Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

* * *

He pulled up in front of Taffy’s house around two on Christmas Eve, tired and wanting only to rinse his face and drink a glass of water, perhaps walk around the block to stretch his legs and soothe his hip, which had settled into a steady throb, but Taffy, who had been watching for him, came out and hoisted herself into the truck. She had arranged for him to rent a studio apartment in Parkside, a neighborhood near hers, from the Ng family. She had once taught Mr. Ng’s nephew.

“Let’s go,” Taffy said by way of greeting. “Mr. Ng is expecting us.”

They drove in silence except for her one-word directions— left, straight, left . Finally, Aaron asked what the studio was like. “Tiny,” she said, explaining that it was actually the back third of the Ngs’ garage, which had been converted into living quarters. “And dark. It’s the fog belt, but you’ll be just fourteen blocks from the ocean.”

The houses on his new street appeared nearly identical: the main quarters sat over the garage and were accessed by a tunnel entrance on the right. When they arrived, Mr. Ng came out. “One rule,” he said as he shook Aaron’s hand. “You pay, you stay.”

“Yes, well, I think I can remember that,” Aaron said. “Certainly the rhyming helps.” Neither Taffy nor Mr. Ng laughed. Aaron took out his checkbook and wrote a check for the security deposit and another for the first month’s rent, an amount close to what he and Walter had paid for their mortgage each month. Taffy had explained that it was the cheapest rent he would find in the city, given his insistence on living alone.

Mr. Ng stared at the check, which had his New Mexico address. “Mexico?” said Mr. Ng skeptically.

“ New Mexico,” he said, and Taffy assured Mr. Ng that New Mexico was in the United States.

“Okay, okay,” Mr. Ng said finally, as though he were granting a dispensation in accepting this as fact. “Here is key.”

But it was not a key. It was a garage door opener. Mr. Ng pointed it at the garage door, which rolled up noisily before them.

It seemed that this basic principle — thrift over convenience — had governed the conversion. No thought had been given to soundproofing, for example, which meant — Aaron would soon discover — that he could hear the family walking above him, hear them talking and arguing and even snoring. A thin wall had been erected to separate the studio from the garage proper, which housed not just the Ngs’ car but also, problematically, the garbage cans. Indeed, in the months to follow, Aaron would lie in his studio at night, imagining all the ways that he could die right there in bed: the Ngs’ Toyota smashing through the wall and running him over as he lay reading; the house (and the family with it) buckling down on him during an earthquake; the ocean forgetting itself and rolling up these fourteen blocks, drowning him in his sleep.

Taffy left him to settle in by himself, which he did not mind. It took him seven hours to unload and return the truck and then find his way back via public transportation, but when he finally stood on his block holding noodles from a Thai take-out place, he realized that he could not remember his new house number. He walked back and forth, pausing at last in front of the house that he thought was the Ngs’, and when he pressed the garage door opener in his pocket, the door rolled up. He ate the noodles with his fingers because the take-out place had forgotten to include a fork and he could not find the box that contained cutlery. Above him he could hear Chinese, a pleasant sound. He focused on it and tried not to think about Walter. The two of them had observed a Christmas Eve tradition: they made a Moroccan chicken with gizzard-and-artichoke-heart stuffing and Brussels sprouts, and as they ate, they talked about what they each wanted from the coming year. It was like making resolutions, except they always began with an analysis of the previous year’s disappointments. The last couple of years, however, Walter had been less willing to focus on the past, to reveal what had frustrated or discouraged him. Instead, he raised his wineglass and announced, “I wouldn’t change a thing about my life,” which left Aaron struggling to articulate his own discontentment.

He was relieved that the telephone was not yet hooked up because he would have called Walter right then to let him know he had arrived safely, but he would not have stopped there. He would have turned contrite, explaining tearfully how sorry he was, and Walter would have slipped into his most comfortable role, becoming patient and forgiving. “It’s fine,” he would have said. “Just come home.”

Aaron wiped his greasy hands on his jeans, crawled onto the unmade futon, and slept for ten hours. The next morning, the city felt at rest. It was Christmas. He appreciated that silence would be his first memory. Then, an ambulance passed outside, and he felt the same sick dread that he had felt as a boy, when a siren almost always meant tragedy for someone he knew. He supposed that soon he would once again stop noticing sirens, but that morning he lay on his mattress and sobbed because the studio was dark and unfamiliar and because he had never lived alone.

* * *

Taffy had arranged an interview for him at her school, the San Francisco English Language Center. They needed someone to teach an advanced class, she said, and the director, Marla, wanted to meet him the day after Christmas. Taffy did not tell him much about the school, just that she had been teaching there for three years, since Glenna left. She had quit her old job, thinking change would make Glenna’s absence less noticeable, but instead she had found that going off to a new school each day and riding a new bus home to an empty apartment only made her miss Glenna more. She wrote this to him after he accepted her invitation to come, the only truly personal thing she had ever revealed. She was being kind, he supposed, letting him know that it would not be easy.

The school was on Anza Street, housed in a drab building from the sixties that bore signs of neglect. Marla was also in a state of disrepair. Half the buttons on her dress had been replaced with safety pins, and when she stood, she appeared to list to one side, though he realized later that her dress was missing a shoulder pad. She began the interview by explaining that she had a firm policy of hiring gay people, though she herself was not gay, because she believed they made better teachers. Aaron did not know how to respond, for he desperately needed the job but was not in the habit of ignoring questionable logic. He laughed in case she was joking, but it turned out that she was not, and the two of them sat there awkwardly. He immediately regretted laughing, not because he had hurt Marla’s feelings, though there was that to consider, but because he had made a decision as he stared down at the road from the wheel of the U-Haul, a decision to stop second-guessing his own instincts. The decision had seemed doable there in the truck, where his needs were basic: he stopped when he needed to urinate; bought food when he was hungry; filled the gas tank when the needle neared empty. Most important, amid the monotony of satiating himself and the truck, there was Jacob, whom he had saved because he had trusted his gut.

He looked at Marla and blurted out what he knew to be the truth, “I’m a really good teacher,” referring to the only part of himself that seemed intact.

“Good,” said Marla. “Because you’re hired.” They stood up, shook hands, and Aaron thanked her.

“What were they studying with their last teacher?” he asked.

“Well,” she said. “Nico’s been sort of filling in lately, so I’m not sure what they’re up to.”

“And before that? What about with their regular teacher?”