After the Parade

by Lori Ostlund

  “Yes,” said his mother. “You came by to pick me up. We were going out—bowling, I think.” She paused. “What does this have to do with bacon, Jerry?”

  “Well,” said his father, “that’s the funny part. You see, I brought a slice of raw bacon with me when I went to pick you up from the Jews. They probably thought I didn’t know anything about Jews—they were snobby like that—but I had the bacon wrapped up in tinfoil in the glove compartment, and just before I went up and knocked on their door, I took the bacon out and rubbed it all over my hands, and when the Jews opened the door, I shook hands with them, both of them.” From the other side of the closet door, Aaron heard his father laughing while beside him, his mother remained silent. “I don’t hear you laughing,” said his father. “Don’t you get it? I had bacon grease all over my hands, and they didn’t even know it. They just acted so polite and pleased to meet me.”

  His father grunted. “You see—not a damn shred of humor between the two of you.” His glass kept clinking, but he did not speak again. Soon, they heard his deep snores on the other side of the closet door.

  His mother wet herself first. When Aaron smelled it—a wild, frightening odor amid the smells of dust and wool and moth balls—he thought that it was his own bladder betraying him, even though he had been focusing on holding it in. He relaxed, a defeated letting go, and felt the sudden warmth of urine seeping across his thighs, pooling beneath his buttocks.

  “Jerry,” called his mother, “we need the bathroom.”

  His father rolled over heavily on Aaron’s bed. “How am I supposed to sleep with all this racket?” he said, his voice thick.

  “We need the bathroom, Jerry. Please.”

  After a very long silence, his father said in the same thick voice, “What if I can’t live without the two of you?”

  “You don’t need to, Jerry,” said Aaron’s mother. “Open the door so we can all go to bed. In the morning, I’ll clean everything up, and then we’ll go to the parade.”

  “I don’t think you understand,” said his father.

  “Understand what, Jerry?” said his mother. “Tell me.”

  Aaron heard his father moving around on the bed, heard him mumbling. “I don’t think the two of you understand what a good life I gave you,” he said at last.

  The gunshot came immediately, an exclamation point on his father’s words.

  “My god,” screamed his mother. She began to kick at the closet door, calling his father’s name.

  It was August, a humid month. The heat from their bodies was trapped in the closet with them and gave substance to the smell of urine and sour clothing and fear. Aaron could not breathe. It was like being in the iron ore mines, like being underwater.

  “Aaron,” his mother said, “ask your father to let us out.”

  “Can we come out?” Aaron whispered.

  “Remind him about how you kicked Paul Bunyan,” said his mother.

  “I kicked Paul Bunyan,” he said.

  “He did that for you, Jerry,” his mother said, but there was no reply, no sound at all from the other side of the door. His mother’s sobs settled into a steady whimper, and the whimpers gave way to silence. Inside the closet and out, there was only silence.

  * * *

  Aaron awakened to the sound of birds. There were nests in the eaves above his window, which his father sometimes sprayed with the garden hose, blasting them loose, eggs falling to the ground along with bits of feather and twigs and dried grass. But new nests always appeared. Aaron never told his father about the new ones because he liked waking up to the cooing of birds. The closet was still dark, but the light beneath the door had changed. It was morning. His stuffed giraffe nudged his chin, though he did not remember taking it out of his suitcase during the night. His mother breathed steadily beside him, asleep on his leg.

  He heard a key in the lock, and the closet door swung open. His father stood over them, haloed in light, still wearing his police uniform. His shirt was coming untucked, the belt hanging undone. His gun was snapped into its holster. Aaron’s mother sat up, the smell of urine rising with her, a stench like gas station bathrooms.

  “I thought you were dead,” she said, her words breaking into sobs.

  “I was just having some fun,” said his father. “But as usual, you two don’t get the joke.” He laughed and stretched in a leisurely way, then brought his hand up over his nose. “Jesus, did you two shit yourselves? Get up and get changed,” he said. “In five minutes we’re leaving for the parade.”

  May–June

  25

  * * *

  Aaron awakened at eight his first morning back. He had fallen asleep at eight the night before, a symmetry that might have comforted him, except twelve hours was a long time to sleep. Ahead lay a day of getting up and going to school, teaching and coming home. Each of these tasks alone seemed beyond anything he felt equipped to do, but he got out of bed and ate, cold, the rest of the spaghetti with butter he had made the night before, after he realized that he had no interest in going out to buy groceries, had no interest in anything.

  When he walked into the school an hour later, his colleagues greeted him as if it were a normal day, as if he had not been gone for nearly two weeks, as if Bill were not still suddenly dead, THE PRIVATE EYE SCHOOL sign gone, Bill’s students gone also. Aaron had been the only person from the school to attend Bill’s funeral, which was held at Mission Dolores. It was easy to pick out Bill’s sisters, one large and disheveled like Bill, the other tiny, both of them looking dazed. “Bill was such a joker,” they said to Aaron when he went over to offer his condolences. Earlier, he had watched them approach the casket, holding hands and peering inside as though they expected Bill to leap up and scare them. “He had a delightful sense of humor,” Aaron agreed, and they looked up at him like he was mocking them.

  He walked into his classroom at precisely nine, which meant he was on time, strictly speaking, but the students had all arrived early, imagining he would be excited to see them. “Welcome back,” they said. “We’ve been looking forward to seeing you.” He had taught them that expression right before he left.

  He set down his satchel and tried to smile.

  “How was your vacation?” they asked. Vacation was what he had told them—anything else, namely a mother he had not seen in almost twenty-five years, seemed too complicated.

  “Fine,” he said. “It was fine. Thank you. Now, let’s get started.”

  He moved toward the board to write out phrasal verbs for review, but his legs felt weak and he detoured to his desk, where, he told himself, he would sit for just a minute, but his mouth was like a drain: as he talked about the difference between put off and put aside, his last little bit of energy flowed right out of him. When classes ended at one thirty, he was still sitting. He could see the confusion on their faces, which evolved into sadness over the following weeks as he continued to show up at nine, right at nine, with no time for pleasantries or questions, no time to help with college application essays or explain the best way to ask an employer for time off. When they straggled back from break late like everyone else, he said nothing, just sat at his desk at the front of the room, flipping through magazines that the former teacher had left behind.

  * * *

  After he left Gloria’s farm, he had driven back to Minneapolis and straight to Winnie’s house, where no one was home because no one was expecting him. It was Wednesday. They were at either work or school. There had been no plan. When he called Winnie from the airport hotel on Monday night, they had spoken for fifteen minutes, just long enough for him to stop crying and tell her about his mother, about how she was living with Gloria and had been all these years, about how Bill had found her and then died, about how he had booked a flight and gotten on a plane and now he was scared.

  Winnie listened.

  Right before they hung up, he said, “I’m so sorry, Winnie,” as he had on his birthday, an apology meant to include everything, from the way he had left w
ithout telling her to the fact that he was calling, out of the blue and sobbing. He had taught his students that adding so in front of sorry made the apology stronger, more sincere, but as he listened to himself say these words to Winnie, now that he had treated apologizing as a matter of semantics, they sounded empty, disingenuous.

  “I know,” Winnie said.

  “I better get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.” He laughed.

  “Wait,” Winnie said. After a long pause, she blurted out, “I love you, Aaron.” They did not usually say this to each other, and he tried to make the whinnying sound, but his voice broke, so he set the phone back on the hook without replying, then lay on the hotel bed and cried some more, sick with the realization of how long it had been since he’d said “I love you” to anyone.

  For thirty minutes, he sat in his rental car outside Winnie’s house. It was a cool, clear day, not unusual for Minnesota in April. Just hours earlier, he had awakened to the smell of bacon and eggs and Gloria’s exaggerated cheerfulness, which meant that his mother was being difficult, for that was how couples worked, he knew, one always trying to offset the other’s behavior.

  “Is she still in bed?” he asked as he and Gloria sat down to eat.

  “Yes,” Gloria said. “But it’s not you, Aaron.”

  He cocked his head to indicate that he knew better, and she said, “Well, of course it’s your visit that’s thrown her, but the way she is? That’s not about you.”

  “Thank you, Gloria. I know that.” He supposed he did know it. “But it’s nice of you to say so.” He ate some bacon, drank his coffee. “You know, after we finally went to bed, I still couldn’t sleep. I started to think about the day we moved to Mortonville, how I woke up that first night in the Rehnquists’ house, and she was gone. I looked for her everywhere. You know where she was? In the closet. I’m sure she heard me calling, but she didn’t answer, yet when I finally opened the closet door, she seemed happy to see me. She invited me in. I sat on the floor, and we talked. She was in there almost every night that first year. I thought it was because she didn’t want me to hear her crying.”

  “Maybe that was part of it,” said Gloria. “But knowing your mother, I’m pretty sure she sat in there because she wanted to keep reliving it, wanted to keep the pain fresh. She just couldn’t forgive herself, you know.”

  “Forgive herself for what?” he said. “He was the one who locked us up, who kept us there all night and pretended he’d shot himself.”

  “I know it doesn’t really make much sense, at least not to us, but she believes your father fell off the float because he was distracted and tired from being up all night. She blamed herself.”

  Aaron had tried to explain the word blame to his students once, so he knew what a slippery word it was, that it reflected how a person perceived an event, not necessarily what was true. When his mother followed the causal chain backward, his father fell from the float and died because she had packed Aaron’s suitcase, intending to leave. Without the suitcase, there would have been no closet, and the parade would have been just a parade instead of the moment that their lives split in two: before the parade and after.

  “I don’t understand it,” Aaron said. “I don’t understand how she could feel that way. You know, all those nights she and Pastor Gronseth sat in the booth talking, mainly they talked about forgiveness. They both felt it should be much harder to earn, that people get off too easily. I always thought it was a theoretical discussion, but I see now that they were talking about themselves.” He pierced the yolk of his other egg and thought about how this fork might be the same fork that Clarence had driven into Gloria’s hand all those years ago. He wondered whether Clarence had ever apologized, or whether he too had counted on easy forgiveness.

  “Her closet was nothing like my closet in Moorhead,” he said. “It was big, the size of an office really. There was an overhead light, and she kept a chair in there. But still, I should have remembered something about that night. Right? It makes me feel like I’m crazy—because how could I not remember?”

  “You were only five, and memory’s a strange thing. Sometimes it protects us from ourselves. Look at your mother. Look at what remembering did to her.”

  He ate his last strip of bacon. “That was the best breakfast I’ve had in months,” he said. “I’m fortified for the road, so I guess I better get going.” He had put his bag in the car before he sat down, preparing for an efficient departure.

  “Will you at least go in and say good-bye to her?” He did not want to. Gloria knew this. “Do it for me, Aaron? Because when you leave, I can tell you it will be that much worse if she has to face the fact that she didn’t even have it in her to say a proper good-bye. And I’m the one who’s going to have to deal with it.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Yes, of course, I’ll say good-bye.”

  “Thank you.” Gloria stood up and began removing their plates, and he stood to help her. “I’d like to give you something of Clary’s,” she said. “It would make me happy to think of something of his with you. Would that be all right?”

  “I’d like that,” he said. “Very much.”

  He knew what he wanted: the book Clarence had shown him that first afternoon. He did not recall the name of the photographer, but they went into Clarence’s room and looked for it together. Diane Arbus.

  “I remember this book,” Gloria said. She laughed and put one of her big hands to her mouth. “I was horrified when Clary first showed it to me, but he loved the pictures.”

  Aaron thought about the letter to Diane Arbus that Clarence had read to him. Clarence had written to a person he thought was alive, a person he believed would understand him and photograph him in a way that made him feel understood.

  “Thank you for the book,” he said to Gloria. “And for taking care of her.”

  “I guess you won’t be coming back?” Gloria said.

  “No,” he said. “I guess I won’t.”

  * * *

  He knew that Winnie was at her store, but showing up unannounced seemed melodramatic, as though he expected her to stop earning a living in order to tend to him. Then he remembered the way she had said, “I love you,” the way she hesitated first because she was nervous, and he started his car. When he arrived, she was discussing a Madurese bed panel with a woman who was taking notes and snapping photos with her cell phone, so he pretended to examine a dowry chest. Winnie came up behind him and threw her arms around him. “Go wait in the backroom,” she whispered. “I’m almost done with her.”

  “I’m sorry to just show up,” he said when she joined him. He sat contritely atop a teak daybed.

  “Don’t be sorry. I’m happy you’re here. I was worried about you.”

  “Still, I don’t want you losing sales over me.”

  The front door buzzed. “We’ll talk tonight,” Winnie said. “You’re staying, right?”

  “If you’ll have me.”

  “You’ll need to earn your keep,” she said. She handed him a bottle of oil and a rag, and as she tended to customers, he oiled furniture, his preferred task when visiting Winnie at the store, finding comfort in the way the wood came back to life, in the ease of working beside her without speaking.

  At six they closed up. He drove behind her in his rental car, back to her house, where they opened a bottle of wine and began making dinner. Soon Thomas and the boys arrived, all three of them excited to find him there. Thomas hugged him tightly, but even after all these years, Aaron found himself gauging the hug, wanting to be the one who pulled away first. He knew what Walter would say: this was just proof of the distrust that existed between gay and straight men. But maybe it was just proof of the distrust among human beings.

  The boys hugged him also and then went to their rooms to change. “We’ll be right back, Uncle Aaron,” they said. They had always called him that, Uncle Aaron, but after dinner, as he and Winnie talked quietly in the living room, he asked, “Do they know about me and Walter? You know, that we’re not to
gether?”

  “Of course they know.” Then, because Winnie had always sensed what he was thinking, she said, “You’re still their uncle. You’ve been their uncle their whole lives. That’s not going to change.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “You know, he called every day that first month. Once he called at two in the morning.”

  “Walter did?” This shocked him. Walter had always adhered to proper telephone etiquette. He said it was unfair to send people to bed or welcome them to the day with the feeling of unease that a call at an inappropriate hour triggered.

  “Just once. He’d been drinking,” Winnie said. “He told me he was calling because he finally got what you’d been saying all these years about king-size beds.”

  “We won’t be getting back together,” Aaron said. “You know that, right?”

  She held up the bottle of wine they had started before dinner, and he nodded.

  “I do,” she said, “but you have to give me time to get used to it, to keep getting used to it. The two of you were together more than twenty years. And now it’s been what? Four months?” She stopped talking and took a sip of wine. “When you left, he waited until Christmas to call, three whole days, and then he acted like it was our usual holiday telephone call, him calling to wish ‘the gentile’ a merry Christmas. He and Thomas talked for a couple of minutes, and then he talked to the boys and wished them ‘half a merry Christmas.’ Finally, I asked him to put you on the line, and he said you weren’t there. I said, ‘What do you mean not there? Where is he?’ And he said, ‘Well, I imagine that by now he’s settled in his new home in San Francisco.’ ” Winnie looked at him. “And that’s how I found out you were gone.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, because she sounded angry.

  “So that’s it?” Winnie said. She held up her wineglass as if making a toast. “To the end of a twenty-year friendship.” She was definitely angry.

  “Okay, you’re right,” he said. “I should have told you I was leaving. You’re the closest thing I’ve got to family. Still, you’re Walter’s sister, not mine, and we have to think about his feelings.”