Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

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Aaron generally avoided the faculty room during break, but that morning he went in, hoping to avoid answering Paolo’s question. He found his colleagues sitting around a box of pineapple buns, purchased from the Chinese bakery next door by Marla, which meant that someone had been in her office asking for something — timely photocopies, perhaps even a raise. He reached for a bun but stopped when he saw the Post-it note taped to the box: Thanks for the hard work. Love you guys, Marla.

Aaron felt increasingly old-fashioned and cranky amid this new social topography: business transactions sealed with a hug rather than a handshake; cell phone conversations carried on in public places, offering the sorts of details traditionally reserved for the bedroom or doctor’s office; and now this, people who hired you to teach English professing love on a Post-it note. Once, when he and Walter overheard a teenager and his parents bid each other farewell at the shopping mall in Albuquerque, Aaron had asked, “Why must they say ‘love you’ as though the kid’s shipping off to war? He’s obviously just heading over to the Gap for a few hours while his parents buy him way too many Christmas gifts.”

Walter had replied carelessly, suggesting that maybe Aaron needed to become more comfortable with his feelings, as though these rote declarations signaled people at ease with emotion. In fact, Aaron suspected the opposite was true, that people had become so removed from their feelings that they were not bothered by what he viewed as emotion-devaluing gestures: words and actions that undermined the very sentiments they purported to evoke by turning them into commonplace, all-purpose responses.

Only Winnie had understood, because she was Winnie. He looked again at the Post-it, missing her terribly.

On his way back from the faculty room, Aaron paused in the doorway of the detective’s classroom, planning to introduce himself, but only the detective’s students were inside: a man in his forties, who, he would later learn, was from Kenya; a young woman with neck tattoos, dressed primly in a pale blue sweater and slacks; and a woman in her sixties, who he would come to suspect was a transsexual, though not because she fit any stereotypes of transsexuals. She was, in fact, a diminutive woman who wore tailored pantsuits, no makeup except lipstick, and little jewelry. Aaron’s suspicion would be based on one small but curious detail, a habit the woman had of stepping back and letting other women pass through doorways before her, as though unable to dispense with years of gentlemanly decorum. The three students were reading from handouts, and he did not ask them where the detective was. He assumed smoking. Four times that morning, he had seen the man slip out of his room and head toward the smoking balcony at the end of the hallway.

Aaron followed his own students back into the room, where he wrote instructions for the next activity on the board while they were getting seated:

On a half sheet of paper, in 3–5 sentences, write an anecdote or detail about yourself that is surprising, amusing, interesting, or even embarrassing. It should be something about you that no one in this class knows. Do NOT include details, such as place names, that would make your identity known. When you are done, fold the paper in half twice.

“Please,” said Yoshi, pointing to the board. “What is anecdote ?” He pronounced it with a soft c so that it sounded like a type of headache medicine.

“An an-ik-dote,” said Aaron, “is a little story about something that happened to you.”

“Can you give us one example?” said Pilar.

“Okay, here’s an example of something about me,” he said. “I love to eat different types of animal feet — pigs’ feet, chicken feet, duck webbing, sheep hooves. This is a detail about me that is surprising. Now I want you to write down an anecdote, and then we’ll read them and see whether the class can guess who wrote each one. It will be a way for us to get to know one another better and to learn about the two new students.” The two new students had arrived the week before, a Turkish woman named Aksu and a young Korean woman who cried when he asked her to introduce herself to the class. Later, she told him that she had never spoken in class in her life, that back in Korea she had received a doctor’s dispensation from public speaking.

The students composed their anecdotes slowly, recopying the final drafts onto fresh pieces of paper, which they folded and dropped into a punch bowl that Aaron had borrowed from the faculty room. He drew a slip and read it to the class. It was about a boy getting his penis caught in his pants zipper and screaming in terror when his father said that he would need to cut it, believing his father meant his penis and not the zipper. Everyone laughed and looked at Luis, who was pleased to be recognized as the obvious author. The next two were in a similar vein, sweet childhood memories that made the class giggle. But the fourth slip described how the narrator had pried open the window of his family’s nineteenth-story apartment and thrown his mother’s cat out. He was eleven and had been egged on by a teenage cousin, who assured him that cats had nine lives. When he rode the elevator down to retrieve the cat, he found it flattened on the sidewalk below. The class grew quiet as Aaron read. Nobody wanted to guess whose anecdote it was because doing so seemed akin to voting for who among them seemed cruelest. Aaron was sure that Neto had written it — he recognized his handwriting — but when Aaron asked whose anecdote it was, Neto sat quietly, refusing to claim ownership.

“Okay,” said Aaron. “I guess that was our mystery writer.”

They learned that Aksu, the new Turkish student, was a couch potato and that Ji-hun went to Golden Gate Park on the weekends, because people gathered on the sidewalk near the museum each Sunday to swing dance. Finally, Aaron pulled his own slip. He had thought about the stories he could tell — his father falling from a parade float, his mother disappearing, saving Jacob’s life — but in the end he wrote down a story that August, his great-great-uncle, had told him the summer of the Englund family vacation. The story was about how his family on his mother’s side had lived above the Arctic Circle for ten years with six other Norwegian families and the Lapps. They had nearly starved because the only thing that grew in the frozen ground was potatoes, and even those grew poorly. At last, they moved to America, where they once again became farmers in a very cold place. Aaron had imagined that the students would relate to the story because it was about coming to this country, but instead they seemed perplexed.

“Why would they farm in the snow?” Chaa asked.

“They needed to eat,” he said, but he knew that what Chaa was asking — what everyone was wondering — was why they had moved above the Arctic Circle in the first place and why they had stayed so long once they realized that the situation was hopeless. He was five the summer that August told him the story, and so he had not questioned his ancestors’ reasoning. But now, assessing the story via the detached logic of his students, he thought that maybe it ran in his family — this attraction to what was futile, this inability to see it as such — for hadn’t his mother chosen to marry his father, even though she was happier working for the Goulds, and when his father died, hadn’t she moved both of them to Mortonville because she said it was not a place to start over? And what about him? It was true that he had once loved Walter, but then, for many years, he had not — yet he had stayed. He had stayed above the Arctic Circle because what was familiar was important, even when it felt like growing potatoes in the half-frozen ground.