Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“They had Noreen, but she left suddenly. What happened was, she was in class one morning, and her husband called.” Marla’s voice dropped, taking on the hushed, excited tone that people use to divulge someone else’s secrets. “He said he’d fallen asleep with the baby on the bed next to him, and she’d rolled off and hit her head, but the doctor said it was more than that.”

Marla took a breath, and Aaron cut in. “What was Noreen doing with them when she left?” He wanted to establish that workplace gossip did not interest him. He had worked at schools that resembled dysfunctional families and had always ended up in the role of the older brother whose repeated attempts to remain uninvolved made him the most sought-after family member of all.

Marla stared at him. “Ask the students, I guess.”

* * *

The next morning, Aaron put on a tie, the green silk that Walter had given him on his last birthday. He did not always wear a tie to work, but he wore at least a shirt with a collar because he believed his students deserved to know that he considered teaching them a profession. He tried not to dwell on the tie’s origins, yet he could not help but think of Walter as he stood in front of the mirror, tightening the tie around his neck. Aaron regarded the world as fraught with symbolism, a place where something as ordinary as knotting a tie became a commentary on one’s life.

When he entered the classroom at nine sharp, carrying a satchel and wearing the tie, the class looked startled. Taffy later explained that the students were coming off two months with Nico, an octogenarian who could not teach at the school permanently because he made frequent trips to Cuba to visit his “young men.” According to Taffy, Nico treated the classroom as a private salon: he arrived at ten because he considered nine an uncivilized hour and spent the morning passing around photos of his latest young man and demonstrating dance steps from the rumba and danzón . One morning, he had shown up in his Castro bar wear, a leather vest and chaps, though he had worn underwear, Taffy noted, perhaps in deference to the realities of the job, which required him to turn periodically to write on the board. “Nico’s lived in San Francisco too long,” Taffy concluded, but Aaron knew that he could spend the rest of his life here and never consider wearing chaps to class. Once, he and Walter had gone to a cowboy bar in Albuquerque, but after thirty minutes they left because Aaron could not bear the sight of men playing pool and dancing and sitting on barstools wearing nothing but chaps, their buttocks ripping away from the vinyl when they stood. “You can’t be so squeamish,” Walter had scolded him afterward.

“Nine o’clock,” Aaron announced. “Time to begin class. My name is Aaron Englund.” He turned to write his name in capital letters on the board. “I will be your teacher this semester.”

“Like the country?” a student asked. The student’s name was Paolo, and he was from Italy. In Italy, Paolo had taught mathematics for twenty-six years, and then one day, he decided that twenty-six years was enough; he would go to the United States, where he would spend his days riding Harleys. He would do this until all the money he had saved during those twenty-six years was gone. When Paolo spoke, which was often, he sounded like someone parodying an Italian accent, and his hands swung rhythmically in the air as though he expected those around him to pick up instruments and begin to play. Aaron tried to imagine Paolo standing in front of a classroom, leading students through the intricacies of math. He wondered how it was possible to go from being that man, a man who wanted numbers to add up, to being a man who embraced risk.

“That’s England,” Aaron said, enunciating the e before turning to write ENGLAND next to ENGLUND. “One vowel,” he said. “The difference between me and a country.” The students laughed.

The class was large, twenty students, but he went around the room learning their names and where they were from. He always did this the first day because he knew that it mattered, especially to those who were accustomed to being overlooked. There were five Brazilians—“Almost a football team,” they joked — and three Thais, but he was most surprised by the Mongolians. He had never had a Mongolian student before, did not think he had even met a Mongolian, yet there were two in the class, both named Borol. When he said, “Borol must be a common name in Mongolia,” the second Borol replied, “Not common,” with a serious face and the voice of a Russian, and the first Borol laughed to let him know it was a joke. He realized that he had always thought of Mongolians as not the joking types. It surprised him to find that he harbored stereotypes of Mongolians.

“Well,” he asked the class, “where should we begin? You must have questions. What’s confused you lately?”

They all stared at him. They had no reason to trust him — his ability or his intentions — yet. In the front row, a handsome Brazilian named Leonardo raised his hand. In Brazil, Leonardo was a pilot, but here in San Francisco, he delivered pizzas, which the other Brazilians referred to as the Brazilian National Occupation. “Why are you studying English?” Aaron had asked each student earlier, and Leonardo had explained that it was his first step toward becoming a pilot in China.

“China?” Aaron said. He had not meant to sound so surprised. “Why China?”

“Is big country,” Leonardo said.

“Yes,” Aaron agreed, waiting for the explanation to continue, but Leonardo, he would learn, did not believe in explaining a point to death. He considered others capable of connecting the dots: a big country required lots of planes, planes required pilots. Leonardo’s reticence would not benefit his English, but Aaron could not help but think that circumspection was attractive in a pilot. Aaron did not like flying, particularly the life-and-death bargaining he did with himself each time he got on a plane. When he imagined the people who sat in the cockpit, he did not want to think of them as chatty sorts who cared about entertaining one another. He wanted to think of them like Leonardo, less enamored of words than flight.

“You have a question, Leonardo?” Aaron asked.

“Yesterday,” Leonardo said, “I hear my coworker say to my other coworker, ‘I hope the boss wasn’t mad.’ ” Leonardo leaned forward. “Is correct?”

“Yes,” Aaron said apologetically, for he could see the point in question. “It depends on the situation, but yes, it is correct.”

“Why?” Leonardo demanded, almost angrily. “Why he is saying ‘hope’ when it is past tense? Hope is about the future. This is what we always learn.”

The other students nodded, asserting their collective will. Aaron could feel their frustration and beneath it their distrust, for they had been taught, rightfully, that hope described the future, yet here he stood, telling them that this was not always so. In just one hour, he had taken away more knowledge than he had supplied.

Aaron had discovered his love of grammar as a boy, when he first observed in these structures and symbols a kind of order, patterns that allowed words — his first love — to join together and make sense. He saw that he could open his heart and love grammar almost more, the way one loved the uglier child best because it required more effort to do so. He was known for explaining grammar in ways that made sense, for filling the board with sketches and equations and even cartoons that his students eagerly copied into their notebooks. He turned now and wrote: I hope he wasn’t mad. Below the sentence, he drew a timeline, the past on the left marked Know, the future on the right, Don’t Know .