After the Parade

by Lori Ostlund

  His students were looking at him, waiting for him to elaborate. Eventually, Katya said, “Americans are so friendly when you meet them, but they will never invite you into their homes.” The others nodded, and she added, “Russians are opposite people. We are very moody outside people, but we will invite you into our hearts.” Katya believed that heart and home were the same thing.

  His students wanted desperately to make American friends and came to him for advice, considering him equipped to offer instruction in the art of befriending Americans. He gave them pointers—eating out was good, but karaoke made many Americans uncomfortable. He did not tell them that he too was alone in this city, that as he walked down the street each day, he wondered about everyone he passed: what they had eaten for breakfast, whether they cursed more when they were happy or when they were sad, whether they were smiling because of something they had just observed or because they always smiled when they were out in the world alone. Lately he had found himself deeply curious about the details of strangers’ lives, yet the thought of engaging in meaningful conversation struck him as unbearable. He was perplexed by his conflicting emotions but accepted that he felt oddly liberated by his loneliness, just as he accepted that he could not tell his students any of this without changing everything between them.

  * * *

  On Thursday, the fourth day without heat, there appeared inside each faculty member’s mailbox a small candle in the shape of a heart, which Aaron interpreted as a token apology, an attempt at appeasement. The candle only intensified his frustration, for it was so small, the school so cold. Worse, when he turned it over, he saw that the price tag had not been removed—49¢, which meant that the collective apology had set the school back less than five dollars, though he suspected that Marla had paid for the candles out of her own pocket.

  By then, it was colder indoors than out, so at the start of class he pulled up one of the yellowing shades along the far side of the room and opened a window. Yoshi went over and leaned out, joking that he wanted to warm up his ears, which was a big deal for shy Yoshi. As he pulled his head back inside, the window slammed, almost guillotining him, and then, in such quick succession that the two events seemed connected, the entire third floor went dark. Aaron supposed it was a blown fuse. He also supposed he should do something about it—report it at least—except weren’t the cold and the dark and the broken window all Pulkka’s doing?

  Soon, he heard the jangling of Felix’s belt in the hallway. When he looked out, Felix’s bicycle strobe was flashing eerily from the stairwell.

  Ten minutes later, the lights came back on. “Okay?” Bart asked, poking his head into the room. Aaron thanked him but could not make his voice sound sincere. He knew that it was not Bart’s fault that nothing in the building worked, that he was just a student working to defray tuition costs, yet Aaron could not help but believe that Marla chose students who were sympathetic to the school’s ways. Bart pointed at the two heaters he had brought up on Monday, which had yet to produce heat, and shook his head as though the heaters had nothing to do with him. He unplugged them and paused in the doorway, a contraband heater in each hand, to say, “Meeting in Marla’s office at noon. Bring your own lunch.”

  Of course, the meeting had not been called to address anything as urgent as the lack of heat, though Aaron noticed that Marla had let her office cool down. Her mistletoe and Christmas lights had been replaced with hearts that said WILD THANG and U R MINE, and she began by wishing them all an early Happy Valentine’s Day. “Did you guys get the candles?” she asked, and they gave mumbled responses, like children who had been asked about a topic that embarrassed them.

  “I have some exciting news,” she said next. “Are you ready?” She paused dramatically. “Mr. Pulkka has rented out the spare room.” She said it as if they were all getting raises.

  “His office?” asked Valerie, whom Aaron did not really know because her classroom was on the first floor and she rarely came up to the faculty room.

  “No,” said Marla. “That little room on the third floor that nobody uses—right across from Felix and Aaron.”

  “To who?” said Felix.

  “Yes,” said Aaron, “to whom?” He hoped that Felix had noted the correction.

  “A private eye,” said Marla excitedly.

  “What’s a detective want with a room in an ESL school?” asked Eugenia.

  “He’s going to teach classes,” Marla explained.

  “Classes in sleuthing?” said Aaron, and everyone except Marla laughed.

  * * *

  It turned out that sleuthing was precisely what the detective planned to teach. That afternoon, the mushrooms were scraped from the wall, a table, chairs, and a whiteboard carried up from the basement. When Aaron arrived to a warm building the following Monday, a function entirely of the weather, he got his first glimpse of the detective. He could see him across the hallway, attaching a hand-lettered sign to his door: THE PRIVATE EYE SCHOOL. He resembled a Hollywood version of a detective—ruddy and big-bellied with a shambling walk and, Aaron would quickly learn, a penchant for tobacco. Unlike priests and professors, who surely benefited from looking priestly and professorial, Aaron imagined that the man’s appearance only made his job—much of which he pictured taking place undercover—that much harder. Perhaps he had turned to teaching as a way to finally cash in on his detectivelike looks.

  Aaron always gave a quiz on Monday mornings, his way of nudging the students back to English. Most of them retreated to their native languages over the weekend, except Paolo, who spent weekends riding with the San Mateo Harley Club and always had questions on Monday morning. What Paolo wanted to know this Monday—waiting until the others were working away on their quizzes to ask—was why the Chinese were such bad drivers. He picked up his pen, preparing to take notes, and the others, even the Chinese students, looked up from their quizzes expectantly. Aaron studied his chalk while the class studied him. He hated stereotypes, particularly those that struck him as somehow true, but he envied his students their ease in asking such questions.

  They asked one another such questions also. The Brazilians asked the Chinese whether they could spot a Chinese American, for example, and they said of course they could because the Chinese Americans walked a different way. “How do they walk?” the Brazilians asked, and the Chinese students said, “Aggressive like Americans. They are not humble anymore.” It was the “anymore” that intrigued him, for it implied that they had been born humble and then had it squeezed out of them. They asked about one another’s features, the shapes of their eyes, the color of their skin, always turning to him for vocabulary: what was this type of nose called, this shade of skin? Most often, he replied that there was no word, at least none that he could think of, and Lerma, the lone Filipina, said, “How do you speak about noses without words?”

  “I rarely talk about noses,” he said, then, “Let’s see. We have hooked noses, aquiline, hatchet, pug.” He tried to recall whether any of these were derogatory.

  When his students had these discussions, he listened carefully but did not take part, except once when he overheard Chaa, one of the Thais, say that Thais liked to own businesses in the Castro. “Why?” Aaron asked, and Chaa said because gay men liked to spend money. “You can raise the price very high,” he explained, “and still gay men will pay because gay men care most about pleasure.”

  Aaron knew that some gay men would take offense at this comment, at the notion that they could be duped into buying anything provided it made them feel good, but he also believed that real conversation ceased the moment a group turned inward, toward communal indignation fueled by a constant parsing of the comment. What did pleasure mean here? Wasn’t this just one more case of hyper-sexualizing gay men? And if the conversation stopped before it really began, could people ever become comfortable with one another? Could straight people understand what it meant to be gay if they were too afraid of making mistakes to ask questions? He had come to prefer dealing with people who ba
rreled in with questions that might be regarded as insensitive to those who maintained a careful distance, forming measured comments that all demonstrated the same studied sense of what was correct. Listening to his students ask questions had taught him this: that nothing could truly get better in this country until people learned to ask the kinds of questions that they had been taught never to ask.

  Still, the truth was that he did not know how to ask these questions either, certainly not about race. Mortonville had existed in a racial vacuum, its citizens not just white but primarily northern European. The only diversity he had known was a handful of Poles who lived along one of the lakes and two boys who were half Vietnamese. Their father was a local man who had gone off to Vietnam to fight and returned married. His name was Richard Schultz. Aaron’s mother said Richard Schultz had left as one sort of person and come back another.

  “What kind of person was he when he left?” Aaron asked.

  He knew what kind he was when he returned. Once when Richard Schultz ordered his eggs scrambled but Aaron’s mother accidentally sent out fried, Richard Schultz karate-chopped his hand down on the edge of the plate so that the eggs flew into the air and landed in a mess on the floor. “Now they’re scrambled,” he had said.

  “I only knew him briefly before he left, but I remember him as a sweet boy, shy and so polite,” Aaron’s mother said, a description that had terrified Aaron because he’d heard these very words used to describe him. He wondered how it was possible to go away to a place—a place like this Vietnam that nobody in Mortonville wanted to talk about—and come back a man who was angered by eggs.

  The two boys spoke Vietnamese with their mother when they were young, but their father put an end to this because he said he wanted his sons to be American. The mother came into the café sometimes and sat alone drinking coffee filled with sugar and milk. When Aaron approached her table to see whether she needed anything, she tried to engage him in conversation, but he could not understand what she was saying, which embarrassed him. Eventually she stopped trying to converse with him and with everyone else in town. He wondered whether living in Mortonville was more difficult for the sons, who thought of Mortonville as home yet looked different from everyone around them, or for the mother, who passed her days keenly aware that it was not home, despite the fact that she would spend the rest of her life there. Aaron always smiled at the boys when he saw them in the hallways at school because even though he looked like everyone else, he knew how it felt not to fit in.

  What Aaron came to understand as a boy was that people focused on difference. He had learned his first real lesson about this the way that people often learned lessons, by doing something that it still made his face hot to think about. It had happened during Show and Tell, which was not actually called Show and Tell anymore because they were sixth graders, though this did not change the fact that each Friday six of them had to go to the front of the room to perform something—a joke, a poem, a story. This was meant to teach confidence, which Aaron suspected could not be taught. He spent long hours memorizing Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” and recited “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer to bored silence while the next boy got up and told a knock knock joke that left everyone hooting with laughter. They laughed when Aaron finished also, but only because he had worked so hard.

  Over the course of the year, he grew tired of their ridicule, which outweighed even the deep pleasure he felt when he passed Mrs. Korkowski’s desk on his way back to his own and she whispered, “Aaron, that was just lovely.” Finally, one Friday he decided to prepare nothing and then learn a joke during lunch. He ate his tuna casserole quickly and presented himself at the library, where he asked for joke books. The librarian pointed him toward an entire shelf, from which he chose one at random. The book was called Fifty Polack Jokes, and the assistant librarian, who was not really a librarian but one of the mothers, flipped it open and scanned a page, chuckling. “This has got some good ones,” she said, and she stamped the book and handed it to him.

  That afternoon, Aaron stood before the class and asked, “What did the Polack say to the garbage collector?” His classmates sat up from the slouch they had slipped into, but before anyone could respond, Mrs. Korkowski called out, “Aaron Englund, sit down.” They all laughed.

  “That’s not the end of the joke,” Aaron said weakly, desperate to deliver the punch line—“I’ll take three bags, please”—which he considered very funny.

  “Now,” shouted Mrs. Korkowski. “Right now.” A few of the students laughed again, but when Mrs. Korkowski stood up, her chair flew backward, and the room grew silent, as though she had actually picked the chair up and flung it.

  After school, Aaron went right home and told his mother what had happened, determined to make sense of it. His mother thought for a while in that distracted way of hers that did not always resemble thinking, and then she said, “Korkowski is a Polish name.” He nodded and waited, and his mother said, “You do know that Polack is a bad word for Polish people?” He did not know about the “bad” part, though of course he had heard the word Polack many times, mainly from the men in the café.

  The next morning he wanted to stay home from school, but his mother said that staying home was not a solution, and so, stomach sour with dread, he went early and found Mrs. Korkowski sitting at her desk, grading their vocabulary assignments. “Yes?” she said when she saw him standing in the doorway.

  In a rush, he told her how sorry he was. “I didn’t know you were Polish,” he said.

  She put down her pen and rubbed her eyes as though she were already exhausted by the day. “My name is Polish,” she agreed. “But Korkowski is my husband’s name. I hope you understand that I would be disappointed to hear you tell a joke like that no matter what my name was. I’ve always thought better of you than that.” Years later, he would realize that he had been chastised for delivering a joke from a book that came from the school library, a book with Polack right in its title, but at the time he had not known to consider any of this. “There’s a whole world out there,” Mrs. Korkowski continued, more gently now. “I want you to remember that, Aaron, to remember that there are things out there beyond what you know or can imagine right now.”

  * * *

  Aaron generally avoided the faculty room during break, but that morning he went in, hoping to avoid answering Paolo’s question. He found his colleagues sitting around a box of pineapple buns, purchased from the Chinese bakery next door by Marla, which meant that someone had been in her office asking for something—timely photocopies, perhaps even a raise. He reached for a bun but stopped when he saw the Post-it note taped to the box: Thanks for the hard work. Love you guys, Marla.

  Aaron felt increasingly old-fashioned and cranky amid this new social topography: business transactions sealed with a hug rather than a handshake; cell phone conversations carried on in public places, offering the sorts of details traditionally reserved for the bedroom or doctor’s office; and now this, people who hired you to teach English professing love on a Post-it note. Once, when he and Walter overheard a teenager and his parents bid each other farewell at the shopping mall in Albuquerque, Aaron had asked, “Why must they say ‘love you’ as though the kid’s shipping off to war? He’s obviously just heading over to the Gap for a few hours while his parents buy him way too many Christmas gifts.”

  Walter had replied carelessly, suggesting that maybe Aaron needed to become more comfortable with his feelings, as though these rote declarations signaled people at ease with emotion. In fact, Aaron suspected the opposite was true, that people had become so removed from their feelings that they were not bothered by what he viewed as emotion-devaluing gestures: words and actions that undermined the very sentiments they purported to evoke by turning them into commonplace, all-purpose responses.

  Only Winnie had understood, because she was Winnie. He looked again at the Post-it, missing her terribly.

  13

  * * *

  On his way back from the facul
ty room, Aaron paused in the doorway of the detective’s classroom, planning to introduce himself, but only the detective’s students were inside: a man in his forties, who, he would later learn, was from Kenya; a young woman with neck tattoos, dressed primly in a pale blue sweater and slacks; and a woman in her sixties, who he would come to suspect was a transsexual, though not because she fit any stereotypes of transsexuals. She was, in fact, a diminutive woman who wore tailored pantsuits, no makeup except lipstick, and little jewelry. Aaron’s suspicion would be based on one small but curious detail, a habit the woman had of stepping back and letting other women pass through doorways before her, as though unable to dispense with years of gentlemanly decorum. The three students were reading from handouts, and he did not ask them where the detective was. He assumed smoking. Four times that morning, he had seen the man slip out of his room and head toward the smoking balcony at the end of the hallway.

  Aaron followed his own students back into the room, where he wrote instructions for the next activity on the board while they were getting seated:

  On a half sheet of paper, in 3–5 sentences, write an anecdote or detail about yourself that is surprising, amusing, interesting, or even embarrassing. It should be something about you that no one in this class knows. Do NOT include details, such as place names, that would make your identity known. When you are done, fold the paper in half twice.

  “Please,” said Yoshi, pointing to the board. “What is anecdote?” He pronounced it with a soft c so that it sounded like a type of headache medicine.

  “An an-ik-dote,” said Aaron, “is a little story about something that happened to you.”

  “Can you give us one example?” said Pilar.

  “Okay, here’s an example of something about me,” he said. “I love to eat different types of animal feet—pigs’ feet, chicken feet, duck webbing, sheep hooves. This is a detail about me that is surprising. Now I want you to write down an anecdote, and then we’ll read them and see whether the class can guess who wrote each one. It will be a way for us to get to know one another better and to learn about the two new students.” The two new students had arrived the week before, a Turkish woman named Aksu and a young Korean woman who cried when he asked her to introduce herself to the class. Later, she told him that she had never spoken in class in her life, that back in Korea she had received a doctor’s dispensation from public speaking.