Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“Homebody,” she announced another morning as she pounded away at a lump of bread dough. “What do you picture?” This was a game they sometimes played. He saw the word as the claustrophobic juxtaposition of two nouns— home and body —that had been pushed up against each other. He told her this, and she nodded indignantly, encouraged by his assessment, but said nothing more.

Most mornings, he measured out the ingredients — baking soda and sugar, cup after cup of sifted flour, salt — lining them up in bowls so that all Bernice had to do was follow the trail down the counter, adding and mixing as she went. This system allowed her to concentrate on the conversation, which revolved around words, the possibilities that they presented as well as their inadequacy. They were kindred spirits, Bernice said, two people more comfortable with words than people, though Aaron came to see the irony in this: words existed because of people, because of a deep human need to communicate with others, not as an end in themselves.

Bernice had gone away to college, planning never to return, but something had happened there, something that caused her to pack up halfway through her first quarter and return home. She said that this made people in town look at her a certain way — like she had thought she was better than they were but had learned she was not. This was all Aaron knew of the story for the first two years of their friendship. Then, one morning as they stood making pies, she told him that after she dropped out of college, she had not left her bedroom for six months, except to fetch food in the middle of the night and to use the bathroom. Over time, he would learn that this was the only way that Bernice discussed her life, parceling out details at unexpected times.

“For the first three weeks,” she added, “I ate only meat.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Meat makes me constipated.”

“And you wanted to be constipated?” he asked, trying to sound casual. He had not gotten over his childhood discomfort at discussing bodily functions.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I did.” She sounded angry, as though his question was obviously foolish.

“What did you do in your room all day?”

“I read, mainly my textbooks because I wanted to keep up with my classes. I practiced my Spanish verb conjugations. We’d only gotten as far as the present tense when I left, but I didn’t mind. I liked being cut off from the past and the future. Some mornings I heard my mother outside my door, listening. Once, I heard her telling Dad that I’d joined a cult, that I was in there speaking in tongues.” Bernice laughed. “It scared her, I think, not to know what I was saying, but I wanted her to be scared.”

“Why?” Aaron asked.

“Because every night after I came home, I heard her on the phone telling her friends that it was true, I was back for good. ‘Bernice is just a real homebody,’ she’d say. So you see, I wanted her to be confused and scared, to realize that she would never know why I’d returned. I wanted her to understand that she didn’t know me at all. Does that make any sense?”

Aaron opened a can of cherries and poured it into one of the crusts that she had lined up for him. “Yes,” he said. “It makes sense.”

“I hate her,” Bernice said. She made it sound simple.

* * *

Mornings at the café went like this: his mother came downstairs at seven twenty, and just ten minutes later, after a quick check to make sure that everything was in order — tables set, shakers filled, coffee brewing — they unlocked the front door and turned the sign to OPEN, and the dining room became instantly busy. Aaron assisted his mother, filling coffee cups and taking orders, until eight twenty, when he gathered his books and ran out the back door and down the same alley that Bernice crept up at four. Sometimes, as he passed the back of her house, a tiny place squatting between two much larger houses, he saw her mother through the kitchen window, standing at the sink in her robe. It felt strange to see her there, knowing what he knew: that her daughter hated her.

The day he found his mother gone, as he and Bernice sat in the kitchen waiting for her to come down because they did not yet know she was gone, he recited the Canadian provinces for a map test he was taking that day. Bernice had made him spell Saskatchewan for good measure.

“Do you think she overslept?” Aaron asked. It was only seven twenty-five, but his mother had not come down late since the day they opened ten years earlier. It was just the two of them that first day, and he had risen early, too excited to sleep, and sat in a booth waiting for her. He knew when it was time to open because the farmers had gathered on the steps outside, including Mr. Rehnquist, who finally tapped on the window and beckoned to him. When Aaron unlocked the door, Mr. Rehnquist said, “I’m sure it’s first-day jitters. Go on up and give her a boost.”

And he had. He had gone up to his mother’s room, where he found her sitting on the edge of her bed, dressed. “Do you have a headache?” he asked.

“I don’t think I can do it,” she said.

He sat down beside her and said that she could do it, that he would help her do it. They would go down together and open the door, and once they did that, everything would be fine. He told her this even though he was not sure it was true.

“What would I do without you?” she said. She stood and smoothed the bed covers because she believed in the small comfort of entering a tidy bed each night, and together they went downstairs and opened the café.

“Better go up and check on her,” Bernice said, but he could no longer imagine doing what he had done just ten years earlier: entering his mother’s room, sitting on her bed, speaking to her encouragingly. Once a week he set a basket of clean clothes, folded, outside her closed door. Other than that, he did not go near her room, nor she his.

By seven thirty, he had no choice. He dragged himself upstairs and down the hallway to his mother’s room, where he found the door open, bed made, his mother gone. He looked out her window, to the alley where she parked the aging Oldsmobile. It was not there either. When he reported this to Bernice, she said that come to think of it, the Oldsmobile had not been there when she arrived at four. She asked whether his mother had seemed strange the night before. He said no, that his mother and Pastor Gronseth had sat in a booth talking as they often did, that after he finished memorizing the Canadian provinces, he had stacked his books on the edge of the table and stopped beside their booth to say good night. There had been nothing strange.

Bernice appeared skeptical but did not waste time arguing because the crowd of customers outside was growing. Instead, she made a sign that read, CLOSED INDEFINITELY. FAMILY EMERGENCY, which he wanted to amend to CLOSED FOR PERSONAL REASONS because he thought the word emergency implied that someone was dead, but Bernice said that nothing made people gossip more than the word personal . In the end, it would not have mattered what they wrote: news spread and people came, making a show of pulling at the locked café door and reading the sign aloud, of peering through the window. “It’s closed,” someone else would say, someone who had engaged in this same series of actions just minutes earlier. Then, they all milled around together, shaking their heads and comparing information.

The news exploded into full scandal just before noon, when it was learned that Pastor Gronseth was gone also. Aaron and Bernice had sequestered themselves in the kitchen, and even after Bernice’s mother phoned with this second wave of news, they continued to bake the bread and rolls and buns that had been rising since morning. As they worked, they talked about keeping the café going, though they both knew that this was impossible: Bernice was a kitchen recluse and Aaron was about to begin his final year of school. In the end the Trout Café would stay closed, the title reverting to the bank, but that day they had appreciated the distraction that pretending provided.