Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“What are you looking at, little boy?” called a voice. He moved closer and saw the woman, stretched out on her side in the garden. She was wearing a large straw hat.

“My name is Aaron,” he said, then added, “Nothing.”

The woman sat up and removed the hat in order to scratch vigorously at her scalp. “My name is Betty Otto,” she said. “You may call me Miss Otto, as I am an unmarried woman, or you may call me by my full name, but you may not call me by my Christian name alone because I do not abide such familiarity from children.” She waved him closer. “I don’t recognize you. You must not be one of those awful Packer boys.”

“No,” Aaron said. “The Packers moved away.”

“Good riddance,” she said. “They were unusually mean children.” He could tell that she considered all children inherently mean.

“What did they do that was mean?” he asked.

“Well,” she said, struggling to her knees and then her feet. “First, they were cruel to Princess.” She pointed at the dog, which sat, untied, at the edge of the garden. “She is pure German shepherd, which you will realize if you know anything about dogs. I’ve had her since she was a pup, and in that time I’ve spoken to her only in German. It is her mother tongue and the only language she responds to.”

The dog lifted its head. “Princess,” Betty Otto called. “Heil!” The dog stood and trotted along the perimeter of the garden to its mistress. When it barked at Aaron, Betty Otto said “Heil!” again, and the dog fell back on its haunches, whimpering.

“You see?” Betty Otto said. “But those Packer boys insisted on screaming at her in English, which confused her, so she bit one of them. Right here.” She tapped her own cheekbone. “Just missed the eye.” She sounded pleased. “The parents tried to pretend it was my fault, but I wasn’t having any of that.”

“Maybe the Packers didn’t know German,” Aaron said.

“Nonsense. Did you ever meet the Packers?” Aaron shook his head. “Well then. After Princess bit the boy, I told them to stay on their side of the trees, but do you know what those horrid boys did?”

“No,” said Aaron.

Betty Otto bent and scratched the dog’s ears. “Those hoodlums came out in the middle of the night and moved the trees, a good foot and a half, I’d say. Just look how close they are to my garden now.” She pointed to the garden, as though this were proof. “They didn’t think I’d see them,” she continued, “but I was expecting them. I waited right over there.” She pointed at a shed. “I fired off a few shots, just to scare them. You should have seen them run.” She gave a pleased chuckle, which Princess echoed with a growl.

“Is that why they moved?” Aaron asked.

“They moved so that Mr. Rehnquist’s son could move in,” said Betty Otto.

“But we moved in,” said Aaron.

“Mr. Rehnquist’s just teaching his son a lesson. You’ll be gone soon enough.” She regarded him slyly. “You know, your mother spends a lot of time outside at night.”

He did not know this. “Would you shoot at her?” he asked.

“She just looks at the sky. Would you shoot someone for looking at the sky?”

* * *

Miss Meeks never warmed to Aaron. Everything about him seemed to displease her: his politeness and earnestness and timidity, his overwhelming need to learn. She did not hide her feelings, and this set a tone, the model for acceptable behavior toward Aaron Englund, the new boy, which his classmates emulated. All of it, Aaron concealed from his mother. The next year, he and the other students moved across the hallway to Mrs. Lindskoog’s room. He still saw Miss Meeks and greeted her courteously each morning. She sniffed in return, crossed her arms, and nodded, but when the children who had been her pets appeared, she hugged them and said how much she missed them. These same children stood around on the playground laughing about the thick veins that covered Mrs. Lindskoog’s calves and about the way they could hear her urinating inside the tiny bathroom attached to their classroom, everyone falling silent when she went in.

“Aaron lacks enthusiasm,” Mrs. Lindskoog wrote on his first report card.

“Lacks enthusiasm?” his mother muttered scornfully, pointing at the string of Excellent s and Very Good s that Mrs. Lindskoog had also given him, but Aaron knew that Mrs. Lindskoog had offered this criticism to help him, just as she hoped to improve his printing by gripping his hand tightly in hers and forcing it down on the page.

Upon entering first grade, he grew quickly enamored of phonics, which taught him that words were not just bunches of letters clumped together arbitrarily. Of course, there were exceptions, groupings that didn’t add up in a logical way, but he came to accept, almost relish, these minor glitches in an otherwise perfect system. It was why the word itself— phonics, with that odd ph —seemed so appropriate. As they walked home each day, his mother usually inquired what he had done in school, to which he replied, “We did phonics.” Sometimes, he followed this with a question related to what he had learned, a question such as “Do you prefer hard g or soft g ?”

“Soft,” his mother had immediately answered, for she had no preference and knew that thinking about it would not reveal one.

“Really?” he said, disappointed. “I prefer hard.”

“They’re both fine sounds,” she said. “You wouldn’t have giraffes without soft.”

It had not occurred to him that things could not — even did not — exist without names. “What would happen to them?” he asked finally.

“Who?” said his mother. She was often distracted.

“The giraffes,” he said. “What would happen to them?”

“Nothing would happen to them. They just wouldn’t be giraffes.”

“What would they be?”

“Well, of course they would be giraffes. They just wouldn’t be called giraffes.”

A farmer drove by, lifting his index finger at them, which was how people waved in Mortonville. Aaron waved back.

His mother had told him once that his grandmother, the pack rat, had phoned the hospital right after he was born to suggest a name for him. Lars. Sometimes he tried to think of himself as a boy who came when his mother called “Lars!” who printed Lars at the top of each page of homework and was intimate with a capital L . No, he had concluded, Lars would be a different boy and there would be no Aaron.

Another time he asked his mother, “Do you know about sometimes y ?” But that time she was tired from doing nothing all day.

“Why what?” she said.

“The letter y, ” he said, about to explain, but she turned to him and snapped, “No nonsense today, Aaron.” After a few more steps, she said, “I’m not myself. I have a headache,” so they walked the rest of the way in silence.

The headaches were why his mother rested so much. He had seen her lying in bed pushing her palms against the sides of her head in an attempt to make the pounding stop. He had never had a headache, not that he could remember, but he knew that she was in pain. He was good at imagining what others were feeling. It came naturally to him, this desire to be inside someone else’s head, to escape his own.

One afternoon he tiptoed down the hallway to his mother’s room, carrying a cold washcloth. He’d wrung it out carefully: if he twisted too much, it would be tepid before he reached her, but neither did he want water running down her face and onto the pillow. In the last year, he’d become an expert at fashioning the perfect washcloth. His mother was lying with her eyes closed in the king-size bed that had belonged to the Packer boys’ parents. When he laid the washcloth on her eyes, she said, “Did I ever tell you about my name?” Her lips moved, but with her eyes covered the words did not seem to belong to her.