by Lori Ostlund
“I asked her what everyone else listening to the DJ at that moment had thought they were hearing, but Gladys said of course they had not heard what she did. They heard him still speaking in his normal voice because that was how Satan worked. I said that maybe it was her imagination punishing her for disobeying her parents. ‘Our psyches work that way,’ I added. I was taking an introductory psychology course.
“At hearing me interpret what had happened not as a battle for her soul but as a matter of simple human psychology, Gladys Moore looked terrified. I saw it in her eyes before she turned away, gathered her books, and left the room. The next day as I passed through the lounge during their Bible study session, Gladys whispered something to the others, and they all turned to look at me and then joined hands and began to pray. After that, the others made a point of pressing up against the wall when we passed in the hallway or moving to another sink if I stepped up beside them to brush my teeth. Only Gladys did not. She remained polite and apologetic, but something had changed. I came back from class one morning a few days later, assuming she’d already gone, but as I stood there fiddling with my bra, I realized that she was still in bed with the covers pulled over her like a tent. It was the same the next morning and the next. She stopped going to classes and then to the dining hall, and just like that, this became our new routine. She survived on the care packages that her parents sent each week, filled with her favorite foods: a fresh loaf of bread and currant jam, nacho chips and salsa, beef jerky, all of which she now consumed inside her tent.
“Her parents began calling more often, but she instructed me to tell them that she was at class, and I did, even though she was right there listening to us talk, listening to me answer questions about whether she seemed to be getting enough sleep and was enjoying her classes, whether she read her Bible and went to church on Sundays, whether anything seemed funny. I always gave the answers that I supposed they wanted to hear, which were also the answers that I supposed Gladys wanted given, and sometimes, Gladys would chuckle, as if maybe something did seem funny to her.
“ ‘Your parents want you to call,’ I would say when I hung up.
“ ‘Roger,’ she would say from under her covers.
“One morning as I made myself toast, Gladys peeked out. ‘You’re using my side,’ she said. I asked what she meant and she said in a panicky voice, ‘My side. Your side. We have sides.’ I apologized and said I hadn’t realized we had sides, and she said, ‘Don’t you remember the letter I sent?’ I said I remembered the letter, of course, but that I had thought she was just being polite, establishing what kind of a roommate she would be. ‘So when you make two slices of toast, you do it one slice at a time?’ I asked, not arguing but clarifying. By then she was completely out of her bed.
“Yes, she said, yes, of course she did, and I said, ‘Even when I’m not here?’
“ ‘Yes,’ said Gladys Moore. ‘It’s still your side.’
“ ‘Is it because you think God’s watching?’ I said.
“ ‘God is watching,’ she said, so I said, ‘I don’t mind if you use my side.’
“ ‘We have our sides,’ she said. ‘And he’s watching you also.’ She picked up the bread knife and held the blade against my forearm. ‘Remember that.’
“She got back into her tent, and I went to the library, where I couldn’t stop thinking about how she’d pressed the blade into my skin. I stayed there until it closed, so it was late when I got back to the room, almost eleven. Gladys Moore had turned on my desk lamp, which I thought she maybe intended as an apology. I undressed quietly and got into bed, but once the light was off, she whispered, ‘Be careful.’
“ ‘Careful of what?’ I whispered back.
“ ‘Of me,’ she said. ‘The devil is trying to make me do things.’ I could hear that she was crying, but the next day she seemed fine, not just fine, better. She was gone when I came back from my first class, and that night she sat at her desk, typing. I assumed she was writing a paper for a class, so even though the clatter of the keys made it difficult to sleep, I said nothing because I was relieved to have her out of bed and back to being a student.
“I woke up to the smell of smoke. Gladys was crouched over the wastebasket, tending a fire inside. I jumped out of bed and tossed a glass of water on it, but it was still smoldering, so I picked the wastebasket up and hurried down the hall to the bathroom, holding it out in front of me. I set it inside a shower and let the water spray on it. The remnants of the paper she’d been typing were inside, charred and soggy, and I emptied everything into the garbage bin in the bathroom and covered it with wet paper towels.
“ ‘What were you doing?’ I said when I returned. ‘Are you crazy?’
“She was back in bed, inside her tent, and when she didn’t answer, I went over and pulled back the covers. A smell rose up, the sour stink of unwashed bed linens. She looked up at me. There were dark circles beneath her eyes, as though she hadn’t slept in days, and her hair had been singed. ‘It wasn’t me,’ she whispered. I could see that she believed it, believed that she’d had no more to do with the fire than I had. I took the blanket from my bed and went to the study room, where I slept on the floor, poorly. In the morning when I returned to our room, Gladys was curled up asleep with the toaster in her arms like a baby. I tiptoed around, foolishly imagining that all she needed was a good sleep, but when I opened my drawer to take out a pair of underwear, I saw that the crotch—indeed, the crotch of every pair—was smeared with currant jam.
“After class I went to the housing office to fill out paperwork for a room transfer. I had to state my reasons, so I wrote down something about differences in religion and schedules because I didn’t want to tell them about the tent or the toaster or the fire or, most of all, the jam in my underwear. When I arrived back at our room, Gladys’s four Bible study friends were in the doorway, holding hands and praying. Inside, Gladys stood in front of the mirror, clutching a pair of scissors, which she’d used to chop her hair down to the scalp. I went in and took the scissors away from her, swept up the hair. ‘Time for you to leave,’ I told the girls, who were watching but doing nothing to help their friend.
“ ‘She asked us to come,’ said Beth, who was quieter than the other three and had, for this reason, struck me as more reasonable. ‘She needs our help.’
“ ‘How’re you going to help her when you’re too afraid to even come in the room?’ I said.
“ ‘We don’t need to come in to pray,’ said Beth, and I saw then that I had been wrong about her, that she was quiet because she was in charge. ‘We’re going to do an exorcism. We were just waiting for you.’
“I knew vaguely what an exorcism was, though not the specifics of what it entailed. ‘I don’t think I’d be much help,’ I said.
“ ‘Gladys said to wait for you,’ Beth said. The four of them looked at one another but not at me or at Gladys, who sat on her bed, shorn, flipping through her Bible and acting as though we had nothing to do with her.
“ ‘She said we needed you because there was no other way to know when the devil was out of her,’ said one of the other girls finally.
“From her bed near the window, Gladys began reading from her Bible: ‘So the devils sought him, saying, If you cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine.’
“ ‘We’re praying for the devil to leave her,’ said Beth.
“ ‘And how will you know when such a thing has occurred?’ I asked.
“ ‘When pigs jump,’ explained Gladys calmly, ‘it’s because they’re trying to snatch the devil out of the air.’
“ ‘So we’re praying for pigs to jump,’ Beth added.
“ ‘Well, I’ve got a test tomorrow,’ I said, ‘so I’ll just leave you to it.’
“I picked up my book bag, but as I walked down the hallway, away from Gladys Moore, who believed the devil was inside her, I heard her call out, ‘Is she jumping?’ and I felt something inside me move. I leaped upward
, nipping the air, and from our room, I heard Gladys Moore say, with clear relief, ‘He’s gone.’ ”
* * *
Until he came to live with the Hagedorns, Aaron knew Rudy only through the stories narrated by the men at the café, where Rudy Hagedorn had been a frequent topic of discussion and amusement. He knew that Rudy spent his winters on the lake, drinking himself into a stupor inside his fish house. When Mrs. Hagedorn had not seen him in a few days, she phoned the café and a party of men was sent out to check on him. Once, he had been found asleep beside a Monopoly board, only one game piece, the shoe, wending its way around the track. Another time, he was passed out over his fishing hole, naked but for a pair of wool socks. After they had determined that he was still breathing, alive and eligible for teasing, the men wanted nothing more than to get back to the café, where they could have a cup of hot coffee and deadpan that they had found Rudy with his head stuck in his own hole—his fishing hole, they would clarify, timing it for humorous effect. With this to look forward to, they hurried him back into his clothes and pulled up his line, only to discover a walleye on the hook, spent from hours of trying to free itself. It was bigger than anything any of them had pulled out of the lake that winter, they said in telling the story later, their voices somber as they recalled how they had all stared at the fish, shaking their heads.
When Aaron first moved in, he rarely saw Rudy, who often did not come home after work, the first part of his day bleeding into the second, particularly when his final plumbing call involved a relieved homeowner expressing gratitude with a bottle. Other times, he came home briefly to put something in his stomach before going back out. While he sat in his recliner eating, a bottle of beer poking up from between his legs, he engaged Aaron in conversation, choosing unexpected topics, though Aaron was quick to hide his surprise. One night, for example, as Aaron sat reading My Ántonia, Rudy said that he preferred Song of the Lark, which Aaron had not read, though he was making his way through all of Cather’s work.
“I’ll read it next,” Aaron said. “Did you read Death Comes for the Archbishop?”
Rudy sighed. “I tried, but I didn’t care for it much.”
“Me neither,” said Aaron, the first time he had admitted this to anyone because his teacher had told him that many people considered it Cather’s masterpiece.
He had never seen Rudy with a book, but that spring when Rudy started taking him fishing, Aaron discovered that he carried one in his glove compartment and another in his tackle box, that he sat each night in his gently rocking boat reading until the light was nearly gone and just enough remained for him to steer to shore by. Rudy taught him how to drive his truck and manage the boat and determine how much line to let down. Aaron looked forward to these evenings, and though Rudy did not talk a lot, he thought that maybe Rudy liked having him around too.
One night, as they sat in the boat staring down at where their lines disappeared into the water, Rudy said, “It was the goddamn desks, you know. They always came around her too snug.” They had not been talking about Bernice before this. They had not been talking at all. Aaron pulled up their lines and turned the boat around, rowing the whole way back instead of using the motor while Rudy sat quietly in the bow. Rudy stored his boat at Last Resort in exchange for handling their plumbing needs, but when they pulled to shore that night he was not sober enough to help Aaron get the boat out of the water. After Aaron had struggled several minutes on his own, a voice came from the dock, asking whether they needed help.
“Walter,” Rudy called back. “Give this boy a hand.”
Together, Aaron and the man hauled the boat out and got it stored while Rudy gave orders from the dock, where he sat, still drinking. When they were finished, they went over to join Rudy, who introduced them by saying, “Aaron, this here’s Walter Shapiro. He’s a professor at the university in Moorhead and no doubt the only goddamn Jew in a thirty-mile radius.” Walter laughed at the introduction and shook Aaron’s hand, and the three of them went into Walter’s cabin for what Walter called “a nightcap.” It was there in the lighted cabin that Aaron recognized Walter as the man who had come into the café for breakfast three years earlier, the man who read a book in French while he ate.
“You came into my mother’s café for breakfast,” Aaron said. “The Trout Café?”
“I remember,” Walter said. “Your mother was an excellent cook. That’s why I had to stop coming, or I would have started to look like Rudy here.” Rudy laughed, though Aaron would later learn that men did not always like to have their weight discussed either. He would also learn, after he and Walter had become lovers, that he was the real reason Walter had not come in again. “You were such a lovely boy,” Walter would explain. “So wistful and polite and filled with yearning.”
Just like that it became the three of them motoring out in Rudy’s boat each night, Rudy listening as Aaron and Walter conversed quietly, often about poetry. The poetry that Walter read aloud to them out there on the water was nothing like the poetry that Aaron had been forced to memorize in school, poems about the loveliness of trees. He started with several by Anne Sexton and T. S. Eliot, followed by a poem that he had driven all the way back to his house in Moorhead to retrieve because he had realized at breakfast that they needed to hear it. It was by a man named Richard Hugo, a poem that began so beautifully Aaron had found himself in tears: You might come here Sunday on a whim. / Say your life broke down.
Walter also asked questions, lots of them, his tone matter-of-fact: What had happened to Aaron’s father, and did he know where his mother had gone, and did he think his life would shape up differently because of these factors? He asked Aaron what he planned to study in college, as if college were a given and the only thing left to be worked out was what Aaron hoped to do with his life. Aaron discovered that Walter was a good listener, and he found himself answering honestly.
“Did Rudy know about you, that, you know, that you’re gay?” he asked Walter later, when he was just starting to figure this out about himself.
“I never told him in so many words, but I suspect he knew. Rudy is a very perceptive man,” Walter said. “Did you know he came out to the cabin one afternoon to talk to me about you?”
Aaron shook his head.
“Well, he did. He wanted my help getting you into college. He wasn’t sure what I could do exactly, but he wondered whether there wasn’t something, given my position at the university. He said he didn’t want you stuck there like his daughter.” It had made Aaron’s heart ache to picture Rudy doing this. “He’s a good man, Rudy is, a kind man. It’s probably why he drinks too much. There are some people that the world’s just too much for, you know.”
“I didn’t know,” Aaron had said. He was just eighteen, and there was so much he didn’t know.
March
17
* * *
On the board, Aaron wrote the day’s phrasal verb: turn into. He added a definition—“to change from X to Y; to become”—and beneath it, examples:
1. We turned the garage into a study.
2. He started studying more and turned into a straight-A student.
3. She turned her jeans into a pair of shorts.
Behind him, the students copied everything into their notebooks, which was always the case when they studied phrasal verbs. To truly understand English, they agreed, they had to know the difference between turn into and turn in. They sat in pairs writing sentences while Aaron circulated, checking their work. He read aloud what Chaa had written: Tommy used to be a man, but then he turned into a gay. The Thai boys laughed, except Tommy, who looked around for Aksu, worried that she might have overheard their teasing.
“You do know that gay men are still men?” Aaron said.
“Yes?” said Chaa. He sounded surprised.
Finally, it was break time, and the students turned on their cell phones and borrowed change from one another for the coffee machine. As Aaron passed the smoking balcony on his way down to the faculty room, he saw
that the sliding door was ajar and that smoke was drifting into the hallway.
“Smoke travels,” he called to the two smokers, before slamming the door shut.
He recognized them, two young Japanese women who planned to remain in the class one level below his because they were afraid of him. “He looks too serious,” they had told his students, referring to his ties and the horn-rimmed glasses, his tallness and the severe part of his hair. The Thais had reported this to him gleefully.
The women began gesticulating. They pointed to the door, their mouths moving, and he pointed to his ear and yelled, “Louder.”
“Broken,” screamed the one on the right. She tugged on the door. Nothing. Aaron tugged. It was indeed broken, like everything else in this building.
“Okay,” he called. “I’ll get help.” Instead of going downstairs to find Bart, he turned back toward the detective’s classroom, assuming that a man who visited the smoking balcony with such regularity would be familiar with the door’s idiosyncrasies. He had not actually met him yet, but they often nodded at each other down the hallway. The detective’s door swung open just as Aaron reached it, and the two men collided, hard. Aaron extended his hand. “I’m Aaron,” he said.
“Bill,” said the detective, his grip unexpectedly loose. “Carpal tunnel,” he added, as though reading Aaron’s mind. “All those years of writing out reports.”
“I was wondering whether you might have some advice regarding the sliding door on the smoking balcony?”
“My advice is ‘whatever the hell you do, don’t close the damn thing.’ ”
“Well, I’ve already done so—slammed it, in fact,” Aaron said.
Bill put an unlit cigarette in his mouth, jiggled it up and down. “Let’s go take a look,” he said. Students had already gathered around the door, but they stepped back, no doubt reassured by Bill’s capable appearance. “Yup, it’s definitely off the track,” Bill confirmed. He turned to Aaron. “I remember seeing a toolbox in the basement when I got the tour—in the corner by the Christmas tree.”