there, close enough to touch. She took a flashlight from a cupboard and knelt beside the toilet, putting her hand on the seat to steady herself, and then she looked up at him. “Come,” she said sternly. And so he knelt beside her. “What do you see?” she asked, shining the flashlight on the floor around the base of the toilet. She sounded hopeful, and he bent closer, noticing dirt and small bits of toilet paper as well as a few tightly coiled gray hairs. Pubic hairs! The sight of them made his throat constrict and he gasped for air.
“You see it?” Mrs. Bergstrom asked in an excited whisper, for she had heard it as the gasp of discovery.
“See what?” He felt miserable.
“The urine,” Mrs. Bergstrom said, her voice low and urgent. She leaned forward, her face hovering above the toilet bowl as if she were about to drink from it or bob for apples. “Every time Father comes in here, it’s all over the floor, and I have to come right in after him and clean.”
“Maybe he can’t help it,” Aaron said.
“I don’t mind cleaning it up.” She sounded angry. “It’s the way he acts, telling me I’m crazy, that I’m imagining things.” She tapped her finger on the seat. “Well, this afternoon I didn’t clean up after him. I knew you were coming, so I left it.”
Aaron looked away, studying the pattern that the linoleum made, trying to make sense of where the lines ended and began. “Yes,” he said. “I see it.”
Mrs. Bergstrom gave a low, growling laugh. “I knew it,” she said and then, “Help me up.” She extended her arm as though inviting him to admire a new watch, and Aaron stood and took her arm, supporting her as she struggled to her feet.
He wanted desperately to wash his hands, but he thought that doing so would be regarded somehow as impolite. “My mother needs me,” he said instead, and Mrs. Bergstrom unlocked the bathroom door, and they went back down the hallway and into the living room, where Mr. Bergstrom still sat beneath the afghan watching the news.
“Were you any help?” he asked Aaron, shouting over the television.
“Not much,” said Mrs. Bergstrom, answering for him, and the Bergstroms laughed together while he bent to put on his shoes.
“Good night then,” Aaron said.
“Yes,” said the Bergstroms.
Aaron switched off their porch light, which had been on this whole time, and stepped out into the darkness. Once again, he paused to peer through the picture window at the Bergstroms, who sat huddled beneath the afghan, collapsing in on each other like melting snowmen. He tried to assign a word to what he saw, to what he felt, but he did not know the word to describe the way that the Bergstroms sat on their sofa, an afghan and a dead son between them, or the soft ache of his own heart.
* * *
When Aaron returned to the café from the Bergstroms’ that evening, Jim Evarold was already there, sitting in his booth. Every Thursday night, while his wife was off at her weekly Weight Watchers meeting, Jim came, sat in the corner booth, and spent a long time staring at the menu. He assessed his options carefully, even though he always chose the special, meatballs, waiting until Aaron’s mother turned toward the kitchen to add, “And a large milk. And some of those Tater Tots.” He always seemed sheepish about his order, perhaps ashamed to be wanting Tater Tots while his wife was off discussing calories and the hollowness of desire, and Aaron’s mother always turned back to him and asked, “That all, Jim?” in a voice that Aaron found aggressive, almost bullying.
Jim Evarold pretended to consider the menu a bit longer then, before clearing his throat to make his usual plea: “Can’t you change the Thursday special to meatloaf?”
“Meatloaf is Friday night,” his mother replied, her voice sour from tending to people’s needs all day. “They’re the same, Jim. Just different shapes.”
Jim Evarold would look at his hands or touch the napkin dispenser and mumble, “But meatloaf doesn’t jump all over the plate when I cut it.”
Aaron supposed some form of this conversation had taken place before he arrived, for Jim Evarold sat with his food already before him. Later, when he picked up Jim’s plate, wiped clean, as usual, of the unwieldy meatballs and the ignominious Tater Tots, he found a scrap of tinfoil resting on the rim. Jim did not mention the tinfoil, which was about the size of a thumbnail, but Aaron knew that it had come from his food. He blew it to the floor, not wanting his mother to see it and be ashamed.
Over the next several weeks, more detritus washed up on the shores of Jim Evarold’s otherwise empty plates: a snippet of butcher string, a scrap of wax paper, rubber bands, twist ties. Still, Jim said nothing, though it was clear that he left them on the plate for Aaron to find. Aaron dispensed with each surreptitiously. Finally, after two months of this, Aaron picked up Jim Evarold’s empty plate one evening and discovered a bristle as delicate as a fish bone teetering on its edge. It was too small to have come from any of the brushes that his mother used in the kitchen to clean the grill or scrub potatoes. He held it on the tip of his finger, wanting to breathe it away with a wish. Instead, he brought it to his mother, who stared at it as though it were an object that had been missing for many years, something she had learned to live without so well that its reappearance now seemed a burden.
“Must be from the vegetable scrubber,” she said at last, turning to flip a hamburger.
Aaron went upstairs and into the bathroom, where their toothbrushes hung from a rack. He reached for his mother’s brush and held the bristle beside it. It matched. He had known it would. What it meant was this: his mother had extracted the bristle from her toothbrush and taken it downstairs, then had cooked Jim Evarold’s meatballs with the bristle inside. She had done this intentionally, and as he pictured the whole sequence of events, he was afraid, for he accepted—somehow only then—how deeply unhappy his mother was. Her despair was like a snowball rolling downhill, growing bigger, moving faster, while he stood at the top of the hill watching it go. He was powerless to stop it.
Yet she had put the bristle in Jim Evarold’s food, marking the world in this small way with her unhappiness, and he wanted to believe that there was something hopeful in her need to do so. He did not know why she had focused on Jim Evarold, whom everyone in town liked, including, as far as he knew, his mother. Jim was a quiet man. He was polite but never appeared to want company, and others accepted this. They greeted him as they passed his booth and moved on.
Just before he and his mother moved to town, Jim’s brother, Matthew Evarold, had killed himself. The skeleton of the story was this: one day after his wife had gone to Florence with the two youngest children, Matthew Evarold went into the barn, looped a rope over a rafter, stood on a feed bucket, and then kicked the bucket out from beneath him. Perhaps he had hoped for someone else to discover his body, but it was his children, returning from school, who found him. Aaron occasionally rode the bus, so he knew where the Evarold family lived, just one stop before his own. Their driveway was long and straight, a dirt path with grass growing down the middle, the house and barn at the end. Aaron imagined the four oldest children trudging up the path that afternoon, laughing and kicking at the grass running down the middle, even as their father was already dead, hanging in the barn directly ahead of them. What had continued to shock Aaron was the way that these two realities could
exist side by side, could share the same moment: a man swinging from a rafter in a barn, and his children, laughing and teasing each other just outside.
As a teenager and then as an adult, Aaron had often felt deeply alone and discouraged, had even encouraged himself to feel worse by convincing himself that no one would miss him if he ceased to exist, but those feelings never moved toward the realm of action, for the thought of not existing terrified him. Still, he felt no anger toward people who did consider suicide—who considered it, attempted it, even committed it—which was not the way that people in Mortonville had responded to Matthew Evarold’s suicide. They said he had killed himself because he was selfish, but when Aaron thought about what selfish meant, what his dictionary said, “Seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others,” he could not reconcile these words—advantage and pleasure, which brought to mind a man grabbing some coveted prize, elbowing others out of the way and claiming the pleasure of it for himself—with the image of a man going into a barn, stepping up on a bucket, and hanging himself.
“Jim took his brother’s death very hard,” his mother told him one night after Jim Evarold had eaten his meatballs and Tater Tots and gone home to the wife who wished more than anything to be thin. “He felt he should have done something to help him.”
“Like what?” Aaron asked. He wondered how his mother knew this.
“Oh, I don’t know. Tried to make him happy I guess.”
“How?” he asked.
“Listen, Aaron,” she said. “You can’t make other people happy. It’s silly to try.”
“Why is it silly?” he asked.
“Because it is,” she said. “And because it will just make you feel like a failure.”
20
* * *
When his mother and Pastor Gronseth disappeared, people in Mortonville felt betrayed, not just by their pastor, to whom they had confessed their problems, but by his mother as well. She knew things about them, secrets that she learned not because she pried but because while she poured coffee and took orders she overheard their stories of an uncle who had done something shameful or a child who had gone away and never come back. It made people feel vulnerable to think that two people who knew so much about them had left together, and this vulnerability translated into distrust, aimed at Aaron because he was the one left behind.
Throughout the following year, whenever he walked into Swenson’s Variety Store to pick up something for Mrs. Hagedorn, the cashier would stop speaking midsentence. “Why, hello, Aaron Englund,” she would call out in an artificially loud voice, and the aisles would fall silent. It was the same when he and Rudy went to pick up plumbing supplies at Bildt Hardware, except in this case it was Rudy shouting back to the men in the office, letting them know Aaron was with him because he feared they might be saying cruel things that a son should not hear about his mother. But the worst was going into the post office, where the postmistress, who stood hunched behind the counter in her blue sweater, announced shrilly, “Nothing for you, Aaron.” Though he pretended that he was there only to retrieve the Hagedorns’ mail, he felt sick with disappointment, which he hid with a smile because he knew that the postmistress reported on his mail, his lack of mail, to the rest of Mortonville. Everyone knew that his mother had not written to him.
At school, it was suggested by first one teacher and then another that he make weekly visits to Mr. Brisk, who came in Tuesday and Thursday afternoons because two afternoons a week was the most guidance the school could afford, perhaps the most it felt was needed. Aaron met with him twice, not because he wanted to but because the visits were already arranged. He had always been obedient about such things. They sat in Mr. Brisk’s office, which had originally been conceived as a ticket booth. It had one window, through which the exchange of money—admission to sporting events and school plays—had taken place. It was this office that Bernice would describe just months later on Christmas Eve, and he never let on that he could picture it all: the office’s smallness, the rickety chair on which one sat, knees jammed up against Mr. Brisk’s desk.
At the first meeting, Mr. Brisk asked Aaron in a general way about his mother, and Aaron said that running the café had made her tired, though she had never said such a thing, at least not the way he made it sound to Mr. Brisk, like she had fled out of sheer exhaustion. The second time they met, Mr. Brisk asked him how he felt about his mother running away with the pastor, but he did not know whether Mr. Brisk was putting emphasis on the running away part or the pastor part.
Aaron did not believe that his mother and Pastor Gronseth had run away because they were in love. He had sat with them all those nights in the café, listening to them talk while he did homework, and he knew that they had come together out of loneliness, both of them incapable of forging friendships with the people around them because these people were their customers. Pastor Gronseth’s customers, his congregants, came to him because they needed his reassurance about their children and marriages and jobs, believing that his reassurance meant something. They brought him maple syrup and freshly slaughtered chickens, but they came with their own needs in mind. What they did not want, could not bear, was to know any details of their pastor’s personal life in return.
Many nights, the two of them talked about forgiveness, which Pastor Gronseth said people were keen on, though his opinion was that forgiveness should be difficult to earn. Otherwise, people were too easy on themselves: they acted without considering the consequences, knowing that they could simply request forgiveness later. He likened it to declaring bankruptcy, which allowed you all the fun of spending while other people dealt with the fallout. He had once been that sort of man, he told Aaron’s mother, a man who left his first wife and their three children because he was tired of the way things were, bored, if you wanted to get right down to it. He had explained all about his past to the church board before he took the job in Mortonville. The three first children visited on holidays and sat in the front pew beside his second wife and their half brother, a loud boy whom none of them liked. Pastor Gronseth had been forgiven by everyone, but he was not sure that he had learned his lesson.
Aaron looked at the two filing cabinets against the wall of Mr. Brisk’s office, cabinets that contained notes on everyone in the school, and then he looked back at Mr. Brisk. “I think Pastor Gronseth needed a ride, and my mother had a car. Pastor Gronseth didn’t want to steal the car from his wife and son.”
After Pastor Gronseth left, there was nothing for the wife and son in Mortonville. They lived in the parsonage, which meant that with him gone, their right to occupy the house was also gone, and though the matter had been handled with delicacy, the church trustees had nonetheless been dispatched to the parsonage to clarify the matter. The wife and son continued to attend church, sitting in the front row each Sunday as pastors from nearby parishes stepped in to give the weekly sermon. All of this Aaron knew from Mrs. Hagedorn, who was Catholic but knew what the Lutherans were up to.
Aaron made a point to avoid the son at school as well as the part of town where the parsonage was located, but one day when he was out taking a walk, the wife and son pulled up beside him and the two of them stared at him through the closed car window. Finally, the wife said something to the son, who rolled down his window.
“Where did they go?” she called across her son to Aaron.
Aaron crouched beside the son’s window in order to see both of them. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, they’ll end up in hell eventually,” Pastor Gronseth’s wife said, and his son nodded. They raised the window and drove off. The next day they too were gone.
* * *
On the morning of Tuesday, March 13, his forty-second birthday and his first alone, Aaron awakened early to the rare and disorienting sound of his telephone ringing. His first thought was to wonder not who was calling but why he had even installed a telephone. “The human voice carries entirely too far as it is,” Mark Twain had s
aid upon the invention of the telephone, words Aaron had repeated to Walter frequently in trying to explain the hostility that a ringing telephone invoked in him.
The origin of his phone antipathy lay in two incidents that had occurred twenty years earlier, when they were still living in Minnesota, the first while he was in college. As he spoke on the telephone to a classmate from his humanities class about a project on which they had been paired, he heard the distinct sound of a toilet flushing on the other end, a sound that, in retrospect, gave meaning to a series of grunts he had discerned earlier in the conversation. It had shocked him to know that while he and this stranger, Franklin (after the president), discussed a mediocre book about an environmental utopia, Franklin had been defecating. It was as if he had been in the bathroom with Franklin.
His distaste for the instrument deepened two years later, as he sat one afternoon in the Democratic headquarters in Moorhead, cold calling on behalf of a candidate whose virtues he could no longer recall. He spent a dull few hours reading from a script that encouraged others to join him in supporting Shirley Lund for state senate, and to amuse himself he invented stories about the people on the list: Marsha Norquist collected antique quilts; Jerold Harvey liked portly cats and bingo; Howard Hofbrau, plagued by a flamboyant name, had become increasingly retiring over the years.
As he dialed the final name on his list, Sadie Thompson, he could not move into the more liberating realm of fiction, for he had known a Sadie in Mortonville, Sadie Sandstrom, a woman in her eighties who painted customized landscapes, though what he remembered most was the way she dressed, in a tweed jacket and men’s dress shirt with a loosely knotted tie. The Sadie who answered his unsolicited call that day was also elderly, her voice like chalk, dry and constantly breaking. She was crying, he realized, sobbing to be specific, and he wanted to hang up, but instead he asked whether she was okay.
