After the Parade

by Lori Ostlund

  Aaron deduced the sort of person that Pulkka was simply from observing how the building was maintained. It was like getting to know the flaws on a lover’s body, for there was something intimate about standing in the men’s room after having relieved himself to discover that the sinks worked, in order from left to right: cold only, hot only, not at all—which meant he had the option to either freeze or scald himself, or go with hands unwashed. One morning he came up the backstairs and found puddles of water pooled on the landing, yellow like urine, and when he went into the unused classroom across the hall from his in search of an eraser, he found mushrooms, at least a dozen, sprouting from the mold on the wall beneath the lone window, the sight of them oddly obscene.

  When Aaron asked the other teachers what Pulkka was like, they laughed. “I’m the only one who’s met him,” Eugenia said. “Once, right after I started, he threw a faculty holiday party in the basement, but he drank too much and ended up sleeping with one of the instructors. Barbara. This was a problem because he lives with his girlfriend. Actually, she’s on the payroll, though no one’s met her either. He pretty quickly realized he better get rid of Barbara, which wasn’t hard because Barbara was a mess. There’d been complaints from the students for a while, but after the party, it came out that she’d gotten trashed with her students one night and took off her shirt right there in the bar in front of them.”

  “Why would she do that?” Aaron asked, his question largely rhetorical. He knew that teachers were like everyone else: varying in their degree of competence and good judgment, not always able to keep their loneliness or dysfunction from pressing in on the workplace. Some of his colleagues, the younger ones, went out drinking with the students, the sort of drinking that made it nearly impossible to stand before the class the next day and make demands about homework and attendance. His own boundaries, he had been told—by other teachers, not students—were rigid. He agreed, though did not consider it a problem. He liked that his students were intimidated, just slightly, by him. He felt that a small dose of fear was conducive to learning. During his nearly twenty years as an ESL teacher, he had taught in a variety of places and knew that privately owned schools such as Pulkka’s were especially susceptible to unprofessionalism because they paid poorly and thus attracted a mixed bag of teachers: the inexperienced; the inept; the improperly credentialed; those in transition, like him; and those like Taffy, who preferred to remain on the profession’s periphery for personal reasons.

  In the classroom next to his, Felix prepared students to take the TOEFL, an ESL exam on which they needed to do well in order to enter college here, but the truth was that Felix’s class offered very little preparation, for Felix prioritized having fun. His morning curriculum included showing movies, playing practical jokes on his students, and listening to music at a high volume. In the afternoons the students sat at their desks, taking practice exams if they were actually interested in improving their scores, and sleeping with their heads on their desks if they were not. Aaron had quickly realized that the TOEFL class was a holding pen for students who needed a student visa but had little interest in being students.

  Aaron was familiar with men like Felix, a homely underachiever who had gone to Korea in his twenties to teach and found himself suddenly successful with women. He did not care that his success had nothing to do with who he was as a person and everything to do with his being American. That he had neither an interest in teaching nor aptitude did not prevent him from continuing on once he was back in the United States because the school afforded him a supply of sexual partners. When Aaron looked at the female students and then at Felix, he did not understand it, for not only was Felix unattractive but he seemed determined to accentuate his worst features. He wore T-shirts that fit snugly around his fleshy waist and a wig tied in a loose ponytail similar to that of John Adams. He was overly fond of accessories and wore a utility belt, to which he snapped or tied various nonnecessities: a money pouch, though he often borrowed bus fare; a walkie-talkie; a container of aspirin that rattled like a maraca when he walked; and a light of the sort that bicyclists wore after dark, nestled into the small of his back, flashing attention on his buttocks as he walked down the hallway or, more disconcertingly, stood at the urinals, urinating.

  Aaron initially heard about Felix’s trysts from Taffy, but Felix himself had recently described for everyone in the faculty room how he had gotten caught breaking into the school with Akiko, one of his Japanese students, the night before. “We didn’t technically break in,” he clarified. “I still had the key from when I taught nights last semester. I just didn’t know Polka Dot changes the alarm code, like, all the time. But you know how he is—he doesn’t trust anyone.” Aaron wondered how Felix could think that his complaint had legitimacy, given that he had engaged in the very behavior that Pulkka was guarding against. “FYI, the alarm’s silent,” Felix added, as though sharing information meant to make them better teachers.

  When Marla and the police arrived, he and Akiko were up in his classroom. He said it that way—“we were already up in my room”—as though the evening had involved nothing more than a scheduled tutorial. “We didn’t even hear them coming. Things got, you know, sort of loud.”

  Aaron stood up then and left the faculty room, though it was too late. He could not erase the image of Felix bent over Akiko, naked but for his utility belt, the bike strobe pulsing as the two of them, teacher and student, worked away atop Felix’s desk.

  * * *

  Most weekends Aaron felt as if he were tumbling over a waterfall, floating and struggling for footing, and then Monday morning came, he entered his classroom, and the ground appeared beneath him again. He had wanted his life to change—had believed he might lose his mind if it did not—and just like that, it had. He had changed it. But after the initial euphoria, which reached its apex in Needles as he broke down the door of Jacob’s room, he felt discouraged. He thought of Walter often, with what seemed like grief some days and simple nostalgia others. He could not tell whether he missed him, the sum of him, but he knew he missed parts of their life together. He missed feeling like an adult in the world, cooking proper meals and eating them at a real dining room table while he reported on his day. He missed the comforting familiarity of knowing a person for twenty-three years: they had known how to occupy space together, how to be quiet together. He had thrown that away, and if he ever met someone new, they would have to start from scratch. They would have to learn how the other smelled first thing in the morning or when he was sick, how he smelled just after a bath or when he wanted sex. They would have to learn these smells and then how to be comfortable with them.

  He did not miss sex with Walter. In fact, he did not miss sex at all. He felt far away from his body, from desire. The last time they had had sex was on Thanksgiving. Aaron had eaten too much, yet when Walter touched him, his mouth still greasy from the turkey, he gave in to Walter’s need. It was still light out, and as Walter moved behind him, he could hear the neighbors tossing a football in their backyard. Afterward, as they lay on the king-size bed, Walter said, “Well, someone certainly was thankful,” affecting an arch tone, both the tone and the words taking Aaron back to those early days with Walter and his group of middle-aged, closeted friends. Walter burrowed his nose under Aaron’s arm while Aaron stared out the window, watching the football arc through the air. He felt something wet, salty, on his lips and realized he was crying. He knew then that he needed to be gone by Christmas.

  Aaron did not miss the king-size bed. He liked this bed, a twin-size futon, which reminded him of the bed he had slept in as a boy. When he and his mother first arrived in Mortonville, they had rented a furnished house from Mr. Rehnquist, where Aaron had occupied the lower half of a bunk bed. He used to tuck a blanket under the top mattress and let it hang down around his bed like a curtain, pretending it was a house or a cave or a boat, this last his favorite because he liked imagining storms that flung the boat about. In the midst of the storms, he would throw h
imself from the bed to the floor, where he pretended that he was swimming, staying afloat and saving his own life because there was nobody else to save him.

  8

  * * *

  The day Aaron’s mother picked him up from his aunt and uncle’s house, after she unlocked their front door and they stepped inside, she said, “Does it feel strange to be home? It’s the longest you’ve been away, you know. Almost a month.”

  It did feel strange, though stranger still was the disarray in which he found the house: dirty dishes stacked in the sink, mail piled high on the counter, a box of clothes open in front of the hallway closet. He had believed they were returning home together, but he saw then that this was not the case. Nor could he make sense of the mess. His mother had always washed dishes as soon as they finished with them. When she brought in the mail, she did not set it on the counter to be dealt with later. He had seen her toss the whole stack in the trash because she cared more about neatness than bills or correspondence.

  Her own parents were pack rats. Perched on his bed one night, she had told him this as if it were a bedtime story. He had met them just once. “I vowed never to take you to that house again,” she said. “It’s no place for a child.” He wanted to point out that she had lived there as a child, but instead he asked what a pack rat was, and she said it meant that her parents were burying themselves alive beneath stacks of paper and plastic containers and instruction manuals for appliances that had stopped working years ago. When they did die, several years later, it was not because of garbage. His grandfather’s heart gave out on a Monday, his grandmother’s succumbing by Thursday. Aaron, who was ten, stayed with the Rehnquists while his mother went to oversee the joint funeral, and when she came back, she said, “Well, that’s that,” and they did not speak of his grandparents again.

  His mother came home from the hospital and walked through their house like a stranger, running her hands along walls as she searched for light switches, bumping hard against the edges of things, the couch, the refrigerator, the sliding doors that led into the backyard. On his third day back, as they sat eating pork and beans for breakfast yet again, she announced, “Aaron, we’re moving,” and though he feared change, he felt relieved, for he saw that they could not remain in Moorhead, where he had always lived but where his mother could no longer find her way.

  They were going to a town called Mortonville. Before he was born, his mother and father had spent a week there at a fishing resort run by a couple who had probably purchased the place with high hopes, the way people do, though by the time his parents stayed, the couple was far past the honeymoon phase of ownership. The resort, which was several miles outside of Mortonville, was called Last Resort. His mother said their cabin was a dark, filthy box, and though she had brought along food to cook their meals, she had become queasy at the thought of eating off the plates she found in the kitchen. She pictured other people using them, people who gutted fish, picked at themselves, and rarely bathed. When she lifted a water glass to her mouth to drink, she was sure she smelled stale milk and fish. They had ended up going into Mortonville twice a day to eat at the Trout Café, an unexpected expense that so enraged his father that he ended their stay early, packing up the car in a huff and refusing to speak to Aaron’s mother, even when she begged him to pull over so that she could vomit. They did not know it yet, but she was pregnant. Each time she told Aaron the story, she ended it the same way: “Later I couldn’t help but wonder if it wasn’t you that made me so sick.” She would sigh, and as he got older he understood that she thought him responsible for all of it, not just the queasiness and vomiting but his father’s anger and their abrupt departure, precursors of the life they would have as a family.

  After his mother announced that they were moving, she said, “Now’s as good a time as any,” and she unfolded a slip of paper with the telephone number of a man who had a house to rent in Mortonville. She did not like telephones, an aversion that Aaron would come to share, so she spent a few minutes pacing before she dialed. The man with the house answered. He did most of the talking, and when Aaron’s mother hung up, the only part of the conversation that she related to him was the man’s cheerful last words: “Let’s just meet at the café in town. You’ll never find the house on your own because I guarantee I give the worst directions in this entire county.” Aaron looked forward to meeting the man. He had never met anyone who actually bragged about being bad at things.

  “That’s him, I bet,” his mother said when they pulled up in front of the café one week later, pointing to a short man who was standing with two tall men. “Our new landlord.” The man removed a handkerchief from the back pocket of his overalls and wiped his hands, rubbing each finger carefully, as though he’d just eaten something greasy, and then he came over to the Oldsmobile, where Aaron was struggling to extricate himself from the household items that his mother had packed around him.

  “Name’s Randolph,” the man said. He shook both of their hands. “Randolph Rehnquist. You probably saw my initials by the train tracks when you came into town. Got my own crossing. Course, you’re welcome to use it.” He was bald and had a habit of removing his cap when he laughed, as though it were improper to laugh with one’s hat on. “Looks like you brought the necessities,” he said. He nodded at the car, which was filled with clothing and bed linens, kitchenware and a few keepsakes.

  His mother had also called these things the necessities. “Only take the necessities,” she had instructed, but Aaron did not understand what made something a necessity. Each time he brought out one of his belongings and asked, “Is this a necessity?,” she looked up tiredly and said, “If you can’t live without it, then just pack it. Okay?”

  “What about my bed?” he asked, but she explained that their new house had furniture that they could use for now; they would get settled and then come back for everything else. But as he watched her wedge plates under the seats and stack frying pans and a colander where his feet would go, he realized that there would be no back-and-forth between this old life and the new.

  The three of them went into the café and sat in a booth, and a man came over with a pot of coffee. Mr. Rehnquist said, “Frank,” and the man said, “Randolph,” and that was the end of their conversation.

  It was from this man, Frank, that Aaron’s mother would buy the café two years later, but that day, Aaron had no reason to think of the café as part of his future, only his past. His father had sat in these booths. He had not been dead yet, and Aaron had not been alive. He could not make sense of this. His mother did not tell Mr. Rehnquist that she had once eaten a week’s worth of meals at this café with her husband. She did not say anything about a husband. When Aaron got older, he realized his mother had known that it would not do to arrive and begin talking about parade floats and dead husbands. Of course she knew that in a town this size a woman who showed up with a young son and no husband invited speculation, but Mr. Rehnquist was not the prying sort. He talked about himself instead, in a friendly, uncomplicated way. He told them that his former tenants had left suddenly. The Packers, he called them. “Packed up and left,” he said. “That’s what you get with Packers.”

  He laughed, but Aaron’s mother, fresh from the hospital, was not thinking about things like laughing along companionably. Mr. Rehnquist didn’t seem to mind. He told them that they could have the house for six months, a year tops, because he was waiting for his son to get married. “When a man gets married, he needs a house,” he said, addressing Aaron as if this were a matter for his immediate consideration.

  They sipped their drinks. “Yut, well, I suppose then,” said Mr. Rehnquist, and somehow Aaron’s mother knew that this meant it was time to leave. They drove out of town, Mr. Rehnquist’s truck crawling along in front of them, turned onto a gravel road and then into a driveway, at the end of which lay a house. His mother shut off the engine and stared. “What do you think?” she asked. All around them were fields.

  “I think we’ll like it here,” he said.<
br />
  “I think so too.” She reached over to pat his leg, but her hand curled into a fist and she instead knocked on his knee three times.

  Mr. Rehnquist said that he wanted to point out some things before they went inside—features of the property he called them—like the birch trees on the other side of the empty garden and a rusty wheelbarrow that he said they should feel free to use. He nodded at the house. “This here’s the house where I was raised, and that’s my field over there,” he said, sweeping his arm toward the field across the road.

  “What do you grow?” Aaron’s mother asked in her making-conversation voice.

  “Oh, corn mainly. That’s about all I know how to grow.” He laughed. “My wife’s the brains in the family. She’s a schoolteacher. Fourth grade.” He studied Aaron. “How old are you then, Aaron?” he asked.

  “I’m five,” Aaron said. “I’m going to be in kindergarten this year.”

  “Going to be?” said Mr. Rehnquist. “School started over a month ago.”

  “Yes,” Aaron said. “I’m getting a late start.” This was how he had heard his mother describe it when she called the school in Mortonville to let them know he would be enrolling.

  Mr. Rehnquist took off his hat and laughed. “Miss Meeks,” he announced. “That’s the kiddie-garden teacher. I guarantee she’s anything but meek.” Aaron did not know the word meek. Mr. Rehnquist gave a half chuckle and exposed his head again. “Good luck,” he said gravely and winked.

  * * *

  Aaron’s new room contained three beds, two of them bunked, the third beneath the window. That night, he climbed into the bottom bunk and fell asleep quickly, exhausted from unpacking and adjusting to a new house. When he awakened, he was not sure how long he had been asleep or what had roused him. He thought it was the silence. His mother had said it would take time to adjust to the stillness of the country after living in town his whole life. He drank the water that she had set by his bed. Then, because the hallway light was on, he got up to look for her.