After the Parade

by Lori Ostlund

  The students composed their anecdotes slowly, recopying the final drafts onto fresh pieces of paper, which they folded and dropped into a punch bowl that Aaron had borrowed from the faculty room. He drew a slip and read it to the class. It was about a boy getting his penis caught in his pants zipper and screaming in terror when his father said that he would need to cut it, believing his father meant his penis and not the zipper. Everyone laughed and looked at Luis, who was pleased to be recognized as the obvious author. The next two were in a similar vein, sweet childhood memories that made the class giggle. But the fourth slip described how the narrator had pried open the window of his family’s nineteenth-story apartment and thrown his mother’s cat out. He was eleven and had been egged on by a teenage cousin, who assured him that cats had nine lives. When he rode the elevator down to retrieve the cat, he found it flattened on the sidewalk below. The class grew quiet as Aaron read. Nobody wanted to guess whose anecdote it was because doing so seemed akin to voting for who among them seemed cruelest. Aaron was sure that Neto had written it—he recognized his handwriting—but when Aaron asked whose anecdote it was, Neto sat quietly, refusing to claim ownership.

  “Okay,” said Aaron. “I guess that was our mystery writer.”

  They learned that Aksu, the new Turkish student, was a couch potato and that Ji-hun went to Golden Gate Park on the weekends, because people gathered on the sidewalk near the museum each Sunday to swing dance. Finally, Aaron pulled his own slip. He had thought about the stories he could tell—his father falling from a parade float, his mother disappearing, saving Jacob’s life—but in the end he wrote down a story that August, his great-great-uncle, had told him the summer of the Englund family vacation. The story was about how his family on his mother’s side had lived above the Arctic Circle for ten years with six other Norwegian families and the Lapps. They had nearly starved because the only thing that grew in the frozen ground was potatoes, and even those grew poorly. At last, they moved to America, where they once again became farmers in a very cold place. Aaron had imagined that the students would relate to the story because it was about coming to this country, but instead they seemed perplexed.

  “Why would they farm in the snow?” Chaa asked.

  “They needed to eat,” he said, but he knew that what Chaa was asking—what everyone was wondering—was why they had moved above the Arctic Circle in the first place and why they had stayed so long once they realized that the situation was hopeless. He was five the summer that August told him the story, and so he had not questioned his ancestors’ reasoning. But now, assessing the story via the detached logic of his students, he thought that maybe it ran in his family—this attraction to what was futile, this inability to see it as such—for hadn’t his mother chosen to marry his father, even though she was happier working for the Goulds, and when his father died, hadn’t she moved both of them to Mortonville because she said it was not a place to start over? And what about him? It was true that he had once loved Walter, but then, for many years, he had not—yet he had stayed. He had stayed above the Arctic Circle because what was familiar was important, even when it felt like growing potatoes in the half-frozen ground.

  His students were still staring at him, waiting.

  “I guess they wanted a challenge,” he said. “And they wanted land, even if it was above the Arctic Circle.” He reached into the punch bowl. “Next story.”

  He unfolded the paper, which read: I am engaged to Bulgarian woman. We meet last year in my country. Now I am in USA and she is in her country. I am waiting for H-1B visa, and she will come here and marry with me.

  The students called out the name of every man in the class, including Aaron, every man except Melvin. Aaron wondered how it made Melvin feel, to seem less likely than his gay teacher to have a fiancée. Of course, Aaron was not sure that the students understood he was gay. He had referred once or twice to his “former partner,” but even native speakers had trouble with the nomenclature of gay relationships, and he knew that for many of the students, Nico, in his chaps, was the model for gayness.

  “You’re forgetting someone,” Aaron said, though it had taken him a moment also to realize that Melvin was the author. Melvin was Korean. His real name was Man-soo, but here in the United States, people had begun shortening it to Man, a nickname that had discomfited him, and so he decided to create his own, Melvin. “Melvin, is this yours?” Aaron asked. “Are you engaged?”

  Melvin began to stammer. “Her name is Nikolina,” he said.

  “How did you and Nikolina meet?”

  “She was cleaning in Korea.”

  “A maid?” said Aaron.

  “Yes,” said Melvin.

  “Your maid?” Aaron asked.

  “No.” Melvin shrugged, licked his lips, which always looked painfully chapped, and said nothing more.

  Of all his students, Aaron had the least sense of Melvin, who tended toward one-word responses and never smiled. The others treated him politely, but they did not tease him as they did one another, perhaps because he was older, thirty-two, though Paolo was in his fifties and everyone in the school joked with him. Aaron knew that their careful, almost deferential, treatment of Melvin had to do with his face, which was crumpled in on the right side, as though a horse had stepped on it. Melvin never mentioned his face, but he carried himself like someone accustomed to people’s stares.

  “Congratulations, Melvin,” Aaron said.

  * * *

  That afternoon, Tommy, who was not so secretly one of Aaron’s favorite students, stayed after class with the other Thais to ask whether there was a word in English to indicate that someone was in love with a person who didn’t love him back. As they huddled around his desk, Aaron noted that Melvin, who was usually the first to leave, was still seated. “Unrequited love,” Aaron said. “Unrequited means unreturned.”

  They repeated it—“unrequited love”—and Bong, the most serious of the three despite his unfortunate nickname, asked questions aimed at pinpointing how the word might be used, questions along the lines of whether unrequited could be used to talk about unreturned library books or food that customers wished to send back to the kitchen.

  “No,” Aaron told him, and “No.”

  “I have unrequited love,” Tommy announced tragically, and Aaron and the other Thais laughed. Tommy tried to look miserable, but he was an optimist with a natural goofiness that he took care to cultivate, all of which undermined his occasional attempts at angst.

  “Are you sure that your love is unrequited?” Aaron asked, which made the other two laugh harder. They apparently knew the object of his affection.

  “Yes,” said Tommy. “I am definitely sure. It’s Aksu.”

  “Ah,” said Aaron, then regretted sounding surprised.

  Aksu, the new Turkish student, was a quiet, beautiful twenty-four-year-old who had just arrived in the United States, having completed her studies to become a French teacher. When she explained this to the class her first day, Aaron asked, “Why didn’t you go to France instead of coming here?” and she replied sadly, “I hate French.”

  “Then why did you study it?” he asked, and she said, either logically or illogically (he wasn’t sure which), “How could I know I hated it until I learned it?”

  “Aksu is quite a bit older than you,” Aaron said, trying to make her seem less desirable, not easy given her wistful smile and doe eyes. Tommy was just nineteen, fresh from high school.

  “I’ve decided I prefer older women,” he said. “They’re worldly.” Aaron laughed. Worldly was a vocabulary word. “And we’re perfect for each other. We’re both couch potatoes.”

  “You’ll need two couches,” said Aaron.

  “Tell us the couch potato story again,” said Chaa.

  “You already know the couch potato story,” Aaron said. He deeply regretted telling them the story, which had only reinforced their notions of this country.

  “Yes, but we like to hear it again,” Chaa said. “Please.”

&
nbsp; The story, told to him by an ER nurse at a party in Albuquerque, was about a man who had been brought in with chest pain. “He was four hundred and eighty-two pounds,” the nurse said. “It took four paramedics to lift him off his couch. So I’m undressing him and trying to get him into a hospital gown—nothing fit, we ended up wrapping a sheet around him—and I felt something hard in his stomach area. I started massaging the region. You know what it was? A TV remote, folded into the rolls of his stomach.”

  He had told his students the story because they were doing a unit on uniquely American court cases, among them the case of a man suing an airline for charging him for two seats because he had not fit into one. Pilar said that when she flew back from Spain after Christmas, she had been made to sit in one of the crew fold-down seats because the woman next to her had spilled into hers, making the flight uncomfortable for both of them. “Even though I paid for my seat,” said Pilar, “I could not occupy it.”

  “Does a ticket represent a person or a seat?” Aaron had asked the class.

  “Why is this a case?” Katya asked. “The man is using two seats. He must pay for two seats.”

  It was then that he had told them about the patient with the remote control folded into his stomach. The truth was that when the ER nurse told him the story, there at the party, they had both laughed at the notion of a man’s vice melding with his body, impressed by the symbolism, but as he told his students the story, it no longer seemed funny or symbolic. It seemed cruel. He felt cruel for telling it, particularly as it aligned too neatly with their stereotypes of America: a place where a man could lie on his couch and eat himself to death because, in America, you were free, free to be lonely, to become so big that you could not get off your own couch.

  Melvin was still at his desk. Already he had taken out and put away his notebook twice, feigning busyness.

  “No story,” Aaron told the Thai boys firmly. “I need to talk to Melvin.”

  Melvin’s head snapped up.

  “Good-bye, Aaron,” said the Thais. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Be on time,” he called after them, knowing they would not be. “And don’t fall in unrequited love.” They laughed from the hallway.

  Melvin sat waiting with his crumpled-in face. Aaron wondered what he had thought of the couch potato story. Did he think to himself that everywhere in the world, people looked at those who were different and said unkind things, or did he hear the story of a fat man and think that it had nothing to do with him?

  “Melvin,” he said. “You’ve been very patient. Do you have a question?”

  He was expecting a grammar question, a request for clarification on the passive voice, for example, but Melvin began to stammer. “I have romantic question,” he said.

  “Oh,” said Aaron. “Okay. Well, it’s certainly the day for that. What is it?”

  “Nikolina and I do not have a language together,” he began.

  “What do you mean?” said Aaron.

  “I do not speak Bulgarian, and she does not speak Korean.”

  “But you met her in Korea. She must speak Korean.”

  “She was maid,” Melvin reminded him.

  “English?” suggested Aaron.

  “She does not speak English.”

  “Okay,” Aaron said. “Can you explain to me how the two of you communicate?”

  “I write in English, and when she receives email, she uses computer translation program to change to Bulgarian. She writes in Bulgarian, and I translate to English. Soon, I will send money to her for English class, but right now, we are using system.”

  “And?” Aaron coaxed him.

  “Two days ago I sent first romantic letter,” Melvin said, looking as though he might cry.

  How, Aaron wondered, had their engagement preceded any kind of romantic declaration? “Okay,” he said. “And what happened then?”

  “Yesterday, she sent response.”

  “Great,” said Aaron.

  “It is not romantic response.” Melvin’s eyes got watery. He handed Aaron a copy of the email and looked away:

  Dear Man-soo,

  Thank you for your letter. I am very like meat. I am very like big steak with potato and sour cream. I hope we are eating steak in America very soon.

  Yours truly,

  Nikolina

  “It is a strange letter,” Aaron agreed. He did not know what to say. “Did you ask her opinion about meat?”

  “It was romantic letter,” Melvin said.

  “Well, may I see what you wrote? Maybe she misunderstood?”

  “She used computer translating program,” Melvin repeated firmly.

  Melvin had arrived in the United States a poor man, but he had spent several years acquiring a very specific computer skill, a skill rare enough that the American government had granted him an H-1B visa, a skill so complex that even though he had described it in detail the first day of class, Aaron had no idea what he did. Computers had gotten Melvin a job, a visa, and, in a roundabout way, a fiancée; he was not about to doubt them, to speculate about their fallibility.

  Finally, he opened his backpack and extracted a second sheet of paper, which he handed to Aaron, who read it and began to laugh. Melvin looked down, embarrassed, and quickly Aaron said, “I’ve found the problem. Your thumb has betrayed you. Space bar, Melvin.” He placed his finger under the last sentence, which read: I would like to keep you near meat all times.

  Melvin stared at it, not speaking, so Aaron picked up Melvin’s pen and underlined the word meat. “You didn’t space,” he said. “You meant to write ‘near me at all times,’ but accidentally you wrote ‘near meat.’ ”

  Melvin stared at the paper, at his feeble attempt at romance. Two weak hahas escaped from his mouth. It was the first time Aaron had heard him laugh.

  “I wouldn’t worry, Melvin. I’m guessing she found your desire to keep her near meat very romantic.”

  Melvin pondered this. Then, he wrapped his spindly arms around himself and laughed, the crumpled-up side of his face like a second mouth gasping for air.

  14

  * * *

  The day Aaron left Mortonville, he did not think of himself as following in his mother’s footsteps, for she had disappeared in the middle of the night, telling no one, while he left on an ordinary Sunday afternoon in July. At precisely two o’clock, Walter pulled up outside the Hagedorns’ house, where Aaron had been living since his mother left. He came up from his basement bedroom, leaving behind the bed and dresser that Mr. Rehnquist and Mr. Hagedorn—Rudy—had moved from his room above the café the year before. He carried a suitcase in each hand, into which he had packed his clothes, a photo album, and some books, and set them by the front door before he went into the living room, where the three Hagedorns sat waiting, for they realized that he was going.

  They had been kind to him, but Aaron assumed that they would be happy to have their home back because that was how he would feel. He did not consider their kindness diminished by the possibility of their relief. He shook Rudy’s hand, and Rudy, who had been drinking already, slapped him on the back and wished him well. Mrs. Hagedorn asked where he was going and why and with whom because even though she would miss him, she still planned to report the details of his departure to her phone friends later. Bernice stood to the side, pretending to be uninterested. When he reached out, awkwardly, to hug her, she pulled back, her hair a black curtain closing over her eyes. He did not know whether she was reacting out of anger or an unwillingness to let him experience her body that intimately, but Walter would later assert that she was in love with Aaron and had pulled away to show him that he was making a choice.

  As Aaron lifted his suitcases into Walter’s trunk, he could hear cheering and horn honking from the ball field several blocks away, which meant that someone had hit a home run, the ease with which he interpreted the sounds only reinforcing his desire to go. As they drove down Main Street, he thought about the day he and his mother arrived, how they had pulled up in front of t
he café that meant little to him then. Thirteen years later, he was driving out of town and away from the boy he had become here, the shy, polite boy who had few friends, whose mother had abandoned him. Once people thought they knew you, it was almost impossible to change their minds, which meant that it was almost impossible to change yourself. Maybe this was why his mother had gone also—because she did not know how to be anything else here but his unhappy mother.

  When his mother first took over the café, she had done all the baking and cooking herself, as well as much of the waitressing, hiring women from town as needed to take orders and serve food during the busy parts of the day, but eventually the baking became too much for her and she hired Bernice. Sometimes Bernice also handled the grill while his mother ran between kitchen and dining room, though Bernice refused to enter the latter, would not even carry out a plate of eggs that was growing cold. Customers loved her baked goods, especially her hamburger buns, which surprised everyone with their sweetness. “That Bernice has the best buns in town,” the men said as they ate their hamburgers. They never got tired of this joke, which had to do with the fact that Bernice was a large woman—359 pounds she informed Aaron matter-of-factly one morning, information he did not know how to respond to, beyond arranging his face so that it did not suggest any of the things that he imagined she was expecting, horror and shock and repulsion. She had particularly large buttocks, which Lew Olsson described as “two pigs in a gunnysack fighting to get out.” Aaron did not care for vulgarity or meanness, both of which the joke hinged on. The men, sensing his discomfort, did what men sometimes do. They added to it, making a point to refer to Bernice as his girlfriend. It was true that they were friends and that this struck people as odd because Bernice was a good bit older than he, twenty to his thirteen when she began working at the café, which meant it was an “unlikely friendship,” but unlikely friendships, he had since learned, were often the easiest to cultivate.