Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“Oh,” said Aaron. “Okay. Well, it’s certainly the day for that. What is it?”

“Nikolina and I do not have a language together,” he began.

“What do you mean?” said Aaron.

“I do not speak Bulgarian, and she does not speak Korean.”

“But you met her in Korea. She must speak Korean.”

“She was maid,” Melvin reminded him.

“English?” suggested Aaron.

“She does not speak English.”

“Okay,” Aaron said. “Can you explain to me how the two of you communicate?”

“I write in English, and when she receives email, she uses computer translation program to change to Bulgarian. She writes in Bulgarian, and I translate to English. Soon, I will send money to her for English class, but right now, we are using system.”

“And?” Aaron coaxed him.

“Two days ago I sent first romantic letter,” Melvin said, looking as though he might cry.

How, Aaron wondered, had their engagement preceded any kind of romantic declaration? “Okay,” he said. “And what happened then?”

“Yesterday, she sent response.”

“Great,” said Aaron.

“It is not romantic response.” Melvin’s eyes got watery. He handed Aaron a copy of the email and looked away:

Dear Man-soo,

Thank you for your letter. I am very like meat. I am very like big steak with potato and sour cream. I hope we are eating steak in America very soon.

Yours truly,

Nikolina

“It is a strange letter,” Aaron agreed. He did not know what to say. “Did you ask her opinion about meat?”

“It was romantic letter,” Melvin said.

“Well, may I see what you wrote? Maybe she misunderstood?”

“She used computer translating program,” Melvin repeated firmly.

Melvin had arrived in the United States a poor man, but he had spent several years acquiring a very specific computer skill, a skill rare enough that the American government had granted him an H-1B visa, a skill so complex that even though he had described it in detail the first day of class, Aaron had no idea what he did. Computers had gotten Melvin a job, a visa, and, in a roundabout way, a fiancée; he was not about to doubt them, to speculate about their fallibility.

Finally, he opened his backpack and extracted a second sheet of paper, which he handed to Aaron, who read it and began to laugh. Melvin looked down, embarrassed, and quickly Aaron said, “I’ve found the problem. Your thumb has betrayed you. Space bar, Melvin.” He placed his finger under the last sentence, which read: I would like to keep you near meat all times.

Melvin stared at it, not speaking, so Aaron picked up Melvin’s pen and underlined the word meat . “You didn’t space,” he said. “You meant to write ‘near me at all times,’ but accidentally you wrote ‘near meat.’ ”

Melvin stared at the paper, at his feeble attempt at romance. Two weak haha s escaped from his mouth. It was the first time Aaron had heard him laugh.

“I wouldn’t worry, Melvin. I’m guessing she found your desire to keep her near meat very romantic.”

Melvin pondered this. Then, he wrapped his spindly arms around himself and laughed, the crumpled-up side of his face like a second mouth gasping for air.

The day Aaron left Mortonville, he did not think of himself as following in his mother’s footsteps, for she had disappeared in the middle of the night, telling no one, while he left on an ordinary Sunday afternoon in July. At precisely two o’clock, Walter pulled up outside the Hagedorns’ house, where Aaron had been living since his mother left. He came up from his basement bedroom, leaving behind the bed and dresser that Mr. Rehnquist and Mr. Hagedorn — Rudy — had moved from his room above the café the year before. He carried a suitcase in each hand, into which he had packed his clothes, a photo album, and some books, and set them by the front door before he went into the living room, where the three Hagedorns sat waiting, for they realized that he was going.

They had been kind to him, but Aaron assumed that they would be happy to have their home back because that was how he would feel. He did not consider their kindness diminished by the possibility of their relief. He shook Rudy’s hand, and Rudy, who had been drinking already, slapped him on the back and wished him well. Mrs. Hagedorn asked where he was going and why and with whom because even though she would miss him, she still planned to report the details of his departure to her phone friends later. Bernice stood to the side, pretending to be uninterested. When he reached out, awkwardly, to hug her, she pulled back, her hair a black curtain closing over her eyes. He did not know whether she was reacting out of anger or an unwillingness to let him experience her body that intimately, but Walter would later assert that she was in love with Aaron and had pulled away to show him that he was making a choice.

As Aaron lifted his suitcases into Walter’s trunk, he could hear cheering and horn honking from the ball field several blocks away, which meant that someone had hit a home run, the ease with which he interpreted the sounds only reinforcing his desire to go. As they drove down Main Street, he thought about the day he and his mother arrived, how they had pulled up in front of the café that meant little to him then. Thirteen years later, he was driving out of town and away from the boy he had become here, the shy, polite boy who had few friends, whose mother had abandoned him. Once people thought they knew you, it was almost impossible to change their minds, which meant that it was almost impossible to change yourself. Maybe this was why his mother had gone also — because she did not know how to be anything else here but his unhappy mother.

When his mother first took over the café, she had done all the baking and cooking herself, as well as much of the waitressing, hiring women from town as needed to take orders and serve food during the busy parts of the day, but eventually the baking became too much for her and she hired Bernice. Sometimes Bernice also handled the grill while his mother ran between kitchen and dining room, though Bernice refused to enter the latter, would not even carry out a plate of eggs that was growing cold. Customers loved her baked goods, especially her hamburger buns, which surprised everyone with their sweetness. “That Bernice has the best buns in town,” the men said as they ate their hamburgers. They never got tired of this joke, which had to do with the fact that Bernice was a large woman—359 pounds she informed Aaron matter-of-factly one morning, information he did not know how to respond to, beyond arranging his face so that it did not suggest any of the things that he imagined she was expecting, horror and shock and repulsion. She had particularly large buttocks, which Lew Olsson described as “two pigs in a gunnysack fighting to get out.” Aaron did not care for vulgarity or meanness, both of which the joke hinged on. The men, sensing his discomfort, did what men sometimes do. They added to it, making a point to refer to Bernice as his girlfriend. It was true that they were friends and that this struck people as odd because Bernice was a good bit older than he, twenty to his thirteen when she began working at the café, which meant it was an “unlikely friendship,” but unlikely friendships, he had since learned, were often the easiest to cultivate.

Each morning at four, Bernice made her way up the alley that ran from her house to the back door of the café, where she let herself in and immediately turned on the small coffeemaker that Aaron readied for her each evening as he and his mother closed up. His bedroom was directly over the kitchen, and in his closet was a vent that brought the smells directly into his room, a sort of olfactory alarm clock: first the odor of coffee wafted in, and then, like a snooze alarm, that of eggs and bacon (Bernice’s standard breakfast), all of it waking him in the most pleasant of ways. He dressed and tiptoed to the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face, by which point Bernice was ready for him. “I’m fit, just barely, for company,” she would say when he appeared, because that was the way Bernice talked. Early on, she told him that she was a misanthrope, which had pleased him, the admission as well as the word itself, which he found beautiful.