Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“I rarely talk about noses,” he said, then, “Let’s see. We have hooked noses, aquiline, hatchet, pug.” He tried to recall whether any of these were derogatory.

When his students had these discussions, he listened carefully but did not take part, except once when he overheard Chaa, one of the Thais, say that Thais liked to own businesses in the Castro. “Why?” Aaron asked, and Chaa said because gay men liked to spend money. “You can raise the price very high,” he explained, “and still gay men will pay because gay men care most about pleasure.”

Aaron knew that some gay men would take offense at this comment, at the notion that they could be duped into buying anything provided it made them feel good, but he also believed that real conversation ceased the moment a group turned inward, toward communal indignation fueled by a constant parsing of the comment. What did pleasure mean here? Wasn’t this just one more case of hyper-sexualizing gay men? And if the conversation stopped before it really began, could people ever become comfortable with one another? Could straight people understand what it meant to be gay if they were too afraid of making mistakes to ask questions? He had come to prefer dealing with people who barreled in with questions that might be regarded as insensitive to those who maintained a careful distance, forming measured comments that all demonstrated the same studied sense of what was correct. Listening to his students ask questions had taught him this: that nothing could truly get better in this country until people learned to ask the kinds of questions that they had been taught never to ask.

Still, the truth was that he did not know how to ask these questions either, certainly not about race. Mortonville had existed in a racial vacuum, its citizens not just white but primarily northern European. The only diversity he had known was a handful of Poles who lived along one of the lakes and two boys who were half Vietnamese. Their father was a local man who had gone off to Vietnam to fight and returned married. His name was Richard Schultz. Aaron’s mother said Richard Schultz had left as one sort of person and come back another.

“What kind of person was he when he left?” Aaron asked.

He knew what kind he was when he returned. Once when Richard Schultz ordered his eggs scrambled but Aaron’s mother accidentally sent out fried, Richard Schultz karate-chopped his hand down on the edge of the plate so that the eggs flew into the air and landed in a mess on the floor. “Now they’re scrambled,” he had said.

“I only knew him briefly before he left, but I remember him as a sweet boy, shy and so polite,” Aaron’s mother said, a description that had terrified Aaron because he’d heard these very words used to describe him. He wondered how it was possible to go away to a place — a place like this Vietnam that nobody in Mortonville wanted to talk about — and come back a man who was angered by eggs.

The two boys spoke Vietnamese with their mother when they were young, but their father put an end to this because he said he wanted his sons to be American. The mother came into the café sometimes and sat alone drinking coffee filled with sugar and milk. When Aaron approached her table to see whether she needed anything, she tried to engage him in conversation, but he could not understand what she was saying, which embarrassed him. Eventually she stopped trying to converse with him and with everyone else in town. He wondered whether living in Mortonville was more difficult for the sons, who thought of Mortonville as home yet looked different from everyone around them, or for the mother, who passed her days keenly aware that it was not home, despite the fact that she would spend the rest of her life there. Aaron always smiled at the boys when he saw them in the hallways at school because even though he looked like everyone else, he knew how it felt not to fit in.

What Aaron came to understand as a boy was that people focused on difference. He had learned his first real lesson about this the way that people often learned lessons, by doing something that it still made his face hot to think about. It had happened during Show and Tell, which was not actually called Show and Tell anymore because they were sixth graders, though this did not change the fact that each Friday six of them had to go to the front of the room to perform something — a joke, a poem, a story. This was meant to teach confidence, which Aaron suspected could not be taught. He spent long hours memorizing Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” and recited “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer to bored silence while the next boy got up and told a knock knock joke that left everyone hooting with laughter. They laughed when Aaron finished also, but only because he had worked so hard.

Over the course of the year, he grew tired of their ridicule, which outweighed even the deep pleasure he felt when he passed Mrs. Korkowski’s desk on his way back to his own and she whispered, “Aaron, that was just lovely.” Finally, one Friday he decided to prepare nothing and then learn a joke during lunch. He ate his tuna casserole quickly and presented himself at the library, where he asked for joke books. The librarian pointed him toward an entire shelf, from which he chose one at random. The book was called Fifty Polack Jokes, and the assistant librarian, who was not really a librarian but one of the mothers, flipped it open and scanned a page, chuckling. “This has got some good ones,” she said, and she stamped the book and handed it to him.

That afternoon, Aaron stood before the class and asked, “What did the Polack say to the garbage collector?” His classmates sat up from the slouch they had slipped into, but before anyone could respond, Mrs. Korkowski called out, “Aaron Englund, sit down.” They all laughed.

“That’s not the end of the joke,” Aaron said weakly, desperate to deliver the punch line—“I’ll take three bags, please”—which he considered very funny.

“Now,” shouted Mrs. Korkowski. “Right now.” A few of the students laughed again, but when Mrs. Korkowski stood up, her chair flew backward, and the room grew silent, as though she had actually picked the chair up and flung it.

After school, Aaron went right home and told his mother what had happened, determined to make sense of it. His mother thought for a while in that distracted way of hers that did not always resemble thinking, and then she said, “ Korkowski is a Polish name.” He nodded and waited, and his mother said, “You do know that Polack is a bad word for Polish people?” He did not know about the “bad” part, though of course he had heard the word Polack many times, mainly from the men in the café.

The next morning he wanted to stay home from school, but his mother said that staying home was not a solution, and so, stomach sour with dread, he went early and found Mrs. Korkowski sitting at her desk, grading their vocabulary assignments. “Yes?” she said when she saw him standing in the doorway.

In a rush, he told her how sorry he was. “I didn’t know you were Polish,” he said.

She put down her pen and rubbed her eyes as though she were already exhausted by the day. “My name is Polish,” she agreed. “But Korkowski is my husband’s name. I hope you understand that I would be disappointed to hear you tell a joke like that no matter what my name was. I’ve always thought better of you than that.” Years later, he would realize that he had been chastised for delivering a joke from a book that came from the school library, a book with Polack right in its title, but at the time he had not known to consider any of this. “There’s a whole world out there,” Mrs. Korkowski continued, more gently now. “I want you to remember that, Aaron, to remember that there are things out there beyond what you know or can imagine right now.”