by Lori Ostlund
“Oh, no. I mean when he was a baby. Our grandfather lived with us. He used to pick Clary up and talk to him when he cried late at night, and sometimes he’d hold him out the window so the rest of us wouldn’t be bothered by his fussing. But one night he dropped Clary. He was sure the fall was what made Clary little.”
“Clarence told me that story,” Aaron said. “After the wasps attacked me. Remember?”
Gloria nodded. “I made mustard compresses.”
He felt foolish, for of course she remembered. She remembered everything connected to his mother. He saw that now. He had not seen it as a boy, but Clarence had, and so had his mother. It was why she had come here. Sad Café Love, he thought. It was better to be the loved than the lover, if better meant easier, safer.
“You know, Clary hated nearly everyone, but especially children,” Gloria said. “I always thought it had to do with their size, but after you left that day, he told me he thought you might grow up to be ‘more bearable’ than most folks.”
She laughed and Aaron found himself joining her. His mother did not laugh. Gloria was the one who had cracked open.
* * *
His original plan had been to show up unannounced. He imagined something useful coming out of the surprise, but he had changed his mind when he arrived in the Twin Cities the night before, once he was back in Minnesota and could feel how easily he might lose his nerve, how he might drive back and forth past Gloria’s farm for an entire afternoon without ever pulling in. He needed something that would bind him to action, something beyond his own weakening resolve, so he took out the telephone number Bill had given him and dialed it from his hotel near the airport.
Gloria had answered. “Yut,” she said, and he said, “This is—” and she said, “Aaron,” as though she had been sitting there by the telephone waiting for him to call.
“Yes,” he said. “This is Aaron,” and then, not knowing what to say next, he added, “Her son,” using the pronoun even though they had not yet mentioned his mother because his mother was all they had between them.
“I’ll put her on,” Gloria said. Her breathing was off, wheezy.
“No,” he said. “Just let her know I’m coming.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”
“All right, then,” Gloria said. She did not say that his mother would be happy to see him or that they looked forward to his arrival. He appreciated the lack of pleasantries.
The hotel was not in an area conducive to walking. This he had learned during check-in, when he asked the woman at the front desk—her nametag said IRENE—what restaurants were in walking distance. She looked at him as though he were asking about strip clubs or how to obtain a sexual partner. The last time he’d stayed in a hotel was in Needles. He remembered the way Britta had regarded him as he signed in; he’d been too tired to operate a pen, unable to recall his address, the one in Albuquerque that he was leaving behind. Perhaps it was just the nature of people who worked front desks to act skeptical and uninterested, to make clear that hospitality had its limits.
“Walking distance?” Irene said. She slid a list of restaurants across the counter. The nearest was three miles away. She put an X beside two she thought might still be open at this hour. It wasn’t even late, nine o’clock, still seven on his watch, which he had not moved ahead when the pilot suggested they do so just before landing. He was sure that he would not be in Minnesota long enough to make it worth the effort of losing and then regaining time.
He was not hungry enough to do everything required to obtain food: get back into the rental car, follow a map, enter a restaurant filled with people, some of whom he would need to interact with in order to procure a meal. Instead, he took his suitcase to his room and set it on the bed, sat down next to it, stood up and paced, and sat again. It was then that he had called Gloria’s number, but when he finished talking to her, he still felt restless. He knew this had to do with the flight, on which he had occupied a window seat for four hours, his knees pressing hard against the seat in front of him. Despite his long legs, he always requested the window. He had come to flying as an adult and hated it, hated especially the moment when the plane veered onto the runway and he could see the long expanse of tarmac before him. The engines revved, the plane lurched forward, faster and faster, while he considered the sheer impossibility of it all. Walter, by contrast, got on a plane, took out a book, and began to read, as calmly as if he were in his study at home. Aaron supposed Walter’s calmness should have made him calmer, but it never had. The only thing that made him calmer was staring out the window with a steady focus that kept the plane moving down the runway and into the air.
He left his room and began walking briskly up and down the hallways of the hotel. Until San Francisco, he had never lived so close to strangers. It both shocked and impressed him to know that people did not alter their behavior around the fact of this proximity. The Ngs continued to scream their discontentment day after day, night after night, despite the fact that he, a stranger, lay below them, while behind each door of this hotel, there were televisions on too loud, children crying, even a dog barking. He did not understand people who traveled with dogs. As he paced, he heard other sounds, private sounds: gas being passed, a man saying, “I’m ashamed to even know you,” people moaning. In room 208, a woman panted the word bigger over and over in a rhythmic, unsettling way. It seemed an impossible demand.
On the landing between the second and third floors he discovered a vending machine. There was nothing in it that he wanted, but he bought two bags of pretzels, a bag of M&M’S, and Cheetos. Back in his room, he emptied everything into the ice tub and began to eat, going from the salty pretzels to the chocolate to the chemical flavor of the Cheetos. Finally, he washed the orange Cheetos powder from his hands and picked up the telephone again, dialing from memory. It was almost eleven, but he knew Winnie would be awake, stretched out on her gerebog, a coffinlike, wheeled rice chest from Java. It had taken four large Samoan men to get it into her living room. When they set it down, they were coated with sweat and collapsed onto it, filled with admiration for its solidness. At night after everyone went to bed, even the dog, Winnie lay atop the gerebog reading, for though she loved Thomas and her boys deeply, she said that part of maintaining that love was knowing to end her day alone.
Aaron listened to the phone ringing, imagined her resting her book across her stomach as she reached for it. Then, “Hello,” she said, right into his ear. She sounded tired, and he wanted to hang up, understanding his own selfishness. She said hello again, and when he still did not reply, she said, “Aaron, is that you?”
“Winnie,” he said. “I’m here. I’m in Minnesota.” And he began to sob.
* * *
It was Gloria who asked him to stay for supper. His mother had gone out to feed the animals, the three dogs as well as the geese and chickens they still kept. They had gotten rid of everything else, Gloria said. It was too much work for a couple of old spinsters. He had not offered to help his mother. He needed a few minutes away from her. He asked Gloria what he could do to assist her with the meal, but she said she had her own way of doing things in the kitchen and did not really know how to factor another person into it, so he stood awkwardly off to the side watching her.
“My mother doesn’t help with the cooking?” he finally asked.
Gloria had taken a pint box of fish fillets out of the freezer and was running hot water over it. “I guess you like sunfish?” she said.
“I haven’t had them in a while.” He did not want her to think he hadn’t had them because he didn’t like them, so he added, “They’re not easy to come by in San Francisco.”
The truth was that he thought of sunfish as specific to his childhood, along with lutefisk, which his mother had served in place of meatballs as the Thursday special the last two weeks before Christmas. She prepared it with boiled potatoes and a white sauce of butter, flour, and water, and on the side was a s
heet of potato lefse, everything on the plate as white as snow. Then she added string beans and lingonberry sauce, the green and red giving the plate a holiday feel. On those two Thursday nights, people lined up outside the café to get in.
“Why don’t you serve lutefisk every night?” he had asked.
“That’s not the way it works,” she said. “Folks are only this interested because I don’t serve it every night. That’s human nature. Besides, I couldn’t stand the smell of it every day.”
His mother hated fish. Didn’t Gloria know this?
“Your mother caught these sunfish last summer,” Gloria said.
“My mother caught them?” he said. She had also hated fishing, though she had gone only once that he knew of, with his father when they stayed at Last Resort on their honeymoon. She had told him the story of that trip numerous times, and always she stressed that she had never been so aware of her life ticking away as when she sat in that boat waiting for a fish to bite.
“Sure,” Gloria said. “All summer long she’s out on the lake. Winter too. She’s got a fish house that one of the neighbor boys hauls out with his truck after the lake’s solid. He gets it all set up for her—puts in the stove, stacks some wood, drills a few holes, brings in her card table and chair. Every morning she packs sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, and I don’t see her until bedtime most days.”
Gloria worked a butter knife between the fillets. “Try not to judge her too harshly,” she said now that her back was to him. She plugged in a frying pan and dropped a chunk of Crisco into it. As it melted, she dredged the fillets in flour and then lined them up in the pan. “Anyway,” she said, “she’s a different person.”
At supper his mother dished up several fillets of the sunfish and ate them without comment. “How’s work?” she asked him.
“Do you even know what I do for a living?” he said. He took a bite of his fish and thought about how much better it would be fried in butter.
“Yes,” said his mother. “Actually, I do. I know some things about you, you know, about your life.”
“How?” he said. “How do you know these things about me?” He knew that she was lying.
“Well,” she said. “I shouldn’t say how I know because that involves other people, and it’s always best not to involve others, but I know you’re a teacher.”
She put another piece of fish into her mouth and swallowed quickly without chewing, which was what he did when someone served him onions and there seemed no polite way to avoid them. Gloria was wrong. His mother had not changed. She still hated fish. Except now she was a person who would pretend she did not hate fish, which meant Gloria was right. He felt his chin quiver, which meant he was about to cry. He did not want to cry, not here in front of his mother. He was no longer the same person either, and he did not want her to think he was, to think he was still the boy who cried about everything. At a dinner party once a doctor had told him a trick she used to keep herself from crying when giving families bad news. She pushed out her jaw. He tried it, and it worked. He turned to Gloria and said, “Supper was very good. Thank you for cooking and for inviting me to join you.”
“You were always so polite,” said his mother. “That was another reason the kids were afraid of you.”
“No, that’s why they didn’t like me,” he said. “When you’re polite to people who don’t deserve it, they think you’re mocking them.”
“I think Aaron has lovely manners, Dee,” Gloria said. “We’re just not used to such things.” She stood and began stacking the dishes, and Aaron rose to help her. His mother sat staring down at her plate, but Aaron took it from her and carried it into the kitchen. A few small bones from her fish were lined up and teetering on the rim.
“Aaron,” said Gloria, “you’ll stay the night.”
It was after eight. He could not imagine leaving now, trying to locate a town big enough to have a motel. “Thank you,” he said. “You’re sure it’s no trouble?”
“It’s no trouble,” said Gloria. “We’ll put you in Clary’s room.” They heard his mother’s chair scrape back from the table. She did not say good night.
* * *
It was just as he remembered, the shelves of books with their spines turned in, keeping their titles to themselves. He sat on the bed, Clarence’s bed, and laughed at the memory of his young self advising Clarence to turn the titles outward. In the corner beside the desk, turned inward like a naughty child, was Clarence’s wheelchair, the afghan that had covered his legs folded neatly across the back. Aaron rose from the bed and gripped the chair’s handles, recalling how he had maneuvered it so carefully down the hallway while Clarence berated him for his clumsiness.
He could hear Gloria moving around the house, closing up for the night. His mother used to engage in a similar routine when he was a boy, a routine that had angered his father, who liked bedtime to be a fast transition into sleep. After checking the doors and windows, she would pause longest at the oven, staring at the dials, and then, still unconvinced, she would open the door and put her head inside. From his bed, Aaron had listened for these familiar sounds, even though the routine often ended with his father screaming, “It’s off.” Once, as his mother crouched before the oven, head inside, his father had come up behind her and pushed her in. Aaron had seen it happen. He was standing in the kitchen doorway, needing another glass of water, but he had crept back to bed with his empty glass.
His day had started in a nondescript airport hotel in Minneapolis and was ending in Clarence’s bedroom. He imagined he would lie awake all night, trying to sort through everything that had happened in between. In fact, he fell asleep immediately. When he awakened—minutes or hours later—he moved from deep sleep to consciousness quickly, aware of something, a presence there in the dark. It was the sort of dark that seemed both vast and one-dimensional, and he stretched his hand into it, colliding with something hard—metal and rubber. It was Clarence’s wheelchair, pulled up beside the bed.
In the iron ore mine when he was five, the Finns had pointed out stalactites, which he did not touch, though he had imagined how they would feel: cold and smooth and slick. He had thought of the stalactites when he laid his finger on Clarence’s tusk. But had the tusk been slick? He could not remember, the tactile part of the memory simply gone. How was it possible to lose part of a memory, for one of the senses to stop contributing? If he reached out into the darkness again, would his fingers remember how Clarence’s tusk had felt in the seconds before Aaron said, “I love them,” or in the seconds after?
Clarence had been crying. He understood this only now.
“Aaron,” said a voice from the dark, “why are you here?” It was his mother.
23
* * *
She had awakened him like this once before, when he was five. Nearly five. It was New Year’s Eve. His father had had to work the night shift, and he and his mother stayed up late watching television and eating popcorn with an ease that felt festive, neither of them saying aloud what they both knew: it was his father’s absence that made it feel like a holiday. He did not remember falling asleep, but he woke up in his bed, the room dark, his mother beside him. “Welcome to the seventies, Aaron,” she said. She smelled of alcohol, though she was not a drinker, and crackers. He recognized both as she leaned close to kiss his forehead, the latter an everyday smell that he associated with soup and upset stomachs, the former a rarer odor that occasionally wafted from his father’s glass at the supper table. She remained there with him a long while, her breathing unsteady, her hand warm on his brow, before she stood and whispered, “Don’t be afraid of the world.” Years later he thought that she had been talking to them both.
“I’m not sure why I’m here,” Aaron said. “All these years, I’ve never tried to find you.” He could not see her face or gauge her reaction. Maybe that had been her plan all along—to wait for darkness, believing it would make them both braver. “When I thought of you, I sometimes thought of you alive and other times,
dead.” Or maybe she had awakened him from the fog of sleep in order to have the upper hand. “But mainly I didn’t think about you.” Only then did he consider that she had no plan, that she had gone to bed, expecting to sleep, but the need to talk had overwhelmed her.
She did not respond, which unnerved him, though he recalled from his childhood this manner of listening that involved silence. It was not particular to his mother. He was the one who had changed, who had come to believe that a person had to say he was listening in order to be listening.
“Walter always felt I should look for you,” he went on, filling the silence. “But that was Walter.”
It was the first time he had referred to Walter. He decided that he would provide no clauses or parentheticals to establish the details of his life, to explain who Walter was, who he was. He would not make it easy for her.
“How did you and Walter meet?” asked his mother, surprising him.
“In the café.” He took pleasure in revealing that Walter was someone for whom she had once cooked. He did not explain the rest of the story, how he had met Walter again after she left, how they had come to live together and be lovers. Let her wonder.
“So you’re a homosexual,” she said at last.
He had always hated the word homosexual, which tended to be used by those uncomfortable with the compactness of gay, those requiring just a few more syllables. “Well, yes,” he said. “I believe that’s been established.”
“It was Walter,” she said.
“What was?”
“Walter was the one who told me things about you—that you were a teacher, that you were good at it, that you had moved to San Francisco.”
“You talked to him?”
“No,” said his mother. “He wrote to me.”
“When?”
“After you left.” She sighed. “But also once before that. Maybe ten years ago. You had just moved to New Mexico, and he wanted me to know that you were fine, that you were a good teacher and a good person. I still remember what he wrote: Aaron’s students love and respect him. He’s great at what he does. He is a compassionate human being.”
