Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“We really need to get back,” his mother said, speaking as though they’d been home all along and had just stepped out, leaving a pie in the oven.

They got in the car, and as they drove away, Aaron looked back at his aunt, who was staring down at the ground as she waved.

They avoided the parade route. That had not changed. When they were almost home, he said, “I forgot my school supplies,” but his mother said they did not have his supplies yet, and he did not explain, even though it made him sick to think of his aunt unloading the car alone and finding the supplies that were meant to be their secret.

His first month in San Francisco, Aaron’s thoughts were consumed by earthquakes. He began to wonder whether his subconscious knew something, even though this kind of thinking — thinking that involved talk of the subconscious — made him uncomfortable. He did not discount intuition or careful observation but found that people too often relied on superstition and wishful thinking, which he grew impatient of being expected to accord the same weight as logic. He spoke aloud of his fear only once, to Taffy, who told him that the school had recently employed a woman from Oklahoma. She had moved home after just one month because she could not stop thinking about earthquakes. Moving back to Albuquerque, moving anywhere, was not an option, so he decided to control his anxiety by not speaking of earthquakes again, a Midwestern approach that he had employed successfully in other situations. It seemed to work in this case also, except on elevators, where his standard fear — that the doors would not open — now wedded itself to a new one. As he stood waiting for the elevator car to tremble and plunge, he began to have what he thought were panic attacks, but these, too, he approached like a Midwesterner, which meant that while everything exploded inside him, from the outside he looked like a man stoically riding the elevator.

He had ridden his first elevator on the Englund family vacation. In a rare gesture of enthusiasm, perhaps even love, his father had parked the Oldsmobile in a loading zone in downtown Minneapolis and pointed to a tall building nearby. Aaron thought that they would look out the car window at the building for a minute or two before driving on, but his father had instructed Aaron and his mother to go inside the building, which he said would surely have an elevator. When they got out of the car, he called after them, “Make it fast. We’re in a loading zone,” as though riding the elevator had been their idea.

Aaron did not know what an elevator even was, but he followed his mother into the building, where they stood in the lobby with a group of men in suits who stared at the two of them, dressed in shorts and grubby T-shirts. Everyone got on together, the other riders rising up around him like corn. When the elevator began to move, he took his mother’s hand and held it tightly while she laughed in a way that suggested she was not entirely at ease either.

On the way down, when they were alone, he asked his mother how the elevator worked. “Cables,” she said. “You know, ropes pulling it up and down.” He imagined people sitting above them, turning these ropes day after day.

“What if the ropes break?” he asked.

His mother showed him the numbers above the door, which flashed as they passed each floor. “Here’s what I want you to do,” she said. “Right after we pass the second floor, I want you to jump in the air as high as you can. That way, if the ropes break, you’ll be in the air when we crash.” He had done it, but that night, as he lay in bed in their motel room, he heard his mother telling his father the story, the two of them laughing. His father said something he did not understand and laughed again, and his mother said, “Jerry, come on. He’s a child. It was sweet.” Lying in bed, Aaron had felt her betrayal.

Aaron continued to think about earthquakes each time he passed beneath scaffolding or visited a museum or movie theater. Once he sat up from a deep sleep, sure that he had felt something, but everything around him was still. When an earthquake finally occurred, a small one, though he had not known this at the time, he was calm. It lasted six seconds. Automatically, he reached for the shoes he kept tied to his futon frame, in accordance with the earthquake preparation manual he had studied with his students.

“Why we must tie shoes on bed?” asked Cheng, a student from Taiwan, where they were accustomed to earthquakes. “Is for luck?”

“Luck?” Aaron said. He considered this. “No, it’s so you can find your shoes easily, even in the dark. Windows break during earthquakes, so it’s dangerous to walk around barefoot.” He wrote barefoot on the board.

“My friend from motorcycle club said me that the streets can be filling with glass, higher than my head even,” Paolo said.

“Your friend told you,” Aaron corrected him, but he was picturing the futility of shoes when faced with a snowbank of glass.

* * *

Aaron had not yet met the owner of the school, who lived up in Bodega Bay but kept an office on the first floor, walled off by glass and never used so that it resembled a museum diorama. A placard on the door read RICH PULKKA, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. Mr. Pulkka claimed the school as a not-for-profit, a status that annoyed the teachers because they said he made plenty of profit, some of it fraudulently, though nobody dared to report him lest it mean trouble for the students. Aaron did not know exactly what the fraud entailed, but he thought it had to do with the attendance requirements for student visa holders. His roll sheets, for example, contained the names of several students who had not once appeared in class. He marked them absent, but when the sheets were returned to him each Monday morning, the A s had been painstakingly turned into P s, no doubt before the roster was photocopied for the official file.

Aaron deduced the sort of person that Pulkka was simply from observing how the building was maintained. It was like getting to know the flaws on a lover’s body, for there was something intimate about standing in the men’s room after having relieved himself to discover that the sinks worked, in order from left to right: cold only, hot only, not at all — which meant he had the option to either freeze or scald himself, or go with hands unwashed. One morning he came up the backstairs and found puddles of water pooled on the landing, yellow like urine, and when he went into the unused classroom across the hall from his in search of an eraser, he found mushrooms, at least a dozen, sprouting from the mold on the wall beneath the lone window, the sight of them oddly obscene.

When Aaron asked the other teachers what Pulkka was like, they laughed. “I’m the only one who’s met him,” Eugenia said. “Once, right after I started, he threw a faculty holiday party in the basement, but he drank too much and ended up sleeping with one of the instructors. Barbara. This was a problem because he lives with his girlfriend. Actually, she’s on the payroll, though no one’s met her either. He pretty quickly realized he better get rid of Barbara, which wasn’t hard because Barbara was a mess. There’d been complaints from the students for a while, but after the party, it came out that she’d gotten trashed with her students one night and took off her shirt right there in the bar in front of them.”

“Why would she do that?” Aaron asked, his question largely rhetorical. He knew that teachers were like everyone else: varying in their degree of competence and good judgment, not always able to keep their loneliness or dysfunction from pressing in on the workplace. Some of his colleagues, the younger ones, went out drinking with the students, the sort of drinking that made it nearly impossible to stand before the class the next day and make demands about homework and attendance. His own boundaries, he had been told — by other teachers, not students — were rigid. He agreed, though did not consider it a problem. He liked that his students were intimidated, just slightly, by him. He felt that a small dose of fear was conducive to learning. During his nearly twenty years as an ESL teacher, he had taught in a variety of places and knew that privately owned schools such as Pulkka’s were especially susceptible to unprofessionalism because they paid poorly and thus attracted a mixed bag of teachers: the inexperienced; the inept; the improperly credentialed; those in transition, like him; and those like Taffy, who preferred to remain on the profession’s periphery for personal reasons.