Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“Well,” said his mother as they pulled out of the driveway, one of Gloria’s doilies on the seat between them. “That’s finally over.”

* * *

He had always liked sleeping in cars, waking up in a different place. It was the closest he came to understanding the passage of time. He shut his eyes, listening to the pleasant sound of gravel rattling beneath the car. “What would you think if we moved?” his mother said.

Aaron opened his eyes.

“We already moved,” he said.

“I mean into town. I’m thinking about buying the Trout Café. I’ve already talked to Frank, and he’s interested. We would live there.”

Aaron tried to imagine it: he and his mother stretching out in the booths to sleep each night, awakening in them each morning, his mother going into the bathroom marked Ladies while he used the one for Men . “Do people live in cafés?” he asked.

“We’ll live over it,” his mother said. “You’ll help me in the kitchen, washing dishes and chopping things. It’ll be a lot of work, you know, so I’ll need you.” It was only then that he understood what his mother meant. They were going to run the café the way that Frank did, frying hamburgers for people and bringing them ketchup and pie.

“We don’t know how to live in a café,” he said.

“We’ll learn,” his mother said. “Sometimes you’re such a scaredy cat.” She laughed, but he heard his father’s voice saying “chickenshit.” “I can cook,” she said. “Remember what I told you yesterday, about when I worked for the Goulds.”

Only later, years later, did he understand that she had needed him to say the things she did not yet believe: that she could run a café and cook for people and be happy.

“What will Frank do?” he asked instead.

“Frank will retire. He’ll go fishing whenever he wants and sit in his garden. Maybe he’ll drop by for a cup of coffee sometimes. First, though, he’ll teach us everything we need to know.”

“Like about the cash register?” Aaron asked.

“Well, yes, the cash register, for one thing. And we’ll need to learn how to manage in such a large kitchen. I’ve got some ideas of my own also.”

She sounded happy when she said this, happy to have her own ideas.

“What kind of ideas?” he asked.

“Oh, just some ideas about how to fix things. Frank’s getting old, and when people get old, they shouldn’t have to think about those things anymore. But we’re not old, are we?” she asked brightly. “For starters, I’d like to change the menu a little.”

“Won’t Frank feel bad if we change the menu?”

“Why would he feel bad, silly?” she said. “It will be our café. Besides, people expect change. They look forward to it.”

He thought about Frank sitting at home in his garden, wondering what had been wrong with his menu. He tried to feel excited because his mother was, but he could not. He did not believe that people looked forward to change.

February started warm (unseasonably so said his colleagues), but over the course of a weekend, the temperature dropped thirty degrees. Aaron woke up late that Monday. There was not enough time to walk to school, and anyway, it depressed him to imagine the bison in Golden Gate Park huddled together on such a bleak day. He added a second sweater under his corduroy jacket and walked down to wait for the bus, which arrived late and fuller than usual, everyone on it subdued, the way people get when the weather has tricked them.

His classroom was like stepping into a freezer vault. When Chisato arrived just after him, he greeted her, and his breath hung like smoke between them. “Excuse me,” he said because he was on his way downstairs to inquire about the lack of heat, but she blushed as if he were asking her to ignore some bodily indiscretion.

Chisato had begun arriving earlier each day so that now she was often there when he came in, sitting in the half darkness of the room, her feet swinging above the floor. She was short, well under five feet, and coy about her age, though Marla had let slip that she was in her mid-forties. She often dressed like a teenager, a chaste teenager, in plaid skirts with fringe and knee-high boots, her hair held back by matching barrettes. That morning, she had on thin white gloves of the sort librarians wear for handling rare documents. Chisato did not interact with the other students, though they were friendly toward her. The Brazilian boys flirted, but Aaron knew that the flirting meant nothing. That was just the way the boys communicated, standing close and touching, laughing easily with their mouths wide open so that you could see their teeth. They all had beautiful teeth, white and not overly corrected the way American teeth were.

At first, he had imagined that Chisato must be terribly homesick, here without family or friends, but as he got to know her, he decided that she was probably lonely in Japan also, that Chisato would be lonely wherever she went. When she started coming in early, he feared that she was developing a crush but soon realized that she viewed this time before class as an opportunity for individual instruction. He appreciated her studiousness yet had begun to feel oppressed by it and by the way she planned out precisely what she would say to him, obviously with the aid of a dictionary and a grammar book, so that even when she described simple things — her landlord’s dog or the bar where she played darts — she sounded like a child reciting a poem that she did not fully understand, her sentences technically correct but without the rhythm and inflection that imparted meaning.

“I was quite moved,” she had told him recently, describing her first bowl of miso soup since leaving Japan, her delivery so lacking in spontaneity or proper inflection that he had understood neither the words nor the emotion they were meant to convey. At his urging, she repeated the story — three times, each telling exactly the same, right down to the intonation of “I was quite moved”—and then, also at his suggestion, she had written those final words out on the board, along the bottom so that he had to crouch to read them.

“Ah,” he said, finally understanding what she had been trying to tell him, though by then the words had meant nothing.

Several of the teachers were already in Marla’s office, where she was explaining that Mr. Pulkka had come in during the night and placed a padlock on the small storage room that housed the heater controls. At the end of her explanation, she looked at her watch and announced enthusiastically, “It’s time for class,” not giving them the opportunity to complain. The teachers turned and went back to their freezing rooms. As Aaron climbed the stairs to the third floor, he thought about how Walter would have stayed right there in Marla’s office until heat had been restored because that was how Walter was. He argued and complained and made demands — to hotel clerks and customer service reps, managers and stewardesses — while Aaron stood by, looking apologetic and embarrassed but still, as Walter had always reminded him, ultimately benefiting from the results that Walter achieved.

Aaron had never learned to be comfortable with anger — because of his father, he supposed — though Walter’s anger was nothing like his father’s. Walter did not get angry often, but when he did, he did not hide it from the world. On the contrary, anger was Walter’s way of getting everyone else to see what was right. It was a public event. Aaron understood all of this. He did. But understanding it did not change the way he felt, and the way he felt was sick inside every time he witnessed anger — not just Walter’s — or felt it rising in himself. He preferred to think of himself as someone who did not get angry, except that he did, his anger seeping out in small bursts of sarcasm or heightened politeness.