Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

He lay down beside her and stared at the ceiling. “No, you didn’t tell me,” he said.

“Do you know what missionaries are?” she asked. He did know. His aunt had corresponded with missionaries. She had shown him the envelopes bearing stamps that were colorful and strange. “Well,” she said, “when I was just a bit older than you, maybe eight or nine, a missionary came to our town to raise money for her mission work.”

“To Park Rapids?” he asked. Until recently, he had thought the town was called Park Rabbits, which he imagined as a grassy place full of benches and trees, people sharing picnics, and, of course, rabbits.

“Yes, of course to Park Rapids,” his mother said impatiently. “Our teacher, Mrs. Olsen, invited the missionary to talk to us about the country where she’d lived for years. Guatemala, it was called. All of my classmates laughed when she said it. I didn’t laugh, but that didn’t really matter because the others did.”

“Why did they laugh?”

“Because of the way she said it. Gua-teh-mal-ah, ” his mother intoned, imitating the missionary. “But they were really laughing because they were scared.”

“Why were they scared?”

“Because people feel scared sometimes when they have to think about the world.”

“Why?”

“I guess because there’s a lot to think about,” his mother said.

“Does it scare you to think about the world?” he asked.

Instead of answering, his mother said, “She was an unusual woman. Do you know what she was wearing? Denim jeans. It was maybe 1950, and the female teachers and students all had to wear dresses. That’s just now changing — do the girls in your class still wear dresses?”

“Some of them wear scooter skirts.”

“What in the world is a scooter skirt?”

Aaron paused, feeling his face become hot. “It’s a special skirt so the boys can’t see the girls’ underwear. It has shorts underneath.”

“Do the boys try to see the girls’ underwear?”

“Some of them do. At recess usually, but also when they’re getting on the bus.”

“Aaron, have you ever tried to look at a girl’s underwear?” his mother asked.

“No,” he said, which was the truth. Sometimes he sat on his bed and studied his underwear, which was white and had a discreet opening for his penis, but he could find nothing interesting about it. If he ever became friends with any of the boys, he thought he would ask why they did it, spent so much time and risked getting in trouble as well for a glimpse of something that surely was as ordinary as their own.

“You know how disappointed I’d be if I heard you were involved with anything like that,” his mother said. She pressed on the washcloth with her fingers.

“Should I fix it?” he asked.

“Please,” she whispered. He lifted the cloth gently and went down the hallway to the kitchen sink, where he thought the water ran cooler.

“You were telling me about the missionary,” he said when he returned, “and about your name.” He settled the washcloth back across his mother’s eyes, and she whimpered.

“Well, we came in from recess, and there she was at the front of the room. We all got quiet right away. Even Mrs. Olsen seemed a little scared of her.”

“Because she was wearing jeans?”

“I guess the jeans were part of it. We just knew she was different somehow, and then after everyone stopped laughing about Gua-teh-mal-ah, she pointed at the map and said, ‘Well, children, a nickel to the student who can actually point out Guatemala.’ We all just sat there, and she looked at us, one by one, challenging us to look away. I couldn’t help it — I looked down before she even got to me.

“Finally, when she’d out-stared us all, she shouted, ‘Ha!’ and slapped her thigh. We all jumped. We weren’t used to adults acting that way. She said, ‘I see that your uniformly maintained ignorance does not amuse you nearly as much as the names of countries about which you know nothing, not even where they are located in this great world of ours.’ Then she turned to Mrs. Olsen and said, ‘I am wasting my time here.’ ”

“What did Mrs. Olsen say?”

“Nothing. That was the worst part. She just bowed her head. I couldn’t bear it because I knew where Guatemala was. In the evenings after I finished my schoolwork, I was allowed to spend ten minutes studying my father’s atlas. Mrs. Olsen knew this. She often sat with me at lunch, quizzing me on geography, but I was so shy in those days, and she didn’t want to put me on the spot.”

“Did you go up and show her?” He wanted the story to end well, wanted his mother to rise as the hero and Mrs. Olsen to be redeemed.

“I didn’t even raise my hand. I just ran up and pointed to Guatemala. You should have seen me. I was shaking so hard that my finger pattered against the map, but when the missionary reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a nickel, I took it. Then, as I turned to go back to my seat, she said, ‘What might your name be?’ I told her, and she said, ‘Ah, Dough-lor-ace ,’ so grandly I didn’t even recognize my own name. Dough-lor-ace .” His mother laughed softly. “Aaron, do you know what my name means in Spanish?”

“No,” he said. It shocked him to think of people saying his mother’s name but meaning something else altogether.

“ Pains . Dolores means pains . Isn’t that amazing? That people in other countries, countries like this Guatemala, are walking around saying my name when they stub their toes, or cut themselves, or visit the doctor. I think about that every day, Aaron — how lucky I was to have that missionary visit our class.”

On a July morning two years after Aaron and his mother moved to Mortonville, she announced at breakfast, “Today, we’re going on an excursion.” He did not know what to make of this. During these two years, they had traveled no farther than Florence, which was just eleven miles down the road, the place where people went to buy shoes or visit the dentist. “Come on,” his mother said. “I want you ready in one Adam-12 .”

“I know how to tell time,” he said.

His mother said nothing, so he gave in and asked where they were going.

“We’re going to visit an old friend of mine. Gloria. I met her years ago, before your father even.”

“Did my father know her also?” He did not know why this interested him, just that it did.

“Yes, but they didn’t like each other, and Jerry didn’t want me to be friends with her.” Aaron liked when his mother referred to his father as Jerry, because it usually meant she was going to talk to him as if he were an adult.

When they were in the car and driving, Aaron asked, “How did you meet Gloria?”

“I was nineteen. I’d gone down to the Cities to work and I got the job with the electric company. Gloria worked there also, so we ended up getting an apartment together, but when I met your father, he didn’t want me living with Gloria anymore, didn’t even want me around her, so I quit that job and got a live-in situation doing housework and cooking for a family. Mr. and Mrs. Gould. They were Jews.” She paused. “They were nice to me. They insisted I take Sunday mornings off for church, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them I’d left home to escape Sunday mornings. I just thanked them, and every Sunday morning I left the house and went away for two hours.”

“Where did you go?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. I took walks. I went bowling and out to breakfast with your father.”

“What happened to those people? The Juice?”

“Not juice. Jews,” his mother said, drawing out the vowel. “Your father made me quit that job also — because they were Jews. At least that’s what he said was the reason, but I’d been there a year already, so I think it was something else.”