After the Parade

by Lori Ostlund

  His favorite restaurant was T-28, a Macau diner, the name a handy mnemonic derived from its location at the corner of Taraval and Twenty-Eighth. At T-28, nobody asked how he was, only what he wanted. He found this deeply appealing and had eaten there every night his first week in San Francisco, drawn to the lack of pleasantries and inexpensive food, until the bubble burst: low on cash, he missed a night, and when he returned, the waitress slapped down his menu and said, “Hey, long time no see.” He imagined her sitting in an ESL class, memorizing such expressions and waiting for an opportunity to use them, to say, “Breakfast special already finished. Early bird gets the worm.” He did not begrudge her the chance to use her knowledge, but he missed the way it had been.

  His morning walk took him down Noriega Street, where he stopped in front of a bank to read the exchange rates posted in the front window, noting which countries’ currencies were listed, because this told him something about his neighborhood, and which currencies had risen or fallen, because this told him something about the world. From Noriega, he walked over several blocks to Golden Gate Park, where he lingered longest. Often, the bison were out, a herd that was kept there—in the middle of a city—to commemorate the lost American frontier. He liked to watch them and think about the irony of this. His last stop before exiting the park was a lake, man-made, where he sat on a bench watching a group of elderly Chinese doing tai chi, teenagers smoking pot before school, and a boy and his grandfather who came frequently, though not every morning, to motor a toy sailboat across the lake.

  He preferred to begin his days in silence and found that walking to work eased him into the world. There was also the fare he saved by not taking the bus. He worried about money now that he was on his own, not because he had relied on Walter—he had not—but there was something reassuring about a household with two incomes. Mainly, he was avoiding the bus because of the twins, who were always on board. He had come to suspect that they had no destination, that riding the bus was what they did, the way that other people went to jobs.

  The twins were identical. They dressed alike, usually in zippered, gray sweaters over emerald green cowboy shirts with snap buttons, and groomed each other like cats, one tamping down the other’s cowlick with moistened fingertips, straightening his collar, rebuttoning his shirt, zipping his sweater to a point just above the heart. It was as though the public nature of the bus allowed them to more fully enter their own secret world. Aaron could not look away.

  Twins were popping up everywhere. In class, Yoshi, who had recently become the father of fraternal twins, raised his hand to note that twins were highly unusual in Japan. Only here in America did you see twins with regularity, said Pilar, the Spaniard, turning Yoshi’s children into a by-product of their parents’ temporary expatriation. Several of her classmates nodded in vehement agreement.

  Aaron knew that he should point out the obvious: the United States was nothing more than an aggregate of the world’s populations and it seemed unlikely that the genetic capabilities of these same populations would change so drastically on American soil. But he did not disabuse the class of its theory, for he had noticed that the students were sometimes skeptical of his views on topics other than grammar. They would not be convinced, for example, that homelessness was not caused by laziness or that Americans did not all eat old food, as one of the Bolors had suggested.

  “What is ‘old food’ anyway?” he had asked, perplexed by the deceptive simplicity of the words.

  “Food that is old,” another student said, because they all understood the charge being made. In fact, they had an arsenal of anecdotal evidence, stories of host mothers who prepared frozen waffles with expiration dates years past, of babysitting for families who ate around mold and expected them to do the same. He tried to explain that they were arguing from exception, assuring them that most Americans did not eat spoiled food or feed it to guests, but he stopped because he saw that they needed to believe these things. They spent their days cleaning houses and delivering pizzas to people who counted change in front of them, convinced of their dishonesty or inability to subtract, or, more likely, some combination of the two, being told—as they accepted a fifty-three-cent tip—how grateful they must feel to be in this country.

  And generally they were grateful. They were young, most of them, and thought about their lives the way that young people do: with anticipation and the sense that their futures would build like symphonies, one great note following the next. But there was a difference between feeling grateful and having gratitude demanded of you.

  * * *

  Aaron encountered his first twins the summer he was five, when he and his parents embarked on a two-week vacation marked by long stretches in the car, six or seven hours at a time. It was hot that summer, and they rarely spoke as they drove, which had less to do with the heat than with the sort of family they were. Along the way, he learned to read his first words—stop, population, and vacancy—but mainly he stared at the back of his father’s head, bristly with its policeman haircut. He had not realized, until then, how white his father’s scalp was, like the inside of a potato at the moment it’s split open.

  “How much longer?” Aaron could not keep from asking. Prisoners, students, passengers on long sea voyages, children in cars: they all know well the slowing that occurs because their time does not truly belong to them. His mother gave cryptic responses involving hours and minutes, words that meant nothing to him, while his father threatened to pull over and give him “a good spanking” if he did not shut up, which did mean something. It was how his father spoke of spankings, employing the adjective good as though the spanking represented some obvious moral truth.

  After several days of this, days defined by the heat and the sight of his father’s head riding squarely before him, Aaron asked instead, “How many Adam-12s until we get there?,” referring to a half-hour television program about policemen that he and his father watched each Saturday.

  “Four,” said his mother, too enthusiastically, and so the Adam-12 system for telling time was established.

  The vacation started at the Paul Bunyan Park in Bemidji, where cement statues of Paul and Babe the Blue Ox stood beside the shore of Lake Bemidji. The Englunds had visited the park twice before, the three visits merging in Aaron’s memory so that years later he could not remember which time they saw a roller coaster being built or which time his father pointed to a family of four and leaned toward him, whispering, “Look, Aaron, there go some Jews.” In the family photo album, there were three different shots of him standing between Paul and Babe, one to commemorate each visit, the changes in those young versions of himself obvious, despite the fact that whoever took the pictures (he assumed it was his father) had stood far back in order to capture the full height of Paul Bunyan, leaving Aaron an incidental presence at the statue’s feet.

  He did know it was during the last visit that his father became angry at him for refusing to go on the rides. “So you’re just going to go through life a chickenshit?” his father asked as they stood to the side of the Tilt-A-Whirl, watching other children board the cars excitedly. In his pretend-casual voice, his father added, “Really, I don’t see how you’re going to manage in school.” Aaron did not say that he wondered this also.

  His father turned then and walked calmly away. At home he might have shouted or smashed a bottle on the floor, but he did not believe in being a spectacle, in providing strangers with that pleasure. Aaron was familiar with his father’s stiff back, with the way his hands dove deep into his pockets and his feet kicked forward with each step, keeping an invisible can in motion, just as he recognized the way that he and his mother stood side by side, dazed by how quickly things could go awry. Only minutes earlier, his mother had turned to them, revealing a clot of yellow mustard on her ear lobe, a leftover from the hamburgers they had eaten while squeezed together on a bench. Aaron and his father had burst into simultaneous laughter, a rare occurrence that had encouraged all three of them, nudging them toward giddine
ss.

  “Dolores,” his father said, “were you feeding that hamburger to your ear?”

  They laughed again while his mother dabbed at her ear with a tissue, using Aaron and his father as mirrors, asking, “Is it gone? Jerry? Aaron? Did I get it all?”

  Years later, when Aaron thought back on that day, trying to see his father’s anger as something predictable, he began here, hoping to understand the slow build of his rage, but when he remembered the way that his mother had giggled and spoken their names, he knew that she had been enjoying the attention, that his father’s tone had been free of reproach. And so Aaron, too, had been happy. It was that simple and that treacherous.

  Aaron and his mother waited, without speaking, for his father to return, and when it became clear that he was not coming back, they spent the afternoon at a free storytelling event about the life of Paul Bunyan. The storyteller—an old man dressed in a plaid lumberjack shirt—fidgeted as he spoke, his right hand rubbing the wrist of the left as though it had just been freed from handcuffs. He regarded the audience eagerly, too eagerly, when he thought he had said something funny. At the end, everyone rose and filed out of the hot room quickly.

  “Stay put, and don’t talk to anyone,” Aaron’s mother said, and she left too.

  The storyteller regarded him nervously. “Young man, did you know that when Paul was just one week old, he was already so big he had to wear his father’s clothes?” He chuckled. “Can you imagine?” Aaron thought about his father’s shirts, which smelled of sweat that had worked itself deeply into the fibers. Even after his mother washed them, the odor remained, requiring only the heat of his mother’s iron to rekindle it. Aaron smiled at the storyteller. It was not his fault that he thought Aaron might be intrigued by the idea of wearing his father’s clothes.

  The man shuffled out, and Aaron was by himself in the room. It was the largest room he had ever occupied alone, and the empty space gave freedom to his thoughts. What he imagined was his parents getting into the Oldsmobile and driving away without him, returning to their house in Moorhead (because his imagination was not equipped to send them elsewhere) while he established a new life here, sleeping under Babe’s stomach when it rained and spending his days listening to the tall tales.

  Into the room came two boys. He could still recall the shock he had felt as he looked at the boy on the left, taking in the severely upturned nose and knobby, receding chin, the blue eyes and unusually short lashes, and then saw the same configuration of unfortunate features on the other boy. They were around twelve, the age at which threatening younger children offered both pleasure and a way to subvert their own feelings of vulnerability. They spoke loudly and swaggered up to Aaron as if he had stolen something of theirs that they aimed to get back.

  “Hey, asshole,” said the boy on the right.

  The other snickered and kicked Aaron’s chair hard. “My brother’s talking to you, asshole,” he said.

  “My mother told me not to talk to anyone,” Aaron replied, his voice soft and overly polite. When he used this voice with his father, it only made him angrier.

  The boys sat down behind him. “I heard that Paul Bunyan had a pecker as big as an oak tree,” the one directly behind him said. He kicked the back of Aaron’s chair, jolting Aaron forward.

  His twin laughed. “Yeah, and nuts like basketballs.”

  The first boy leaned forward, his voice loud in Aaron’s ear. “I heard a train thought his asshole was a tunnel—went in and never came out.”

  “Paul Bunyan was a fag,” his brother said, and the boys slammed backward in their chairs, yelping like puppies.

  Aaron’s mother returned and glared at the boys. “We’ll wait in the car,” she said to Aaron, which meant that she had not found his father.

  They left the park and walked up and down several streets, his mother pausing at each corner, giving careful consideration to all four directions. Her tendency, like his, was to leap to the worst conclusion; he felt her fear in the way she squeezed his hand tightly one minute and flung herself free of him the next. They rounded a corner and there was the Oldsmobile, the driver-side door open, his father’s legs jutting into the street.

  “It’s about time,” his father said when he saw them. “Four o’clock. What have you people been doing all day?” He called them “you people” when he found their actions as inexplicable as those of strangers.

  Aaron and his mother got into the car. They said nothing because they knew that silence was best in the aftermath of his father’s anger. Aaron fell asleep against the car door, too tired to worry, as he usually did, that it might spring open and send him tumbling into the road. When he awoke to the cessation of motion, he discovered that they were in front of a motel consisting of cabins and an office shaped like a wigwam, a VACANCY sign lit up in pink neon over its door. When his father got out of the car, the smell of rotting apples wafted in. He went into the wigwam and came back with a key, which he used to unlock one of the cabin doors, and they went inside. His mother quickly opened the windows, letting in the smell of the apples, which mingled with the smell his mother had been trying to air out, a sour odor not unlike the one that came from his father’s feet when he sat in his recliner after working all day and ordered Aaron to pry off his shoes.

  “Bed, Aaron,” said his mother. He followed her into the bedroom, where she produced his pajamas and toothbrush from a suitcase. He’d felt such pleasure at seeing his possessions appear in these unfamiliar surroundings. They spent two nights there, hot, sleepless nights during which Aaron clung to the edge of the bed he shared with his parents because his father had not wanted to pay extra for a cot. The sickly sweet stench of rotting apples had intensified daily, its source an overly burdened tree that shed its fruit in a wide skirt outside their bedroom window. His father liked the smell, and the windows remained open.

  The first morning, his father took him inside the wigwam, showed him a shelf of souvenirs—beaded necklaces, T-shirts, and miniature totem poles with eagle wings flaring out from the top—and instructed him to choose one. He considered each item while his father chatted with the old man behind the desk. When the old man shuffled over to a postcard rack near the door, passing gas with each step, Aaron’s father turned to glare at Aaron as though expecting him to do something shameful, laugh perhaps.

  “Did you find something, son?” he asked. He called Aaron “son” when there were other people around.

  Aaron held up a beaded pouch shaped like a canoe with a zipper running from bow to stern. His father examined it. “That’s what you want?” he said. “A purse?”

  Aaron turned and grabbed the totem pole with eagle wings, mumbling “thank you” when his father paid for it, and they walked back to the cabin.

  “A totem pole,” said his mother. “Oh for cute.”

  She was sitting on the bed, stitching up a pair of his shorts that had split at the seam. He was a plump child whose clothes suffered routine outbursts, though as an adult, he would be thin, his childhood pudginess retained only in his hands. He handed his mother the totem pole, which she set on the sill of the open window. Each time Aaron awakened that night and saw it outlined there, wings spread, he could not help but feel that his mother had given it the option to flee.

  The next morning, she packed their suitcases while his father sat on the bed and hurried her along, and then they walked across the road to a diner called Freddie’s. Aaron was allowed to have pancakes, which they rarely had at home because his father hated them. They recrossed the road, and as his father loaded their suitcases into the trunk, his mother prepared three washcloths, wetting them and rolling them up inside a bread bag, which would be stored in the glove compartment for emergencies. She had done this the previous morning also. His father came in whistling and carrying a paper bag that the motel owner had told him to fill with the apples that lay scattered and rotting outside their cabin. The three of them gathered half a bagful, and while Aaron and his father waited in the car, his mother went ba
ck into the cabin, leaving the door ajar so that Aaron caught glimpses of her as she bent to peer under things. His father drummed impatiently on the car’s roof, his thumps growing more thunderous when she finally appeared. She got into the car holding a matchbook wrapped with black thread left over from mending Aaron’s shorts. His father, weighing the delay against this bit of nothing, snatched the matchbook and flung it out the window.

  The car was filled with the waxy, overripe scent of the apples and the smell of his father, who had not bathed at the motel because the bathroom had only a shower and he preferred a tub, where he could stretch out while Aaron’s mother shampooed his hair and scrubbed his back until it turned red. His father gnawed steadily on the apples as he drove. Aaron tried to eat one, but his stomach was weak from the heat and the car’s motion, and he managed just a few bites. He closed his eyes and pressed his brow against the window.

  “Look!” he heard his father cry out, and he pulled away from the window and opened his eyes. His father’s right arm was stretched awkwardly behind him, back over the top of the seat; in his hand, clutched like a baseball, was a half-eaten apple. Aaron thought that his father was offering him the apple, but as his eyes focused, he realized his father was showing him something: a worm that he had bitten in two, the half still in the apple wiggling frantically, the other half presumably doing the same in his father’s stomach. Aaron did not know which half—the one he could see or the one he was forced to imagine—caused what happened next. His body convulsed, and then his father’s arm was covered in vomit, his vomit, the pancakes and bacon and bits of apple all vaguely identifiable. His father took his eyes from the road to look at his arm as if he too were trying to sort out the ingredients of Aaron’s breakfast.