After the Parade

by Lori Ostlund

  Each morning at four, Bernice made her way up the alley that ran from her house to the back door of the café, where she let herself in and immediately turned on the small coffeemaker that Aaron readied for her each evening as he and his mother closed up. His bedroom was directly over the kitchen, and in his closet was a vent that brought the smells directly into his room, a sort of olfactory alarm clock: first the odor of coffee wafted in, and then, like a snooze alarm, that of eggs and bacon (Bernice’s standard breakfast), all of it waking him in the most pleasant of ways. He dressed and tiptoed to the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face, by which point Bernice was ready for him. “I’m fit, just barely, for company,” she would say when he appeared, because that was the way Bernice talked. Early on, she told him that she was a misanthrope, which had pleased him, the admission as well as the word itself, which he found beautiful.

  “Homebody,” she announced another morning as she pounded away at a lump of bread dough. “What do you picture?” This was a game they sometimes played. He saw the word as the claustrophobic juxtaposition of two nouns—home and body—that had been pushed up against each other. He told her this, and she nodded indignantly, encouraged by his assessment, but said nothing more.

  Most mornings, he measured out the ingredients—baking soda and sugar, cup after cup of sifted flour, salt—lining them up in bowls so that all Bernice had to do was follow the trail down the counter, adding and mixing as she went. This system allowed her to concentrate on the conversation, which revolved around words, the possibilities that they presented as well as their inadequacy. They were kindred spirits, Bernice said, two people more comfortable with words than people, though Aaron came to see the irony in this: words existed because of people, because of a deep human need to communicate with others, not as an end in themselves.

  Bernice had gone away to college, planning never to return, but something had happened there, something that caused her to pack up halfway through her first quarter and return home. She said that this made people in town look at her a certain way—like she had thought she was better than they were but had learned she was not. This was all Aaron knew of the story for the first two years of their friendship. Then, one morning as they stood making pies, she told him that after she dropped out of college, she had not left her bedroom for six months, except to fetch food in the middle of the night and to use the bathroom. Over time, he would learn that this was the only way that Bernice discussed her life, parceling out details at unexpected times.

  “For the first three weeks,” she added, “I ate only meat.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Meat makes me constipated.”

  “And you wanted to be constipated?” he asked, trying to sound casual. He had not gotten over his childhood discomfort at discussing bodily functions.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I did.” She sounded angry, as though his question was obviously foolish.

  “What did you do in your room all day?”

  “I read, mainly my textbooks because I wanted to keep up with my classes. I practiced my Spanish verb conjugations. We’d only gotten as far as the present tense when I left, but I didn’t mind. I liked being cut off from the past and the future. Some mornings I heard my mother outside my door, listening. Once, I heard her telling Dad that I’d joined a cult, that I was in there speaking in tongues.” Bernice laughed. “It scared her, I think, not to know what I was saying, but I wanted her to be scared.”

  “Why?” Aaron asked.

  “Because every night after I came home, I heard her on the phone telling her friends that it was true, I was back for good. ‘Bernice is just a real homebody,’ she’d say. So you see, I wanted her to be confused and scared, to realize that she would never know why I’d returned. I wanted her to understand that she didn’t know me at all. Does that make any sense?”

  Aaron opened a can of cherries and poured it into one of the crusts that she had lined up for him. “Yes,” he said. “It makes sense.”

  “I hate her,” Bernice said. She made it sound simple.

  * * *

  Mornings at the café went like this: his mother came downstairs at seven twenty, and just ten minutes later, after a quick check to make sure that everything was in order—tables set, shakers filled, coffee brewing—they unlocked the front door and turned the sign to OPEN, and the dining room became instantly busy. Aaron assisted his mother, filling coffee cups and taking orders, until eight twenty, when he gathered his books and ran out the back door and down the same alley that Bernice crept up at four. Sometimes, as he passed the back of her house, a tiny place squatting between two much larger houses, he saw her mother through the kitchen window, standing at the sink in her robe. It felt strange to see her there, knowing what he knew: that her daughter hated her.

  The day he found his mother gone, as he and Bernice sat in the kitchen waiting for her to come down because they did not yet know she was gone, he recited the Canadian provinces for a map test he was taking that day. Bernice had made him spell Saskatchewan for good measure.

  “Do you think she overslept?” Aaron asked. It was only seven twenty-five, but his mother had not come down late since the day they opened ten years earlier. It was just the two of them that first day, and he had risen early, too excited to sleep, and sat in a booth waiting for her. He knew when it was time to open because the farmers had gathered on the steps outside, including Mr. Rehnquist, who finally tapped on the window and beckoned to him. When Aaron unlocked the door, Mr. Rehnquist said, “I’m sure it’s first-day jitters. Go on up and give her a boost.”

  And he had. He had gone up to his mother’s room, where he found her sitting on the edge of her bed, dressed. “Do you have a headache?” he asked.

  “I don’t think I can do it,” she said.

  He sat down beside her and said that she could do it, that he would help her do it. They would go down together and open the door, and once they did that, everything would be fine. He told her this even though he was not sure it was true.

  “What would I do without you?” she said. She stood and smoothed the bed covers because she believed in the small comfort of entering a tidy bed each night, and together they went downstairs and opened the café.

  “Better go up and check on her,” Bernice said, but he could no longer imagine doing what he had done just ten years earlier: entering his mother’s room, sitting on her bed, speaking to her encouragingly. Once a week he set a basket of clean clothes, folded, outside her closed door. Other than that, he did not go near her room, nor she his.

  By seven thirty, he had no choice. He dragged himself upstairs and down the hallway to his mother’s room, where he found the door open, bed made, his mother gone. He looked out her window, to the alley where she parked the aging Oldsmobile. It was not there either. When he reported this to Bernice, she said that come to think of it, the Oldsmobile had not been there when she arrived at four. She asked whether his mother had seemed strange the night before. He said no, that his mother and Pastor Gronseth had sat in a booth talking as they often did, that after he finished memorizing the Canadian provinces, he had stacked his books on the edge of the table and stopped beside their booth to say good night. There had been nothing strange.

  Bernice appeared skeptical but did not waste time arguing because the crowd of customers outside was growing. Instead, she made a sign that read, CLOSED INDEFINITELY. FAMILY EMERGENCY, which he wanted to amend to CLOSED FOR PERSONAL REASONS because he thought the word emergency implied that someone was dead, but Bernice said that nothing made people gossip more than the word personal. In the end, it would not have mattered what they wrote: news spread and people came, making a show of pulling at the locked café door and reading the sign aloud, of peering through the window. “It’s closed,” someone else would say, someone who had engaged in this same series of actions just minutes earlier. Then, they all milled around together, shaking their heads and comparing information.

  The news exploded int
o full scandal just before noon, when it was learned that Pastor Gronseth was gone also. Aaron and Bernice had sequestered themselves in the kitchen, and even after Bernice’s mother phoned with this second wave of news, they continued to bake the bread and rolls and buns that had been rising since morning. As they worked, they talked about keeping the café going, though they both knew that this was impossible: Bernice was a kitchen recluse and Aaron was about to begin his final year of school. In the end the Trout Café would stay closed, the title reverting to the bank, but that day they had appreciated the distraction that pretending provided.

  Around five, they decided to sneak out the back door and walk up the alley to the Hagedorns’ house. While Bernice stayed in the kitchen wrapping up baked goods, Aaron went up to his room to pack a bag and to confront the new reality of his life: overnight, he had become jobless, homeless, and motherless. He found himself in his mother’s room, looking for clues but mainly for something that would catapult him forward, toward anger or clarity or grief. As he opened her dresser drawers, he saw that she had taken every bit of clothing she owned, shorts and sleeveless blouses as well as wool pants and sweaters, the broadness of her needs suggesting that she had not known where she was going, only that she would not return. In the bottom drawer was the family photo album. He picked it up, imagining her shifting it out of the way in order to access all the entirely replaceable items she had chosen to take. He dropped it back in the drawer and kicked the drawer shut, hard.

  The following week, when Mr. Rehnquist helped him move, he found the album there in the drawer where Aaron was determined to leave it. “It’s a sacrifice,” he told Aaron. “She’s depriving herself of these memories in order to give them to you.” Though it would be years before he allowed himself to accept the possible truth of this or feel anything but rage at the sight of the album, he let Mr. Rehnquist pack it.

  That first night, as he lay on the makeshift bed that Mrs. Hagedorn had made for him atop one of their couches, Aaron flipped through his textbooks, stopping on the map of Canada. It seemed so long ago that he had stood with Bernice in the kitchen of the café, spelling Saskatchewan and waiting for his mother to come down. The note was tucked into his chemistry book. His mother had put it there, believing that he would find her gone, pick up his books, and go off to school. She thought she knew him, and he was angry all over again. You’re old enough now, the note said, only that. He lay awake in the Hagedorns’ living room, wondering what he was old enough for and how long she had been waiting for him to get there.

  15

  * * *

  The Hagedorns were large people who occupied the smallest house in town, a dollhouse that the three of them had been forced to move into when Bernice was a teenager, after their old place burned to the ground, the three of them awakening just in time to escape. Bernice and her parents ended up in the only house they could afford, where, she told Aaron, they were like three cabbages rolling around inside a produce drawer. By the time Aaron came to stay, they had occupied the house nearly a decade. It had grown even smaller with their belongings, yet they made room for him. Their living room contained three couches, and most nights he and Bernice lay on them, reading or talking. She never mentioned his mother, never asked whether he missed her. He knew that this was partly his fault because in those first weeks after she disappeared, he had pretended not to care; at the time, with his teachers looking sorry for him and his classmates ignoring him for a change (a gesture of kindness he supposed), it had seemed the only way to make it through the day.

  Instead, over the course of the year, Bernice told him the story of her life, in installments, each one perfectly composed so that he wondered whether she wrote it out and practiced telling it beforehand. On those nights when her voice slipped into confessional mode, he rolled onto his side so that he could watch her as she spoke, the mountain of her stomach dwarfing the twin hills of her breasts. Her story, which she referred to as “the story of my expanding girth,” began like this: “For the most part, it has been a steady climb, one without shortcuts or the occasional dips and plateaus. As a baby, I watched from a high chair in the corner of the kitchen as my mother chopped and pounded, rolled and sprinkled. When I cried, she paused long enough to pop a bit of something—cookie dough, fried potatoes, a fingerful of Cheez Whiz—into my mouth so that by the time I was two, I had become a corpulent child who could not yet walk but demanded treats incessantly. My entreaties, according to my father, were frighteningly eloquent, marked by the syntax and diction of a child twice my age. ‘You were a little queen holding court,’ he likes to say, which has always bothered me, not the image itself but the clarity with which he recalls it, for in my memory of those early years, my father does not exist. There is only the kitchen—the oven, its door opening like a warm mouth, the potholders hanging beside it—and my mother, who exists as a fat finger smelling of nicotine that delivers these ‘shut-up’ treats into my mouth.

  “By third grade, I had outgrown all the desks that the school had to offer, so one was created for me, a space-consuming contraption made of an old door that the janitors balanced across the tops of two tin barrels, each of which was big enough to have fit any of my classmates inside. I remember the wonderful racket the barrels made as they were rolled down the hallway to our classroom. The desk, which was larger than the teacher’s even, accorded me an authority that I had not experienced before. When, after a few days, the atmosphere threatened to return to normal, I began tapping my pencil steadily against the barrels, keeping this up for minutes at a time. I pretended to be deep in thought, unaware of my actions, though I simply wanted to see whether anyone would tell me to stop. Nobody did, not even the teacher.

  “From there, I discovered that if I stayed at my desk feigning busyness when the others got up to go outside for recess, my absence went unchallenged. I particularly hated recess since I’ve always felt most keenly aware of my size outdoors. I despised, as well, the games we played, each of which afforded my classmates another forum to ridicule me. During kickball, they cheered mockingly when I ran the bases, and during Farmer in the Dell, whether I was chosen as the cheese or the cow, there was always the opportunity for a joke. But dodge ball was the worst. My peers all seemed to have unusually good aim, though I helped them along by providing an ample target. It reached the point where even my own teammates could not resist taking aim at me. The first time this happened, I was caught off guard, and the ball hit me squarely between the shoulders and jolted me forward onto my knees. Both sides laughed merrily.”

  Bernice laughed also as she described this. Aaron watched her stomach quiver gently. He did not laugh.

  “I went home sore and bruised on dodge ball days, and at night I would lie in bed and press hard on the bruises to intensify the pain.”

  “Why?” Aaron asked.

  “I thought that if I could increase my tolerance for pain, I would eventually inure myself to it altogether.”

  “And did you?”

  This question she seemed to consider only briefly before declaring that the desk had been her “salvation,” saving her from physical activity, which tired her, as well as the humiliation of being a spectacle, which tired her even more. “Most days,” she said, “I was content to stay at my desk reading, enjoying my solitude in the empty room, but occasionally I would go over to the desk of a classmate who had been particularly cruel to me that day, open it, and handle the items inside. Later, as I watched him prop his desktop open with his head and rummage around inside, a pencil gripped between his teeth, I liked to imagine myself sauntering over and informing him of what I had done, liked to imagine his repulsion. I never did. It was enough to sit at my desk and watch him sliding his hands back and forth, back and forth, across all of the places that mine had been.”

  * * *

  Bernice had told him the story of the desk in October, five weeks after he moved in. The next installment did not come until Christmas Eve. They were alone in the house, despite the late hour, fo
r her father had taken a bottle of spiced rum and retreated to his fish house and her mother was at church, the midnight Mass, which actually started at eleven. It was a particularly cold Christmas—cold even by Minnesota standards, which were far beyond the standards that people elsewhere applied when assessing the cold—but the cold did not keep people home. Indeed, Aaron had noted over the years that morning coffee hour at the café was often busiest the day after a blizzard, as though people needed to make clear that the weather did not dictate their actions. After Mrs. Hagedorn left, Aaron and Bernice lay on their sofas listening to cars crunch by and to families discussing Christmas light displays as they walked past the house on their way to church. They competed to see who could identify the voices first, a contest that Bernice won, despite Aaron’s years of having waited on these people at the café.

  Bernice sampled a roll of lefse from the stack she had buttered and sugared for the two of them. The lefse had been dropped off earlier by Agnes Olsson as partial payment on a plumbing bill. “Agnes’s potatoes weren’t dry enough,” Bernice observed, “but I guess it’s a fair trade since my father’s not the best plumber in town.” It was true that Rudy was not the best plumber, though he was cheap and did not mind getting dirty.

  Bernice’s voice turned confessional then, as it had when she told him the story of the desk. “In the fall of 1976, I enrolled at Moorhead State University,” she began, moving from elementary school straight to college, as if the years in between had been too uneventful to mention. Aaron rolled onto his side to listen. “My graduation marked a crossroads: I had come down a path of uninterrupted disappointment, also known as my youth, to find myself in a clearing, a flitting moment in which I allowed myself to feel hopeful, to feel that life just might jag crazily off in a new direction. In short, my life became like a Robert Frost poem.”